Torin's grip tightened over the back of the creature's head, his fingers sinking into the bony crest, the horns digging into his palm. He could feel the thing's pulse—if it had a pulse—thrumming against his skin, fast and panicked, like a bird trapped in a fist.
He grinned. There was nothing warm about it.
"What was it you wanted to do to my eyes?"
His voice was soft, almost gentle. The kind of voice you used when you had someone exactly where you wanted them and you wanted them to know it.
The Harvester hissed, its remaining teeth bared, its three arms flailing uselessly at his wrist. But the sound was thin, reedy. The defiance was there, but it was a fragile facade now, a mask it was wearing because it didn't know what else to do.
The fear underneath was plain as day—in the way its pupils had contracted to pinpricks, in the way its tail twitched and coiled without purpose, in the way its whole body trembled against his grip.
Torin shook his head slowly, disapprovingly.
"Still putting up an act, are we?" His grin didn't waver. "Well... we can't have that."
He raised his arm—the one holding the creature by the head—and hurled it downward.
The Harvester hit the dirt with a sound like a sack of meat hitting a stone floor. The impact drove the breath from its lungs—if it had lungs—in a wet, rattling gasp. Its claws scrabbled at the frost, tearing furrows in the frozen ground, but before it could even think about moving, Torin's boot found its chest.
He kicked it onto its back, the motion casual, almost lazy. Then his foot came down.
The weight was immense. Torin was still enlarged from the Gigantize spell, his frame twice its normal size, his mass proportionally greater. The boot that pinned the Harvester to the ground was the size of a small shield, and it pressed down with enough force to crack a boulder.
The creature's ribcage—or whatever passed for a ribcage in whatever hell it had crawled out of—creaked under the pressure. Its chest caved inward, just slightly, just enough to make its breathing come in short, painful gasps.
Its three remaining arms clawed at his ankle, claws scraping against ebony-hard skin, leaving scratches that healed almost as fast as they appeared. Its tail lashed out, trying to wrap around his other leg, trying to find purchase, trying to do anything that might make him move.
Torin didn't move.
He didn't say anything either. He just stood there, his weight pressing down, his eyes fixed on the creature's face, watching the fear build behind those pale, dead eyes.
Then his hand shot down.
He gripped the Harvester's tail—the thickest part, just where it joined the torso—and squeezed.
His fingers sank into the flesh. The scales that had looked harder than steel, that had gleamed dully in the fog like polished armor, cracked under the pressure. Blood—that thick, purple, wrong-colored blood—welled up between his fingers, hot and slick.
The creature screamed, a high, keening sound that cut through the fog like a blade.
Torin pressed down harder with his foot. Then he yanked his arm upward, pulling away a chunk of flesh the size of his fist.
The Harvester's scream became something else. Something that didn't sound like any language Torin had ever heard, something that was pure agony given voice.
Its body arched off the ground, its arms flailing, its claws tearing at the dirt, its tail whipping back and forth in frantic, uncontrolled spasms.
Torin held the chunk of flesh up for a moment, letting the creature see it. Blood dripped from his fingers, pooling on the frost, steaming in the cold air. The meat was dark and stringy, threaded with veins that pulsed with a light of their own.
He let it drop. It landed on the Harvester's chest with a wet slap, a mash of blood and red chunks and things that might have been organs or might have been something else entirely.
"Behave." Torin's voice was calm. Almost bored. "Or I will strip the entirety of your flesh from your bones. One handful at a time."
He squeezed the creature's tail again—not enough to tear, just enough to remind it what was waiting if it didn't cooperate.
The Harvester's resistance died.
It happened all at once, like a candle being snuffed. The claws stopped scratching at his ankle. The tail stopped thrashing. The arms went limp, falling to the ground on either side of its body, palms up, fingers curled. Its chest rose and fell in quick, shallow gasps, and its whole body—that long, serpentine length of muscle and scale and terror—began to shake.
It wasn't even trying to hide its fear now. The mask was gone. The defiance was ash. All that was left was the thing underneath—the thing that had been hunting a child through these woods for two months, that had been so confident in its power, so certain that nothing in this world could threaten it.
It was wrong.
Torin leaned down, his face close to the creature's, his grey eyes boring into those pale, dead orbs.
"We'll start simple, you ugly piece of Daedric shit." He leaned closer, his face inches from the creature's, his breath steaming in the cold air between them. "Who do you serve? Which of the jumped-up elemental entities you call Daedric Princes pulls your strings?"
The Harvester's already pale face went paler. Its pupils contracted to pinpricks, and for a moment—just a moment—something that might have been terror flickered behind those dead eyes. Not the fear Torin had put there. Something older. Something deeper.
"Can not tell." Its voice was a rasp, a whisper, barely audible over the wind. "Will not tell."
It let out a low hiss, its ruined mouth working, black blood still seeping from its shattered teeth. Its remaining arms twitched at its sides, fingers curling and uncurling, like it wanted to reach for something and was stopping itself by sheer force of will.
"You are frightening for a mortal," it said, and the words seemed to cost it something. "Knowing and frightening indeed." Its pale eyes met Torin's, and for a moment something almost like respect flickered there. "But there are worse things than you."
Torin let out a low hum, the sound vibrating in his chest.
He hadn't expected a straight answer. Not really. Daedra were many things—cruel, cunning, patient when it suited them—but they weren't stupid.
They knew the hierarchy they served, knew what waited for them if they betrayed their masters. There was nothing Torin could do to this creature that a Daedric Prince couldn't do ten times worse. A hundred times. A thousand.
But he'd asked anyway, because any answer—any flicker of reaction, any slip of the tongue, any momentary lapse in that careful, terrified composure—could tell him something.
And this harvester had told him plenty.
The way it had reacted to the question. The way its whole body had tensed, coiled, like it expected a blow to come from somewhere else. The way its voice had dropped, become reverent and terrified all at once. This wasn't just loyalty.
This was deep, bone-rooted dread. The kind of fear that came from serving something that punished failure with torments beyond mortal imagination.
Yet another clue.
A harvester, hunting a child. A child, specifically. Not just any victim, but a small, innocent creature that had done nothing to earn its attention. That suggested something about the master.
The Daedric Prince who'd sent this thing wasn't looking for warriors or mages or people who could fight back. They wanted something else. Something helpless.
And the killer in Falkreath—the one who tortured Eydis, who healed her just so she could suffer again—that fit the same pattern. The same cruelty. The same delight in the helplessness of the victim. The same methodical, almost ritualistic approach to pain.
Molag Bal.
He had the loyalty of this twisted Daedric clan, that much was almost certain—more harvesters served him than any other Prince, drawn to his hoard of souls like flies to a corpse.
And the pattern of torture, the healing, the extended suffering?
That was his signature. His particular brand of cruelty. The kind that broke people slowly, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but the pain and the fear and the desperate wish for an end that never came.
But Torin couldn't be sure. Not completely. Other Princes had their cruelties too.
The murderer could be serving any of them. Could be serving none of them.
And at the end of the day, it didn't matter.
He wasn't here to deal with a Daedric Prince. Couldn't, even if he wanted to. The Princes were forces of nature, concepts given form, things that existed beyond the reach of mortal steel and mortal magic. You didn't fight them, not directly, not without playing by their rules. You survived them, if you were lucky. You avoided them, if you were smart.
What he could do was deal with their agent. The servant they sent to do their work in the mortal world, whichever twisted bastard who sold their humanity for a scrap of power.
Cut off the arm, sever the connection, and whatever Prince was pulling the strings would have to find another puppet, another way, another time, another place.
That was the goal. That was all he could do.
Torin was just about to ask the harvester how it had crossed from Oblivion—who had summoned it, what door it had slipped through, what mortal fool had opened a path for something like this—when a flicker of orange caught the corner of his vision.
His eyes widened.
He turned, hands already moving, and saw the firebolt streaking toward him through the fog like a comet. Fast. Too fast. The kind of speed that came from practice, from power, from someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
His hands shot up. Magicka surged. The ward erupted from his palm like a shield of solid light, spreading outward just in time to catch the projectile. The firebolt splashed against it, a bloom of orange and red, heat washing over Torin's face despite the ward's protection.
He didn't have time to think about who had thrown it.
Another burst of light. Pale blue this time. Coming from below.
The harvester.
While Torin's attention had been on the firebolt, the creature had been weaving. Its remaining hands moved in patterns he couldn't follow, its ruined mouth whispering words he couldn't hear. And now a sphere of blue flame was rising from its palms, cold and hungry, flying straight for his face.
Torin's hand dropped. The ward flickered, shifted, barely in place before the sphere hit.
The impact was like being punched by a giant. The ward shattered on contact, fragments of light dissolving into the fog, and the sphere exploded against his raised hand with a sound like cracking ice. Cold—not the cold of winter, but something older, something that wanted to freeze the soul itself—shot up his arm, into his chest, into his skull.
He staggered back a step. Just one. But it was enough.
The harvester slithered free from beneath his boot, its tail lashing, its remaining arms digging into the frost, propelling itself across the ground like a serpent fleeing fire.
It was fast—faster than anything with that many wounds had any right to be—and in seconds it had put twenty feet between them.
Torin's teeth ground together. His hand shot out, calling the axe to his palm, the haft slapping against his fingers. He drew back, ready to throw—
Another firebolt streaked from the fog.
Torin spun, ward flaring, absorbing the impact. The heat washed over him again, closer this time, close enough to singe the fur on his collar.
He snarled, his eyes scanning the mist, trying to find the source—
Movement. To his left. A shape in the fog, shifting, moving, staying just out of sight.
He couldn't track it. Couldn't split his attention between whatever was out there and the harvester that was getting further away by the second.
The harvester had stopped running.
It had planted itself at the edge of the clearing, its serpentine body coiled beneath it, its three arms raised. Its palms faced the ground, fingers splayed, and from them oozed something that wasn't quite smoke and wasn't quite light. Something grey and hungry, something that moved like it had a will of its own.
It slapped its hands against the earth.
The ground shook.
Not the tremor of an earthquake, not the rumble of something natural. This was wrong. This was the ground rejecting something, trying to push back against what was being forced into it.
Cracks spiderwebbed across the frost. The earth split open in wide, jagged gashes, and from them—
Hands.
Bony hands, fingers like twigs, grasping at the air. Hands covered in dried skin, stretched thin over knuckles and metacarpals, nails grown long and yellowed. Hands that still had flesh clinging to them, rotting in strips, the muscle beneath black and withered.
They pulled themselves from the earth, these things that had been men once, maybe, or mer, or something else entirely. Skeletons with scraps of leather still hanging from their ribs. Rotted, maggot-ridden corpses.
They rose on legs that were more bone than flesh, their jaws hanging open, their eye sockets dark and hungry.
The harvester's ruined mouth stretched into something that might have been a grin—hideous, triumphant, a slash of black blood and shattered teeth against that pale, dead face.
Its remaining arms folded close to its body, its tail coiled beneath it, and without a word, without even a parting hiss, it turned and bolted.
It moved like a serpent through tall grass, its body undulating across the frost, its claws digging into the dirt for purchase. Within seconds it was at the tree line. Within seconds more it was gone, swallowed by the fog, leaving only a trail of purple blood and overturned earth to mark its passage.
Torin's eyes tracked it for a moment. Then they snapped to the opposite direction.
The figure that had been throwing firebolts was already moving. He caught a glimpse of a shape—human-shaped, cloaked, hooded—sprinting through the fog, staying low, staying fast.
The figure disappeared into the mist.
They were running. Both of them, in opposite directions, leaving Torin standing in the middle of a clearing full of the rising dead, his axe in his hand, his chest heaving, his options narrowing by the second.
He could chase the harvester. Follow its blood trail, hunt it down, finish what he'd started. But the undead it had raised would be left behind, shambling toward Falkreath, toward the town full of people who had no idea what was coming for them.
He could chase the ambusher. The hooded figure who'd interfered, who'd given the harvester the opening it needed to escape, who'd been watching from the shadows and waiting for their moment.
But again, the undead would be left behind. Again, the town would be at risk.
He could stay. Hold the line. Cut down every corpse that crawled out of the ground, one by one, until they stopped moving. Until the magic that animated them faded. Until the threat was ended.
That was the choice they'd given him. Chase one of them, and let the undead rush Falkreath. Stay here, and let them both get away.
Torin held his ground.
His expression darkened as the corpses pulled themselves free from the earth, as they turned toward him with hollow eyes and grasping hands, as they began to shuffle forward, slow and relentless. He planted his feet, lifted his axe, and waited.
The seconds stretched. The corpses came closer. The fog swirled around him, thick and cold.
He watched the tree line where the harvester had disappeared. Watched the mist where the firebolt thrower had fled. Watched, and waited, and let them run.
Seconds passed, and then a minute as the undead surounded Torin.
The corpses were close enough now that he could smell them—old earth and older rot, the particular stench of things that should have stayed buried. Their hands reached for him, bony fingers grasping, jaws working soundlessly.
Torin didn't move.
Not until he was sure. Not until the blood trail had faded into the fog, not until the sounds of slithering and footsteps had been swallowed by the wind.
Then his expression shifted. The darkness lifted. The hard line of his mouth curved upward, just slightly.
The lightning dancing along his axe flickered, shifted, turned from white to gold. The runes blazed brighter, casting long shadows across the frost, illuminating the faces of the dead as they shambled toward him.
This was a much better outcome than he expected.
He'd intended to let the harvester escape. To create a gap, let the creature slip free from his grasp and escape. Then he'd follow the blood trail back to wherever it was hiding. Or at least Auri would.
That was the plan. That had always been the plan... but to think someone would so generously help him sell the act...
And now... now he had two trails instead of one, each leading in different directions, leading to different answers. The harvester. And the ambusher, most likely the culprit himself.
Two threads to pull. Two paths to follow. That was much better than the words of a filthy daedra.
Torin's grin widened, cold and sharp, as the first corpse lunged for his throat.
His axe came up. Lightning flashed. And somewhere in the back of his mind, he was already thinking about what to do next while Auri tracked down the harvester and its helper.
He can't lounge around while she gets busy, after all.
...
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