SotF: Just a Formality I

• Posted by Delta September 30, 2016 - Filed in TSC: Skyrim - #SotF  - 1,329 views

  

  She woke up with beads of sweat on her brow and her hand bruised from clutching the knife she kept under her pillow.

   

                 She found herself flat on her back, breathing heavily as if she had been running. The dream that roused her awake wasn’t a particularly new one; it was a spectre that had been haunting her for many moons. The worst of it was that while she couldn’t exactly remember what happened in the dream – it always came back to her in an indistinct, cloudy blur except for the end: A flash of green.

                

                 The others, her brothers and sisters were still soundly asleep. She couldn’t see them – daybreak had yet to arrive and the night hearth were now dim embers thought it made little difference – her eyesight was just as rubbish during the day. She could however hear them. Were it not the dream, the sound of their snoring or their teeth grinding would’ve woken her up anyway. She uttered a curse and buried her face in her pillow.

   

                 She tossed and turned, trying to get some sleep. She made prayers, counted sheep, and thought of the dullest lectures of her life but nothing worked. The dream, that flash of green, was a herald of pain and adversity and they have never been wrong. Even more reason to get a wink, she knew.

   

                 She groaned, pulled the knife from under the pillow and ran her finger on its edge, slowly. To suffer a self-cut would be an embarrassment, to suffer a self-cut from this dull blade would be an embarrassment tenfold.

   

                 The knife was barely a knife. Fashioned from a nail, the blade of it was the point flattened and its side sharpened, and the handle was the post bent to form a crude guard. By all means, this was a terrible knife. The balance was atrocious, and the many dents and chips the blade had suffered over the years made clean cuts all but impossible.

   

                 It was however, still her knife.

   

                 Annoyed, she rose and twirled the knife twice in her fingers. Then she laid the weapon flat on her side and folded her legs, eyes closed.

   

                 She focused on the rhythm of her heartbeat and breathed in and breathed out.

   

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  Next Chapter: The Vigilants of Stendarr