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They went by many names. Flawless Warriors. Scions of the Dragon. Slayers. Sanjherai. Dragonknights.

Every one of their followers almost as equally misunderstood.

Tarveth should know. He trained almost a generation’s worth. Every one of them different, every one of them unique, extraordinary. They came to him to learn what it really meant to wield the powers. They came to him to test their own understanding.

Or at least, they had. He hadn’t been the Burned Dragon for some years now. He doubted he ever would be again.

Did he miss it? It was something he asked himself often. He missed certain aspects of that old life, to be certain. He missed the world when it was simple, when rifts from Oblivion weren’t opening at every wrong turn in the wilderness and Daedra of every shade of morality weren’t probing at the tattered remains of Akatosh’s Covenant, seeking to beguile and ensnare the terrified mortals in their besieged plane. He missed his brother, Danion, with a grief that still shut his breath away, despite the rare fortune he’d known in finding not only others but an entire family beyond the one he’d left behind. And there were times when he even missed some of his particularly special pupils. Imladris. Agrunn. Kharia. Cinvaelin, Xharthusey, Emilio.

He did not miss who he had been before the Burned Dragon. Before the disfigurements that had provoked the name at all.

And yet here I am. Lighting the candles once more.

Tarveth closed his eye. It was the only emotional response he would permit himself to his thoughts. He’d been trained well. Too well, some might argue. Emotion was not something his discipline embraced. In fact, the disciple was taught against it, taught to revile and beware it. Sentiment was an unwelcome, unnecessary and dangerous distraction and gave the fire you let burn up in your spirit another fuel to feed from. Sentiment clouded the razor judgement expected of you, gave such things as mercy and love sway over your actions when the Flawless Warrior was one who obeyed the law of blood. Slay or be slain, without exception.

The discipline wasn’t wrong. Emotion was a distraction. Emotion did give the inferno within another means to try and control its wielder. Emotion was also something more important than anything he’d ever imagined because of those things like mercy and love, things that, while perhaps eternally robbing from you the slight chance there ever was to become a Flawless Warrior, was worth the sacrifice in the end. His time among the Nords had taught him that unforgettable lesson. Sentiment was the thing that gave value of anything at all in a humourless life.

Tarveth opened his eye. Maybe he couldn’t show it. It had been ingrained in him as permanently as the nerveless contusions of flesh sprawled across the left half of his body. But he felt it keenly, every day, every minute, every breath.

He felt its hurts, too. Emotion hurt just as badly as flame on the skin. Another reason for the sanjherai to beware it, for the pain it was capable of inflicting, like poison in the veins. Sometimes emotion hurt so badly it inspired madness. Another reason. Madness took the fire right out of your control. And to lose control was the sanjherai’s ultimate shame.

Supposedly.

But the peoples of Tamriel tended to be a lot more forgiving in this respect than the Tsaesci. Among that kin, the slightest error resulted in tremendous pain and suffering, or death. Usually both. They had to be flawless to survive.

Tarveth should know. He might shun them now and always, but they were still his people. He’d made sure of that, once upon a time.

A very, very long time ago, when the Aldmer were still a fledgling race in Tamriel, three peoples had fought a bitter, violent war in the ancient fatherland of Akavir. It made no difference that all were born of the blood of the same god, whom the people of Tamriel knew as Akatosh. Dragon, Po’Tun and Tsaesci, firstborn, secondborn and bastard-born, all engaged in a brutal conflict the survivors would record in their histories as the Aeon of Six Commonwealths.

The Po’Tun and the Tsaesci both survived. The Dragons lost. Their people were all but destroyed, and a mere handful of survivors fled across the Padomaic Sea.

Those of Tamriel, had they known the forgotten histories, would ask only, “How? How did a race as powerful and terrible as the Dragons lose to mortals? How did the Tsaesci and the Po’Tun strike such fear into their hearts, to humble even their proud and formidable leader into flight across the sea?”

Because of their Emperor, the Po’Tun would say. Because of the vovraika’an, the Tsaesci answered without hesitation. The pinnacle fighters among the sanjherai, the ones who had achieved the epitome of the Flawless Warrior. Individuals whose understanding and mastery of the potential unintentionally given by their bastard-Father allowed them to not only look forward in the current of Time, but backward. They were the ones who had learned to weaponize the Dragons’ single, greatest fear.

The death of their very souls.

In Tamriel such individuals were a famous legend, of course. Dovahkiin, Dragonborn, soul-eaters. In Akavir, in the ancient bloody Aeon, countless soul-eaters had marched on the Empire of the Dragons. Countless had ripped Dragons from Time itself, countless had spread the suffusing power among their followers so they would become all the stronger. Countless had kept up the sacred crusade across the great war that had lasted generations upon generations. Countless had turned the Empire of thousands, hundreds of thousands, into a few hundred broken refugees that finally fled. And the Tsaesci would never forget that power that had shattered an Empire of gods, even if thousands of years later they shunned the sanjherai Arts for the affinity it required to Akatosh, the Father they spurned.

Sanjherai had grown rare in Akavir. With the Dragons gone, there was no more need of them, not really. The Po’Tun’s Emperor was seldom seen, and he was only one. And the vovraika’an passed into history.

There were always some who tried to reignite the smouldered path. Heirs of the legendary dragonslayers of beyond-ancient eras took up their legacy blades, gave themselves utterly to the forbidden teachings, and forged themselves a mastery of the Arts in an ocean of blood. A few almost succeeded. Or did.

Tarveth lit the first candle.

The Tsaesci were an eternally ephemeral people tended to be described as snakes. That was the form they had assumed when first they’d risen from the blood-splattered earth in the shadow of a brawl between the gods that had Fathered them. The High Tsaesci, the original children, inherited their reptilian nature, their everlastingness, their beauty, and their golden scales from one Father; and they inherited their brutality, their lust, their yearn for conquest, and their vampiric thirst and reverence for blood from the other. It was these opposing forces that had entailed their existence that made them such a brittle, violent and unstable people, but a people nonetheless that had learned to master the deliverance of death and torment in every conceivable form. They perceived no difference between to eat and to conquer. They were a hideous people dressed in skins of undeniable beauty.

They mocked compassion, they reviled sentiment, they trained every fibre of their being to slaughter, victory, and devoted reverence of the holy embodiment of everything they existed for, that which had taken the form of the Queen Empress, their living goddess. And her daughters, the ones whom her incomprehensible but beautiful will acted through in their Empire. These daughters were disciplined by their mother in many practices unheard of and unfathomable to the rest of their people. They were sorceresses who had the ear of gods and the demons of Fell, from where all power and existence came, they were beings who demonstrated mere echoes of the power of the Queen Empress.

One such daughter had decided to restore in a handful of selected followers the abandoned knowledge of the Way of the Flawless Warrior. She chose an old port that once had been manned by Tsaesci slavers but now lay derelict and forgotten by the Empire. She rebuilt it and there began a queendom of her own. She taught her followers to overcome the disdain of generations of their shunned Father, as well as to embrace the one they considered holy. She taught them how to tap into the power of their own unholy blood to become like the warriors that had caused the collapse of the Empire of gods. All the while, she waited for the sign she knew, eventually, must come. Someone who existed with a will and endurance to move beyond sanjherai.

Once, six different peoples – six Commonwealths – lived in Akavir, were born from its air and soil. Aside from the aforementioned three was the ice-folk who inhabited the eternally frozen north of the continent, great masters of magic, perhaps the greatest ever to exist in the continent; then there were the two simian races that came into being side by side together, the Isle-folk, agile and kind-hearted, and the race of Men, with minds of improvisation and industry. The Tsaesci failed to conquer the Isle-folk, who could retreat to the trees and vanish beyond scent. But Men were slower, clumsier, and vulnerable. And clever. So clever that the Tsaesci decided not to exterminate the race, but to breed them into their own.

And thus were Men eaten by the Tsaesci, reborn into Tsaesci; mortal Low-named mongrels in the shape of Men that applied their craft to their serpent kin and learned their ways in return, with pale skins that had learned to shy under the sun, and eyes that saw in the night, and all the cruel savagery and the yearn for conquest that had so utterly destroyed their own foundling Empire; an Empire none of them remembered, for their instinctive desire to serve and uphold the glory of the Queen Empress. As warriors born, each and every one, they created ways to overcome their slowness, their vulnerable, scale-less bodies. Shields to deflect, armour to guard. The High Tsaesci only ever wore the sheaths for their weapons, crossed across their backs, fighting only in the suit of scales they’d worn from within their mother’s womb.

The Low Tsaesci lacked the same rigid pride of their forebears. They had minds that eternally adapted, improvised, embraced the concept and the necessity of change. Minds that focused upon strategy and the security of number, minds that embraced, even, a semblance of brotherhood, if not sentiment. Minds that worked against the Dragons with surreal efficiency. Minds that learned through exposure and sensation to tap into the hidden potential that existed strongly in their mongrel blood, minds that crafted a Way that taught them to simulate the Dragons’ almighty gifts, to corrupt and reshape them to their own needs and will, to eventually even look into Time, and learn to undo it from the Dragons’ fabric.

They seldom like to remember it, but it was not the High Tsaesci the Dragons fled from.

Low Tsaesci were mortal, and had to reproduce at a much faster rate than their High kin. But it refined in them the gifts, not diluted them, not if they were maintained with strict attention and faithful diligence. And they were. They were practiced with such dedication that towards the end of the countless years of war there were descendants practically born as vovraika’an, with intrinsic understanding of their inbuilt talents, guided by genetic memories refined from generations of ancestry committed to a single purpose.

When the Aeon passed and the Dragons all but faded from living memory the Arts became a rare and almost disgraceful practice. The descendants of the Arts lost touch with the powers that had given their ancestors such esteem, faithfully following instead the unchanging mindset of their Higher kin. These true heirs of the sanjherai Arts, or ones even still willing to walk the Way, faded across the many mortal generations.

But dying embers could be roused to a flame with a whisper of wind. And a flame that was nurtured could grow into a blaze that consumed forests, cities, lives.

After thousands of years the Queen Empress received a vision that there were Dragons still in the world, a few survivors that had passed across the sea into an unknown land. And the sanjherai saw a resurrection. But the Arts had become tainted with negligence. The Tsaesci that practiced it could not refine in them, could not even conceive, the same legendary skill of their ancestors. They could be trained to competence, but not to be extraordinary, let alone vovraika’an.

Nonetheless, they passed over the sea to complete their holy crusade, and discovered an entire continent rich with conquest. Here they learned, laughably, that the Dragons had tried to rule it, and failed again to mortal diligence. But these mortals had not seen the like of they, and for the glory of their Empire they sought to crush these races of men under their heel.

And then they were stopped, incredibly, impossibly, by a vovraika’an; no, one who was more than that, like their holy Queen Empress he was the vessel of gods. The spark of ancestral memory deep in the core of their beings stirred. They laid down their weapons and pledged their lives and the lives of their descendants to come to this Dragon and all his descendants that walked among them, the Dragon who had conquered this land, the Dragon known as Reman.

After the conquest of Tamriel and the securing of Reman’s dynasty, they devoted themselves once more to the hunting of the last Dragons.

The Dragons were aware of their peril. Their might broken twice over, and their leader gone, it was only a matter of time before they were discovered and slain in turn. The immortal pride of some would not let them turn to others, not even their remaining own for aid. Others, however, were wiser. To shield them from the mortals that hunted them, they made mortals their allies, blessing these mortals with a touch of their own power and the power from their Father. These mortals repaid this generosity with more than a lifetime of service, committing their descendants and the descendants after they to safeguard a single immortal life, for power, fortune, and luck. They were servants sworn not unlike the Dragon Priests of old, spies and agents whose purpose countered that of the vovraika’an, even if they must live among the slayers to take that power to further their own. Some Dragons, some of the weaker ones, had done this since the time of the Six Commonwealths, and as such the Tsaesci had a name for these glorified slaves; vahriin. Oathsworn.

And among the most famous of the vahriin in the tales and knowledge of the Tsaesci race is the one called the Golden Son.

Tarveth lit the second candle.

Daughters of the Queen Empress were often referred to as Shaielets, after one of their mother’s many names. The daughters of Shaielets, from coupling with lesser Tsaesci, were brought under the Queen Empress’s care and accepted as daughters of her own, trained in all the arts and rare skills unseen outside her dynasty. The sons were disinherited if High-born, or killed if Low-born.

There came a time when a Shaielet coupled with a Low Tsaesci. She gave birth to a Low-born son. But this son was not killed.

After several years he was brought to the Queen Empress. Even among the children from her many husbands, her sons were given only a fraction of the privileges entitled to all her daughters, and none of them were ever trained in the same powers and arts. Except for this one. She named this Low-born as her son, and like her daughters, personally schooled him in many forgotten arts.

In particular, he was trained as a sanjherai. Ignited in him was more than an echo of the power that had dismayed the Dragons of old. His mother had sensed it, and the Queen Empress had too. Here was the closest their Empire might ever see of a vovraika’an again, and the Queen Empress had no desire to allow this great power of the Tsaesci to diminish utterly and fade forgotten.

In time, the son of the goddess crossed the sea to find the established Dragonguard. He was perfectly trained, yet lacked the pride of the High Tsaesci and was accepted among the Low readily enough, despite his unheard of privileges. The Queen Empress’s investment in him seemed to repay, when it was he who slew the Dragon Krahjotdaan, one of the last ever alive, and yet he pledged his victory not to himself but to Reman. Glory and Flawlessness seemed to be his destiny.

And then, the son of the goddess shocked all, when he took the forbidden oath and became a vahriin. Why? To elope with a Tamriel native. One of the Temple servants vanished with him that same night. Hunters pursued them in vain and fear. One who was a shadow of a vovraika’an now served the very creature he had been bred and trained from birth to hunt. The Tsaesci could not conceive why. The glory and wonder of the Golden Son became a curse and a cautionary tale, and all spoke his name in infamy. Sentiment was again reinforced as an evil and a poison that brought low the greatest of warriors, for why else would he have lowered himself for a servant with no name and no legacy?

The servant did have a name, and gradually that name grew across generations to make a legacy of its own among the Houses and Great Houses of Morrowind. Everything it stood for, as well as its string of peculiarly mannered descendants, remained still a reliable source of gossip.

The embers of the sanjherai did not diminish in the descendants of the Golden Son. They were attended to with all the diligence and dedication of the ancestral lines of beyond-ancient times. They grew into a flame, and the flame into a fire.

All the while, in her queendom the Shaielet waited for the sign she knew, eventually, must come. Someone who existed with the will and endurance to move beyond sanjherai. She was rewarded with the Golden Son himself, born again and returned to his motherland willingly to seek the power that was his by right of talent. Thus she took him as her consort, cleansed him with rituals of pain and blood of the taint from within he had acquired in his centuries in Reman’s land, and refined in him again of the forbidden, forgotten Arts.

He was a vahriin and of that there was no secret made. The blessing and the curse of the Dragon made his heart only crueller, his understanding of the Way only stronger.

Tarveth lit the third candle.

All of it was long ago, so long ago, and he did not like to remember it. But he had finally figured out, or at least placed a solid suspicion on, the anomaly that was starting to pursue him dangerously. And he knew, or at least assuredly suspected, his shameful past was relevant.

Thus he hadn’t told anyone. Not his friends, not even the ones who had looked into his memories. They’d beheld the horrors and atrocities he had willingly performed in the promise of power a lifetime before, and still accepted him. Not his family, who knew even less. Not his father, who had shared the curse and passed it down to him, as his father had before him. No, he’d told no one. One could see, but not understand, even among Dragonknights. Some things could not be taught and were known only by inborn instinct. He should know, better than anyone.

Tarveth felt this now, this almost conscious awareness that suffused every fibre of his being. And an urgency he felt was not quite his own. If any less of a sensation pulled in him he would have spat on the concept of what he was about to do.

In the quiet, sheltered patch of earth behind his mainland property, where he’d grown a garden in which to meditate, three candles stood flickering in the encroaching twilight. They represented many things. They stood for the trinity that made up the quintessence of the sanjherai, the fragile and critical seamless unity of the body, the mind and the spirit. They alluded to a comforting third of the nine stances of the sword the discipline exercised. They represented, to speak metaphorically, the three fires that burned in Tarveth’s blood. He was a child of many races, they’d said once. His old master had called him Threeflames for exactly that reason. It didn’t bring him pride.

Tarveth stared at the little flames and felt bleak. Amber for the Red Mountain to whom the Dunmer were bound in life and death. Pale gold for Akatosh, the snakes’ shunned Father, in which a glimmering of His sacred blood ran in his veins. Blue for Ba’al, their revered Father, whose scars still burned in his nightmares.

It took him a moment to remember why he was doing this.

Molag Bal’s Planemeld had cost an inconceivable number of mortal lives in his merciless reaping of their souls, but some still had enough spirit left to fight the forces of Coldharbour. Some even had the calibre to reclaim what had been stolen from them and take the fight directly into Molag Bal’s plane. Tarveth had done so once. He’d endured three years of the lifeless hell without purpose before making his return to the mortal plane, only to turn back and redirect all his soulless, vindictive hatred of an unbalanced trinity and the destructive talents of a Master Knight upon the Prince that had caused him such anguish. In hindsight he knew he should’ve lost his mind long before his escape, considering the merciless torments the Daedra had made him endure. There was a stubborn, unconscious fleck of resilience that existed in him that the Daedra had never really figured out but which had mostly preserved his sanity. Then again, they would never have had many opportunities to learn of Tsaesci.

Tarveth had returned to Coldharbour only a few times since then. The latest and last reason had been because his sister, the light of his life and perhaps the most precious thing left to him, had returned there with her two lovers, one of whom was soulless and fighting the same fight Tarveth had once. There wasn’t much question about following them.

Even for a bastard son of Ba’al there’d been some unexpected surprises in the Oblivion Plane, and one such surprise had narrowly left Tarveth with his life. It was while he was recovering from a near-mortal wound in the only safe haven in Coldharbour, the Hollow City – a place the Prince of Domination had no power over – when it happened for the first time.

He’d dismissed it as a headache, some lingering effect from the stress of healing and the trauma of what had made the wound. An abnormal headache, perhaps – headaches didn’t last fleetingly or have an agonizing flash accompanying it – but a headache all the same.

He stopped dismissing them when these absolutely excruciating split-second agonies, so great as to utterly overwhelm a Knight trained all his life to resist pain, pursued him into Tamriel.

They came unpredictably, when his guard was at its lowest. He could not anticipate them, and each time they came back only stronger and fiercer than before. Only recently had they started leaving a lingering taint of urgency. He stopped labelling them as abnormal. He quickly gained from them a sense that they were directed. He stopped ignoring them, and in his meditations he reflected on these anomalies and tried to figure out their purpose. He had no wound to his head, no lasting injury that had cause to give him grief. It was too unanticipated to be emotion of some kind. It felt like someone was driving a dagger through his skull.

And then had roused the suspicion. It wasn’t the dagger-like feeling he should be aware of, it was the someone. The cause of these pains. The more he reflected upon it, the more certain he was that these mental attacks were consciously delivered.

He’d considered, at first, that it was some enemy he’d made across the years now seeking some sick amusement in torturing him with these flashes. If that was the case he could have the magic taint they’d leave traced back, then go and dispose of the matter. Except under further reflection he concluded that whenever the stabs left that taint, that sensation that he felt unconsciously, they conveyed urgency, not malice.

Finally he’d concluded the concept that someone was trying to reach him.

It hurt so much because it was a communication that should not be capable of existing.

He’d pondered the matter carefully. And then, despite his best efforts, he found his thoughts turning back to the years when he had been young, and foolish, and full of malice himself. When he’d endured the unspeakable agony of clutching at the threads of Time and looking not forward, but back.

Tarveth couldn’t say with rock-solid certainty what he thought might be happening to him. He was only mostly certain. He almost hoped he was right. He needed these flashes to end, and soon. They were getting worse.

He touched his arm, throbbing with a sharp and physical pain he’d forgotten was there. The latest flash had been the previous day. He’d needed the mercenary work to distract him from the miserable, sullen depression that had plagued him since the woman he thought he’d spend the rest of his life with, to whom he had been engaged, had left him with the need to have a family of her own; something he was incapable of giving her. Sentiment had been poison in his veins then, and it reminded him mockingly of how futile his chances had really been. Why had he even allowed himself to hope? He was a sanjherai born and bred, he existed to kill as a perfect warrior. Mercenary work that made people think twice about their morals was an ordinary a job for him as an artisan crafting his wares. Disrupting the power a bandit clan was building in the pass between the borders of Eastmarch and the Rift was mindless, simple work. The extermination of the outlaws was carried out mindlessly and simply. It was something he’d done numberless times before, and it was a perfect distraction. Battle trance stripped almost all conscious thought from the mind to let the trinity perform flawlessly in its unity.

The last three rogues he’d confronted should have presented no trouble. He remembered how they’d been pissing their breeches at the sight of his bloodsoaked greatsword and his skull-painted face as he bore down on them like the envoy of Death itself. And while he’d been deflecting their terror-shaken weapons, to shatter their flimsy defences and send their wretched souls to Sovngarde, the flash had taken him. In that single, fleeting moment, physically blinded by the pain, he missed a parry and the bandit’s blade opened a bone-deep gash from wrist to elbow.

He still killed them, of course. He shouldn’t have still been able to wield a cumbersome greatsword with a crippled arm, but Dragonknights were known the world over for their formidable endurance. But that had been too close for comfort. If it was starting to affect his concentration in combat, he had not a painful bothersome but a deadly weakness. It had to be resolved.

The healers he’d seen in Shor’s Stone afterwards had stitched the wound, performed their limited magic to cleanse it of infection, and assured him he’d regain full use of the limb. Tarveth would’ve normally gone straight to Teleri, his shield-brother’s wife, but she would have asked how he’d managed to acquire such a wound at all, and he wouldn’t have been able to explain. So for now he was letting the wound sit. He’d go to her after this ritual, regardless of its result, and have her attend the thing properly, suffering the inevitable chastisement when she recognized the wound was at least two days old, as well as the delay on the delivery he’d been making for her before he’d taken the contract. All of it would be an effective distraction from the sucking depression.

For now, he’d come this far. The candles were lit and waiting.

Tarveth looked around furtively. It was a needless gesture. More than ever, he was alone. The garden of his property, the locals called Velothi Reverie, was walled off. His front door was locked. He’d even barricaded the back door that led to the garden.

No one could disturb him, and no one would.

One-handed, he set about lighting the incense, placed between each candle to assume a hexagon around the circle of earth he’d cleared among the plants. The scents of bittergreen roots, ginger, jasmine and nettle roses arose in a nostalgic aroma that roused the unconscious sensation. They were ample substitutes for the herbs used in Akavir for these rituals, and each plant especially had a potent effect on sanjherai.

Tarveth hesitated for only a moment longer before adding another substance. Nightshade. The fragrant flower was used in Dunmeri ancestor rituals. Here it would fulfil the same purpose.

It was just a suspicion, but he had no other lead.

The pungent burning herbs swelled into the cool night air. The flames shivered on their wicks, waiting expectantly. Tarveth could put it off no longer. He stood just long enough to shed the light cloak from his shoulders, the only article of clothing he was wearing, aside the hairtie pulling his grey hair back into its customary ponytail, and the eyepatch covering his burned-out socket, which he removed and placed with the cloak. His burn scars prickled in the cool evening air, and he felt a brief flush of the old panic when he felt the heat of the candles glow against his calves. But, controlling himself, he lowered himself to kneeling, placed in the centre of the candle triad. He faced the amber flame, the pale gold to his left and the blue to his right.

The incense washed around him. He felt his senses stir and his mind detach to let them.

He could see himself again – no, that wasn’t him, just a grisly shade he did his best to forget, hands bathed in blood as he knelt swooning under the powerful, unseen forces that arose from the centre of the candle triad. The whispers of the priests surrounded him, urging those forces to consume him. The hissed words melted into a monotonous symphony in his mind and he spoke them quietly, flawlessly. Aloud the words were no less potent here than they were across the sea.

He saw the shade flinch as if struck, then arch his spine, baring his nakedness to the arrangement of grinning dragon skulls mounted together on a ceiling of ivory bone. The chains on his wrists clanked sharply as his arms jerked and his head rolled on his shoulders. The candlelight glistened off his painted, rune-patterned flesh.

He sank deeper than that. Deeper than stone, deeper than flesh, deeper than bone. He did not raise his voice. The candle flames around him suddenly quivered to an unseen force.

Tarveth opened his eyes – no, eye, he felt the familiar dull, feeble reflex from whatever muscles remained in his left socket where all stayed black. He kept his heart beating a steady pace. He had its attention now, the force siphoning from him and from the life of the candles, their wax stems quickly melting. He had to speak swiftly to it or it would leave.

He changed his speech. He nearly stumbled over the words when he felt it pulse through his very skull, throwing his head back so sharply he felt a bone pop in his neck. But he didn’t stop. He didn’t even pause to draw breath. His blood stirred with a life of its own, caressed by intangible fingers. He bent his gaze, fixing it to the earth around him. He felt its solidity rise through him, holding him down even as the Fell force engulfed him with greater zeal. The candles swayed, the fumes of the incense seemed to swell to a colour.

The shade thrashed, screaming hideously, fighting its chains with unconscious savagery. The priests’ chant swelled with excited power. The dragon skulls grinned down from their empty, mocking eyes.

Not them. Tarveth closed his mind to it, as effectively as shuttering a window. I’m not looking for them. Let me look back through myself.

He realized he’d stopped breathing. He was being pulled down, sucked down into the very earth. He resisted the urge to fight it. He concentrated on the glow of the three fires lingering in his vision. Red, gold, blue, he focused on them… could see all three waving at him like welcome beacons in the grey, grey night. They flickered. He thought they went out entirely.

It was a stupid endeavour, he thought briefly. Of course he would fail.

It was only a brief thought.

Tarveth regained vision. He was in a dark place, away, although this did not frighten him. There was the feeling of something throbbing in semblance of life, but nothing more than that. Nothing here was tangible, he knew, nothing here was real. It was only a channel, a conduit. He was on his feet, though he couldn’t recall getting up. He looked at himself. He wasn’t surprised to see the scars remain. His master’s chastisement had marked mind, flesh and soul equally and would remain with him for the remainder of his very existence. Though still vulnerably exposed, he felt no danger or shame. He’d been here enough times to know exactly where he was and why he was here.

He couldn’t help but notice it had a bluer taint than usual, though.

“I knew you’d come eventually,” said the voice. Tarveth felt and saw the flash, but this time, there was no pain, just a vague sense of triumph and a faint but definite feeling of existential reluctance. The flash before his eyes took form. For a moment, he faced a mirror.

“Jletha, sai jhata.” Hello, my son. Delivered with all the appropriate scorn.

Tarveth narrowed his remaining eye and with great defiance he looked away. “So it was you, then.”

“Yes. So you should know that what I have to say is important. I’ve passed through many gates to find you, you know.”

“You should pass back through them. Let me alone. I don’t follow that path anymore. Or have you come to finally take your vengeance on me?”

“Vengeance for what? To them you are my son and in turn the son of the goddess, just like I was.”

“Both those sons are long dead. Shouldn’t I be calling you Lord Kalthus now?” Tarveth spoke with an edged mockery that surprised him, but did not reflect in the pale face of the wraith that stood ahead of him.

“I answer to that name about as well as you answer to yours, Ta’avith.”

The one-eyed warrior flinched. “Why are you here?”

“I’ve been trying to contact you since Ba’al’s plane.” The shadow of his ancestor stepped closer. He had the pale skin and slender, lightweight musculature of his brethren, silver grey hair, and gently slanted lilac eyes. Two eyes. “Even there, in the Father’s plane I could only reignite the connection we share through blood. It’s my blood more than yours, after all, and it’s a crude way for kin to speak. It’s a current that flows only one way. If the Tsaesci hadn’t transmuted your body I doubt I’d have been able to reach out to you at all.”

“You shouldn’t exist,” said Tarveth bluntly. “You’re long dead, Ku’aljhath. Your… our people don’t believe in spirits.”

“I don’t deny that. But we’ve both perverted that concept. My ashes will lie in your family tomb. And you…” The Golden Son wore a pale smile. “We don’t need to recall what you did. What they did to you. But let us conclude that they brought us closer together, even in death. Maybe not close enough for you to speak to me like the Dunmer can with their familial deceased. But enough to communicate. My heir indeed.”

“I can’t maintain this long. I know my body’s dying in that circle.”

“You’ll return to it before it does. But I expected that to be the least of your concerns.”

“Enough, Ku’aljhath. You should feel that I’m not soulless anymore.” Tarveth’s eye flashed. “I slew the Father. I cut him in half and tore my soul back from his screaming husk. Now tell me why you wanted to see me.”

“Because a great wrong is rising in your country, a wrong that you must set right.”

“Be straight with me. Tell me what.”

The ancestor ghost was restless. “It’s not easily explained. I know you know our heritage well, Tarveth, better perhaps than any other alive. But you know that long ago I slew the Dragon Krahjotdaan and wrote his legacy into my blades.”

The descendant nodded tersely.

“Whether it is because I slew one of Akatosh’s sons,” Ku’aljhath continued, “or because I became vahriin to another, whom I served until the end of my days, I’ve possessed an awareness for the bones of their dead, even as a phantom. Their spirits still cling to them. A vovraika’an never ended them and they only wait for a chance to reform and return to their place in time. But I’ve felt a disturbance to this tranquillity. Something is coming. Something that I can only describe to be wrong.”

Tarveth spat into the indigo existence around them. “You should also feel that I broke the line. I’m vahriin no more. I ended your legacy and freed my House’s destiny.”

“But you should be concerned.” Ku’aljhath’s expression grew graver. “Because it’s the touch of a Prince that’s perverting its bones.”

He stepped closer. “I’ve lived among your kindred long enough to understand the nature of the Daedric Princes. And you should know the malice of the Princes better than both of us. Thus should you recognize that an Aedric child should not be corrupted by a Daedric hand.”

Lilac eyes held lilac eye. “And I know you, child of mine. I know for all your disdain for the Elder Race, you won’t stand by and let the greater evil triumph.”

Tarveth was the first between them to drop his gaze.

“Where is this?”

“I don’t know.” A frown darkened the spirit’s brow. “I’ve lost much precision in my perception. But I can feel it as surely as you would feel an ant tickling your spine. You shouldn’t need to ask about what cannot be explained and only understood through instinct, sanjherai. Perhaps you can better make sense of it, traveller.”

The blue darkness around them suddenly shifted and took a new form, as if commanded by Ku’aljhath’s mere thought. Tarveth looked around. Beyond them lay the murky silhouettes of mountain peaks, jagged and ice-slick. The ruins of an old temple were hollowed into it. The style was undeniably Ancient Nordic.

The image dissolved to reform – arching halls tinted with a sickening green, echoing with the ripple of cultists in chant. Tarveth’s jaw tightened at the malicious murmur of Daedric. Monstrous humanoids stumbled on unsteady limbs, diseased flesh peeling from their bones, maddened like rabid beasts.

Another image. A huge cavern, the floor littered with yellowed bones, the carved walls scarred by monstrous talons, dotted with the rusted brass gears of Dwemer design, startlingly green ivy crawling through the neglected stonework. A Dragon’s lair, overgrown in its disuse.

The image changed again. Voices in the dark, and the shimmering of an infamous cerulean light; a light that drew the dead from their graves. In their radiance the carvings on the walls were made clear. Dragon Priests overseeing their legions; their masters the Dragons in their rule.

Ku’aljhath waved his hand. The image around them faded and redefined itself. Three dragon-like shapes crouched on their frozen altars, icicles drooping from their serpentine heads and throats and stretched flesh wings, with the dark chill of the mountains all around them. An ominous teal light steamed from their parted maws. “Hircine, Molag Bal, Vaermina, Mephala, Mehrunes Dagon, Clavicus Vile, Nocturnal,” recited the ancestor ghost. “I hope you are prepared to confront the malevolent power of another.”

“Peryite,” Tarveth quietly identified. “Prince of pestilence and order. He’s one of the weakest of the sixteen. Why would he care to make chaos?”

“I believe it is for you to find out,” said Ku’aljhath steadily. “One does not truly know the nature of a Prince. Not even you.”

“I don’t try to. I just end up giving them reasons to wish me dead.”

The image darkened, but did not end. A hollow clattering met their ears. A sickly glow tinged their indeterminate surroundings. And then, a sound Tarveth thought he would never hear again. A huge horned head arose from the dark, twisted in a crude parody of life. Acid dripped from its teeth and a maleficent viridescent light shimmered between its fleshless jaws. Its body was engulfed in the sinister cerulean light of necrotic energy, barren fingers spreading as it arched its empty wings and howled a wretched cry.

“Not even their spirits should suffer this indignity,” Ku’aljhath murmured. “The spirits lie within their bones. No mortal could hope to raise it, but it will suffer in its disturbed death-sleep.”

“I don’t know where it is,” Tarveth argued. “The vague images you’ve shown me, they’ve only told me it centres in Skyrim. East, West, where?”

“I have no doubt that as it awakens, you will find it,” said Ku’aljhath solemnly. “You may revile everything to do with the people, but the instinct of the sanjherai remains as strong in you as ever it did. We forged our legacy with the slaying of Dragons. You are a vahriin no more, Tarveth. You may take up your blade to it. In fact, you must. You know yourself that you must.”

Tarveth couldn’t explain. It couldn’t be explained. Nor did it have to be. He dipped his head.

“I don’t do this for myself,” he growled, “for you, or for any of the fetched snakes.”

“If you remember my legend correctly,” said Ku’aljhath, smiling tiredly, “nor did I.”

“But it’s still my duty, isn’t it?”

“No more than the one you have already embraced, warrior.”

The words seemed still spoken in his ears when Tarveth opened his eye to watch the candle go out.

His body was stiff, cold and dry of air. The first gulp of the cold night brought painful life back into his body, driving him convulsing onto his elbows, pain stabbing hot through his body as his injured arm protested beneath his weight. The incense had burnt out, thin silver coils of wisp all that remained of the surreal smoke. At last he stabilized and slowly uncurled his shivering form from the soft, cool earth, fatigue inhibiting his every movement as he slowly climbed to his feet and groped for his cloak.

He looked back only once on his way indoors. The garden was almost entirely black in the shadow of the taller plants and trees. He could still taste the incense in the air.

Tarveth cleared the door, stepped through it, closed it, and leaned heavily back into the wood.

They went by many names. Flawless Warriors. Scions of the Dragon. Slayers. Sanjherai. Dragonknights.

His hand reached over his shoulder to grasp at a sword hilt that was not there.

Maybe the purpose had changed somewhat since the Tsaesci brought their infamous martial art to the shores of Tamriel so long ago. Maybe the crusade that had brought them here at all had similarly faded into legend like the soul-eaters themselves. Maybe.

Then again, a familiar ancient power was stirring again. Perverted and wrong, and no less dangerous for it. But the presence was there.

Tarveth felt it, just then. Like an ant crawling up his spine. Subtle and unquestionable. Deep within his veins, an ancient, almost forgotten instinct was roused, ingrained in him by generations of an all but forgotten ancestry committed to a single, legendary purpose.

Oh yes.

He should know, better than anyone.

Description

They went by many names. Flawless Warriors. Scions of the Dragon. Slayers. Sanjherai. Dragonknights.

Every one of their followers almost as equally misunderstood.

Tarveth should know. He trained almost a generation’s worth. Every one of them different, every one of them unique, extraordinary. They came to him to learn what it really meant to wield the powers. They came to him to test their own understanding.

Or at least, they had. He hadn’t been the Burned Dragon for some years now. He doubted he ever would be again.

Did he miss it? It was something he asked himself often. He missed certain aspects of that old life, to be certain. He missed the world when it was simple, when rifts from Oblivion weren’t opening at every wrong turn in the wilderness and Daedra of every shade of morality weren’t probing at the tattered remains of Akatosh’s Covenant, seeking to beguile and ensnare the terrified mortals in their besieged plane. He missed his brother, Danion, with a grief that still shut his breath away, despite the rare fortune he’d known in finding not only others but an entire family beyond the one he’d left behind. And there were times when he even missed some of his particularly special pupils. Imladris. Agrunn. Kharia. Cinvaelin, Xharthusey, Emilio.

He did not miss who he had been before the Burned Dragon. Before the disfigurements that had provoked the name at all.

And yet here I am. Lighting the candles once more.

Tarveth closed his eye. It was the only emotional response he would permit himself to his thoughts. He’d been trained well. Too well, some might argue. Emotion was not something his discipline embraced. In fact, the disciple was taught against it, taught to revile and beware it. Sentiment was an unwelcome, unnecessary and dangerous distraction and gave the fire you let burn up in your spirit another fuel to feed from. Sentiment clouded the razor judgement expected of you, gave such things as mercy and love sway over your actions when the Flawless Warrior was one who obeyed the law of blood. Slay or be slain, without exception.

The discipline wasn’t wrong. Emotion was a distraction. Emotion did give the inferno within another means to try and control its wielder. Emotion was also something more important than anything he’d ever imagined because of those things like mercy and love, things that, while perhaps eternally robbing from you the slight chance there ever was to become a Flawless Warrior, was worth the sacrifice in the end. His time among the Nords had taught him that unforgettable lesson. Sentiment was the thing that gave value of anything at all in a humourless life.

Tarveth opened his eye. Maybe he couldn’t show it. It had been ingrained in him as permanently as the nerveless contusions of flesh sprawled across the left half of his body. But he felt it keenly, every day, every minute, every breath.

He felt its hurts, too. Emotion hurt just as badly as flame on the skin. Another reason for the sanjherai to beware it, for the pain it was capable of inflicting, like poison in the veins. Sometimes emotion hurt so badly it inspired madness. Another reason. Madness took the fire right out of your control. And to lose control was the sanjherai’s ultimate shame.

Supposedly.

But the peoples of Tamriel tended to be a lot more forgiving in this respect than the Tsaesci. Among that kin, the slightest error resulted in tremendous pain and suffering, or death. Usually both. They had to be flawless to survive.

Tarveth should know. He might shun them now and always, but they were still his people. He’d made sure of that, once upon a time.

A very, very long time ago, when the Aldmer were still a fledgling race in Tamriel, three peoples had fought a bitter, violent war in the ancient fatherland of Akavir. It made no difference that all were born of the blood of the same god, whom the people of Tamriel knew as Akatosh. Dragon, Po’Tun and Tsaesci, firstborn, secondborn and bastard-born, all engaged in a brutal conflict the survivors would record in their histories as the Aeon of Six Commonwealths.

The Po’Tun and the Tsaesci both survived. The Dragons lost. Their people were all but destroyed, and a mere handful of survivors fled across the Padomaic Sea.

Those of Tamriel, had they known the forgotten histories, would ask only, “How? How did a race as powerful and terrible as the Dragons lose to mortals? How did the Tsaesci and the Po’Tun strike such fear into their hearts, to humble even their proud and formidable leader into flight across the sea?”

Because of their Emperor, the Po’Tun would say. Because of the vovraika’an, the Tsaesci answered without hesitation. The pinnacle fighters among the sanjherai, the ones who had achieved the epitome of the Flawless Warrior. Individuals whose understanding and mastery of the potential unintentionally given by their bastard-Father allowed them to not only look forward in the current of Time, but backward. They were the ones who had learned to weaponize the Dragons’ single, greatest fear.

The death of their very souls.

In Tamriel such individuals were a famous legend, of course. Dovahkiin, Dragonborn, soul-eaters. In Akavir, in the ancient bloody Aeon, countless soul-eaters had marched on the Empire of the Dragons. Countless had ripped Dragons from Time itself, countless had spread the suffusing power among their followers so they would become all the stronger. Countless had kept up the sacred crusade across the great war that had lasted generations upon generations. Countless had turned the Empire of thousands, hundreds of thousands, into a few hundred broken refugees that finally fled. And the Tsaesci would never forget that power that had shattered an Empire of gods, even if thousands of years later they shunned the sanjherai Arts for the affinity it required to Akatosh, the Father they spurned.

Sanjherai had grown rare in Akavir. With the Dragons gone, there was no more need of them, not really. The Po’Tun’s Emperor was seldom seen, and he was only one. And the vovraika’an passed into history.

There were always some who tried to reignite the smouldered path. Heirs of the legendary dragonslayers of beyond-ancient eras took up their legacy blades, gave themselves utterly to the forbidden teachings, and forged themselves a mastery of the Arts in an ocean of blood. A few almost succeeded. Or did.

Tarveth lit the first candle.

The Tsaesci were an eternally ephemeral people tended to be described as snakes. That was the form they had assumed when first they’d risen from the blood-splattered earth in the shadow of a brawl between the gods that had Fathered them. The High Tsaesci, the original children, inherited their reptilian nature, their everlastingness, their beauty, and their golden scales from one Father; and they inherited their brutality, their lust, their yearn for conquest, and their vampiric thirst and reverence for blood from the other. It was these opposing forces that had entailed their existence that made them such a brittle, violent and unstable people, but a people nonetheless that had learned to master the deliverance of death and torment in every conceivable form. They perceived no difference between to eat and to conquer. They were a hideous people dressed in skins of undeniable beauty.

They mocked compassion, they reviled sentiment, they trained every fibre of their being to slaughter, victory, and devoted reverence of the holy embodiment of everything they existed for, that which had taken the form of the Queen Empress, their living goddess. And her daughters, the ones whom her incomprehensible but beautiful will acted through in their Empire. These daughters were disciplined by their mother in many practices unheard of and unfathomable to the rest of their people. They were sorceresses who had the ear of gods and the demons of Fell, from where all power and existence came, they were beings who demonstrated mere echoes of the power of the Queen Empress.

One such daughter had decided to restore in a handful of selected followers the abandoned knowledge of the Way of the Flawless Warrior. She chose an old port that once had been manned by Tsaesci slavers but now lay derelict and forgotten by the Empire. She rebuilt it and there began a queendom of her own. She taught her followers to overcome the disdain of generations of their shunned Father, as well as to embrace the one they considered holy. She taught them how to tap into the power of their own unholy blood to become like the warriors that had caused the collapse of the Empire of gods. All the while, she waited for the sign she knew, eventually, must come. Someone who existed with a will and endurance to move beyond sanjherai.

Once, six different peoples – six Commonwealths – lived in Akavir, were born from its air and soil. Aside from the aforementioned three was the ice-folk who inhabited the eternally frozen north of the continent, great masters of magic, perhaps the greatest ever to exist in the continent; then there were the two simian races that came into being side by side together, the Isle-folk, agile and kind-hearted, and the race of Men, with minds of improvisation and industry. The Tsaesci failed to conquer the Isle-folk, who could retreat to the trees and vanish beyond scent. But Men were slower, clumsier, and vulnerable. And clever. So clever that the Tsaesci decided not to exterminate the race, but to breed them into their own.

And thus were Men eaten by the Tsaesci, reborn into Tsaesci; mortal Low-named mongrels in the shape of Men that applied their craft to their serpent kin and learned their ways in return, with pale skins that had learned to shy under the sun, and eyes that saw in the night, and all the cruel savagery and the yearn for conquest that had so utterly destroyed their own foundling Empire; an Empire none of them remembered, for their instinctive desire to serve and uphold the glory of the Queen Empress. As warriors born, each and every one, they created ways to overcome their slowness, their vulnerable, scale-less bodies. Shields to deflect, armour to guard. The High Tsaesci only ever wore the sheaths for their weapons, crossed across their backs, fighting only in the suit of scales they’d worn from within their mother’s womb.

The Low Tsaesci lacked the same rigid pride of their forebears. They had minds that eternally adapted, improvised, embraced the concept and the necessity of change. Minds that focused upon strategy and the security of number, minds that embraced, even, a semblance of brotherhood, if not sentiment. Minds that worked against the Dragons with surreal efficiency. Minds that learned through exposure and sensation to tap into the hidden potential that existed strongly in their mongrel blood, minds that crafted a Way that taught them to simulate the Dragons’ almighty gifts, to corrupt and reshape them to their own needs and will, to eventually even look into Time, and learn to undo it from the Dragons’ fabric.

They seldom like to remember it, but it was not the High Tsaesci the Dragons fled from.

Low Tsaesci were mortal, and had to reproduce at a much faster rate than their High kin. But it refined in them the gifts, not diluted them, not if they were maintained with strict attention and faithful diligence. And they were. They were practiced with such dedication that towards the end of the countless years of war there were descendants practically born as vovraika’an, with intrinsic understanding of their inbuilt talents, guided by genetic memories refined from generations of ancestry committed to a single purpose.

When the Aeon passed and the Dragons all but faded from living memory the Arts became a rare and almost disgraceful practice. The descendants of the Arts lost touch with the powers that had given their ancestors such esteem, faithfully following instead the unchanging mindset of their Higher kin. These true heirs of the sanjherai Arts, or ones even still willing to walk the Way, faded across the many mortal generations.

But dying embers could be roused to a flame with a whisper of wind. And a flame that was nurtured could grow into a blaze that consumed forests, cities, lives.

After thousands of years the Queen Empress received a vision that there were Dragons still in the world, a few survivors that had passed across the sea into an unknown land. And the sanjherai saw a resurrection. But the Arts had become tainted with negligence. The Tsaesci that practiced it could not refine in them, could not even conceive, the same legendary skill of their ancestors. They could be trained to competence, but not to be extraordinary, let alone vovraika’an.

Nonetheless, they passed over the sea to complete their holy crusade, and discovered an entire continent rich with conquest. Here they learned, laughably, that the Dragons had tried to rule it, and failed again to mortal diligence. But these mortals had not seen the like of they, and for the glory of their Empire they sought to crush these races of men under their heel.

And then they were stopped, incredibly, impossibly, by a vovraika’an; no, one who was more than that, like their holy Queen Empress he was the vessel of gods. The spark of ancestral memory deep in the core of their beings stirred. They laid down their weapons and pledged their lives and the lives of their descendants to come to this Dragon and all his descendants that walked among them, the Dragon who had conquered this land, the Dragon known as Reman.

After the conquest of Tamriel and the securing of Reman’s dynasty, they devoted themselves once more to the hunting of the last Dragons.

The Dragons were aware of their peril. Their might broken twice over, and their leader gone, it was only a matter of time before they were discovered and slain in turn. The immortal pride of some would not let them turn to others, not even their remaining own for aid. Others, however, were wiser. To shield them from the mortals that hunted them, they made mortals their allies, blessing these mortals with a touch of their own power and the power from their Father. These mortals repaid this generosity with more than a lifetime of service, committing their descendants and the descendants after they to safeguard a single immortal life, for power, fortune, and luck. They were servants sworn not unlike the Dragon Priests of old, spies and agents whose purpose countered that of the vovraika’an, even if they must live among the slayers to take that power to further their own. Some Dragons, some of the weaker ones, had done this since the time of the Six Commonwealths, and as such the Tsaesci had a name for these glorified slaves; vahriin. Oathsworn.

And among the most famous of the vahriin in the tales and knowledge of the Tsaesci race is the one called the Golden Son.

Tarveth lit the second candle.

Daughters of the Queen Empress were often referred to as Shaielets, after one of their mother’s many names. The daughters of Shaielets, from coupling with lesser Tsaesci, were brought under the Queen Empress’s care and accepted as daughters of her own, trained in all the arts and rare skills unseen outside her dynasty. The sons were disinherited if High-born, or killed if Low-born.

There came a time when a Shaielet coupled with a Low Tsaesci. She gave birth to a Low-born son. But this son was not killed.

After several years he was brought to the Queen Empress. Even among the children from her many husbands, her sons were given only a fraction of the privileges entitled to all her daughters, and none of them were ever trained in the same powers and arts. Except for this one. She named this Low-born as her son, and like her daughters, personally schooled him in many forgotten arts.

In particular, he was trained as a sanjherai. Ignited in him was more than an echo of the power that had dismayed the Dragons of old. His mother had sensed it, and the Queen Empress had too. Here was the closest their Empire might ever see of a vovraika’an again, and the Queen Empress had no desire to allow this great power of the Tsaesci to diminish utterly and fade forgotten.

In time, the son of the goddess crossed the sea to find the established Dragonguard. He was perfectly trained, yet lacked the pride of the High Tsaesci and was accepted among the Low readily enough, despite his unheard of privileges. The Queen Empress’s investment in him seemed to repay, when it was he who slew the Dragon Krahjotdaan, one of the last ever alive, and yet he pledged his victory not to himself but to Reman. Glory and Flawlessness seemed to be his destiny.

And then, the son of the goddess shocked all, when he took the forbidden oath and became a vahriin. Why? To elope with a Tamriel native. One of the Temple servants vanished with him that same night. Hunters pursued them in vain and fear. One who was a shadow of a vovraika’an now served the very creature he had been bred and trained from birth to hunt. The Tsaesci could not conceive why. The glory and wonder of the Golden Son became a curse and a cautionary tale, and all spoke his name in infamy. Sentiment was again reinforced as an evil and a poison that brought low the greatest of warriors, for why else would he have lowered himself for a servant with no name and no legacy?

The servant did have a name, and gradually that name grew across generations to make a legacy of its own among the Houses and Great Houses of Morrowind. Everything it stood for, as well as its string of peculiarly mannered descendants, remained still a reliable source of gossip.

The embers of the sanjherai did not diminish in the descendants of the Golden Son. They were attended to with all the diligence and dedication of the ancestral lines of beyond-ancient times. They grew into a flame, and the flame into a fire.

All the while, in her queendom the Shaielet waited for the sign she knew, eventually, must come. Someone who existed with the will and endurance to move beyond sanjherai. She was rewarded with the Golden Son himself, born again and returned to his motherland willingly to seek the power that was his by right of talent. Thus she took him as her consort, cleansed him with rituals of pain and blood of the taint from within he had acquired in his centuries in Reman’s land, and refined in him again of the forbidden, forgotten Arts.

He was a vahriin and of that there was no secret made. The blessing and the curse of the Dragon made his heart only crueller, his understanding of the Way only stronger.

Tarveth lit the third candle.

All of it was long ago, so long ago, and he did not like to remember it. But he had finally figured out, or at least placed a solid suspicion on, the anomaly that was starting to pursue him dangerously. And he knew, or at least assuredly suspected, his shameful past was relevant.

Thus he hadn’t told anyone. Not his friends, not even the ones who had looked into his memories. They’d beheld the horrors and atrocities he had willingly performed in the promise of power a lifetime before, and still accepted him. Not his family, who knew even less. Not his father, who had shared the curse and passed it down to him, as his father had before him. No, he’d told no one. One could see, but not understand, even among Dragonknights. Some things could not be taught and were known only by inborn instinct. He should know, better than anyone.

Tarveth felt this now, this almost conscious awareness that suffused every fibre of his being. And an urgency he felt was not quite his own. If any less of a sensation pulled in him he would have spat on the concept of what he was about to do.

In the quiet, sheltered patch of earth behind his mainland property, where he’d grown a garden in which to meditate, three candles stood flickering in the encroaching twilight. They represented many things. They stood for the trinity that made up the quintessence of the sanjherai, the fragile and critical seamless unity of the body, the mind and the spirit. They alluded to a comforting third of the nine stances of the sword the discipline exercised. They represented, to speak metaphorically, the three fires that burned in Tarveth’s blood. He was a child of many races, they’d said once. His old master had called him Threeflames for exactly that reason. It didn’t bring him pride.

Tarveth stared at the little flames and felt bleak. Amber for the Red Mountain to whom the Dunmer were bound in life and death. Pale gold for Akatosh, the snakes’ shunned Father, in which a glimmering of His sacred blood ran in his veins. Blue for Ba’al, their revered Father, whose scars still burned in his nightmares.

It took him a moment to remember why he was doing this.

Molag Bal’s Planemeld had cost an inconceivable number of mortal lives in his merciless reaping of their souls, but some still had enough spirit left to fight the forces of Coldharbour. Some even had the calibre to reclaim what had been stolen from them and take the fight directly into Molag Bal’s plane. Tarveth had done so once. He’d endured three years of the lifeless hell without purpose before making his return to the mortal plane, only to turn back and redirect all his soulless, vindictive hatred of an unbalanced trinity and the destructive talents of a Master Knight upon the Prince that had caused him such anguish. In hindsight he knew he should’ve lost his mind long before his escape, considering the merciless torments the Daedra had made him endure. There was a stubborn, unconscious fleck of resilience that existed in him that the Daedra had never really figured out but which had mostly preserved his sanity. Then again, they would never have had many opportunities to learn of Tsaesci.

Tarveth had returned to Coldharbour only a few times since then. The latest and last reason had been because his sister, the light of his life and perhaps the most precious thing left to him, had returned there with her two lovers, one of whom was soulless and fighting the same fight Tarveth had once. There wasn’t much question about following them.

Even for a bastard son of Ba’al there’d been some unexpected surprises in the Oblivion Plane, and one such surprise had narrowly left Tarveth with his life. It was while he was recovering from a near-mortal wound in the only safe haven in Coldharbour, the Hollow City – a place the Prince of Domination had no power over – when it happened for the first time.

He’d dismissed it as a headache, some lingering effect from the stress of healing and the trauma of what had made the wound. An abnormal headache, perhaps – headaches didn’t last fleetingly or have an agonizing flash accompanying it – but a headache all the same.

He stopped dismissing them when these absolutely excruciating split-second agonies, so great as to utterly overwhelm a Knight trained all his life to resist pain, pursued him into Tamriel.

They came unpredictably, when his guard was at its lowest. He could not anticipate them, and each time they came back only stronger and fiercer than before. Only recently had they started leaving a lingering taint of urgency. He stopped labelling them as abnormal. He quickly gained from them a sense that they were directed. He stopped ignoring them, and in his meditations he reflected on these anomalies and tried to figure out their purpose. He had no wound to his head, no lasting injury that had cause to give him grief. It was too unanticipated to be emotion of some kind. It felt like someone was driving a dagger through his skull.

And then had roused the suspicion. It wasn’t the dagger-like feeling he should be aware of, it was the someone. The cause of these pains. The more he reflected upon it, the more certain he was that these mental attacks were consciously delivered.

He’d considered, at first, that it was some enemy he’d made across the years now seeking some sick amusement in torturing him with these flashes. If that was the case he could have the magic taint they’d leave traced back, then go and dispose of the matter. Except under further reflection he concluded that whenever the stabs left that taint, that sensation that he felt unconsciously, they conveyed urgency, not malice.

Finally he’d concluded the concept that someone was trying to reach him.

It hurt so much because it was a communication that should not be capable of existing.

He’d pondered the matter carefully. And then, despite his best efforts, he found his thoughts turning back to the years when he had been young, and foolish, and full of malice himself. When he’d endured the unspeakable agony of clutching at the threads of Time and looking not forward, but back.

Tarveth couldn’t say with rock-solid certainty what he thought might be happening to him. He was only mostly certain. He almost hoped he was right. He needed these flashes to end, and soon. They were getting worse.

He touched his arm, throbbing with a sharp and physical pain he’d forgotten was there. The latest flash had been the previous day. He’d needed the mercenary work to distract him from the miserable, sullen depression that had plagued him since the woman he thought he’d spend the rest of his life with, to whom he had been engaged, had left him with the need to have a family of her own; something he was incapable of giving her. Sentiment had been poison in his veins then, and it reminded him mockingly of how futile his chances had really been. Why had he even allowed himself to hope? He was a sanjherai born and bred, he existed to kill as a perfect warrior. Mercenary work that made people think twice about their morals was an ordinary a job for him as an artisan crafting his wares. Disrupting the power a bandit clan was building in the pass between the borders of Eastmarch and the Rift was mindless, simple work. The extermination of the outlaws was carried out mindlessly and simply. It was something he’d done numberless times before, and it was a perfect distraction. Battle trance stripped almost all conscious thought from the mind to let the trinity perform flawlessly in its unity.

The last three rogues he’d confronted should have presented no trouble. He remembered how they’d been pissing their breeches at the sight of his bloodsoaked greatsword and his skull-painted face as he bore down on them like the envoy of Death itself. And while he’d been deflecting their terror-shaken weapons, to shatter their flimsy defences and send their wretched souls to Sovngarde, the flash had taken him. In that single, fleeting moment, physically blinded by the pain, he missed a parry and the bandit’s blade opened a bone-deep gash from wrist to elbow.

He still killed them, of course. He shouldn’t have still been able to wield a cumbersome greatsword with a crippled arm, but Dragonknights were known the world over for their formidable endurance. But that had been too close for comfort. If it was starting to affect his concentration in combat, he had not a painful bothersome but a deadly weakness. It had to be resolved.

The healers he’d seen in Shor’s Stone afterwards had stitched the wound, performed their limited magic to cleanse it of infection, and assured him he’d regain full use of the limb. Tarveth would’ve normally gone straight to Teleri, his shield-brother’s wife, but she would have asked how he’d managed to acquire such a wound at all, and he wouldn’t have been able to explain. So for now he was letting the wound sit. He’d go to her after this ritual, regardless of its result, and have her attend the thing properly, suffering the inevitable chastisement when she recognized the wound was at least two days old, as well as the delay on the delivery he’d been making for her before he’d taken the contract. All of it would be an effective distraction from the sucking depression.

For now, he’d come this far. The candles were lit and waiting.

Tarveth looked around furtively. It was a needless gesture. More than ever, he was alone. The garden of his property, the locals called Velothi Reverie, was walled off. His front door was locked. He’d even barricaded the back door that led to the garden.

No one could disturb him, and no one would.

One-handed, he set about lighting the incense, placed between each candle to assume a hexagon around the circle of earth he’d cleared among the plants. The scents of bittergreen roots, ginger, jasmine and nettle roses arose in a nostalgic aroma that roused the unconscious sensation. They were ample substitutes for the herbs used in Akavir for these rituals, and each plant especially had a potent effect on sanjherai.

Tarveth hesitated for only a moment longer before adding another substance. Nightshade. The fragrant flower was used in Dunmeri ancestor rituals. Here it would fulfil the same purpose.

It was just a suspicion, but he had no other lead.

The pungent burning herbs swelled into the cool night air. The flames shivered on their wicks, waiting expectantly. Tarveth could put it off no longer. He stood just long enough to shed the light cloak from his shoulders, the only article of clothing he was wearing, aside the hairtie pulling his grey hair back into its customary ponytail, and the eyepatch covering his burned-out socket, which he removed and placed with the cloak. His burn scars prickled in the cool evening air, and he felt a brief flush of the old panic when he felt the heat of the candles glow against his calves. But, controlling himself, he lowered himself to kneeling, placed in the centre of the candle triad. He faced the amber flame, the pale gold to his left and the blue to his right.

The incense washed around him. He felt his senses stir and his mind detach to let them.

He could see himself again – no, that wasn’t him, just a grisly shade he did his best to forget, hands bathed in blood as he knelt swooning under the powerful, unseen forces that arose from the centre of the candle triad. The whispers of the priests surrounded him, urging those forces to consume him. The hissed words melted into a monotonous symphony in his mind and he spoke them quietly, flawlessly. Aloud the words were no less potent here than they were across the sea.

He saw the shade flinch as if struck, then arch his spine, baring his nakedness to the arrangement of grinning dragon skulls mounted together on a ceiling of ivory bone. The chains on his wrists clanked sharply as his arms jerked and his head rolled on his shoulders. The candlelight glistened off his painted, rune-patterned flesh.

He sank deeper than that. Deeper than stone, deeper than flesh, deeper than bone. He did not raise his voice. The candle flames around him suddenly quivered to an unseen force.

Tarveth opened his eyes – no, eye, he felt the familiar dull, feeble reflex from whatever muscles remained in his left socket where all stayed black. He kept his heart beating a steady pace. He had its attention now, the force siphoning from him and from the life of the candles, their wax stems quickly melting. He had to speak swiftly to it or it would leave.

He changed his speech. He nearly stumbled over the words when he felt it pulse through his very skull, throwing his head back so sharply he felt a bone pop in his neck. But he didn’t stop. He didn’t even pause to draw breath. His blood stirred with a life of its own, caressed by intangible fingers. He bent his gaze, fixing it to the earth around him. He felt its solidity rise through him, holding him down even as the Fell force engulfed him with greater zeal. The candles swayed, the fumes of the incense seemed to swell to a colour.

The shade thrashed, screaming hideously, fighting its chains with unconscious savagery. The priests’ chant swelled with excited power. The dragon skulls grinned down from their empty, mocking eyes.

Not them. Tarveth closed his mind to it, as effectively as shuttering a window. I’m not looking for them. Let me look back through myself.

He realized he’d stopped breathing. He was being pulled down, sucked down into the very earth. He resisted the urge to fight it. He concentrated on the glow of the three fires lingering in his vision. Red, gold, blue, he focused on them… could see all three waving at him like welcome beacons in the grey, grey night. They flickered. He thought they went out entirely.

It was a stupid endeavour, he thought briefly. Of course he would fail.

It was only a brief thought.

Tarveth regained vision. He was in a dark place, away, although this did not frighten him. There was the feeling of something throbbing in semblance of life, but nothing more than that. Nothing here was tangible, he knew, nothing here was real. It was only a channel, a conduit. He was on his feet, though he couldn’t recall getting up. He looked at himself. He wasn’t surprised to see the scars remain. His master’s chastisement had marked mind, flesh and soul equally and would remain with him for the remainder of his very existence. Though still vulnerably exposed, he felt no danger or shame. He’d been here enough times to know exactly where he was and why he was here.

He couldn’t help but notice it had a bluer taint than usual, though.

“I knew you’d come eventually,” said the voice. Tarveth felt and saw the flash, but this time, there was no pain, just a vague sense of triumph and a faint but definite feeling of existential reluctance. The flash before his eyes took form. For a moment, he faced a mirror.

“Jletha, sai jhata.” Hello, my son. Delivered with all the appropriate scorn.

Tarveth narrowed his remaining eye and with great defiance he looked away. “So it was you, then.”

“Yes. So you should know that what I have to say is important. I’ve passed through many gates to find you, you know.”

“You should pass back through them. Let me alone. I don’t follow that path anymore. Or have you come to finally take your vengeance on me?”

“Vengeance for what? To them you are my son and in turn the son of the goddess, just like I was.”

“Both those sons are long dead. Shouldn’t I be calling you Lord Kalthus now?” Tarveth spoke with an edged mockery that surprised him, but did not reflect in the pale face of the wraith that stood ahead of him.

“I answer to that name about as well as you answer to yours, Ta’avith.”

The one-eyed warrior flinched. “Why are you here?”

“I’ve been trying to contact you since Ba’al’s plane.” The shadow of his ancestor stepped closer. He had the pale skin and slender, lightweight musculature of his brethren, silver grey hair, and gently slanted lilac eyes. Two eyes. “Even there, in the Father’s plane I could only reignite the connection we share through blood. It’s my blood more than yours, after all, and it’s a crude way for kin to speak. It’s a current that flows only one way. If the Tsaesci hadn’t transmuted your body I doubt I’d have been able to reach out to you at all.”

“You shouldn’t exist,” said Tarveth bluntly. “You’re long dead, Ku’aljhath. Your… our people don’t believe in spirits.”

“I don’t deny that. But we’ve both perverted that concept. My ashes will lie in your family tomb. And you…” The Golden Son wore a pale smile. “We don’t need to recall what you did. What they did to you. But let us conclude that they brought us closer together, even in death. Maybe not close enough for you to speak to me like the Dunmer can with their familial deceased. But enough to communicate. My heir indeed.”

“I can’t maintain this long. I know my body’s dying in that circle.”

“You’ll return to it before it does. But I expected that to be the least of your concerns.”

“Enough, Ku’aljhath. You should feel that I’m not soulless anymore.” Tarveth’s eye flashed. “I slew the Father. I cut him in half and tore my soul back from his screaming husk. Now tell me why you wanted to see me.”

“Because a great wrong is rising in your country, a wrong that you must set right.”

“Be straight with me. Tell me what.”

The ancestor ghost was restless. “It’s not easily explained. I know you know our heritage well, Tarveth, better perhaps than any other alive. But you know that long ago I slew the Dragon Krahjotdaan and wrote his legacy into my blades.”

The descendant nodded tersely.

“Whether it is because I slew one of Akatosh’s sons,” Ku’aljhath continued, “or because I became vahriin to another, whom I served until the end of my days, I’ve possessed an awareness for the bones of their dead, even as a phantom. Their spirits still cling to them. A vovraika’an never ended them and they only wait for a chance to reform and return to their place in time. But I’ve felt a disturbance to this tranquillity. Something is coming. Something that I can only describe to be wrong.”

Tarveth spat into the indigo existence around them. “You should also feel that I broke the line. I’m vahriin no more. I ended your legacy and freed my House’s destiny.”

“But you should be concerned.” Ku’aljhath’s expression grew graver. “Because it’s the touch of a Prince that’s perverting its bones.”

He stepped closer. “I’ve lived among your kindred long enough to understand the nature of the Daedric Princes. And you should know the malice of the Princes better than both of us. Thus should you recognize that an Aedric child should not be corrupted by a Daedric hand.”

Lilac eyes held lilac eye. “And I know you, child of mine. I know for all your disdain for the Elder Race, you won’t stand by and let the greater evil triumph.”

Tarveth was the first between them to drop his gaze.

“Where is this?”

“I don’t know.” A frown darkened the spirit’s brow. “I’ve lost much precision in my perception. But I can feel it as surely as you would feel an ant tickling your spine. You shouldn’t need to ask about what cannot be explained and only understood through instinct, sanjherai. Perhaps you can better make sense of it, traveller.”

The blue darkness around them suddenly shifted and took a new form, as if commanded by Ku’aljhath’s mere thought. Tarveth looked around. Beyond them lay the murky silhouettes of mountain peaks, jagged and ice-slick. The ruins of an old temple were hollowed into it. The style was undeniably Ancient Nordic.

The image dissolved to reform – arching halls tinted with a sickening green, echoing with the ripple of cultists in chant. Tarveth’s jaw tightened at the malicious murmur of Daedric. Monstrous humanoids stumbled on unsteady limbs, diseased flesh peeling from their bones, maddened like rabid beasts.

Another image. A huge cavern, the floor littered with yellowed bones, the carved walls scarred by monstrous talons, dotted with the rusted brass gears of Dwemer design, startlingly green ivy crawling through the neglected stonework. A Dragon’s lair, overgrown in its disuse.

The image changed again. Voices in the dark, and the shimmering of an infamous cerulean light; a light that drew the dead from their graves. In their radiance the carvings on the walls were made clear. Dragon Priests overseeing their legions; their masters the Dragons in their rule.

Ku’aljhath waved his hand. The image around them faded and redefined itself. Three dragon-like shapes crouched on their frozen altars, icicles drooping from their serpentine heads and throats and stretched flesh wings, with the dark chill of the mountains all around them. An ominous teal light steamed from their parted maws. “Hircine, Molag Bal, Vaermina, Mephala, Mehrunes Dagon, Clavicus Vile, Nocturnal,” recited the ancestor ghost. “I hope you are prepared to confront the malevolent power of another.”

“Peryite,” Tarveth quietly identified. “Prince of pestilence and order. He’s one of the weakest of the sixteen. Why would he care to make chaos?”

“I believe it is for you to find out,” said Ku’aljhath steadily. “One does not truly know the nature of a Prince. Not even you.”

“I don’t try to. I just end up giving them reasons to wish me dead.”

The image darkened, but did not end. A hollow clattering met their ears. A sickly glow tinged their indeterminate surroundings. And then, a sound Tarveth thought he would never hear again. A huge horned head arose from the dark, twisted in a crude parody of life. Acid dripped from its teeth and a maleficent viridescent light shimmered between its fleshless jaws. Its body was engulfed in the sinister cerulean light of necrotic energy, barren fingers spreading as it arched its empty wings and howled a wretched cry.

“Not even their spirits should suffer this indignity,” Ku’aljhath murmured. “The spirits lie within their bones. No mortal could hope to raise it, but it will suffer in its disturbed death-sleep.”

“I don’t know where it is,” Tarveth argued. “The vague images you’ve shown me, they’ve only told me it centres in Skyrim. East, West, where?”

“I have no doubt that as it awakens, you will find it,” said Ku’aljhath solemnly. “You may revile everything to do with the people, but the instinct of the sanjherai remains as strong in you as ever it did. We forged our legacy with the slaying of Dragons. You are a vahriin no more, Tarveth. You may take up your blade to it. In fact, you must. You know yourself that you must.”

Tarveth couldn’t explain. It couldn’t be explained. Nor did it have to be. He dipped his head.

“I don’t do this for myself,” he growled, “for you, or for any of the fetched snakes.”

“If you remember my legend correctly,” said Ku’aljhath, smiling tiredly, “nor did I.”

“But it’s still my duty, isn’t it?”

“No more than the one you have already embraced, warrior.”

The words seemed still spoken in his ears when Tarveth opened his eye to watch the candle go out.

His body was stiff, cold and dry of air. The first gulp of the cold night brought painful life back into his body, driving him convulsing onto his elbows, pain stabbing hot through his body as his injured arm protested beneath his weight. The incense had burnt out, thin silver coils of wisp all that remained of the surreal smoke. At last he stabilized and slowly uncurled his shivering form from the soft, cool earth, fatigue inhibiting his every movement as he slowly climbed to his feet and groped for his cloak.

He looked back only once on his way indoors. The garden was almost entirely black in the shadow of the taller plants and trees. He could still taste the incense in the air.

Tarveth cleared the door, stepped through it, closed it, and leaned heavily back into the wood.

They went by many names. Flawless Warriors. Scions of the Dragon. Slayers. Sanjherai. Dragonknights.

His hand reached over his shoulder to grasp at a sword hilt that was not there.

Maybe the purpose had changed somewhat since the Tsaesci brought their infamous martial art to the shores of Tamriel so long ago. Maybe the crusade that had brought them here at all had similarly faded into legend like the soul-eaters themselves. Maybe.

Then again, a familiar ancient power was stirring again. Perverted and wrong, and no less dangerous for it. But the presence was there.

Tarveth felt it, just then. Like an ant crawling up his spine. Subtle and unquestionable. Deep within his veins, an ancient, almost forgotten instinct was roused, ingrained in him by generations of an all but forgotten ancestry committed to a single, legendary purpose.

Oh yes.

He should know, better than anyone.