The Demands of the Divines Chapter 8 in The Demands of the Divines

In the Thalmor Embassy Fakhriya found proof that the Thalmor had not been responsible for the dragon attack at Helgen. She also found dossiers on Delphine, on a Blade named Esbern, and on Ulfric Stormcloak.

Fakhriya’s estimation of Delphine went up after she finished a thorough reading the Thalmor’s file on the Blade. Although Fakhriya had never had any reason to doubt that Delphine was everything she claimed to be, it was gratifying to get independent verification. What little the Thalmor knew of Delphine was consistent with what Delphine had related to Fakhriya.

Apparently Delphine had long been a source of trouble for the Thalmor. According to the file, Delphine had been involved in several operations prior to the Great War that had been extremely damaging to Thalmor plans. The Thalmor tried to kill Delphine more than once. The file indicated that Delphine had eluded three attempts on her life, including one instance where she had single handedly destroyed a team of assassins. Delphine’s status in the Thalmor dossier was described as Active High Priority. Thalmor operatives had instructions to capture or kill Delphine, and were explicitly advised to only approach her with overwhelming forces.

The file on Esbern indicated that the elderly Nord had been an expert on dragon lore for the Blades. Esbern had escaped the attention of the Thalmor because he had not been a field agent like Delphine had been. The dossier revealed that it was only after the Thalmor had lost sight of Esbern that his role in planning several operations against the Aldmeri Dominion had been revealed. The most recent update to Esbern’s file indicated that he was believed to be living in Riften. The Thalmor hoped to capture him and use his knowledge of dragon lore to cope with the current dragon situation in Skyrim. A Thalmor report speculated that the Blades might even be responsible for the return of the dragons.

Fakhriya closed Esbern’s file and tossed it on the bed beside her. It had been almost dawn by the time Fakhriya got back to her room at the Winking Skeever in Solitude after she escaped from the Thalmor Embassy on the evening of the First Planting Reception. Fakhriya didn’t remember changing her clothes before she went to bed, but the outfit she had worn to the party – or what was left of it – was tossed carelessly on a nearby chair. She was dressed in a simple tunic that she typically wore for sleeping.

Fakhriya remembered waking up briefly in the morning when Jenassa brought in a tray of food and some ale, but had drifted off again when Jenassa left the room. It was late in the afternoon when Fakhriya awoke for the day. She spent the remainder of the day picking at the food Jenassa had provided and reading through the letters and files she had taken from the Embassy.

“So you’re finally awake,” Jenassa said as she came into the room that evening. “How was the party?”

“Successful, I think,” Fakhriya said. “The Thalmor don’t seem to know any more about the dragons than we do, but they are looking for a man, a Blade, who they think can provide them with answers.”

“Another Blade?” Jenassa replied. “Your friend, Delphine, never mentioned another.”

“It’s likely she didn’t know about him either, but Delphine will need to find this man before the Thalmor do,” Fakhriya said. “I don’t even want to think about what might happen to him if the Thalmor find him first.”

“What do you mean?” Jenassa asked.

“The rumors are true,” Fakhriya said gravely. “The Thalmor do torture their prisoners.”

Fakhriya picked up some of the papers on the bed and tossed them towards Jenassa.

“Read the report and the dossier on Esbern. Esbern is the Blade the Thalmor are looking for. The informant who revealed Esbern’s hiding place to them was chained up in a cell when I found him. They were torturing him. It was horrible.”

Jenassa started to thumb through the dossier as Fakhriya spoke. She looked up when Fakhriya mentioned the torture.

Fakhriya went on to tell Jenassa everything about the dungeon. The tortured man. The Thalmor interrogators. Fakhriya started crying when she told Jenassa about Malborn’s death.

“I wanted to save Malborn, but I didn’t know what to do,” Fakhriya sobbed. “He had been so scared from the beginning of this mission. He was depending on me to get the files and get out of there before anything bad happened, but I wasn’t fast enough. I attracted too much attention and he got killed for it.”

“Malborn knew the mission was dangerous,” Jenassa said. She sat on the bed beside Fakhriya. Fakhriya rested her head on Jenassa’s shoulder as Jenassa embraced her. “They might have caught him even if you had gotten out of there sooner. You did all you could do.”

“All I could do was a lot of nothing,” Fakhriya countered. “I not only let Malborn die, I also left the tortured man behind. He’s probably dead, too.”

“It would have been better if you could have saved them, but you had your own job to do in there,” Jenassa insisted. “And you did it. Delphine needed this information and you got it. Because of you, this old man Esbern might have a fighting chance if Delphine can get to him before the Thalmor do.”

“I know you’re right,” Fakhriya said as she wiped the tears from her cheeks, “but I can’t stop thinking about how I messed up. Malborn was so brave. He tried to warn me when the Thalmor came in. He needed me and I let him down. And the tortured man. I was horrible to him. I had the information I needed. I didn’t have to ask him for it. If I had helped him instead of interrogating him, he might have survived.”

“I don’t want to be cold about this,” Jenassa said gingerly, “but if the prisoner was already as weak as you described, he would have only slowed you down. He probably would have been killed by the frost troll you encountered even if he somehow got past the Thalmor.”

“You had to escape,” Jenassa continued in a sterner voice. “If things had gone better with Malborn, he likely could have come with you, but Malborn tried to warn you because he understood that you had to escape even if he didn’t. The mission was important enough that Malborn was prepared to die for it. As for the prisoner, he was a lost cause long before you stumbled upon him.”

Jenassa got up and squatted beside the bed so that she was at eye level with Fakhriya. Jenassa put her hand on Fakhriya’s face.

“I know it’s hard when you lose good people,” Jenassa said, “but you can’t let this eat at you. Ideally everyone on your side would have gotten out alive, but things rarely play out ideally. Delphine trusted Malborn because she knew he would do whatever was necessary – even die – to make sure the mission was a success. Delphine trusted you for the same reason. You were nearly killed yourself, but you did what you had to do to survive and you accomplished what you had to accomplish. Honor Malborn by remembering his bravery. You don’t owe him anything else.”

Jenassa’s words evoked another wave of tears from Fakhriya. Fakhriya wiped the tears from her face as quickly as they fell as she tried to compose herself.

“Maybe I just need to sleep some more to get my head back on straight,” Fakhriya said. “Are you coming to bed?”

“No,” Jenassa said as she got to her feet. “I thought I’d sit in the common room for a while.”

“Is it late?” Fakhriya asked.

“Not really,” Jenassa said. “The sun went down a while ago, but the kitchen is still serving supper. You should go ahead and get some sleep. I’ll be back up in a little while.”

Fakhriya pulled the blankets up to her shoulders as Jenassa headed for the door. Fakhriya abruptly sat up just as Jenassa was about to leave.

“Jenassa, do you think the Blades had something to do with the dragons?”

Jenassa stood in the doorway as she considered the question.

“No, I don’t,” Jenassa said as she turned around to face Fakhriya. “If what Delphine has been telling us is true, the Blades, or whatever is left of them, don’t have the resources to raise Alduin. And we know from Kynesgrove that Alduin has been responsible for raising every dragon since. I would be more suspicious of those Greybeards who sent you looking for that horn than the Blades. I’m sure the Greybeards could raise a dragon if they wanted to. But there’s no reason to worry about that now. You should go to sleep. I’ll be back soon.”

Fakhriya got back under the covers as Jenassa shut the door. She had forgotten all about the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller. It had been the Greybeard’s request that Fakhriya retrieve the horn for them that had started the chain of events with Delphine.

Fakhriya abruptly sat up and gasped. As the nightmare that woke her faded from her mind, Fakhriya took note of her surroundings. She was in bed. She was in the room at the Winking Skeever. It was night. Jenassa was asleep beside her. Everything seemed fine, but Fakhriya’s heart felt like it was pounding through her chest.

Fakhriya got out of bed and lit a candle. From the messenger bag she retrieved the third Thalmor dossier. Ulfric’s dossier. Fakhriya hadn’t told Jenassa that she had it. Fakhriya couldn’t put her finger on why she felt so secretive about Ulfric’s file, but she wanted to read through it herself before she told Jenassa about it. Fakhriya took the candle and the file to a table in the corner of the spacious room near the wardrobe where the light would be less likely to disturb Jenassa.

Ulfric’s file was substantially larger than the files on Delphine and Esbern. Fakhriya was surprised to learn that Skyrim’s civil war was not the first event that drew the Thalmor’s attention to Eastmarch’s Jarl. Apparently Ulfric had a long history with the Thalmor.

The earliest pages in Ulfric’s file described his being captured by the Thalmor during the White-Gold Tower campaign of the Great War. After a string of Aldmeri successes in southern Cyrodiil, Titus Mede II fled Imperial City to avoid capture by Aldmeri forces. The White-Gold Tower campaign was one of several fierce battles fought for control of the Imperial capital. A teenage Ulfric Stormcloak had been captured with his unit in the fighting. According to the dossier, the Thalmor did not know who Ulfric was at the time of his capture, but when they learned under questioning that Ulfric was the son of a Skyrimic Jarl, he was singled out for more detailed attention from his Thalmor captors.

Elenwen, the present ambassador to Skyrim, had been a Thalmor operative in 4E 174 when young Ulfric was assigned to her as an asset. Page after page described the methods of torture used on the boy in a series of brutal interrogations. None of the torture seemed to have the intent to do any lasting physical harm beyond the immediate goal of breaking the boy down. Despite sleep and food deprivation, beatings, being tied up in contorted positions and being relentlessly questioned, Ulfric lasted several weeks before he finally revealed the worthless information that he had protected against such an unyielding onslaught.

Fakhriya’s stomach sank as she tried to comprehend what Ulfric had experienced.

The file revealed that Ulfric was of value to the Thalmor because he was the son of a Jarl, but it seemed to Fakhriya that Ulfric would have been too young to be a military leader of any importance at the time he had been captured. The file further explained that the Aldmeri forces had already taken control of Imperial City before Ulfric broke under the torture, yet Elenwen convinced Ulfric that the information he had supplied, which the Thalmor didn’t need and didn’t use, had been critical in securing the city.

No matter how many times Fakhriya reread the file, it didn’t make any sense to her that the Thalmor would torture Ulfric if they didn’t expect to get anything useful from him.

And then the Thalmor let Ulfric escape. They didn’t release him. They set up a circumstance where Ulfric would be tempted to try to escape on his own. According to the dossier, the Thalmor waited longer than a week for Ulfric to see the opportunity and act on it. The dossier detailed the measures the Thalmor took to facilitate Ulfric’s escape from the prison and tracked his progress cross country until he reached Skyrim.

The dossier resumed in the year 4E 176 when Ulfric was sent to lead a Nord militia to subdue a Breton rebellion in the Reach, a hold in southwestern Skyrim. The dossier referred to the Markarth Incident, but Fakhriya didn’t know what the Markarth Incident was. Whatever happened in the Reach, the Thalmor were satisfied with the results even if it meant they lost direct contact with their asset, Ulfric.

Fakhriya was reeling at the implications. The dossier explicitly said that the Thalmor had been in direct contact with Ulfric in the Reach. How did Ulfric go from being a tortured prisoner to being a willing operative of the Thalmor in a span of two years? And if Ulfric had been working for the Thalmor, what happened in Markarth that made Ulfric unwilling to continue dealing with the Thalmor after that?

The remainder of the file outlined the decision by the Thalmor to intervene on Ulfric’s behalf on the day he was supposed to be executed by the Imperials in Helgen, which was the day Alduin attacked the city. It seemed the Thalmor considered the dragon attack to be a fortunate occurrence because it provided a means for Ulfric to avoid execution without drawing attention to the Thalmor’s interest in saving him. The dossier went on to indicate that Thalmor were supporting the Stormcloaks in the civil war, at least enough to keep them fighting, but not enough to help them win against the Empire.

It was dawn by the time Fakhriya finished with Ulfric’s file. Reading the file had stirred up the guilt she felt about the mission at the Thalmor Embassy. In addition to the guilt, Ulfric’s file left Fakhriya with vague sense of dread. The comfortable room suddenly seemed confining. Fakhriya changed her clothes, blew out the candle and set out for a walk.

She hoped the fresh air would clear her head.