(ESO FanFic: Templar of Shezarr – Part 2)

WARNING: GRAPHIC VIOLENCE

Lost Hawke – Character Intro (Rusia Cassiana)
Imperial, DragonKnight, Daggerfall Covenant
Current Location: Port Hunding, Stros M’Kai

“I used to be a Templar,” she mumbled soggily into her cup, waving vaguely at the barkeep for another dose of Old Clear-Eye Whiskey; the most oxymoronic name for a liquor ever created. “But that was before…”

Razzaq, the Redguard chef roped into bartending duties that evening, pointedly ignored both her mumbling and her request for another drink. He had a firm policy about how drunk strange women with swords were allowed to get in his establishment and she’d definitely reached that limit. Especially considering this one looked rough even before she started downing liquor. Her blue & silver armor might have once been expensive & possibly even of Noble origin, but now it was a filthy, dented, gashed up mess. He didn’t want to know where all those dark, russet colored stains came from.

Pushing a greasy strand of bright, auburn hair out of her face, the woman dropped her forehead onto the bar with a long sigh. Razzaq winced as her dirty skin came in contact with his freshly wiped counter. She might have been pretty, the degenerate, if she’d been clean. Not beautiful, but tall & willowy, with a face some might call strong, or handsome, or even striking in the right light, if one was being generous. Right now he wouldn’t touch her with a 10 foot pike, even if he wasn’t of an entirely different persuasion anyway.

Groaning slightly, the woman crossed one arm over her face, trying to block out the flickering candlelight hurting her eyes, while continuing to mumble out loud to no one in particular. “That was before they all left me. All gone now. All gone.”

A rustling beside her made the woman instinctively drop her arm and slide her hand down to the pommel of a wickedly curved machete hanging at her side. Her dulled blue-green eyes attempted to focus on the stranger who now occupied the dingy, red velour covered chair next to her, but they weren’t behaving very well. She thought she glimpsed a brief smile coming from the darkness of their hooded face before they turned to order a cup of mulled wine, but everything was a bit too blurry to be sure. Encased in a voluminous dark gray robe, she couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman, although from their shorter stature & general shape, she guessed it was likely either a short human female or maybe a Bosmer. Not that she particularly cared at the moment. She would rather they just go away, whomever they were.

Razzaq dropped a goblet in front of the stranger within seconds, while continuing to offensively ignore her weak hand gestures for more whiskey. Giving up on getting another drink, the woman considered just attempting to work a teleportation spell and try to get home without accidentally teleporting to the wrong destination again, and waking up the next morning in bed with a Seadrake. The thought seemed like a more difficult quest at the moment than taking on one of those massive dragons rumored to be terrorizing the Khajiit homeland of Elsweyr. Solo. While armed with a broom and a chamber pot. The floor was starting to look like a reasonable alternative destination.

“A Templar you say?” A strong and slightly amused voice prodded her from the brink of passing out right there in the middle of the Screaming Mermaid and embarrassing herself even more than she already was. “You certainly don’t look like a Templar now.”

A flush of anger roared into the woman’s ears as she snapped upright again, nearly falling off her stool as a wave of dizziness spun through her head. She faced the stranger, blinking rapidly while attempting to focus on their mostly hidden features. “How dare you! I’ll have you know I wasn’t just a Templar, I was the chosen Templar of…”

The woman’s mouth snapped shut suddenly and a brief look of clarity passed over her eyes. “Nevermind. You wouldn’t understand and I really don’t care what you think.” She laid her head back down sideways on the bar, her check pressed into the cool wood next to her mournfully still empty cup. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not a Templar anymore.”

The voice was softer this time, more soothing. “I’ve never met an ex-Templar before. I thought that was kind of a lifetime sort of thing, no?”

Her words slurred both by alcohol and half her face being flattened against the bar, the woman sighed, “I suppose yes that is how it is supposed to be. But I couldn’t do it anymore after… After I lost them all. I just couldn’t anymore. How can you be a healer when you couldn’t save the people you love? How can you be a leader of light when you can’t even keep your own family together?”

The stranger’s eyes sharpened slightly as they leaned in. “Your family? Poor dear, what happened to them?”

A wall that had been eroded by drink and exhaustion crumbled a little in the face of the stranger’s seemingly kind attempt to engage her. The woman drew herself upright again, pushing her shoulders back and steadying herself against the bar with one hand, while the other shot up to touch a small medallion hanging around her neck. A light rose within her eyes, making them almost glow with an unnatural and slightly disturbing shine.

“They were the Band of the Hawk. They saved me. They rescued me after my parents were killed. You never knew a more noble group of people, even if they were mercenaries. They took me in as an orphan, as they did many other orphans of war. They raised me and trained me, gave me a purpose and a family to replace the one I had lost.” Her shoulders slumped, and she fell forward again, resting her head in her hands. “And then they left me. They left me alone with no one.”

Leaning even closer, so close they could have rested an easy hand on her shoulder, but didn’t, the stranger crooned gently to her. “Oh that sounds terrible dear. I’m so sorry.” They paused to slowly push their goblet of wine over in front of her empty cup. “Please have this, I am not really very thirsty.”

The woman grabbed the wine eagerly and downed half of it in one long gulp as the stranger continued to offer their condolences. “How terrible for a young woman to lose two families in such a short lifetime. Although, haven’t I heard of the Band of the Hawk?”

Touching her medallion again, the young woman took another long drink of the stranger’s wine. “Maybe. There are some out there riding under that name, I think. They may call themselves that, but I don’t know them. They are not my people. They are not my family. All of them are gone.” Raising her eyes to the ceiling as if she is striving to somehow connect again to the spirit that once drove her as a Templar, the woman braced herself against the bar with both hands as she continued.

“I looked for them. To try to find those that vanished. To see if any had survived after the orphanage & our home base of Whitehawke in Stormhaven was leveled by the daedra. But it was if they had never existed except for me… And the bodies of those who didn’t make it. I looked for a long time for anyone else who might be left. Then I put down the mantle of a Templar and went to study with the Dragonknights.”

She looked down at the stranger once again. “After all, if I couldn’t save the ones who died in my arms, and I couldn’t find any of those who had vanished, what good was I as a Templar? How can you be a Templar anymore if you’ve lost your faith?” The woman’s hand strayed back to the hilt of the razor sharp & impeccably clean machete by her side again. “Turns out I’m a much better killer than healer I guess.”

Shifting on their chair again, the stranger moved in so close their knees were pushing into hers like a pair of lovers. “Yes, yes. You’ve always been a killer, haven’t you Rusia?” the stranger whispered under the noise of the tavern’s loud, drunken patrons. “Rusia Cassiana isn’t it? Originally of Bruma?”

Rusia jerked backwards from the stranger at hearing her name slide out of their mouth, but they grabbed her arm and pulled her back close again so hard she nearly lost her whiskey & wine filled stomach at the jolt. Her machete trapped between her leg and the stranger’s, she tried to reach for the dagger tucked into a sheathe on the other side of her sword belt. With a hiss, the stranger grabbed both her wrists and yanked her in even closer.

Weak from too much liquor and too little rest, Rusia struggled against the surprisingly strong grip of the diminutive stranger. They held her tight though, and after they whispered a few words she didn’t understand, she found herself slumping helplessly against them. Her befuddled mind tried to open her mouth and yell out for help, but she couldn’t even grunt in protest of the stranger hauling her upward off her chair. Somehow they had rendered her nothing more than a limp doll they could drag around at their leisure, despite the protections against magic she had imbued in her armor. All of it happened so fast, she still couldn’t even process what was going on.

The stranger held her up with one arm around her waist while they threw some coins on the counter for their drinks. “Apologies for my friend here, I’m afraid she’s rather a sloppy drunk. I’ll make sure she gets home before she ends up taking a nosedive under one of your tables and you have to call the Watch to be rid of her.”

Razzaq looked at both of them with a suspicious furrow between his brows, but grabbed the coins and nodded as the stranger turned to guide me through the crowd & out the tavern door. Anyone who might have witnessed the entire encounter likely would have just thought they saw two lovers have a brief moment of quarrel before the sober one decided to drag the drunk one away. The stranger had orchestrated the whole thing very carefully. Rusia should have known much better than to allow herself to get so trashed outside the safety of her heavily warded home.

Home, she thought to herself groggily as the stranger bumped her though the door of the tavern, down the stairs and around the right side of the building. Not really home. Just a house. A house on the Strid River in Reaper’s March she’d bought & decorated with what was left of the Band of the Hawk’s emergency stash. She’d hoped at first she might find other survivors of her mercenary family to fill the empty rooms. She never had. Now it was just an echoing reminder of all she’d lost. And yet she had never been able to let it go. Well, she contemplated as the stranger moved her off the main street and down into a dark alley, no use worrying about it now because she was probably never going to see it again anyway.

Pushed and pulled by the stranger, her will quashed by the stranger’s magic, Rusia was dragged through a stand of palm trees and around to the unlit rear of the tavern. Finally, the stranger stopped, one hand propping her up by the chest against the back outside wall of the Screaming Mermaid. She noticed the body of a freshly killed wolf lying nearby. Soon she would be nothing more than it was, an empty, rotting bag of meat. A random and sad place to die, she thought. Not in battle or in your own bed, but in the piss smeling, rat crawling back alley of some nowhere town. One more time she struggled to free herself from the compulsion laid on her, to understand how and why she’d ended up here. As the Stranger pulled a long, incredibly thin glass dagger from under their cloak, she managed to croak out one word through dry lips.

“Who?”

She couldn’t really see it in the darkness behind the tavern, but Rusia almost felt the stranger smile again as they stepped forward to press their body against hers. Even that close, she still couldn’t tell if they were male, or female, or anything other than human shaped and about a foot shorter than she was. The stranger looked up at her, their eyes glinting with a strange reddish tint out of the darkness of their shadowed face.

“Oh dear Rusia, it has been my honor to track you, to follow you, to wait for you to fall to your own weakness. So easy it was to slip a catalyst into the wine that would allow my spell to work against you from the inside out when you thought your magicked armor would keep you safe. A bit disappointing though that the end of my chase was so anticlimactic. Ah well. But you didn’t ask about any of that did you? No, you asked the most important question. Who?”

The stranger pressed the tip of their dagger against her side, just at the seam in the side where the thin blade could slip between the two joined halves of her armor. Just in line with her heart. At least it would be quick, or so she thought. Gently wiggling the blade to pass through the armor seam, padding, and shirt underneath, the Stranger pressed the dagger against her skin so softly it felt only like the tiny pinprick of an ant at first.

“My name, dear girl, is unimportant. And I was not told it was yours to know before you die. There is another name, however, I was told to make sure you hear before the last breath passes from your lips.”

All Rusia could manage was a soft gasp as the stranger slid the paper thin dagger ever so gently through her skin and muscle, maneuvering it perfectly between her ribs like a hot knife through butter. Then she choked as the blade punctured her left lung and moved inward. She swore she could feel it now hovering a hair’s width from her rapidly fluttering heart. All the fog in her mind from drink and lack of sleep had melted away, leaving her with a painful clarity in the last moments of her life.

The stranger paused in their glacial execution, rising on their toes to whisper into her ear. “Please accept regards from your mother. Caecilia said to give you her love.”

Shock coursed through her body as Rusia heard her mother’s name. The mother she thought had died alongside her father in a murderous betrayal by their best friend when she was only twelve. She felt the stranger tense to drive the dagger into her heart at last, and sent up a last desperate arrow of sorrow in her mind to the God she had abandoned when she turned away from being a Templar.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry I lost my faith. I’m sorry I couldn’t save them. I’m sorry for whatever I did that turned my own lost mother into my murderer. Please take me back into your light as I pass beyond. Please let me find peace.

Rusia shut her eyes and waited for the final strike as blood rose up from her pierced lung and cut off her air.

Then everything exploded.

The most brilliant light flared outside of her closed eyelids and some incredible force shoved Rusia sideways away from the glass dagger embedded in her body. She fell, hard, onto the reeking pavement as the light flashed over her and the stranger, who had been thrown in the opposite direction.

As the harsh glow faded, Rusia opened her eyes one final time to see the stranger struggle to rise from the ground, their hood askew, a look of abject terror on their newly revealed features. Not a short female or a small Bosmer male at all but a stunted, blue-skinned Xivilia. It must have been wearing an illusion to keep her and others from realizing what it was, even with the concealing cloak and hood.

Her mother had sent a daedra to murder her.

Rusia’s eyes fluttered closed again as the Stranger hissed loudly at something behind her, turned, and ran out of the alley like it was on fire. Which, she thought as the world faded to black, it actually might have been. A smile ghosted her lips as the darkness descended.

FINDING A NEW LIGHT