It was the Nord tradition to bury their dead. When a Nord met his end, he would be entombed in the Hall of the Dead in his town. He would be laid to rest in that Hall, and would awake (hopefully) in another, amongst warriors and legends. Some groups tended more towards funeral pyres, but burying was very much the common practice for Nords. Eirdis knew that well enough, having seen more evidence than she cared to in her life thus far.
She also knew, from the few short weeks she had spent in Morrowind prior to being caught up in an Imperial ambush on the border, that the Dunmer had no such tradition. Many had no idea what a burial was. The ones that did tended to look down their nose at whoever mentioned it; depending on who you talked to, quite a few viewed it as barbaric, distasteful, or downright disrespectful. Their tradition when one of their own kind passed was to burn the body, leaving the ashes as the only physical remainder of the deceased.
"When a Dunmer passes, his body is given to fire, so he might return to the ash from whence he came."
That was what a priest in Morrowind had told her when he'd seen her confusion at being told the ancestral tomb was where their dead were laid, only to be met with piles of ash. She remembered how she'd felt even after the explanation, how odd it seemed to her.
"The Dunmer don't believe that death is the end, we believe that it's the beginning."
It made a little more sense now, and she could see the reasoning behind it, kind of. Maybe she couldn't, maybe she was likening horse hides to mead barrels, but she could feel the words resonating in her mind as she stood there, staring. Hadvar, behind her, didn't notice her reverie. He was too busy crouching by the trees, watching the skies to make sure the dragon had definitely left before they continued on. Eirdis kept her eyes on the burning town that stood at their backs.
In her life up to this moment, 34 winters and soon to be 35, Eirdis had been a lot of things. A solemn child, a bored miner, an outraged bleeding heart, a fugitive… and many, many other things that she could not remember or didn't care to recall. She wasn't proud of everything she had done in her life. She wasn't necessarily ashamed of much either. She'd run away from lots of things, and tried unsuccessfully to recreate her life every time. Something always got in the way. There was always a barrier.
But here, with the ashes carried downwind catching in her hair and the roars of a beast still ringing in her ears and a shaken Imperial soldier droning on about the Legion, she didn't feel any resistance. There was no ward here. No barrier. Nothing in her way.
She wasn't the one burning in Helgen. She almost was, but the fact remained, she was relatively safe and sound in the forests of Falkreath Hold with a mace in her hands and an experienced soldier with her. So maybe this was a bit unfair to say. Maybe it was callous or self-centered.
Regardless of all that, she didn't see an end in these ashes. She saw another chance—a great, glorious, wondrous new start. These flames and flaky ashes and pillars of thick black smoke were her rebirth. She would carry the fires of Helgen in her heart, and Skyrim would be hers again. And should anyone stand in the way of that, she would spit fire as deadly as any dragon's breath.
This was a new beginning.