"[i]I know where I sit. Heavy black depths.[/i]"

The air was an ichor. Thick with devilry and dust that hung in the air like heaps of meat in all too little broth. The ring had, as it fell through the air, tumbled. Drifted. Carved through the muck and moisture. When it landed, it did so against the soft sand near the front most third of the cell. The stone bricks were kept. Maintained. Cleaned. Stained still in old black blood at the edges and between the cracks. Old blood, from ages past. The bed in the cell's corner was a stone thing with sand piled up on it. Spilling out. Softened. The sand-covered floor was equally soft, and fine. Powdery. Most of the dust in the low air was from this sand, which drifted as the wind came through the iron-bar window behind the cell's sleeper.

Rings of iron bound up the corpse in the center of the room. Around the wrists forced behind its back. Around the ankles on which it sat upright. Thick linen sheets covered the squirming husk as it heaved, shifted, and cracked against the stoney hush. It was obscured by the linens from head to ankles. The oblivion runes [i]Bedt, Hekem, Koht[/i] were burnt onto the head of the linens. Between the runes, which were arranged in a triangle, was a black soul gem that held the entire magical contraption together with the chains that held it against the subjet's face. The runes burnt a low amber, and the soulgem pulsed a dull magicka blue on occassion.

Everyone on this level of the prison could smell the raw excess magicka peeling out of the cell, despite the warding over the linens that peeled away at the corpse's reserves. It probed. It felt. It extended itself outwards. It didn't come in wafts. Instead thick tendrils that hazed at the edges, that could be physically tracked along their length by the smell.

As soon as the ring struck the sand in front of the heaving, covered figure, the smell retracted. Like a flinch. It squirmed. It returned so quickly that it flickered like the whip that was being visualized to force it homeward. When the magicka settled behind the linens, a singled clawed hand came up from beneath the layers of thick fabric. It was still bound, and its partner hid just behind the fabrics' excess. 

The back of the figure seemed to writhe and worn about. Two loud snaps occurred, and the bent elbows returned to their positions on the knees of the squatting figure. His posture, corrected now, enabled his hands to burn their own gold light. In front of him. As the golden glow of restoration magic danced from his hands, his arms audibly snapped. A snap and a crunch as his shoulders corrected themselves. With his arms in front of him now, he felt comfortable reaching out and grasping the ring.

He traced its shape. The runes. He did not wear it. Instead he felt at the elements of it. The decorative. The magic it carried. Its foreign essence.  That wasn't Deadric, was it? No it wasn't. The Daedric alphabet was written with a stylus. This script wasn't meant for creatures with hands. No more than a specific number of strikes in each.

He paused to pick sand out from his own nails. 

"[i]Is it... ehn—chaant—ed? Currrs—ed?[/i]"

The whole of the corpse was dried. Desicated by the soft sand. Its skin peeled away, at the edges. One could track the peeling by the blackness. That skin that was blackened by slow rot peeled first. Unending discomfort. The question was punctuated by a heave as the lungs of the old body and the larynx all struggled with the air that contested with the condition of the being. He'd have projected his voice, one might think, were he not so constrained.