No One Told Me Not To Breathe
Martin Septim/Azralath Aevitas (Imperial Hero of Kvatch)
CW: none
Part I of Take Me Back to Eden | -> Next
Inspired by the way Martin looks at your character if you stand near him while he's being introduced at Cloud Ruler Temple.
Title is from Take Me Back to Eden by Sleep Token.
Martin stands at the top of the path to the temple - to Cloud Ruler Temple, the safe haven for the royal family and the Blades that guard them - and now, only him.
The path isn’t a long one, it isn’t a winding road or a steep mountain path, it’s a simple stone-paved walkway at the top of two bits of stairs and a landing, but Akitosh does it feel like the longest he’s ever walked in his life. He turns, and facing him in two neat rows like pieces on a game board, are the Blades. His Blades.
He thinks he might be sick, actually.
He’s never truly been an anxious man, but his nerves are more than frayed after such a grueling couple of days, and he still hasn’t slept more than an hour or two since that horrible night in Kvatch. And to learn he’s the new emperor, the last remaining son of Emperor Uriel Septim VII… He doesn't even want to think about it - not now, at any rate.
Jauffre stands just beside him and addresses the Blades, gives them Martin’s name, calls him by his blood-father’s regal surname, and Martin feels himself forget to take every other breath. Gods. How is he meant to do this? How is he supposed to lead an entire empire when all he’s ever known is the life of a farmer’s son? All regrettable decisions and past worships aside, he’s never had any sort of formal, royal training - he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Jauffre finishes speaking, looking to Martin expectantly, and all the Blades look to him as well, the final chorus of ‘Hail!’ like the echo of a fired bowstring in the cold mountain air.
Martin feels the chill of Bruma’s snow freeze his lungs as he takes in a breath involuntarily. He’s… he’s supposed to speak, isn’t he? That’s what emperors do - they give speeches, they address their subjects. He looks from one face to another, then another, and another, until he’s looked at all of them, acknowledged all of them, but no matter what he does no words will come. These people are strangers, looking to him like he’s their savior and he can’t think of anything to say…
Armored. Heavy. Heavier than the Blades’ boots.
They come up beside him, pause, shift, stop.
He turns his head like a shooting star towards the gravitational pull of Nirn’s orbit and sees her.
She is haggard, dirty, soot-faced, splattered in mud and ash and grime, having had no chance to wash the filth of Oblivion’s wastes from her skin, but she’s there - the only person among the small crowd that he knows, even just a little, even if only by a single day ahead of all the others that he’s met just now, has yet to meet, can see before him but does not yet know their names.
Miss Aevitas. Azralath. The Hero of Kvatch, herself. His anchor through this whole insane journey so far, his beacon of light in that dark, dark night of Kvatch’s destruction. Hope, incarnate.
It’s her they should be praising, not him. It’s her that’s done something to halt the tide of bloodshed, her that’s risked her life to save so many others already. Martin is merely a man - supposedly with holy dragon’s blood within his veins - but she is more. She is fire and fury and courage and everything he wishes he could harness for this moment and the upcoming trials beyond. An inspiration - whereas he… what even has he done so far? He held fast the chapel doors as the few survivors of his home’s razing cowered and prayed and looked to the heavens to help them. Martin had done what he could - but Azralath…
Azralath had done everything.
She pauses near him, beside him but not directly, petting the muzzle of her borrowed paint horse and looking for all the world like a fraying banner in the wind - proud and steadfast despite the wear and tear.
He looks to her, as he did when she’d come to him in the darkest hour man had ever seen, in the depths of despair and destruction and death - he looks to her the way the Blades look to him right now to lead them in the not-so-distant future.
And he finds the words to finally speak.
She watches him as he gives what might be the most awkward speech of his life, and from the corner of his eye he watches her in return, her eyes as blue as ice and deep as rain clouds, a constant reminder of how he’s even here.
He turns to her when he’s done and the Blades are satisfied with his acknowledgement. He huffs in tired, self-deprecating laughter that holds no mirth and only fatigue, makes the observation that no one seemed to mind that his speech was… what it was. And the smile he receives in return is just as exhausted, but proud.
And Martin has never felt so at ease after something so nerve-wracking in his life as when she smiles at him.
“Thank you, my friend,” he murmurs, barely audible over the sound of the Blades’ heavy armored footfalls around him as they go back to their duties or ready the fortress or whatever else he doesn’t feel like bothering to think about. It’s not his priority. Not this. Not now.
Miss Aevitas - Azralath - smiles just a bit wider.
“Yer welc’me,” she replies, quiet and heavily accented and rough from lack of sleep.
There’s no cow-towing, no hailing of the new emperor; just a soft exhale and a sympathetic nod.
She responds to him like a person, like a human, like a man - and Martin cannot think of a time when he’s found it easier to breathe.
