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Description
The snow storm ever strengthens. The air has turned to gruel, thick and lumpy and pale-grey - and so viciously biting with the tiny shards of ice that it almost feels scalding-hot. Its scraping, grainy ripples are enough the knock back even Illandar, whose feet have, before now, glided with nearly no touching down, over the porous, springy white crust on the ground - like ever so many marshmallows scattered by a clumsy sweet-maker. As he himself told the child, thinking that the metaphor might liven him up and distract him from that incessant whimpering.

He put a lot of thought into it too, his mind making a tremendous leap across centuries, to a vibrantly colourful evening somewhere on the verdant shores of the southern isle of Khenarthi’s Roost, all soaked in a dazzling palette that is nothing like this blasted gruel: the juicy green of the palm leaves, the glinting gold of the curving rooftops, contrasting with the airy lilac of the cloudless sky; the blaring orange speckles on the water, dotted playfully by the setting sun; and the flowing, river-like dark-blue silk hugging the curves of a bowing Khajiit that served a trayful of sweetmeats to him and his crew. His family.

Just this one image - marshmallows; sqeet, melting marshmallows - took him to the days… before.

Before those bloody madmen from the Maormer Embassy - whom he had nothing to do with - decided to summon some sort of hurricane, and invoked the wrath of that wild Bosmer woman, who cut, and ripped, and gnawed a bloody path through their fleet, taking the lives of many a Maormer, with no thought of whether or not they were involved.

Before he lost everyone he cared about and, mindless with a desperation to rival the Bosmer’s, threw himself into the cold, fathomlessly dark embrace of Molag Bal, emerging as he is now. With skin, formerly shifting in colour like mother of pearl, now frozen white, hard as marble; with eyes, once pale like pebbles on the sea shore, now burning with a hungry yellow flame; with teeth sharper than the fangs of many a sea serpent he once trained from the very first crack of the eggshell (oh, how he still misses them, his scaly darlings, hundreds of years since gone, reduced to coiled, leering carcasses on the bottom of the sea, along with his crewmer, his sons, his daughter, his faithful boatswain… his everyone).

Before he drowned himself in the wine-like, inebriating fountains of red that streamed out of the punctured Bosmeri necks, and then emerged, no less hollow, no less aching than when he had just turned into… this. Staggering, groaning, under the weight of all the souls he has parted from their bodies, soiling and had them in the process - and in the grip of the gut-wrenching thought that he was no better than she who had cackled, face stretching into the likeness of a wolf’s maw, as she held up his younger son’s torn-out heart.

Before he took to the seas again, flying on tightened sails away from the screams that kept resounding through his every bone, beating inside his chest in the stead of his deathly still heart. Before his ship sank, submerging him into icy nothingness for, perhaps, a thousand years, until a Nord fisherman pulled him out, and he awoke, in this dismal, war-torn land, where humans squabble with each other, almost comically oblivious of the dragons that fly over their heads in increasing numbers, screeching out jets of flame. Before. Before. Before.

This tangent made him feel sorry for himself; and he hates that. He hates feeling in general. And to make things worse, the urchin did not even appreciate his marshmallow analogy! He has probably never had one, at least not in recent memory - the miserable ragged thing. Shivering all over so that his teeth rattle like dice in their box. Even after Illandar has so generously wrapped him in a conjured cloak woven from pulsing reddish light. Figuratively speaking, of course. He would never actually go about tucking children into blankets.

The urching is not used to the cold, clearly. It is simply not in his blood.

His skin is dark as freshly tilled soil in a land far more fertile than this gods-forsaken hold of Skyrim. Ra'Gada, his kin call themselves; though Illandar believes that, over the ages, the name has been corrupted to Redguards. In his time, the child’s people were formidable seafarers - some even on par with the Maormer; an impressive accomplishment for those with such a fleeting lifespan. And, from what his stumbling about in this age has shown him, they still have not forgotten the craft, though the Aldmeri Dominion (there is another one? again? and far less tame than young Ayrenn’s happy little union of Altmer, Bosmer, and Khajiit) has drained them of much of their strength.

The boy’s father was a sailor as well, as he announced to Illandar and his perpetual companion, Lydia the Housecarl, when they stumbled upon him amid the snowdrifts, and Lydia, with Illandar’s begrudging approval (expressed through a silent eye roll) grabbed his hand and began their long, dragging journey to the (so-called) shelter of Dawnstar.

The hapless man - so Illandar chanced to hear; he certainly has not been listening to the child’s sniffling blather on purpose - had gotten sick with some hard-to-cure malady during a voyage, and the crew had dropped him and his young son off in a dismal freezing port, leaving him to die and the boy, to grow up far earlier, in human units of measurement, that younglings are expected to.

He has been fending for himself ever since, allowed to sleep on the floor at the inn but expected to ‘earn his keep’. Mostly through chores like wading out into the snowy gruel in search for firewood. That what he was in the middle of doing when the blizzard hit and he got lost. Illandar and Lydia are - supposedly - guiding him back. Even though they have other matters to attend to. Like having a stern conversation with that wimp from the museum, who thought recovering the shards of a powerful Daedric artifact would be a grand idea to pass a winter evening.

The child is slowing them down. At this point, he has stopped shuffling through the snow on his own, and has wrapped around Lydia’s chestplate like a tiny octopus. His feet are so worn with all this walking that they have begun to bleed; Illandar can sense it through his threadbare shoe soles even without looking at him - and the odd pang in his gut that the discovery has caused must have come from his undying hunger. Surely. He hardly ever feels anything else. He should not feel anything else. Whether or not he will act on this hunger, is a conscious choice he is making every day, depending on whether the morsel in question is reprehensible as a person (the boy… may pass; his only sin is making child-noises) - but he should not feel anything else. He hates feeling.

The damned snow is also slowing them down. Whipping their faces. Blocking their view - too dense even for Illandar’s sharpened vision to pierce through. Now, if he could rise above it somehow…

'All right, I’ve had it’, he says, turning around and snapping his fingers before the startled, bug-eyed faces of Lydia and the boy.

'What are you doing, my Thane?’ Lydia asks, as a ribbon of greenish glow - the hallmark of Alteration magic - snakes across both of the mortals’ throat.

She speaks with the same tone as always. Outwardly polite, but with a very, very audible note of disapproval. Mixed in with… Is that a hint of threat he detects? The way she has tightened her grip over the child would certainly suggest that. Parental instincts and so forth. Illandar used to have those himself… Before.

'It is the same charm I cast on you to help you breathe underwater,’ Illandar tells her… And senses a twitch in the corners of his mouth.

One upside of being undead is that he no longer fears the cold, or suffocation - so he can explore his beloved element, water, for as long as he likes. Hiding from the merciless sun in the lush algae forests at the bottom of Skyrim’s lakes; laying down on his back, with his arms folded under his head, to watch the kaleidoscopic dance of diamond-like light and shadow on the inner side of ice floes; floating from cabin to creaking, barnacle-carpeted cabin on a sunken ship, passing his fingers along the fuzzy rotting wood and remembering. Remembering what was… Before.

He often dives down when he gets too overwhelmed by dry-land cities, especially during the daytime - and when he first did that in front of Lydia, the poor woman thought he was trying to drown himself (really, as if that Nazeem character’s blabbering about the Cloud District would ever wound anyone that badly). She threw herself in after him, armour and all, endearingly… that is, foolishly believing that she was saving him - so he cast a spell on her to keep her breathing until he explained. She looked around her, with a quiet wonderment, raising up her hands to see the paint strokes of water colour them white and blue, and agreed to accompany Illandar on his future underwater excursions. It was rather… refreshing, to find such an adventurous spirit in what he had assumed was going to be a tiresome clunky tag-along foisted upon him by the Jarl of Whiterun. But he is still mystified as to where the lip twitch came from. It was rather close to… a smile. But he - he does not smile. Not like that. Not in a way that is caused by… feelings. He does not get feelings.

'I am not an expert on… breathing, but a… lumberjack or some other such Nordly fellow from Ivarstead told me that it apparently gets harder the higher up you climb. I am just taking a precaution. Now, you…’

He turns his attention specifically to the boy, and he reads it as cue to introduce himself.

'Alesan’.

'Yes, however you may be called - please try not to scream. Or wet yourself. I will do you no harm’.

With that he flexes his shoulders, falls onto one knee in the snow, digging his fingers through the crust - and feels Molag Bal’s twisted magic boil through his skin, erupting in fungus-like growths, which melt and bubble and squelch back into place, trickling down his arms, building over his shoulder blades, sticking to his throat in an extra layer of thick, wire-like sinews.

When his new form solidifies, and he straightens up, unfolding a pair of jagged wings and letting a fanged snarl split across his bat-like face, he sees Lydia flinch… But ever so slightly.

She has already seen him take this shape, as he was defending her from a colossal metal centurion they had accidentally awoken in the steam-fogged hallway of some underground palace. She yowled in horror back then - but her expression mellowed with time, as she watched the transformed Illandar throw all of his weight against the dwarven construct, gouging its dynamo core out of its chest with his new, dagger-like claws.

Young Alesan, however, skips the horror and goes straight to admiration. Illandar rather… likes that about him. No - no he doesn’t!

'Wow!’ the boy cries, reaching out curiously to poke a finger at Illandar’s shoulder.

'Were you secretly a dragon all along?’

'I am no dragon,’ Illandar growls - at least, he hopes he growls. The transformation has warped his voice somewhat, but most sounds he makes can still be understood correctly. This sound ought to be taken as a growl - not an amused chuckle.

'But I can fly. I want to take you above the clouds so that we can see the path to Dawnstar better’.

'Are you strong enough to carry us both, my Thane?’ Lydia asks, as Illandar squats down again and she gingerly helps the boy straddle his back.

While fidgeting about, she chances to brush her hand past his face - and rests it there about two or three heartbeats longer than necessary. Or… Or is it just one heartbeat? Her pulse has sped up for some reason, so it is hard to tell.

Quite in spite of himself, Illandar nuzzles against her palm, like an oversized, monstrous cat. Emphasis on monstrous. That is how mortals see him, after all - regardless of form. That is how he sees himself. No - he had better not start feeling sorry. He had better not start feeling.

'I will manage,’ he replies curtly - and, once both his riders are safely in place, kicks off with his massive hind legs and soars into the air, aiming up, up, up until the lumpy gruel ends.

It takes more than a few wing flaps, the icy wind hissing as it fills his webs - but, at long last, he breaks through the snow clouds, and shoots out into a dizzying, starry vastness, Masser and Secunda rolling out to greet him in all their shining, scarlet and silver splendour.

'Oh, fangs and fins,’ he uses an old Maormer curse, which flies thoughtlessly off his tongue and then burns it with a bitter aftertaste. 'I should have tried this long ago! This is as good as diving to the bottom of the sea!’

'It is!’ Lydia gasps, through the hair that is flapping all around her face.

Illandar slants his eyes to look at her. In his private thoughts - not at all tinged with any sort of… feeling - he has found quite a few adjectives to match his unexpected Housecarl. Stalwart. Dependable. Patient. Warm - as in… a warm hand on his chest as she was dressing his wound from a flame-coated weapon (those Forsworn witchmen have some impressive enchanting skills, he will give them that). But now, in this moment, cheeks flaming with the excited rush of flight, widened green eyes drinking in all of the heavens’ glittering star dust… He thinks he can call her beautiful.

And the boy - oh, the boy is having the time of his life. He is nigh on leaping in place, cocking his head at the most impossible angles, in a voracious hurry to take in everything that floats by him. The winking dots of the stars; the silky billows that caress the surface of the moons; and the tiny toy houses of Dawnstar below, with lit-up windows like dabs of golden lacquer to finish the craftsman’s job.

They land on a stretch of grey, empty wintry beach at the far end of the docks. The snowstorm has calmed somewhat, and the waves rise no higher than usual, murmuring a wordless tale that would so delight Illandar… before. Before he became a monster, and let a hatred of all feelings, any feelings fester within his icy chest.

'Well, there you have it,’ he announces, reverting back to elven form once both young Alesan and Lydia step onto dry land. 'You will find your own way from here, as will we’.

'Thank you for your amazing magic!’ Alesan beams. 'My da used to hate magic of any kind, and so do the folks of Dawnstar - but I think they are wrong!’

Illandar has a snide remark ready just for the occasion - but before he can demonstrate his wit (cold and dry, as it should be), he feels something bump against his legs. The blasted little octopus has decided to… hug him. Does he really think it is all that it takes to… ingratiate himself to an eldritch creature of the night? Does he really believe that he can just hug Illandar, and… and…

Over his shoulder, Illandar sees Lydia smiling encouragingly. A… beautiful smile that still has some lingering stardust in it. Stiff and stilted, as though he himself were turning into a Dwemer automaton, he pats the top of Alesan’s head… And experiences no feelings. No feelings at all.

Description
The snow storm ever strengthens. The air has turned to gruel, thick and lumpy and pale-grey - and so viciously biting with the tiny shards of ice that it almost feels scalding-hot. Its scraping, grainy ripples are enough the knock back even Illandar, whose feet have, before now, glided with nearly no touching down, over the porous, springy white crust on the ground - like ever so many marshmallows scattered by a clumsy sweet-maker. As he himself told the child, thinking that the metaphor might liven him up and distract him from that incessant whimpering.

He put a lot of thought into it too, his mind making a tremendous leap across centuries, to a vibrantly colourful evening somewhere on the verdant shores of the southern isle of Khenarthi’s Roost, all soaked in a dazzling palette that is nothing like this blasted gruel: the juicy green of the palm leaves, the glinting gold of the curving rooftops, contrasting with the airy lilac of the cloudless sky; the blaring orange speckles on the water, dotted playfully by the setting sun; and the flowing, river-like dark-blue silk hugging the curves of a bowing Khajiit that served a trayful of sweetmeats to him and his crew. His family.

Just this one image - marshmallows; sqeet, melting marshmallows - took him to the days… before.

Before those bloody madmen from the Maormer Embassy - whom he had nothing to do with - decided to summon some sort of hurricane, and invoked the wrath of that wild Bosmer woman, who cut, and ripped, and gnawed a bloody path through their fleet, taking the lives of many a Maormer, with no thought of whether or not they were involved.

Before he lost everyone he cared about and, mindless with a desperation to rival the Bosmer’s, threw himself into the cold, fathomlessly dark embrace of Molag Bal, emerging as he is now. With skin, formerly shifting in colour like mother of pearl, now frozen white, hard as marble; with eyes, once pale like pebbles on the sea shore, now burning with a hungry yellow flame; with teeth sharper than the fangs of many a sea serpent he once trained from the very first crack of the eggshell (oh, how he still misses them, his scaly darlings, hundreds of years since gone, reduced to coiled, leering carcasses on the bottom of the sea, along with his crewmer, his sons, his daughter, his faithful boatswain… his everyone).

Before he drowned himself in the wine-like, inebriating fountains of red that streamed out of the punctured Bosmeri necks, and then emerged, no less hollow, no less aching than when he had just turned into… this. Staggering, groaning, under the weight of all the souls he has parted from their bodies, soiling and had them in the process - and in the grip of the gut-wrenching thought that he was no better than she who had cackled, face stretching into the likeness of a wolf’s maw, as she held up his younger son’s torn-out heart.

Before he took to the seas again, flying on tightened sails away from the screams that kept resounding through his every bone, beating inside his chest in the stead of his deathly still heart. Before his ship sank, submerging him into icy nothingness for, perhaps, a thousand years, until a Nord fisherman pulled him out, and he awoke, in this dismal, war-torn land, where humans squabble with each other, almost comically oblivious of the dragons that fly over their heads in increasing numbers, screeching out jets of flame. Before. Before. Before.

This tangent made him feel sorry for himself; and he hates that. He hates feeling in general. And to make things worse, the urchin did not even appreciate his marshmallow analogy! He has probably never had one, at least not in recent memory - the miserable ragged thing. Shivering all over so that his teeth rattle like dice in their box. Even after Illandar has so generously wrapped him in a conjured cloak woven from pulsing reddish light. Figuratively speaking, of course. He would never actually go about tucking children into blankets.

The urching is not used to the cold, clearly. It is simply not in his blood.

His skin is dark as freshly tilled soil in a land far more fertile than this gods-forsaken hold of Skyrim. Ra'Gada, his kin call themselves; though Illandar believes that, over the ages, the name has been corrupted to Redguards. In his time, the child’s people were formidable seafarers - some even on par with the Maormer; an impressive accomplishment for those with such a fleeting lifespan. And, from what his stumbling about in this age has shown him, they still have not forgotten the craft, though the Aldmeri Dominion (there is another one? again? and far less tame than young Ayrenn’s happy little union of Altmer, Bosmer, and Khajiit) has drained them of much of their strength.

The boy’s father was a sailor as well, as he announced to Illandar and his perpetual companion, Lydia the Housecarl, when they stumbled upon him amid the snowdrifts, and Lydia, with Illandar’s begrudging approval (expressed through a silent eye roll) grabbed his hand and began their long, dragging journey to the (so-called) shelter of Dawnstar.

The hapless man - so Illandar chanced to hear; he certainly has not been listening to the child’s sniffling blather on purpose - had gotten sick with some hard-to-cure malady during a voyage, and the crew had dropped him and his young son off in a dismal freezing port, leaving him to die and the boy, to grow up far earlier, in human units of measurement, that younglings are expected to.

He has been fending for himself ever since, allowed to sleep on the floor at the inn but expected to ‘earn his keep’. Mostly through chores like wading out into the snowy gruel in search for firewood. That what he was in the middle of doing when the blizzard hit and he got lost. Illandar and Lydia are - supposedly - guiding him back. Even though they have other matters to attend to. Like having a stern conversation with that wimp from the museum, who thought recovering the shards of a powerful Daedric artifact would be a grand idea to pass a winter evening.

The child is slowing them down. At this point, he has stopped shuffling through the snow on his own, and has wrapped around Lydia’s chestplate like a tiny octopus. His feet are so worn with all this walking that they have begun to bleed; Illandar can sense it through his threadbare shoe soles even without looking at him - and the odd pang in his gut that the discovery has caused must have come from his undying hunger. Surely. He hardly ever feels anything else. He should not feel anything else. Whether or not he will act on this hunger, is a conscious choice he is making every day, depending on whether the morsel in question is reprehensible as a person (the boy… may pass; his only sin is making child-noises) - but he should not feel anything else. He hates feeling.

The damned snow is also slowing them down. Whipping their faces. Blocking their view - too dense even for Illandar’s sharpened vision to pierce through. Now, if he could rise above it somehow…

'All right, I’ve had it’, he says, turning around and snapping his fingers before the startled, bug-eyed faces of Lydia and the boy.

'What are you doing, my Thane?’ Lydia asks, as a ribbon of greenish glow - the hallmark of Alteration magic - snakes across both of the mortals’ throat.

She speaks with the same tone as always. Outwardly polite, but with a very, very audible note of disapproval. Mixed in with… Is that a hint of threat he detects? The way she has tightened her grip over the child would certainly suggest that. Parental instincts and so forth. Illandar used to have those himself… Before.

'It is the same charm I cast on you to help you breathe underwater,’ Illandar tells her… And senses a twitch in the corners of his mouth.

One upside of being undead is that he no longer fears the cold, or suffocation - so he can explore his beloved element, water, for as long as he likes. Hiding from the merciless sun in the lush algae forests at the bottom of Skyrim’s lakes; laying down on his back, with his arms folded under his head, to watch the kaleidoscopic dance of diamond-like light and shadow on the inner side of ice floes; floating from cabin to creaking, barnacle-carpeted cabin on a sunken ship, passing his fingers along the fuzzy rotting wood and remembering. Remembering what was… Before.

He often dives down when he gets too overwhelmed by dry-land cities, especially during the daytime - and when he first did that in front of Lydia, the poor woman thought he was trying to drown himself (really, as if that Nazeem character’s blabbering about the Cloud District would ever wound anyone that badly). She threw herself in after him, armour and all, endearingly… that is, foolishly believing that she was saving him - so he cast a spell on her to keep her breathing until he explained. She looked around her, with a quiet wonderment, raising up her hands to see the paint strokes of water colour them white and blue, and agreed to accompany Illandar on his future underwater excursions. It was rather… refreshing, to find such an adventurous spirit in what he had assumed was going to be a tiresome clunky tag-along foisted upon him by the Jarl of Whiterun. But he is still mystified as to where the lip twitch came from. It was rather close to… a smile. But he - he does not smile. Not like that. Not in a way that is caused by… feelings. He does not get feelings.

'I am not an expert on… breathing, but a… lumberjack or some other such Nordly fellow from Ivarstead told me that it apparently gets harder the higher up you climb. I am just taking a precaution. Now, you…’

He turns his attention specifically to the boy, and he reads it as cue to introduce himself.

'Alesan’.

'Yes, however you may be called - please try not to scream. Or wet yourself. I will do you no harm’.

With that he flexes his shoulders, falls onto one knee in the snow, digging his fingers through the crust - and feels Molag Bal’s twisted magic boil through his skin, erupting in fungus-like growths, which melt and bubble and squelch back into place, trickling down his arms, building over his shoulder blades, sticking to his throat in an extra layer of thick, wire-like sinews.

When his new form solidifies, and he straightens up, unfolding a pair of jagged wings and letting a fanged snarl split across his bat-like face, he sees Lydia flinch… But ever so slightly.

She has already seen him take this shape, as he was defending her from a colossal metal centurion they had accidentally awoken in the steam-fogged hallway of some underground palace. She yowled in horror back then - but her expression mellowed with time, as she watched the transformed Illandar throw all of his weight against the dwarven construct, gouging its dynamo core out of its chest with his new, dagger-like claws.

Young Alesan, however, skips the horror and goes straight to admiration. Illandar rather… likes that about him. No - no he doesn’t!

'Wow!’ the boy cries, reaching out curiously to poke a finger at Illandar’s shoulder.

'Were you secretly a dragon all along?’

'I am no dragon,’ Illandar growls - at least, he hopes he growls. The transformation has warped his voice somewhat, but most sounds he makes can still be understood correctly. This sound ought to be taken as a growl - not an amused chuckle.

'But I can fly. I want to take you above the clouds so that we can see the path to Dawnstar better’.

'Are you strong enough to carry us both, my Thane?’ Lydia asks, as Illandar squats down again and she gingerly helps the boy straddle his back.

While fidgeting about, she chances to brush her hand past his face - and rests it there about two or three heartbeats longer than necessary. Or… Or is it just one heartbeat? Her pulse has sped up for some reason, so it is hard to tell.

Quite in spite of himself, Illandar nuzzles against her palm, like an oversized, monstrous cat. Emphasis on monstrous. That is how mortals see him, after all - regardless of form. That is how he sees himself. No - he had better not start feeling sorry. He had better not start feeling.

'I will manage,’ he replies curtly - and, once both his riders are safely in place, kicks off with his massive hind legs and soars into the air, aiming up, up, up until the lumpy gruel ends.

It takes more than a few wing flaps, the icy wind hissing as it fills his webs - but, at long last, he breaks through the snow clouds, and shoots out into a dizzying, starry vastness, Masser and Secunda rolling out to greet him in all their shining, scarlet and silver splendour.

'Oh, fangs and fins,’ he uses an old Maormer curse, which flies thoughtlessly off his tongue and then burns it with a bitter aftertaste. 'I should have tried this long ago! This is as good as diving to the bottom of the sea!’

'It is!’ Lydia gasps, through the hair that is flapping all around her face.

Illandar slants his eyes to look at her. In his private thoughts - not at all tinged with any sort of… feeling - he has found quite a few adjectives to match his unexpected Housecarl. Stalwart. Dependable. Patient. Warm - as in… a warm hand on his chest as she was dressing his wound from a flame-coated weapon (those Forsworn witchmen have some impressive enchanting skills, he will give them that). But now, in this moment, cheeks flaming with the excited rush of flight, widened green eyes drinking in all of the heavens’ glittering star dust… He thinks he can call her beautiful.

And the boy - oh, the boy is having the time of his life. He is nigh on leaping in place, cocking his head at the most impossible angles, in a voracious hurry to take in everything that floats by him. The winking dots of the stars; the silky billows that caress the surface of the moons; and the tiny toy houses of Dawnstar below, with lit-up windows like dabs of golden lacquer to finish the craftsman’s job.

They land on a stretch of grey, empty wintry beach at the far end of the docks. The snowstorm has calmed somewhat, and the waves rise no higher than usual, murmuring a wordless tale that would so delight Illandar… before. Before he became a monster, and let a hatred of all feelings, any feelings fester within his icy chest.

'Well, there you have it,’ he announces, reverting back to elven form once both young Alesan and Lydia step onto dry land. 'You will find your own way from here, as will we’.

'Thank you for your amazing magic!’ Alesan beams. 'My da used to hate magic of any kind, and so do the folks of Dawnstar - but I think they are wrong!’

Illandar has a snide remark ready just for the occasion - but before he can demonstrate his wit (cold and dry, as it should be), he feels something bump against his legs. The blasted little octopus has decided to… hug him. Does he really think it is all that it takes to… ingratiate himself to an eldritch creature of the night? Does he really believe that he can just hug Illandar, and… and…

Over his shoulder, Illandar sees Lydia smiling encouragingly. A… beautiful smile that still has some lingering stardust in it. Stiff and stilted, as though he himself were turning into a Dwemer automaton, he pats the top of Alesan’s head… And experiences no feelings. No feelings at all.