The Keeper and the Listener

Chapter 2: Beautiful (Cicero)

The scaled beast was taken down quite swiftly, thanks to the Listener and I. For most of the time in which we fought it, we stayed behind the shelter of that boulder, shooting arrows into its rough hide from a distance. Once the creature had been severely wounded, the Listener rushed out from the safety of the mass of rock, charging it and slamming her intricately designed mace into its skull.

She had once told me that she received that mace from the Daedric Lord of Domination, Molag Bal, himself. At the time, I had pretended not to believe the story, but everyone knows that she had quite interesting relationships with the Daedra, Sheogorath most of all. I had heard many people jest about the Daedra fighting each other over who gets to keep the Listener's soul in the afterlife. As much as it irks me to hear others make fun out of her current situation, I know for a fact that her soul belongs to none other than our unholy matron herself, the Night Mother.

When the dragon had finally drawn its last breath, the Listener turned her silvery gaze upon me and began speaking to me, though I heard not a word she had said. I was too entranced by the dragons corpse that lay behind her, as its numerous scales began to slowly light up in flames, flying off into the air in soft flakes before disappearing completely. Amongst the ashes, a bright light, completely unnatural and yet familiar to me, began to swirl up into the air, moving straight toward the Listener as she spoke.

The light curled around her body, gently wrapping itself around her armor and, where there was not that, her porcelain-like skin. It hugged her form closely, taking her over completely as it made her eyes shine an even brighter color than before. In this lighting, she truly looked like an angel, though she was far from.

It was beautiful. She was beautiful. The lights danced around her in slow, graceful motions, before they finally settled onto her skin, satisfied with its performance, and absorbed into her body as though that were its rightful place.

Her form glowed briefly, before all signs of that wonderful, dancing light disappeared entirely. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I may not have known it had occurred at all. She acted as though it hadn't, speaking in a nonchalant tone to me, as she had been the entire time. This was quite normal for her, as I often forgot.

On occasion, I forgot that the woman standing before me was not only the Listener, but many other things as well. She was the leader of the Dark Brotherhood, head of the Thieves Guild, member of the College of Winterhold, Stormcloak, thane of Whiterun and, most importantly, she was Dragonborn.

Holding the ancient power of the Thu'um, this woman before me had the blood of the ancient dragons running through her veins, and her mind was able to awaken their power. To use their voice.

Quite some time ago, I had not a clue that she was in any way related to the dragons or the Greybeards and their mysterious ways. She never used her Thu'um, and made it her goal to avoid the corpses of fallen dragons, so as to avoid absorbing their powers. This behavior, which I had thought to be normal at the time, continued for some time, before the call happened.

I had heard it twice before, and that had been before and during my first time meeting the beauty before me. The call of the Greybeards.

Unlike the Dragonborn, the Greybeards spend their entire lives devoted to learning the way of the Thu'um. Unable to absorb dragon's souls, they resorted to more ancient methods, isolating themselves at High Hrothgar, the highest mountain in all of Nirn, to learn from their mentor, Paathurnax.

The call was just as powerful as it had been in previous times, and even I could tell that it was far more forceful. It shook the earth beneath myself and the horse I had been riding, and I hurriedly turned my gaze upon Irrissa, who sat atop her dark steed, Shadowmere, beside me. Her bright gaze was clouded with dissatisfaction, her pale lips tilted down in a frown.