Thank you for the follows! I really hope I won't disappoint.

So far I have an outline of the plot planned out, though of course everything is subject to change, even according to reviewer opinion. Updates should be frequent.

Thanks again for reading!

CHAPTER 2: Exodus

In retrospect, my childhood hadn't been as bad as I'd thought it was as a young boy. Sure, my father had been busy most of the time, but he'd always included me in his work. My sister and I had always been close, and though I always played the protector, she'd been there for me just as prominently when I needed her. And then there was Hadvar, a boy my age – my best friend.

I recalled so easily the games we'd play – of course, they were always fighting games, and we'd fashion ourselves grand Imperial soldiers, protecting Skyrim from evil. How much fun we always had, even during the many silly fights we'd had over who got to be Tiber Septim in each game...

How had it ended up like this?

"Ralof!" Hadvar yells, sword glimmering with the reflection of the flames around us. "You damned traitor. Out of my way!"

Traitor. As if he wasn't the very embodiment of that word himself.

Already in stance; I draw my axe, ready to fight him if it would come to it. "We're escaping, Hadvar," I say firmly, ensuring there's no doubt about the fact. "You're not stopping us this time!"

"Fine! I hope that dragon takes you all to Sovngarde!"

Though his words cut deep, a part of me can't help but think he can't really mean that. But there's no time to dwell on a friendship long lost – a small figure appears running in the short distance behind Hadvar, and I immediately move toward her.

"Irma!" I call, and she slows her pace when she spots me. "Come with me, into the keep!"

She's quick to respond, and I throw a final glance to Hadvar, who breaks eye contact and escapes into the neighbouring tower. I open the door to the keep, making sure Irma's in before I close the door behind us, finally releasing the breath I hadn't even known I'd been holding in a rush.

"Here, let me get those off for you."

When she fixes me with a lost look, I lift her wrists for her, hooking one of the loops with the tip of my axe and jerking it abruptly, slicing through the cord easily. She shakes the rest off easily and nods appreciatively; looks like she might say something, but then her expression changes over something behind me.

I sigh when I finally see him too; Gunjar slumped on the floor near the opposite wall. I walk toward him gingerly, crouching to check whether there's any chance he might've survived, but battle seldom allows such luck. "We'll meet again in Sovngarde, brother," I whisper, before picking up his fallen weapon. Irma appears beside me, her eyes on Gunjar, and I hand her the weapon before she has time to dwell on it.

"Glad you're alright," I murmur, and I'm not sure whether to be happy we're alive or depressed that only two of us survived. "Looks like we're the only ones who made it." It still seems unfair. Our execution gets interrupted, yet only two of us get out alive in the end, anyway? I hold myself back from questioning the gods again. We need all the divine intervention we can get right now, and yelling at said divines is not likely to gain their favour.

"There could be others," Irma suddenly says, and it kind of throws me off. I hadn't expected her to reply, or even speak to me at all. "Elsewhere."

"You're right," I nod. "But... that thing. That thing was a dragon. No doubt. Just like the children's stories and the legends." A shiver runs down my spine. As children, those stories were so exciting and dragons sounded so cool to us. Now it felt like I was living a nightmare. "The harbingers of the End Times."

Irma bit her lip at that, clearly feeling no more at ease than I was. Then she glanced up as a light rain of dust fell from the ceiling, accentuating the fact that we weren't safe here.

"Guess we'd better get moving. I'll check this gate, you check that one. Maybe one of them is our way out of here."

"Locked," she calls back from her gate, and as I try to open the other one, I find myself with the same answer. "Damn. No way to open this from our side." I give the gate a smack with the base of my palm, grunting in irritation. We didn't come this far just to perish inside a crumbling building.

"Shh, quiet!" Irma suddenly says, and I freeze on the spot. "Do you hear that?"

I stay silent for a moment and sure enough, voices with that familiar Imperial accent can be heard down the hall behind Irma's gate. "Imperials!" I hiss, running over to her quickly and hiding behind the right wall, directing her to the other side. "Take cover!"

The steps grow louder, and Irma shrinks back further from the edge of the gate. My hand tightens around the haft of the axe, and I control my breathing. Everything echoes in here.

We hear a female order, "get this gate open."

My eyes fly wide open and Irma's reaction is the same, except they narrow less than a heartbeat later, the voice undoubtedly bringing back a particular grudge. And maybe it's just my imagination, but her posture seems a lot more battle-ready than it had before.

The gate swings open and the captain is the first to step through, but I barely get a chance to move before Irma attacks the captain, knocks her down good and hard, and fights to get her axe at her throat. I'm a little shocked. I figured she would know the basics of using a weapon, but I'd never really... well, expected this.

I don't get a free viewing, however, as the soldier that had come with the captain steps through the gate and engages me immediately. I only just manage to lunge out of the way as he swings with a grunt, the blade just short of slicing my chest, instead cutting the blue sash of my uniform, almost clean off. I get back into stance, instinct guiding me mostly as I step back to avoid another slash, aimed at my neck this time, and as his body absorbs the momentum of his swing, I take a chance and hurl my axe at him. It isn't a perfect throw, but the blade ends up embedded in the left side of his chest anyway, and he goes down with a choke, wide-eyed until he falls down dead – pleasantly, on his back and not forward, onto the axe. That might've been messy.

As I press his chest down with my boot and pull my axe out of it, I notice Irma standing up too, her already-dirty face speckled with red and frowning, chest heaving with exertion, her axe bloody as well as the hand she holds it in. Well.

"Good work," I state, and she glances over at me, looking as if I hadn't just spoken, then holds up a key. I open my mouth in surprise, then I figure instructions are better than compliments at the moment. I point to the opposite gate, undoubtedly where the captain and soldier had been hoping to get to. "Let's try it on that gate, bet that's where these Imperials were headed."

She seems to respond better to me when I'm talking business, as she immediately hurries over to the gate on my prompt and tries the key. Once again I wonder what her story is, though I'm a little uncertain I want to know now that I've seen her happily slice someone's throat open without a second thought.

The gate swinging open with a screech brings me out of my thoughts, and Irma is standing there, waiting for me. "Great," I say in relief as I motion for her to go through first. "Come on, let's get out of here before the dragon brings the whole tower down on our heads."

I follow her down the hall, and we're both in a jog, the distant sounds of destruction above not lost on us. If we don't die in fire, it's likely we could die here by –

"Look out!" I shout, and grab Irma's shoulder before she can run any further, pulling her backward. In the process I end up gracefully falling down and she tumbles backward onto me in turn, but it's lucky. A few seconds too late and she'd have been crushed by rock and rubble. Her head turns abruptly, and I can hear her quick breathing as she whispers a thank you and gets back up onto her feet. I dust myself off and get closer to the blocked hallway, though the rising dust makes it almost impossible to breathe. It's entirely cut off for certain. "Damn," I mutter, thinking twice about moving any of the rocks lest it have a chain reaction. "That dragon doesn't give up easy."

"This way," Irma says, opening the door to our left. I'm not sure how far this passage will get us, but I know as well as she does that this is our only choice.

There are others down here, however, and Irma's steps fall into a slow pace, her arm extended toward me in signal to tread carefully. I recognise the voices to belong to more Imperials, and when Irma glances back at me, I give an affirmative nod. Both of us burst into the room, and the Imperials scramble to meet us with swords extended. I don't get much of a fighting chance though, in a different way than you'd assume.

I'm left feeling somewhat dumbstruck when Irma, ever the anomaly, blocks the blow of the first Imperial, cuts into the arm of the second with her axe, then returns to clash her blade with the first's before knocking him down with a kick to the gut which looked stronger than I'd thought her capable of. This seems to be my cue to enter since her focus switches over from the fallen soldier to the one still left standing. As the soldier gets back onto his feet, I step into the fight and give my axe a swing, which is poorly deflected and leaves me with an easy kill.

My gaze is on Irma as she wipes fresh blood from her cheek, and I know she is aware of my stare but she ignores it entirely, pretending to be busy with searching for items.

"What was that?"

"This is a storeroom," she replies instead, "we should collect supplies." And while it's lovely to have her talking more than a word at a time, I'm more interested in where she learned her technique, not obvious fact statements.

I step right into her space, and when she doesn't stop looting the shelves like a madwoman, I block them with my arm. (I feel I must explain that my arms are fairly thick, no boasting intended.) Irma sighs heavily and regards me with good measure of visible exasperation. "Where did you learn to fight like that?" I inquire, and she squirms, noticeably uncomfortable. "That was proper close-range technique right there, and you don't learn that by play fighting with brothers."

"I learned like any other warrior learns," she replies brusquely. "Lessons and practice."

It's a fair explanation, one that leaves any further questioning to seem like excessive interest; and I don't want to invade her personal life. I am, after all, a gentleman – or at least, I try to be.

"Let's get going," I finally say, and her impatience is palpable. She gives me an expectant look, complete with raised eyebrows, and I slowly lower my arm to let her continue to rummage along the shelves and through the drawers. "Look for potions, we'll need them," I add as I move to search the barrels.

Moving into a stairwell, I hear more voices at the bottom of the stairs, most likely Imperials again. With a shushing motion, I carefully step down near the bottom of the stairs, daring a glance inside before turning back to Irma, who looks to be waiting a visual report. "Troll's blood!" I whisper. "It's a torture room."

Aversion contorts Irma's face. When we enter the room to fight, we find not just torturers, but a fellow Stormcloak. "Myrta!" I call as I grab the man attacking her, pulling him away, and her face lights up with the same relief my voice contains.

"Ralof!" she exclaims, her happy tone of voice odd in contrast with the blade she pushes into the torturer's chest, right before I throw his limp body aside. "You're alive!"

"Barely." I glance over at a suspicious-looking Irma, who joins us after she's handled the other torturer. "Irma, this is Myrta. Don't worry, she's a Stormcloak, she's with us."

Myrta greets Irma with a nod, but Irma only regards her for a moment before glancing briefly at me to speak. "Okay. I'm going to see what I can find around here," and then she goes to do just that.

I clear my throat, addressing Myrta once more even as I keep track of Irma's activities. "Is Jarl Ulfric with you?"

"No," Myrta answers, her brow creased. "I haven't seen him since the dragon showed up."

"Alright... what about any of our other men?"

"None that I've encountered thus far."

Irma's loading a knapsack with items from the room as well as those she'd been carrying from the storeroom, and then she makes toward the next room, pausing to wait for us.

"We'd best get moving then," I say, and Myrta agrees, following as I head over to Irma.

We make our way down another set of stairs until we arrive at the mouth of a cave, and Irma stops in her tracks. Myrta and I pause as well, immediately hearing the talking within.

"The orders are to wait until General Tullius arrives."

"I'm not waiting to be killed by a dragon!"

If nothing else, the multitude of Imperials on our route was at least a good sign that we weren't heading into a dead end. We're confronted with three Imperial soldiers, but with Myrta on our side now, it's an even battlefield. The soldiers aren't much of a fight, probably reckless in the panic induced by the dragon attack, and we press on after picking up their fallen arrows (and maybe a few of the septims in their pockets). There's an opening at the other side of the area, but it seems to delve further down into the cave.

"Let's go on ahead," I say, "see if the way is clear."

But when I look to my side, I only see Irma. I look back, where Myrta is collecting supplies from the soldiers' bodies. "Myrta, come on, we need to go!"

"Go on!" she calls without looking up. "I'll be right on your tail."

I exhale uncertainly, glancing at Irma who is waiting for me to make up my mind, before pressing on. "Let's see where this goes."

We walk through the passage way, where a lever sits in front of a risen drawbridge. Irma pulls it, lowering the bridge so we can get across, though a familiar crumbling sound has us quickening our pace – and now I truly, truly believe the gods are smiling down on us today, because no sooner do I step off the bridge that a boulder falls, crushing the bridge, followed by a shower of rocks and earth that fill up the passage, allowing no return.

The look on Irma's face tells me she's thinking the same thing I am. I swallow. That's just the way it is, I try to tell myself before walking past her, heading down the path on the right. "No going back that way," I remark, as if it weren't obvious. "We'd better push on... Myrta will just have to find another way out."

Irma, unsurprisingly, stays silent as she follows me down along the stream. We hit a dead end once we're in the tunnel, but there's another passageway, which Irma leads the way into. I am just about to revel in how brave she is before she stumbles backward with a shriek, almost smacking into me, her fingers curled in disgust in response to whatever lies ahead. I step in front of her, glancing back at her somewhat worriedly – she hasn't had cause to react this way since I'd met her, so what could've possibly scared her this bad?

Frostbite spiders.

I almost laughed out loud as I hung my axe on my swordbelt, equipping my bow instead and going on ahead to kill them myself. From a distance, they posed little threat, and once I had killed the three smaller ones and planted an arrow in the large one, it wasn't too difficult to finish the creature off with the axe to save the fair damsel in distress. I turned back to Irma, who was finally making her way into the cavern slowly, cautious and looking a little embarrassed.

Of course this brave girl would be afraid of spiders.

"I hate those damn things," I say with barely-concealed amusement – I really wanted to make her feel better. "Too many eyes, you know?"

Her expression is full of disgust as she looks up at me from the spider corpses, and I have a feeling she won't take the lead this time, so I go on ahead with a smile. We reach yet another clearing in the caverns, but it's not empty, and I catch Irma before she gains too much courage and goes storming in. "Hold up," I whisper, much to her confusion.

"More spiders?" she asks apprehensively, and I won't deny, she's sort of cute when she's scared.

"No. It's a bear, just ahead. See her?" There's really no need to point it out, but I do anyway; revealing the sleeping beast in the larger part of the cave. "I'd rather not tangle with her right now. Let's try to sneak by. Just take it nice and slow, and watch where you step." I pluck her axe from her belt, push it into her hand. "Go ahead," I urge. "I'll follow your lead and watch your back."

Determination sparks in her eyes, and she gives a firm nod before crossing over the stream, careful with her steps as she eases toward an abandoned cart. Quick to fall close behind her in case we get detected, we both sneak past the bear, and my heart stops for a moment when I hear a low growl – but it's just a yawn. We scurry into the tunnel and Irma breathes a sigh of relief, and I chuckle quietly, wiping away invisible sweat from my brow.

We proceed in through the tunnel, only to be greeted by slivers of light up ahead. "That looks like the way out," I say hopefully, and as if synchronised, we both pick up our pace, running toward it until a large opening appears, almost blinding us with outdoor light. "I knew we'd make it!" I can't help cheering, laughing as I breathed clean air for the first time since before the attack.

No sooner had I thought it did a very recognisable roar reverberate in the close distance. "Wait!" I pull Irma a little roughly into the brush, crawling behind a boulder as the black dragon finally appeared overhead, flying away from the town as if it had finished what it had set out to do. We emerge slowly, before finally relaxing once it was clear he wasn't coming back.

"There he goes," I mutter, frowning at the departing figure, a black shadow against the blue sky. "Looks like he's gone for good this time."

Irma's gaze is scanning our surroundings, and I know she's searching for any survivors who might've escaped this way.

"No way to know if anyone else made it out alive, but this place is going to be swarming with Imperials soon enough." I cough and look away from the rising smoke billowing from Helgen. "We'd better clear out of here."

I know that in the aftermath of the disaster, it's easy for panic and despair to sink in, so I try to distract her from it – but when she looks back at me, she seems – well, not calm, but in the least she doesn't seem too heavily affected. Neither does she seem to be in any more a chatty mood than she'd been so far.

"My sister, Gerdur, she runs the mill in Riverwood, just up the road," I offer, unsure what else to say. "I'm sure she'd help you out."

Her eyes are piercing, and yet, they're unreadable. Always unreadable. Maybe that's the reason for what I say next. "It's probably best if we split up."

For a moment, she doesn't react, but she seems to be thinking. Then she takes the axe from her side, holds it out to me – she wants to return it. I frown as I take it in my hand, but then I hand it back. "Keep it," I tell her. "It doesn't belong to me, and I want you to be safe."

Irma takes the axe back hesitantly, her gaze never dropping. Then she nods her head, her usual sign of gratitude, but just as she turns to depart, she stops and turns back. "Thanks," she says. "For saving me. And... good luck."

It immediately makes me feel a tinge of regret for suggesting splitting up, but I swallow that back. "Good luck to you too," I reply; "I wouldn't have made it without your help today."

I thought I saw the slightest twitch of her lips, maybe a smile, or maybe not.

And then she's gone. Again.

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