The Labourer's Grand-daughter's Tale
It was autumn now, nearly time to return to Cyrodiil. The Synod would be eager to see my final report, and its collective patience, though considerable, was not unlimited. Still, there would be no need for me to complete the job in a rush. I had already reported on the situation with the Skyrim vampires, and had bought myself a good deal of time and tolerance with the details I had uncovered there. Negotiations between the Volkihar, the Dawnguard, and the Imperial Court had been under way for some time now, and although I had no direct word of their progress, my correspondents told me that the talk among Synod members was that the concept of uniting Tamriel's vampires under the Volkihar banner had been accepted in principle by the Imperial Court and the Dawnguard. With this, it seemed that Serana's ambitious plan to become High Princess of the vampire race had taken its first steps toward realization. Her father would have been proud of her, I thought wryly.
During my long stay in Skyrim, I had discovered more about the life and associates of the Dragonborn than I had dreamed possible, but the parts still stubbornly refused to come together into a coherent whole. Everyone had seen something different in her, as if she were not a person but a mirror that reflected what the observer wanted or feared to see. Serana, her vampire lover, had called her an emotional vampire, stressing her agonized self-doubt, while to the priestess of Meridia, she had been the spark of incomprehensible wickedness that had burned her lifelong faith to the ground. To the descendant of a Stormcloak she had crippled, she seemed iron-hearted and brutal, while the youthful band of scavengers who had followed her like disciples from tomb to tomb found her considerate, empathic, and vulnerable. It wasn't just the usual medley of varied nuances generated by a diversity of viewpoints. It was as if the witnesses were discussing completely different people.
I was in Riften, in the last week of a final stay at the Bee and Barb, sorting my notes and checking up on a few details of the Dragonborn's tenure as Thane of Riften as I prepared to say farewell to Skyrim. I had come there after a last visit to Whiterun. Whiterun was the obvious first place to go to learn about the Dragonborn, one would think. There was even a set tour, sanctified by generations of guides: First, the Western Watchtower, or what remained of it, where she had taken down her first dragon and discovered her gift. Then, just outside the walls to where the Stormcloak attack had been broken; the gate where she had conjured the Ash Guardian; the stretch of level ground where she had summoned Durnehviir. Inside the walls, her old house, of course, now a home for orphans attached to the Temple of Kynareth; the sacred Guildergreen that she had restored to life; and peering from the Dragonsreach steps over the outer wall, the Skyforge where she had been cremated, since the Companions didn't allow mere tourists the privilege of entry. All very interesting, but all very well-known. I had taken the tour the first time I had visited Skyrim, years before my present task had begun, and had read accounts of the Dragonborn's life and activities there many times since then. Even with my Synod credentials, which opened most doors – at least in an Empire-friendly town like Whiterun – there turned out to be little new to learn.
Still, although the information was familiar, on occasion I found that my perspectives had changed. Visiting Breezehome, the small house where the Dragonborn and Shahvee had lived for nearly all of their lives, where they had raised their daughter, and where both of them had died, I suddenly realized how strange it had been that they had spent so much time there and so little in their other residences. In their later years, they had had several other houses across Skyrim, but none had seen heavy use. When not in Breezehome, they had occasionally passed a few weeks in Lakeview Manor, the first house that the Dragonborn had built, long before she had married Shahvee. Nevertheless, all in all, they had been there no more than a month or so out of the year; their other houses, perhaps a week or two. Because it was inconvenient for Shahvee to move about when she was running a business? Because things such as their library and alchemical materials were better kept together, in one place? Perhaps. But also a shying away from ostentation, a desire to avoid public attention – perhaps even an implicit refusal of the status fame had accorded to them. They might have had their own fiefdom – the Dragonborn was offered the throne of a Jarl at least twice – but they chose to remain in the sort of house a blacksmith or fletcher might own. It was, in a way, a self-evaluation, their implicit judgment as to how valuable their contribution to the community had been.
And now I was in Riften, trying to fit this observation and everything else together. On occasion, someone still visited me with a scrap of what he or she hoped was new information. It was nearly always of dubious relevance, and if not, it was invariably something that I already knew. But I did not have the heart to discourage my self-appointed amateur assistants, many of them simple country folk who still spoke of the Dragonborn with reverence. They were just trying to help. In fact, their good-hearted uselessness reassured me: it seemed to confirm that I had been able to assemble most of the surviving facts, and that no major piece of the puzzle remained to be found.
It wasn't one of the pieces that was missing. It was what made the pieces a whole.
-o-o-o-
Four days before departure, around the time that the market stalls close up for the evening, there was a soft, hesitant knock on my door in the Bee and Barb. I confess that I was tempted to ignore it: it was late and I was tired and my inability to put things together was beginning to irritate me. But I opened the door, reflecting that anything that knocked so softly would at least pose me no threat.
And indeed, there was nothing there but a thin Nord woman, probably in her forties or early fifties, dressed in the multiple shades of brown favored by the working farmer, her graying hair covered by a scarf. She looked at me, but seemed hesitant to speak first, so I took the lead.
"Um...good evening...I don't think we had an appointment...as a matter of fact, if we have met, I've forgotten you entirely...but come in, come in and sit down, please."
The woman walked in and settled herself primly on a chair opposite to my desk. Her destination and her general demeanor told me that her purpose in coming here was to deliver another nugget of information about the Dragonborn. I smiled outwardly, sighed inwardly, and seated myself on the other side of the desk in the dignified but attentive posture expected of a Renowned Academic.
"Now... I expect it's something about the Dragonborn or something associated with her, am I correct?"
The woman cleared her throat and shifted on the chair. She seemed timid and a bit overwhelmed at the sight of the books piled all around, waiting to be packed for the journey home. But she managed to respond after a short silence, in a thin clear voice that seemed too young for her.
"Yes, sir. I heard you were leaving, sir, and there's one thing, the stories that my grandfather told me when I was very young. He's long dead now but I think he would have wanted you to hear it, if you have the time now, sir. I would have come earlier, but I live much to the south of here and don't come to town often at all. But it is about her, something she did at Forelhost, the old Dragon Cult tomb. Not many north of Riften know the story, I'm sure, and the place that I'm talking about, it's rare that it has any visitors from this city, let alone further away."
I nodded. Forelhost. I recognized the name. Nasty place, scene of a mass suicide by Dragon Cult members. It was one of the first tombs to be permanently sealed by mages from the College of Winterhold, not long after the Dragonborn died. She'd cleared it earlier, of course, but not much was known of the interior of the structure, other than it went a long way underground, into the mountain. And I wasn't about to start fiddling with the wards to look inside, even if my spellcasting skills had been good enough to relax them, which they weren't.
The woman continued, "My grandfather was living closer to Forelhost than we do now, nearer to the foot of the mountain slope. He told me that early one summer's morning a few years after the Stormcloaks were put down, not long before he married my grandmother and got his own farm, he answered a knock at the door to find none other than the Dragonborn herself standing on his doorstep. He'd never seen her before, he said, but there was no mistaking her: the brilliant blue eyes, the black hair, the pale skin, the scars on her neck and face and hands. He just stood and stared, I suppose, probably with his mouth hanging open, and didn't dare say a word.
"They stayed that way for a minute or two, and then the Dragonborn asked my grandfather if there were any people and carts in the area that she could hire for a day or two to do some digging and shifting materials around. Not in a tomb, she said. From the front door of a tomb to a forest glade a short distance away by farm wagon. She said she'd take care of the part inside the tomb herself.
"My grandfather had a cousin his own age living not far away, and my future grandmother had two brothers who were used to rough work on farms and the like. So he gathered these, and picked up another couple of fellows, neighbours. They all waited at his house for a short while, and then the Dragonborn came back and they started off, her riding and the others on a cart. Forelhost is at the end of a winding road cut out of the mountainside. My grandfather always said he wasn't all that happy at going close to such an ill-omened place, but so long as the pay was good, the work was in daylight, and he didn't have to go inside, he could put up with it. Besides, he said, none of them thought that anything dangerous would happen to them if the Dragonborn was there."
"Did this have anything to do with an attack on the tomb guardians?" I asked. "Did they take supplies up with them or did they go there empty?"
"No, no." She shook her head emphatically. "It was long after all that, I think, after the rebellion ended and before Dragon's Peace, though my grandfather did say that the dragons weren't much of a nuisance at that time, at least compared to what they had been before. There hadn't been any fighting about anything for a good long time, or six young men wouldn't have gone off like that to who knows what place in the wake of a famous warrior. They'd have been too nervous of finding themselves in someone's army as 'volunteers' before they knew what was what."
I nodded my agreement. Staying close to home, keeping your head down, thinking twice before doing anything at all, no matter how routine and innocent – those were the old days that bards celebrated in their songs, scenes from high romance, loyalty unto death, black betrayals, grand gestures both evil and good – and of course the Dragonborn, to her fans practically the Tenth Divine, as the old scavenger had said. When all it had really been was a time when you couldn't go out at dawn to work in a field without wondering whether you'd be buried at the edge of that very same field at sunset. When you'd pass a corpse at the side of the road and never give it a second thought unless it was someone you knew well, or find a vulture dead in the vegetable patch, choked by the rings and necklaces it had swallowed. When you never knew anything for certain, except that you lived in fear the way a fish lives in water. The romance and excitement had been added later by people like the bard I had met on the road to Windhelm, paint over rotten wood.
"Anyway," she continued, "the Dragonborn was riding that strange blood bay of hers, the one with the red eyes, and the men followed behind in a wagon harnessed to two horses. She'd told them to harness two to a single cart, since the last part of the road to Forelhost's entrance is steep, and slippery as well. They were going north, and the men thought they would be heading straight up the path as soon as they reached it, but the Dragonborn directed them left, towards the mountain slope on the other side. There had been a fellow living hard by the mountain on the western side of the path before the war, eccentric, name of Holdfeld, I forget his first name. Anyway, he had begun to behave more and more strangely, my grandfather said, and finally his wife and kids left him. Just in time, because he managed to blow the house up and set it on fire two or three weeks after they had left. No one ever found out the exact details, but he must have been tampering with some magic or other without properly understanding what he did, and it killed him. No one did anything with the ruin of the house, other than to bury the bits and pieces that remained of Holdfeld. It just sat there for year after year and fell down a little more every winter.
"When they got near, my grandfather noticed that things had changed around there from the time he had last seen it. What was left of the house had been cleared away. The broken stone remnants of the chimney, the remains of the walls, and the rotten flooring had been removed. Even the foundations were gone. All there was now was a stone wall that enclosed where the house had been and a bit of land around it, like an orchard wall, maybe four feet high. It looked new, and there was a gate in it just where the old footpath to the house crossed the wall. Nothing special, but all laid out neatly and carefully. From the cart, the men could see that the land inside was cleared and flat, just earth with nothing growing there yet. The Dragonborn got off her horse outside the gate, and the men followed her into the enclosure, still puzzled as to what they would be doing here.
"She told them that she was making a graveyard there, a memorial. She'd bought the old house site, and had it cleared off a couple of months before, and the wall built. Fine, my grandfather and the rest thought, though where were the bodies? and what did all this have to do with Forelhost? The bodies would be coming, she said, or rather they were going to get them. But some of the workers would stay there and dig the graves. The crew that had been there before had left stakes in the ground showing where the graves should be; there were nineteen small ones, child-sized, and a single adult grave. There was a stack of black, polished stones as well, by the inside of the wall, square, about a span by three span and three fingers' thick. Nothing carved on them that my grandfather could see. These were the memorial stones, the Dragonborn told us. After the graves were filled up with earth again, they would go on top to mark the sites of the burials.
"Simple enough, my grandfather thought. But where were the nineteen dead children coming from? There hadn't been a killing on that scale anywhere near here, not ever, not of children. None of the men had ever heard of anything like that. But for the time being, no one ventured to ask. They were being paid for the work, and while it was difficult to see what good it would do, it certainly wasn't going to do any harm. A gesture of some kind, perhaps. A whim. Who really cared? They were just grateful for the chance to earn some coin in those lean days after the war ended, my grandfather said.
"He and his cousin got back onto the wagon and began following the Dragonborn again, up to Forelhost. He told us that it was a tricky drive in the last part of it, with the road slippery and narrow. Thank goodness it widened a bit at the end so they didn't have too much trouble turning the horses and cart around, my grandfather said.
"Have you ever been up there?" the woman asked.
I shook my head. "No, there's nothing but the Word Wall to see there now. The tomb's sealed and nearly all of it is underground anyway, apart from the Wall out front."
"There's a little watchtower that you enter and then go across a sort of bridge to the courtyard outside the tomb entrance," she explained. "I've been up there, a long time ago now. My grandfather told me that the Dragonborn left her horse by the cart and told them to wait. She'd be bringing the bodies out, and didn't need help, she said.
"It seemed forever before she returned, my grandfather told us, time enough anyway for him and his cousin to get chilled to the bone, and nervous too. What if she didn't reappear at all? He knew that was silly, he said, but waiting outside an old tomb for a delivery of the dead didn't exactly increase his peace of mind. Were the dead to come from the tomb? But how could there have been children there, in a fortress? And why bother with them anyway, when they had rested up here for ages, and so far as he or anyone else knew, weren't complaining to anyone?"
She paused for a moment and I said, "It must have been quite a story, coming from him. You've remembered a lot of detail over all those years."
"He told it dozens of times, scores, until people got tired of it. Sick of it, really," the woman replied with a faint smile. "Sometimes I was the only one who would stay and listen to him. They made jokes about it when I was a little girl, said he must have fallen in love with her. But I suppose the Dragonborn was the most important person he ever met, and there were other reasons too...I'd better just tell the story, sir. He asked me to pass it on, tell it to my own children, but they can't abide it. I suppose it was meant for the likes of you."
"I wish I could thank him if it was meant for me," I replied. "Most of the stories people come to me with are ones that I've heard a long time ago. I don't remember this one at all."
She shook her head. "Just a boring old man's long boring story, a reason to be careful about how much drink you served him on a winter's night, that's what the people around here think, if they remember it at all. But I'd better keep going... the tomb and the snow..."
"You were saying how your grandfather and the other man were waiting for the Dragonborn on the path outside the tomb."
"Yes, and a long wait it was, my grandfather said, and freezing. When she finally reappeared, she was carrying two bundles of some things wrapped in linen and very old. These were the bodies she'd spoken of. She was carrying six of them, a bundle of three in each hand. They were small of course, and dry and light as feathers, probably would have fallen apart except for their cloth wrappings, my grandfather said. She brought them down very slowly and carefully, and arranged them in the back of the wagon. Lucky she seemed to want to do all that herself, since my grandfather and his friend weren't at all eager to lay their hands on draugr, even child-sized and completely dead. She covered the small bodies with a big old cloth to keep the snow off them, and went back into the tomb, leaving the two men to babysit the cargo. Thank goodness for their nerves, the Dragonborn came back much more quickly the next three or four times, until the nineteen small forms were arranged in the back of the wagon, and last of all, a sack that seemed to contain an adult's skeleton, not that either of the men cared to peek inside. Through all of this, she didn't say a word, and when she'd finished settling the last one in, she just got on her horse again and began to walk it back down the path. My grandfather took that as his cue, and began to ease the wagon back down the way it had come, snowy and slippery as the road was. After a while, they were out of the snow and on level ground again, still following the Dragonborn, she not saying a word all the time."
"And then they went back to the cemetery and buried them all? Did she say anything about why?"
So many details the talkative old man had passed on, but still no answer to that question.
"My grandfather said she was quiet the whole time. It wasn't hard to figure out what else had to be done. By the time he and the other in the wagon returned, most of the graves had been dug out – no need to go very deep with bodies that old, and the ground wasn't particularly hard. They were in three lines, and the adult, only some bits of a skeleton really, was a little further in, closer to the mountain slope. The Dragonborn placed the bodies in the graves, they filled them in again and placed the black stones over them, and that was the end of it, for that day. She paid my grandfather and the other five, and they set off home in the wagon, quiet but puzzled. It still wasn't clear to them what she was up to."
The woman paused, and I asked the first question that came to mind.
"Is the graveyard still there?"
"Oh yes...I heard she left money to the Temple of Mara in Riften to see that it was kept maintained if anything happened to her. It's still there and still in good condition. There's a statue of Mara beside the graves, and people have gotten into the custom of going there to pray for sick children. I don't myself know whether it does any good, but a lot of worried parents seem to have faith in it.
"And there's more of the story that happened after that one day that my grandfather worked for the Dragonborn. It was a few months later, at the beginning of autumn that year.
"He was riding alone this time, my grandfather said, and happened to pass by the place on his way back from Riften, in the late afternoon, hurrying so that he wouldn't have to travel after dark. And he saw that horse of hers with the glowing eyes tied up at the cemetery gate, and thought he'd stop for a moment. No particular plan in his head, he always claimed, just curiosity.
"So he pushed open the iron gate and looked inside, meaning to just take a glance and go, and there she was. She was alone, seated on the larger slab, the one for the adult, her eyes down and singing a quiet little song to herself, one that my grandfather had never heard before and would never hear again. It was a simple tune, like a child's song, he said, but he couldn't understand the words very well. About autumn and death, and waiting for the spring to be born again. My grandfather said he asked those he met from High Rock if they knew the words or the tune, but none of them did. Perhaps it was something she had made up herself.
"He stood there as it began to get dark, just watching the Dragonborn sit there and sing to herself, and wondering if he should slip away before she noticed him. But she already had, of course. She stopped her singing, looked straight at him – he always said, looked straight through him, with those piercing blue eyes of hers – and waved him forward.
"She seemed to recognize him, and asked if he had been one of the men who had worked on the graveyard. He replied that he was, and that it looked finished now. Other people had clearly been busy there since he and his friends had dug the graves and filled them – the black markers, still uninscribed, were nested in neat collars of stonework, the bare ground was covered in flowering plants and vines, and off behind the Dragonborn and to the side, there was a statue of Lady Mara surrounded by children. He told her he was glad to see how beautiful it was now that it was done, and she nodded. But it wasn't quite finished, she told him. She added that there would be one last thing. A word wall behind the graves, a low one, modest. Human words, she said. Words to whisper, not to shout. Something like love, or trust, or honor, she told him. Words that had their own power.
"Then, before he could ask, she told him who they had buried there. Who the children and the adult had been. It had all begun for her when she had fought her way through Forelhost, years ago now, and had found the bodies of the children, half-buried in what seemed to have been an underground garden. In a room close by, an alchemy lab, she had discovered the adult, a skeleton sitting a bit above the tables, with an arrow still stuck in the bones of her rib cage. Someone had shot her there, as she sat. One of her own, it had to have been. The attacking troops had never penetrated that deep into the sanctum.
"She'd eventually found a couple of notes that explained it all, the Dragonborn said. One from the woman the skeleton had been, the Head Alchemist, Froda, demanding that they stop making poisons to kill the children. The other from Rahgot, the Dragon Priest whom the Dragonborn had finally destroyed, centuries later, telling Froda to stop interfering and that he would discuss it later. It wasn't hard to see that the discussion he spoke of had come in the form of the arrow that remained in her, dead for centuries, still looking on helplessly at what she had not been able to prevent.
"The heap of dead children had been a terrible sight, she continued, but at the time she was sure it would soon be forgotten, buried under new horrors. There was certainly no lack of those. But months later, Froda came to her in her dreams, perhaps because the Dragonborn had settled the score by finally destroying the undead Rahgot. She was a beautiful woman, the Dragonborn said, about her age, black hair and pale skin, though brown-eyed and not as slightly built as she herself was, and of course not scarred – but still, a Breton, so very like the sister she had never had.
"And Froda had a request. She asked the Dragonborn to take the bodies of the children, when she could, after the war had ended, and bury them under the sky instead of leaving them in the darkness of the underground fortress. Trapped in the crumbling debris of Rahgot's madness, they would never know peace. She didn't threaten or demand, just asked it as a favor, almost shyly, and the Dragonborn realized that Froda had never been a dominating person, only a careful worker who hadn't let her mind wander beyond her daily tasks until Rahgot ordered the children poisoned. And then she had stood up for the first time, found her voice, and died. In the dream, Froda told her that Rahgot had come himself to give her one last chance to go along. She looked at him, and at the drawn bow pointed at her, and said No once more, very soft and clear, knowing it would be the last word she would ever say. A pretty good choice for a last word, the Dragonborn said. Even though it didn't change anything. The children had been poisoned anyway. But she had kept faith with them, and with herself.
"Then the Dragonborn fell silent for a while, my grandfather said, her eyes on the ground. Finally, she looked up and asked my grandfather a question that he certainly wasn't expecting.
"'And who am I?'"
"You can imagine how my grandfather felt when he heard that. She repeated it twice before he could get his answer out, that she was the Dragonborn, of course. A famous person who did good, who served Akatosh and Mara, had honored the Nine and had been blessed by them. And a jumble of anything else he could think of, I'm sure. He was bewildered by the sudden query, and even a bit frightened, he said the last time I remember hearing him tell the story."
My narrator broke off for a moment and shook her head. "These last pieces, he told a bit differently every time," she said apologetically. "He only spoke about the Dark Brotherhood and the daedra to family members, I think. But I'll try to give it the way he usually told it to me."
"The Dragonborn paused for a moment, thinking about my grandfather's answer, and replied that her parents had not called her Dragonborn, nor had the friends she had grown up with in High Rock. That Dragonborn "her" had not existed before she crossed the border into Skyrim and been arrested. Here, she had found the title, the powers, and most important, a mission that carried her along with it, but she remained what she had always been, someone who never said No to anything or anyone if she could help it. A savior? Perhaps everyone else had managed to forget, but she still remembered that the original motive for her trip to Skyrim had been horse theft. Skyrim hadn't made her what she was, she said. She was that all along. All that Akatosh's gift and its powers had added was a grand purpose, an objective that neither she nor others could question, that had to be reached, no matter what. You might even call it an excuse.
"She looked directly at my grandfather, and asked him, did he think that being the Dragonborn meant she had to be a good person? Did he know that she had been a professional murderer, Listener to the Dark Brotherhood? And Grand Master of the Thieves Guild as well, even when she was playing the hero on the battlefield? That she had slept in the arms and the love of a vampire of the purest and most ancient line, a Daughter of Coldharbor? That she had bowed before Mehrunes Dagon, Prince of Ambition and Destruction, executed an apostate for Peyrite the Plaguebringer, and beaten a priest to death for Molag Bal, King of Rape? That she had sworn herself to the service of Azura and Hircine, feasted with Namura's coven on the raw human meat of her own kill, worshiped Nocturnal, princess of the night, and Sithis, Lord of the Void? Yes, she had revered the Nine, and they had favored her, but not only them. Alduin's mad ambition to devour all had in the end become a threat to the interests of both Aedra and Daedra. Tasked with his destruction, she had turned to any power that seemed to take her another step down her path, towards her destiny. And had never questioned what territory it might cross, sunlit or night-shadowed. She was a thrall of the chase, a servant of the goal, she said. She could just as well have become evil through and through, if the goal had led her along a different path. Being Dragonborn was no guarantee, no protection at all. Look at what happened to Miraak, she said, as if everyone knew the name, but my grandfather never found out who that Miraak had been..."
She paused and looked at me quizzically.
"I don't suppose you do, do you? Is it in any of these books?" And she turned to glance at the piled-up volumes again, a bit nervously, I thought, as if Miraak himself might be hiding behind them and would pop up to menace us at the mere mention of his name.
"He was the very first Dragonborn," I said, "Thousands of years ago. He tried to return to our world at the time of the civil war in Skyrim, and she had to stop him. Travel to Oblivion and destroy him. It happened over on Solstheim, where their name for Miraak is the Traitor, and with the war and all, not much news of it reached the mainland, then, or ever, I suppose. I'm not surprised that your grandfather didn't recognize his name."
"And he was a bad person, was he, sir?"
"Very. We were lucky she was there." Just in time, I overcame my professorial reflex to give the story in detail. It was far too late for that.
My narrator sat silently for a moment, assimilating this information, and then went on with her grandfather's tale of the Dragonborn.
"Anyway, she said, look at Miraak. And that was why she had decided to bury Froda here as well, with the children, she said. Froda was someone who had never had a mission. She had never read an Elder Scroll or spoken with the shade of Ysgramor in Sovngarde. She had never shared a mug of ale with Sanguine, or received a tongue-lashing from Nocturnal, or eased open one of the Black Books of Hermaeus Mora to see where its magic might take her. She had only loved the children under her care, and chosen to die rather than be part of harming them. The Dragonborn never dies, she said, and laughed, but no humor in the laugh at all, my grandfather said. A bitter laugh. The goal is her guarantee of life, of success no matter how obtained. Why should the gods bother to send a savior who fails? The outcome had been fixed before the game began. So she had taken the nearest route to the goal, not minding overmuch where it ran and the twists and turns it took.
"But the goal was good and Alduin is gone, my grandfather replied to her. No need to worry now that the task is over, the journey finished.
"The Dragonborn shook her head, almost violently. No, she said, never finished. She had too many debts to pay, and who could say how much time left? Not just burying the dead. That wasn't enough. She's made an example of Alduin, but dragons were still attacking people. She'd have to do something about that. At the time, my grandfather said, he assumed that she was planning to kill them all off, but instead she put together that agreement, Dragon's Peace, that keeps them on the high mountains and men in the valleys, apart from each other. That wasn't to be known for a while yet, but she must have been planning for it even then. She mentioned the trolls as well, and spriggans, and even the hagravens. Was she planning a universal peace, one through which all creatures capable of reason would be reconciled? Perhaps, my grandfather said. Perhaps.
"It was nearly night by then, my grandfather said, the last glow of the setting sun, the cemetery already deep in shadow from the mountain behind it. We both should go home, the Dragonborn said abruptly. I need Shahvee. I always get depressed when I'm away from her. And I don't want to make whoever cares about you wonder if you've been eaten by a bear. Thanks for listening. Sometimes it sounds better when I hear myself telling it to someone else.
"My grandfather just nodded. He didn't know who Shahvee was, until I found out and told him years later. And his memory of what the Dragonborn said wasn't constant; sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. But always the same tone. That she hadn't made the best choices and now it was too late to change them. Things don't even out the way you think they should was the last thing she said as she and my grandfather mounted their horses to go. She looked very tired at that point, he said. Please believe that I tried. I did my best. But try to balance good against evil, and you'll soon learn that evil weighs heavier in the scale than you ever could have imagined.
Then she turned the head of her horse and rode off into the night, going the opposite direction from my grandfather's house, along the road that led up towards Riften. My grandfather visited the cemetery many times after that over the years, and it was kept up well, always neat and orderly. And he never saw the Dragonborn again. But he hoped she had found some peace, in the end."
After my informant had finished, we sat in silence for what seemed a long time. Finally I asked, "Who do you think she was?"
"I don't know. I just feel sorry for her. But my grandfather said once..."
She paused briefly, and when she began to speak again, her voice had become hesitant.
"He said once that she seemed like a child wandering over a battlefield, everyone she knew lost or dead, just knowing there were things very difficult but important that she had to do. No choices, no options. No compass, or map, or road home. Or at least that's what she chose to think. Perhaps that was why she envied the alchemist, someone who had made a choice, backed her words up with her life, and never regretted it for a moment, even though it meant her death. Someone who lived in a moral world, someone who had rules and maps and things that were certain, while she herself never felt she could afford to consider anything but actions and consequences. I don't know myself whether that's correct. I just thought my grandfather's tale might be of help to you."
I smiled at her concern. "Oh, I think your grandfather's account goes a way towards answering some of my questions. It's been extremely interesting to hear. But it was a long story, and it's too late for you to return home tonight. Let me pay for you a room here, and you can be away first thing in the morning."
-o-o-o-
The woman knocked on my door early the next morning, to thank me and say goodbye, and this gave me the chance for one final question, one that had occurred to me after she had left.
"You said there was a word wall as part of the memorial," I said, "and that it was to have a human word or words on it. What words did she choose for it in the end?"
"Oh, just one word. Love."
I wasn't surprised. Of course it would be that.
"Have a safe trip home, then."
"Thank you, sir. I hope you find what you need."