[I've got a busy day ahead of me, so I'm pulling something out of the archives. Wrote this while playing the Dawnguard expansion of Skyrim, during a particularly enjoyable questline. For the record, the timeline in which Dragonborn Justine remained a vampire was aborted, and in canon, she helped rebuild the Dawngaurd to battle back the Vampire Menace]
The stink of sulfur was carried out
into the Stone Quarter by the heat of the blacksmith's pit, and
carried further by the heat of the day. Windhelm was normally a
bracing place, being as far North as it was, but this was an
unseasonably warm month of Last Seed, the cold fronts simply unable
to batter down the stubborn climate.
Justine chafed uncomfortably in
the heavy Dawnguard armor, shifting the shoulder plates back into
place. It was ill-fitting and hot, and she didn't like heavy armor
to begin with. Her beloved assassin's gear was stowed in a hollow log
a kilometer from the city gates, and she had approached in the
Dawnguard armor, ostensibly on official business. The organization
had been dormant for a good, long while, but people remembered what
they stood for, and they remembered the menace that Vampires could
bring.
Restlessly re-adjusting the bulky
helmet, she had strode past the city guards confidently, and into the
Stone Quarter, where she was met by the pungent sulfur of the
blacksmith's forge. She glanced to her left, to the shadows formed
against the wall by the afternoon's sun. Her companion, who had
shadowed her progress, nodded back.
Justine surveyed the crowd in the
market area. She had a target, but she wasn't sure which one the
target would be. It was a high profile target, to be sure, but her
source wasn't specific. Her eyes scanned slowly, past the woman at
the grindstone and the man leaving the apothecary, past the market
stall selling cheese wheels and the child playing with a tame baby
skeever. Too many possibilities..
"Watch yourself,
milk-drinker," the man shouldered his way past Justine, in a
blacksmith's apron with a massive two-handed axe on his back. Bald
and bearded like, let's face it, many of Skyrim's eligible bachelors,
Oengul War-Anvil headed in the direction of the forge.
Justine glanced back in the
shadows, nodded, and broke towards him, sending a fierce snap kick
into the side of his knee. The man buckled, falling forward, as
Justine caught him by the back of his apron, drawing a silver knife
from the folds of the heavy armor and resting it under his throat.
She called out to the denizens of the market.
"People of Windhelm! By the
order of the Dawnguard, this man is a spy for the Vampires of Castle
Volkihar! He must be put down for your safety!"
She drew the blade swiftly across
his throat, and Oengul War-Anvil made a gurgling, choking sound as he
fell, bleeding out on the cobbled stones of the market grounds.
"By the Order of the Jarl,
stop there!" The hold guards had been fazed by the display, but
no longer. They approached Justine, their blades drawn, when there
was a flash, and a loud bang, as her companion Sarana stepped quietly
from the shadow and tossed a smoke bomb at their feet. She and
Justine took off, shouldering and elbowing their way through the
gathering crowd. The two women jumped onto a nearby cart, then pulled
themselves over the hold's walls.
"Back to Volkihar, then,"
Justine said, "Your father should be pleased."
"My father," said
Sarana, "is a very hard man to please."
The sun was just setting, and
Justine cast off the Dawnguard helmet. Her amber eyes glowed in the
evening dusk that brought relief from the afternoon heat. The two
vampires set off Northwest, towards Castle Volkihar, to report that
the Dawnguard had been successfully framed for the murder of a
prominent citizen of Windhelm.
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