Grinding and groaning, the side of the pillar fell away, aided in the way that its interior consisted of a series of ancient stone gears and mechanisms that allowed it to hinge open. It was solid and unyielding, several centimetres thick, and the shudder that ran through their boots could be felt in the pits of their stomachs when it finally came to rest.
“I don’t know what we were all expecting,” Sofia had to step around from the opposite side to peer into the now opened pillar. “but this doesn’t feel to be it.”
"It's a sarcophagus."
"An ‘occupied,’ sarcophagus." Face framed in the blue-white glow of another of Kaius’s magelights, Lydia’s armoured form lurked like a statue of metal as the three of them looked at what the pillar contained.
"Well, it is a crypt after all. What were you expecting? A hall full of gold and jewels, or living people inside of coffins?"
The stare that Lydia gave Sofia was one of her signature ones that appeared capable of leaving bruises, her eyes glaring out from behind her helmet and aventail.
Contained within the pillar, held in place by the interior’s design, was a body. One that time had not been merciful towards. Its flesh was dried, brittle and shrunken, all moisture long since vanished, leaving the remains as a skeletal husk wrapped around ancient bones. Its teeth were rotten or missing, hair in ragged clumps, and whatever clothing it had once been wearing had long since rotted away into dust and powder. The body was so thoroughly dried out that it was practically fossilised into matching the granite that surrounded it.
"We came all this way just to find a dead woman?"
"Not necessarily." Magelight in hand, Kaius was leaning in and looking at the way that the body’s head was tilted back, locked into place by the way that the sarcophagus's interior was carved into a roughly humanoid shape to keep the body upright. "I doubt the vampires were interested in a corpse as such, but to be buried like this meant that whoever this was, they were important."
"Like a queen or something?"
"Possibly. There’s nothing left to show any details of who or what they were, but you certainly don’t bury paupers and peasants like this."
"Paupers and peasants like us, you mean?” The stillness of the crypt was playing on their nerves, but not as much as the drip…drip…drip… and the sound of blood splattering. Mounted on top of the revealed, hexagonal pillar, the spiked pedestal and the still-impaled corpse was hanging above their heads, some of the blood staining the pillar’s sides as it dribbled and congealed. Most of it however was draining through the grates at the pedestal’s base into the sarcophagus’s interior, flowing along the carved stonework and dripping directly onto the desiccated body’s face and opened mouth.
"Do you suppose the draugr are angry because we disturb their sleep? I know I would also be pretty angry. Not that she's a Draugr or anything though."
"You keep saying 'she' or 'her." Lydia gave the body a quick head-to-toe glance at . "How do you know that it's a she?"
"Well, she's got a woman's hips. I mean, isn't that pretty obvious?"
"But what do you mean she's not a draugr then?"
"No embalming, no removal of organs or preparation. The Dragon Cult would remove your guts, your brain and everything else from inside and store it away in burial jars. Then they would soak you in resin. She hasn’t had any of this and hasn’t been mummified."
"But she's all desic... desacrate..." The aversion was palpable on Lydia’s face as she tried to find the correct word. "All dried up."
"That's what happens when you get locked away in a stone box, instead of being buried in the ground." Kaius muttered. "She must have been important to be put away like this."
“It’s certainly not traditional Nordic burial practices from the last three Eras. But it’s also not Nedic, Dragon Cult or even Snow Elves. There are no inscriptions, no runes or carvings on the outside. I don’t know of any of the local cultures that had the habit of burying people alive like this.”
Slowly, and with astonishment, both Kaius and Lydia turned and looked at Sofia as she stood there glancing between them.
“What?”
"That's probably one of the most intelligent things that I have heard come out of your mouth." Glancing between her and the corpse, Kaius gestured to the sarcophagus. “How do you know all of this?”
"I'm not just my gorgeous appearance and my incredible fighting prowess." Sofia stuck her tongue out at the two of them. “I read books, and if you spent as much of your time jumping into Skyrim’s tombs and barrows as I have, you might learn as much as I have.”
“So you have read more than just ‘The Lusty Argonian Maid.’”
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“A girl will always have favorites.” She replied, looking at Kaius for a moment, and trying not to focus on how the corpse was positioned as though its head was tilted back in a silent scream. She was especially not trying to focus on the amount of blood that had covered its face, lips and mouth. "I hope I don't die and end up looking like the draugr. That would be my worst nightmare."
"And there's the Sofia we know..." There was no mistaking the tiny chuckle from Kaius as he held a magelight in the palm of his hand while studying the sarcophagus’s interior. "There's various runes and inscriptions on the inside, most look like enchantments but I can't read or understand any of them. They're nothing like anything I've seen before.”
“It’s pretty hard to read the ones on the inside of the lid as well with all the scratches.”
Glancing down to their feet, Kaius looked over the similar markings that had been engraved into the inside of the sarcophagus’s lid. Sofia was right in the way that they were difficult to read. Despite being carved from granite, there were dozens of parallel scratches lightly marking and defacing the carefully made runes and inscriptions.
“Fingernails. Talo’s balls. She was locked into this while she was still alive.”
All three turned and looked at the desiccated, skeletal figure, its face and head increasingly covered in the blood of slain thralls, and Sofia shivered at the thought of being trapped in such a way.
“None of this makes any sort of sense. I mean, the rest of the crypt we came through to get this far is definitely ancient Nordic. Early first Era at the latest, but this whole cavern seems… newer somehow? It’s still very, very old though.”
“How old do you think?”
“No way to be sure.” Sofia shrugged, not even thinking about how Kaius was immediately deferring to her knowledge without any hesitation. “The Dragon cult was destroyed at least four thousand years ago, and the upper layers here are definitely older than that. But everything else here is wrong. The architecture, the design, the layout. They were big on blood sacrifices, but nothing this complex. Cutting throats into a bowl, decapitation, cutting out hearts, or staking a sacrificial victim to the ground for a dragon to eat them; those were their usual methods.”
“Maybe this was a punishment or something.” Stepping forward to get a closer look at the corpse, and the sarcophagus’s interior with a mage light in hand, Kaius frowned, chewing the inside of his cheek in thought. “There looks like there might be a compartment or something behind her. Sofia, give me a hand here.”
"Of course you want me to help you feel up a woman. Why don’t you ever offer to feel me up?”
In the months they had been travelling together, Sofia’s joking and teasing was a recurring theme, and she never failed to take advantage of making Kaius feel awkward with her innuendo. It was mostly in jest, but always highly amusing for her, and at the moment it was making their efforts to move the blood splattered, rigid and ancient corpse to one side a lot easier. At least, until she saw the way that its sunken eyelids had opened.
At first she tried to put it down to a trick of the flickering, blue-white magelight as it began to dim. Staring directly into the empty, black hollows where the dead woman’s eyes had once been, Sofia still felt as though the dead woman was somehow looking back at her. Both sockets were empty, the eyes long since rotting into dust but there was movement in the shadows of the skull. Movement, that Sofia tried to convince herself, was nothing more than her and Kaius jolting the body. At least until the jaw began moving, and a skeletal, dried out hand came to rest on her arm.
After a second’s worth of shock and a moment of building horror and realisation as the understanding sunk in, she staggered away with a rolling, breathless series of curses and profanity that struck with almost as much force as Kaius’s thu’um. Kaius too was left backing away in shock and surprise, his hand falling to the hilt of his broadsword as the long dried out body began twitching and spasming.
"Why can’t anything in this damned province stay dead?” With her axe back in her hand, Lydia had begun moving between them and the twitching corpse, before Kaius's voice echoed through the cavern.
“Lydia, wait!”
“I’m sorry my thane, but… why?”
“We’ve triggered some sort of enchantment.” His own shock and surprise was wearing off, just as quickly as the sensation of magicka was building strong enough for all three of them to feel. “Don’t get too close!”
The throbbing, pulses of magicka continued to build and even Lydia, unaccustomed and inexperienced with the arcane, could feel the overwhelming potency of the powers that had been unleashed. A red and purple glow was building, the runes and inscriptions of the engraved interior glowing and shimmering, occasionally sparking with elemental discharges that left the air cold and tingling. Step by step, feeling the pressure on their souls, they backed away up the stairs while attempting to judge what would be a safe distance.
At first the body was shaking and trembling, as though being repeatedly struck with lightning, but as the magicka in the air grew, the first of the changes began to appear. It was slow; some flesh softening here, additional strands of hair growing from the wizened scalp there, and all three of them realised that there was none of the typical, blue glows of its eyes that was the usual signifier of necromantic powers. Sofia was left groaning and pressing a palm to her temple at the sheer, throbbing might of the enchantments activating one by one. It was tremendously powerful, spiking through her brain in waves of pain as the magicka flowed from the stone enchantments and into the trembling body as it was restored to life.
Hands clenched into fists so tightly that a living person would have drawn blood with their fingernails, arms and legs shaking to the point where the sound of bones crunching echoed through the crypt but the body was changing, piece by piece. It began where the blood had stained the brittle, grey flesh; skin and muscle and ligaments softening and stretching, the pinkness of vitality spreading from mouth, cheeks, lips and face, down the neck and throat as it went. Eyes reappeared in the sunken, empty sockets, pale blue and staring out in agony, tongue reforming in a mouth where the decayed and blackened pegs regrew anew into fresh, white teeth.
The entire process looked like absolute agony, and it soon sounded as painful as it looked, as the changes spread over the throat and into the chest. Blackened, shrivelled organs began to move and the withered heart within the brittle ribcage and wafer-thin skin began to pulse in time with the magicka. Lungs expanded and reformed, their regeneration soon hidden under the rolling wave of fresh muscle and skin, and the dead woman began screaming without pause.
Muscles grew and expanded, bones solidified and skin softened, losing the papyrus-like texture it had only moments before. Even the hair, once being little more than a clump of faded strands jutting from the skin-taut skull, began to thicken and multiply, fresh growth erupting from the scalp and growing sleek and dark like polished ebony. Gone was the withered, dried out skeletal remains, and in its place was a young, naked woman with sleek, raven-black hair who collapsed, face first out of the opened sarcophagus.
