Heyo, it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these literary sketches, so time to stretch out the old fingers and do some calisthenics. I might do this every Sunday or so just to help fill out more content since I’ve been so lazy as of late.

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And so it was down in the belly of the cave, full of bile and stink and horror, that darkness became a welcome sight and light an age old villain.

Thieves and monsters share this in common, and the girl was no exception. They say she wore the shadows like a scarf, but in the bowels of this dungeon they served as something else – a gas mask, a guardian, a friend. Fear may be the artwork of the blind, but so is courage. The imagination required to not think – to close your eyes in a room full of snarling wolves – was something few possessed and even fewer understood. Blindness quiets a mind drunk off adrenaline’s booze. Darkness can strip even the nastiest monsters of their fangs, claws, and face, and place them in the mirror.

Still, the demons lurking in the corners of light were merely echoes of the beast that surrounded her. And the deeper she delved the more it clenched its fangs, slowly choking the throat of the great black wind.

Its name was greed.

Like all sworn enemies of the dark, its light shone brightly, from its ruby eyes to its pearls of teeth to a coin purse full of Septims. And all it took was a single CLINK to impregnate her mind like so many bastard sperm, a single noise so full of lust and screams that it made Molag Bal cover his ears. It was an unseen form of domestic violence – married to the coin, the thrill, and the hunt, and all it took was the promise of more to keep her in this abusive relationship.

And so it was always at night, like the moth and the flame, werewolves and the moon, that the girl meets her demise; when the darkness can no longer save her, and a thief is honest with no one save herself.