Better Than The Night Mother

Chapter 2

Other: Note- I realised that some of you might not initially know what I mean when I say smallclothes- basically, they're underwear. Just thought you'd like to know

The first thing I had noticed when I awoke was that my head was foggy. Not quite the "Oh crap, I got drugged last night, am I pregnant now?" foggy, more of the "I must have lost a lot of blood, because I still feel a little off from that and I have that full body tingling feeling that you get when you've had a lot of healing spells cast on you" sort of thing, though there was also something else that felt off but I couldn't figure out what it was, so I just decided to ignore it for the time being. At that particular moment, I didn't remember what had happened to me the night before, and honestly I could feel that my body was not totally healed from whatever it was that happened, since there's only so much healing energy a body can take at one time before it starts to bcome harmful, which is why healers heal people over time, rather than just sending six or seven healing spells at them at once, then telling whoever it was to get out. Besides, this bed was comfortable, as far as beds go, so I'm just going to lay here a bit longer.

I felt, however, that I had been sleeping for quite some time though, as while my body was content to just lay there, my mind was too restless to just relax and not think, and, for lack of anything better to contemplate, my restless mind traveled back to what, exactly, had put me in this obviously weakened state. I remembered getting the assignment from Farkas, how it was just supposed to be a short, easy mission, perfect for a "new-blood", since I was still considered one.

All I was supposed to need to do was track down a small group of bandits and kill them, but, well, obviously there were a lot more of them than we had thought. I breathed in deeply as it slowly started to come back to me, my memories slowly pouring into my mind at about the same speed that chilled molasses would.

The bandits had gone into ancient nordic ruins, and they had used someone with nearly perfect stealth skills, better than anyone I knew, to let them get to the treasure without having to fight through the hoard of undead in the ruins. Sadly, I am no where near matched with their stealth agent, so I ended up fighting about twenty or so draugr. Then, to top off that wonderfulness, I found out that the "small clan of bandits" had actually been a large hunting party, or something like that, for a very large clan of bandits. There were about fourty or so of them in there, and I ended up repeatedly summoning a flame atronach to distract and do some damage to their group while I slowly picked them off from above with my arrows.

After an mini-duel with their stealth agent, which I won (while I may not be as good at sneaking, there are very few people who stand a chance against me with a bow in my hand), I looked down and saw that there were only thirteen or fourteen men left. That was when I made my mistake.

I got cocky, I didn't take into account that they were clearly far more skilled then simple bandits- I'm thinking they they were at one point or even still are, professional mercenaries. As it was, I overestimated myself and underestimated them. I did manage to defeat them all, but at a heavy price- I had several critical wound scattered around my body, I was out of health and magicka potions, and one of the men had poisoned their weapon with a long acting posion that blocked my magicka regeneration. In essence, I had messed up big time when I jumped down from my perfectly safe ledge and tried to take them on myself.

I had, quite literally, crawled away from the ruins, barely alive and my only hope of surviving was if I somehow managed to make it back to the road, or, by some one in a million chance, someone happened to find me out there before I lost too much blood and died. I couldn't remember when and where I actually passed out, but I did know one thing- I had definitely not managed to to make it back to the road.

That thought gave me pause- Honestly, what was the chance that anyone would ever find me out there, especially when it was dark as pitch, barring the small amount of light provided by the stars, especially since I had been face-down and everything but my face was covered in dark clothing and armour and the side of my (exceptionally pale usually, and at the time probably almost pure white) face that would have been visible when laying face-down was probably mostly covered by my jet-black, excessively long hair... And even though my body would have been clearly visible in the sunlight, theres no way I could have remained alive for that long without healing, so someone had to have found me pretty soon (probably within minutes) after I fell unconcious for me to still be alive.