Semla

Ralof sat in the corner near the door, one boot braced against the wall, a small block of wood in his hands. A knife moved steadily, shaving thin curls that fell soundlessly to the floor. He didn’t look up at her right away. He must have heard her stir, but he didn’t rush to speak until she was fully awake. “There’s food,” he said at last, voice low. “If you feel like it.” Talisse nodded once, though she wasn’t sure if he saw it. Her throat felt tight, dry. She swung her legs over the side of the roll and winced, pressing her lips together as a flare of soreness shot up from her feet. She got up, and crossed the room slowly and tore off a piece of bread and left the rest on the table. It was dense and a little stale already, but better than nothing. She ate a few bites standing up, then moved to the hearth and sank down onto the floor nearby. Someone had left a folded length of felt by the fire. Talisse pulled it around her shoulders, cocooning herself in its rough warmth. The wool scratched faintly against her skin. She held the bread loosely in one hand, forgotten after a few more bites. Feeding the hearth another log, then a second, she settled them carefully atop the embers. They caught slowly, orange light blooming as the fire breathed back to life. She remained there, staring into it, eyes unfocused. The embers shifted and glowed, collapsing in on themselves. Now and then a log settled with a soft pop, sparks lifting briefly before vanishing. Her reflection wavered in the firelight—broken, indistinct, never quite whole. Her body still remembered, even if her mind tried not to. She adjusted the felt tighter without thinking, fingers curling into the fabric. Ralof’s knife kept moving. Scrape. Turn. Scrape. He didn’t fill the silence. Didn’t ask how she was feeling, didn’t offer reassurance or platitudes. He simply stayed where he was, a solid presence in the room, as immovable as the beams in the ceiling. They sat in like that for a long while, the kind that slowly folded in on itself. Talisse drifted inward, her thoughts turning dull and heavy, looping without direction. The fire became background noise, its warmth pressing against her shins while her mind wandered somewhere far less gentle.

Got tagged by @hircines-hunter

Right, I'm going to post two snippets from both the main fics.

First is from chapter 19 of Sleepers Awake- Erra and Josh are taking a lunch break. ************************************************************************

“Take some,” Erra offered, pushing the lacquered box towards him a little, “We will not have the opportunity to eat once we enter the Burial Caverns.”

“I ah—”

“Trust me on this one, Agent,” Erra stated, pushing the box a little closer to him, “Hunger will make a warrior falter just as quickly as any foe.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I also have a tendency to overpack, Lukal,” Erra smiled as he made one final gesture towards the lacquered box, “I will not go without, if that is what you are worried about? Besides, Nanaya’s manti are quite filling.”

Teldryn relented and reached for one of the plump, guar-filled dumplings the mer had offered, shovelling the whole thing in his mouth as his companion laughed.

“Use the box, Agent!” Erra cackled, “It catches the juice better than choking!”

Teldryn swallowed, the soup burning his throat on its way down. It took him by surprise. “I thought that box had a frost enchantment?”

“It did,” Erra nodded, reaching for another dumpling, “I noticed the spell was a fairly basic one, so I modified it a little.”

“I thought you said you weren’t a mage?” Teldryn recalled, raising his brow at the mer.

“Because I am not,” Erra shrugged, taking a bite of his dumpling and catching the juice in the lacquered box as he leaned over it.

“Yeah, but don’t you like, need some sort of magic to do that?” Teldryn asked, reaching for another dumpling.

“I said that I do not have free-flowing magic,” Erra stated, straightening his posture a little, “I can, however, use my magicka if I channel it through tools.”

“Like through enchantments?” He recalled the mer saying something to that effect.

“Exactly,” Erra nodded, a grin slowly spreading across his face, “And I am a very good enchanter, Agent.”

Agent, he kept calling him that… it all felt so formal, like this was all just a job for him— It was, Teldryn knew that, but he couldn’t help but feel a pang in his chest whenever he heard him say it.

He was reading too much into shit again…

“So, all I have done is replace one gem with another that creates heat.” Erra continued, tapping the side of the box, “And if I want something chilled, I can just swap it out for the old one.”

“I ah…” Teldryn sighed, looking back down at the box and the remaining dumpling that sat in the corner, “I’m glad the box is useful.”

“Oh, very much,” Erra nodded, “Did you want the last one?”

“Um…” Teldryn swallowed. He watched as Erra pushed the box towards him again, and he reached for it in his insistence. “Fine.”

“Finish that off, and then we should probably get moving,” Erra stated, happily, “If we move quickly, then we might reach the caverns before the sun is high above us. I wish for us to be home as the moons rise.”

“You think I’ll have cleared it by then?” Teldryn wondered, waiting for his companion’s answer as he wolfed down the last dumpling and handed him back the lacquered box.

“Maybe,” Erra shrugged his shoulders as he sealed the box and placed it back into his pack, “if you are smart about it.”

*************************************************************************

And a larger snippet from chapter 23 of Serious Mistakes. Here we have one of Joshi's dreams. He does eventually have a good time after this so ...

Sometimes Teldryn’s own mind would pull him back into the Dreamsleeve, intent on replaying something from his past. Usually some other mistake that he’d tried his best to forget. In this case, his mind had been replaying Vodyn Free-Winter’s demise on and off since Sigrun had waltzed her way back into his life. He wasn’t surprised that this vision had taken over his senses for yet another night.

He had woken up to a room engulfed in flames, bits of burning thatching falling from the ceiling as the flimsy log cabin he had been knocked down in collapsed around him. Rolling out of the way as a burning beam came crashing down right where he was lying. He didn’t have a solid memory of just how he had gotten out of that cabin, and that’s where these dreams would warp and weave their own story. Prey on all his fears, his guilt, anything that made him vulnerable felt like fair game in the Dreamsleeve. The best that he could do was follow the actual memory until he found his way out, or someone woke him up. He prayed for the latter.

Teldryn recalled stumbling out of the burning building just as the whole thing collapsed behind him and lying down in the blood-soaked dirt of the bandit camp in the middle of Hjaalmarch Hold as he tried to catch his breath.

Only he felt sand as he rested his cheek on the cool earth.

Why would there be sand?

The night sky stretched high above him, thousands of stars swirling in a cosmic dance as black smoke kissed the heavens. The sky was not this clear in Skyrim, the marshes and frost wouldn’t allow for it.

So, he’d left one memory and stumbled again into another. Teldryn closed his eyes and tried his best to concentrate. If he could pull on this thread, then he could unravel the whole tapestry and find his way out. Wasn’t he meant to be worrying about something in the waking world?

He concentrated, trying his best to place this ghost of a memory. He’d escaped his fair share of burning buildings, though only a handful had him escaping into the desert and even less had him clawing at the sand in nothing but a crimson lace robe.

Then he heard it. The distant charm of a Nightingale, drifting on the desert wind.

He knew what this was.

Teldryn stood, his hair spilling over his shoulder with the movement. It was long, the strands meeting his hips as he flicked it over his shoulders. Last time he had hair this length, he was fucking around in an old Dwemeri ruin in the Alik’r. Worst Skooma trip of his life!

He heard it again, the song of a Nightingale drifting on desert winds.

This was where his memory started to stutter, flashes of twilight, flashes of stars. The silvery hue of her mask, the way it felt when she swallowed his tongue.

Teldryn looked up, spotting a figure standing atop the dune before him, her dark, auburn hair blowing in the wind. He recalled feeling struck by her eyes, a familiar hue that felt all the more poignant now that he could place a name to the woman that stood before him.

He had buried this vision with the rest of Sanguin’s cult. Had labelled it as a warning from Azura, of what would happen if he strayed from her grasp. That she would allow the Ascended to find him and devour him, his mind slipping away as the madness finally took hold. He saw it as a threat, a sign that he needed to lay low for a while, get back to something more grounded, more solid.

Azura had a habit of taking the faces of the people he knew and amalgamating them in a way that struck him where it hurt the most. Though this vision had always been confusing. He had assumed that the woman bathed in Twilight was Azura taking aspects from the bottom of his mind. The iris of the late Champion of Cyrodiil here, the sclera of his late husband there, the hair whose colour reminded him of that of the Mother of Morrowind.

Then blur it all with the worst skooma trip he’d had in his life, and he’d just thrown the vision away as a “bad trip” that Azura had piggybacked off of.

Teldryn took a step forwards, his right side hurting something awful as he scaled the dune. A quick glance down reminded him of the blow he had taken to his ribs when he had tried to flee. He had always found it odd how his sleeping mind remembered his waking state. Sometimes he was frozen in time, as himself before all this hell had started. Then he’d stumble into a memory and time suddenly moved forward. Stop, start. Stop, start.