Chapter Text
In the worst of Koht’s half-dead half-waking dreams, perhaps she is Shor, or perhaps she is herself, with a crevice, a canyon, a cut the size of continents carved into his/her chest. This is fundamentally wrong of course: she is not Shor, she is not the rhyming twin of the word slaughter, and yet he and his breaking skin, ashen, blood-soaked, are what she dreams of. Regardless of what she considers rational, the world begins to harden, and turn white, as she/he grasps onto the part of him/her that will not bend until the blood has drained from his/her hands. Earth shakes. Mountains rise upwards like ruptures and valleys drown in seas. The wind cools. A gentle stream that once cross-stitched carpets of soft leaves and sewed cool lakes to newborn woods cuts deep, cuts cold. It is ice now.
“I am not you,” she says. Shor looks in her direction.
In her dreams, she sees herself and himself: a husk who watches moons cross above his/her corpse with absolute silence. Once lush gardens of song fossilise in an instant, and turn into cold, hard stone. The voices of many fall quiet, for him/her to speak, and in that moment, they freeze.
"I am better than you," she says. “I will eclipse you,” she says, as Shor looms over her. “We will eclipse you.” He/she pulls out a knife.
In her dreams, she sees a many-eyed seer begin to unpick a tapestry. A body is fraying, a body is unravelling, there are fragments of colour, and sound, and texture, that he/she holds with an iron grip. His fingers, her fingers, are coated with rust.
Shor, who does not smile, gives her the blade.
Remnants, fading warmth, and a breath that tastes of ash. His/her hands, now scarred, now worn, the exposed bone, the stone, holds the weight of memories, of lifetimes.
Shor begins to speak. It is rich, her voice. It is soft, resonant, it carries a great weight with each syllable, and it sends a ripple down her throat. It is, above all, deeply familiar.
“Then show me,” Shor says, in her voice. “Show me who you are,” she says, in her voice, in the voice of Kagrenac.
...
...
It is not customary to hold a funeral after a member of the clan has been banished, but Kagrenac hangs strings of white painted bell-chimes, as is customary, outside of the gates, that make a hideous clang as the wind touches them. This, too, is a tradition: a death is not the place for beautiful things. A death is another thing taken from them, another reason to howl. Strip them of their clever machines and their brass machinations and their wondrous music and whatever trifles and contraptions they have invented to make them think they were anything else, this is what the Dwemer are: a grim people, a morose people, obsessed with endings, with the last beat of the war drum, with the falling cadence of the last note.
(The descendents of the first graveyard. The spirits who were given spades, and told: dig.)
Some are surprised to hear that the Chief Tonal Architect is in mourning. Has she not won? Is she not victorious? Is this not what she set out to achieve, no matter what the cost? Is this not what she desired?
(No, no, it is not).
She pays no heed to the thoughts of others on this. She knows the myth intimately: after the rebellious priest - that passionate, proud, relentlessly infuriating, self-righteous and stubborn priest that had a heart the size of the moons - was banished from her home, she brought back the beginnings of a revolt that brought the old citadels to their knees, that shook the scholarly order to its foundations. Her disappearance is not the end of all things. It is simply the beginning of the end.
She allows herself as much time as she can bear to think about her. She surfaces from her workshop to watch the sun fall as the chimes strangle notes, clouded with hot smoke, the taste of sulfur, a sickening thing. She holds onto the railing too tightly. (She weeps. She weeps far more than she would like to admit.)
On the thirteenth day, she decides it is enough, she is done with wallowing in the worst of her failures and regrets, she is done staining herself with old memories that refuse to reconcile, that black tarnish. She removes from the dagger tied to her belt, the gold-and-green blade that has rested at her side for over two hundred years, lovingly crafted by the woman she once called a wife. Without ceremony, she takes it to her forge and melts it down.
From what remains, she crafts two things.
Keening; it is to call, to cry out, to pull towards and seize with an earth-shattering wail, the helpless - no longer helpless, no longer without definition, without tone, there was a new clarity, a new sharpness, it would cut until it bled and bled and bled --
Sunder; it is to stop, to shut down, to cauterise, to cleave an ocean, to cut a mountain into two - he sat on his throne as his bright-bannered armies tore each other to pieces - to say, enough. - Enough of this. No more.
These were not tools of an arrogant vision; these were not tools from which were to impress courtly curiosity, no shimmering swords plucked from a pretty song . These were the creations of generations of tired, aching feet that had walked from the cradle of Aldmeris to the cold reaches of Atmora, across this strange world in searching for a sanctuary, a spot to rest, and mourn their dead in peace.
The Dwemer had found none. No such peace, she had come to realise, existed in a realm where their hard-earned bitterness was regarded as spiteful, as suspicious, as a voice to be silenced. The Dwemer could trust none - nobody, no, apart from themselves. They would carry their own tools and carve their own future.
These are the tools she uses to touch the Heart, the Heart that belongs to one she serves no longer. The Heart that is hers, by right, to take.
-- Kagrenac.
And as she works, It speaks to her like a lullaby.
-- Kagrenac. Is that what they call you now?
It was a less than a hum, a gentle prick at the back of her skull, that began to form shape, and flavour, and resonance,
-- I know you, I think. Knew you? Know.
And through every intonation, every soft syllable that danced between a laugh and a sigh, words began to creep into her ear and twirl along her spine,
-- Know. Yes, I think it is know . That… The way you move your hands. Your little rhythms. They’re quite unmistakable, you know. I know.
She spins around.
“You do not know me,” she snaps to an empty room.
-- You sang to me once. I could not forget it, for the world.
“Perhaps your memory is faulty. I am not a singer.”
-- How could you not sing? Did you forget how?
Kagrenac scoffs, and does not answer.
-- Did you forget, Kagrenac?
She continues to weave a melody as Keening cries out, its lament unheard by all but two.
-- I loved you once. Did you forget?
She continues to cut it into a rhythm with Sunder’s blows, her hands trying not to shake as it breaks what was once treasured.
-- I loved you.
She throws the tools to the floor.
“Wretched spirit! Do not bother me with your trifling illusions!”
Her words ricochets around the empty workshop, shaking, twitching, breaking.
-- You don’t… remember, do you? Do you remember?
She shakes her head as if she is hearing something that she does not want to hear - a truth she does not want in her ears, falling off her tongue.
-- You do not remember. You can’t remember.
She says nothing, hands curling and uncurling, breathing fraught, holding back a tide of something immense.
-- Why don’t you remember?
“Gods wretched and forgotten and undeserving -- you just don’t know when to stop, do you? You just don’t know when.”
-- You… you shine like her. The little spirit. Koht. A pause, as if her words have not even been heard. Remarkable. I am in fragments, pieces that cannot collect themselves and yet I can still see you. Like the whole sky wanting to break from its confines. So brilliant, and yet. A chuckle. A laugh. You are still very small.
The tools hiss quietly against the cold earth. It feels like a monstrosity.
"You killed her, you wretch."
-- Ah. Yes. A pause. A thoughtful one, the scent of rememberance. A pity it came to that, wasn’t it?
“It was an atrocity. You had better not forget that.”
There is a slight pause, before the voice comes to her, in cascades, a waterfall, softer, an image of distant moonlight twinkling in its cadence.
-- You know, if you had let me, I could have given you the wings you desired. I could have… there was so much I could have done. So much more.
“Why are you telling me this? I do not want your empty promises. All you did was hurt me.”
A pause, and she felt warmth, and sorrow, and regret that wrapped her like a blanket.
-- I have been thinking of what words I would say to you for some time. What I would tell you, if we were to meet again, by chance, by sheer chance, were we to entangle in each other again... ironic, really, that it would be me, this time, to refuse to kneel to you.
“What in Oblivion are you talking about? Speak some sense.”
There is no immediate response.
Instead, there is a moment of quiet, and it begins to feel achingly sad, to her, the quiet, even as the tools are howling against the flesh of the earth, even as the machinery around her is screaming.
-- I wonder if you are aware of what threads you are even bringing together, here. You ought to know, and yet…
A pause.
“Speak,” she says.
--Do… did you love her? That was not a lie, was it?
“Love who?”
-- She. She who lingers in a place I cannot reach, who has been scattered to the stars you so desperately want to touch and yet she only longs for the earth beneath your feet. Do you love her?
Kagrenac says nothing, and looks away.
-- I hear snatches, strange things, soft words, hard voices. I hear only fragments, pieces upon pieces, dissected, disassembled…
“Do not speak of her.”
-- She hears, regardless of how softly I speak.
"Do not speak at all, then."
-- It flows through you, did you know? Not through some long lost connection between us both, some aching familiarity, some thread bound between us from forces unknown. She hears snatches, strange things, soft words, hard voices. She hears it through the thread you have woven between each other. This is your doing, your magic. Not mine.
"You speak as if I have chosen to inflict this plague of dream-sickness, upon us. Do not deny your responsibility in this. The fault lies with you.”
-- Yet not for one second did you consider staying away from me. A beat. Something dark and playful dances on his lips. Am I irresistible to you, Kagrenac? Does she yet know about this song you spin in secret, in the dark? Does she know how your speak of melodies into an old lover’s ear? Old lover, new lover, perhaps we are the same face in different masks. Does she know of me yet?
“I have never loved you, Lorkhan. And I will never love you.”
The voice is silent.
And the colour, it feels, appears to drain from the room.
And for a moment, there is no music.
Only noise.
Harsh, and discordant. Fraying. Turning white.
As Kagrenac motions to pick up her tools again, so the voice speaks:
-- You and I are more alike than you realise.
“I am nothing like you.”
-- And yet you desire so much to make a new beginning, a vibrant change, you are willing to seize this world from my hands, in secret, by deception, without telling even one of those you consider dear. Hurting them, to do so. I did not expect you, of all people, to take up the mantle --
“I am nothing like you.”
-- Perhaps not at first. I thought you were something else, something entirely different. I could not believe what you first brought to me with your own two lungs. How could someone such as you be so bold? How could I not love you? You outshone us, in that moment. Inspiration. Clarity. Magnificence. If spirits like you could bring music like that, then surely… surely…
“Do not lie. You think us beneath you.”
-- The opposite . Quite the opposite, I promise you.
“Your promises mean nothing. You let us die, you us rot. You watched us wither, and crumple, and turn into empty shells, into husks that would waste away, that would bleed until they could not stop. You watched us and you told us nothing . How could you? How could you, if you admired us so much? ”
-- Kagrenac. I wish you could understand. I wish you could. I wish you could see through my eyes.
“I would cut out your eyes if it meant saving my people.”
-- Kagrenac… oh Kagrena, Kagrena... I wish I could put visions into words. I wish you could see the whole world in motion, it is marvellous, the change.
“Do not call me that.”
-- Kagrena?
“You left us all to die! You abandoned us! We care nothing, nothing for you -- how could I possibly love you, when you turned on us, you betrayed us, you treasonous wretch! We will grind your corpse into an oil to gear our machines. We will live without you - live beyond you. Surpass you! You will mean nothing, one day, people will spite your name, people will curse you, and your ashes we will build a world that wasn’t born from blood.”
-- Truly, Kagrena?
“I would do anything for my people. I would do anything, even if they loathed me for it, even if they would put my head on a pike afterwards. I would even hurt her. I would hurt the one I loved more than the skies and the stars.”
-- You would forsake love?
“This is about survival. Not love.”
-- Some have said love is survival.
“They are fools.”
-- And your own heart, Rena, what does that say? Could you live with that choice?
…
…
… Kagrenac wakes.
Two tools are not enough.
She makes a third. To guard against treasonous spirits, against troublesome ghosts, against spectres who would fill her ears with prophetic visions and half-waking dreams that smelt of books and brass and strong teas. Wraithguard; it is to silence, to still, to not simply quieten the loudest, most troublesome of dissenting voices - but to banish them. To banish Her.
It is not without cost. It hurts. It hurts deeply to use. To protect oneself, sometimes one must cut part of themselves out.
It is a choice she is willing to make.