From Out of a Cimmerian Nightmare

"My uncle Kaltos sent you to kill me, those years ago."

Moonlight dusk silence. Dim tranquil firmament awash in the resplendent, milky stars. I'd just finished telling my sweet little niece a bedtime story about a young wizard - "ah, like you!" she'd said with a grin on her pretty face, to which I'd told her I was almost not young anymore! - a wizard who aided everyone whose heart was noble, with silly, smart peaceful solutions to dire situations, like preventing battles by asking his horde of friends to help him rob blind all of the soldiers at night, taking their posessions after paralyzing them as they slept, then wrapping the soldiers up in thick and puffy jester clothes that stuck to the skin, that made them unable to fight even unarmed; or selling trinkets with side-effects to people he felt deserved a lesson; the women almost invariably ended up waking up in the morning with beards, and the men with lipstick that they just couldn't wipe off no matter how hard they tried. As always, I tucked my niece in as she was still recovering from a fit of cute hysterical laughter, to which I couldn't help but laugh too. I wished her happy dreams, to which she wished me dreams with a nice lady; her five year old wit reminded me of her mother, who had always been so very funny.

I never read anything to her where anyone died, or was injured in a significant way. Most bedtime stories I'd seen weren't to my liking, because I wanted to keep her away from all that.

Her mom had expired two years prior. So I decided that, as far as I could, I'd not let the girl come in any contact with any form of death again, be it even a dead bug. I would done so evermore, were it possible.

I was not her uncle in that I was a sibling of a parent. I had, in fact, been in love with her mother my entire life, and always dreamt I was going to marry her someday, and that we'd be the happiest two people that ever lived.

It wasn't to be. We were wonderful friends. Then my mentor, a great and powerful magician, who had taken me in as an orphan, sent me to Alinor so I could further my studies. I did not expect to be stuck there, and in Skywatch, Firsthold and Falinesti, for years and years. But I was, and it was in Alinor in the beginning that I first met the older Haymon Camoran, honored guest at the time, student under the same teachers, and older.

"We were never through, you and I. That's all."

By the time I was back, twenty years had gone by. My mentor had passed away and she had married. She had missed me so very much. Sadly, her husband was an old friend of mine that she'd taken for a kind and decent man, when it had always been obvious to me he was neither; perhaps she just didn't know him as well as me. It was all great, and they had the girl, but he started beating them. Learning of it, enraged, I fantasized of poisoning him, and, to my regret, likely would have done so, had he not died on an expedition pursuing Orcs, as the fearless noble he warranted he was.

"I don't even remember why you wanted to kill me, or why so many people want to kill me nowadays. But I vaguely recall you tried to."

Then the rare illness she'd had since she was young - that I'd spent all those long nights as a child dreaming I'd find a cure for when I grew up - started ravaging her body, and in my unfaded love crippled me as well. She was unable to endure it. And nothing I had ever lived through, none of countless losses of friends I had endured throughout my life, especially in Valenwood, measured up to a whit of the dismal blackness I felt then.

"It was all your fault, you know. I could have helped you."

She didn't have other family on her side, and didn't want her husband's family to have her, so she left the girl to me. I swore I would never let even the tiniest harm in the world ever come to the girl, and stayed by her side in her last moments. Before she died, she told me she had always loved me; she had just gotten tired of waiting for me. I would have rather had it she had not loved me.

Then I ran away with the girl. The feisty little thing ended up being more than a daughter to me, and I loved her dearly.

"I have a child too, but I'm going to disown him if he doesn't turn out just right."

And there I was that night, as bands of light came up on the empyrean, thinking of how much she resembled her mom, down to even their beautiful messes of black curly hair, as she slept in her bed embracing her soft stuffed bunny toy a few feet away, inside the house. I was sitting in the back of the garden by lamplight sipping warm berry tea with milk, and my eyes stared at the quiet, sleeping village below in the glen, all their windows darkened and softened by their dreams, under the soothing lull of the stream running through it. The warm breeze tingled my spine and toes. The strange little blue and red birds were staying up late that night, and their lovely bewitching music whispered to and from the blooming white trees on the hills around, and I imagined they were songs of unrequited feathery love as I heard them melt and mingle into the seductive, overwhelming pulse of curvets of the fragrance of flowers of the trees. My eyes started dropping and I soon dozed off, my back on the chair, my hand still around the cup's handle on the wooden table.

All the little blue and red birds died later that night.

"The best you can hope for, really, is to make love to dissolution. Deluge yourself with it."

Camoran wasn't supposed to come that way. He was far to the south.

"Old-fashioned time-honored massacre, which I missed. I wanted some of it again before I lost the chance. We used to have it so much in the old days. I was only having fun; it was never really with the intention of hurting anyone, but they got in the way. See? They didn't really care, or mind. Had they, they wouldn't have joined in."

Why?

"Had you been expected to perish, you would have. They were careful."

From my sleep, I felt myself hoisted and held on the down-slanted cliff; ensorcelling rendered me immobile, mostly insensible. The sharp tips of three arrows plunged into my back, driving through my flesh, one nearly into my heart. I felt the hurt, was let go and tumbled down into the deep ravine ahead, the arrow shafts breaking on the rocks after pulling themselves in me a bit. Then I tumbled to that spanless hole you go to when your grasp on your mind becomes too loose.

"If you died, then, it was too bad. I have learned to deal with such chafing of my fun, albeit I would be missing out on this."

The muffled motes of life hung on me with their sad faces.

"Everything of life is enmeshed with death. You need water to live, and too much of it will kill you, lest you call yourself a fish or a certain strain of lizard; in the latter you are merely indifferent to it, and in the former it is turned upside. You need food to live, but it is merely the extension or synthesis of dead life, and you yourself will become food in death, at first to worms. Love is a road to the maintenance and propagation of certain life, and that is what it truly means - and by belying death, it strengthens its sway and influence. It makes death thunder and rip open."

Under the aurora, they killed the mothers, the fathers, the elders, the youngsters and the children in the dale before most had even awoken. They incinerated the houses, and afterwards they killed the birds and burned down the trees, on principle. They spun the beauty into disfigured wasteland, jaded life out of the ground with forbidden thaumaturgy, and were gone by dawn, broken shapes under the horizon, as fast as they had appeared out of the nothing.

"Life isn't that great anyway, and they were going to lose it sometime anyhow. I don't think I really did something that bad."

I slipped my way into existence again in the morning and tried to not lose grasp again, to not die for good. The throb of the serenity of quietus glimpsed withinside and pushed and pulled me through the quake and torpor of the hollow places, home to the slipping, splintered soul.

I longed for waking. I dreamt of dreaming of waking, and understood that I had in fact woken. Yet it was in my mind.

"They were a bit slovenly and almost did kill you, yes. But you aren't dead now, are you?"

I grabbed onto a lingering will, caught it and pressed onto it, threw myself into an ebb of healing. I grabbed the broken shafts and pulled them out of me; the pain was great enough for me to be oblivious to it.

"It's actually nice seeing you after all these years."

The wind fluttered timidly. I cleaned my dusted eyes with unseen river water blood, and let them open. I saw it was daybreak, and the leaves of collapsed lilacs were adorned in gore. It was a netherworld with daft cerulean skies.

The sights I saw as I walked around the razed, unframed village transcend expression. I stared at the charred corpses of the limbless, decapitated children, like broken dolls, in disbelief.

I couldn't find my girl's fragile body in our mansion, or anywhere.

I fell apart.

"You need to lighten up. You need to get a sense of humor. Too few people have it anymore, but it's an important asset, I think. It helps you see in perspective."

He had chosen to embody death, the coldness that makes life bow and fade. I looked inside my annihilated soul for colorless coldness that could make death kneel.

---

"You aren't going to kill me," he said in his breathy voice as he heard me. He turned his chair around and faced me. "I have the girl, safe."

He explained he had come after me - "because I was in the area, mostly," he'd said - and because he wanted his revanche for my botched assassination attempt on him as a youthful Nightblade. "Nothing serious; just to make you run around a bit."

"I have bound myself by oath to grant you any wish you want, with the help of the towering powers that I serve. But be careful what you choose. Do you want the girl, the daughter you never had, the daughter that should have been yours? Or do you want her mother, love of your life - that you used to talk about all the time back in the day, but who wouldn't wait for you - so you can have your own children with her? Or maybe you prefer something selfless, like me bringing back everyone I've ever killed? What will it be?"

I realized I had never forgiven her mother. In the end, I asked for the girl.

"Enthralling choice. Very well, then. She's down the hall, in the bedroom. I hope she liked my toys."

---

"I've left several impostors to take care of the other parts of the war. It seems as though I am in several places at once. Would confuse me if I didn't know all about it beforehand."

I followed past the aureate rocks. The amaranthine fields of daffodils and dandelions. The speckled subfusc knolls. The greensand plateaus. The hyacinth brooks and creeks. The variegated screes, emerald and indigo. The carmine plains. The raspberry plantations. The silhouettes of dilapidated keeps. The testaceous buttes. The ivory gullies. The geranium canyons with freckles of royal blue. The fields of poppies. The crushed, yet still breathing towns, their inhabitants terrified. The geysers of the celadon marshes. The timeworn oaks. The tangerine waterfalls beneath ruby and sapphire clouds, tinctured thus by the enchanted air. The burnt sienna valleys. The clair de lune woodlands. The jagged, clashing turquoise ridges of the Wrothgarian Mountains.

"I will die soon, as I have chosen to. I would have never lost this war if I had not chosen it. My defeat will serve a higher purpose."

They marched on fast, yet they rested. I could not.

They stopped in a large castle by the edge of the mountains, and erected barricades around it. They were preparing for the upcoming battle when I came upon it. It was a rainy afternoon, and they knew well that an army of the allied kingdoms of High Rock was marching to meet them. I had seen them too from the summits.

"Overall, aren't I a mirror of you? Wouldn't we be in the other's places if fate had traded us for them?"

The castle gates were closed. The legion of crimson-clad Redguards and Wood Elves were arrayed in the battlements. I circled around from a distance and, as I had anticipated, found a breach in one of the elderly walls, that a troop were bulwarking with freshly cut logs. I snuck in after bewitching myself to be unseen. Then I crept my way through an open door leading to the donjon, and searched around for the fiend.

I was standing behind him now, in the musty keep's library, no books on any shelves other than the ones he'd brought himself. There were bookcases on the sides of the entrance that the wide room went on behind. He was on the other side, facing the burning hearth, in a worn chair, in the ancestral battle garments of his dynasty. I approached. I counted on the echoes of the thunder and the rain outside to mask the creaking floor as I approached.

But he heard me. So we talked.

Then I rushed to the room where he said the girl was.

And.

And.

And...

There she was.

With her beautiful black curly hair.

Safe like he had said.

Her gaze lost in the air.

The flesh of her ears dangling down.

On her face... a blank expression as she moved her nose sniffing.

To his sick mind, I had not specified that she should be alive.

Not long afterwards, Haymon Camoran died, in the midst of demented laughter.

He pierced his own heart before I could.