[h3][i]Alone[/i][/h3]

The sun had settled below the horizon and dusk retreated across the night sky to follow it while Gregor walked. His face was stoic, almost expressionless save for a slight furrowing of his brow, and his gait was that of either a man annoyed or a man on a mission. As it so happened, Gregor was both. He could feel in his bones that tonight was the night. This sacrifice would be enough. It was an exhilarating thought and the lingering negative emotions that remained from his confrontation with Raelynn were slowly expunged. He knew he loved her and that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, but the Pale Reaper also knew that she was nothing compared to the importance of his task. If she couldn’t deal with the consequences of his path then so be it. He did not need anyone. He could walk the long walk alone. He had been alone for ten years before. What was different now? [i]Nothing.[/i]

He took a deep breath, enjoying the sterile, clear smell of the desert at night. Gregor turned his head this way and listened for any sounds of the party and the oasis encampment he had left behind, but none were audible. He had walked far enough. Nobody would interrupt him here. Gregor looked up at the stars and stared, recognizing some of the constellations. He briefly wondered if the sky would look different later. Focusing on the here and now, Gregor looked down and took off his backpack, rummaging through it to find the necessary tools and ingredients. He used his foot to clear and flatten an area in a circle and then drew the pentagram with bone meal and blood. He paused to look at his hands -- they were steady as a rock. Gregor smiled to himself. He reached into the backpack again and pulled out the black soul gems. Five points on the pentagram for five souls. It felt… predestined. The universe had guided him towards this moment. He sank down onto his knees in the middle of the pentagram and placed the gems where they belonged, gently pressing them into the sand so they would stay upright. 

A thought occurred to him that stopped him in his tracks. For such a monumental moment, everything he was doing felt so… mundane. His movements were just ordinary movements, even if the objects he was handling were extraordinary. The clothes he was wearing, the way he styled his hair… there was nothing special about it, about him. And yet, if everything went according to plan, these would be the last things he would ever do as a mortal. The Pale Reaper shrugged, eager to get on with it, but Gregor found himself looking up at the sky again. Wouldn’t it be appropriate to reflect on everything that had brought him here? 

He thought about his family, first and foremost. The familiar memories of his childhood and his youth, the carefree years in Anvil, all together and happy. Gregor remembered the long afternoons in the golden summer light out in the yard with his father and his brother, playing at being soldier, Hector doing what he could to instill some actual skill and discipline them, but often powerless to stop the boys from simply rolling around on the grass and smacking their wooden swords edge-to-edge. The memory made him smile. Marcus had been so eager, so hungry, to devour everything he could learn and catch up to his big brother. Gregor had never been a very passionate child and had seen fit to do things at his own pace. Such were the luxuries of the firstborn, he mused. He remembered how his mother would watch them from the kitchen window and call them inside for dinner when it was ready. Every time, Hector would take a moment to kiss Gaia and whisper something to her that Gregor could never hear. The way his mother smiled without fail meant that it was probably something sweet. 

And Julia was born, of course, bringing some lightness and silliness into the dynamic between the big brother trying to be important and the little brother wanting to be just like him. Even as a young girl she’d always been playing with her dolls, fussing over them and bothering her mother for things to satisfy their fictional needs. Gregor knew, deep down, that Julia had children of her own by now. He wondered if they knew his name. Gregor took a deep breath and suddenly became aware of the tears on his cheeks. The memories were so vivid, so clear, that recalling them ripped open old wounds almost instantly. And yet those memories were the very thing that Gregor cherished and wanted to protect most of all. He did not want his life to be stolen from him by a disease. And as much as it had hurt to leave everything and everyone behind, to go so far away for so long that any nieces and nephews he could have might not even know who he was, it was essential that he had -- for [i]their sake[/i] too, or they would suffer the same fate that he had and be forced to watch their mother wither away and die before her time. And, ultimately, with the passage of enough years, that same death would come for them too. There was no future for the Sibassius bloodline without Gregor’s intervention. He held their lives in his hands.

He gingerly put the last soul gem in place. The air changed immediately. Something was coming. Gregor closed his eyes and did not startle when the five soul gems were cracked asunder by an incorporeal force. He did not have to look to feel the essence within slither free from their crystalline prisons; the screams of the Dwemer’s victims echoed from somewhere far away. These souls were steeped in fear and malice. He spread out his arms.

“Welcome,” the Pale Reaper whispered. 

[hr]
[i]13th of Sun’s Height, 4E208 
Southern Druadach Mountains, West of Falkreath Hold[/i]

The rains had come and gone. Gregor had weathered them all in silence as he stood vigil during the dark mountain nights and even now, when the sun pierced the heavens and bathed the valley below them in light, droplets of rainwater and dew still clung to his faceless armor and his black cloak. After Daro’Vasora’s speech, Gregor helped to unload the horses without being asked. His undeath made him tireless and while his movements were slow and measured, he was steady and reliable. Gregor ignored the glances of the others and said nothing when he stood shoulder to shoulder with Sora as they unfastened more supplies. What was there to say? Weeks had passed without incident but that wasn’t enough time for anyone to forget what had happened. Gregor didn’t blame them or expect otherwise. He focused on helping out where he could instead, putting his strength to use and spending most of his sleepless nights watching over the party -- but never alone. There was always at least one other person awake, to keep an eye on him as much as anything else. Gregor had ignored their stares too and retreated behind the inscrutable steel of his helmet. 

Once their work was done and the camp was set up, Gregor briefly looked around for Raelynn and saw that she was speaking to Fjolte. It had been too long since Raelynn had spoken to anyone that wasn’t him or Jaraleet. Gregor’s self-imposed status as a silent pariah did not have to be hers as well, so he decided to leave her to it. While he certainly had the tireless energy left to forage for food he knew the party wouldn’t like it if he wandered off on his own and out of their sight, so Gregor sat himself down on a fallen tree at the edge of the camp and did the same thing he had done so many times before: take care of his blade. The weight of the claymore in his hands was comforting and he laid it across his lap before he produced a whetstone, a cloth and some blade oil from his backpack. He looked up occasionally while he worked, taking note of Zaveed speaking to Latro, but for most of the time Gregor focused on his thoughts. 

Fjolte had recovered some of his memories with the use of a strange and alien mixture of herbs during one of the nights they had made camp. Gregor did not pretend to understand how the Nord’s concoction worked, but it had summoned visions that Gregor could only assume to be the truth of the matter. They were disturbing and he hadn’t found the courage to talk about them yet. He remembered a fight between himself and Raelynn just before he had set out into the desert and the words that he had spoken were nothing but awful. Had it really been him? Gregor had asked himself that question a hundred times. It had been his body and his voice but the words he had spoken to her in their tent seemed so cruel, so callous, so loveless… it was hard, very hard, to believe that they had been his own. It wasn’t the first time that Gregor had felt that sometimes he wasn’t in control of his actions. There was a side to him, or there had been, that could almost be said to have a mind of its own. He had tapped into the darkness in his soul deliberately before, but this was different. Was that why he hadn’t been able to recall those memories? Because they weren’t truly his? Everyone had always said that the dark arts were corrupt by nature and that one couldn’t practice them without becoming a monster themselves. Gregor had never wanted to believe that and had always considered that to be superstitious nonsense. Perhaps there had been truth to it after all. 

He listened to the rasp of his whetstone across the rippled edge of his sword, the chirps and songs of the birds in the trees behind him and the soft whispers of the wind through their branches. The air was cool, he knew, and it would be a pleasant change for the others. It all felt the same to him. Gregor wasn’t even bothered by his wet clothes. He had tried to made peace with these changes ever since they had left the gathering of the tribes behind but it was hard to say if he was making progress. Some days he felt liberated by the lack of sensations, some days he felt a deep yearning for biting cold or searing heat. He saw that the others had started a fire and watched as a cooking pot was hoisted over the flames. Gregor had tried to eat something on Raelynn’s insistence and found that it tasted like nothing. He hoped the others would enjoy their meal.

Sevari was among those tending to the stew. Gregor hadn’t spoken to him since the Khajiit had pressed the barrel of a pistol to his face in the prison. In fact, he hadn’t spoken to anyone that had been in that damned room with the damned Dwemer executioner since then. While that was probably for the best, it nagged at him that he had never thanked Zaveed for his unlikely intervention. For him to defy his own brother after the argument he’d had with Gregor in the oasis… it was deserving of gratitude, whatever Zaveed’s motivations might have been. Gregor saw him speaking to Latro and wondered when the time would be right. Would it ever be? Was there a point to waiting around for some magical signal to tell him that it was alright to express his thanks? Probably not. If he was to talk to any of them again, he would have to initiate that. They could easily and wilfully go the rest of their lives without seeing him again. Gregor knew that. Not for the first time, Gregor questioned what he was doing here. Perhaps it was nothing more than a fool’s hope to think that he could redeem himself in the eyes of the party. Still, there was only one way to find out. 

A voice came from his left. “Is it true what they say about you?”

Gregor turned his head and saw Mazrah standing there with her arms crossed and her head tilted, staring at him like a historian might stare at a curiosity. There was no disdain or hatred visible in her eyes. Gregor wondered why she approached him now. The two of them hadn’t spoken since… the party, he realized. That felt so long ago already. 

“Yes,” he said and averted his gaze. 

Mazrah frowned and took a step closer. “Show me.” 

Gregor shifted and grabbed the hilt of his claymore tighter. A drop of water slid down his helmet’s visor and fell on the soft earth below. “No,” he whispered. 

The huntress looked at him with something approaching pity, but not unequivocally so. She’d been told what Gregor had done to turn him into this thing. It was hard to imagine the nice man she knew from the party to be such a killer. Worse than a killer, even. Hell, it was hard to imagine their faceless traveling companion to be those things, too. There hadn’t been a single instance of aggression or trouble from him, not one word of protest -- not even a whisper. 

“You’re a strange man, Gregor,” she said at length and shook her head. “We’re going to forage for food. Are you coming?” 

He shook his head and squared his shoulders. “I have to finish this,” Gregor said and resumed whetting the blade with the stone. 

Mazrah could see that the edge was already as sharp as it was ever going to be. She finally took the hint, however, and her posture softened a little. “Take care,” she muttered and returned to the camp, discomfort visible in her eyes. She wasn’t easily disturbed but being around Gregor… it was like the very air itself was stifled by his melancholy. 

Behind her, the lich was left alone with the birds, the wind and the rasping of his whetstone. Pine needles had fallen from the trees and settled on his cloak, and he looked like he’d been sitting there for more than a hundred years.