#tepa

Over kwama eggs cooked any number of ways, in a silence that shrank further each evening. Over learning the rhymths of Tepa’s days and finding the gaps where I fit.

“Morning,” Tepa said, more statement than greeting. They crouched beside the hearth, a lump of blankets and belts, prodding at the ashes with a long splinter of wood. “Hungry?”

I ached. Couldn’t remember when last I’d woken to anything but aching. One floor’s much the same as another when it comes to sleeping. All as bad as the rest, and the best bedroll in the world makes only the slimmest scrap of difference. I’d scarce slept, eyes unclosed all night. So why was opening them now so hard?

“Words,” Tepa clipped. “Talk with words. Muteface tailless dryskins…” They poked again at the hearth. “I’m starved. Got eggs.”

“Course we have…” I unsteadied up onto an elbow, then came to a sitting hunch. The bedroll came up with me, clutched cloaklike round my sloping shoulders.

Two more prods, insistent. A puff of ash from the hearthdust.

I groaned. “Words. Tscht. You’re a blight of a one for using them yourself, aren’t you? Fire — that what you’re telling me?”

Tepa’s tongue flickered out, making their lipless mouth shine. “Yes. Yes, please.” Behind their words that humming sound came, warm from inside their head. They were shivering.

I clambered up and crouched on the hearth’s far side. There was wood to burn. Sticks and splinters of the stuff, chewed and parched and smoothed with time, seasons tallied in each twist of the grain. If Old Ebonheart had anything aplenty it was fuel to a fire. I cupped my hands and whispered sparks into the pyramid of kindling.

“How did you manage without me.” I imagined Tepa eating cold fishflesh, raw and til lately wriggling. I imagined them sucking the yolk from egg cells, tongue searching in like the antenna-tongues of their nix, to find out what scraps they’d missed. “Second thought, don’t tell me.”

“Doesn’t matter, does it?” Tepa’s eyes bulged towards me, black and so wide-set they seemed cross-eyed trained like this, so tight on me. “I have a Simra now. What’s passed is in the past.”

Reaching behind them and towards the wall, they snatched a skillet. Knew where it was from memory. I flinched, half-scrabbling backward. But they only put it by the flames to warm.

“Sudden movements…” I muttered, red rising in my cheeks.

“If I was going to kill you, think I’d wait four days and do it with a pan?” Their long neck wrinkled as they drew their head back. Distaste, I think. “Messy. No, no, it’s just for eggs. See?”

They took the damp cloth from off the egg we’d been working through, leather-skinned and long as a shinbone. Truffled free two gel-skinned cells from out of the yellow-white pith. I nodded my head into a bow, dropping my gaze, and uncovered last night’s pot of boiled black gram. With my hands I shaped the last of it into pats while Tepa set a little grease on the skillet to melt. Soon it was sputtering. They pinched the eggs open in their smooth unnailed fingers. The skins stayed in their practiced hands. The big righ yolks fell to fry in the grease, sunset reddish and spitting. My panbreads joined the eggs and with our hands we squat and ate there, both from the same black skillet.

Tepa fed the nix after that. Always. And always as they did, I’d follow into the temple rubble, down the scaffolds that led from the tower, to scull the pots with water and grit in the shadow of the spire, the temple’s still-standing face. If Old Ebonheart had anything in abundance, it was grit and dust and pebbles. Idol dust and icon housings here, gone to nothing but shardments of stone to scour our pots and pans.

Nix, I discovered, will eat all but anything, so long as it came from plant or beast. The Quarter taught me the same of pigs, but I’d never been pounced and jawed at by a pig as I had been with these nix. To see Tepa’s nix take to meatscraps, bone, eggskins and eggshells, and worse did nothing to ease my unease around them. And the kenning put to them in Tamrielic – hounds – didn’t help either. Scrapping scrabbling things that can climb like sheep or goats and take their sustenance in the harshest places. Tepa scratched between their plates and they leaned and clicked in return. I kept my distance and kept to the pots and was glad when Tepa told them loose, out to forage. But by nightfall they always came back.

The mine after that, for Tepa. And for me, my long slow watch. This was my new normalcy –  safety, company, shelter and food – but in its way it felt like it had come from some great turning. An upsidedowning of things. The enemy I made and fled from had found me and I was glad. The place where Shurfa, Medis, and Balambal had died was where I did most of my living now. And in time convenience and common sense turned to trust. Less from Tepa’s earning it, and more the way any community’s bonds form. Laziness. Laxness. Suspicion is exhausting. Fear gnaws at you, worse and worse all the time as you live with it, like holding onto a handful of ice and longing always to let go. Easier to believe what you’re told is the truth, and those you know are honest. And I think, for Tepa’s part, they were. And in time I tried to be the same, each of us doing our part to keep a run on our township of two.

My old worries rotted away.

Starving was always a threat, but now it was on the horizon; a warning more than some wolfish dread closing always in for the kill.

The cold was there, in the frozen skin of our water trough each morning, and the chill on my cheeks as I kept my watch. But I had blankets and fire, and shelter when I needed, and in Skyrim I’d suffered worse. Not so for Tepa, who shivered and whimpered from it, all but always. After all, their blood was cold all along, and gave them no warmth of its own. So by day they toiled in the heat of the mine and by night they bundled up by our fire.

At first I worried for the smoke we made. “Might be two of us now,” I said, “but we’re in a dangerous place. What if someone sees? They’ll know we’re here. All they’d need is three…”

They only laughed. A hacking sound, each syllable cut out deliberate from the hiss and rumble of their face. “Yes, yes, they will. I count on it. How else will they know to find us?”

“Who? Friends?”

“Not enemies.” Tepa tilted their head, rethinking. “Not the kind to worry on when they’re standing in front of you, anyway.”