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Akatosh is dreaming when Martin floats towards him.
In front of the spectacle, even his golden soul flickers for a moment. The heart of time shows itself true to his eyes – a forest on fire, woven and twisted around its own core.
But Martin is here for a reason they both know, and that is enough to make him strong. Where the hands of a mortal would get lost, a Septim’s must find the way.
He comes to the dream prepared. The flames keep their side of the promise. The golden vortex which engulfs him shakes the foundation of Aurbis to its core, heals the wounds, seals the rifts.
Martin goes out with an embrace. He lays to rest, consumed, and joins the spinning vortex of the dream.
His consciousness becomes a string of honey with extraordinary ease. Dense, fluent, impossible to part. Without anything left to do or to say, he falls asleep.
Long after he is no more, something tries to awaken him.
Akatosh is sleeping when Sheogorath chooses to visit.
The scenery he lands in is a tangle of brambles, knotted and dark as charcoal. He knows them as the remains of what cannot burn – the edges of a night even the Aedra, as far as they can reach, are blind within.
He comes in the form of a night owl, whose feathers split the sparse light that touches them into purple and gold. Despite the inky sky, he playfully shows their hidden yellow to the underbrush. They are but a pale mirror of the gargantuan wings – and yet, somehow, their texture matches in ways they do not speak of.
“Do not let yourself forget,” he hoots to the darkness. Akatosh’s scales twitch in distant response.
Though the glimmer of his flames is far out of Sheogorath’s reach, he can feel them reaching for his contours. They caress his broken mind with the sensitivity of tongues – and if his soul shivers, in half-terror, he does not lose his resolve.
“Whether you hear me or not, mark my words,” he hoots again. “I won’t let it all be for nothing.”
Sheogorath flies out of the forest, just high enough to glimpse the border of the dragon’s dreams. The fire rages on, warm, perfect, self-contained. On his way out, he breaches his skin like a parasite.
Akatosh does not wake. Too eternal to feel touched, he lets the solitary germ move within him as he pleases.
And yet, as soon as he leaves, something in the cycle of his sleep goes wrong.
Sheogorath is not expecting anyone when Akatosh knocks on his door.
He does not have a door, let alone a voice to invite him in. He is wrapped up in dead ivy and roots, at the core of a yellowing mushroom forest that mirrors his vain desires.
That he is growing roots in the ground, and the Shivering Isles are dying from the same poison as him, Akatosh does not seem to care. He has no presence, no voice – Sheogorath feels him in no other way than the pounding of his own heartbeat.
Like thunder, he thinks, half-unconscious. Like a knock.
Akatosh only accepts to take form at the bottom of his eyes. He shapeshifts with every motion of the evening breeze; he is at once his mirror, a dragon, a formless being, the reflections of some faces he lost.
He is answering a call, he suggests. A response to pleas of the Madgod’s, long ago or not. It does not matter.
And though Sheogorath does not remember what he means, a side of him desperately does – the side that sent the message, the side that could never forget, having loved and lost.
He lets that side take over. Akatosh folds into himself – to do the same on his end, whatever that means.
Ardent dry lips move over his own, in a dance they knew someplace and sometime else. As they devour, they speak.
Will you dream walk with me?
The words are, at once, a proposal and an answer.
When he fails to find the tools he needs, Sheogorath chooses to escape.
He will never get anywhere if the Isles drown him in noise. That is the tale his mind tells him at first, to compensate for the failure. The change of scenery allowed him to leave everything behind; and if he explains it away with need for peace and quiet, all he really does is dwell in the memory.
To shape the world anew – he is almost sure he can’t, at least from here. He did not manage it back home, or in the palace. He just lacked the focus.
But the bubble of quiet he dwells in, deep in Pelagius’ mind, is perfect to recapture the impression of deep fire on his mouth.
Here chatter is rare, and silence much more abundant. He begins by trying to focus, then loses himself, every time, into the ghost of that touch. It is the only thing he remembers wanting or liking now, within the spiral of gloom he feels trapped by.
His standstill endures strong, barely lined with guilt, until the mortal tumbles into the same dimension.
Deep down, Sheogorath is in shock. She wields the staff with a balance foreign to most of the Daedra he can name. He does not pinpoint the moment he finds out – he just recognizes the divine grace she sports, from a stained glass of memories he buried long ago.
Sure, maybe it was cowardly of him to run away. Maybe coming here was but a waste of time.
But when that impression tugs at his insides, and the mortal’s eyes sparkle golden from within, he instantly changes his mind.
Sheogorath knows in a heartbeat that he is needed elsewhere.
And that, he realizes, he can only understand because he was there to meet her.
It will work as you wanted.
He stands at the core of the whirlwind Akatosh is, untouched by heat or loss of any perception. He feels himself spiral across eternity instead, winding and twining with it like the coils of a serpent.
Many are the golden fragments his soul caresses in its motion. Maybe, one of them – the one – responds to his touch with the same triumphant relief.
“Do you want the same?”
What you want, I want.
The voice the dragon borrows is both familiar and forgotten. It moves a primal instinct in him – the instinct to protect, unexplained, against all logic and all odds.
He feels a scorching heat wrap around his body – like the touch of a human, but born of a star. His eyes roll back, to pierce the fiery heavens around them with their stare. Though the intensity of the contact is unbearable, his skin does not burn, and his consciousness floats unharmed.
After moments of untold pain and bliss, Sheogorath awakens, to find a golden orb within his grasp.
“A part of your soul,” he breathes, the words scalding in his mind as he puts them together. “To send on Nirn. To push your own will back.”
Whatever it takes.
Strong, gentle fingers form from the fire heart of Akatosh, guiding his own gestures to follow a celestial path. Just beyond the transparency of his scales, the world is all painted in grey; and the orb floats away to a fixed point in time, delivered to be born by their join hands.
Sheogorath’s mind walks back, to a place he has already been. Airy tears condense in his faraway eyes. He understands now.
He understands. He is going to help. Like he could not before, he can now.
And in the spire of flame, at the heart of the world, he feels an embrace his size and shape.
The voice he loves so well repeats what he longed to hear.
You and I, against it all. Forever.