Torin stood in the flickering gloom of the cavern, half-naked, barefoot on the cold stone, and glared at the robed figure with a fury that was white-hot and utterly justified.
He was, to put it mildly, not in a good mood.
The last two days had been a special kind of torture. He'd spent every waking hour hunched over the enchanting table in this damned cave, his eyes burning, his head throbbing from the relentless focus.
He'd practiced the same damn enchantment—a simple stamina-draining glyph—on a small army of scrap iron daggers and chipped swords borrowed from Eorlund and the Warmaiden's.
It was failure after failure, until his magicka felt scraped raw. Finally, just before dawn, he'd managed the delicate, maddening weave correctly and bound it to his own weapon.
The success had hit him like a physical blow. He'd stumbled to the bedroll and face-planted into it, his brain shutting down with one coherent thought: Sleep. For a full day. Or until the next era.
He was not a heavy sleeper. Years of hyper-vigilance in a world full of things that wanted to eat you saw to that. So when the sound of knocking—actual, rhythmic knocking—echoed through the stone, it drilled straight into his sleep-fogged brain.
Instinct, older than reason, took over. Someone's at the door. You answer the door. It's polite.
So he'd answered. And been greeted by a crackling bolt of lightning.
Now, the adrenaline had burned away the last of the fog, leaving behind pure, seething irritation. He hefted the newly-enchanted axe onto his shoulder, the cool metal a familiar comfort.
He pointed the blade directly at the hooded figure, who was wisely keeping his distance now, those creepy purple eyes assessing him like a bug under glass.
"Alright," Torin's voice was a low, dangerous growl, rough with sleep and anger. "You get one chance. Who are you, and how do you want to die? Choose quickly before I bash your head in."
The figure let out a sharp, incredulous scoff that echoed in the cavern. "Insolent knave," the voice hissed, laced with a venomous pride. "You dare speak of death to me? To a master of the grave? You are a temporary inconvenience. Nothing more."
The necromancer spread his hands wide. A dark, violet light—the color of a deep bruise—swirled to life around his palms, then dripped down like liquid shadow onto the cavern floor. Where it struck stone, it didn't pool.
It burned. Five pits of inky darkness hissed open in a semicircle before him, reeking of cold soil and old bones.
From the writhing shadows within, figures began to claw their way out. They were shades, translucent and shimmering with that same malevolent purple energy, clad in a jumble of ancient armor—twisted, elegant Ayleid cuirasses mixed with heavy, grim Nordic plate.
Their eyes were empty sockets of glowing violet light. They raised spectral weapons, a silent, chilling threat summoned from the memory of battlefields long forgotten.
The necromancer lowered his hands, a smirk audible in his voice. "Let us see how you speak to death when it is standing before you..."
The sight gave Torin a moment's pause.
He'd grown numb to the sheer, chaotic weirdness of this world. However, the suspicious hooded stranger turning out to be a necromancer?
Honestly, it was a refreshing cliché. Nice and predictable.
What surprised Torin, however, was the kind of necromancer. Five of them. Five Wrathmen. Those shambling, purple-glowing nightmares didn't just crawl out of any old graveyard.
They were souvenirs from one place, and one place only: the Soul Cairn.
The very idea of a pocket dimension of eternal torment was bad enough, but running into a mage powerful enough to yank five souls back from it… while he was just trying to take a damn nap in a cave? That was a new level of inconvenient.
The necromancer mistook Torin's thoughtful pause for fear. A triumphant, dramatic flare went through his posture. He thrust a bony finger toward Torin, his voice ringing with theatrical command. "Now go, my undead legion! Bring this arrogant whelp to his knees! Break him!"
The Wrathmen didn't hesitate. They leveled their ghostly blades, ancient armor creaking in a silence that wasn't sound but memory, and began to advance. Their movements were slow, deliberate, heavy with the weight of forgotten centuries.
Even in death, it was clear—these hadn't been common bandits. They'd been warriors, killers, and death had done nothing to dull those instincts.
Torin just grinned. It was a feral, tired expression that didn't reach his eyes.
He raised his heavy axe high, not in a strike, but like a conductor raising a baton. He channeled his magicka, not into a spell, but through the weapon. The intricate, silvery metal of the axe head began to glow from within, a warm, golden light that pulsed like a heartbeat.
Arcs of pure, sun-bright lightning crackled and danced along the blade and hammerhead, hissing against the cavern's chill.
He didn't shout a battle cry. He didn't even speak. He just planted his back foot and hurled the axe.
It wasn't a graceful throw. It was a brutal, spinning launch of pure, enchanted weight. The weapon became a whirling disc of golden light and crackling energy. It tore through the first Wrathman like it was made of old parchment.
The shade didn't even have time to scream; it burst into a shower of dissipating violet mist.
The axe didn't stop. It carved through the air and slammed, head-first, into the stone floor between the remaining four advancing spirits.
KA-CHOOM.
The impact wasn't just sound. It was a detonation of holy fire and chain lightning. A radial wave of searing, golden energy exploded outwards. The light didn't just illuminate the cavern—it cleansed it.
The remaining Wrathmen dissolved instantly, their forms unwinding into shrieking tendrils of shadow that were then burned into nothingness by the raging currents of lightning. The smell of ozone and burnt ectoplasm filled the air.
The necromancer stumbled back as if physically struck, a choked sound of pure horror escaping his hood. His grand summons, his legion from beyond the veil, had been erased in less time than it took to blink.
Torin strode forward, the golden light from the axe's crater fading to a soft glow. He couldn't help a dry, humorless chuckle as he reached down and wrenched his weapon free from the smoldering stone.
"Should've summoned atronachs," he said, his voice echoing flatly. "Or a Dremora. Maybe even a dozen scamps. Anything else."
He hefted the axe back onto his shoulder, the metal still humming with residual power. Undead? They were no threat to him. Not anymore.
He'd made sure of that years ago, after a particularly nasty, prolonged fight to fulfill a contract that ultimately led to requisitioning this very cave from a nest of vampires who'd thought it made a cozy crypt.
Torin watched the last mote of undead essence sizzle away into nothing, a grim satisfaction cutting through his exhaustion.
Those vampires, years back, had been a nightmare. Quick, strong, healing from wounds that would drop a bear, and they'd just kept coming in the dark. He'd left that fight more blood-donor than victor, and he'd sworn never again.
That's where the heavy, silvery thing on his shoulder had been born. The ultimate argument against anything that refused to stay dead.
First came the metal. Not just common silver, which was too soft for a weapon of such heft, but a brutal alloy of silver and orichalcum. Getting the orichalcum meant months of careful trade with the Orcs of Dushnikh Yal, parting with enough septims to make a jarl blink.
Then came Eorlund's fee. The old smith didn't do charity work for custom masterpieces; Torin had paid in rare gems, flawless beast pelts, and a sworn oath to clean the Skyforge runoff pipes for a year.
The result was a weapon of impossible density, a hybrid of axe and maul that could crush a skeleton to powder or sever a draugr's head without losing its edge.
But metal alone wasn't enough. You needed a blessing. So Torin had gone on a pilgrimage of sorts, visiting every shrine and priest of Arkay he could find between Whiterun and Markarth. Most gave it a standard blessing, a flicker of hallowed energy.
It was Runil, the kind Altmer priest in Falkreath, who'd given him the real key.
"The weapon is strong, lad," Runil had said, his old eyes thoughtful. "But Arkay's peace is a gentle thing. What you hunt… sometimes you need Arkay's wrath. There is a spell. 'Skywrath.' It calls down the purifying light of the sun and the fury of the storm. It is… not gentle."
Torin had been wary. Destruction magic was volatile, messy. It tempted you to solve every problem with a fireball, and he'd seen where that led. But the idea stuck. He bought the tome, not to cast the spell, but to understand it.
By then, he'd finally cracked the Enchanter's Codex Skjor had given him. Its logical, almost mathematical approach to weaving magic into objects had clicked in his modern mind. So he didn't learn to cast Skywrath.
He spent months reverse-engineering it, breaking its essence down into arcane principles, and painstakingly weaving those principles into a permanent enchantment.
He'd been tweaking and improving it in his spare time ever since, turning a spell of holy vengeance into a property of the steel itself that was lethal to all, but especially the undead.
And now, this necromancer was facing the final product.
The cold, logical realization finally punched through the necromancer's arrogance and sunk its claws in.
I brought a skeleton key to a vault sealed by holy light.
Panic, sharp and acidic, flooded his veins. He took a hurried, stumbling step back, his robe whispering against the stone. But decades of study and survival instinct fought back against the fear.
He was still a master of the arcane, even on the back foot.
Summoning those five Wrathmen had drained his reserves, true—no more grand spectacles from the Soul Cairn. But he had enough magicka left to fight. To blast this brute with chains of frost, to wither his flesh with decay, or, at the very worst, to wrap himself in a cloak of shadows and flee.
He began to channel, the air around his hands chilling, dark energy coiling for a retaliatory strike.
He never got the chance.
Torin's body flashed with a vibrant, emerald-green light. A Greater Haste spell, cast not with a shout or a gesture, but with a thought, so seamlessly it was like watching a wolf shift from a trot to a sprint.
One moment, he was ten paces away.
In the blur of the next, he was there, right in the necromancer's space, the cold stone floor biting at his bare feet.
The hammer-side of the axe was already at the apex of its swing, but it wasn't the weapon that froze the necromancer's blood. It was the eyes of the man wielding it.
There was no battle-rage, no triumphant fury. Just a cold, detached focus, like a butcher assessing the best cut. This wasn't a fight to him; it was pest control.
The silvery blade, still faintly glowing with golden embers, didn't whistle or scream. It just moved, a precise, horizontal arc.
The necromancer's world tilted. There was no pain, just a sudden, dizzying sense of vertigo. He saw the cavern ceiling rotate, then the rough stone floor rush up to meet him.
Thud.
Torin watched, his breath pluming in the suddenly quiet air, as the severed head hit the ground and rolled. The hood slipped back, revealing greyish-blue skin, a sharp, angular face, and the distinct pointed ears of a Dark Elf.
A Dunmer. Of course. Torin let out a weary, exasperated sigh that fogged in the chill. Just how many boxes does this guy need to tick? Hooded necromancer, Soul Cairn minions, dramatic monologue, Dunmer…
It was like someone ordered a villain from a cheap story book.
Shaking his head, Torin got down on one knee beside the headless corpse. The metallic smell of blood was sharp, mixing with the ozone and burnt-ectoplasm stink.
He began rifling through the satchel strapped to the body with pragmatic efficiency. Potions (mostly poisons), a few soul gems (dim and empty), a journal filled with cramped, obsessive script…
Then his fingers brushed against something familiar. Not by touch, but by a creeping, visceral sense of wrongness that shot up his arm. His whole body went still.
It was a book cover. Leather, but… sticky. Unnaturally so.
A cold dread, two years dormant, coiled in his gut. That's how long it's been since that damned book last found him... did it return?
As the book finally cleared the satchel's opening, Torin's entire body went rigid with a tension he hadn't even realized he was holding. Then, a wave of relief so potent it made him lightheaded washed over him.
It wasn't the book.
This one was just a regular, everyday, horrifically cursed necromancy tome. Its cover was jet black, made from some leather that felt suspiciously like preserved flesh, embossed with a stylized skull wrapped in thorny vines.
It oozed malice and dark intent—the kind of thing that would give a priest of Arkay hives—but it was just a thing. A tool. It wasn't… alive with intent.
He'd have preferred to pull a handful of warm, fresh horker dung from that bag than see that blood-red cover again. Six years. That thing had been a ghost on his trail for six years, appearing in bandit camps, in abandoned chests, always waiting.
This? This was just a regular Fredas' evil.
With the adrenaline of the fight and the spike of dread both gone, the true, crushing weight of his exhaustion slammed back into him. A yawn cracked his jaw, so wide his eyes watered.
Bed.
The thought was a siren's call.
He got to his feet, his joints protesting, and cast a final, weary glance at the headless Dunmer sprawled on his floor. Leaving a necromancer's corpse to rot in your workshop was just asking for trouble—ghosts, plagues, or worse, other necromancers coming to investigate.
With a sigh of pure annoyance, Torin raised his hand and snapped his fingers twice. The sharp sound echoed in the cavern.
From the darkened mouth of his hidden living quarters, a series of precise, metallic clanks answered. Two Dwarven spiders scuttled into the firelight, their bronze bodies gleaming, their multiple optic lenses whirring as they focused on the task.
They didn't need instructions.
One moved to the shoulders, the other to the feet, their clawed legs finding easy purchase on the robe. With a synchronized, mechanical heave, they lifted the corpse and began dragging it in a slow, clicking procession toward the cavern entrance, headed for a discreet burial far from his doorstep.
A shuffling sound came from the passage, followed by a low, questioning growl that vibrated in Torin's chest. Echo, now a massive wall of fur and muscle, filled the doorway, her dark eyes scanning the cavern, nostrils flaring at the scents of blood and ozone.
"It's fine," Torin said, his voice thick with sleep. He gave her a dismissive wave. "Go back to sleep."
Echo let out another rumbling grunt, this one laced with clear skepticism, but she turned and ambled back into the darkness of the living quarters.
Torin dragged a hand over his face, his own enormous yawn threatening to swallow his head whole.
He took one last look at the smoldering spot where the Wrathmen had died and the bloodstain on the floor. The spiders were already gone, their clanking fading into the distance.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow he'd have to clean this up properly. He'd have to go through that journal, see what brought this Dunmer here.
But that was tomorrow's problem.
Right now, his bunk was calling with a voice louder than any Dragon's shout. He stumbled back into the passage, the stone cold under his bare feet, and let the darkness swallow him. He was going to need every second of sleep he could get.
Because things were about to get very, very busy.
...
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