The Flame Awakens

“I caught your petty thief,” Arden told Cherese Brigette, the innkeeper, when he sat down for breakfast the next morning. 

“Where is he?” she asked, stopping her sweeping to look around.

“Her. I let her go. Just a poor Orsimer trying to scare up some food and a bit of gold. Harmless. Though she did have a bit of a wild look in her eyes,” reflected Arden, smelling his crepe with suspicion. He missed Mogh’s cooking, even if it was indulgent.

Cherese looked at the silver pin on Arden’s cloak. “A Resolute out doing your good deeds, eh?” she scoffed and continued sweeping. “A good deed for me would have been to turn her in. So did you come to Wayrest to help out at the Abbey?”

Arden shook his head. “What’s happening at the Abbey?”

“I heard talk at the bar one night that the Abbot’s brother was abducted. That’s all I know,” Cherese said, shrugging and stooping to scrape something off the floor.

Arden continued eating, reflecting on his dream. Thankfully it wasn’t disturbed by a scene of fiery destruction but was rather a strange journey in a lavender landscape; vignettes of Templar duty played out before him, tales of dead heroes that were different from what he had been taught. New logic. Better, stricter justice. 

It all seemed to accord with what Cherese had naturally expected of him. Naturally expected.

The damp air of Pariah Abbey greeted Arden as he passed through its arched gates the following day. Inside the great hall, Abbot Durak stood waiting, his broad Orc frame a pillar of authority, flanked by robed Spirit Wardens. His deep-set eyes, stern and unyielding, softened slightly as he addressed the Templar.

“We’re running out of time,” Durak began, his voice resonating through the chamber. “My brother Muzgu has been taken by the Supernal Dreamers. They’ve dragged him to the Moonlit Maw, a cave defiled by Vaermina’s influence.”

The Spirit Wardens exchanged worried glances. Arden stepped forward. “What do they intend to do with him?”

Durak’s jaw tightened, his tusks pronounced. “He’s to be a sacrifice—a vessel,” he grunted with disgust. “A vessel to open a portal large enough to let Quagmire spill into Tamriel. If they succeed, the nightmares of Vaermina will devour everything.”

“I’ll lead a rescue,” Arden said without hesitation, eager for some action after dismal days of rain and visits to the graveyard. “Whatever it takes, we’ll bring him back.”

Durak regarded him with a measured nod. “Take Brother Gerard and a team of our strongest Wardens. Stop the ritual. Save my brother.”

The Moonlit Maw lay hidden within a shadowed hillside, its entrance marked by jagged rock formations that jutted like the teeth of a slumbering beast. As Arden and the Spirit Wardens approached, the faint glow of torches flickered within, casting shadows onto the cave walls. A steady, rhythmic chanting echoed from deep inside, growing louder with each step.

Gerard held up a hand, motioning for silence. “We go in quietly,” he whispered. “Stick to the plan. Distract the cultists while Arden moves for Muzgu.”

The group nodded, their faces locked in concentration. Arden adjusted the grip on his sword. Beneath his cloak the relic felt strangely cold.

Inside, the Moonlit Maw was a nightmare made manifest. The walls were slick with condensation, and pools of stagnant water reflected the eerie violet glow of the portal at its center. The air felt thick and oppressive.

The cultists had transformed the central cavern into a grotesque ritual site. Muzgu stood on a raised dais covered with arcane symbols and surrounded by four statues, his arms stretched out and held by invisible chains, his head bowed in forced submission. Around him, the Dreamers chanted, their voices weaving a discordant hymn that made Arden’s stomach churn. In an archway behind Muzgu, the portal to Quagmire pulsed. Figures could be seen writhing within, their forms shifting and stretching unnaturally.

Gerard gestured and the Spirit Wardens lunged, launching their attack from the shadows. The cultists reeled as steel tore through their ranks, their chants turning to cries of alarm. Arden used the chaos to his advantage, slipping past the fray and sprinting toward the archway.

A priestess stepped into his path, her mask depicting a grotesque, leering face. “You cannot stop the will of Vaermina!” she shrieked, raising her hands. The air around Arden warped, and the cave dissolved into a labyrinth of twisting corridors and shifting walls.

Arden stumbled, the illusion disorienting him. The relic at his side grew hot, and a voice shouted in his mind. Strike! End her!

Gritting his teeth, he swung his sword blindly, the blade cutting through the illusion as though through mist. The priestess screamed as the magic shattered. Arden recovered his balance and slashed broadly across her midsection. She stumbled and fell forward, clutching her innards. 

Arden approached Muzgu, who began speaking in a trembling voice.

“Bless you Templar, but you didn’t need to risk your life for me. What I need is strength of will. What I need is for you to kill me.”

“What!” Arden said. “Why do you want to die?”

“The Supernal Dreamers performed a ritual. They summoned a Daedric spirit and bound it within me. My brother, Durak, taught me to contain the spirit temporarily, but it’s gaining strength. I can’t hold out much longer. If the spirit possesses me, it will combine my power as a Spirit Warden with its own. I would become a danger to everyone in Stormhaven. You need to kill me before that happens. Force the spirit back into Quagmire. Follow it, kill it, then return.”

“Kill you?” Arden said in disbelief. “Surely there is another way.”

Muzgu seemed to consider for a moment.

“The only other way would be to try to force the spirit out of me and into a dreaming cultist. But it would kill the cultist,” he said, shaking his head.

Brother Gerard drew up next to Arden. “Then we find a dreaming cultist, Sir Duremont,” he said, glancing back the way they came. “There is no choice here.”

Arden hesitated. The archway seemed to be growing as it pulsed with power. A weakened Muzgu glanced at Arden and slowly nodded, putting his head down.

Arden raised his sword with his right hand and touched its pommel to his forehead in an act of solemnity, his lips moving in a silent prayer. Embrace the cycle. He bowed to Muzgu, placed both hands on the grip, then brought the blade down swiftly, cutting off the monk’s head. Gerard cried out in shock. The Daedric spirit screamed and the portal crackled open in a curtain of blue fire. The Templar leapt through.

He was greeted with the strange hues as in his troubled dreams; scenes shifting and punctuated by flashes of lightning. Almost immediately, two dangerous green beams shot toward his head. He dodge rolled to the right, saved by his training and instincts, and in a single fluid motion rose to his feet surrounded by a dark protective sphere. The Watcher rose up ten paces in front of him. Another single beam came out of its central eye but to its surprise bounced harmless off Arden’s shield and lashed back at itself, slowing the movement of its tentacles. 

Arden pressed his advantage. He held out his left hand, and a ball of sun fire formed around it. He threw it at the Watcher and it immediately erupted in flames, catching many of its tentacles on fire.

It flailed about and screamed in pain as it drew back. Another ball of sun was thrown and more fire burst forth. The Templar closed the distance between them and began hacking away at each tentacle in turn. Instead of dispatching it he was consumed by blood lust, cutting and chopping furiously to impose the most pain. The Watcher was immobilized but Arden no longer saw a threat. He saw a Daedra responsible for forcing him to kill Muzgu. Down upon the ground now the Watcher was pierced through and through. Each time Arden withdrew his sword he looked down at the ichor accumulating on its blade with a kind of fascination. 

Finally satiated, satisfied with the tortuous death of the Watcher, Arden stepped back to catch his breath. As he bent to the ground to clean his sword with sand he noticed his reflection in the black sheen coating the blade. Or rather, he noticed dark eyes gazing back at him—eyes that knew him, even if he didn’t know them. He stared, trying to recognize the face, but he couldn’t.

Looking around, his attention was drawn to two vertical, smooth panels on the sides of the cavern where he stood. They were inscribed with strange runes—symbols that should have meant nothing, yet somehow stirred a sense of recognition within him. As he stepped closer, the runes flickered to life, burning red, as though responding to his presence.

He fumbled for the shard, drawing it from its pocket. The runes along its surface glowed in perfect unison with those on the cavern walls, almost pulsing like a heartbeat. The shard quivered in his grip, then rose of its own accord, slowly spinning in the air above his palm. Mist like spilled blood curled around it, and each rune blazed with crimson light, a language he suddenly understood without knowing how.

House Duremont. Tiberius. Ambassador Calithar’s lecture. His nightmare. The Orc. Muzgu. These memories flickered in his mind, no longer as lessons or regrets, but steps—deliberate, necessary—all leading to this. The cold logic of destruction and rebirth settled over him like a mantle, displacing the hollow rhetoric of Templar vows and Stendarr’s distant, empty mercy. Compassion and restraint were delusions, comforting fictions for the powerless. Here, now, power was truth, and the shard—and the force awakening within it—was anointing him as its chosen vessel.

In his need to make sense of the senseless, it had never occurred to him that he was vulnerable to forces beyond his comprehension; his vanity never admitted that he could become a pawn to powers far greater than himself. In an instant his judgment snapped; he forgot that he was standing in Vaermina’s illusory dreamworld of Quagmire, where nothing was true except despair.

His way forward now seemed crystalline. The cleansing would begin with House Duremont. The Covenant itself needed purification. And there was only one path to achieve it.

War.

The word carried weight—not like a threat or burden, but like the blade resting in his hand, perfectly balanced, waiting to be used. There was no doubt, no hesitation. Everything that had felt tangled and contradictory before—duty, honor, compassion—had been stripped away. All that remained was the clarity of fire, the simple understanding that the world could only be made right through its own destruction and rebirth.

It wasn’t rage that filled him. Rage was too human, too fleeting. This was something sharper, a logic that felt as though it had always existed inside him, waiting for this moment to rise. He was certain the shard had not corrupted him; it had revealed him.

For the first time, he felt like himself.

As Arden stepped from the portal after some time, the monks stared at him, wide-eyed. They barely recognized the Breton who had entered, for the man before them bore an intolerable presence. One which they could feel in their bones, even if they could not name it. Keeping him in sight, they backed slowly away, then turned and fled back toward the monastery, whispering prayers to any god but Stendarr.