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They find the beginning of the temple in the mouth of the mountain, the thing pock-marked and poked through, airy as a loaf of bread. It must be as much hole as rock, if they’ve been walking clean through it already, and if there’s more to go; from this new rugged-walled chamber the sky is visible through a dimpled hole in the roof, night-dark and threatening rain, juts and spurs of stone sticking out into it like jagged, uneven teeth. The moonless night is the only source of light the whole hollow space has, now that Delphine’s torch is flagging. Esbern strikes his own alight, his skin and hair pale enough to glow with it and his eyes wide and darting, and he peels away into the cavern proper, underneath the cold gap in what should be the roof, to exclaim over the rocks.It is a temple, the Dragonborn does not tell him, and it is inside a mountain. Both are usually made largely of rocks. She doesn’t follow why this development is so energising to him. But she follows him a few fumbling steps all the same, careful to go slowly so she doesn’t tangle her feet in dirt or roots or each other, and she looks around, too.It is very large, the cavern; colourless as the empty sky, dirt and uneven gravel giving way to the smooth grid-cracked stone of a manmade floor, the walls smooth and sheer. They go up very high, and more stone swells from their bulk, sharp-edged and lopsided, like it might fall down on them; thick knots of hanging moss and scrubby mountain bushes grow from the cliff-face dirt. Above, the sky. Ahead, empty braziers, more odd stone structures, and a massive stone-carved face set into the far wall. Esbern waxes lyrical about all of it, as if, perhaps, the rest of them have no eyes and can’t see any of it themselves. He keeps a hand fisted in the collar of his coat even as he narrates everything he sees. He might be cold. She’ll ask Lydia later what the weather is like; if they need warmth, she can tell the fire to light, and then they will all smile at her.But the braziers here are empty, as Esbern says they have been for a long, long time. They are not pausing for fire yet. Like all the other hallways and half-crumbled rooms they’ve passed on their journey into the cratered middle of the mountain, this isn’t their destination, just another trap or trick or test to pass on the way through. Esbern says they’re getting close. Delphine is checking, eagle-eyed, for more traps. The Dragonborn stands next to one of the braziers and listens to them both until she stops wanting to.(There is a seal on the ground that might be the way through, Esbern says, and then he starts talking about rocks again, gesturing with his elbow at the large, smooth-carved head tucked neatly into the archway. See how they revered him, he says, and the Dragonborn looks.)She looks it in its sightless eyes. The head is big, looming, built into the wall; it is smooth where the dome of the scalp would be, its brow ridged heavy, its mouth a flat, proud line. It has been here a long, long time, Esbern keeps saying, and she knows it to be true; but that’s not all he’s said, and so she steps smoothly forward, over the careful disc set into the floor, squinting in the colourless dark – Esbern, with the strong-flaming torch, is behind her, and her shadow flickers oddly as it approaches the massive stone cheek – and she looks into one of its blank eyes up close, and then she reaches out and sets her hand on the end of its nose.The stone is old, weatherworn, ages and eons of rain digging little pits and trickles into its surface until it feels not like the too-smooth stone in modern temples, the sort that makes her shoes slip and her hands glide like they’re oiled, but like something more raw, more natural. It doesn’t seem very reverent, to the Dragonborn – they didn’t even give him hair, or horns, or paint him, but the stone feels solid under the callused rasp of her palm, and it’s very easy to look him in the eye, though of course he doesn’t look back.She says, “His name was Reman.”“Ye-es,” says Esbern behind her, who may have been talking already, and then, “yes, this whole place – the entire temple complex, perhaps, and this entrance hall at the very least – appears to be a shrine to Reman Cyrodiil. You recall –”“You said it was dragons,” says the Dragonborn, and he stops, again. (The temple – he’d said the temple was about dragons – dragonguard and dragonlore. The face carved into the weathered stone wall is very, very human, even though it’s sharp at the brows and the chin, even though a steady drip of water has carved a damp scar through the jawline.) It takes a moment to grasp the words – Esbern opens his mouth again – she cuts over the sound of him, says “He’s not the Dragonborn. He’s Reman.”She can see Esbern out the very edge of her eye, in the corner. He is looking at her. “Reman,” he starts, and then he stops; her hand reaches along the faintly worn shape of the face’s cheek; he says, “He was – one of the best known dragonborn emperors. As far as I’m aware, they all – had names – you’re an outlier, in that regard.” She presses her thumb into a worn spot, like a mole. Esbern says, “It isn’t mutually exclusive.”The Dragonborn looks very hard at the flat, pale eye, and considers this.“But there isn’t room,” she says. Esbern keeps looking at her. The torch in his hand flickers and leaps like windblown snow, like sound.“He founded the Second Empire, Thane,” Lydia says lightly – standing shadow-faithful somewhere behind her, nearer her good ear – “so I think he managed alright.”The Dragonborn leans back until she feels her armoured shoulder bumping into another body behind her, eyes still focused on the worn-away carvings and careful-smooth shapings of the head.It doesn’t look very reverent. It doesn’t even really look like a real head, all the lines too sharp, all too intentionally carved; even if it were smaller, a size heads more usually are, and made out of skin and blood instead of cold raw rock, it wouldn’t really look like much of anything. Bald. Pointy. There’s nothing in it, maybe apart from the size, that suggests anyone of significance. Nothing that says dragonborn. Nothing that says Reman, not in the tone Esbern uses when he says it, like it means anything. There aren’t a lot of important names in the world. Most people don’t have any. No-one has more than one.They said she would learn about the Dragonborn in this temple; she supposes that this is a sort of learning.“You have names,” Lydia reminds her, gentle; “Delphine gave you one, remember?”When she presses her fingers hard against the curve of the stone, their tips blanche, turning yellow-white as bone. “Alixandra,” she supplies – and Lydia gave her Thane, and the woman with yellow hair, back before almost everything else, gave her feilan and dear. Mirmulnir gave her Dovahkiin as she swallowed him. That one was earned, so it’s different to a gift. She says, “But I’m not them.” You can have as many names as you want but you can’t be more than one. Not both at once. How could anyone fit it all?They talk as if the stone head is Dragonborn and is Reman in equal measure, and if Reman is really so important – she is already so big. She can’t imagine where he would put it all.They said she would learn about the Dragonborn in this temple; she thought she already knew, but perhaps he is different to her. She is beginning to wonder if there is anything that is the same.There’s Delphine’s voice, somewhere, dimly, from a far-away side of the room; the Dragonborn has to turn her head to find her in the moonless dark, her torch a sputtering ember, her words hazy as they reach the Dragonborn’s bad ear. She swims into focus, says, every word clipped neatly as ever, “Are we going to talk about rocks all night, or are we going in?”What she means by that is that she wants to go in; so the Dragonborn takes her hand from the ridge of the statue’s cheek, and turns around (clips Lydia’s shoulder on the way), and walks onto the disc a little ways away from the door. It’s made of a different rock than everything else, smooth-grained, the soles of her shoes slipping against it just a little; but there are enough grooves to find purchase against, cut into the stone in concentric circles and sharp-edged lines. Little channels. The rock around them is stained dark.A blood seal, Esbern called it. Her blood seal. She is not bleeding. The sky above, through the snapped teeth of the cavern ceiling, is starless and clean.She looks up at Lydia.Lydia sighs. Her eyes are the same devouring grey-blue of the sky.“How much blood,” she asks Esbern, “and where?”The Dragonborn cocks her head so she can make out his response. “The art is lost,” he says, quavering in the way that means he’s thoughtful, “and the specifics elude me – but little, surely. Where would be the sense in exsanguinating guests of honour?” He pauses. “The centre. Yes, I – hm. The centre.”“Excellent,” says Lydia; the Dragonborn looks at her hands, but they do not move to the hilt of her blade. Lydia sighs again, with gusto. “Can I have your shaving knife, please?”The little knife is produced, and held as near to the flames of the torch as possible without singing Esbern’s pale fingers so any dirt will burn away, and then it is given to Lydia. It is very small in her hand. It doesn’t look like it can do much damage; the Dragonborn is not convinced it will even break skin.Lydia screws up her face at it. Quiet, she says, “And I must, Thane?”The Dragonborn blinks. “I shouldn’t.” Her fingers are not deft – her hands shake when they mean to be still, and move in fits and jolts when they mean to be steady – and caution in things that could cause injury has been very firmly pressed upon her.Lydia’s face wears very strange shadows when she twists it that way. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she says, and the Dragonborn knows they prefer it when she replies but it’s too inconceivable for any response to be dredged up, so she rolls up the thin material of her sleeve – the bracers were removed ages ago – until it’s bundled loosely above her elbow, just below the point of her pauldron, and holds her arm out. She’s quite confident it’s cold in the cavern-hall, but her skin doesn’t goose-pimple.With needlework delicacy, Lydia lances the pale skin just near the bend of her elbow. Her face is focused and flickering in Esbern’s helpful torchlight. Then, “Shit,” she says, with a feeling more easily interpreted than most, and she hurriedly takes off her belt and wraps it once-twice-three times tightly around the Dragonborn’s arm. The effort is hampered by the pauldron. Blood dribbles sluggish down the crease of her elbow; she doesn’t feel it.“Be easier with leeches,” Esbern says ponderously.“Or a bowl,” says Delphine, and she takes off her pack to get one.They drip a little bit of blood into the curved bottom of her shiny bowl; it has a pattern in it that is covered up quite quickly. Delphine pinches the little cut to get it to produce more. She says it’s too shallow. (“I have a lot of blood,” the Dragonborn says, and Lydia says, “Yes, but I’d like to leave as much of it as possible in your body.”)They give her back the bowl, with its not-very-much blood trickling around the base, and she crouches down low to the floor and pours it into the middle-most circle of the seal.For a moment, as it seeps out blankly over the stone, nothing happens; but then it drips into one of the channels, and between one blink and the next it’s running over the strange pattern of it as if there’s nearly enough blood to cover it all, a strange criss-cross sprawl rapidly darkening with it. Like a gnarled, heart-shaped halo. Like a spiralling crown of horns.(Sossedov, she remembers, and she is proud of remembering, but she does not say it because these are not words to be uttered lightly.)She looks up and ahead, then, at the Reman-Dragonborn’s weathered rock face. She thinks it might be her temple more than his, no matter how many things he might be, because she is here and he is rocks. She wonders if maybe he needed the spare name, because one day someone would take the first one from him. She will need to think about these things again.With a loud, horrible grinding noise, his face is pulled away into the hollow of the rock, a yawning passageway opening up behind him.