[hider=Contemplations]
"B'Vehk! Can I not think of a single thing  to write on when it finally becomes relevant?!" Tylmaesa groaned, letting her fingers run back through her hair. The mess of dark, blueish locks of hair atop her head parted in waves, tugging and straining toward the back of her head - but she paid the sensation little mind. If her hair came undone, it would. If it didn't, then she could handle a little bit of pain. Perhaps it would inspire her, even?

Laughing the thought away, Tylmaesa allowed herself to stare at the darkened sky above, her vision blocked by a thick net of tightly packed clouds, the rays of Aetherius occasionally managing to punch through in one place or other. Where Magnus or the clouds did not obscure her sight, she found falling snow, tiny shapes of falling, frozen water alighting upon her ashen skin. For several more seconds, she simply stared into the sky, deep in thought... But nothing came. No flash of inspiration from the blood, no idea formed from the aether - nothing.

Sighing in frustration, she brought her gaze back down to earth, and the bodies strewn about her presence in various states of injury. Some were lucky, she thought - their limbs were shorn from their bodies, bone and muscle cut so cleanly and effortlessly through as to seem like they were cut by a perfect blade. Others had been less lucky, bellies sliced open, leaving their guts to spill out into the snow, but even these s'wit received the kindness of their heads being removed from their bodies, their lives plucked away like ripe grapes from a vine. It would have been a sight to behold, truly, Tylmaesa reasoned.

A single warrior - a giant among her kind - assailed by a horde of hardened Nord bandits, each one of her foes a warrior in their own right. But she - this half-naked Dunmeri warrior, a stranger in a strange land - was possessed of skill that was perhaps sublime, and a heart so steely that nothing could shake her. Why, then, did every tale she could think up sound so terribly uninteresting? What distinguished the droll slaughter of a poorly constructed camp full of savage highwaymen from the many masterpieces of Vivec? How would she tell the tale?

Quietly laughing, Tylmaesa shook her head. Even Lord Vivec's ego was not so towering. Perhaps [i]that[/i] was her fundamental issue.

Over and over, Tylmaesa let those thoughts simmer in her skull, idly kicking aside the ruined body of a man clad in tattered furs and steel mail. The next, a lightly protected and willowy archer, was brusquely shoved aside by Tylmaesa's foot. Both bored her, but in wildly different ways - one lacked finesse, and the other possessed far too much. The third corpse she encountered in her path, Tylmaesa couldn't even bother to remember, offering it the indignity of being stepped on as she passed on by, crunching bones beneath her muscular bulk.

[i]Ah.[/i] She thought to herself.

"There you are." Reaching down, the heat of a roaring bonfire illuminating her face, Tylmaesa deigned to turn the next body over onto its back. A giant of a woman, equal to her height or perhaps even taller, lay motionless in the snow, unable to survive having each of her limbs systematically cut away from her torso. Some wounds were older than others, no doubt, but only so little as to scarcely matter, and so Tylmaesa paid little mind to the precise manner in which she removed each limb from the steelclad warrior's body. So savage was the beast that she wore the collected teeth of what Tylmaesa assumed were her fallen prey around her neck - the thought sent a sharp, throbbing pang of agony through Tylmaesa's leg and arm, a reminder of the now heavily bandaged wounds on her limbs, and the yawning gash across her torso.

"Tough little bastard, you were." She grunted, bending down to stare at the expression frozen on the bandit's face. Stoic. Unflinching. Not a hint of terror in her eyes. Did she not know death was coming, Tylmaesa wondered, or did she simply not care?

A woman like this expected it, Tylmaesa reasoned, glancing sidelong at a pair of wooden cages aside the tents scattered around the camp. The camp was old, lived-in - discarded bones, no doubt from their meals, dotted the campsite, and a think layer of ash beneath the bonfire told her it had been used many a time. The wrinkles on the towering woman's face, the scars that seemed to cover nearly every last inch of her skin...

She was old, Tylmaesa reasoned, reaching up to wipe flecks of blood from a small cut on her face. Allowing her hand to fall, reaching behind her neck, it came to rest on a scar of her own. Which it was she couldn't remember, much less what gave it to her - did the old bandit think the same? Did she wonder what brought her to a life of thievery, kidnapping, and senseless murder, or did she simply accept it, just as she seemed to welcome death? Was she forced to do all this by circumstances, or did she merely lack any moral fortitude?

Her chest tightened. A physical pain, perhaps, or did her heart truly ache?

[i]Get your head out of your ass.[/i] She silently admonished herself, faintly recalling Vivec's Thirty-Sixth sermon, the words that haunted her. Foul Murder. Foul Murder. The sound echoed in her head, over and over, until she finally pushed herself back to her full height with a huff of frustration.

He had murdered, and He knew it to be wrong. He had admitted as much, even if not publicly. What distinguished Vehk from a simple bandit? After all, had both not committed murder for personal gain?

F
O
U
L

M
U
R
D
E
R.

The very arrangement of the words stuck in Tylmaesa's thoughts. Masked, but only just. Hidden, but in such plain sight it was a wonder more did not see it. It must have been intended to be seen, surely. Why else would Vehk have written it?

That was what separated them. It must have been. Vehk was a tormented being; one who surely harbored regret for his actions, who knew that his murder was "foul". Was it not Vehk who had permitted the Tribunal to fall, who even perhaps orchestrated the ascension of the New Temple which would defy him?

She remembered the fall of Baar Dau, the death of so many of her friends in the fall of Vivec city, the dying of her crops, the loss of everything that was important to her...

She remembered the pain of betrayal, of how eagerly people she once thought to be her friends abandoned her for their own personal gain, the Morag Tong assassins that surely followed her even now.

Foul Murder.

And yet, here she was. She was strong. Stronger than ever before, perhaps; no longer a soft noble that relied upon what she was born into to survive. She remembered how angry she felt as Vivec abandoned her people, and he slaughtered what he had mode - and then, finally, she remembered that her people had only grown stronger by their suffering. That they had loved, and they had lost - and yet, they persevered, throughevery moment of all-consuming hopelessness.

Only then did Tylmaesa realize she had been clutching her skinning knife so tightly that her knuckles turned white. 

Smiling, the fog of pain dispelled, she remembered His final words to her.

The beginning of the words is ALMSIVI.

Tylmaesa allowed the knife to drop softly into the snow, a tear rolling down her cheek. She reached into her pocket, removing a weathered map, upon which was marked the city of Skingrad, circled in red.

Her fate had only just begun, and there was so very much work to do.

She was ready.[/hider]