[center][h3]Of Scorn and Confessions[/h3]
A Collab by: [@Leidenschaft] and I
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A man shunned, a heart broken, woe upon him, did Leif Raven-Stone come stumbling from the Windpeak Inn, his coin spent on several flagons of ale, and his blood boiling like molten iron. It pained him, and it felt as if a great, poisoned blade had been thrust through his very heart. Glimpses of his beloved, Sevine, came to him, again and again, a scene that would never end. How she stood beside the Khajiit, Do'Karth, the two exchanging intimate words in hushed tones, and how she leapt upon him, her arms embracing him readily, like a lover now known. There, the Khajiit gave her a token of his affection, some amulet that she now bore proudly around her slender neck. The very same neck that he yearned to kiss, the very woman that for so many years, he desired to call his own. She even had the courage to kiss this cat upon his cheek. And what of him?! He was cast aside like a piece of spoilt meat! Staggering off the porch of the inn, Leif made his way through the streets, the hour of the early evening had gone, and little light now remained as the sun, now a brilliant ball of crimson, sank lower over the hill. Muttering to himself like a mad-man, one that lost his mind, as tears stung his eyes, he came upon Sevine's horse, Asper. A creature she loved and doted upon even more than himself. Swearing harsh curses under his breath, he fumbled hopelessly with the knot she had tied, a simple loop, until it unfurled. Slapping the powerful beast on the rump, he yelled, waving his hands wildly in the air, "Be gone ye beast! Have off with ye!" With that, Asper sprang away, startled at the sight of the drunkard that had become Leif. Where the horse went, none would know until Sevine came to call for him later.

"Forsake me, will she? I will show her! I will show her the true man I am, and then she will desire to be mine..."

For a while he rested against the tree, burying his head into the crook of his elbow, as sweat poured down the sides of his crown, with his eyes closed, as he had not the strength to open them and to look upon the world. Off in the near distance, he heard voices of men engaged in conversation. This seemed to provoke him, for he pushed himself off the tree with great force, almost collapsing to the ground, and went stumbling, headed towards the voices. Swaying to and fro, his sight well blurred, he could only make out the figure of a tall man, with great height and girth to match, along with a mighty red-beard. 'Twas none other than Jorwen Red-Bear, and even in his dastardly state, Leif knew him nonetheless. Approaching Jorwen, and his companions, he bellowed in a great and terrifying voice, perhaps to instill fear, whatever the reason, it could not be discerned in his clouded mind. 

"I challenge ye! The three of ye, to a match! Come! Take up your swords, and bear them against me! I am Leif Raven-Stone, I fear no man! Fight me if you wish, for I am no coward! And only a coward would deny such a worthy challenge!" His fingers felt blindly as he reached to unstrap his sword from its leather thongs, and when he had done so, swung it in a wide arc as a display of bravado. Although, to the others, he would simply appear as a drunk fool that would only harm himself than them. The sword slipped from his grasp, and wedged itself into the flesh of the earth. He found not the strength to recover his sword, for he could not steady himself in his current state to even take the hilt again into his hands. As he went to retrieve the blade, he fell to his knees, and there, he remained, his blood-shot eyes glaring up at the three men, too drunk to move, or to speak for the moment.

Of a sudden, Brittle had his knife in his hand and took a step forward. Jorwen reached out clamped a hand on Brittle's shoulder with a grip that told him he would have no blood. "I'll have you know, little lad, every moment you are in my presence is one I choose not to murder you. You take one more step towards that man, it'll change."

Brittle grinned sheepishly at Jorwen and let go his high laugh, sheathing his knife and holding his hands up in peace. Mire made no moves, though Jorwen was ready for him. He never came on. Instead, he spoke, "This talk isn't over. Black Sutt still wants you at your earliest convenience."

"Who knows when that'll be." Jorwen squinted at Mire, "Perhaps it'll be so long he'll keel over before I get a chance to. Or the Deadlands freeze."

Mire just chuckled and shook his head, gathering his companion and walking away into the town, the darkening sky over the bay around them. Jorwen watched them leave and when they had finally gone, he turned to Leif. "There was a time, Raven-Stone, when bellowing a challenge to the Red-Bear was something only a man looking for a gory death would do." Jorwen walked towards Leif, his hair dangling over one eye, and he stood over him. Then he pushed the locks from his face with a sad smile and offered a helping hand to the lad who was very obviously drunk, "But I distance myself from those times unless that man I was is utterly needed. Take my hand, Raven-Stone, and walk with me."

Even after the flashing gleam of metal blades were sheathed, Leif did not flinch, nor wallow for an apology. Yet, as the great Red-Bear came to stand over him, he simply looked up, his body swaying, he went to push the offered hand away, and fell to one side, he quickly scrambled back to an upright position, and regarded Red-Bear as a man that dared to end his rage. Whatever logical sense was left, Leif uttered a crestfallen sigh, and after a few misses grabbed the weathered man's hand in his own, and forced himself up. If Jorwen had a nose like a hound, he would certainly smell the alcohol coming off his body in great wafts, so potent that some would wonder if they themselves could become intoxicated by simply being in his presence.

"And if a gory death be what I seek, who are you-" Leif hiccuped loudly, one that shook his body with great force, "to stop me? My heart has been thrust upon a deadly knife as is, so there is nothing left... in this world, for me to hold life dear." His words were slurred, and his head bobbed like a dinghy being tossed about on mighty waves of the ocean. 

Yet, as he stood there in his condition, he did not relinquish Jorwen's hand, for it was like a great anchor that kept him from drifting out on the sea of miserable drunkness.

Jorwen frowned at Leif's words. The father in him wanting to hug the lad, but Leif was a man. He needed guidance, not pity, or at least just a conversation long enough for him to sober up or fall asleep. "We've plenty chances to come for gory deaths, my friend. But try as you might, I will not give you one." Jorwen laid a good-natured hand on Leif's own and then put his steadying hand around the lad's shoulders, keeping him upright as they began to walk. Jorwen looked Leif up and down, the smell of alcohol stinging his nose, "One only drinks like that either for great mirth or great sadness. I can tell it's the latter, friend." He let it go unsaid that he was no stranger to it, the drink or the sadness, "What troubles you? Speak freely. Has a friend passed, a lover?"

As they walked, his feet shuffled, as if his boots were filled with lead, when Jorwen mentioned what troubled him, his mane of tawny hair shook as did his head. "One could say... that the one I love has forsaken me, and chosen another to be her lover. Of all the fair women in this land that I have lain with, sang to, wooed, adored with tenderness... It is [i]she[/i] that has captured my heart since I first lain eyes upon her." Shaking his head once more, as if to clear the drunken fog from his mind, Leif sighed, like that of a forlorn lover.

"It is Sevine. For she has taken her first love. Do not misunderstand, Red-Bear, for my pride as a Nord man is gravely injured. She has not chosen a man! Her choice lies with the furred beast, Do'Karth. Perhaps my beating heart would not feel so wronged if it were another man, but this?! This is an abomination! And where is her great pride and dignity for a mighty Nord woman, that she might lie in the bed of a dirty cat?!" He cried aloud, nay, shouted, so that all may hear who were in ear-shot. 

"She cannot even bear children with him... And I have would have been an honorable husband, I would have loved her until her beautiful, crimson tresses were grey with age, and wrinkles on her face. I would have looked after her until the end of time, and there would not be a want that I couldn't fulfill. What man I am now? I ask of you, what man I am now, if all this time, I have been but an ignorant fool? She never wanted me. She never saw how I took care of her, even in the darkest hours of the war, when she was struck down by that Imperial officer, who smate her with a poisoned blade. Who was there when she laid upon that cot stricken with fever? 'Twas not that beast! 'Twas I! And I have tended to her ever since, like a faithful housecarl that serves his Thane." His words were morose in nature, and he did not hold back the torrent of deep pain he held in his heart. Perhaps it was the alcohol that made his tongue loose and wagged so freely. Yet, as they walked, Leif leaned heavily on Jorwen, he wanted to sleep, but as the bear of the man led him on a walk, he knew in his heart that he needed someone to speak with.

"I see. You loved the Huntress." Jorwen nodded, and his pain brought to mind his own from years ago, buried by the sheer amount of years between it and now, but Leif had uncovered it. "I was not always my wife's lover, nor was she mine. I found another while Halla and I were..." He looked away, "She was a warrior, one of those in Ulfric's Band he took to take Markarth back from the Reachmen. I followed her, because war was the only thing I was certain I could be good at and because she understood me in that light. The Reachmen ambushed us one night after we escaped the Empire's so-called justice for Ulfric. I was stabbed, the lifeblood draining from me, and what they did to her... they slit her throat and left her on the ground like a broken doll. I raged and raged across the Reach." Jorwen sighed. "My heart was torn and battered by more things than you could know. I was alone, angry, so endlessly angry at the Gods and at everything else. I know your search for a gory death all too well."

Jorwen set Leif down on a bench and sat next to him with much work. His joints were not all there anymore, but he'd die before he could no longer heft his sword. "Try to look for death to your heart's content, Leif." Jorwen looked up at the night sky, his breath smoking on the cold air, "As you say, no man can stop another from making his own choices. But want it or not, those you'll leave will miss you, Sevine among them. And the death you seek is not quick or painless. She's made her choices, you can make your own. Rage across the lands of men and elves and beasts all you want. I only hope you find something that brings you happiness at some point in that journey far sooner than I did."

The deep brevity of his words resounded within Leif as they sat side-by-side on the bench, his body had quit swaying, and all but a great headache had slowly begun to descend upon his crown, his conquest for emptying his purse of all coin. He did not speak for many moments, there were many questions that swam inside his head, and for once, he forgot Sevine, if only for a little while. "Then mayhaps, this heartache too, will disappear in time, and mayhaps, there will come some greater good of it. All I have yearned for in this life, is a woman for which to make a wife, and to one day, have a family of my own. I envy you, Red-Bear, that you have such someone to call your own, to have a warm embrace waiting for you... Alas, it will not be for me, for sometime to come. But tell me this Red-Bear... Your wife, Halla? Does she know of your lover to wrongly slain? Does she know of your grief that you once held inside?" Why he wanted to know this, he could not say, perhaps to comfort him in the future if he found himself in a similar situation, were his potential lover to be cruelly murdered as had Jorwen's.

"No." Jorwen shook his head. "She only knew that I was a proud and contemptuous man from the day I met her. I fathered Solveig after I'd talked Halla for two days and it was not the warm and gentle entanglement of lovers, but of two people who had a pain to quell. And failed to do that. Her anger and sadness has leaked out of her as the years passed, as did mine. Our daughter may have found both."

Jorwen chuckled at that, "And yes, Leif. It is often hard for young men to realize there are many years ahead of them and not just the very moment they are in. If nothing else, you will learn to be at peace with yourself. Only then can another love you the way you deserve. Halla found it to be true, as did I. The ghosts of my past are still there, but I have learned to distance myself from the man I was. You are ever the better man than me, Leif. That I know from the stories men tell of your's and your Clan's name. Keep it so."

At the mention of Solveig being his daughter, a blossom of red coloured his cheeks like that of a blanket of poppys covering a grave in the spring. Why had he been such a fool? Oh woe upon him, and mercy befall him if Jorwen ever heard from his daughter's mouth the words he had said to her at Candlehearth Hall before knowledge of the Kamal's had blackened this world. Clearing his throat, he offered Jorwen a gracious smile. There was a deep comfort in his words, one that Leif had never heard before in his life. For his father and mother alike, Jorrlak and Sanja, dead they may be now, never spoke so soothingly to their son, and if they did, he was a lad too small to remember. "I am all that is left of my kin... Perhaps that is why I seek so strongly a family to make my own, so that my namesake will not be forgotten so easily, and like the Red-Bear, and even of the Huntress, my name too, will be sang in halls long after my passing. But come, I will keep your secret, as your wife is a good woman. You have a kind spirit Red-Bear, one that most must often over-look because of your name. If I may ask one favor of you tonight, as you have done me a great favor already by saving me from shame... Will you walk with me back to the inn, so that I do not lose my way, or fall down in a pile of manure to sleep?" Already, his head dropped with the heaviness of sleep, and his eyes closed slowly, tiredly. He would feel better in the morning, or wake with a crushing headache.

Jorwen's head leaned forward from looking up into the sky, a small smile on his lips, "I thank you for letting an old man talk and hopefully finding that some wisdom sticks. I think Halla and I have been together so long the news of another woman long dead would hardly phase her past punching my shoulder." He chuckled, "And of course, friend. I'll walk with you."

He stood and the two clasped each other by the wrist. Jorwen hauled the man up, not such an easy feat for the man's size and his sleepiness. The two walked in comfortable silence back towards the tavern. Jorwen could not say farewell to his friend and have him hear it, as he'd fallen asleep standing somewhere between the bench and the inn. He threw down what coin was needed for a room and laid the man down in the bed there, face-down lest he meet an end ingloriously choking on his own vomit. He lingered in the doorway, ruminating on their talk, and wondering if he'd ever have the strength to talk to his daughter like that. If he had the gall to, after so many years apart and absent. Jorwen had never tried to lie, and so he gave Leif his wishes for a heart at peace someday and meant it. He made his way feeling both tired after old hurts had come back to him and a small bit content that his words could help another instead of hurting them. Settling down and doing nothing these past days felt good, especially when they were with his wife. For more time than the quiet moments before the battle, Jorwen had been a man of peace. He hoped Leif would take his words of staying as good a man he could to heart.

It was for that reason, a bittersweet feeling came over him when he saw his friend, Do'Karth by his fire.