Beyond the Pale

Good Man, Bad Man, Dead Man, Thief

The wind had kept picking up all night. A sleepless night for Castorius.

He'd been wandering aimlessly until the first rays of sun were caught in the thick veil of dark cloud enveloping the sky. None of them reached all the long way to him. Not that he would have noticed if they had.

It didn't matter to him that the woods were teeming with beasts, predators, and bandits. Each of his steps could have very well been his last in this dangerous terrain, in the dead of night. He knew this, but he didn't care. There was an awfully strange quality to what little sound his most primary instincts of survival were still making.

What does it matter?

What did any of it matter? This was the world of predators and beasts. Of bandits. Of murderers and monsters. They would get you anyway, in the end. The only way to fight them was to join them. To become them.

Was that what he'd been doing?

Questions, questions, and more questions, doubt and self-accusation. Those had been the only company he'd had in the long hours of the night—the only predators to come after him. In comparison, he would have almost welcomed a set of sharp teeth biting into his leg. An arrow in the back. An axe to the head.

So far, he'd managed to dodge all of those. But to what end? Did his survival entail anything more than the death of someone else? That was certainly how it was starting to look. Did the survival of a little shitweasel like him unavoidably come at the cost of the life of someone innocent? Was that the necessary sacrifice? Was that the great alchemy behind everything, the scheme of things?

With such a price, certainly it would have been better to just die. Better for everyone. Who was there that would even miss him, to hold on to his memory? Who would cry for him?

No one, that's who.

And was that the sort of world he'd been helping to create? If it was with the help of murderers and monsters that Ulfric was to overthrow the Empire, then what next? How was he to ascertain he could keep them reigned in indefinitely?

Gods knew Castorius hardly loved the Empire, but even he had to wonder. At least it kept up law and order to some extent. It may have, gods forbid, even been the only force keeping the beasts out, from keeping the predators from running the whole show.

Or did it?

He was so very tired, more tired that he'd been in his entire life. Only when he stopped moving did he feel the ache all over in his body. Even his bones hurt. Was it simply the exhaustion, or was it the other sort of heavy burden he'd been logging around?

He slumped against a tree and let himself slide down. The hem of his tunic rode up his back, and his bottom was soaked upon hitting the wet ground. He was currently unable to muster any concern for such things.

Sitting down made the traffic in his mind even worse. Rubbing his temples, he tried to bring clarity back into the mix. He wasn't having much success with it, such was his exhaustion. A thought trailed a thought trailing a though, but what resulted made no coherent sense. Just a jumble of one notion feeling more pathetic than the last.

If only I could get some sleep . . .

No! He gave his head a violent shake, enough to feel momentarily dizzy. This was no time for sleeping. He had to think!

Think what?

He needed to do something. For all he know, what had gone on had been all his fault. He didn't know who had given the order to kill Fair-Shield and his family, but he had a nasty suspicion. If that Argonian pirate, Jaree-Ra, had survived the mountain collapsing on his ship, there was no question of who he would hold accountable. He couldn't, of course, have known that Castorius himself survived, but might have simply assumed as much when not finding the body.