Something Wicked Ch. 18

It was raining. Hard.

John walked along the pier. He glared as he did so, staring at the man right across from him. Water pelted his suit with reckless abandon, dripping all the way down onto the gun he held in his hand.

“No more guns, John.” Viggo Tarasov spat out, his voice clear despite the downpour, “No more bullets.”

“No more bullets.” John easily agreed, tossing the empty gun to the side. He would do this with his own hands.

“Just you and me, John.” The Russian shook his head, almost reprimanding in his tone.

“You and me.” Repeated words. No more were needed.

They circled each other, testing the waters. Probing for weakness. Viggo moved first - a feint. Nothing more than a shout. Nothing more than that, until it was. Five punches, faster than John would have thought the old man was capable of. The sixth was blocked by John’s forearm, as were the seventh and eighth.

A ninth came, and John answered with his own blows to the chest. Viggo staggered, feeling the impacts. The assassin followed it up by grabbing at the, no doubt, expensive suit the man wore. Just as quickly, Viggo retaliated with an elbow downwards.

John didn’t let that stop him. A savage blow to the head. Once. Twice. Three times. The mafia boss staggered backwards, right into a crate. At that moment, Viggo slipped.

And died of a broken neck.

‘What?’

…

Stalking through the crowded subway was not ideal. Every corner had one of them. Bounty hunters, out for the price on his head. He needed to get out of here. Fast. He was a target out here, sticking out with all the blood and grime on his face. It was a miracle that nobody had noticed.

Then someone did. Eyes on his head as he walked, he could feel it.

There. Walking parallel to him on an upper floor. Cassian. John could see that he held in his hand a gun. Silenced, like his own. John pulled out his gun discreetly, just in time to suppress a flinch as Cassian fired first. Three times, none hit.

John retaliated with his own shots. None hit.

Neither of them could afford to aim. They couldn’t risk a panicked crowd. To do so would be to make both their jobs even harder. No, one of them needed to be stopped here, or both of them were heading into a train.

More shots. Trading. The impacts came nearer and nearer. It was only a matter of time before either of them got lucky. John was.

His shot got Cassian right through the neck, killing him instantly.

‘Wait, no. That’s not what happened.’

…

“John!” Helen smiled at her husband with a tired, but radiant smile. A doctor to her side gave the man a similarly happy smile as she held out her hand.

“Mr. Wick, I presume?” John took the offered hand with a dazed look on his face. The doctor laughed, “Your wife has talked about you quite a bit! The moment she woke up, she couldn’t stop telling me all about you!”

“Can you blame me, doc?” Helen pouted, but that didn’t stop her from grinning a moment after, “It isn’t everyday you get told that you’re cured.”

“It’s…this is real?” John held his wife’s hand desperately, looking at her with wide eyes. His heart hammered even as Helen smiled at him gently.

“Yes, Mr. Wick. I’m happy to say that your wife is fully cured-”

The doctor couldn’t even finish as John wrapped his arms around Helen and held her tight. Helen returned the hug. Warm. Comforting. Nostalgic.

‘But this isn't how it went.’

…

John jerked awake, his hand already halfway to the Blade’s hilt before he registered the fire’s dim embers, the muffled howl of wind, and the rhythmic breathing of the Khajiit still asleep in their bedrolls. His heart hammered against his ribs as if trying to escape the prison of his chest. Sweat clung to his temples despite the cold, the dreams - memories - clawing at him.

Lies. Every one of them. Viggo hadn’t slipped. Cassian had died in the train, not the platform. Helen had never...

He swallowed hard, fingers digging into his knees. The Ebony Blade hummed against his spine. He could almost feel the curious eyebrow of the Prince being lifted.

Across the fire, Ahkari’s eyes gleamed in the dark, slit pupils narrowed. She’d been watching him, “Bad dreams, John of Riverwood?”

He didn’t answer, busying himself with tightening the straps of his pack. Dawnstar couldn’t wait. Neither could the Vigilants. Every second here was another second the Blade’s whispers grew louder, its weight heavier. And if even his sleep was being affected, then it was even worse than he thought.

Very rarely did John get nightmares that truly woke him up. After everything he had done, the only things that did so were the memories of happier times. Never anything that never came to pass.

"Ah, silence. This one assumes that you mean yes." Ahkari's voice was dull, if tinged with just the slightest bit of dread, "Fear not, John of Riverwood. Nightmares in Dawnstar are no passing curiosity. Hm, you should have an example soon enough."

As if on cue, another of the Khajiit woke up with a strangled shout. Even John was taken aback by the sheer fear that echoed out.

John's gaze snapped to the source of the scream. Dro’marash thrashed in his bedroll, claws tearing at the air as if fending off invisible specters. Kharjo was already at his side, pinning the younger Khajiit’s shoulders with a grip that brooked no resistance, "Jode's light, Dro!" He growled, "Wake!"

The camp erupted into murmured Ta’agra, sharp and urgent. Ahkari rose, her fur bristling, but her voice remained steady. "The dreams grow teeth here." She said, more to herself than John, "Even the moons cannot protect us this close to the coast."

John stood, the Blade’s weight like a second shadow, "You’ve seen this before." It wasn’t a question.

Ahkari’s tail lashed once, a whip-crack of frustration, "In Dawnstar, they call it the ‘Sleeping Sickness’. They whisper of a shadow that drinks their fears like nectar." She inclined her head toward the distant town, its lanterns flickering weakly through the snowfall, "Khajiit caravans avoid its streets when the nights grow long. However, with the storm, we had no choice but to suffer in its tender mercies."

He forced his breath steady, "The Vigilants. Did they know what caused it?"

Zaynabi, having awoken at the shouting, barked a laugh, bitter as frostbite, "The Vigilants knew less than they claimed. Always chasing ash when the fire had already spread." She tossed a pouch of crushed snow-thistle into the fire. The flames hissed, spitting emerald sparks, "Two moons ago, they bought saltrice from this one. Talked of ‘investigations.’ Of a door in the mountains. But doors can be opened from both sides, yes?"

…

The storm’s remnants clung to the mountainside like a spiteful ghost. John trudged forward, the Khajiit’s warnings about doors and whatever else buried under the singular rhythm of his boots crunching snow.

He had left them earlier than initially intended. He needed to get rid of the Blade - now more than ever. The faster he passed it on, the faster he could get out of Dawnstar. That didn't make it any less of a slog when one was wading through knee high snow in the bitter early Skyrim mornings.

The Blade’s weight pressed heavier with each step, its scabbard thrumming against his spine like a second heartbeat. You’re wasting time, it whispered, not in words but in sensations. The greasy slide of Viggo’s blood between his fingers, the hollow click of Helen’s hospital monitor flatlining. John gritted his teeth, focusing on the path ahead.

The path narrowed, cliffs shearing away into void. Ice glinted unnaturally, reflecting not sunlight but fragments of memory: Helen’s hospital bed, Viggo’s broken body, Cassian’s blood pooling on subway tiles.

“Enough.” John snarled, driving his fist into the ice. It shattered, but the visions clung, bleeding into the snow at his feet.

The wind carried Helen’s voice now, frayed and distant: “You promised you’d stop.”

Promises, the Blade crooned, Noose around the neck of better men.

‘Almost there’, John told himself, breath ragged.

The Hall loomed closer now. He could see it. But the more he saw, the more his heart sank.

…

The first wolf lunged from a copse of skeletal pines. Not a wolf, a thing, fur matted with hoarfrost, eyes vacant as a doll’s. It moved wrong, joints snapping like dry twigs as it lurched for his throat. The Blade cleaved through its ribs before John fully registered the threat. Black ichor steamed in the air, stinking of burnt hair.

Two more followed. Then five.

They died easily. Too easily. Their bodies collapsed into ash, scattering on the wind like funeral pyre remnants. The Blade thrummed with delight. Satisfaction. But it had been like that ever since he beheld the remnants of the Hall of the Vigilants.

John wiped ichor from his face, “Shut up.” Even as he spoke, his words betrayed his fraying morale.

The Hall’s remnants rose from the snow like a butchered carcass. Stone walls, once austere and imposing, lay split asunder, their fractures glowing with embers that pulsed like dying hearts. Smoke coiled upward in greasy spirals, staining the sky in darkness. Where the roof had collapsed, flames still gnawed at splintered beams. The air reeked of seared oak, melted steel, and something sweetly rotten.

Bodies littered the courtyard. Some were pinned under fallen masonry, their silver mail glinting dully beneath ash. Others lay contorted mid-prayer, hands fused around snapped maces or talismans of Stendarr, now blackened and warped. One man’s face had been reduced to a crater, the skin around it blistered into a scream.

More wolves came as the Blade’s laughter crescendoed in John’s skull. More wolves were put down.

Beyond the courtyard, the Hall’s main chamber gaped, its doorway a pulled open by some great amount of force. Inside, frost-encrusted murals of Stendarr’s mercy, now defaced with glyphs that wept black fluid. A massive brazier lay upended, its coals spilled across the floor in a trail leading to the altar - or what remained of it.

At the shattered altar, a spiral of ash and bone fragments coiled inward, centering on a single word gouged into the stone in jagged Daedric script. John knew that he didn't know that script. He had only heard of it ever since he had arrived in Tamriel. But, he could not deny that he just knew what was written there, the very word being seared into his mind as the Blade's smugness turned sour. Disapproving, almost.

BAL

Beneath the script lay a single priest, dead in a jagged cage. Flesh peeled back to expose ribs like prison bars. Frost gnawed at his hollow eyes.

The word pulsed in John’s vision like a fresh wound, its edges oozing shadows that slithered across the stone. He didn’t know the Daedric script, but the Blade - no, he knew it was Mephala - seared its meaning into his skull anyway.

MOLAG BAL

The name coiled in his gut, cold and greasy. The Prince of Domination. Enslavement. Of Vampires. The pieces fit together. The Vigilants had been attacked by vampires, as insane as that may sound. The wolves, or rather, the undead hounds, were there to clean things up.

A monster beyond monsters.

The Blade hissed in his grip, its edge trembling - absolute possessiveness from Mephala, primal and acidic. Shadows pooled around the priest’s corpse, chains of dark vapor coiling toward John. Molag Bal’s laughter rumbled through the hall, shaking ash from the rafters.

The Blade shrieked in John’s mind, a sound like razors on bone. Shadows lashed around him, chains of molten darkness snapping at his limbs. The priest’s corpse twitched, jaw unhinging with a wet crack.

“A stray pup,” Molag Bal’s voice boomed through the corpse, “Baring teeth at his betters.”

John swung the Blade, cleaving the cage. The corpse disintegrated, but the sigil flared, searing his vision. Vampiric laughter echoed as frost surged up his boots, anchoring him. From outside, he could hear the shuffling of too many feet.

The Blade hissed.

MINE.

The corpse laughed.

…

A/N: The words in all caps should have been centered, but Patreon doesn't allow that, sadly. Instead, have this file where it's properly formatted. Nothing else has changed, so no need to read through it if it's alright with you.