Meridia is either the best or the worst at cleaning house.
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Chapter 21: Meridia's Pest Control
When Farkas woke to take his turn on the watch, he found Aela and Kodlak talking. Must have been safe thus far, if they were content to distract themselves with words.
"But the power, that little bit of extra speed in your reflexes…." Aela spoke to Kodlak, both seated on the edge of the winged woman's platform. "It's saved your life more than once, I know from Skjor, and the fights I have had at your side."
"You're of course right, sister." Kodlak looked up at the full moons while Farkas listened. "But I have lived as both a man and a beast. I will not begrudge you for your preference, but in my last days I wish to be a man. In a way, the change has been good for me." The old man flexed his arms, and the muscles underneath strained the wolf armor he wore. "Without the tension in my muscles at all times, I was able to fight like I did before the rot. Even if it means the rot claims me sooner, it was worth it to be able to be a Companion one last time."
"You're still a Companion, don't say such things, old man."
The wind shifted, and Farkas realized the cause of their talks from the scent he picked up. It motivated him to speak. "You aren't a werewolf anymore."
Kodlak forced a laugh and hobbled to his feet. His leg was almost fully grown back--that magic ring Yagraz had given him was powerful stuff. "Aye. The newest whelp provided me a cure." He indicated the small cat that was curled up next to Yagraz at the base of the statue. "Which reminds me, Aela, have you any experience with crossbows?"
The redheaded Nord woman scoffed. "Of course I have. Shorter range, slower to shoot, but they hit hard as a master archer's arrow. Why?"
"Because I think that would be the only weapon someone as… diminutive as he can wield."
"He seems decently smart to me," Farkas commented. "Didn't steal from us. But if you say he's dim…."
Aela scoffed. "He means short, ice-brain. If you want me to teach the cat how to shoot, fine. But I don't see the warrior's heart in him. A mage's mind, definitely, and a healer's hands. But no call to battle."
Farkas pondered these things without changing his facial expressions--he had learned to do it so well that even Vilkas couldn't tell when it happened anymore.
"Then what do you call leaping onto the World Eater, hmm? What do you call healing people in the thick of battle?"
"Stupidity is what I'd call it." Aela frowned while Kodlak hobbled away to his cot. "Fighting a dragon is a warrior's duty, not some milk-drinking cat wizard's."
"Not all warriors fight with steel." Farkas quoted what he had heard his father, Jergen, say about mages and scouts in the Legion. "We used to not take elves, now we do. Why not mages?"
"The boy isn't even a real mage." Kodlak's armor scraped on the stone he had made his sleeping spot next to. A wall at his back, to worry less about ambushes. "I watched him spin soul gems into a thread and knit enchantments into a dainty little cloth thing. That and healing are all I know of his magic."
Aela waved Farkas off when he approached the edge to sit beside her. "Go back to sleep, shield-brother. I'm too worked up to go back to sleep for a while yet."
Farkas knew better than to talk back to Aela when she wanted to be alone, so returned to his bedroll. Fortunately, it was still warm from when he had left. Once he laid down, looking up at the stars, an idea struck him that he couldn't help but speak. "...Do you think it's possible to knit a bolt of lightning?"
"Well, the gods have to do it somehow. Might as well be knitting."
--
Mohamara was woken up by an eagle swooping down and trying to carry him away. Again. Unfortunately for the eagle, it didn't account for the ability of Mohamara to reach around, grab it, and bite it in the neck.
It amused Aela to no end when the tojay returned to camp with a dead eagle in his mouth and spat it out to start plucking feathers. "What the fuck is up with eagles here?" He asked her in between extracting feathers as Yagraz had shown him.
"That's a black eagle," the Companion archer answered. "They hunt goats, pigs, and sometimes children. Snatch them up and drop them then feast on the corpses. It's why people don't usually live in these mountains."
Mohamara paused and looked southward before turning back to Aela. "Does Dragon Bridge put up with this too?"
Aela nodded. "They have a storied tradition of archery for exactly that reason. I'm told that every child past their tenth year is skilled enough with a bow to take down any black eagle mid-swoop." She chuckled a bit and looked southward to the distant bridge. "Tell me, boy. Do you want to be a Companion?"
The tojay shrugged and took his knife to cut open the eagle's chest. "I don't know. Yagraz would be happy if I did, and Kodlak tried to sell me on the idea but… right now I think I should stay here, in Haafingar. Elisif is going to need someone to make her laugh after what happened."
Aela turned to look at him with an arched brow. "It doesn't bother you? To debase yourself like that?"
Mohamara met her eyes, defiant. "I signed up for the job a Fool. It comes with the territory."
"Hmm. Then perhaps Kodlak is wrong about you. A Companion should not be content to be laughed at."
"Aren't you guys all about honor? What honor do I lose by making people laugh when they need it? Is it dishonorable to bring people happiness?"
Aela's expression became steel, and Mohamara saw a yellow tinge creep into her eyes. "It is dishonorable to be mocked and do nothing about it. It is dishonorable to want to be mocked, as it diminishes the honor of all those who would stand with you."
The cat didn't look away from her but shrugged. "That sounds like your opinion, and less like codified rules. Do you think less of Yagraz for having me as her friend, then?"
"My thoughts on my shield-siblings are my own."
"That's a way of saying yes while being too afraid to admit it." Mohamara easily lept seven feet into the air as Aela snarled and crossed the gap between them in a flash. Werewolf speed was not to be fucked with. "Ooh," the tojay commented as he landed and immediately jumped again to avoid any grabbing attempts from the Companion. "Consider that nerve touched."
"You don't want to test my patience, cat." Aela went for neither of her weapons and made no moves to grab the tojay as he bounded around the temple roof.
"Then maybe you shouldn't start conversations expecting others to handle your delicate sensibilities. You know what also diminishes the honor of all who stand with you?" The cat pulled down on one of his eyelids and stuck his tongue out at the Companion. "Being so fragile that they can't have opinions different than yours."
The Companion snarled, and her eyes went almost entirely yellow while her canines visibly grew in size. Mohamara realized that he might have pushed the issue too far, and was about to flee before the impending werewolf transformation started.
But it became unnecessary. On his next jump upward, Mohamara found himself going far higher, much faster than he had done previously. For a moment, he thought the Red Shoes enchantment had activated but he kept going hundreds of feet into the air--well beyond what the enchantment should have been capable of at max power.
Then, when he could see all the way to Whiterun Hold, he stopped and was suspended in the air. Light gathered into a central point not far away and exploded into a winged figure vaguely resembling a woman made of white light.
Meridia.
The force holding Mohamara had seized him somewhere around his chest, so he flailed about in an attempt to get into a position of supplication. It didn't go well, with the cat ending up flipping over multiple times as Meridia approached and overall just screwing up his physical orientation.
When she finally arrived, he had managed something close to the position of supplication… at about ninety degrees off where it should have been. "You, mortal." Her voice echoed far in the thin air so high up. "You have restored to me my beacon, and permitted my splendor to return to Skyrim. For your efforts, you may speak to me."
"All that I do, I do to spread the word of your benevolence through the world," the tojay replied, with his eyes blocked by the backs of his hands. Technically the pose of supplication was just a kowtow, but there was some hidden meaning behind it--perhaps it was bound to a specific set of ideas through sympathetic bonds that only Meridia could pick up on.
"As you should, good and faithful servant."
Inside his mind, where it was appropriate to have such thoughts, Mohmara squealed to himself from the joy of Meridia's praise.
The light from Meridia's seeming shifted as she circled around the mortal. "Where is your amulet, mortal? I distinctly recall that all my servants should have one that I might know the strength of your love for me."
All the joy that he had felt before turned to ash and dread. "It, uh… was stolen, my Lady."
"By whom?"
"An Orc. I never knew his name. He stole it shortly after I… uh, appeared in this time?" He didn't dare bring up Sheogorath to Meridia yet. More than likely she had known from the moment he was brought to her temple as a baby.
"I see."
Those two words cut Mohamara to the bone, he imagined the disappointment Meridia must have had, that one of her faithful couldn't fight off a drunk robber. His ears went flat against his head and his tail went underneath him. "If-if it pleases you, I can perhaps make another--"
"It would not please me, no. The amulet is not merely a magical necklace, it is a morpholith mined and polished from my Realm. How arrogant of you, to think you could replicate my work."
The situation was growing increasingly worse, Mohamara realized. Meridia was going to be upset with him, and what way she would choose to express that feeling was up in the air.
"But even without the amulet, I can see your heart. You cower at the thought of displeasing me--good. Too many of my servants fail to realize the severity of their errors. Such as this."
Mohamara felt Meridia seize his leg and roll up his pants leg, and then jab an insubstantial finger into the scars along his shin.
"I am particular with my words, mortal. So when I order my Vessels to be repaired, I expect to come back to find them in exactly the condition I expect of them. Which is why I am utterly enraged when my orders are ignored like this." As she spoke, she squeezed down on Mohamara's ankle like he was a stress ball.
Meanwhile, in the Colored Rooms, a general broadcast was sent out to all Meridia's servants from her chamberlain. "Would the Knight designated L4NC-3 please report to the throne room. Now."
The specific Knight was in the middle of its lunch break, and obediently got up while all the other Knights pointed, 'ooh'd', and one sang the 'someone's in trouble' song.
Mohamara kept his mouth shut as Meridia used his leg like a stress relief ball. Fortunately, she let go before breaking any of his bones.
"But this is not your fault. You have served admirably. I am… pleased, with you."
"Before… before you commit to that, my Lady." Mohamara knew, he knew that what he was about to do was stupid beyond all forms of reason. But he couldn't do otherwise. He couldn't lie, even by omission, to his Lady. "I… did not go after the beacon right away when I learned where it was. I stayed in Solitude, and fulfilled the orders of Sheogorath first because I thought… I thought…."
"You thought that Sheogorath was like me. That his orders were to be obeyed and made a priority on pain of death. Is that about right?"
Mohamara nodded and was ever so slightly grateful that he couldn't see whatever look of displeasure Meridia was leveling at him.
"I had thought to make you my Champion, to make your voice equal to mine. But perhaps I should bless some other mortal, one who is not so foolish." The light of Meridia's presence shifted again, growing more distant. "Tell me--why do you confess this? Sheogorath would have never spoken of it, and you could have been greatly rewarded had you stayed silent."
"Because I love you, and you love me. And keeping a secret from you would have eaten at that love with fear of it being discovered." The tojay braced himself for the beacon firing off a beam of light to murder him then and there, or perhaps for Meridia to shuffle his bones around, or turn him into a worm.
Meanwhile, in the mind of a madman, the gracious host looked up from reading a letter from hundreds of years ago to the lady his friend had invited in. "What's got you grinning like a fool?"
"Shut up, mortal," Meridia replied with a toothy grin from ear to ear.
Back to the scene far above Meridia's temple, the Daedra did not speak for a long while. "I see. Since you are not suited to being my Champion, you will serve me in a different way. There is a profane darkness lurking in my temple. If I had a Champion, I would see it cleansed. But since all I have is a Vessel, I will use you to… exterminate the infestation myself. Inform the mortals skittering about my roof that they will need to hurry and get as far away as possible."
"Yes, my Lady." Mohamara nodded and began to sink back to Nirn automatically.
--
Yagraz woke up to find her cat friend missing, a half-cleaned dead black eagle, and Aela staring vacantly upward. She questioned this and did not enjoy the answer one bit. "What the fuck do you mean he jumped up into the sky?"
"I mean what I said," Aela responded, in a daze. "I… we were talking, he was jumping around and then--like a bow launched from an arrow--up he went."
"The fuck were you talking about then?"
"Really? That's what you want to focus on, what we talked about?"
Yagraz got up in Aela's grill to remind her that the Orc was not at all afraid of the Nord as their comrades were and that Yagraz was by far the more capable fighter in close range. "I'm focusing on what I can do things about right now. So if the two of you were talking something that might have activated some weird Meridian recall device, I--"
A tojay Khajiit landing on Yagraz put an end to the pending argument. "Y'all need to run!" Mohamara shouted to them as he scrambled to the ground. "Kodlak! Farkas! On your feet, Companions!"
Farkas hopped to his feet from laying on his back and drew his greatsword in one fluid motion. "Where's the fool who needs killing?"
"You'll be the fool that get killed in a few minutes!" The cat ignored Yagraz and Aela's confused looks and went behind Farkas to attempt to push him. "Run! Everyone, you need to grab your stuff and go, like now."
"Hold on, short-stuff," Yagraz started as she walked over and picked the Khajiit up. "What's going on? Where were you up there?"
Mohamara grabbed Yagraz by the face and brought it close to his to whisper. "Meridia is going to blow up the temple, and none of you want to be here when it happens."
Without changing her expression, Yagraz set Mohamara back on the ground. She calmly packed up Mohamara's stuff and hers and went to physically pick up Kodlak from his sleeping spot. "We need to start running. Farkas, grab Kodlak's stuff."
"Right." The wolf-twin quickly gathered up his stuff and followed after Yagraz as she started to book it.
Aela did the same but had far less to grab so she was able to catch up quicker. "What in Oblivion are we running away from?!"
"An angry Daedra, that's what!" Yagraz ignored Kodlak as he started to wake up from the running. "Meridia is doing some house cleaning, and none of us would survive it!"
"I knew Telma was putting her life at risk doing that stuff," Farkas commented as they kept running south toward Dragon Bridge.
Yagraz wasn't looking back, she knew better, but she could tell something was happening from the way the clouds started to break apart and vanish--as if struck by a shockwave.
"Look out!"
Farkas' shout saved Aela and Yagraz from being struck by long trails of lightning that followed the road, upending the worn stone and setting trees alight as they passed. For a moment, all the light vanished from the sky, and it was night time again.
"Don't look back!" Yagraz ran as fast as she could, and found it odd that the Red Shoes enchantment on her boots didn't activate. "You'll go blind! Do not look back!"
They felt the explosion long before they heard it. The ground under their feet shook, like an earthquake. From behind them came a strong shockwave that tore leaves from the trees they passed. But after that came an even stronger shockwave that knocked them all off their feet and sent them rolling down the road--they could hear the explosion at that time, but the noise was intermingled with the rushing air, so they could not pick it out.
Where had once been the Temple of Meridia was now a smoking crater, strewn across the mountainside. Aela had to dodge to the side to avoid part of Meridia's statue striking her as it bounced down the road and eventually tumbled away into the valley below.
"Wow," Farkas commented as he looked at the plume of smoke and ash rising from the mountain. "That must have been a really dirty house."
--
High above the smoking mountain, Meridia watched the ash rocks settle through the Vessel's eyes. The necromancer who dared trespass was dead, and her temple in ruins. The beacon orbited her like a moon. And in moments, Dawnbreaker--her mighty weapon--rose from the temple ruins undamaged. She touched a finger to it, restoring the power that had been stolen from the weapon to power the squatter's vile corruptions, and called it back to her throne in the Colored Rooms.
With the work done, she freed herself from the Vessel and watched him take in the ruin that had become of Kilkreath.
He grieved for her holy temple. Even though it was not the same one he had been brought too sixteen thousand years from that moment, he still held Kilkreath as his 'home'. She had gleaned these things from their time together.
"Hear me, mortal." Meridia permitted the Vessel, her son, to be sluggish in his attending to her command. Grieving for what was lost and could never be reclaimed was an important part of her faith, after all. "As you are inadequate to be my Champion, you will go amongst my faithful and spread the word of the return of my splendor to Skyrim. You will do this as long as you are here, in this time. Planning around the Mad God's schedule is… irksome, but I haven't the means to keep you longer than he intends. So, while you are here I command you: Grow mighty, grow in influence, and build for me a new temple on my sacred mountain."
The Khajiit wiped away the tears he had shed for the temple and tried to get into the pose of supplication once more. "Y-yes, my Lady. Your will be done."
There was but one last thing to attend to, then Meridia could release her avatar. She accessed the beacon and reactivated its higher functions. Once it was initialized, she used it to locate another piece of lost property. She found it in the Reach, a Hagraven nest, and summoned it to her hand with but a thought.
The avatar of light approached the cat and lifted his head out of the supplication pose. He, of course, had no idea what was happening as she wrapped the fine silver chain around his neck and clipped it for him.
"There." Her tone became demonstrably warmer as the amulet's miniature beacon lit up, and she could feel the earnest love from her son's heart flowing back into her. "All is forgiven, servant. Go now, and see my will done. Know that I love you. Goodbye."
Once more the cat began to drift back down to the surface of Nirn. Meridia only slightly adjusted his course so he wouldn't land directly on top of the molten rock, and vanished from the world.
It was only when she was fully herself again did she remember she had forgotten to remove those unsightly scars.
"Meri-pants," Sheogorath called from the arena of paranoia. "Did you blow up a mountain without me?"
"Well I would have been happy to have you there," the Lady of Light and Life said without raising her voice. Sheogorath was aware of everything that happened in the madman's mind, after all. "But someone couldn't be bothered to get off their orange and purple backside."
"I can't miss my soaps, Meri-pants! We've got sandalwood squaring up with High Rock Spring for the Sudsy Championship!"
"You know sandalwood's going to win by cheating. They do it every time."
"Well if they fight enough times, surely High Rock Spring will wisen up and--damnit High Rock Spring! That's the two-thousand and fifth time you've fallen for that trick!"
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Slowly working the yucks back into the story after last chapter. Progress!
