« The Secret Garden »
Sontaire was busy, so Bodran had let himself in. Not through the door, of course (Soindaale wouldn’t have approved), but through the window. He presumed, although it was wrong of him to do so, that Sontaire would have no clients in her personal bedroom that day. And so, he stripped himself down and lay on her bed expectantly. Bodran, notorious for his lack of patience, was bored with this posturing within five minutes (besides, his nipples were cold).
Snugly clothed by Sontaire’s bathrobe, he paced her room. And for the next half-hour, he made sure his facial hair was perfectly groomed in the bathroom, he read a bit of her book on her bed, and he explored her fine jewellery to appraise them silently in his head. Bored with even this, it was time to play ‘treasure hunt’. It was inevitable, even with a business so smoothly run as Sontaire’s, that little things would often fall between the cracks (in fact it was all the more likely since Sontaire’s business was a large one by Skyrim’s standards). And so Bodran, naked as the day he was born save for Sontaire’s bathrobe, went through every nook and cranny of Sontaire’s bedroom looking for hidden booze, coin, and forgotten lingerie.
And that’s when he found a book which he had never laid eyes on before. The only immediate details he could discern was that it was old and well-used. Bodran cracked it open without question, flicking through its pages carelessly. As with most books on Nirn, the pages were handwritten—and so Bodran found nothing interesting in that respect. It was rather, the small water stains on some pages, the scrawled out bits of others, and the numerous blank pages at the end which made this book stand out amongst the others. Making himself at home under the duvet and propping himself up against a generous amount of pillows, he began to read.