Dragon's Conquest

Rest Well Among Failure

Ulfric shut the leather cover and stared at the back of the Dossier for some time.

He still felt...empty.

Not just because he had eaten three, maybe four times in the last however many days, the Dossier contained none of the answers he knew it never did for the questions he didn't know. There were almost no revelations in it; all he learned was just how effective of war strategists the Thalmor were, and how easily they picked apart his strategies once everything had been laid out for them and they turned tail to flee.

The insight into his interrogations, on the other hand, left him in a calm fury that he wanted to bring with him to the Summerset Isles.

Elenwen was a master interrogator. He remembered every word she spoke to him, noting where the supposedly accurate transcripts failed by a synonym, forgotten verb, wrong punctuation, complete lack of inflection that mere ink on parchment could never capture. The way she gathered her information was a cruel work of art, her blades, whips, spells were her paintbrushes. Her poison sweet words and lovingly evil lies were the pens and inkwells of her magnum opus; she wrote by picking apart his head until she settled herself inside to stay.

The dates listed finally gave Ulfric a notion of how long he had been in his cell before he escaped--before they, she, let him escape, the Dossier insisted. He was proud of how long he held his tongue before he cried out, screaming in a whisper the precious secrets that led to the fall of the Imperial City, the fall of the once-proud Empire of Talos, the fall of his honor.

He held out until after the Great War had ended.

~~~

The last of the preparations for Odahviing's summoning were more trouble than they were worth, in Nariilu's opinion, but if it was what it took for Jarl Balgruuf to agree to her plan, so be it. She, J'zargo, and the acolytes and priests of Kynareth went street to street warding the Plains District, leaving Farengar, Colette and Danica to ward Dragonsreach and the Clouds District themselves.

She didn't envy them. Even with over a dozen of them working nearly nonstop, it had taken all damn day to cover the District. It was well over half the city and Nariilu still felt entitled to complain, and her head, aching from magicka fatigue, agreed. She downed another blue potion courtesy of Arcadia, wiped her brow, and forced one leg after the other to make the long climb to Dragonsreach, listening to J'zargo and her stomach whine the entire way, each trying to outdo the other.

The guards at opened the doors for them and Nariilu nearly stumbled at the threshold, not paying attention to the slight step. She hit J'zargo on the arm to shut up; Farengar was already reporting to Jarl Balgruuf on the state of the wards, and Kodlak Whitemane waited his turn nearby to comment on how many citizens would be where. Not many citizens were evacuating, she had noticed, or they were waiting until tomorrow. Then again, she hadn't been paying attention to the streets, except to mark the crossroads with intricate runes covered in soul dust.