The night sky was a whirling blizzard. The crunching snow beneath his boots sounded like the Madgod Sheogorath chewing ice, loud and jagged above the howling winds. The gale was so frigid that it felt scalding hot, and he felt as if the skin on his face was about to invert on itself and fall away from the cold. Naively thinking that Bruma was by far the worst of the Jerall Mountains, this man neglected to bring a scarf to wrap his face.
Now he paid dearly.
Reaching the height of the winding pass, he stopped and resituated his fur hat on his head. Scowling, squinting, he stared down into a whirling slide of snow and fog.
"Ruddy Colovian blood, by Stendarr, it's worthless," the Imperial murmured to himself. He hiked up his pack and set down the perilous descent into the fog of that pale pass.
He descended further and further down, and yet the snow hardly cleared at all. The sun began to rise to his right, casting everything in an awful, indecipherable placid light. The fog was still thick and the sun was hardly more than dim.
Over all the whistling wind and blowing snow, the man didn't see the crouched figures that hid behind spiny, snow-covered bushes and in deep embankments along the side of the road. He only barely saw the hazy gray figures down below on the path, thickly built, armored – Nords, by their profiles.
The Imperial thought, I must be in Skyrim.
At that moment, someone grabbed him from behind. He froze, the unfamiliar gloves hauling him up and swinging him to the ground. The side of his face smacked the flat stones of the old path and it chilled him to the bone and made his eyes spin.
"One more up here," said the cold voice above him. It had the coastal Colovian lilt of someone who was born around Anvil in the Gold Coast, but that lilt was bitter from the frost, and the roll of the tongue was sharp. Probably a soldier. That didn't make sense.
Reeling on the ground he heard an incomprehensible, shouted response from below. There was commotion, too. He shuddered at the close sound of zipping rope, unspooled from a coil, and shuddered again as his gloves were yanked off and tossed aside into the snow. The cold ate his bare hands. He felt the pressure of the rope wrapping around his wrists, and the soldier cinched it tight, and hauled him to his feet and spun him around and set him marching down the pass. He saw below the grey silhouettes of the Nords, with more soldiers leading them, further down the baleful slope and into the fog.
"Who," the prisoner stammered, his teeth chattering uncontrollably, "who are you people?"
"We're the Imperial Legion, Stormcloak," the soldier said hotly at his ear, his voice still muffled by the wind, "Don't recognize us when we have the upper hand?"
Sanedlos Kvinchal, son of a Chorrol Legionnaire, understood suddenly and clearly.
He was in a very bad way.
The soldier prodded him to move faster – they started to catch up with the others – Stormcloaks, he understood.
"Arkay, take my soul," he said to the howling wind.
It responded with a cruel, icy screech, and Sanedlos took that as the God's answer.
