Chapter 9

Chapter 9

     Cold.  That was the first thing I noticed, and I wondered if one could feel cold in Sovngarde.  I didn’t remember feeling the sensation when I had fought Alduin with the warriors of old, but then I had been a bit busy at the time.  People didn’t go to Sovngarde merely to sightsee.

     This cold was a dry sort of cold, the kind where the snow would not stick if you tried to ball it up in your hands.  It wasn’t a bone chilling cold, nor yet the kind where you could tell it was cold but the temperature didn’t really bother you.  It was just… cold.

     Then I remembered Miraak.

     My eyes flew open and I jolted into a sitting position, then instantly sank back with a groan at the sudden blinding glare and agonizing pain.   I spent the next minute or so lying on my back with one hand pressed over my eyes, waiting for the pain to die down again.  After what seemed ages it finally did, and I tried sitting up again, much more slowly this time, and pried two fingers apart to slowly get used to the light.  Before I could entirely see again I managed to push myself to my feet, ignoring the stabbing jolts in my shoulder.  I staggered a bit, still disoriented, then my vision finally cleared.

     I was in the middle of what had once been the Skaal village.  Turning around and around like a drunkard, tears came to my eyes as I looked around me.

     It was Helgen all over again.  The charred wooden posts of what had once been huts poked up out of the ground like the ribs of a dead animal, some still flickering with small bursts of flame.  The previously hard packed ground was churned up into slush by great claws, thrown into piles and tinted black and red by the soot and….

     Blood.  Blood was everywhere.  As I dazedly turned around, it seemed as though every single villager had either been torn so completely to pieces that the body parts were strewn across the entire width of the village or else their charred and blackened bodies were lying in various grotesque positions of agony and death.

     I fell to my knees and threw up.  Shakily I wiped my mouth with my left hand since it hurt too much to use my right and staggered back up.  I couldn’t stay here.  I had to get somewhere, tell someone….

     Tell them what?  That I had just unleashed a threat that may possibly be greater than even Alduin the World-Eater had been? 

     This was all my fault.  I had gone on many quests full of peril and difficult choices, but in all my time as Dragonborn, nay, my entire life, I had never screwed up this badly.  I may have gotten into plenty of scrapes and occasionally dragged others into them with me, but I had never done anything like this.  Miraak was so bitter at his former dragon masters that he was going to use his power to take out all his anger on the world, and I had been unable to stop him.

     I had to get to Raven Rock.  If they decided to execute me when they found out what I’d done, well then, let them try.  I wanted to warn them, but that didn’t mean I would just bow down to death.  I had laid my head on the chopping block once and vowed I would never do it again.  Not that I could pose much resistance in this state….  Speaking of which, why wasn’t I bleeding to death?

     I looked down at the place where I had been stabbed.  Green vines were tightly wound around my torso around the Thieves’ Guild armor, so tightly in fact that I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t noticed before.  I could still see the tip of the spike poking out between the vines.

     Hermaeus Mora, I realized with an unpleasant shock.  I tried to pry a couple fingers under the vines, but they were too tightly constricted even for that.  Why did he save me?  The answer was obvious.  His previous champion had gone rogue, and he wanted his new one to clean up the mess.  I supposed I should be grateful for him saving my life, but all I could really think about right now was how much it would hurt to cut the vines away and pull the spike out.  And of course, the second I did that my shoulder would once more be pouring rivers of blood.  Better to leave it like this until I could reach Raven Rock.

     If it was still there, of course, and if I didn’t pass out in the snow on the way there.  It was, after all, on pretty much the other side of Solstheim.  The island wasn’t all that wide, but I knew the terrain that I had freely crossed over before would take me agonized hours to travel in this state. 

     I looked back once, when I had climbed up on a ridge.  The trees hid most of the sorry remains of the Skaal village from sight, but I could still see wisps of smoke rising in the distance.  Briefly sending a plea to the Divines to allow the departed souls into Sovngarde, I turned and plowed onward.  Walking hurt, but not as much as I had expected it to.  In fact, my entire right arm and chest felt numb and unresponsive, and I seriously hoped I wouldn’t run into any bandits.  Even a wolf pack could prove deadly to me right now.

     That would be one for the history books.  The Dragonborn who had defeated Alduin, become champion of Hermaeus Mora, and been made Guildmaster of the Thieves’ Guild getting brought down by a pack of wolves….

     I started to laugh, then realized what I was doing and desisted.  I remember once during the Civil War I had tried to help a Stormcloak soldier whose arm had been cut off.  The man had started giggling then laughing unnaturally and hysterically, a wild look in his eyes.  That man had scared me more than all the fighting I had done in my life.

     I concentrated on the simple act of placing one foot in front of the other, only occasionally glancing up to orient myself in the correct direction.  Despite that it had only been midmorning when I left the Skaal village, it was dusk by the time I finally reached Raven Rock.  I saw no smoke, no other signs that Miraak had been there, but I was still wary.  As I neared the long wall that protected the settlement, I noticed to my relief that there were guards at the entrance.

     I had never been so happy to see guards in my entire life.

     They looked at me askance as I passed through the gate, but obviously they recognized me from before.  I had thoughtfully worn a wolfskin cloak over my damaged armor to hide the dark vines, or else I might be arrested for no other reason that being an oddity and a possible danger.  I managed to walk normally for just the amount of time that it took to get past those guards, then slumped against the wall of a house to rest for a moment, exhausted.

     “Good to see you again, lad!” a voice greeted from in front of me. 

     I would know that voice anywhere.  “Brynjolf?” I raised my head and smiled in spite of my current state of self-loathing.  Sure enough the master thief stood in front of me in his full set of Nightningale armor, his hood drawn back to reveal a head of red hair falling down to his shoulders.  Not just Brynjolf, but Vex too.  Something serious must have happened with the Guild if they had traveled all the way to Solstheim.

     I nodded to Vex, and she smiled her catlike smile, brushing back her white bangs behind her ears.

     Brynjolf placed his hand on my right shoulder and I couldn’t repress the grimace of pain.  He withdrew it instantly.  “What is it lad?  Are you hurt?”

     “You could say that.”  I had the sudden and idiotic urge to start laughing again.

     Both his and Vex’s expressions were now filled with concern.  Brynjolf wrapped my arm around his neck so I could lean on him and Vex led the way to somewhere I really wasn’t sure of, since I was busy staring at the ground directly in front of my two feet.  I was suddenly so bone-tired that without Brynjolf’s support I might have fallen.  I felt a rush of heat, then heard a door creak.  Vex was speaking to someone and I thought I recognized the voice, but my tired mind couldn’t place it with an owner.  I felt myself being lowered onto something, then suddenly remembered why I had come to Raven Rock.

     “Miraak!”  I jolted upright, spitting the name out like a curse.  “Tell Veleth about Miraak!”  I writhed as Brynjolf and Vex tried to force me back down, motivated by an uncontrollable fury.

     “Kisvar, calm down!” normally composed Vex shouted. 

     I had no intention of listening to her, but suddenly the rage was gone as fast as it had come.  It left nothing but exhaustion and a black abyss that slowly expanded until I could see nothing else.

     The next time I opened my eyes was entirely different.  First, there was a roof over my head instead of wide open, blindingly bright sky.  Second, my shoulder still ached, but not nearly as badly.  Third, thank the Divines, I wasn’t cold. 

     “Awake at last?” Vex’s matter-of-fact voice rang out.

     Having learned my lesson last time I tried to sit up quickly, I raised myself to one elbow first, noting I was on a cot.  “Almost.”

     “You’ve been out all night,” she said from her chair at a table on the other side of the room.

     The words shocked me like one of Miraak’s lightning spells.  I swung into a sitting position and would have gotten up if the change hadn’t suddenly caused my head to swim sickeningly.

     “I wouldn’t do that.”  She made no move to stop me, but her voice still made me pause.  “You lost a lot of blood while we were trying to cut those blasted vines off and pull the claw out.  Give it a moment.”

     For once I listened to her, mostly because I certainly felt like all the blood in my body had been drained away.  “Tail spike, not claw.”  She raised her eyebrows, but I didn’t elaborate.  “Brynjolf?” I asked shortly.

     “Went to the inn with Glover.  No, you aren’t going after him.  We didn’t spend half the night patching you up to let you collapse right outside the door.”  I glared at her, but she just smiled at me sarcastically.  Yes, a smile can be very sarcastic, and Vex had the most sarcastic one in Skyrim.  Probably in Solstheim too, come to think of it.

      “Fine,” I growled.  If Miraak hadn’t attacked Raven Rock yet, it was unlikely that he’d do so now.  He may be strong, incredibly strong, but even he would pause at the task of attacking a settlement full of determined Dunmer guards.  Even with the assistance of his enthralled dragon.  Unless of course he had found more dragons to enslave….  The thought made me shudder.  However, I had been all over Solstheim in my quest to cleanse the Stones, and I hadn’t seen any other dragons on the island besides the one I had killed.  Not that he didn’t have one or two stashed away somewhere in case of emergency….  I was obviously still not thinking straight, since I was comparing dragons to the stashing of wheat for the winter.

     I rolled my shoulder.  It was sore and it ached a bit, but the stabbing pain was gone.  I looked down and saw nothing but smooth skin.  “Did someone-” I started, confused.

     “Glover didn’t tell you?  That would be like him.  He trained to be a healer at the Mages’ College in Winterhold, back before he became a thief,” Vex explained.

     I had thought it must be a spell, since healing potions required time to work properly, but I hadn’t expected the blacksmith to be the caster.  The thought of rough and grouchy Glover being a healer was kind of amusing, actually.  Looking around, I saw the blood soaked remains of my Thieves’ Guild armor lying over the back of a chair.  Feeling well enough to stand by now, I reached into the pockets, looking for something else to wear until I could get a new set or get this one mended.  Which wasn’t likely, seeing as it had little black spots of acid, larger splotches of blood, and a large hole in it.  I decided to wear my Nightingale armor for now, unable to bear the thought of trying to wear heavy armor for the moment.

     At that moment the door banged open, heralding the arrival of the two men.  “How are you feeling, lad?” Brynjolf asked. 

     “Well enough.”  I nodded gratefully to Glover.  Both men sat down in chairs around the square table Vex sat at, and with a little effort I joined them.

     “Now how about you tell us what in the name of Nocturnal you were going on about yesterday?”  Brynjolf suggested.

     How much should I tell them?  Part of me really wanted to tell someone else, let me feel like this burden could be shared on someone else’s shoulders, but then I also didn’t really want the world to know what I had done.  Want them to know? I snorted to myself bitterly.  Soon the entire world will know what I did, whether I tell them or not.  If Miraak enslaved all the dragons on Skyrim, he would be unstoppable.  I was the only other Dragonborn alive, and thus was the only other person who could truly slay a dragon. 

     Basically, without me, the world was screwed.  And the world might as well be without me for all the good I could do.  Miraak had nearly slain me once; with uncounted dragons at his back, he could finish the job.

     I told them everything.  I told them about the note I found on the ground back in Skyrim, finding the Northern Maiden and sailing to Solstheim, discovering that something was going on with the people, and how I went to check out the temple.  Explaining about the black books and Apocrypha was a bit harder, but no one interrupted me.  I told them of Storn’s sacrifice, how I had almost killed Miraak until Relonikiv had intervened, how I then woke up in the destroyed Skaal village.  Finally, I told them where Miraak was headed next.

     “Skyrim.”  Brynjolf made the name sound like a curse.  “He’ll head straight across the ocean to Skyrim.” 

     I hated to make this their problem, but I didn’t know what else to do.  I may be the Dragonborn, but I was part of the Thieves’ Guild too.  Normally they would be concerned with nothing more than the jobs they were assigned, but I was dragging them into this as their Guildmaster.  “Yes.”  What else was there to say?

     No one spoke, and I realized they were coming to the same conclusions that I myself had before speaking.

     “This Miraak.”  Vex asked, just to confirm.  “You say he’s also Dragonborn?”

     “Yes.  He was Dragonborn back in the First Era, when dragons still ruled the earth and the other races were their slaves.  Miraak asked Hermaeus Mora for the knowledge to defeat his masters.  A dragon priest was about to kill him, and Hermaeus Mora drew him into Apocrypha to save him.” 

     “He’s just one man though,” Glover objected.  “How could he do any real damage in Skyrim, no matter how strong a magician he is?”

     “It’s not the magic, it’s his dovah blood.  Glover, he has Shouts that I’ve never seen before, let alone mastered.  Including one that allows him to bend the will of any dragon to his own purposes.”  I felt like this was an extremely inadequate explanation of his power, but I couldn’t really think of any way to impress the seriousness of this on my audience.

     Vex was silent, and I could see plainly what she was thinking.  She was basically imagining someone stronger than me at the head of a… flock? Horde? Herd? of dragons.  The image had been playing over and over in my mind, usually involving the destruction of Solitude or some other such heavily guarded city.

     Brynjolf set his foot on the table leg, giving an appearance of calm.  I saw right through it.  He and I had known each other for years, ever since he set me up with that one job in Riften.  “And you learned this Shout?  Could you not use it to take control of the dragons yourself?”

     “He’s known this Shout for nearly three entire eras, Brynjolf.  Literally.  And I’ve known it for a few days.  There’s no way I can wrest control of a dragon from him.” 

     “But you did, when you rode the dragon, right?” Glover asked.

     “I think he wanted me to.  If I hadn’t been able to sway Sahrotaar, I wouldn’t have been able to reach him on that island, no matter how strong my magic or sword arm was.”  I hadn’t thought about that before, neither in my blind rage nor journey here, but I felt sure this was true.  “If he was actually fighting me for control….”  I shook my head despairingly, the ache in my shoulder escalating.  I reached up to massage it.  “He had the entire encountered planned out, except possibly that he would have to heal himself twice.”

     “But he can be killed,” Brynjolf pointed out.

      That’s exactly what I thought when I fought him, I wanted to scream.  They didn’t understand.  None of them did.  Or at least, they didn’t understand the full implications. 

     “Yes, but we won’t even be able to get close to him once he enslaves enough dragons, and he’s no weakling.  He can use Shouts in ways I’ve never seen.”  I recalled the way he had used Unrelenting Force to redirect my fireballs.  “Speaking of that, how will we even find him?  He could be anywhere, go anywhere.  He could sit at the top of the Throat of the World and direct the fight from there and never show his face.”

     “This isn’t your fault, Kisvar.”  Vex didn’t sound pitying, which was good because I felt like the one thing I couldn’t handle right then was pity.  “No one else even had a chance of killing him, but you knew you had to try.  You couldn’t do any more than what you did.”

     “Oh yes I could have,” I said bitterly.  “I was about to kill him.  If I had seen the dragon coming sooner or struck just a little bit faster this quest would be over with right now.  Instead, the entire Skaal village died for absolutely nothing and I practically destroyed the world.”

     “Shut up.”  The words were so unexpected that I did, glaring at Glover.  Haha.  Glaring at Glover.  That sounds funny….  I slapped myself mentally.  “Whether this is or isn’t your fault doesn’t matter.  What are you going to do about it now?” 

     Do about it now?  The fight might as well be over.  I didn’t know where Miraak was, and once he surrounded himself with dragons, he would be unbeatable.  I opened my mouth, but Glover silenced me by banging his fist on the table.  “I’ll tell you what you’re going to do.  You almost killed him once, and it seems to me like just bad luck that you didn’t.  You even did it while on his turf, singlehandedly, and without knowing Shouts as well as he does.” 

     It really hadn’t been quite like that, but I didn’t interrupt.

     “And,” he said, raising a finger, “he doesn’t know you’re still alive.  He thinks his lat real threat has been eliminated.  If we keep it that way, he’ll become careless and we can find out where he is.  Then, when you face him next, you won’t be alone.”

     Brynjolf broke in.  “You have allies, and not just in the Guild, lad.”

     A flicker of hope sprung up in my chest.  True, I had been alone in Apocrypha (no, Sahrotaar didn’t count), and I did have many allies in Skyrim.  Maybe not all was lost.  I now felt foolish for expecting the three thieves to blame me for what had happened, although part of me still wished they would.  Whatever they said, it was my fault.

     However, they had given me the mental slap I needed to push on and fix this.  I would set this to rights or die trying. 

     As cliché as those words sounded, I meant them with every ounce of willpower I had.

     “All right.”  I looked around the table and smiled a little.  “I guess we’re sailing back to Skyrim.”

As promised, here's another chapter.  It should be pretty long.