A/N: This was inspired by a friend arguing with me that Skyrim doesn't have enough characterization for the easy writing of engaging fanfic. We ended up with a bet, and this was my contribution. At the time, I had been reading Quietus by Liisa Vatanen (which you should go read because it's amazing) and I was like, "I wish I could write something that awesome." What I ended up with was not that awesome, because seriously, not sure anything could be, but it is what it is.
This is the first of three chapters.
Disclaimer: Not my characters, not my world. Also, some lines of dialogue are quotes from the game.
Beautiful Skyrim Weather – Chapter One
"This must be that beautiful Skyrim weather I've always heard about." Serana's voice could hardly be heard over the howling wind.
Shivering, Cassandra hugged herself and shoved her frozen fingers under the equally frozen armpits of her ebony armor. It didn't actually help; her fingers were sheathed in plate gauntlets – it was mostly an instinct. Not for the first time, the Imperial woman caught herself wishing she'd never left Cyrodiil. "Of course the vampire would think the blizzard at noon was beautiful weather."
Serana brushed snow off of herself. "I'm no fan of the sun, but it would be better than this." She spat out a clump of snow. "If I'm not careful, I'll be snowed in just standing here."
Cassandra retreated back into the cave behind them. "I'd rather be snowed in than freeze to death. We'll just have to wait for the blizzard to pass. I could spend the entire afternoon shouting at it and nothing would happen. Your father can't end the world without the bow, and he won't ever get the bow if we never make it to the end of this pilgrimage." She gently set down the ceremonial ewer onto the cave floor and much less gently collapsed next to it. Every inch of her body ached. Falling down a waterfall was like being trampled by a mammoth, except that mammoths weren't normally accompanied by giant spiders clawing at your face. Uhg. Spiders. Serana's entire bag, Cassandra's bow, and Azura knew how much else had been broken or lost in the headlong tumble.
"If my mother had buried me under a pile of snow instead of sealing me in a box in the middle of a magic puzzle in a hole in the ground, my father would still be looking for me," said Serana. She sat down facing the Dragonborn and began picking snow out from where it had fallen down the front of her Volkihar armor.
From the safety of her full ebony helm, Cassandra rolled her eyes. Calling Volkihar armor "armor" was more than a smidge generous; it was Volkihar armor because only a powerful pure blooded vampire could afford to climb through a glacial crevice filled with feral falmar while wearing a silk and lambskin outfit that left so much exposed. Serana was a vampire for Talos' sake, there was no reason for her to have a window cut out over her chest. Except, well, that reason. Cassandra wasn't complaining about the design, just contemplating it.
"You're staring," said Serana.
"No I'm not," Cassandra replied immediately.
"Yes, you are, you rolled your eyes at me and then you started staring at my chest. That helmet makes your face dark, not invisible."
Heat rushed to the Dragonborn's cheeks and she wondered if the vampire could see that too. "I was just thinking. And staring into space. And you happened to put your chest there."
Was the vampire mad? Pleased with herself? It was so hard to tell through the sarcastic drawl. Cassandra liked to think of Serana as a friend, but deciphering where she herself stood with the other woman was difficult. Serana had been truly grateful for being released from her prison, which was a pleasant change of pace from the jarls' dismissive thanks for saving their holds from utter ruin ("yes, yes, here is the bounty for slaying the dragon, now could you please get out of my way?"). Serana seemed friendly, trusting, sincere. Cassandra wanted Serana to like her. But Cassandra remembered when they met ("I was expecting someone like me, at least"), and more than once she'd looked up and met Serana's eyes on her and felt less like a comrade and more like dinner. It had been happening more often lately, and the Dragonborn didn't like it.
"Oh? Then what were you thinking about?" And there it was. The dinner look. Serana's eyes seemed to be boring a hole into Cassandra's neck, covered though it was by armor. Perhaps she should invest in a leather gorget to go under all the ebony.
"Not," Cassandra began, "about your chest. Or the way your armor leaves your chest very exposed and vulnerable to falmer arrows and sun. I was thinking about other things." Weakly, she grasped for what other things she might have been thinking about. She could have been thinking about Serana's full lips. Or her hips. Or... "I was thinking about how we're going to find the other wayshrines down in the valley."
"If a snow elf pilgrim with a glorified bucket full of water can do it, I think we'll manage."
"It's not a bucket, it's an ewer. A ceremonial ewer of Auri-El."
This time it was Serana's turn to roll her eyes. "So it's a fancy bucket of some old god. It's still a bucket."
"Akatosh," Cassandra said. She was suddenly acutely aware of the weight of the amulet of Talos in her pocket. The gods were the gods. Serana's religious avoidance of temples bothered her. But she didn't feel it was her place to lecture the far older woman.
Serana shrugged. "Rest. I'll take first watch."
It was late evening by the time the blizzard calmed. Outside of the cave and the slope down to the valley floor was blanketed in a thick snow that made walking slow and difficult. Thankfully though, the valley floor itself was low enough to have been sheltered and there were a few scraggly trees that had blocked the worst of the weather and left a small path covered in only a thin layer of snow. Here and there, glowing gleamblossom flowers poked up from under the white, throwing off just enough light to make everything else that much darker.
Cassandra lit a torch and held it aloft. The stars were bright and the moon was in the sky – somewhere. The tall peaks surrounding them blocked out most of the light. "I'm not sure where we go from here and I can't see so you'll have to keep your eyes open for the first wayshrine." She glanced around, but all she could see were long shadows. Hopefully they weren't long shadows hiding vale sabre cats. Cassandra hoped that the sickly green stripes on their pelts would give them away before they could get close. All it would take was one of them to knock the ewer out of her grasp and spill the water everywhere.
"Your life would be so much easier if you could see in the dark," said Serana.
"Tried it once, didn't like it," Cassandra mumbled.
"Wait, what was that?"
"Huh?"
"You said you tried seeing in the dark once. You were a vampire?"
Cassandra's heart skipped a beat. "No! That wasn't what I meant. I was never- not that there's anything wrong with being a vampire."
Serana's eyes narrowed. "Because there's not?"
"Because there's not," Cassandra repeated back. Serana was looking at her with the dinner eyes again, and it was unnerving to say the least.
"Are you sure you're a member of the Dawnguard?" Serana asked mildly.
"So I have a little more life experience than Isran. Is there something wrong with that?" Cassandra raised her torch a little higher and took a few steps forward, squinting into the dark. "I'm not a vampire hunter, I'm the Dragonborn. I didn't join the Dawnguard to kill people, I joined to help people."
Serana humphed. "You're a very queer mortal. The wayshrine is that way." She pointed in almost the opposite direction from where Cassanrda was walking. "I can see the sun disc sticking out of the ground."
"Great," Cassandra said. "That's one down." She spun on her heel and began to tramp through the snow in the direction Serana had indicated. "I wonder how much water I need to add to the ewer? It could get heavy after another four dips. Do you think the path was better marked when-"
"Cassandra, watch out!"
The sabre cat came out of the tree and landed across Cassandra's neck. The ewer went flying out of her hands. It hit the ground on its side and rolled. Serana dived for it, sending up a spray of freshly fallen snow where she slid across the earth. The torch was also dropped, but it didn't receive a rescue like the ewer and, extinguished by the snow, it rolled away into the night.
A few feet away, Cassandra flailed, trying to catch hold of the sabre cat and pull it off of her face. The half-starved predator had gotten one of its paws jammed into the narrow opening of her ebony helm and no amount of tugging could dislodge it. Inside the helm, Cassandra grit her teeth as the animal's claws raked across her nose and pushed her face as far back as the helm would let her. With one hand she grabbed hold of the cat's shoulder and pushed as hard as she could while she groped for the dagger at her side with her other hand. The beast's jaws latched around her arm, but its teeth shattered on her ebony gauntlet. Finally Cassandra managed to draw her dagger. Again and again she stabbed blindly until the animal collapsed on top of her.
Cassandra let out a great sigh of relief. And then she tried to get up. And then she tried again. And then she gave up. The combined weight of her armor and the sabre cat was too much. "Serana?" she called.
"Hang on," was the response. Serana picked up the corpse of the animal but the paw was still caught in Cassandra's helm. She dropped the sabre cat back down. "I need to cut it loose."
When Serana finally got the cat off and the paw removed, Cassandra thought she was going to suffocate from the smell of wet fur. Coughing and choking, she sat up and pulled her helm off. "Ewer?"
Serana held up the initiate's ewer and turned it upside down. Nothing came out.
Cassandra swore. "We'll have to go back to the cave..." Her words trailed off when she noticed the vampire was staring at her unblinkingly. And smiling.
"I've spent enough time underground myself, but if you want to go back, I'm right behind you," Serana said hollowly.
"Of course we have to go back," said the Dragonborn. "The water spilled, we need to get more from the first wayshrine. Why are you staring at me like that?"
Serana shook her head violently and blinked her eyes several times. "The water is fine. It froze to the bottom of the ewer. I – I'm sorry. Your face, I just..."
"What about my face?" Cassandra lifted a gauntleted hand to her face, but when her fingers touched her mangled nose she hissed in pain. "Oh. How bad is it?"
"It's bad," Serana said. She took a step back, then another. She swallowed hard. "Perhaps you should fix that."
"Right," Cassandra mumbled. She raised her hand to her face again and focused. A faint yellow-white light enveloped her fingers and nose. She hardly ever used magicka and it showed every time she tried to cast a spell. Restoration was practically the only school she was passable with. When she took her hand away again, the deep gashes across her face had scabbed over, though they still oozed a little around the edges. Hopefully it would be enough to prevent infection. They would scar eventually, but Cassandra had dragged her body through so much that a few more scars hardly mattered. "Is that better?"
"No, your face is still covered in blood. But I'll be fine. If you could just keep your distance until it dries?"
Cassandra nodded and put her helm back on. It stank like cat and blood, but not wearing it was risking her life. "Which way was it to the wayshrine?" Her torch was gone, never to return. Peering out from inside the ebony helmet, she could make out dim shadows. She assumed the moving humanoid shadow was Serana.
The rest of the walk to the second wayshrine was thankfully uneventful and the women passed the time with small talk about the probability of more sabre cat attacks. The conclusion was: low, except for when it would happen. Although Cassandra suggested that they stop there at the shrine for the night and set up camp, Serana insisted that they press on. She could see perfectly well and could guide them. They had no time to waste.
"You may be nocturnal, but I'm not," Cassandra argued. "I can't see. Look at what happened with the sabre cat. The world will still be there to be saved tomorrow. I should know. We don't even know how far it is to the next wayshrine."
"Don't lecture me on patience." Serana's tone was as cold as the Skyrim weather she loved so much. She took a deep breath and crossed her arms over her chest before continuing. "Look. Every minute we stand here arguing, you look tastier and tastier. So can we please just get moving?"
"No," said Cassandra. "No we can't. I already told you, I can't see anything. If we try to press on now, we're one ambush away from it not mattering how hungry you are. Why is this a problem now? It's never been a problem when we traveled before."
"The Volikhar court has a way of preserving blood as a potion. It tastes off, but it's the same as feeding normally. All of mine were in my bag."
Cassandra was silent. She'd known the vampire was surviving off of bottled blood, but she hadn't thought enough to realize that when Serana's bag was lost in the long fall down the waterfalls all the vampire's food went with it. Gods damn it all. Serana had even warned her about the rotting rope and plank bridge. "This changes things," the Dragonborn said slowly. "How long do you have?" She moved to pinch the bridge of her nose in frustration and then hissed when she brushed up against her still unhealed wound.
Serana shrugged. "Before I starve or before I maul you?"
"Both."
"I'm not sure. A few days maybe. I don't want to find out."
Cassandra grimaced. Without seeing the valley in the light and from a mountaintop, it was impossible to know how long it was, but she suspected it was more than a few days journey to the end – and the end was almost inevitably where the last wayshrine would be. They could try to turn around and head back, but that meant going up at least two waterfalls while fighting off spiders and falmer. The walls of the valley were high enough and the location remote enough that any calls for help wouldn't reach the intended ears. She couldn't even summon Arvak – something about the place was stopping the spell. The only way out was through. "Let's get moving then. Do you know where we should go next?"
Serana stood up and brushed snow off of herself. "There's a stone arch over there. I saw another one on our way here. I think they're path markers of some sort."
They passed through arch after arch, though Cassandra could hardly see them. She imagined that once upon a time, when the path had still been traveled by snow elves on pilgrimage, the stone structures would have been magnificent. She was busy daydreaming about what the monuments might have once looked like when Serana's voice interrupted her thoughts.
"I'm sorry if I was short with you," she said.
Cassandra shook her head. "You had every right to be. I was being stubborn and you had a good reason for wanting to travel now. If we travel at night I'm a worse fighter, if we travel by day you're worse – I was just being selfish. If you hadn't snapped at me, I'd still be insisting we sit and twiddle our thumbs back there."
"Thank you for understanding then."
The crumbling arches lead the two women up a path that went through a low pass in the side of the valley wall and into another vale. A nest of spiders attacked them on the way to the crest of the hill, but with Serana in the lead they had enough of a warning to set down the ewer carefully before quickly dispatching the arachnids. Frostbite spiders were everywhere in Skyrim, but they were extremely fragile and even the larger ones only took one or two solid hits to kill. In the distance, a waterfall rumbled.
The Dragonborn was absentmindedly wiping slimey spider gore from her sword when they reached the crest of the ridge. Serana stopped abruptly and Cassandra, only half paying attention to where she was going, barely stopped in time to keep from knocking the vampire down. "What is it?" Cassandra demanded. "Is there something wrong up ahead?"
Serana shook her head. "Just… come here. Look at this."
Hesitant, Cassandra shuffled forward and peered around the female vampire. Her jaw dropped at what she saw in the next valley. They had climbed far enough out of the vale that the stars and moon bathed the world in a pale light, and that light glittered off of a hundred thousand droplets of water, frozen in mid motion as they cascaded down from a great lake atop a plateau. Great plumes of ice hung suspended in the air, and beneath them more plumes of ice, and beneath those still-running water dropped the hundred feet or more to the valley floor.
"This is the kind of thing I love seeing…" Serana mumbled. "Makes everything else worth it."
Cassandra wanted to make some sarcastic comment about Harkon and his relative importance to an ice sculpture, but the words wouldn't leave her mouth. Instead, she just stood quietly by Serana's side, awestruck by the natural wonder.
They stood like that for some time, long enough that, when Cassandra remembered how bitterly cold it was to stand in the wind atop a hill, the sun too slow in warming the horizon. Grumbling, Serana put up her hood. "We should go… It's your turn to squint at things in the distance."
Cassandra nodded. "I think I see the next wayshrine over there, to the south. It's on a little bit of a cliff." The Dragonborn lead them down from the pass and then alongside the icy river. Bit by bit, the sun continued to rise, casting its rays into the enormous ice crystals of the frozen cascade and turning them all empyreal hues of red and gold.
As the Dragonborn walked, she was wrapped up in her thoughts. If they traveled nonstop for the entire day, they would have to rest at nightfall. There was no way to avoid it. Pressing on while exhausted was more dangerous than losing time sleeping. And the farther they went without stopping, the worse it would be for whoever kept first watch. Did she even want Serana keeping watch though? Vampires were known to prey on sleeping victims and- and Serana was a trustworthy companion and Cassandra had no business suspecting her of anything. But the sooner they rested, the better Cassandra would feel. About everything.
"Cassandra, we're here."
Cassandra snapped out of her thoughts in time to hear the last of the ghostly prelate's words. She suspected though, that if she'd continued to stand there, he would have repeated himself. The prelate's existence was at once a tribute to his god's power and a desolate reminder of how little power that god still had.
"-to honor the mantras of Auri-El and fill your vessel with His enlightenment?"
"Yes," said the Dragonborn, almost as mechanically as the prelate. In a hundred thousand years, would the temples of the Nine be nothing more than lonely ruins for adventurers? The amulet of Talos felt heavy in her pocket.
"Auri-El bless you, child. For you are a step closer to the Inner Sanctum and everlasting wisdom."
Closer to the Inner Sanctum, maybe, but Cassandra had heard too many promises of wisdom and power to put much stock in this one. The prelate cast his spell and the wayshrine rose up out of the ground. Cassandra dutifully dipped the ewer in the basin and added a cupful of water to the ice at the bottom of the container. Hopefully, she turned to the ghost and asked, "Which way to the next wayshrine?"
"May Auri-El's warmth imbue your body with strength."
"Is that a riddle or directions?" Cassandra asked.
"May Auri-El's warmth imbue your body with strength."
"We should cross the river and head north," said Serana. "The only thing to the south is another waterfall. I think I've had enough of waterfalls for the time being."
"May Auri-El's war-
"Shut up!" Cassandra yelled at the ghost. To her surprise, it obliged. "Okay, let's go north. If I ever try to jump off of a waterfall, you're free to stop me, with force if necessary." Following her own instructions, she began to walk toward the horizon where several large ice sheets formed a bridge over the water.
"You should be careful what you ask for," Serana said.
Cassandra laughed. "If only I'd learned that lesson before I came to Skyrim."
"What do you mean by that?" Serana asked. "I've told you a lot about my family. You've said almost nothing about yourself."
"There's not much to say," Cassandra said. "I'm the Dragonborn. I go from hold to hold killing dragons, fishing cats out of trees for small children, and finding family heirlooms peasants dropped while exploring Nordic ruins a hundred miles or more from their town."
"But you're more than that," said Serana.
"I have a few other titles," Cassandra said with a shrug. "Most of them earned by killing people."
"No doubt they were people who deserved to die," said Serana – an opinion stated like a fact.
"Not all of them," replied Cassandra. "Some of them were… just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Skyrim is a bad place for peace." She hoped Serana would get the hint and drop the conversation. She'd always respected the vampire's 'I'm not having this conversation with you,' so why couldn't Serana do the same?
"I have a hard time believing you'd kill innocents. You spend your free time giving gold to beggars and playing tag with orphans. Or are you doing that for redemption?"
"I'm just doing what good I can for its own sake. I'm not looking for redemption," Cassandra snapped. "I did what I did because I chose to, and now I'm doing this now because I choose to."
"Really? You feel as though you've had a choice in all your journeys?"
Clearly Serana was not going to take the hint. Cassandra stopped walking and turned to face the vampire. "If there's something you want to ask, ask it. Otherwise, can we please stop talking about this? I did some things that I'm not proud of, but they're in the past now, and I don't want to dwell on it. I try not to press you when it's clear you don't want to talk about something. I would appreciate it if you'd do the same. Also, I'd appreciate it if you stopped looking at me like I'm dinner." The Dragonborn started walking along the path again. "Now let's get this quest over with. Because I'm not dinner. I'm a person."
Serana stood there dumbstruck for a moment, then hurried to catch up. "I'm sorry, I was only trying to make conversation. You're – I – I just wanted to get to know you better. I didn't realize you didn't want to talk about it. I know you're a person, not just food. And you're a good person. That's why I want to know more about you. And I'm sorry about how I look at you. That's just how my eyes are."
"You don't look at Isran like that," Cassandra said. She suddenly felt terrible about her outburst. Serana's apologies made the entire thing seem entirely unjustified.
"That's because when I look at Isran, I really am thinking about dinner," replied Serana.
Cassandra wanted to ask, so what are you thinking about when you look at me? But the conversation needed to be over. "This valley is so empty," she remarked.
Serana had no reply to that, and so they walked along the bank of the frozen river in silence. Once or twice Cassandra thought she heard movement in the rocks to their right, but every time it was nothing but the wind. Not a single spider, cat, falmer, troll, or dragon attacked them on their way to the third shrine. The distraction from the lingering silence would have been welcome, but Cassandra wasn't complaining. The sun was a little past its zenith when they crossed a stone bridge across the mouth of the gorge and reached the top of the wayshrine poking out of the snow on the other side.
"You've arrived at the Wayshrine of Resolution. Are you prepared to honor the mantras of Auri-El and fill your vessel with His enlightenment?"
Cassandra sighed. "I'm not sure I want him filling my vessel."
"You've arrived at the Wayshrine of Resolution. Are you prepared to honor the mantras of Auri-El and fill your vessel with His enlightenment?" repeated the prelate.
"Yes," Serana answered.
"Then go forth, child. May the enrichment of Auri-El strengthen your resolve as you undertake your journey to the Inner Sanctum."
Cassandra dipped the ewer into the basin and did her best to ignore the repetitions of 'May Auri-El's glow shield you from your enemy.' "Where do we go now?" she asked, somewhat rhetorically, as she exited the dome of the shrine. She handed the ewer back to Serana, who they had decided was the better choice to hold onto it.
"Up the valley," Serana replied.
Cassandra was turning to follow the stony path away from the shrine when something down on the frozen lake above the waterfall caught her eye. "What's that?"
"It looks like a giant rock," said Serana dryly. She squinted against the glare of the sun reflecting on the ice. Wind had shaped the fallen snow into great drifts but left most of the surface uncovered. "I think there are steps cut into the base though."
"We should check it out before we head on. It could be important," Cassandra said. Before Serana could say anything, she added, "I know we need to be hurrying, but the snow elves wouldn't have put up a stone monolith in the middle of a lake for nothing." Cassandra took Serana's grumbling for some sort of affirmative answer and began to scramble down the rocks to get to the lake. Out on the ice, the freezing wind was horrific. Cassandra felt it cutting through every gap in her armor and working its way through her many layers of cloth and leather padding to chill her bones. She was almost halfway to the stone monolith when the first dragon burst up through the ice. As a gut instinct, Cassandra shouted before the beast could rise up very far -
"JOOR ZAH FRUL!"
The dragon roared and rose up a little farther before circling and landing. Against all odds, it didn't crush the ice it stood on. Not for the first time since the waterfall, Cassandra wished she had her bow. She drew the dragonbone sword she'd taken from the body of a Keeper and advanced on the grounded dragon while Serana circled from the other side, blasting it with ice spikes.
That was when she heard the crash behind her. Cassandra turned just in time to see a second dragon exploding up from the lake. She mentally swore. Shouting left her too winded to keep both dragons down at once, and fighting both at once was out of the question. She broke into a run toward the first dragon. She needed to keep it grounded. Two dragons in the air would be an unwinnable battle.
The briefest flash of heat on the back of her neck was her only warning-
"WULD!"
Cassandra was almost on top of the grounded dragon now. The ice where she'd been running was vaporized in a wash of flame. While the dragon still in the air circled for another pass, Cassandra assessed the situation. The first dragon was still on the ground, snapping with a toothless mouth at Serana – a swift lance of fear jabbed through her gut, but she had to assume that the vampire could take care of herself.
The two dragons they were fighting were different from any that Cassandra had seen before. These had orange scales flecked with blue and a row of horizontal spikes protruding from the sides of their neck, all the way down their backs. The spines gave the Dragonborn an idea.
Cassandra took a running start and leaped up, grabbing hold of one of the reddish spines by the dragon's neck with her left hand and using it to pull her feet up to run along the dragon's neck. She used her momentum to then spin and twist, landing on the dragon's back and barely avoiding falling down to the ice below. For a moment Cassandra's head swam from the spinning and her left shoulder felt like it had been dislocated from the strain of her weight and that of her armor. The dragon, reacting to its unwanted rider, reared up, shook its neck, and then took off into the air with a mighty jump.
Cassandra nearly slid off, but managed to cling to the dragon's spines. She was some distance down from its head, only a little forward of where its neck joined its body. There wasn't time, or a way, for her to get any higher. Gritting her teeth, the Dragonborn clenched her sword and began to hack into the scales covering the beast's spine. The first few blows merely scratched the dragon's hide and slid off, but soon they opened up a gash in its neck, and then the gash widened, and then bone was laid bare. Cassandra took as deep a breathe as she could to steady herself and then let go the dragon's spine so that she could hold her sword in both hands. Angling it downward, she plunged the blade down in between vertebrae with all her might.
The dragon screamed and twisted in midair, going into an out of control roll.
A hundred feet in the air, Cassandra let go. The ground came rushing towards her and for a moment she worried that she would truly die from the fall. "FEIM ZII GRON," she shouted, and her Thu'um reached out into the Void and changed her form, leaving it somewhere in between the corporeal and the Void itself. She landed on her feet.
The dragon was not so lucky. It plummeted from the sky, hitting the ice with a sickening crack and then bouncing several times before finally lying still a short distance from the massive stone near the edge of the lake.
The other dragon wheeled about in the sky. "Voslaarum! Zeymah Volsaarum! Krosis, Volsaarum! Zu fen kos him nahkriin!"
Cassandra looked up at the dragon, silhouetted against the darkening sky. "Meyz unt zu, nivahriin pook su'um!"
The dragon screamed in rage, tucked its wings close to its body, and dove down at the ethereal Dragonborn. It crashed through her incorporeal form and the ice beneath her feet, leaving a great watery hole behind. Splashing frantically, Cassandra grabbed ahold of the edge of the ice. She had just gotten a second hand up on top of the surrounding ice when her shout wore off and suddenly the full weight of her armor was pulling her down. Her gauntleted fingers scrambled at the slick ice, but couldn't find any purchase. "SERANA!"
The water was almost pitch black beneath the surface. And it was cold – very cold. Cassandra tried to find the straps on her gauntlets, the clasps, anything, but the water slowed her movement and the ebony fingers were too bulky and there was no light. She wasn't going to get the armor off in time. Did she know a waterbreathing spell? Yes! She did. How did it go, how did it go? What school was it from? Panic clouded her mind and instead of thinking of the spell, all she could think about was how she was going to drown. A sad death for the Dragonborn. All she'd worked for, all she'd overcome, and now she was going to die in a gods forsaken lake in the middle of nowhere.
There was a small puddle of light at the surface, the place where the dragon had broken the ice. It was getting smaller. And then it was gone. Instead, there were two golden orbs floating there – they looked like... eyes? An arm wrapped around Cassandra's waist and suddenly she wasn't sinking as fast anymore. Her helm came free and went tumbling down into the depths of the lake, and then one gauntlet and then the other, and then she wasn't sinking anymore, she was rising.
But they weren't rising fast enough. Cassandra's lungs burned – the only part of her that still felt warm. She tried to kick her feet, to add something to the swimming, but to no effect.
And then there was the dragon.
The shockwave from the roar from beneath their feet actually propelled them toward the surface, but it was followed by a jet of scalding water that blistered Cassandra's exposed skin. It seemed to go on forever, but then, as suddenly as it had come, it stopped.
When Cassandra's head breached the surface, she immediately began to cough up water. Serana pulled them both up onto the ice. The vampire's skin was even worse than the Dragonborn's. Serana's hands looked partially melted and the skin on her face was blistered badly. On the horizon, the sun had sunk below the mountains and was only barely still lighting the sky. The icy wind howled across the lake. "I told you this was a bad idea," Serana muttered. "Please don't die." The vampire hoisted the Dragonborn's limp form over her shoulders and set off as quickly as she could toward the wayshrine at the top of the hill at the edge of the lake.
As she walked, the defeated dragon lying on the surface of the lake began to shimmer with an unearthly pale pink-yellow glow. The light shimmered and twisted, intensifying, and then leapt forward, rushing toward the body of the Dragonborn. A twin stream joined it, rising up from beneath the ice. The two ribbons of power sank into Cassandra's body and then vanished. Where the dragon had been, now only a skeleton remained.
