Chapter 2: Sleeping Tree Sap is Bad. M'kay?
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Earlier Mohamara had been grateful that he hadn't been constantly reminded of how cold Skyrim could be. But as he stood with one leg in a bear trap, in just a pair of underwear, and missing his tail he began to rapidly realize the lack of warmth in his limbs. At some point, he had started shivering badly and probably had made his wound even worse.
The armored cathay woman, Khayla presumably, returned with a rolled up quilt not too long after leaving. Khayla passed the quilt to the cathay man and then crouched down around the bear trap holding Mohamara's leg to examine it.
"A lot of lost blood," she commented as she examined the trap. "And it likely broke his leg."
"Get the trap open already." The elder cathay unrolled the quilt and threw it over Mohamara, even including his head. Once the tojay couldn't see much of anything beyond quilted fabric, he felt the eldest Khajiit double the layers of the quilt by folding it over onto him. The blanket did little to combat the cold even when doubled up. "Ja'khajiit, when Khayla releases the trap, fall backward. This one will catch you. Walking on that leg is not an option."
Mohamara nodded because he couldn't keep his teeth from chattering enough due to shivers to talk. He could still feel the pain, both in his tail and in his leg, but the cold seemed so much more present. Under the blanket, he grabbed the edges of the quilt and wrapped them around himself even tighter.
The trap squeaked a bit as it opened up, and suddenly the strength that had allowed Mohamara to stand with it snapped onto his leg left him. Even if he hadn't intended to do as the cathay had said, the tojay ended up falling backward and being caught early on. The cold provided a sort of shield, it kept the pain from becoming as severe as it had when the trap first slammed shut on his leg. But in exchange, he was shivering constantly due to a cold that felt like he was naked in the Pale rather than somewhere in the Reach.
He was carried bridal style, and soon found himself placed onto a stiff surface on his side with the injured leg on top. Mohamara's ears and nose could pick up enough information to tell him that he was lying in the back of a wagon full of items and that there were two new Khajiit in proximity to him.
"Is so small," an unfamiliar male voice in the same accent as the other Khajiit commented from outside the wagon. "A ja'khajiit? From another caravan?"
"Worse," the eldest Khajiit responded, grave. "A tojay, outside Elsweyr." Sharp inhalations met his words, and the wagon shifted like someone was climbing up.
Hands moved aside the layers of quilt blocking his face and Mohamara found himself looking into the curious eye of another cathay woman. "It is true," she declared before shutting the blankets around his face again. "A tojay!"
Mohamara didn't
get the significance, but he knew pretty much nothing about Khajiit culture. Perhaps tojay Khajiit were rare, or they had an important job in Elseweyr?
The cold was inescapable, especially after the blankets up to his waist had to be rolled away so his wounds could be inspected. The second cathay woman hissed, angry--probably at the sight of Mohamara's tail. "This is not good, we have no regeneration potions."
"Don't worry about that just yet. Get the wounds cleaned, bandaged, and a splint on that leg before he freezes to death." An additional weight landed on Mohamara, presumably another blanket.
The cold seemed to only worsen with every attempt to warm up, which made it difficult for the cathay woman helping Mohamara to examine and treat the injuries. "He is shaking too much--we need something to keep him still."
The tojay tried to force himself to be still, but the shivering persisted anyway. He wanted to apologize but ended up with a bit tongue when he attempted to do so. Once more, his face was uncovered, but this time he mostly saw a furred hand holding a purple bottle roughly the size of his head by a narrow neck.
"Ja'khajiit, open. This is strong medicine."
Mohamara forced himself to hold his mouth open while two drops of shimmering, viscous magenta liquid were dropped into it. The taste wasn't unpleasant, but it produced a burning sensation that spread outward from his throat and stomach after he'd swallowed it. Suddenly, his body was too heavy to shiver, though the burning negated the need for the heat generating movement. As he tried to process what the 'medicine' was, he noticed that everything was turning purple--the blankets, the small portion of the wagon he could see and even the cathay woman.
But he didn't have long to process this development, as his face was covered up by blankets yet again. The dark mixed with the purple hue and soon the two combined into a purple-tinged black void.
At some point, he had closed his eyes and not realized, for when he opened them up he was not in a wagon. He was on a dune of white sand, overlooking many such dunes as far as his eyes could see, with four sharply rising gray mountains in the cardinal directions. The sky was a lighter blue than it should have been, with no clouds and with two additional stars in the daytime sky alongside the expected one. They were orange and purple, which got Mohamara to squint in exasperation.
"Can't even let me have my fever dreams, can you?" As if in response to his question, the two new stars started to grow larger. Significantly larger, and it was a second before he realized they were going to crash
into the white desert. Mohamara promptly turned around and started to climb further up the sand dune, but once he disturbed the sand it started to slide downward.
After a brief struggle against gravity, he found himself half-buried in white sand at the base of the dune. A monumental crash indicated that something had landed, which made the Khajiit look up from trying to dig out.
It was a grape cluster, enormous in scope. Each grape on the cluster was bigger than the statue of Azura in Winterhold, which in turn made the whole cluster almost the size of the Throat of the World. A second crash drew his attention again, and sure enough, it too was a fruit. A cross-section of an orange, equal in height to the grape cluster.
"Yagraz would have
so much to say about me dreaming of fruit." With no longer any pressing matter that he could think of, he started to dig his way out of the sand. Except, it wasn't sand at all. The grains weren't the right shape to be sand--sand was round, but the grains he was seeing were square. On impulse, he pinched some and put it in his mouth and found it to be incredibly sweet. "Sugar? A desert full of sugar?" The Khajiit paused to think about what he had just said. "A desert dessert?"
He only noticed the sudden appearance of a foamy white liquid in hindsight, and soon saw an enormous pillar of the liquid flowing from the sky--directly from where Meridia's star should have been. Again, on impulse, he tasted some when he could reach it and found that it was clearly milk.
"Sugar, fruit, milk…what the--" He didn't get to finish the sentence as the four mountains in the distance began to move as the milk levels rose to cover the last sugar dune--Mohamara's sugar dune.
He woke up craving a grape and orange smoothie.
The cold wasn't so bad, but Mohamara couldn't remember why it had been bad at first. It was summer, wasn't it? And he'd paid his heating bill on time, hadn't he? A stabbing pain in his leg and tail as he tried to roll over onto his back brought at least some of the memory back. But he couldn't recall how he'd gotten out of the bear trap, or where he was now.
"Ja'khajiit," an elderly man's voice called from outside his blanket coccoon. "Do not be moving so much, you will start bleeding again."
That only made Mohamara want to move
more because apparently, he'd been bleeding. It took him far too long to muster the strength to even lift his hand, he'd forgotten why he was so desperate to move.
"Just a few more days of travel to Markarth, ja'khajiit, then we will try to get a healer for you." Oh great, he was going to the hospital in Markarth.
"My insurance doesn't work at Markarth Memorial though," the tojay complained. However, as he finished saying that he struggled to remember why he wasn't in an ambulance if he needed a healer. "I don't feel well, but don't have that kind of money." With the Gildegreen Hospital in Whiterun closed due to a fire, the more expensive hospitals in Markarth, Winterhold, and Eastmarch had all taken the time to raise their prices. As Mohamara began to think of hospital bills, he forgot why he needed to go to the hospital in the first place.
"Atahbah, the sap's wearing off. Another dose when you move him next."
Mohamara tried to move several more times, but he was so lethargic that the most he could do was speak or move his fingers. After a time, exhaustion forced him into a dreamless sleep.
A sudden shaking motion woke him up, apparently at night for the sky was dark. The layers of blankets around him were pulled away so that his head and shoulders were revealed. A sudden wave of bitter cold hit him, and Mohamara tried to grab the blankets back but his arm wouldn't move. A cathay Khajiit man, his hair in braided rows and his mustache sporting gold rings picked Mohamara up and moved him around until the tojay was sitting upright at the edge of a wagon. Outside, a gathering of four dour-looking men, mostly tan-skinned Imperial humans. They wore leather armor that seemed to incorporate skirts and had some form of weapon visibly on their person. Some held torches, while two held a bruised and battered Orc between them.
"This is the one he stole from," the cathay man said, hissing in anger. "Cut off his tail, then shoved him into a bear trap!"
"N-no!" The Orc sputtered through his busted tusks. "His tail'd been cut off when I found him, I swear!" He was elbowed in the side, which drove him to cough for a few minutes.
"You're a sick bastard, you know that?" The Imperial man who had elbowed him all but snarled at the Orc, a hateful expression on his face. "First you maim and rob a
child, then you lie to my face and think I'll believe it!!"
"Control yourself, Auxiliary." A fifth Imperial man appeared from around the wagon, dressed in heavy metal armor similar to the other Imperial's leathers. Beside him was a far older cathay Khajiit holding a bundle of clothes in his arms. "The man's bound for Cidhna Mine already, don't beat him too badly or he won't be able to work."
"This one thanks you, Quaestor." The eldest Khajiit spoke before laying the bundle of clothes next to Mohamara. "We did not expect to have grandson's stolen items returned to us."
"It was pure luck that allowed us to catch this thief. But that writ I gave you should let you get medical treatment at any Legion camp if Markarth won't let you get a healer. Safe travels, citizens." The Imperials and their Orc prisoner went off into the night, with only their torches to indicate they still existed after a while.
"We're sure they're his clothes?" The first cathay, with the fancy hair, asked of the elder. At some point during the discussion with the Imperials, Mohamara had taken to leaning on the taller Khajiit's shoulder. He still couldn't move very well.
"He's got witbane, doesn't mean he can't speak," the elder Khajiit snapped and started unfolding the bundle of clothes next to Mohamara for the tojay's inspection. "They are yours?"
He didn't know what had caused them to be so badly stained with light-blue patches, but Mohamara nodded.
"And this?" From inside his jacket, a rectangular slab about the size of a book but far thinner was produced.
"'S my slate," to tojay said. He wasn't
tired but couldn't muster the strength to move about; speaking was difficult with his energy constraints as well. And as he looked from the slate to the old Khajiit, he found he'd forgotten how he came to be seated at the end of a wagon.
"For drawing? Hmm, perhaps an artist then." The slate was wrapped up in Mohamara's jacket and set aside in the wagon. "Khajiit apologizes for likening you to a kitten, ja'khajiit, but the Men would only believe it that way."
"Racists."
The cathay Mohamara was leaning on chuckled as he lifted the tojay back up to go to his sleeping spot. Mohamara had no idea how he knew where his sleeping spot was but didn't get to ponder it for long. The cathay man uncorked a huge purple bottle and held it up for Mohamara to drink from. "Not too much, small one."
The taste was… like grapes and oranges, Mohamara realized. Somehow he felt like that should have been important, but it didn't.
He dreamed of the jungle, though he had never seen the jungle. Thus the trees stopped existing if he looked directly at them. So most of the time he looked at the yellow grass of Whiterun's plains in between the jungle trees--because it made perfect sense for a jungle to have grass.
Mohamara was being hunted by a giant snake with three heads. One head had orange scales and was filled with light so bright it threatened to set itself on fire. The other had purple scales and snapped at anything and everything it saw--even if there was nothing there. The tail had a third head of golden scales that Mohamara expected to help him, but every time he called out to her, she looked away.
The snake sang a bizarre
song as it chased after him, as it phased through trees that stopped existing for brief moments. He'd thought this would make it easy to get away from, but sometimes it would pop up directly in his path and force him backward. The snake, particularly the purple head, snapped at him often and almost caught him by the tail more than once.
But usually, he could escape enough to find the tail head, and beg her for help. And every time, she would turn her head away. This song and dance persisted until Mohamara was fed up, and he lept at her to
force her to help. The gold-scaled tail-head snatched him out of the air and devoured him whole.
And Mohamara woke up to find a Nord man with milky white eyes peeking in on him from outside the wagon. The two stared at each other before the Nord man carefully backed away and vanished.
"Ah, good, the sap has worn off." A voice with a peculiar accent spoke from outside the wagon.
Mohamara tried to sit up to look for it but found that his leg produced a searing pain when moved too much.
"The witbane will keep you from being able to remember, but your leg is broken. No moving around until Ri'saad comes back with a healer." A cathay man crouch-walked into the wagon. His strange braided hair and gold-adorned mustache made him seem familiar, but Mohamara couldn't place him. His clothes were odd, layers of fabric topped with a leather jerkin--something Mohamara would expect from an old-fashioned elf, not a Khajiit.
Mohamara tried to sit up, but a stabbing pain in his leg made him think that wasn't a good idea. When had he hurt his leg? When had he gotten into an actual wooden wagon? Where in the seventeen Daedric realms of Oblivion were his
trousers?! All these questions and more raced through his mind.
"Here, water." A wooden cup of the indicated liquid was offered, and Mohamara accepted. "Ri'saad will be able to get you a potion for the witbane at least, but it'll taste awful."
The cup was taken, and Mohamara sipped as much as he could while laying on his side. The water… tasted funny? Like the pipes the cathay had gotten it from were bad. Still, it was not bad tasting water, and he needed to be ready for whatever he was about to get that tasted bad.
When he looked up, he was surprised to find a cathay man crouched in the wagon, as if he had always been there. The taller Khajiit's expression was pitying mixed with something else, but Mohamara couldn't identify it. "Um. Who are you?"
The cathay man smiled, indulgent. "You know, you've asked me that often over the past ten days."
"Ten days?" The last thing Mohamara could remember before going to sleep was coming back from Temple and--... The cup fell limp from Mohamara's hand, creating a mess that the cathay hurried to clean up. "I've missed Temple!" Pain in his leg didn't matter anymore, the strange man who had appeared from nowhere making a fuss didn't matter anymore. Mohamara hastily tried to get free of the blanket cocoon. He had to get out!
"Khayla, need help back here!"
A cathay woman in a suit of steel armor that featured Nord designs appeared at the end of the wagon as Mohamara decided that he couldn't trust a leg that
stabbed him every time he tried to stand. She caught the tojay as he tried to lunge free of the wagon, and pushed him back in with ease.
Missing Temple was
unacceptable! He'd
never missed Temple! It was the only part of his life that made him unambiguously happy--he built his whole week around it, and his faith had been rewarded in the past. When he'd been brought back from his first foster family, the Lady herself gave him an audience--he'd been permitted to ask one question of Her.
'Is it wrong that I still love them?'
The question had taken a surprisingly long time for the Daedric Prince to answer, but her answer had cemented in him her divinity. It had done more to convince him the Meridia loved him, and that by going to Temple he could show her that he loved her back.
The armored woman had no difficulty pushing Mohamara back into the wagon, where a cathay man who Mohamara didn't recall being there grabbed him by his jaw and forced a purple potion bottle into his mouth.
"Wait, that's too much!" The armored woman shouted to the cathay man as Mohamara swallowed one, two, three full mouthfuls of the strange grape and orange flavored sap the bottle had held.
Everything turned shades of purple, the forms of the cathay Khajiit that surrounded him twisted and stretched, and the sound of a deep drum beat filled the air.
Mohamara watched as lines of tojay Khajiit walked through a hall of curved stone, bronze-picks slung over their shoulders. They marched in perfect synch, even when they had to walk straight up a wall, across the ceiling, or upon individual rocks falling from high above to cross a cavern. As he watched them, the drums grew more noticeable, until a horn sounded. At the horn, the tojay Khajiit all broke from their line and began to mine--into walls, doorways, each other, or the thin air.
Someone was singing a
song, but Mohamara couldn't place who, or where. He also couldn't place where he was, or who he was. He was the pickaxes being swung, he was the tojay swinging them, he was nothing at all. Everything was still so maddeningly purple.
As he watched, the tojay began to grow larger--to the size of Men and Mer. Their fur left their bodies and collected around their heads, in great beards and manes of hair bound up in bronze-like metal.
The sensation of water surrounding him caused him to shake violently out of the dream, and realize where he was. Even as he woke, the song he'd heard in the dream stuck in his head, like an ear snake--coiled around his brain, not letting go.
He actually was in a basin of water, in a stone room that took after Dwemer designs but was clearly too young to actually
be Dwemer in origin. Thankfully there was a slightly moth-eaten curtain because as Mohamara took greater stock of the situation he found that his clothes were gone. A nearby chair with a towel and corked bottles made him think that he'd been purposefully placed there.
"From the splashing, I'm hearing in there, I'll guess you're awake at last." A woman's voice called from beyond the curtain, which made Mohamara's ears droop. Someone had
seen him like this. "Mind your leg injury when you bathe, the break's healed but we've left bandages on it until the scars close up. Don't take off the ring."
Mohamara noticed a gold band on his finger and had been about to take it off when the woman's voice told him not to. There was some magicka flowing from the ring into him, and his instinct had been to remove the possibly cursed item. Thankfully, the enchanting course he'd taken let him identify the magicka as a weak regeneration effect.
"Get to bathing in there. The Jarl is going to be uppity enough about Khajiit in his city--no need to make it worse by smelling bad."
One of the corked bottles produced bubbles when mixed with the water, which made it much easier for Mohamara to feel safe in the curtained room.
His mind was… foggy, like he'd taken really strong medications and was out of it for days. During the bath, he put together a rough idea of what had happened. One, the Mad God had shown up and taken a personal interest in his life. Two, that interest manifested itself in sending him back to an unknown time before the Tenth Era.
"Um." Mohamara started after realizing he should narrow that down some more. "Could you perchance tell me the year?"
"Two-hundred and one of the Fourth Age. Don't worry, we get asked those sort of questions all the time by people who come down from bad drinking parties and the like."
"Oh… thank you." Mohamara knew next to
nothing about the Fourth Era. The last time his school teachers had taught history that ancient, the Khajiit had been six years old. Really, why would he have learned something that was sixteen thousand years ago, with multiple Dragon Breaks in the intervening time?
"When you're done, there are some clothes for you here. Your friends in the caravan sent them up for you since they couldn't come in the city walls."
When Mohamara found the clothes, he was amazed by how far fabric technology had
come in sixteen thousand years. What he was given was a rough-around-the-edges green robe, child-sized, with an attached hood and stole. Why the stole had to be sewn onto the robe, he had no idea. And to his surprise, he found
his shoes provided as well. Had the cathay found the Orc who'd robbed him?
He didn't know about cathay, but he knew cathay-
raht to be the premier warrior morph of the Khajiit species. Morph was almost certainly not the proper word, but Mohamara had only spoken to other Khajiit raised as he was--in the foster care system.
The leg that had been trapped in a bear trap was… noticeably weaker than it had been previously. Every so often, it would give out and he'd have to grab onto a wall or a piece of furniture to remain standing. And even when it worked, he found himself unconsciously limping on that side.
But! His leg wasn't broken, he wasn't freezing any longer, and things were starting to look up in terms of his situation.
The only problem that he had no idea how to deal with at all was that the song from his fever dream was
still stuck in his head.
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Mohamara's part of a sect of Meridia's faith that believes Meridia and Magnus to be the same entity, hence her being referred to a the main star of the day. That should make later parts of the story fun, and hopefully funny.
Also, don't you hate ear-snakes?