The hooded figure moved through the entrance of the Broken Fang cavern like a shadow slipping into a deeper dark. His boots—fine, supple leather, utterly out of place in the dusty wilds southeast of Rorikstead—scuffed softly against the stone floor, each step echoing a hollow protest into the emptiness.
He paused just inside the threshold, the outside light dying at his back. A wave of stale, dry air, thick with the scent of old earth and decay, washed over him. With a sigh of pure disdain, he raised a gloved hand and snapped his fingers.
The sound was sharp, definitive. In its wake, a dozen small, shimmering spheres of pale blue light winked into existence around him. They hovered for a moment like attentive will-o'-wisps before darting off to settle in high crevices and on broken sconces, casting the cavern in a cold, ghostly luminescence.
The light did the place no favors.
The hood tilted back slightly as purple eyes, glowing faintly with their own inner light, scanned the ruin. It was… pathetic. A complete and utter dump. Rusted, mangled cages hung from chains on the ceiling like grotesque metal fruit.
Ancient Nordic burial niches, carved into the walls, gaped empty and violated, their stone lids shattered on the ground. The remnants of pillars lay where they'd fallen, half-buried in centuries of dust. The whole cavern felt less like a lair and more like a grave that had already been thoroughly picked over.
Beneath me, the thought curled through his mind, cold and sharp. This hovel is profoundly beneath me.
But it was remote. It was defensible. And it was empty. It would have to do. Once it was cleaned, fortified, and properly warded, it would serve. It would be a sanctuary, a workshop, a stepping stone.
His eyes, picking through the debris, narrowed. There, in the thick blanket of dust near the center of the cavern floor, were tracks. Clear boot prints, sized for a man or a large mer.
And alongside them, the broader, deeper impressions of a large paw. A bear, perhaps. Or a sabre cat. They cut through the dust, recent enough that the finer debris hadn't settled back into them.
A slow, thin smile spread across his face, hidden by the hood. So, the cave wasn't completely abandoned. It had a tenant, who was a way. Or at least, a visitor who might return.
Perfect.
Whoever this unfortunate soul was, blundering about in his future demesne, they would serve a purpose. A fresh, strong body, animated by his will, would make for excellent labor. No need to tire his own hands moving rubble and hauling corpses.
The fool could clean the filth, shore up the walls, and then, once the useful muscle had rotted from his bones, stand guard at the entrance as a fitting welcome for any other intruders.
The image pleased him. It was efficient. Poetic, even.
His mind drifted forward, past the grunt work of renovation. He saw this damp hole transformed. Braziers burning with green flame. Tome-laden shelves carved from the living rock. Alchemical apparatus bubbling in the corner. A place of power, however modest. A chrysalis.
From here, he would rebuild. Gather resources. Conduct the necessary… experiments. This dank cave was not the end.
It was the beginning of the path back. The path to Dragontail Mountain. The path to the sanctum he had been so rudely ejected from by those mewling, shortsighted upstarts who called themselves necromancers.
The memory of their smug faces, their pitiful spells, their betrayal—it sent a hot jolt of hatred through his veins, quickly cooled by anticipation.
He could see it so clearly. His return. Not as a fugitive, but as a lord of death. Their knees buckling on the cold stone, their foreheads pressed to the ground before his maggot-ridden feet as the terrible, glorious chill of his lichdom washed over them.
A shiver ran down his spine. But it wasn't from the cave's chill.
It was from pleasure.
A satisfied sigh hissed from his lips, the sound swallowed by the cavern's oppressive stillness. With his hands clasped loosely behind his back, he began a slow, deliberate circuit of the chamber, his glowing spheres of light drifting along in his wake like dutiful attendants.
The cavern was adequate on the surface, but he was no fool. This was clearly an old Nordic barrow, and the Nords of old were a paranoid, secretive lot. Their ruins were like onions—layers upon layers, with the juiciest bits always buried deepest and guarded by the dead.
He'd spent enough years knee-deep in the rot and dust of such places, pilfering ancient magics and forgotten reagents, to know their tricks. They loved their hidden chambers, their pressure-plate traps, their walls that weren't walls.
And they had a particular fondness for using the wall-mounted burial tombs themselves as the keys. The mechanism would always be behind the one tomb that didn't quite match its brothers.
Finding it required patience and a keen eye up close: the hollow sound of a knock, the faintest whisper of a draft seeping through a seam, a pattern in the dust where the stone had shifted minutely over centuries.
One by one, he began his inspection, moving with the tedious care of a scholar. He ran gloved fingers along cold stone edges, tapped lightly on weathered carvings, watched for the tell-tale dance of dust motes in the light of his floating orbs. The first tomb, solid and silent. The second, immovable. The third, just another slab sealing empty nothingness.
Half an hour bled away in the silent ritual. He was on the verge of dismissing this particular nest as disappointingly straightforward when he found it.
The fifth tomb along the western wall. His knuckles rapped against it, producing a subtly different, slightly hollow tok-tok-tok compared to the dead thud of the others. The signs were there, clear as a shout to one who knew how to listen.
The necromancer let out a low, annoyed breath that fogged briefly in the chill. Typical.
On one hand, this was a complication. A hidden passage meant potential residents. A Draugr, or worse, a nest of them, could come shambling out to try and separate his head from his shoulders while he was deep in meditative trance.
That would be… inconvenient. He'd have to clear it, a messy and tedious chore.
On the other hand… where there were hidden chambers, there were often hidden treasures. Forgotten soul gems, pockets of rare minerals, perhaps even a scrap of pre-Ysgramor lore.
The gamble was tempting.
He was just leaning closer, one hand extended to search for a hidden lever or pressure plate in the surrounding stonework, when the decision was made for him.
A deep, grating rumble echoed through the cavern, the familiar sound of stone grinding against stone for the first time in an age.
The tomb he'd been inspecting shuddered violently. With a shuddering groan that shook dust from the ceiling, the massive slab of stone ground sideways into the wall. But what it revealed wasn't the cold, corpse-smelling abyss the necromancer had braced for.
It was light. Warm, flickering firelight. And it was blocked by the broad silhouette of a man.
Instinct screamed. The necromancer jerked back a full pace, the magicka he'd been gathering flaring to life in his palm with a sizzling, violet crackle. He held the destructive energy there, coiled and ready, but didn't release it. Blindly firing into an unknown space was the act of a panicked apprentice, not a master of the craft.
He waited, his glowing purple eyes slitted against the sudden glare. As his vision adjusted, the details of the scene before him came into focus, and his shock only deepened.
It was a Nord. A mountain of a man, standing in the doorway with the casual ease of someone answering their own front door. And he was wearing… almost nothing. Just a pair of simple, worn linen britches. His torso was bare, a landscape of thick, ropy muscle and old, pale scars that crisscrossed his skin like a map of past wars.
The Nord rubbed a massive hand over his face, stifling a yawn that seemed to come from his boots. Drowsy, steel-grey eyes blinked, focusing slowly on the robed figure in his cavern.
"The hells…?" the man's voice was a low rumble, rough with sleep. He scratched at his chest, unperturbed by the crackling magical energy pointed at him. "Who's knockin' on a man's door this late? I'm tryin' to get some sleep."
The necromancer's eyes narrowed further behind his hood. He didn't answer. His mind was racing, reassessing. This was no Draugr. This was a living, breathing warrior of a kind he usually took great pains to avoid—the kind who could snap a spellcaster's neck before the first syllable of an incantation left their lips.
He took in the details with a practitioner's cold eye. The man's frame wasn't just tall; it was built for pure, devastating power. The shoulders were like anvils, the arms thick as timber, the stomach a solid wall of muscle. Every scar told a story of violence survived. A seasoned veteran, without a doubt.
But then, the crucial details registered, and a slow, greedy light began to burn in the necromancer's purple gaze.
The warrior's guard was down. He was half-asleep, baffled, not angry. He wore no armor. He held no weapon. He'd just… answered the door.
And such a specimen… Oh, such a specimen. The possibilities unfolded in his mind like a black flower. A body this strong, animated and bound to his will? It would be a masterpiece. An unstoppable guardian. A brute-force tool for the dirtier tasks.
The fresh, powerful flesh would last longer, too, before the rot really set in.
The fear bled away, replaced by a cold, calculating hunger. The risk had just been inverted. This wasn't an obstacle. It was an opportunity that had just walked, yawning, into his hands.
The decision solidified in the necromancer's mind, cold and sharp as an ice shard.
Now.
He moved with the ruthless swiftness of a striking snake. His wrist flicked upwards, fingers splaying. The air in the cavern crackled, thick with ozone, as a jagged fork of violet lightning snapped from his palm, screaming across the short distance toward the bare-chested Nord.
All the drowsy confusion evaporated from the warrior's face in an instant. His own hand came up—not in a clumsy block, but in a precise, practiced motion. The air before his palm shimmered, coalescing into a transparent, hexagonal ward that glowed with a soft blue light.
CRACK-ZZZT!
The lightning struck the ward and died, its energy dissipated into harmless sparks that skittered across the stone floor. The ward flickered, but held.
The necromancer's purple eyes widened in genuine shock. The speed of the reaction was one thing—this mountain of muscle moved with a warrior's reflexes.
But the ward… this lumbering brute knew how to weave a proper defensive spell? It defied all categorization.
That shock lasted only a heartbeat. Because the look that replaced the Nord's sleepiness was a pure, unadulterated murderous glare. It was the look of a predator who'd just been poked with a very sharp stick.
The necromancer's survival instincts screamed. His left hand swept in a wide arc, palm slamming down toward the floor. A line of searing, crimson fire erupted from the stone, roaring upwards in a roaring wall of heat and flame, cutting the cavern in two and hiding the warrior from view.
With his other hand, he wove a quick, intricate pattern in the air. A faint blue aura enveloped him. He didn't run—he jumped backwards, the Featherfall spell turning his leap into a swift, gliding retreat, putting twenty feet of smoking, fire-lit space between him and the threat.
He had a second to think, to plan his next curse, his binding ritual—
A flash of emerald green light pulsed from behind the wall of fire. The flames themselves seemed to shudder and part, not extinguished, but pushed aside by a force of pure will.
The Nord walked through the conflagration, untouched, his raised hand now clenched into a fist wreathed in fading green energy. And he wasn't empty-handed anymore.
As if summoned by the thought of battle, a weapon shot from the darkness of the hidden passage behind him. It spun once through the air with a heavy whirr before the haft smacked neatly into his waiting grip.
The necromancer's breath hitched.
It was a monstrous thing. A single, hefty piece of forged metal that seemed to blur the line between axe and maul. One side was a flat, brutal hammer-head, a square chunk of metal designed for crushing plate and bone.
The other tapered into a wicked, sharp axe blade. The haft wasn't wood; it was the same silvery, metallic alloy, shaped like coiling, thorned roots that fused seamlessly with the weapon's head.
It was a tool of pure, unsubtle devastation, and it looked like it weighed half as much as a man.
The towering Nord hefted it onto his shoulder as if it were a walking stick, his grey eyes locking onto the necromancer with a focus that promised a very specific kind of death.
From behind his hood, the necromancer let out a silent, internal curse that scraped the bottom of his soul.
Of course.
He wasn't just unlucky. He'd somehow managed to pick a fight with a spell-slinging, half-naked Nord who kept a magical siege weapon behind his bedroom door.
...
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