Qahnaarin awoke in fitful spasms.
Not a true awakening, of course. That would entail wallowing in her mortal flesh once again. Disgusting. And yet when all was said and done, it was not her little sister laid low.
Bruised, scorched and parched; left to die - or live - in disgrace and ignominy.
Somewhere above her, the squabbling sounds of gulls filters down into her senses, full of wind and salt. The offshore breeze picks up and sweeps aloft tiny whorls of sand and grit, aggravating her nostrils.
With aching slowness, the dragon lifts her head out of the dirt. The great crest upon her brow, usually a source of smug vanity, weighs down her skull like an ungainly helm.
Blinking eyes crusted with congealed blood, she observes the flat plateau she sprawls upon and thinks of her earlier mountain fastness, emitting a low rumble of misery.
She does not remember how she came to be here.
Qahnaarin's world constantly shifted, sifting through memory, past, present and future like liquid, or smoke. Thanks largely to the Father of Time, nothing was solid or certain. Through many instances, many false-awakenings, she felt much like a child's inflated balloon, cut adrift to wander without meaning, or purpose.
After defying death against impossible odds and defeating a god, it seemed her destiny had left her to fade into obscurity.
Indeed, through the physical decline of her earthly counterpart she would one day do more than fade. She would cease to exist. Die.
Death was a difficult subject for dragons. A potent poison consumed accidentally or deliberately might well succeed in killing a dovah, presuming they did not utilise any healing magicks or bully subservient mortals into aiding them… But ageing like those selfsame mortals was a neigh-on incomprehensible topic.
How would Qahnaarin meet her end? Would she know Death when he finally came for her? Would she be old and asleep in a warm bed somewhere or violently thrown into his arms, killed?
Or would, as had very almost been the case, she die in battle against another pseudo-dragon? She doubted a body, discounting how weak and pathetic it may already be, could survive without a soul.
With a suppressed growl of pain, Qahnaarin heaved her considerable bulk upright, uncomfortably aware of the protesting creaks of bone, the pull of sprained muscles. Wrists braced against the loamy soil, claw-thumbs dug in, her wings extended out behind her and stretched instinctively, twin masts of membranous gold, beautiful enough to strike a chord in the heart of any poet… when not besmirched by blood and filth.
Blinking clear her eyes, she carefully snuffed the air for any signs of company. None, save for the expected presence of lesser creatures: birds and insects and other small things holed within the encroaching scrub. To have been laid so low…
She did not know how long the battle had raged against the blue male who had so rudely awoken her. Were it for a day or a week meant little really, save that in event of the latter there were ready sources of emergency rations available. She knew there were several mortal hamlets nestled within her former hunting grounds that would have served that end admirably.
She did recall it had begun in the night, dawn perhaps an hour or two away. The blue dragon had inexplicably known her name, using it as the bait to draw the female, force her to accept his challenge. It had incensed Qahnaarin to no end that he had not offered his. Whoever her adversary had been, he had not deigned follow the simplest measures of protocol or honour in their debate. Invading her territory and attacking her in the dead of night while she slept? Scum.
But for all her dignified outrage and bluster, she had barely escaped the encounter alive.
The male had been big and scarred, a veteran almost dwarfing the ochre fool she had slaughtered previously; Qahnaarin was not so easily intimidated by size, however. His Thu'um presented a more dangerous facet: to her very unpleasant surprise she could barely match it. Overall, the stakes of their mêlée were well set for a long, drawn out struggle.
And so, for interminable time they had fought, the very sky seeming to tear and split under the power and ferocity of combat. It had not gone well.
Qahnaarin had barrelled in overconfident, too arrogant in her own warrior's prowess to consider the male might have expected just this reaction from his younger, female opponent. Each powerful slash of her claws the dovah deflected upon the heaviest portions of his dark blue armour, sustaining very little damage that could not be shrugged off completely. Where her movements were sinuous as a striking adder, reliant on speed and greater dexterity, his defence was almost lazy, meeting her attacks head-on, letting them be deflected by sheer mass or slapped down by one vast, lapis hued wing. Each time one of her attempts to slide past his considerable guard failed, Qahnaarin's rage increased, eyes narrowed to poisonous slits and teeth bared in a snarl of hatred.
She had screamed at him, fire belching forth from her jaws as unintentionally as it proved ineffective. In the brief pause following her Shout, where no sane enemy would dare present themselves too closely for danger of roasting, the male had struck.
For a second or so, the blow appeared to have been deflected by Qahnaarin's thick crown of hardened scale and bone, even if the force alone had spun her through the air, but abruptly her vision was blinded by blood.
The male had opened up a long, deep gash diagonally above her brow, a hair's breadth away from one large green eye. What's more, she was certain it had been a deliberate choice, an Ancient's condescending way of informing a fledgling of their own inferiority, perhaps even a deliberate offering of compromise in exchange for her life.
Qahnaarin spat upon such proposals.
Tearing through the air, she shot straight for his head in retaliation, calling upon Unrelenting Force, legs braced for a forwards impact with the intent of latching on, dismissing the threat of his size so that she might rip his throat out.
The male seemed to realise her tactics, spinning to face the charge directly, meeting her Voice with his own, cacophonous, bone-crushing force melding to one, then dissipating.
When the collision did come, he was more than ready for her. Far too late to abort her attack, she felt the brush of fear sympathetic to her own upon her mind like a distant wind. Prey.
The sharp shock of teeth ravaging the very base of her throat forced a shrill howl of disbelieving agony out from Qahnaarin, wings thrashing up a hurricane around the larger dovah's head, inflicting a thousand tiny tears with her frontal rending claws. The male completely ignored them.
Spitting her out of his mouth like an offensive piece of meat, her adversary flapped his wings strongly enough to bat her away, accelerating his victim's impending fall.
How many times had Qahnaarin practiced a stoop… a plunge, a death-dealing assault from above? Yet it seemed in that terrible moment the dragon had never quite noticed the stomach-shrivelling magnitude of the sky before, never looked down upon the distant lands of Nirn and considered what an impact with them at high speed might entail.
With furious certainty, she suddenly realised from whence such mortal observations had sprung.
Hardly aware of the keening wail emerging from her own torn throat, in that selfsame worst possible moment Qahnaarin became hideously aware of her Other Self; the freezing cold assault on her scales, the spinning sickness of her surroundings. Prey.
She was NOT prey!
Silently screaming this at her feeble counterpart, hoping against hope the wretched thing had enough mind to take heed, Qahnaarin flapped her wings with renewed strength, attempting to stem the outflow of blood from her wounds through willpower alone.
Above her resounded the male's roar; it seemed sight of her renewed vigour had incensed him to end what he'd started.
A detached part of her understood, not without a twist of irony, the veteran was almost certainly about to perform her own favourite trick against her. If he didn't finish the job on her throat, trapped under the force of his weight and the howling air pressure her neck would snap. She simply could not let that happen.
Carefully maintaining some pretence of total helplessness, disturbingly easy given her straits, Qahnaarin twisted her airborne body, minutely altering the tension of muscles, the angle of wings so that her fall rather became a semi-controlled plummet. Directly above her, the blue dovah made his move.
Taking the howling air into her lungs with deep, painstakingly slow gulps, flooding her body with oxygen, she had watched with necessary detachment the next events unfold, almost in slow motion.
Her adversary had transformed from a distant blur across the heavens to an engulfing totality, filling her vision. As she unfeelingly acknowledged the near-killing impetus of his feet and talons and mouth upon her body, breaking a fair few ribs on impact, her mind consumed itself in the tiniest of details.
The delicate, secondary colouring of the male's armour; lapis hued indeed, molten silver tipping each individual scale. The harshness of his breath, akin to a roaring tempest in her ears. She smelt a powerful magick upon him. And the eyes. The eyes unbalanced her. Perhaps some small, suspicious part of her enemy wondered at Qahnaarin's seeming docility, even though her fate was sealed. Would any self-respecting female remain so quiescent in a male's grasp?
And so, though not a syllable emerged from his throat, those black, void-cold eyes asked the question, glittering with intelligence and enquiry. With the chosen Words, not so much Shout as whisper, Qahnaarin gave answer.
Feim.
The golden dragon dissolved in his grip, in an instant becoming as substantial as a gossamer thread of spider's silk, drifting without anchor.
Deaf to the furious, thwarted roar of her assailant, her ghostly semblance had proceeded to float unhurriedly down. Away from the fray, the challenger and any lingering pain… at least for a little while. Down unto the world below.
Like a descending fog, Ethereal-Qahnaarin had entered a dense, coniferous forest. Leaves and branches alike failed to acknowledge her passage with as much as a tiny shudder. By the time her mist-form reached the woodland floor, her concentration was exhausted.
Regaining solidity bit by bit, the female had allowed herself a moment or so to relax, fully aware of the danger of doing so when she was not, literally, out of the proverbial woods. Her fretting was well-grounded.
Above her, unseen through the encompassing density of bark and foliage, the male was circling. He could have copied her act, descending to her level, but well did he know Qahnaarin would be long gone by then. The forest had become her shield. Unfortunately for his brash if not sly prey, that shield bore a deadly weakness.
When she heard the vindictive blast of his Voice turned flame, she had for a brief, stark second known terror.
Then all sense of the world had drowned in fire.
Above her now, only the gulls still circled. To her sides, smouldering timber had been replaced with the soothing bustle of the ocean. Yet inexplicably the scent of ash in this place lingered. Perhaps it was merely the reek of her wounds.
As Qahnaarin slowly recuperated upon that nameless and deteriorated scrap of coast, she brooded, and came to a decision.
She would discount her situation, her identity and even the dream world she existed in itself if she must: all that really mattered now was the blue dragon. His was insult without provocation, murderous intent without reasoning. She would find him, if she had to tear her little sister's mind apart in the crucible of her jaws! She would never take the mantle of victim.
Privately relishing the salty air and the background murmur of life upon the shore, she began a careful preening of her battered and bloody scaling. For now, she was content to plot, through effort forcing her anger down to that of a seething cauldron... or a dormant volcano.
How the tables had turned for the Vanquisher.
"Hey. HEY! Argonian, wake up!"
The voice was familiar. She had definitely heard it before.
"Come on!" the voice insisted.
"Ralof?" mumbled Hatches 'neath rushes.
"Never heard of him, lady," asserted the voice.
Her vision cleared and suddenly she was upon a rickety old ship, miraculous in the fact it was still perfectly sea-worthy. Standing over her was the captain, one Gjalund Salt-Sage. She wondered that she had actually remembered the Nordic embroidery.
"Well, here we are," smiled Salt-Sage.
Feeling much like a sack full of old bones left out in the elements for far too long, Rush sat up upon the patch of damp deck she'd claimed for the duration of her journey, instinctively curling her tail around her legs to avoid having it trodden on. Again. Her shoulder throbbed, but she purposefully ignored it. Had someone previously informed her she'd be traversing the Sea of Ghosts in the depths of a Skyrim Frostfall, in the company of a rag-tag band of previously-hypnotised sailors with terrible notions of hygiene, she'd have been tempted to freeze them solid with her Thu'um.
"Mighty impressive, 'ain it?" embellished young Sogrlaf, stepping smartly over the Argonian hauling a coil of fraying ropes. The odour of old sweat seemed to linger after him for an obscene amount of time.
Slowly, Rush took a hold of her bearings, gazing about her with a traveller's trepidation that their destination might prove just as unpleasant as the journey. At first glance, her summation appeared correct.
Rapidly approaching Gjalund's ship from the bows loomed an island. Grey as granite it was, reminiscent of the sky above Winterhold or her own scales. A small, sneaky side of her observed this with a hunter's approval of natural camouflage. She had never been much good with a bow, but in her opinion there was no reason why a part mage, part swordswoman couldn't combine flinging fireballs and filleting her enemies with a bit of stealth, now and then.
Squinting her eyes, she made out in miniature an untidy port bearing precious few other vessels, behind which hunched clusters of run-down old warehouses and buildings.
Even on her better days, her opinion of the place would have been a variant of 'cesspit'.
That said, as Gjalund and his hands expertly swung the Northern Maiden into harbour, filtering out beneath the fog of lingering sleep and her peripheral vision emerged a truly spectacular sight.
"Damn!" swore Rush, briefly overwhelmed by a rare instant of awe. She hadn't felt like this since the first time she set foot in Blackreach. "It's got big!"
Gjalund made a show of breaking from his tasks, squinting mockingly into the distance with a hand over his brow. To the east of the mangy freighter towered the fabled mountain of fire.
Viewed off the coast of Solstheim, Red Mountain was a magnificent reminder of the Aedra's creations. Like a far-flung threat of death it crouched, ever-present in the minds of the island's inhabitants. Until now, Vvardenfell alongside its infamous volcano had been no more than a hazy mirage upon the horizon as the Maiden swiftly cut her way through the sea en route to Raven Rock. Tall and inscrutable, the mountain now glowered down upon all, a violent and provocative giant always willing to destroy.
It gave Rush pause to consider how the Dunmer refugees who had sought asylum here since the bleak aftermath of Red Year could stand living always in that monster's shadow. Then, the obvious answer came. They had no choice.
Feeling oddly muted, Rushes stood well back from the busy crew making dock, taking mental note of her supplies. Sword. Armour. Potions. Before her impulsive escape from her sickbed and the College she had also liberated a pot of Colette's cure-all salve from her personal stores, sure in the knowledge the dizzy little Breton would never notice its absence. So far it seemed to be helping the wounds her previous assailants had dealt her.
Which really did bring back the matter at hand, and the grim task ahead.
Stepping off the ship with a wave and a complementary purse of coin that disappeared into Gjalund's hand with supernatural swiftness, Rushes breathed in the briny air of Raven Rock's dilapidated docks with a profound sense of olfactory relief.
It would be late noon by account of the sun's passage across the murky Solsteic skies. Before her lay a town quite ready to call an end to a busy day of labour. No doubt her Dunmeri peers would look upon the questions of a heavily armed Argonian mercenary-type with as much enthusiasm as they would a war band of reavers from one of Salt-Sage's bogus sea tales.
Nonetheless, the Dragonborn had to try. More than her life had been put at stake. Whether it took her a day or a year, she would root out the invisible patron of the cultists, this Miraak. She would choke the answers from him and when she could learn no more, she'd roast him alive for his troubles.
Curled nose to tail in quiet repose upon a lonely shore, Qahnaarin rumbled in drowsy approval.