too damn old for this shit

Now if Kaidan had found himself in better company than Estrith’s foul tongue and fouler manners, then his outlook might not have been so grim. But as it were, all he could think upon was how he should have left when he had the chance – for each moment that Kaidan lingered in Estrith’s company was one moment that brought him ever closer to death, he was certain of it.

When they parted ways earlier that morn, for instance; Estrith to wash the dust of the road and the debris of the forest away in the river and he to heed to nature’s call further downstream – that was a perfect opportunity to slip away unseen and take his leave through the trees. There was another perfect opportunity yesterday evening too, when she’d busied herself steeping roots and grinding petals of the wildflowers she’d picked throughout the day, losing herself to the rhythmic motions of a mortar and pestle. Kaidan recognised some of the blooms scattered around her as she worked – wild lavender, bundles of little mountain flowers in varying hues of orange and red, and another more distinctive variety of flower. He’d first seen them when he was nought more than a lad, swaying benignly by the banks of the Brena River during his and Brynjar’s three-year stint in Hammerfell not long after they’d reclaimed his mother’s sword. Pretty little bell-shaped blooms with swollen, lilac petals that bobbed and bounced about in the breeze. He’d made the mistake of picking some, hoping to win a kiss from that Breton guild-merchant’s fair-haired daughter who he was sure head given him eyes the other day. The small curve of a smile graced his lips as he picked them, already lost in foolish little daydreams, wondering about how soft her lips might feel against his own.

“What in Oblivion’s name are you playing at, lad?” Brynjar had berated. His tone was short and clipped as he smacked the small bundle of purple flowers from Kaidan’s grasp. “That’s Deathbell, that is.”

Kaidan felt his face burn from anger and embarrassment both, the frail bubble of his pleasant musings popped. “Lay off, will ya? It’s jus’ flowers.”

“Drop a few petals from that there flower into a man’s stew and he’ll lack the strength to lift his sword for a week. Take yer little bushel to the right alchemist, and they’ll whip up a tonic strong enough to stop his heart right in its tracks instead.” Brynjar laid aside the fishhook he was wiring and spat on the ground. “Just flowers… there’s no such thing. You need t’take care, lad. Some flowers are not nearly so innocent as they look.”

Kaidan stuck his thumbs in his belt and kicked at the ground, sulking and grumbling lowly.

“Speakin’ of which,” Brynjar piped up after a few moments of sullen quiet. “There are lasses out there not too different from those bonny little bells… you’ll want t’be careful of those, too. They’re nothing but trouble.”

Kaidan glowered up at him. “What do you mean?”

“I’m old, not blind, lad. I’ve seen the way you look at her.” Another flush of heat prickled Kaidan’s neck. “But don’t let yerself get swept away by a comely face. Like those flowers, there are lasses out there who are just as pretty, just as sweet-smelling, and just as sure to lead a man to his grave.” Brynjar grinned, but the flash of his teeth was too grim for humour. “Better warriors than you or I have been laid low, letting women like that mess with their heads with nought more than a look.”

If Kaidan had known then what he’d one day get into… he’d have sworn off women altogether. For Rosalind had done so much more than lay him low, and it had all begun with a single look just as Brynjar had said. But Rosalind was no poisonous little flower.

She was toxicity itself.

“Heads up, swordsman,” Estrith had called then, snapping him out of his reverie. The time to leave her grinding herbs had come and gone, he’d realised, as she tossed something his way.

“What’s this?” he’d asked, palming the corked-up little vial she tossed toward him. An oily, viscous liquid sat within, dark and sickly violet in hue.

Magebane, she’d called it. A poison to lace the tips of her arrows and the length of his sword; a poison to set aflame the magicka in one’s blood and squeeze their racing heart. Not potent enough to kill a man… but certainly painful enough for him to wish that it had.

“I’ve found that elven mages are particularly prone to its effects,” Estrith said darkly. She’d worked slowly and methodically, taking one arrow from her quiver and dipping the point into the bowl before her. Then she brought it up, spinning it around her fingertips as the coating dried before carefully setting it down and taking up another. There was a gleam of recollection in her eyes as she spoke. “Their bodies are weak, dependant on the flows of Aetherius absolutely. The way they writhe about when they are sundered from it…” she recalled, the hint of a laugh on her breath, “…anything to make it end.”

Kaidan swallowed against a lump in his throat. He had no love of mages and their kind but… “Why not just kill ‘em outright?” he asked. “I’ve heard that flower can be used to make a poison that’ll stop a man’s heart in its tracks.”

Estrith’s answering smile was sharp as she returned, “How many of the Dominion’s secrets do you suppose a dead elf can spill, Kaidan?”

Kaidan only grit his teeth as she turned back to her arrows, sunlight shimmering threads of gold in the straw of her hair while she hummed faintly to the tune of torture like some sort of cruel, fey, woodland creature.

And it was just as Brynjar had said.

Nothing but trouble.

But… if Kaidan was honest with himself, he’d known that he should have left that very first night. Going after a werewolf alone was one thing, but as soon as Estrith revealed that she had every intention of tracking down what she thought was a Thalmor operative, he should have upped and left, no explanation given. Not that he would have needed to give one – it wasn’t as though she’d asked for his help. Even now, Kaidan wasn’t convinced she anything more than tolerated his company.

No… a swift departure would definitely have been the smart decision. But Kaidan never really was very good at those.

You see, he almost had chosen wisely, and left.

That very first night, as soon as he heard a shift in her breathing that signalled slumber, he’d laced up his boots and shouldered his pack. But then he’d turned suddenly to place a couple more logs in the fire so she at least would not wake up alone to the sting of a chill… and he made the mistake of looking at her. Coiled atop the furs of her bedroll like a stray cat, Estrith held one arm held close to her chest and the other curled back to make a pillow for her head. The glint of one of her little throwing knives was just visible within a loosely closed fist. Save for the faint glow of the dwindling campfire and a frail shaft of moonlight peeping through intermittent breaks in the clouds, all was pitch black around him, but Kaidan’s eyes had long since grown accustomed to the gloom. There was a sudden pop and crack as the freshly laid logs in the fire cut the night, and the sound roused Estrith ever so slightly. She rolled onto her back and stretched, knife falling from her grasp, arms winding up and over her head, brushing hair away from her face. Gone was the seemingly permanent scowl she wore while awake, but it seemed she – much like himself – found no peace in dreaming, either. She looked almost… sad. There was a downwards tilt to the pink of her lips, and her brows drew close with the trace of a frown. Kaidan stooped close to shift her knife away – now too close to the exposed skin of her neck – and he saw beneath the moonlight what she kept so well hidden beneath the fall of her hair.

Like him, she too was marked.

Kaidan wore the sins of his past like a brand across the face, and he’d long since given up any attempts to conceal it. Everything about him screamed ‘I am other’. He wasn’t built like most men were built, he towered over crowds – his eyes were fucking red, for Nine’s sake. He’d never met anyone amongst the Men of Tamriel that he’d felt a passing kinship to, so what difference would a tattoo across his face make when he was already an outcast? Besides, every glimpse Kaidan caught of his own face offered a cruel reminder of all that he had taken, and…

And all that he had cast aside to take it.

There were times he looked upon that wicked tattoo – a flash of crimson on the surface of a too-well polished tankard, a blaze of red upon the glassy surface of a lake gripped by winter’s laboured breath – and he clung to the feelings of revulsion it stirred up. Kaidan relied upon those sharp reminders of the depths that he’d sank if only to spur him onwards, upwards, fighting on to keep his head above the waves. Every sighting of the man he’d once been renewed his vow to never walk in those depraved shoes again.

But Estrith’s mark was… different. Someone had hurt her, and it didn’t take any stretch of the imagination to picture who.

She carried the trace of a storm upon her face, a concentrated wreath of pale and chaotically intersecting lines around her left eye. They ran all along the slope of her cheek and brow and up, a trail across her temple that ran into her hairline and out of sight. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen the signs of lightning burn. Brynjar had a set of his own that ran across his shoulder and along his back from the Great War, raised-red and angry strokes that had always pained him, no matter what the temple healers tried. Then Kaidan joined the Dawn and he’d been witness to a hell of a lot more. Rosalind… well, she liked what she liked – and, like her, lightning didn’t much care to be contained. It was always explosive and always ugly, and it left a mess of charred and melting flesh behind.

But Estrith’s scars were not quite so. It seemed to Kaidan that there was something careful in the casting, something controlled, something almost… delicate. Like a hand that reached forward to brush tears away in comfort but left her with a curse to carry instead. Perhaps it was the hand that took her parents, too. The hand that had left her alone in this world, with nought more than rage and all its shadows to hide within. The thought pulled at something unfamiliar in his chest and he –

Well. Whatever the reason, he decided to stay.

But by the Gods if he didn’t regret it.

He could have been half-way towards the border by now. Half-way towards what might have been some guarantee of safety in the free country of Hammerfell. Instead, he was in the company of a girl who seemed intent on chasing down her own demise. But… Kaidan took pride in many things and backing down from a fight wasn’t one of them. Besides, if this girl’s nasty little poison was as effective as she’d said it was, and if luck was on their side, then maybe – just maybe – he might be able to extract a few answers of his own.

If they ever stopped walking around in bloody circles, that was.

Kaidan sighed, frowned, and pursed his lips around the words of a question that still made it out despite his best efforts to contain them. “…Are you sure you know what you’re doing with that bloody thing?”

The glare Estrith shot him over her shoulder was sharper than any knife sitting in her belt.

It was the third time in as many hours they’d stopped right in their tracks that afternoon, Estrith coming to an abrupt halt before him while Kaidan (eyes trained to the horizon for any glint of sunlight dazzling off gold plate) all but ploughed into her narrow back. It was the third time in as many hours he’d received an elbow to his gut for the offense. Not that it made any difference to him, but if she kept jabbing into his steel like that, he was sure that elbow would be riddled with bruises by nightfall.

Through the pounding in his head, Kaidan’s eyes lingered warily – and not for the first time that day – to fall upon the bleached and withered form of an old pine tree. If a dead tree could look pained, then this one certainly did, sat in the midst of a circle of bloated, swollen mushrooms in varying hues of warty brown and blood red that had surely sapped the life from it. The longer he looked at it, the worse he felt. “I can’t put my finger on it… but I feel like we’re going ‘round in circles,” he suggested cagily.

“Don’t be stupid,” Estrith muttered, but from the way her eyes darted towards the dead tree, he was not alone in thinking such.

After a heavy breath, Estrith began digging around in the small leather pouches tied to her belt, and Kaidan struggled to stifle his resulting groan. She brought a pinch of black dust from one pouch and scattered it over the… the compass, or lure, or whatever she called that Oblivion bound thing in the palm of her hand. Once, twice, three times she rolled it about in the ashes before whispering words that he couldn’t make the shape of and blowing them away. Immediately, the trinket in her hand lit up and pulsed a soft but eerie green light upon her pale face. When she let it tumble from her grasp to dangle upon the string, the lure plummeted like a deadweight to the end of its length and fell impossibly still. The first time he’d watched her do this, a cold creep of horror had traced its way down his spine to witness the pendulum slowly begin to twitch and jerk about, like an invisible hand had suddenly reached out and taken hold of it.

Witchcraft, it was.

Kaidan could hardly believe that he was allowing himself to be led about by such a thing. He could only imagine what Brynjar would have to say about it. But Brynjar was long gone now, leaving Kaidan with nothing but a target on his back and the bite of unanswered questions forever gnawing at the edges of his mind. If trying to find those answers led him down some uncomfortable paths, then so be it. Kaidan was no stranger to discomfort.

But now, instead of leading them along through paths unseen, the lure at the end of Estrith’s line had gone all but still. It rotated gradually upon the spot, emitting a faint, eldritch light, but it seemed it would lead them no further.

“What does that mean?”

Estrith made no reply but to inhale, snatch up the lure and return it to a pocket within her faded emerald cloak.

“Are we lost?”

“No.”

“Is it broken?”

She cast an agitated glance around the sheltered clearing they were stood in, eyes dark with frantic thought, flitting from the slimy mushrooms at her feet to the overgrown path through the trees they’d just left. A doubtful glance at the canopy above. A petulant kick at the dirt beneath her boots. “No, I… I don’t think so.”

“Then why isn’t it –”

“Well the mage clearly isn’t here, is he?” she griped, gesturing at the empty space between them. “Either the bastard has met his – hopefully painful – end at the hands of something far luckier than ourselves, or he’s… I don’t know. Cloaking himself, somehow,” she explained irritably, now aiming a kick at the large fleshy mushrooms that littered the grove. He didn’t know her well enough to be sure, but he thought he saw a glimmer of confusion behind the shadow of frustration in her eyes. “It seems I can lead us no further today.”

“Oh,” Kaidan said, after a pause. “So er… what do we do now, then?” he asked, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Besides waiting to see if the trace picks up in the morning?” Estrith threw down her pack at the base of the withered old tree. “It won’t be long until sundown. I’m going to hunt,” she said, turning to him briefly. “You can set up camp.  Or leave. Or whatever. I really don’t care.” Then she made for the treeline without another word.

For a moment, Kaidan just stared blankly at the space between two firs where Estrith’s form had disappeared, before exhaling the breath of a sour laugh. He didn’t think he’d ever find anyone less personable than himself. Then the hairs on the back of his neck all stood up at once, and Kaidan found his eyes pulled once again to the grotesque form of that dead tree at the head of the clearing. Bleached white wood and limbs all twisted at jarring angles, while blooms of swollen fungi and lichen suckled at what remained. His eyes hurt just looking at it.

Kaidan grit his teeth. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something about that tree gave him the creeps. He ventured close enough to it to retrieve Estrith’s pack and cast a furtive glance about his surroundings. Whether the trace Estrith tracked belonged to a Dominion operative or not, there was no shadow of doubt in Kaidan’s mind that they’d cross paths with the Thalmor one way or another. He knew full well there was a squad on his heels. He could only hope that they were few in number, and that he and Estrith found them first, and gain an advantage through stealth and the element of surprise. For now, however, Kaidan thought it would be best to set up camp somewhere a little more defensible than an open grove with a horrible, creepy dead tree at its head. He shouldered Estrith’s pack above his own and set off after her in search of an appropriate place to settle down for the night, keeping a cautious eye on the horizon all the while.

If Kaidan had thought to look up, he might have noticed the oddity of a single, too-dense shadow in the canopy above, or the shake of a branch not quite in time with the breeze. He might have attributed the absence of birdcall and the prickle at his neck to something other than the ominous presence lingering around the lifeless tree. If he’d noticed any of those signs, he might have put them together and considered the sudden immobility of Estrith’s lure to suggest that it had not become lost, but had rather found.

Instead, Kaidan looked around himself, and ahead of himself, and he deemed the coast safely clear.

He remained oblivious to the whisper-soft footfall of a single pair of shadow-wrought Aldmeri leathers just two-dozen feet above his head.

*

             By the time Estrith returned, Kaidan had set up a light camp beside the tinkling of a stream –just a couple of leather tarps stretched out and roped up to some trees, nothing that couldn’t be torn down in a hurry should the need arise. He’d doffed his chest plate and his gauntlets, set a pot of water to boil, and had just peeled off his undertunic when the taciturn hunter announced her appearance through the graceless thump of two dead pheasants tossed at his feet.

“Might as well make yourself useful and see to those while you’re at it.”

Kaidan exhaled. “Tell me, Estrith… you have many friends back in Falkreath?”

“Nope,” she said coolly. “I don’t have any friends anywhere.”

“Really now?” Kaidan replied, raising his eyebrows mockingly. “I find that hard to believe.”

“And I’ve no need of friends,” she continued, turning away to stow her bow and quiver beside a gnarled thicket of roots, “so don’t get any ideas.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Kaidan scoffed, ignoring the pheasants she’d chucked at him (each one felled by a single arrow through the neck). Instead, he began to unravel the bandages around his shoulder and torso which, he realised with a wince, were now some days gone by without a change, and they were beginning to smell like it too. If not for the threat of the Thalmor on his heels, he would have sought aid from a temple or something.

“Good. Because the sooner we’re done with this business the sooner we can part ways, and you can go back to frittering away all my coin on –” Estrith paused, turning to him for the first time since her arrival, and looked at him with her mouth slightly agape. Then her eyebrows drew close together again. “What on Nirn are you doing?”

Kaidan blinked at her, a rag poised between his fingers in the waters of the stream. “What the bloody hell does it look like?”

“It looks to me like you’re trying to rid yourself of the arm entirely,” she retorted, throwing an uneasy look at his shoulder. He knew it wasn’t a pretty sight, but at least it was no longer weeping so profusely. “For how long have you had that wound?”

Kaidan shrugged. “Bah, it’s nothin’ for you to worry about. Prob’ly just looks worse than it is.” He squeezed out the rag and brought it up to wipe away what sweat and grime had accumulated over the past few days, only to find it slapped from his hand. “Oi, what’re you –”

“Let me see,” Estrith said, crouching briefly to take a closer look. Her eyes narrowed as she peered at his shoulder. “So this is what’s been troubling you. One of those bandits get you with a rusty axe or something?”

Kaidan chuckled lowly at the thought that any of those brigands, as unskilled as they were unwashed, could ever hope to lay even a glancing blow upon him. “They should be so lucky,” Kaidan breathed. “Nah, this I got about two sennight ago. Draugr in an old barrow near Whiterun.”

Estrith quirked a brow at him. “What are you doing traipsing around old barrows?”

“Biting off a little more’n I could chew, apparently,” Kaidan said grimly. “I’ll be honest, it’s not somethin’ I’m in a hurry to repeat.”

Estrith shook her head at him, eyes fixed again on his shoulder, only half listening. “A fortnight of fester, bloodroot setting in… surprised you’re still on your feet,” she muttered to herself.

It took a while for Kaidan to register her words. “Hold on… blood what?”

“Don’t move,” Estrith huffed impatiently, getting to her feet. She grabbed the rag he’d dropped and wound her arm back, tossing it far downstream. “Set some water from the pot aside and wash with that. Nothing else.”

“But it’s boiling,” Kaidan protested.

“It’s clean,” she corrected scathingly. “You’ve no idea of the filth churning about in those waters. Imagine, surviving a barrow-dive just to fall to your own stupidity,” she snarked, picking up her knife again and heading for the trees.

Kaidan bristled. “Do you call everyone you meet stupid?”

“Everyone I meet usually is,” she said with the twitch of a grin on her lips.

Sometime later, Estrith returned to camp with a sprig of herbs and a bundle of plump, slimy looking mushrooms cradled within her arms. Kaidan eyed them distrustfully. “Please don’t tell me you’ve gone and gathered those from that fuckin’ tree,” he muttered.

“Not all of them,” she replied indifferently. “I had to go further upstream for the Imps. You’re lucky I found them at all.”

Kaidan watched Estrith dubiously as she did various different things to the mushrooms she’d gathered, squeezing out the juice of some with the flat side of her knife, grinding others into a paste. But he drew the line when she pulled a thin, leather bound roll out of her pack and unravelled it to reveal a small collection of sharp little instruments. “Look, I appreciate yer concern, but like I said, you don’t have t’worry about me –”

“Oh, I’m not worried,” Estrith said plainly, stepping forward to kneel before him with a bowl of foul-smelling mush in one hand and what looked like a small torture kit in the other.

“Right.” Kaidan stood up as she sat and began to step away, kneading at the ache in his temple. “Good. So, I don’t need any help –”

“But you’re of no use to me if you can’t lift your sword.”

Kaidan exhaled a grim laugh. “I can lift my sword jus’ fine, thanks.”

“For now, perhaps,” Estrith shrugged carelessly. “Though for how much longer is anyone’s guess.”

“Look, I’m fine,” Kaidan snapped, looking down at her, his head throbbing along with the rising of his voice. “It’s just a little flesh wound. I don’t need you and whatever witchcraft you’re trying makin’ it any worse, alright?”

“Witchcraft?” Estrith echoed, pulling a bemused face. “Do I look like a mage to you?” Then she laughed outright at him. “Kaidan, this is medicine, not magic. It’s medicine you’ll be in dire need of soon enough.”

Kaidan stared off into the distance and folded his arms, gritting his teeth as even that small motion sent a lance of pain running along his arm. He wasn’t used to his injuries lingering around like this, wasn’t accustomed to needing the help of another. When first he saw the veins around his wound darkening, he’d hoped it was a trick of the light, but each day the colour deepened and spread. He was half hoping it’d go away on its own, his body fighting it off as it fought most everything else. But he was sore, and he was tired, and he –

“First, it’s the dreams.”

Kaidan stilled as Estrith’s voice rose softly behind him.

“Bizarre, feverish things as the rot in your blood takes your fears and your memories, twists them up and bends them all out of shape,” she said. “But then it enters the daylight hours, too. You’ll wake to a pain that pierces behind the eyes and find the colours of the world shine too bright, see shadows that creep towards the sun, hear voices that belong to no one.”

That didn’t mean anything. Kaidan was no stranger to nightmares, after all. Hell, he couldn’t remember the last night’s sleep he’d had without one that he hadn’t drank himself into Oblivion to achieve. But a pang of pain pickled hot and bright behind his eyes and he closed his lids against the endless thrum of it.  

“Soon enough, you lose sense of what’s real and what’s not as the rot takes hold of it all, mind and body.” Estrith’s voice was closer now, and Kaidan opened his eyes to find that she had discarded her tools and foul-smelling balm to stand right before him, close enough to count the freckles dusting her nose. Close enough to spy one sliced right in two by the shimmer of a lightning bolt. “I’ve seen it before, many times. Soldiers carried in from the field just a little too late, or stubborn guardsmen playing down an injury to save face.” She folded her arms. “There are far better deaths than succumbing to rotten blood.”

Kaidan narrowed his eyes at her but made no reply.

“Whatever. Do what you will,” Estrith said, shrugging her shoulders as she stepped away. “But do it on your own. You’ve slowed me down enough –”

There was a golden swish of hair as Kaidan reached out and grabbed her, a flash of ire in her coldly inquiring eyes as they wrenched up to meet his own. He stared down at his own fingers clenched around her elbow as if they belonged to another, confused, unconscious of any decision made to stop her departure. “Alright,” he breathed eventually.

Estrith snatched her elbow away. “Alright what?”

“Alright… you can help me.”

Nothing but folded arms and a single, pale brow raised with an infuriating sense of superiority.

Kaidan scoffed. “I’m not beggin’ you”.

He wasn’t sure if it was anger or amusement that curled her lip. “As I said, do what you will.”

Kaidan huffed, chewing the inside of his cheek as she stepped around the clearing, stooping first to gather her pack, and then to fetch her shortbow and quiver. “Fine,” he grunted, wringing a hand through his sweat-ridden hair. “Will you help me? Please.”

There was no mistaking the mischievous glint in her dark eyes as Estrith turned on her heel to face him again. She dropped her pack and gestured with her chin back to his perch by the stream. “Sit.”

Moments later and Kaidan was restraining one wince after another as Estrith, balanced almost entirely in his lap, leeched the pus and bad blood out of the gash in his shoulder with the too-firm press of a series of hot rags. With the light of day now fading, Kaidan was losing sight of things in the distance with which to distract himself, and every now and then he caught his eyes lingering on the face of the girl before him. And whenever his eyes did fall on her, wandering thoughts soon followed. Like how he half-wanted to smooth out the small crease forming between her brows as she worked, or hear the story behind the fleshy pink of a newly-formed scar through her bottom lip, or mention that in all his travels through Tamriel, not once had he seen eyes so dark and deep as hers that were framed by lashes so pale.

“Your parents ever tell you it’s rude to stare?” Estrith asked, breaking the silence between them.

So she’d noticed. Kaidan chewed his lip. “No,” he said slowly. “I’ve never met ‘em.”

Estrith’s hands grew still, disarmed for just a moment by his revelation, and he was suddenly reminded of his conversation with the innkeep back at Dead Man’s Drink. He knew she was without parents too. He caught the glimmer of something within the black depths of her eyes before she inhaled, shrugging back into her cloak of hostility once again. “You’ll just have to take my word for it then,” she said stiffly.

Kaidan smirked. “I’ll try and bear that in mind. Ouch – ! D’you mind?” he griped, pulling away instinctively as she pressed the rag a little too firmly upon his tender collarbone.

“Just, hold still,” she retorted impatiently, placing a hand roughly on his chest to steady him. “It’s not my fault you left this thing to worsen. Gods, I’d’ve sworn this was your first if you weren’t already riddled with scars.”

“Oh, eh – not the only one who’s been starin’, am I?”

Estrith tossed the bloodied rag into the pot, a light blush only barely noticeable beneath her scattering of freckles. She made no response but to consider the collection of instruments in her pack, some ivory, others wooden and curved or shining and wrought of metal. She passed her fingers rather pointedly over the largest, sharpest looking tools and cast him an unkind look that left little to the imagination. Kaidan hid well his sigh of relief when she settled instead upon a benign looking sort of spoon, but grimaced when she took the bowl of a foul-smelling poultice in hand – and by Kyne did it sting.

“What is that anyway?” he asked through his teeth.

Estrith shrugged. “An unguent, to neutralise the rot that’s poisoning your bloodstream.” She worked quietly, eyes narrowed ever so slightly as she smoothed the stinking paste into and over the gash through his shoulder, singular in her focus. Kaidan did catch her gaze briefly flicker every now and then, however, to survey the multitude of scars he bore.

“You can ask about ‘em, you know,” Kaidan said after a while, trying to distract himself from the sting in his shoulder as it grew sharper. “Everyone else does.”

Estrith sniffed. “Everyone else is boring.”

Kaidan smirked. Then he frowned around a sudden flash of déjà vu, almost as though he’d had this conversation before, sat beside a roaring fire with another girl in another life. But just as suddenly as it came it left, whisked away as Estrith rose to her feet.

“That should do it. If all goes well, I’ll clean and stitch you up in the morning,” she said, fidgeting briefly with her short crop of hair. “I’ll brew you some tea for the… um, the pain.”

Kaidan waved her off, despite the sting around his shoulder gradually growing into a creeping, crawling burn down his back and along the length of his arm. “No need. I’ll be fine.”

“Oh, there will be need alright,” she returned casually.

“You know…” Kaidan said, having not quite heard her. The light had taken on a strange, almost blooming glow while the crackling of the fire grew all echoey and distant. The amber sunlight filtering in through the trees above took on a life of its own, fluttering about like so many tiny fireflies. “I met an alchemist in Cyrodiil once. ‘E said sometimes the best cure for poisoning’s more of the same. Fight fire with fire, like.”

“Well, that depends entirely on the poison and it’s pace,” Estrith said, her voice taking on a dreamlike quality as she sprinkled into a tankard some herbs that were, quite unusually for herbs, sparkling. “And there aren’t many alchemists would be willing to admit it, but… he’s not wrong.”

Kaidan felt suddenly quite cold. He stood to his feet but found he couldn’t quite wrench his weight away from the shadows pooling at his feet. “Wait… what have you… what’ve you done t’me?”

Estrith’s pale face swam before him, her voice oddly disembodied from the movement of her lips. “I hope for your sake you’re as strong as you look, swordsman,” he heard her say. He wasn’t sure if it was guilt or glee that quirked her lips so. “This will help.”