The sound of hunting hounds barking in the distance echoed through the trees, sharp and urgent, their voices carrying through the fog like warnings from the dead.
Torin could hear the guards shouting to each other, coordinating the search, spreading out through the woods in widening circles. They were doing their best—he'd give them that—but the forest was vast, the darkness was deep, and Hrogar had a head start.
Torin and Auri approached Hrogar's house through the mist. The building looked different now than it had earlier that day—darker, somehow, more menacing.
The door hung open, splintered at the frame, and the windows were dark. Shadows moved inside—guards, probably, doing whatever they could for the fallen.
Sergeant Helka stood at the door, her arms crossed, her face pale in the torchlight. She looked exhausted—more exhausted than the situation warranted, like she'd aged ten years in the past few hours. Her uniform was stained with something dark, and her hands were red.
She noticed them approaching and straightened, her eyes flicking from Torin to Auri and back again.
"Do you need something from me?" Her voice was flat, drained.
Torin shook his head and gestured at Auri.
"No. She just needs to look around. Catch Hrogar's trail." He glanced at the Bosmer beside him. "That's what she's good at."
Auri nodded along, her amber eyes already scanning the ground, the doorframe, the windows.
"He might have used illusions to escape," she said, her voice quiet and focused, "but those don't leave tracks. Only the real one does."
Helka sighed and rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. The gesture was weary, defeated.
"I don't know how much good you think you'll do in the dark," she said, "but suit yourself."
She turned to gesture at the treeline, at the darkness beyond, at the forest that stretched for miles in every direction. "In any case, the hounds are already hunting for Hrogar. We've got four of them—good dogs, well-trained. If anyone can pick up his scent, they can."
Auri said nothing. She was already kneeling, her face inches from the ground, her eyes tracing the chaos of footprints that marked the trampled earth around the door.
Guards had been here, their boots churning the soil into mud. But somewhere beneath all that confusion, there would be something. A single print that was deeper than the rest. A smear of blood. A trail that led away from the house instead of toward it.
She just needed to find it.
Torin, meanwhile, turned to the doorframe. The wood was splintered, cracked, marked with the impacts of swords and axes. Dark stains—blood, mostly—dotted the frame and the walls around it.
"I heard there was a scuffle," he said. "Casualties?"
Helka winced. The expression was involuntary, a flinch that she couldn't quite hide. She gestured toward the open door with a hand that trembled slightly.
"See for yourself."
With a frown, Torin stepped past her and peered into the house.
The main room was chaos. Furniture had been overturned, a table lay on its side, and the hearth fire had been scattered across the floor, its embers still glowing faintly in the dark.
The air smelled of blood and smoke and something else—something metallic, something that reminded him of the shrine in the cave.
Three guards lay on the floor.
Two of them were groaning, their hands pressed against their middles, their faces pale with pain and blood loss. They'd been stabbed—Torin could see the wounds, dark and wet, seeping through their fingers.
Someone had tried to bandage them, but the cloth was already soaked through.
The third guard lay motionless. Completely silent. His face was peaceful, almost, like he was sleeping, but the blood pooled beneath his head told a different story.
Helka's voice came from behind him, low and heavy.
"We already moved the wife's body. The men however..." She sighed. "The old one—Torik—he got hit in the head. Twice." She shook her head slowly. "He's been out cold since we found him. Nothing we've done seems to rouse him. Not shouting, not shaking, not even cold water to the face."
She grimaced, her jaw tightening.
"He's the lucky one, I suppose. The other two got stabbed. Lost too much blood before we got to them." She looked down at her hands—at the blood that still stained them—and her voice dropped to barely a whisper.
"I stopped the bleeding. Packed the wounds, applied pressure, did everything I know how to do. But I'm not a healer. I can't mend internal wounds. Can't fix what's torn inside."
Torin straightened, his expression hardening.
"Let me take a look."
Helka blinked, surprise flickering across her exhausted face.
"You're a healer?"
"I know some Restoration," Torin said, already moving toward the wounded men. "Enough to help. Maybe enough to save them."
Torin settled onto his knees beside the young guard, ignoring the way the blood-soaked floorboards pressed against his boots, ignoring the ache in his own muscles from the long night.
The guard's eyes were wide, frightened—the eyes of someone who'd come face to face with death and hadn't quite believed they'd survived.
"Alright, friend," Torin said, his voice calm, steady, the kind of voice you used with wounded animals and terrified children. "Let's see what ails you."
He placed his hand over the injury—a deep puncture wound in the guard's side, just below the ribs. The flesh was torn, the edges dark with dried blood, and the shirt around it had been cut away to expose the damage beneath.
The young guard merely nodded, his jaw clenched against the pain, his knuckles white where they gripped his belt. He didn't speak. Probably couldn't.
Magicka flowed through Torin's hand and into the wound—not healing, not yet.
He was probing, exploring, the way a carpenter might run his fingers over a crack in the wood before deciding how to fix it.
Closing the wound would be easy.A simple application of Restoration magic, a few minutes of concentration, and the flesh would knit itself back together.
However, Torin had learned that you didn't heal what you didn't understand. You didn't close a wound until you knew what was inside it.
Dirt. Fragments of cloth. Bits of broken blade. Anything left behind would fester, would poison, would kill the patient just as surely as the original injury.
So he probed.
His magic seeped into the wound, sensitive as fingertips, searching. He found the torn muscle, the severed blood vessels, the places where the body had already begun to try and heal itself.
And as he searched, he used telekinesis—gentle, precise—to extract the debris. A fleck of dirt here. A thread of cloth there. A tiny shard of something metallic that might have been a chip from the blade.
The guard gasped, his body tensing, but Torin's free hand pressed against his shoulder, holding him still.
"Almost there," Torin murmured. "Just a little more."
He probed deeper.
And then he froze.
His eyes widened, just slightly. His hand, still glowing with magicka, went still.
He raised his head, looking straight into the guard's eyes—those wide, frightened, pain-filled eyes—and a slow smile spread across his face.
"This is your lucky day," Torin said. "Hrogar somehow missed all your vital organs. The blade barely tickled your liver and intestines." He shook his head, marveling at the sheer improbability of it. "Just scratches. Nothing more. You'll be fine."
The guard gasped—not from the magic this time, but from the effort of speaking. His face was white as snow, his forehead slick with sweat, his lips cracked and dry.
"With all due respect," he said, his voice barely a whisper, "I'm not feeling so lucky right now."
Torin chuckled—a low, warm sound that seemed to fill the room.
"A knife in the side will do that to you," he said. "Makes everything feel like the end of the world. But trust me. In a week, you'll be back on your feet, grumbling about guard duty and complaining about the weather. In a month, you'll barely remember the scar."
The guard tried to laugh—Torin could see the attempt flicker across his face—but the wound flared up, and the laugh turned into a gasp of pain, his hand clutching at his side.
"Easy," Torin said, his voice gentle. "Easy. Let me finish."
He gestured for the guard to calm down, to breathe, to let the magic do its work. And then, finally, he began to heal.
Golden light poured from his palm, warm and bright, sinking into the wound. The torn flesh began to knit. The severed blood vessels sealed themselves. The scratches on the liver and intestines—barely more than paper cuts, really—closed up as if they'd never been.
The guard's breathing steadied. The tension drained from his body. His eyes, which had been wide with pain, grew heavy, drowsy, the way eyes did when the body finally realized it was safe.
Torin withdrew his hand. The wound was closed—pink and fresh, but closed. There would be a scar, probably, but that was all.
The guard's eyes fluttered. His head lolled to the side.
And then he was asleep.
Torin smiled—a real smile, tired but genuine—and looked up at Helka and the other guards who had gathered to watch. Their faces were a mixture of awe and relief, and more than a few of them were looking at him like they'd never seen anything like it.
"It's alright," Torin said, rising to his feet. His knees popped, and he winced. "He's just sleeping. Let him rest for now. He's earned it."
Helka let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding.
"Thank you," she said quietly. "Truly."
Torin nodded and turned to the next wounded man.
He had more work to do.
...
As he finished healing the last guard—the older one, Torik, the one who'd been struck in the head—Torin's frown deepened. He sat back on his heels, his hands resting on his knees, his eyes fixed on the unconscious man's face.
For someone who'd just managed to save three lives, he should have been relieved. Satisfied. Maybe even proud. Instead, something gnawed at him, something that didn't quite fit.
The older guard's injury certainly looked severe. The wound on his temple was ugly with jagged edges, dark bruising spreading across his cheek and jaw, blood matted in his grey hair.
Beneath the skin, Torin's probing magic had found something worse. A fracture in the skull. A thin, hairline crack that ran from the point of impact toward the ear.
But that was it.
No bone fragments pressing into the brain. No swelling where there shouldn't be swelling. No bleeding inside the skull. The brain itself had remained completely intact. It was shaken, certainly, enough to knock Torik out and keep him out for several hours. But undamaged.
Torin had seen head injuries before. Had treated them, even. This one should have been worse. Much worse.
He rose to his feet and began to pace. His gaze moved to the second guard, the one with the stab wound in his stomach, the one he'd healed second.
He'd been so focused on the healing itself that he hadn't deliberated his findings. Not like he was deliberating now.
His frown deepened further.
Like the first guard, the knife had gone in cleanly. Sliced through flesh, through muscle, through the layers of tissue that protected the organs beneath. And then it had come out just as cleanly, leaving a wound that was almost surgical in its precision.
The internal damage was minimal. The knife had nicked the liver—barely a scratch, really—and grazed the intestines. Nothing more. Nothing vital. Nothing that would have killed him, even if Torin hadn't been there.
Almost identical to the first guard, Torin thought. Same depth. Same lack of fatal damage... just a different entry angle.
He closed his eyes, picturing the wounds. The first guard—the young one—had been stabbed in the side. The blade passed through the flesh and exited without touching anything important. A scratch on the liver, a graze on the intestines.
The second guard—the one with the stomach wound—had been stabbed from a different angle. Lower. Closer to the navel. But the result was the same. The blade had missed everything that mattered.
The damage was superficial in all three cases. The kinds of wounds that looked terrible but weren't.
One time was an accident. Two times was a coincidence.
Three times was a pattern.
Torin's mind raced, turning over the possibilities, trying to fit them into something that made sense.
Either Nocturnal herself was protecting those three guards—the Daedric Prince of Mystery, Luck, and Shadows, who rarely intervened in mortal affairs and almost certainly wouldn't waste her favor on three random guards in Falkreath—or Hrogar simply hadn't wanted to kill them.
But, well, knowing what Torin knew about the Daedric Prince of Mystery, that wasn't entirely impossible. Nocturnal's ways were strange, her motives inscrutable.
She'd been known to tip the scales in unexpected directions, to favor the unlikely, to turn certain death into narrow escape for reasons no mortal could understand. But her interference was extremely unlikely. Almost absurdly so.
So that left the other possibility.
Hrogar had pulled his blows. Deliberately. Intentionally.
Torin stood there in the middle of the blood-stained room, and he couldn't shake the question that had lodged itself in his brain like a splinter.
What reasons does Hrogar have for sparing these guards?
Could he not have reverted to his monstrous self completely? Was there still something left of the man who'd written those entries about love and redemption and the warmth of his daughter's embrace?
Torin's mind began to wander even further.
Would simply recovering his lost memories make Hrogar revert to his old self? The journal had been clear—he'd used magic to erase his past, to bury the monster so deeply that it could never resurface. And yet he still remembered.
However, Hrogar had made the decision to change while having those same memories.
The journal entries about loving Eydis, about wanting to be worthy of her, about rejecting Molag Bal...those had been written after he'd already done all those terrible things. After he'd already been a monster. He'd known exactly what he was, what he'd done, and he'd chosen to be different anyway.
So what had changed this time?
Could the sudden outpour of dark memories, crashing back at once, overwhelming his carefully constructed walls, too hard to reconcile with his reality, cause a fit of mania? A departure from sanity that had made him lash out and kill all those people, including his wife and daughter?
Or was there something else at play? Something Torin hadn't considered? The inkling that Hrogar might be innocent began to form before Torin thoroughly crushed it, not allowing it to take shape.
He was still reeling from the blow of reading the journal, and a part of him might still wish Hrogar to be innocent, grasping at straws just to prove his judgment was right.
He couldn't trust himself. Not right now.
Torin shook his head slowly, rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand.
He didn't have answers. Not yet. Just questions and doubts, piling up like stones, each one heavier than the last.
He looked at Helka, at the guards, at the sleeping men he'd just saved.
"Keep them warm," he said quietly. "Keep them comfortable. They'll wake up in a few hours. Maybe sooner."
He turned toward the door and noticed Auri was already near the treeline, kneeling on the ground and inspecting a footprint. It seemed she found something.
Questions and doubts can wait.
He had a monster to catch... but more and more, Torin was starting to wonder if the monster was even more complicated than he'd thought.
...
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