#ariakitty

Brina couldn’t stand to be near the Night Mother’s tomb. Everything about it set her on edge, made her blood run colder and her heart intermittently start to race as if she were being pursued by some unseen threat; but damn her if she would stop Brina from working on her alchemical experiments during their visits to Dawnstar! With Babette’s half-blessing, Brina was determined to take the alchemy table down to the Listener’s quarters, far from the looming sarcophagus that kept fooling her mind and tricking her ears.

It was all in her head, she told herself. All in her head -- but better to move the alchemy table all the same.

Pushing, shoving, lifting got her nowhere. For the first half hour, she wondered if the thing was somehow secured to the floor.

“This was a mistake,” she groaned under her breath, content to give up. And besides, she thought, the Night Mother wasn’t doing anything, she was just a musty old corpse that couldn’t possibly say or do a thing to her! Why, even now, the room was filled with blissful silence--

Almost silence, except... a voice...? Muffled, behind the iron doors of her coffin--

“Cicero!!”

She hadn’t even needed to tell Cicero the task. She only got out, “Could you hel--,” before he was bounding eagerly to her side and swearing he would move mountains for her. Not a mountain, just a table, she assured him.

They barely got it off the floor, so they made do dragging it away from the garden and across the stone to the stairs.

The echoes of scraping bounced from every wall, every corridor, making the most dreadful wail throughout the Dawnstar sanctuary.

In the common room, sifting through a list of victims in the cozy amber warmth of the fire, the Listener and Nazir each cursed.

“Fuck the Nine, Sister,” Zeno said while Brina and Cicero arranged themselves at the top of the stairs. “Why the racket? And-- no, don’t, stop, you’re going to fall down those stairs and break your neck. For fuck’s sake.”

“Our most honored Listener is right!” Cicero crooned. “Easier to just push the table, let it fall!”

“Let’s not do that, either,” Nazir said, only just fast enough to stop Cicero from following through. “Get some initiates to help you, if you insist on doing… whatever this is.”

“N-no! We’ve got it, everone just keep on with your business!” Brina huffed. She tried to lift the table again, only for it to slip from her fingertips and bang loudly down yet again. It took many seconds until the crashing noise stopped echoing through the hideout. “Whew… This place is just one big stone bell, isn’t it?”

“Is that why they call us a crime ring?” Cicero quipped. His proud smile doubled as Brina burst with laughter and collapsed over the table and Zeno turned a look his way equal parts disgust and offense.

“That wasn’t even funny! Sister, stop encouraging him, it’s worse than the jokes themselves!” Zeno stood from the table and bounded up the stairs two at a time. “Here, I’ll carry it down my own fucking self if Cicero promises no more puns today.”

“Oh, Listener, you jest! Everyone knows how you just love when Cicero chimes in with such clever wit--”

“I'm about to push you down the stairs.”

“Uhm, how about we just carry down the table, please? Carefully?” Brina said, and gave a demonstrative lift.

After some bickering over the placement of hands, and some careful shuffling around to keep Brina from falling to her grisly death, the three started to slowly lower the table whilst Nazir below groaned and sighed for every minute his work was delayed.

“Why are you even doing this?” Zeno asked.

“Because,” said Brina, “I think the Night Mother is really--”

For the rest of their lives, all three would deny that theirs was the hold that slipped in that moment. It was all Zeno could do to dive sideways from the stairs completely to avoid being brought down with it. Between Brina’s shriek of surprise, and the resounding clangor of the table hitting every step on the descent and ultimate crashing on the floor, the sanctuary was, for that one brief moment, the single loudest place in Skyrim.

“Well,” Brina lamented with buzzing ears from the third step, “that was a good plan after all, Cicero. Took hardly a moment to get to the bottom.”

“Stop encouraging him.”

“Ooh, thank you, thank you, sweet sister, always a pleasure to serve you, though it wasn’t Cicero’s fault--”

“Fuck off, it was absolutely your fault--”

Brina pointed to the other side of the room. “Hey, don’t fight, we’re not done! We still need to get this the rest of the way to the bedroom.”

“Ugh, and why do you need to move it to the bedroom?”

Because darkness rises when--