Finally, after a minute that felt like an hour, Torin seemed to calm himself.
He took a deep breath—ragged, barely controlled, but a breath nonetheless.
His hands, still resting on the table beside the small skeleton, unclenched. His knuckles, white from pressure, slowly returned to their natural color. But his eyes—those grey, knowing eyes—still blazed with an inner fire, flickering with an arcane light that spoke of power barely held in check.
He turned to Runil.
"How?" His voice was eerily calm—the kind of calm that comes before a storm, before the sky splits open and the thunder rolls. "Where did they find her?"
Auri's eyes widened at the way he said her. The familiarity within it. Not the child or the remains or the body. Her. As if he knew this skeleton, as if he'd known the little girl who'd once worn its flesh.
Runil, on the other hand, didn't notice. He was still reeling from Torin's sudden change—the flare of magicka, the rage that had filled the room like smoke. But he was a priest of Arkay. He'd dealt with grief before, in all its forms. He responded calmly, his voice measured, professional.
"Under a tree, lying on the ground..." he said. "The guards said they'd searched that area more than once. They've been over that ground a dozen times since the killings started." He paused, his brow furrowing. "They said it's like the bones just... fell from the sky. Like they weren't there yesterday, and then today, suddenly, they were."
Torin's barely restrained rage and grief flared.
So that's how you intended to help me. Before leaving.
She'd told him she would help him one last time. Told him she couldn't bear to worry about him anymore. And then she'd vanished into the fog, her small form swallowed by the mist.
She'd led the guards to her own remains. Made them appear where they'd searched before, where nothing had been. Used whatever strange power lingered in her ghostly form to give him the resolve he needed.
Something seemed to snap inside Torin. The calm that had been holding him together cracked, and behind it was something grim, something determined, something that would stop at nothing.
He began to look around the Hall of the Dead with a focus that was almost frightening. His eyes swept over the altars, the candles, the shelves of embalming supplies.
They passed over the shrouded bodies waiting for burial, the urns of ashes, the dusty tomes of Arkay's rites.
And then they landed on a small wooden chest propped on a table near the exit.
The donation chest. Where the faithful left offerings for the priest, coins and trinkets and small gifts to support the work of the Hall.
Torin walked to it, his boots echoing on the stone floor. Without hesitation, without asking permission, he opened it.
"That's the donation chest, boy," Runil said, his voice rising with confusion. "What are you—"
His words died in his throat.
Torin reached into the chest, his hand disappearing into its depths. When he withdrew it, he was holding a book.
The cover was blood red.
Not painted red. Not dyed red. Blood red—the color of fresh arterial spray, the color of life pouring out onto cold stone. The leather seemed to pulse faintly in the candlelight, as if something inside it was breathing, waiting, hungry.
Runil took a step back, his face going pale. He had no idea how the book had gotten there. He'd never seen it before. He'd emptied the donation chest just yesterday, had counted the coins and set aside the trinkets, and there had been no book. No red cover. No sense of wrongness pressing against his soul.
But here it was. And the sight of it alone—let alone the fact that it had appeared in his Hall without his knowledge or consent—sent shivers down the old Altmer's spine.
The book that could not be destroyed. The book that always came back. The book that had haunted Torin since Riverwood, since a madman had pressed it into his hands and claimed it was a gift from the Woodland Man.
Worst yet was what Torin did next.
He raised it in front of his face. Held it up to the candlelight, the red cover gleaming, the pages inside waiting. His expression was unreadable—grim, resolved, empty of everything except purpose.
And then he opened it.
The pages crackled as they parted, old and dry, brittle as dead leaves in autumn. The sound seemed too loud in the quiet of the Hall, echoing off the stone walls, mingling with the whisper of the candles and the distant drip of water somewhere in the darkness.
Runil watched, transfixed, as the handwriting on the pages began to shift and change.
Words appeared and disappeared, sentences formed and dissolved, the ink crawling across the parchment like living things. It was as if the book was rewriting itself in real-time, reacting to Torin's presence, to his eyes upon it.
The language was nothing Runil recognized—not Aldmeris, not Daedric, not the old Nord tongue of the Atmorans, but something older. Something that shouldn't exist.
Then the ink turned into smudges.
Dark blotches spread across the pages, bleeding into the margins, soaking through to the other side. The smudges thickened, rose, began to protrude out of the pages like blisters on burned skin. Runil opened his mouth to shout a warning—
Faster than anyone could process, the ink solidified into tentacles.
They shot out of the book like striking snakes, black and glistening, covered in what looked like wet leather or maybe skin.
They wrapped around the upper portion of Torin's face—his forehead, his eyes, the bridge of his nose—squeezing tight, holding fast. The flesh of the tentacles parted in several places, vertical slits opening like wounds, and from within them, eyes emerged.
Dozens of eyes. Small and round and glittering, darting all over the room, taking in everything at once. They had no color—or maybe they had all colors, shifting and changing like the ink on the pages. They looked at Runil. At Auri. At the ceiling, the walls, the candles, the shrouded bodies waiting for burial.
They saw everything. And they remembered.
For a moment, the world seemed to stop.
Then Auri moved.
She'd overcome her shock faster than Runil would have thought possible—faster than he himself had, certainly. Her hand flew to her belt, fingers closing around the hilt of her dagger, and she charged at the tentacles with a snarl that didn't sound like anything a Bosmer should be able to make.
She didn't make it two steps.
A new tentacle emerged from the book—longer than the others, thinner, with no eyes on its twisting length. It whipped through the air like a scourge, catching Auri across the chest, and the force of the blow sent her flying backward.
She hit the wall with a sickening crack, her bow clattering to the floor, her dagger spinning out of her grasp.
Runil ran to her side, his heart pounding, his robes tangling around his legs. He crouched beside her, his hands hovering over her shoulders, afraid to touch, afraid to hurt her further.
"Are you alright?" he asked, his voice shaking.
Auri gritted her teeth, her amber eyes blazing. She pushed herself up, ignoring his offered hand, and spat something that might have been a word or might have been a curse.
"I'm fine." Her gaze was fixed on Torin's face—wrapped in tentacles, two bloody streaks running down his cheeks where something had pierced or cut or simply pressed too hard. "I'll be better once I know what this is. And how to remove it from this world."
Runil shook his head slowly, his mind racing through decades of priestly training, searching for something—anything—that could help.
"I don't know what it is," he admitted. "But it feels Daedric. Ominous. The wrongness of it... it's like standing at the edge of a cliff in the dark. You know something terrible is out there, but you can't see or fight it... you can only wait."
He studied the tentacles, watching the way they pulsed, the way the eyes blinked and stared and saw.
"I'm not sure we can remove it without harming Torin." His voice dropped to barely a whisper. "Not forcefully. Not with the methods we have at our disposal. If we cut them, they might tighten. If we burn them, the fire could spread to his face. If we try to pull them off..." He trailed off, shaking his head.
"So we do nothing?" Auri's voice was sharp, demanding.
Runil met her eyes.
"For now, I think we should wait, and see." He glanced at Torin's face—impassive, unreadable, the tentacles wrapped around his eyes like a blindfold made of nightmares. "He might know what he's doing. He opened the book deliberately. He knew—or suspected—what would happen."
Auri's jaw tightened, but she didn't argue. She just retrieved her dagger, wiped the blade on her sleeve, and positioned herself between the book and the door.
Ready to fight, if fighting became necessary.
Hoping it wouldn't.
...
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