AN: Hi there, and welcome to my fanfic! This is a sort-of sequel to my Oblivion story, "The Gods Must be Crazy", though it isn't necessary to read that before starting this, and I will do my best to explain and give proper context to anything in it that gets referenced here. Also, this probably goes without saying, but for anyone who started reading it after I started the rewrite, this will contain a spoiler or two relating to its ending and later plot developments. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this chapter, and any and all feedback is appreciated!
Edwin awoke with a jolt as the cart rolled over a bump in the road. For what wasn't the first time, he wondered whether accepting that job as a cook in Jarl Ulfric's camp had been a good idea. Sure, he got to wear a Stormcloak uniform and his father didn't think he was a complete failure anymore, but he'd really have preferred to not get caught in that Imperial ambush. At least he knew that Ulfric's cause was justified, though. Anyone that thought a young man armed with naught but a ladle and a kettle of lukewarm stew was enough of a threat to capture alongside trained soldiers had no right to run an empire.
Gods, even the horse thief belonged on that cart more than he did. While he knew it would probably have just gotten him killed, he wished he would have at least tried to fight off the Imperials instead of surrendering like a milk drinker. At least then he could know that if he was headed for execution, he could die with honor and find a place for himself in Sovngarde. But there was little use in dwelling on that now.
The presence of General Tullius and several Thalmor agents in Helgen as the train of carts passed through the city made it hard to imagine anything but an execution as his final destination. Most of his cart-mates seemed to be of the same opinion, and as they were being unloaded in a large, open section of the city with an ominous-looking stone block set up in its center the horse thief tried to make a run for it. Edwin was halfway tempted to follow him until a pair of Imperial archers turned the man into a human pincushion. At least a beheading would be quicker.
For some reason only the gods knew, he was the second prisoner called to the chopping block. He managed to keep himself from retching as he knelt beside the corpse of one of his former comrades, and tried not to look down as he laid his head in the still-warm pool of blood on the block. They hadn't even bothered to remove the first man's head from the box beneath him, and its bloody stump and lifeless, staring eyes unnerved him more than he cared to admit. Whatever happened, he couldn't let himself show any fear. Nords died with honor. The headsman's axe glistened an almost beautiful shade of red in the sunlight as he raised it, and Edwin squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for it to fall.
The blow never came, however. Instead, he heard screaming and the world around him shook with some kind of terrible force. Edwin opened his eyes to see a black dragon perched atop the tower beside him, staring right at him as it prepared to let loose another attack. The world shook again, and then everything went dark.
To say that Marcel was having a bad day would have been an understatement. Well, it had been more of a bad week, really, but things were not going well for him either way. Leaving Cyrodiil for Skyrim had seemed like a great idea at the time; Skyrim was one of the provinces that the Thalmor had the least influence in, and he'd grown tired of them breathing down his neck constantly. What he hadn't planned for was running into worse things than Thalmor agents once he got there.
He'd barely made it over the border before a sabre cat had pounced on him out of nowhere and given him a good mauling that had been immortalized in the lovely new scars on his face. After that, a group of bandits had stumbled across him, robbed him of everything but his smallclothes, and left him for dead in the snow. He had then had the good fortune of being along the route of a Thalmor patrol led by none other than Skyrim's First Emissary Elenwen herself. Who had immediately recognized him, commanded that he be healed well enough to keep him alive, and taken him as a prisoner. And now it looked like he was scheduled for execution alongside several cartloads of Stormcloaks.
"Can't we talk this over?" he asked as he tried to keep pace with Elenwen's horse. Being tied to a saddle was not fun. "For old times' sake? You're not really going to kill your best friend, are you?"
"You're not really stupid enough to think that us being playmates nearly two centuries ago will convince me to spare you, are you?" Elenwen replied, bringing her horse to a halt. "How an elf could choose to ally himself with humans instead of his own kind as… dramatically as you have is quite beyond me."
"You do remember it, though. I knew you still cared." Marcel smiled at the irritated sigh, followed by a ghost of a smile, the Altmer let out. "And as I recall, us Dunmer are just as inferior to you as humans are."
"Former friend or not, I couldn't let you go if I wanted to. You've hindered our cause too much over the years for me to let you slip through my fingers without severe consequences."
"I'm not saying you should just let me go," the Dunmer said. "Just… maybe loosen that rope attaching me to your saddle a bit. I can run off into the forest, you can reprimand your soldiers for not tying a more secure knot, and everyone can live happily ever after."
"Absolutely not. I-" Whatever Elenwen had intended to say was drowned out by a powerful explosion of some kind and the sound of panicked screams somewhere nearby.
Before any of them could make sense of what was happening, what could only have been a dragon flew over them, and set the houses around them on fire. Elenwen and her fellow Thalmor agents abandoned him in favor of getting themselves safely inside the town's large, stone keep and, through either deliberate sabotage on Elenwen's part or a fortuitously unsecure knot, Marcel was able to break free of her horse. All the city gates were securely closed, so he had little option but to go towards whatever was unfolding at the town's center. Hopefully the dragon and fires would keep everyone from noticing his bound hands and ragged prisoner's garb.
As he drew closer to where the executions must have been held, the flames grew larger and hotter, and he had to fight his way past a small army of fleeing townspeople and soldiers, Imperial and Stormcloak alike. Once he was alone except for the corpses of a few unlucky sods that couldn't outrun the dragon, he looked for something he could use to cut the ropes off his wrists. A large axe resting by a stone block served his purpose well enough, and he was about to go looking for a place to hide until things had died down a bit when he noticed that one of the corpses surrounding him was still breathing.
Marcel was fairly sure it was a Nord, and while he was wearing a Stormcloak uniform he looked like he was barely out of his teens. His light brown hair was streaked with blood oozing out of a gash on his forehead where he must have knocked his head against something in the chaos of the dragon attack. Whatever had happened to him, a closer inspection revealed that he was definitely still alive, but wouldn't be for long if the dragon decided to stop torching the other side of the town and make another pass over the place its rampage had started. Even if the dragon left him alone, he wasn't likely to last very long on his own, especially against any animals or humans who came along to scavenge what they could from the town's remains.
Normally the Dunmer would have just left him there, but for some reason he couldn't force himself to do it. He didn't know the man, and while he didn't know much about the Stormcloak rebellion he did know that they weren't exactly friendly to anything that wasn't a Nord. Especially elves. He had no way of knowing how this one would react if he woke up and realized he'd been helped by a Dunmer. Still, he did seem like he was young enough to be open to different ways of viewing the world, and even if he did react badly he probably wouldn't be much of a threat. It just wouldn't have felt right to condemn someone who hadn't even grown a beard yet to that kind of death, either. The dragon making its way closer to their location finally settled it.
Inwardly thanking the gods that the man wasn't as broadly built as most of his countrymen, Marcel dragged the unconscious Nord into a sturdy-looking stone tower and waited for him to wake up.
Edwin awoke to find himself safely inside and away from the dragon. He tried to sit up, only to fall back to the floor with a groan when his head felt as though someone had taken a warhammer to it. He gingerly prodded at his forehead and found a rough strip of fabric wrapped around it in a makeshift bandage. It was damp, though an inspection of his fingers revealed that it wasn't with blood, thank the Nine.
"Good, you're awake," a decidedly non-Nordic voice said from somewhere near his feet.
Curious as to who had moved him, and whether he had only been saved from the dragon to meet his end at the hands of another Imperial headsman, Edwin sat up again, more slowly this time, and found himself looking into the red eyes of a Dunmer.
He was dressed in a ragged set of clothes, with a wide strip of cloth missing from the shirt that had probably been used to bandage Edwin's head. The dark gray skin on the elf's wrists had been chafed to a shade of red that almost matched his hair and, as the patch of facial hair beneath his lower lip made abundantly clear, would have been more than capable of growing the beard that the gods seemed so intent on denying the young Nord. It was clear enough that the Dunmer had also been a prisoner, though he had no idea who had taken him captive, or why. It did, however, seem safe to assume that he was not a Stormcloak.
"Who are you?" Edwin asked.
"Marcel. Are you all right? I found a healing potion on that corpse, but it probably wasn't enough to completely heal that head wound of yours," the Dunmer replied, gesturing to the body of one of Edwin's former comrades.
"I'm fine," the Nord said, shakily forcing himself to stand. Then, as an afterthought, he added, "My name's Edwin."
"It's nice to meet you." Marcel got to his feet as well. "Do you think you can travel? I'd rather not spend the night here if we can avoid it."
"We?" Grateful as he was that the Dunmer had helped him, Edwin wasn't sure he liked the idea of them traveling together. He'd never live it down if anyone found out that he'd needed help from a gray-skin, and for all he knew Marcel was working with the Imperials. Though it wouldn't have made much sense for anyone on their side to help a Stormcloak…
"Whatever your plans are, I'm going with you. I didn't drag you through a burning town so you could wander off and get yourself killed."
"I don't need your help," Edwin growled. He was tired of other people seeing him as weak, but at least it made sense when it was coming from someone who was bigger than he was. Even if it was probably justified given his condition, he couldn't accept being treated like a weakling by someone smaller than him, especially when that someone was an elf.
"All right. Let's see you go off on your own, then."
Edwin managed to make it out of the tower and into the ruined town before he realized that, while he probably could have walked anywhere that wasn't too far away, he wasn't going to be fighting off anything stronger than a newborn kitten for a while. The sun, low in the sky as it was, was incredibly bright, and if he moved too quickly or suddenly his head ached and the world around him seemed to spin.
"We can travel together," he sighed, leaning against the side of the tower.
"That's what I thought. So, where are we going?"
"We should go to the nearest hold capital, and tell the Jarl about the dragon attack. Someone needs to spread the word about what happened here, and there's no guarantee that anyone else made it out alive. Our best bet is probably Whiterun, but it's a bit of a walk…"
"We'd better get started, then," Marcel said, picking through a pile of rubble near the tower's base.
"We should. There's another town around here somewhere. Riverwood, I think its name was. It might be best if we stopped there for the night and finished our walk to Whiterun in the morning."
"That's fine by me." Marcel had moved most of the rubble out of the way, and dragged the corpse of an Imperial soldier out of what was left.
Edwin cringed as the Dunmer stripped the man of his armor and put it on, his heart sinking when he saw his traveling companion wearing an Imperial uniform. Even if that soldier had sided with the Imperials, it felt wrong to stand by and let someone rob his corpse. He supposed there was no helping it, though; without robbing any corpses, Marcel would have been stuck wearing those tattered rags for the gods knew how long. He looked around for a weapon for himself as the Dunmer fastened the Imperial soldier's sword to his belt, and settled for a sturdy-looking warhammer sticking out of another pile of rubble. He doubted he'd be able to swing anything more than once, but hopefully if he was wielding a warhammer he wouldn't need to.
Once they'd picked up everything useful or valuable in they could find, they left the ruined town and struck off in what Edwin hoped was the direction of Riverwood and Whiterun.
"So, what were they going to chop your head off for?" Marcel asked once they were a fair distance down the road.
"I was working as a cook in a Stormcloak camp and there was a raid…"
"The Imperial Legion is executing cooks now? That's not ridiculous at all…"
"…Why were you there?" Edwin asked. He'd assumed that, whatever he was a prisoner for, the Dunmer had at least started out on the Imperials' side. But if he was willing to criticize their actions, maybe he'd misjudged the elf.
"I pissed off the Thalmor."
"How did you do that?"
"Everything, or just the most recent part? Because those are very different answers."
"By the Nine, how long is your history with them?"
"Well over a hundred years. Closer to two, really."
"That's explanation enough for me," Edwin said. "Does that mean you're not working with the Imperials, either?"
Marcel sighed. "I am a loyal citizen of the Empire who happens to think that the best way to show that loyalty is interfering with the Thalmor's plans when I can."
Edwin was silent for a moment, trying to figure out what to make of his traveling companion. On the one hand, he and the Dunmer were in agreement on their opinion of the Thalmor. On the other, their thoughts on the Empire itself clearly differed. Still, some common ground was better than none, and he just couldn't find it in himself to dislike the elf.
"Whatever side you're on, thanks for helping me get out of Helgen," he finally said. Edwin saw no purpose in making enemies where he didn't have to, and anyone that was willing to drag an unconscious stranger to safety was probably worth trying to befriend.
"Thanks for getting over that pride of yours," Marcel replied, the corners of his mouth turning up into a small smile.
The rest of their journey to Riverwood passed in a pleasant silence, with both parties content in the knowledge that whatever the next day brought, at least they wouldn't have to face it alone.
