User:JohnB/Fanfiction/The Multicolored Dream Coat

“Here he comes,” the eldest, Aldam, remarked to his brothers.

They turned and looked. There was a youth approaching over the grassy landscape carrying a parcel.

“What do you propose to do?” the second brother Benar asked, concerned that the eldest might take it upon himself to lead them into doing something they may later regret.

They had been watering the guar herd at a deep well, and Aldam nodded toward it.

“Good place for him to disappear,” he observed drily.

“No, Aldam, he’s our brother!”

“Not by our mother.”

“But a brother nonetheless!”

“Casain, what do you say?”

“I don’t like it. Whatever you do, either count me out or do it in a way that puts us all above reproach.”

“Quiet, here he comes.”

Daynil approached and set the parcel on the ground. He untied the knotted cloth that held it together and spread it out on the ground.

“Father said to bring you this supper so you will never be reduced to eating carrion,” he explained arranging the dishes on the cloth.

“Well, tell me you s**t!” Aldam suddenly barked grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and pulling him to his feet. “Who told him that we found a fresh carcass of a nix hound and stole it from the beast that killed it?”

Daynil’s eyes widened with alarm.

“So it really did happen!”

“So really what happened?!”

“The dream I told father about.”

“He saw it in a dream!” Aldam scoffed turning to the others, and they all guffawed.

“Was I anywhere nearby to see what happened that day?” Daynil asked furtively.

The three elder brothers huddled to formulate a response because it was true that he was nowhere within spying distance of where they barbecued the fresh carcass and devoured it.

What they didn’t know was that the multicolored coat that their father had found in an old junk shop in Tel Vos and presented to Daynil contained a powerful enchantment that gave the wearer the uncanny ability to see things in dreams that others either failed to see the significance of or hoped to keep secret, and to interpret dreams that nobody understood. He doted on the boy because he had taken a second wife after the first one died, but she also died giving birth to Daynil.

“This is getting creepy,” Casain said to the others. “How could he have known what happened that day? I say give him a good drubbing and let him go.”

“And then he’ll go and tattle on us!” Benar put in.

“I have a better idea!” Aldam said.

They tore the multicolored coat off his back and were about to throw him into the well when one of the brothers saw a band of rogue Ashlanders coming their way. When they were within hearing distance, the brothers hailed them.

The Ashlanders approached, and the brothers asked how much they would give to buy their slave.

“He has no bracer,” one of the Ashlanders pointed out.

“You hillbillies know nothing of the ways of the world, do you?” Aldam responded. “He’s growing, but technically he’s still a minor. The bracer goes on when he’s reached maturity. Besides, it should be no concern to you that he is really our half-brother, who we’d like to see taken away very far from here.”

One of the Ashlanders approached Daynil and inspected his teeth and musculature. He then took up a collection of gold coins from the others Ashlanders and gave them to the brothers. The Ashlanders prodded Daynil on as they led him away. The brothers killed a cave rat and smeared its blood all over the multicolored coat to make it look as if Daynil had been attacked and killed by a wild beast. Rent and defiled as it was, the coat was no longer of use to anybody, but the enchantment had migrated into the person of Daynil himself. Their father was inconsolable, and tears streamed down his face as he interred the coat in the tribal ash pit.

During the first night of his captivity, Daynil dreamed that he had a master. Furthermore, the master’s bed had been turned over, and Daynil stood falsely accused of having done it. He felt disturbed upon awaking because this was the first time he ever dreamed a dream about himself—and it didn’t bode well. Something very bad was going to happen to him, and it was going to take great patience and fortitude to ride it out. But he somehow knew that all would turn out well in the long run.

He was in fact bought by a Telvanni magister, but rather than send him into the egg mine, his master decided it better to groom him as an apprentice. He was childless, so when Daynil came of maturity, he could adopt him as his heir rather than clap a bracer on him. When told of this plan, Daynil knew it was too good to be true. The dream had informed him otherwise, and he remained wary of everyone around him who could one day bring his downfall from the master’s good graces.

First on the list was the master’s wife. When a couple were childless, more often than not it was blamed on the wife, not the husband. The ignominy was a painful burden, and she would do anything to redeem her honor and walk with her head high among the matrons of the Telvanni community. Then her husband would have no need for this new slave. He would pack him off to the egg mine, and nobody would be the wiser. Her husband was never at home during the day, so what she planned to do seemed all too easy.

At first the suggestions were discreet and indirect. She would take him into town for some shopping, and when pointing something out, she would touch his arm or look endearingly into his eyes. Daynil needed some way to avoid this pest, so he requested that his master give him some sort of assignment that would keep him away from the house during the day, but the wife had already preempted him on that. The master responded without giving it much thought that it was just as well for the time being if he assisted his ladyship. In other words, the disaster was already engraved in stone. There was no erasing any part of it.

Seeing she was victorious in this matter, her entreaties to Daynil became bolder and Daynil became more desperate to find some way to fend her off. She was also becoming desperate, to the point that she actually dragged him bodily into her bedroom and threw him down on the bed.

“This is no way for me to repay my master’s goodness!” Daynil pleaded, but she still strove to undo his trousers.

“What better way than to help me present him with a bouncing baby boy?!” she growled with the exertion.

So great was the scuffle that ensued it actually caused the bed to overturn. Daynil extricated himself from underneath and fled from the room.

“Embrace your demise!” she screamed after him.

Servants came rushing to her to find out what had happened.

“He assaulted me!” she bawled out with a touch of melodrama.

Daynil had also fled the house, so now he was also an escaped slave. If the false accusation didn’t sink him, this simple fact certainly would. He waited in a place where he knew the servants would find him.

Injustice was swift, and Daynil found himself in a holding pen at the Rotheran Stronghold arena waiting his turn to be fed to the nix hounds. This was the fate of escaped slaves or those who wronged their masters in the way Daynil had been wrongly convicted of.

One morning, one of the inmates told of a wonderful dream he had in which he was loaded down with shackles, but they all fell from his body as a brilliant sun was rising in the east. The others scoffed at him.

“No, this sounds interesting,” Daynil replied. He turned to the one who had dreamed. “You’ve been pardoned.”

“Nobody leaves here alive!” one inmate responded.

"I reassure you, it has happened."

"When?" the inmate who'd dreamed asked incredulously.

“This morning. Here it comes now,” Daynil mused as a key entered and turned in the lock of the holding pen door.

The door opened, and the inmate who had dreamed was called to present himself.

“My turn already?” he asked tremulously.

“No, your master has changed his mind,” came the explanation. “He needs you more alive than dead. Come with us.”

“Remember me!” Daynil called out above the commotion among the inmates.

“I will!”

It didn’t seem that way. Days passed and the line into the arena was getting progressively shorter.

Then suddenly in the middle of the night, the door was unlocked and guards came in bearing torches.

“Prisoner Daynil, come with us!”

Daynil feared that his master had opted for a swifter execution, but as it turned out, the master of the slave who’d been released had just suffered a horrific nightmare. The slave remembered Daynil, and Daynil was now being summoned to counsel the man who would soon be his new master.

(The story had to end here; otherwise, I would have had to locate the "Land o' Goshen" and the City of Ramses somewhere in Morrowind. The story of the carrion eaten by the brothers was something I read in a Jewish commentary on Joseph [can't remember where]. I'm not Jewish, but I understand that eating carrion is one of the most un-kosher things a Jew can do. The brothers had to be brought back into line, and this is why Joseph was hated--he was Jacob's eyes and ears.)