Work Text:
“By my calculations, some planes of Oblivion would be experiencing a solstice today,” said the hulking form of Yagrum Bagarn, last Dwarf, and expert in interplanar astronomy. The brassy metal of his Dwemer Spider Legs clicked as he adjusted in place underneath a large, white umbrella. He scratched a few more numbers into a leather bound tome, and wiped his hands on the oversized tunic Beyte had fashioned him—this one was stitched from soft red fabric and printed with white florals. It would have looked rather dashing, if not for the—well. One oughtn’t point out the scars of other peoples’ illnesses, after all.
Divayth Fyr scratched at his overlong silver beard and peered over the darkened lenses of the spectacles he had crafted to shield his eyes from the abundance of sun in this place. “Yes, I’d imagine so. This particular plane seems to have perfectly even day-night cycles—such that it would, in theory, always be an equinox.”
“Ridiculous we should end up here, my friend.” Yagrum snapped his fingers absently and a humanoid shape burst from the sand beside him bearing a tray of drinks. He took one, the nearest being something served with a pink paper umbrella and a matching straw poking out of the green shell of a local delicacy—what they’d been calling a ‘coconut.’ It was a form of palm fruit filled with sweetened water. “It’s almost like we needn’t work at all.”
“Ah yes. You always were rather addicted to your research,” Divayth Fyr said. The sand atronach held out the tray of drinks to him. Tiny particles drifted across the form of the creature as if its body was made of wind, and the sand itself had just been picked up in the air currents. The dark elf nodded, taking a drink and waving dismissively. The sand atronach bowed, wordless as always, and melted back out of view. He stretched, wiping the sand off his own tunic—his was blue with white florals—and leaned back against the large, pale pink, spiraling shell they’d had incorporated into their front yard’s decor.
Nobody knew what manner of creatures these shells came from—mollusks of some sort, surely—but they’d never seen one alive. Fyr hadn’t been able to fashion anything that made deep sea diving as accessible as he’d like—the depths of the oceans surrounding their island far exceeded the capabilities of Water Breathing spells. But such was a problem for another day. Everything was a problem for another day in this place.
“Well, all things considered, Fyr, some of us might be more prone to losing our minds,” Yagrum grumbled. His voice was deep and stoic—always sounding mildly more stressed than need be. “If, of course, that hasn’t already happened.”
“Have a little faith in me, Yagrum!” Fyr said with a grin. “The very same potion I used on you worked previously on Sero, did it not? Alas, even with him, it merely halted the disease from progressing. He, too, suffered scarring—but, as best as can be determined, he did not descend into madness. At least…not because of corprus.”
Yagrum Bagarn shrugged. It was an odd movement, being that his arms seemed far too small for his body. “Nerevarine business or corprus, that one would not be immune to madness, by my calculations.”
Fyr would have laughed at the nonchalance in his voice, but opted to remain silent and sip his drink. Here they both were, truly immune to the chaos of Tamriel and the burden of mortal living. Behind him towered his manor, painstakingly recreated from bricks of pressed sand. Before him sprawled the ocean, clear blue and rife with fish of uncountable varieties. The sun shone most of the time—and even when there were storms, they didn’t last long enough to be a bother. And the atronachs! Such placid, dutiful servants he could not have hired given a budget of a thousand drakes per day, per person. And yet…Yagrum still yearned for something more.
“How many years has it been, my friend?” Fyr asked after the silence between had been scoured dry and brittle.
“Hmm, since what?” Yagrum said, distracted as he squinted up at the cloudless sky from under a raised palm and jotted down more notes. He sighed and dropped the charcoal into the book. He ran his hand thoughtfully through his squared-off gray beard, leaving behind streaks of black dust. He glanced sidelong at Fyr. “Since the Red Year or…?”
“Yes since the Red Year,” Fyr said, sipping his drink again. “We arrived on this plane relatively quickly and found no reason to leave.”
“Correction. You found no reason to leave,” Yagrum Bagarn said matter-of-factly. “And to answer your question… It’s been just shy of one hundred and ninety-seven years.”
“Why, then, do you stay?” Fyr said. He already knew the answer, but Yagrum did like to be consulted and given options to consider. “The sun does nothing for your skin, which is already in quite a state. The salt of the ocean, too, dries it terribly. The sand scours it if the wind picks up. You were never really a fan of seafood, even back on Mundus.” He sighed, sipped his drink again, and waved away his own comments. “I could go on.”
“Do feel free not to,” Yagrum Bagarn said. It sounded joyless, but Fyr knew better and grinned at the jab. “It is, as they say, quite simple. Quite simple indeed.”
“Oh?” Fyr peered over his spectacles again, making a show out of his faux-confusion.
“Where else would I go?” Yagrum Bagarn was not the type to smile, but if he was, Fyr was certain this would be the time. “My friend—you stayed. You built a life here. You may have those…clones of yours to assist you, but who would keep you out of trouble?”
“Trouble? Me? Surely I wouldn’t get into any on my own!” Fyr laughed, a jovial sound that seemed misplaced coming from the mouth of an immortal sorcerer.
“Unfortunately, I know you,” Yagrum Bagarn said, monotone, “and trouble has always been all you’ve ever gotten into.”
“Well. The last bit brought us here. A realm of islands and sand atronachs—of oceans and beaches and sand-manors and palm trees,” Fyr sighed, unable to resist the urge to wax poetic. He cleared his throat. “We could have left, the two of us, long ago, yes. But…why? We’ve everything we need!”
Yagrum Bagarn was silent, except for the gentle whirring and clicking of his Dwemer Spider Legs, which paced on their own while he thought. “Yes…everything but the will to study.” He snapped absently, and a sand atronach burst forth beside him. He gave it a disgruntled look and it shrank back into itself, pulling the drink tray—empty—into its torso. “The Dwemer are here, then.”
“Excuse me?”
Fyr wasn’t expecting that.
“Perhaps on another island.”
“How did you come to that conclusion?”
“My dear friend, this place saps the motivation to acquire knowledge from almost everything,” Yagrum said with a sigh, “even you.”
“I…yes. I take offense to that, but yes I see what you mean,” Fyr said, chewing the end of his straw. He wished the sand atronach had brought with it more drinks.
“So you see it then,” Yagrum Bagarn said, voice still flat. Fyr nodded. “My peers did not disappear permanently. They are merely…stuck. Here. We will need to build a boat and go searching for them.”
“The theory has merit,” Fyr said, fully intending not to research the best ways to build boats with what material they had on hand.
“When will we get started?” Yagrum Bagarn asked. The monotonous drawl would have seemed uninterested to everyone else, but Fyr knew better.
He hated to disappoint his oldest living friend, so instead he simply said, “Eventually.”