#kennelkeeper

Ankou’s body was laid flat on the table, as if he were dead. This was wrong, wrong. They weren’t supposed to die, they couldn’t die. Piecing the little bird back together again would be the final acceptance of how wrong she had been about that fact. She was not prepared to face this, not yet, maybe not ever, but the corpse was running out of time. Any more procrastination, any more opportunity for stagnation and decay, and the kite would come back wrong, different, less.

Her notes on Merta’s magic had been left behind, hidden in her manse. It was all just as well; she could improvise, and it wasn’t as if she needed to put him back together piece by piece all over again. Besides, the vampire’s magic had been tainted, a false gift from a false friend. Merta was a skilled and powerful necromancer, true, but Narcisse was a fast and prodigious learner. She could replicate the process well enough. She could refine it to suit her own interests.

Assuming this didn’t blow up in her face.

The energies of death pooled at her fingertips, swimming with her sorrows, mingling with melancholy. Arcs of violet light crackled off her fingers and into the empty vessel. This was not the simple process of raising a mere, mindless thrall. This required subtlety, care. Ideally, she would have had weeks to hone the technique, sort out the hiccups in the formula. She was realizing more with each passing day that circumstances were often far from ideal.

Oghma rested comfortably at the edge of the table, observing her work, as he often did. She could feel his eyes devouring every minuscule twitch of her fingers. She realized halfway through the process that he was watching her fail. The body was beginning to reanimate, yes, but the movements were slow, clumsy, stupid. She had brought nothing back but a mass of bone, feather, and flesh.

The mage cut the stream of magicka before the hollow resuscitation could be completed, watching the body fall still with an empty stare. Sadness, frustration, all of it had given way to numbness. She had failed. Again, she had failed. She pleaded with herself to feel the crushing weight, to feel outrage, betrayal, anything to motivate her. Narcisse could not feel anything at the moment, except what it was to be alone.

She found no sleep that night. Her body and mind were like a void, a soulless space where thoughts that seemed not to be her own crept through the shell of her consciousness. There was nothing, no purpose or drive, only raw and unfeeling thought. Like a frigid machine, her mind processed and reprocessed the formulae that drifted through the empty space.

By the time dawn illuminated the shadows of Falkreath, three had been restored to four once again. Narcisse could not say how she had managed it. The smallest kite sat calm and quiet, as if nothing had ever happened. She felt no victory. She could feel eyes on her, eyes within her, coolly observing her results. Had it been some sort of test? Had all of it been a part of some sort of trial? And had she succeeded? Had she ever had a chance to?