Woe Comes To Winterhold
We arrived in Winterhold as the sun was setting, its dying light turning the cloud-dotted sky a dull, sullen red and throwing sharp-edged shadows across our path. The buildings those shadows belonged to were an unimpressive sight. All had seen better days; most looked in need of some kind of repair; some were beyond help, roofless and abandoned, their rotten timbers jutting from the hard ground like broken teeth.
"Gods, what a dump."
Beside me, Lydia stayed silent, perhaps out of some deep-seated loyalty to her province. I didn't know. I was an outsider, after all, and I had no such concerns. Besides, I'd grown up on the streets of Mournhold. I knew desperation when I saw it.
And things in Winterhold were pretty desperate. I wouldn't say I was an expert on Skyrim history, but I was picking things up. Winterhold used to be a prosperous trading city, but the catastrophe that sent half of it crashing into the sea while leaving the Mage's College mysteriously – and suspiciously – intact had broken the place, crushing its spirit. Anyone who had an ounce of ambition or drive had left, heading for Windhelm or, if they were particularly adventurous and didn't care about getting their hands dirty, Riften in the south. The only reason anyone visited Winterhold now was the Mage's College, aloof and impervious on its pillar of rock just outside the city. Hell, it was why I was there. I'm sure the irony of the town's survival depending on the one thing most people blamed for its downfall wasn't lost on its citizens.
Winter held it alright in an ever-tightening grasp and, as I walked past hollowed out homes and ramshackle stores, I began to wonder if it would ever let it go.
"You! Stranger!"
As greetings went, I'd heard worse. I felt Lydia tense beside me. I could well imagine the glare on her face as the guard strode over, but being thane of Whiterun didn't matter much here. We both knew that.
I watched the guard closely, as he advanced through the slush towards us. His armour was worn but well-maintained and he carried himself with an easy grace, his sword arm relaxed at his side. Briefly, I wondered how the Jarl managed to afford a city watch. There couldn't have been too much gold left in the vaults.
I smiled thinly.
"Good evening," I said.
The guard looked at me warily from behind his helm. In the fading light, it was difficult to see his eyes through the narrow slits.
"You're a long way from home, dunmer."
My smile widened. I get that a lot, usually from idiots looking to start something. But I didn't think that was the case here. Maybe he was genuinely ignorant of the diaspora. Maybe he was trying to be sympathetic and just hadn't got the hang of that sort of thing. Maybe when he'd said 'home' he'd meant Windhelm. A lot of dark elves had ended up there, I knew. Gods help them.
Whatever his intentions were, I didn't answer him and I saw the first signs of uncertainty in the way he looked from my face to Lydia's and back again. I could almost hear the question in his mind. What's a nice Skyrim warrior-maiden doing with her? I saw him take in my dark grey skin, the scar on my cheek, the tightly braided silver hair, the ornately-decorated elven armour.
"Well," he said eventually, "I don't want any trouble."
"You won't get any," I assured him.
In that, as I have been so many times since entering this wild and unpredictable region of Tamriel, I was utterly and horribly wrong.
From high above us, somewhere in the darkening sky, a cry sounded. Lydia and I both stiffened. We'd heard that sound before – a raucous, aching scream, too deep – too hungry – to be that of a simple bird. Instinctively, all three of us looked up, but only Lydia and I knew what we were looking for.
"There!" Lydia said, tightly.
But I'd seen it too – a black shape against the pink-grey clouds, sleek body, wings sweeping behind it as it rode the currents of the sky. I felt a familiar tension in my gut. I'm not a prayerful woman. When the gods see fit to destroy your home in a volcanic explosion, you tend not to bother them too much. But, at that moment, as I watched the dark shape begin to turn towards me, I was tempted to make my relations with them much more cordial. Very tempted.
"It might fly on," said Lydia, giving voice to my own hope. "I've seen that happen. It might…"
The cry sounded again, louder this time. The shape in the sky was becoming more distinct, blotting out a handful of stars even as they began to wink into being.
I turned to the guard. The sun had almost set now and its last red rays reflected from his helmet, transforming it into a shimmering bloody prophecy of violence and pain.
"Get everyone inside!" I told him. "If people have got cellars, they need to be in them now."
He was still looking at the sky; his hand had strayed to his sword hilt. Above us, the shape in the sky was becoming clearer. I could just make out its snout, long and vicious. The thing moved lazily, describing a wide arc in the sky above the eastern approaches to the city. The street had not been particularly busy before, but people began to emerge from their houses, something in the creature's cry drawing them outside to witness its approach.
I swore. "Get everyone inside!" I said fiercely. "Do it now!"
"What…"
A dark shadow fell across us briefly. A few yards away, one of the townsfolk screamed. From the corner of my eye, I saw Lydia draw and string her bow. Tiny threads of silver were bound into the grain of its wood; they sparked with a life and fury of their own.
"Now!" I yelled.
The guard wrenched his head round to stare at me.
"But the city. My duty…"
"Is to protect your people." I glanced around me. There were perhaps a dozen of Winterhold's bedraggled citizenry on the street. I turned back to him. "Go now!"
"But…"
I almost kicked him. "Have you ever fought one of these things before?" I didn't wait for a reply. "I have. Now, go!"
He hurried away, shouting at the townsfolk to get back inside. From somewhere behind us, a warning bell began to toll, its sound a doleful counterpoint to the dread I felt in my gut. The thing was close now, almost in Lydia's range.
"How are we going to do this?" I asked her.
She kept her attention fixed on her target, waiting, perfectly still, sighting along the arrow shaft, maintaining the tension in the bowstring.
"How did we do it last time?" she replied, quietly.
Last time had been out on the Whiterun plains just beyond the rolling foothills that eventually become the Throat of the World. Last time, Lydia had almost died, cooked alive by gouts of fire so strong even my dunmer heritage could not adequately protect me. Last time, I had poured spell after spell into it, had almost drained a sparksword with a frantic, desperately brutal assault, all the while the fire and the fear soaking me in slick sour sweat. Last time we had been lucky and we both knew it.
"Bring it down and I'll take it from the side," I said, trying to sound confident.
She gave what could have been a snort, but it was impossible to tell. "As you wish, my thane."
And then she loosed.
I watched the arrow speed away from her, heading for the underside of the creature swooping down towards us. For the briefest of moments, the slow-breathing blackness was broken by a tiny spark of light, a small brightness that faded quickly. The thing in the sky turned its head towards us, beat its wings once and then, tucking them in close to its body, fell like a thunderbolt on the city of Winterhold.
People have a lot to say about dragons. Usually, they're people who have never actually seen one. They talk about ancient wisdom and savage nobility; they talk about grace and power and awe-inspiring majesty. They talk about tradition and history and the way dragons symbolise an era of heroism that has long since passed from these blood-drenched lands. All of which is true, but misses the point pretty spectacularly.
Beside me, Lydia was firing, her mouth set into a grim line, her eyes hard. The soft twang of her bow was lost utterly in the dragon's roar as it flew overhead, low enough for its wingtip to brush the tower on the Jarl's keep. The few people still in the street cowered in its shadow. A couple of guards began to fire up at it from the shelter of a ruined house.
When it got to the western edge of the city, the dragon began to climb. For a moment, I dared to hope that it might be heading for the College. Surely there'd be enough mages there who knew enough to take it down. But it turned slowly, lazily, shrugging off the few arrows that struck it, confident in its supreme proficiency in the art of destruction.
"We seem to have attracted its attention," offered Lydia drily, as she nocked yet another arrow to her bow. Poison dripped from the arrowhead. Well, it was worth a try.
I reached into my backpack. Alchemy is a particular passion of mine. The land of Skyrim is rich in materials that can be processed to make tinctures and philtres to strengthen the body, speed up the reflexes and enhance the mind. It was the last of the three I needed here. Quickly, I took out a small glass bottle that contained a dark, smoky liquid. I drained it in one gulp, briefly tasting lavender and something old and earthy. Carefully and very precisely, I began to say the words I'd read in the book I'd found in an ancient vault deep beneath an old Nord burial mound.
Lydia let the poisoned arrow fly. The dragon's shadow passed over us again and the air shook with a roar I thought – hoped – was tinged with pain. I concentrated on finishing the casting. The air in front of me bulged and split as a bubble of violet-tinged madness forced its way through into our reality. From that swirling chaos emerged a slender being of grace and fire. It acknowledged me with a coquettish bob of its smouldering head, executed a perfect backflip and, with a strangely girlish giggle, streaked away in the direction of the dragon.
It had made two passes now and was circling again for a third. My meagre experience told me that it would probably be the last before it landed. Then things would get really nasty. Hastily, I risked a glance around me. And frowned. Winterhold didn't look all that badly damaged. The street was clear now; a very few crumpled shapes stood out darkly against the dirty snow. But the buildings were largely unharmed. Well, they were no more damaged than they had been when we'd first arrived.
And then I heard the guard's shivering moans. I glanced across to the ruined house in which two of Winterhold's watchmen had sheltered. It was almost completely encased in a thin shell of ice that I was sure hadn't been there before. One of the guards lay completely still and I knew instinctively he was dead. The other was curled up into a ball like a hibernating dormouse; he shook and groaned, his armour, his cloak, the exposed flesh of his arms all coated in a thin layer of…
"… frost dragon," Lydia was saying. " It's a frost dragon." Her eyes widened and she dropped the bow, reaching for the two-handed sword at her back. "And it's here."
The street shook and I almost lost my footing on the treacherous slush-slicked ground. Heart pounding, every nerve in me screaming to run in the opposite direction, I walked forward, drawing my sword with my right hand and, with a tersely spoken word, calling forth a blazing nimbus of fire around my left. Lydia followed me, the enormous zweihander in her grip glowing softly in the murky air. Ahead of me, the fire atronach shot bolt after bolt at the massive shape hunched at the end of Winterhold's main street. Even as I watched, it snapped its head round and belched a stream of freezing air at the atronach. With a brief scream, it winked out of existence.
There would be no third pass. Perhaps it was the presence of the atronach; perhaps it was the poison on Lydia's arrow; perhaps it was some unknowable imperative in its implacably alien mind: whatever the reason, the dragon had decided to end things quickly. An arrogant bellow bursting from its ancient lungs, it emerged from the shadows, stalking forwards into the ghostly light cast by Winterhold's feeble street lamps.
If I'd been one of those people who have a lot to say about dragons, I might have gazed at its hoary, frost-rimed scales glimmering like shards of polished silver and found them unutterably beautiful. I might have admired the slope of its porcelain-white wings, the powerful muscles that undulated beneath its skin like waves on an increasingly stormy sea. There is something about a dragon that demands your worship, that reminds you of your insignificance in a cruel, uncaring world in which violence and pain are the only reliable means with which real power can be measured.
And perhaps that moment of awe, that bitter brief epiphany, is worth dying for.
Me? I prefer to live.
"You did say you'd take it from the side," pointed out Lydia.
The dragon turned its angular head towards her. Its eyes were horrible, narrowed mirrors that reflected from its black heart an immense capacity for violence, an ancient pulsing desire to rend, claw, kill. It bellowed and its breath was damp and gelid; it stank of earth and the grave, of old blood and the frenzied ecstasies of murder.
"I did," I muttered, starting to edge around the massive creature, keeping my attention focused on its eyes. Even then, it still surprised me.
I've seen swamp snakes strike slower than that dragon did. One moment it was watching Lydia, the next its head whipped round towards me, spearing forwards, thrust out on a serpentine neck whose corded muscles were hard as iron.
It almost got me. I dived out of the way, rolling awkwardly in the half-melted snow. I felt it touch my calf, a glancing, almost intimate, blow. I rolled over and over, desperate to get away from its questing head, its widening jaws. It roared again and the world grew colder. My mouth was full of dirt and snow but the dragon's head filled my vision: the small horns on its skull; the rows of teeth as sharp as daggers; the wet darkness of its maw; the depthless malice of its eyes.
TO BE CONCLUDED