Chapter Five
Alduin is a real dragon, with flesh and teeth and a mean streak longer than the White River. And there was a time when Alduin tried to rool over all of Skyrim with his other dragons. In the end, it took sum mitey strong heroes to finally kill Alduin and be dun with his hole sorry story.
- Thromgar Iron-Head, Alduin is Real, and he ent Akatosh
Brital Stone-Stander sat up, and spit the taste of earth from her tongue. She had dreamed of flight.
Dawn sliced through the room from the single slit in the eastern wall, cutting glitter from the gneiss slab where her head had just rested. The shaft extended straight smooth through the mountainside, cut by her own voice and precisely aligned to accept the breaking of dawn. A cave room, really, however planed its walls, and far bigger than she needed for shelter. Her sleeping slab stood alone at the center, solely illuminated. Beneath rested a rough octagon of mylonite, engraved with her ruminations on the nature of animal heat, radiating an appropriately opiatic warmth.
She dressed, wrapping herself in the scaled mantles and furs scattered around the room where she had tossed them the night before. Gold and jewels sprinkled carelessly from the folds of her clothes to join the rest of the treasure littering the dusty floor – spillage of the crates, caskets, and chests stacked high in the corners.
Stamping her feet in her boots, Brital strode toward the door, pausing only to survey the charcoal schematic pulled taut in a wooden frame against the wall, dimly visible in the corona of the lone sunbeam. The fixative had taken well overnight, leaving the parchment a light amber from the wash of pine tar. There were lighter fixatives in the south, carried north, sometimes, by Khajiit caravans, but pine tar was what she knew. She ran a rough finger across the page. With hope, she would not have to use it.
Shrieking winds scraped at her cheeks as she threw open the stone door, smooth on hinges oiled in troll fat, winds so fierce and loud that no speech without Voice was possible there, where Kyne's breath harried the snow in swirls across the stone. Morning's light blazed from the ice, stinging her eyes; bitter cold bit her ears, but both were nothing.
Brital stood with sun rising at her back and watched the shadow of the Throat of the World shorten across the forests of her childhood, the mists burn off the shores of Lake Ilinalta. Far more often she had looked the other way, from amidst the moss-bearded trees of the Kreath to the mount of the seven thousand steps. Dreaming, first, of High Hrothgar's calm, but in short span glaring at yet another bitter disappointment. She hungered, but she would not eat; some things were best done in fast. The sun was enough risen, taking its ease on the peak. She spoke.
You will come.
Her draconic words, quiet as they were, slashed through Kyne's howls and swept down across Skyrim in a great roaring rush, rippling last year's dead grasses in the plains.
They were summoned; now, to preparations. She turned from the edge and strode toward the center of the holy mountain's peak, where stood a circle of thick stones, standing high as her chest and cut from the very rock where Brital now kept her rest. Engraved channels and incised dragon scratch scored their faces, cut by the chisel at Brital's belt. Just beyond, an enormous inverted triangle faced the dawn, a narrow jamb for the temporal tear it framed – the time wound, where Alduin, dragon of the End Times, had been cast out of the world in days of old.
Brital hauled four crates from her chamber to the circle of stones and wrenched them open, pulling seven thick black books from the padding hay within. She placed one atop each pedestal, closed until needed – and then caught sight of the gaggle of bearded men standing silently in the snow behind her.
"I ent never asked for yenne," she said – in Tamrielic, but even so the air warped and twisted with her voice. "Get ye back to yer nunnery."
They traded looks. "You did not tell us of your return, Dovahkiin," said whatever-his-name-was at the front; he spoke so rarely and said so little, and Brital always forgot names anyway. "We have Need to Speak with you. We allowed you your freedom after the fall of the World-Eater, but now we must consider your place in the world. The crisis is passed, and so passed must be your divine providence."
Brital snorted, sending a boulder tumbling down the mountain. "Ye couldnat calm me if ye wer ten-thuhhousand times as gree. Deynat talk shit." She brushed the straw from a final tome, its cover a crazed patchwork of variegated leather.
"We would not dream of trying," he snarked back, his little voice scratching under her mantle. "Still, you must curb your Voice. The world requires your peace, now."
"The world think well to want mountainne of me, doesnee? And chanchin' what it want all over. Myn voice, myn silence, myn anger, myn peace. The world think well to outright own me, eh?"
"You are Dovahkiin. Bormahu's gift comes with its price: that you use it properly, for the good of others."
She laughed bitterly. "Deynat fool yerself. The world, she think she own all y'all, mason or master chust the same." She tucked the last book against her chest and took her place at the center of the circle, before the towering triangular gate. In the distance, faint roars rang between the mountains.
The greybeards again traded inscrutable looks, their hands flashing with their silence signals. The talentless old fools; puny as their voices were, they could not even control their thu'um sufficiently to prevent collateral damage. And too stupid to see that there was no speech without innocent injury.
"It may be that you still have some fate to fulfill," admitted the hairiest of them. "But we have listened closely to your travels, and you speak without forethought or finesse. Consider the Need behind your actions, Dovahkiin. Consider carefully."
"Consider myn ass, windy."
This, of course, they ignored, even with the noisome echoes it wrought. Brital had spent little enough time enduring their teaching, the ill-grammared louts, but enough for inurement.
"How came this here, Dovahkiin?" they asked, gesturing to the pedestal stones and gate. "And what is its purpose?"
"It here because I put it here with myn own handde. What it do yer gonna see when yer masterre come, if ye think ye can survive it."
"Kyne help us," spoke one of the silent beards, staring up at the triangular frame. "Elder scrolls."
Elder scrolls there were indeed, mounted two in the top corners and a third unfurled upon the doorway like a slain swan. Its surface was completely blank, wiped clean by the numinous touch of the very tear in time it had cut so long ago, shimmering there between the stones.
"And these books – they are of Daedric origin," another said, staring at the tomes on their stones. "Gods – we were troubled by what we heard of you on the winds, but we had not thought your fraternizations had gone so deep! What could such things do, together, here where the blood of Time pools upon the very breeze?"
"That yer gonna see, if ye talk much longer," Brital grimaced. "But if ye stay ye better know that I'm gonna suck yer breath out yer lungge like all the rest and no hoot or hanny fer what that do to yenne."
Hot on the wake of her words, a roar shattered the shrieking winds of the peak. An enormous body swept across the sun, the deep rush of its wings whirling about them. Answering roars wailed from far off, their wind-winding owners swift on their way.
"Decide or get out," Brital snapped, looking to the skies. "Yer masterre are here, and I ent got time for yenne." And the dragons seized the mountaintop.
They came from every direction, of all sizes and colors and curls of crown, vary-winged but uniformly earsplitting, shouting greetings and insults and coarse banter at each other in dragon tongue as they landed upon boulders and circled the peak, filling the air with flame and brimstone, chill and tingle. Chief among the throng was of course Paarthurnax, millennial-leader of the greybeards themselves upon the Throat. He slammed down atop the stone gate before her, all tattered grey scales and tumorous horns.
"Hello, dragonborn," he said through the din, in dragon-tongue. "Why have you called us back to the Throat?"
"HELLO!" Brital shouted back.
"HELLO!" returned the assembled wyrms, knocking the greybeards on their backs in the snow. Brital kept her feet, bound to the earth.
"Richness of hunt and hoard to you all!" Brital shouted. "I trust you have enjoyed retaking the world without my teeth at your throat or Alduin's will at your back?"
An uproar of exclamations, at that, so filled with words as to be unintelligible except in its raw laughter, its glee in plunder and conquest and flight. Paarthurnax, pacifist that he claimed to be, kept quiet, but Brital noted his wings and scales flexing restlessly.
"I have not called you here to debate you from the old ways with padded words, as some would," she continued, "but rather to enlist your assistance with something that concerns all with the blood of Bormahu in their veins." That got only a roundly skeptical reptilian glare.
"I of course speak of the wound in time that scars this very mountain," she said, pointing to the shimmering warp between the stones. "Mortals ripped the weft of the world when they banished Alduin, using an Elder Scroll to break the very nature of the world. Ultimately, this tear threatens us by our very nature, and is in itself a desecration of the will of Bormahu. We must heal this wound."
Scattered rumblings, rippling reality in waves of stardust and sulfur, but the one seemed generally accepting. Of course it did; it was in their blood to desire the proper continuity of time, even if only their mothers actively maintained it. She had not concocted this plan without forethought, after all.
"The taste of your words agrees with me," rumbled Paarthurnax, "but this wound circumpenetrates all of time. I tried many times to close it myself, but never was I able. Some kenning prevents even the jills from touching it."
"It was made with an Elder Scroll, an objective account linked inextricably to the history and events of this world," Brital explained. "Thus, it must also be unmade with a scroll, and unmade throughout all of time at once." She stared him down, then swept her eyes across the perched wyrms. "To do this, I will walk upon the winds of time."
Another wave of rumblings; barks of disbelief and surprise and apprehension, spinning off into eddying debates of whether such a thing could be possible for a mortal – even a mortal with the blood of Bormahu, the divine dragon of time itself. Several quickly heated into outright arguments, their participants whirling off the mountain to circle each other in mid-air, shouting points and counterpoints in lashes of fire and lightning.
"I do not mean insult, friend," spoke Odahviing, cutting through the more measured discussion of those still perched, "but how will you be able to ride the time winds? Even had you wings, I think you would fall. There is a strange heaviness in you that defies the freedom of flight."
"Indeed, you are correct," replied Brital, like a scratch under the chin. "I am unable to fly or be flown." Odahviing would know; she had born Brital across Skyrim several times – or tried to bear her, but had never been able to take her weight farther than a few miles, saying that she had pressed down like a mountain the higher she flew. She could carry all Brital's crates and chests from Solstheim to the Throat without resting, but Brital herself had had to take a ship.
"Then it should be another who enters the winds," snapped a squirming little wyrm from between another's spiraling horns. "Who will enter the maelstrom?"
"I will," Brital blasted. "The prophecy is integral to my own fate, and I am integral to the prophecy. This is not a matter of choice; no other can do this. But as I cannot fly, and none can carry me, I have found a way to walk the winds instead."
"The books I have gathered here are the property of the Eye of the Forest," she said, gesturing to the seven-stone circle. "When last dragonkind ruled this land, they took the form of gems, engraved with secret words at every layer of examination. As I am sure some of you know very well, each represents an egress into the Eye's Forest, where the detritus of dead possibility is caught and collated. By funneling the Forest's senesced potential through this Scroll's grounding irrefutability, I intend to make of this tear a doorway unto a garden of what could have been and may yet still be. On that garden's paths of certain possibility, I will be free to find and close this tear in all of time."
"An interesting plan, dragonborn," answered Paarthurnax as the rest growled lowly between; there was too much mortal consideration in this talk for it to make much sense to them. "The Eye of the Forest may attempt interference, though. It is no sleepy wyrm."
"The Forest's Eye has no power here, Paarthurnax," Brital said. "This is the seat of its antithesis; there will be no interference." She was nowhere near confident of that, in truth, but there would at least be no prevention of her plan.
The ancient dragon showed his throat, ceding the point. "And what role have we to play in this? Why summon us with your voice of bone?"
"Because the wound must be kept clean and open while I do my work, or I will be unable to heal it here, or return to this time." And because the more thu'um behind the initial unsealing, the more unlikely of possibility's paths she would be able to tread. "Further, I need your breath to guide me back into the world. The paths will by labyrinthine, I expect."
But then a puny little voice cut in. "This many danger," shouted one of the greybeards. "Add hide history, demon talk to bone true only must destroy."
"Shut yer cretinous mouth," spat Brital in Tamrielic, spraying him with acidic spittle. "Deynat yenne dare to speak in front yer masterre. Shut yer damned grammalackin' mouthe." The others crowded round, whispering words of cleansing to wipe the burning spit from their leader's skin. Paarthurnax looked on stoically; they had been his pets for many years, but it seemed that time was done.
"I do not know how long the repair will require, in this history," Brital went on. "It may be instantaneous, or it may take months, or even years. I need you to remain here, intoning my guide chant, until I return." She met their eyes one by one. "And mind me well. I would have your breath willingly in this," she said, "but make no mistake: I am the World Eater's end and I know the words of your wills. I will have your breath in every eventuality."
That brought the first true silence since they had arrived. Respect her strength they undoubtedly did, but no one appreciated it.
"If that is your truth, then let us begin," growled Odahviing from her perch. "This must be done, but let it be done soon. The world is ripe for the hunting, and those few who resisted your call will take opportunity to seize what we are too busy to claim." The assemblage showed their throats in agreement, and Brital too raised her chin.
"Then begin the chant," she said, and as the rumbling words went up from the scaly congress, meant to synchronize and combine their thu'um, Brital turned to the cowering monks. "Last chance," she growled. "I told ye – if ye stay I'll have yer breath chust the same. Yer no dovah; ye may keel down. Good goneance, but fair warnin' fer foolle." And without waiting to see what they would choose, she closed her eyes and entered the chant herself.
Aal mu kos med ven ko gravu'un
Aal mu pah aav daar thu'um
Aal mu tinvaak voth gein su'um
The words rushed through Brital's lungs; she could feel the thu'um of every dragon, each with its own unique resonance. Discrepancies in pitch and rhythm bled gradually away, and they spoke as one through the dragonborn in her circle of stones.
Aal mu kos med ven ko gravu'un
Aal mu pah aav daar thu'um
Aal mu tinvaak voth gein su'um
She opened her eyes and removed a stick of charcoal from the case at her belt. The dragons' heads were upturned uniformly, their eyes closed, speech in their entirety. She spoke a new word and they spoke with her; the black books slammed open on their pedestals. Brital strode to each and scrawled new words of power upon their pages, and then right out into the very air, linking each tome to the others with chains of text, until the circle whirled with a ring of forbidden lore, a floating shell of etched esotera and smudged sigils. Jhunal sorcery, that, and almost blasphemous there are Kyne's temple, but Brital gave no damns about that; she would do what she had to do. The sky darkened with the blood of apocryphal possibility, clouds twisting into yellow-grey spirals strafed with multicolored lightning; a reflection of Nirn's contaminated potentiality. Rifts began to crackle across the air as she continued her work, closing almost instantly, open only long enough to glimpse the Daedric denizens of the myriad realms beyond.
Aal mu kos med ven ko gravu'un
Aal mu pah aav daar thu'um
Aal mu tinvaak voth gein su'um
When all was prepared, she returned to the steps before the time wound in its stone gate, Paarthurnax crouched above. She let the chant build within her, growing in intensity, and then bellowed a new Word.
Aal mu kos med ven ko gravu'un
Aal mu pah aav daar thu'um
Aal mu tinvaak voth gein su'um BEX
The space within the gate tore like rotted cloth, and winds a thousands times more vicious than Kyne's shrieks tore at Brital's skin and hair, pouring through from a chaotic black maelstrom of warped visions and a cacophonous multiplex of language. The sky cracked with the force, spitting flailing hordes of daedra out upon the lands around the mountain. Wails of birth, screams of death, shrieks of laughter and pain, quiet mumbles and soft words, the cries of birds and the eroding lap of the sea on the shore, roaring beasts and chittering insects all at once, flaying and decaying hearing and sight. The Elder Scroll shivered at its egress, blank with the overflow.
Brital wrote once more, scripting a connective paragraph upon the air between the cloud of apocrypha and the pristine scroll. Her charcoal dripped forbidden knowledge, touched the page – and instantly words spilled across the scroll, shifting like oil on water. Another Word, and the edge of the divine parchment spun out into the storm, forking and splitting a thousand thousand times, cutting the clouds of history into woody pillars, twined between with paths for the tread of brave mortals.
Paarthurnax opened his eyes and looked down at her as she stepped toward the doorway of time. He blinked slowly; yes, go now, do this thing. You do what is good for the world. Heal time. Make it right again.
But when Brital set out upon the black pathways of possibility, charcoal in her hand and the Oghma Infinium tucked against her chest, she had, of course, no intention whatsoever of healing time's tear.
The dragons chanted on, and the storm raged about the Throat, brooding black fate.