Board Thread:Roleplaying/@comment-5583506-20150311002226/@comment-5583506-20150312032711

(Here we go. Zoor, we will do what you suggested thirdly. Couldn't reach you in chat.)

Sinderius Hestria was a middle aged man with grizzled hair and a thick stubble of beard trimmed to his jawline. He had a pair of roundish glasses resting on a hooked nose. He sat in his rented apartment overlooking the market street and was writing, writing on the book which would secure his economy for the next three or four months. It would be a book about the many legends and lore found within Riften as told by the commoners and the beggars.

He hoped that he could make enough money from the book in order to move back to the Imperial City. He simply couldn't remind himself of why he had come to Skyrim in the first place.

To gaze upon its wondrous nature, he thought, or at least that's what he told himself.

His wealth had gone downhill ever since had arrived to this forsaken town. Now he scraped by selling poems and love letters. The love letters were really popular, especially amongst the frequent visitors at Haelga's Bunkhouse.

He seated himself on his pin chair and wrote on the parchments with his quill, gently adjusting his glasses to make sure he didn't spill ink all over the place and had to start over. He had done it once and swore to himself that if it ever happened to him again, he would never write another book. He looked down on what he was writing. He had been paying some beggars to tell him some legends about Riften. The stories were mostly mundane and varied depending on who was telling them, but the most odd one was the one about "the Pale Man".

Sinderius knew very little of this boogeyman of Riften. Apparently the creature or the man, once again it all depended on who was telling the story, had been some kind of horrible person having lived hundreds of years ago and was now haunting the desolate alleyways of Riften, looking for unfortunate souls. The legend was utterly ridiculous. Sinderius knew that his own grandfather had been living in the vicinity of Riften approximately during the time when the legend was created, yet nothing was mentioned in the family history book about some "Pale Man" roaming about. It was probably just a story loosely based upon some beggar with a skin disease, he imagined.

He had a hard time trying not to laugh as he wrote down the childrens' rhymes he had heard and studied from the poor children living in the neighbourhood.

He will raise his hood and say "Hello"

"I am a Pale Man and where shall we go?"

So, look around every corner, look around every street

Just hope that the Pale Man, you will never meet

He will lower his hood and bid you "Goodbye"

Leaving you out in the gutter to die...

But from within the walls underground, stands a Pale Man alone

Waiting for that special someone to reawaken his bone...

For being a childrens' rhyme, he felt the theme to be rather unsettling. Just what was "the Pale Man" exactly? From a child's point of view? Was he an animal the children had encountered? Or perhaps just a metaphor for the "adults"? Nevertheless, each time he read the rhyme he felt goosebumps all over his body. He decided it was to be enough work for one day. He rose up from his chair and approached the window, peering out in the darkness. A thin veil of mist covered the streets and the lantern posts were vaguely lit a little bit of everywhere...

Just another Riften night, he speculated as he blew out the candle on his desk, causing his room to go entirely dark.

Then he heard it. A creaking noise. The staircase... It was strange. He was sure that he had locked the door to the stairs leading up to his apartment, and he had the only keys. Well, he and the landowner, but he had left the town on business in Ivarstead for a couple of days.

The creaking noise came closer and closer, slowly moving each and every step along the way to his room. He froze up in terror, not knowing how he would react to such an event. A burglar? What would he do? Throw the chair at him? Burn him with the still-warm candle?

The creaking noise was close now. The murky floorboards gave away to weight of whoever was emerging from the dark hallway of his apartment. He could barely see anything. It was so dark... But he decided not to make any noise and so moved further into the room, standing by the side of the window to prevent the moonlight to give away his position.

The noise of vague, but steady footsteps could be heard approaching his chamber. His mind kept tracing back to that childrens' rhyme and left his mind crippled with terror and fantasies about "the Pale Man" coming to take him. He shuddered at the thought, but kept still and quiet.

''Look around every corner, look around every street... ''It kept repeating in his head.

Then the creaking noises stopped. Just outside the open doorway of his chambers... It was so dark... He knew that if the candle had still been lit he would have been able to see whoever was standing at the other end of the room clearly now, but then again he preferred not to see. It was all so quiet...

He swallowed and felt really uncomfortable with the situation. Did the burglar know that he was in here? Was that the case, why he wouldn't come closer? He listened intensively for any signs of there being someone there. He heard it.

There was indeed someone there. Heavy breathing could be heard from the hallway of shadows. The breathing was slow, collected and steady, as if it anticipated him to make a move first. He decided not to, not because he didn't want to, but because he couldn't. His legs simply wouldn't move out of sheer fright. This was his first encounter with a burglar from Riften, and yet he felt awkwardly calm at the same time. He imagined that anyone else would have been running scared by this moment.

Then suddenly he heard violent, heavy stomping coming against him in the darkness. It all came so sudden and unprepared that he simply gave out a shriek of fear. That would be his last mistake. A dark figure separated itself from the shadows and stormed against him. A pair of eyes glimmered in the light from the moon which trickled into his dirty windows. And the eyes were not the only thing that gleamed. Too late he had noticed the sharpened blade... but he did notice its cold touch...

''Look around every corner... ''

(Sorry for the wait!)