Tirdas, 2nd of Heartfire, 4E 201

Dear Diary:

We made it to Windhelm this evening and I got to talk with Ulfric Stormcloak, but the whole situation in the beginning was much less than desirable. I would much rather been stepped on by an angry mammoth than go through that headache again!

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"No cats in the city!"

"But I need to see the Jarl! It's important!" Zahrassa argued, stomping her foot and steam billowed out of her mouth from the cold air.

"Laws are laws," the guard snapped, crossing his arms and shaking his head.

"The guard does not know who he speaking to, yes?" Kharjo said, stepping forward.

"Don't make me laugh, cat. Your kind aren't welcome here!"

"But I'm the Dragonborn!" Zahrassa whined, crossing her thin arms and scowling. The guard actually started to laugh before glaring at her.

"You? A cat, the legendary Dragonborn?"

"Yeah, and I can prove it!" She huffed, uncrossing her arms and putting her hands on her hips.

"I don't believe you. Cats can't Shout, only Nords."

"Well then watch this," Zahrassa sneered, turning around and trying to mentally prepare herself for the throat pain that was sure to come. Faendal and Lydia got out of the way so that they wouldn't get hit with the wave of energy.

"This is ridic-"

"FUS!"

"BY THE DIVINES!" The guard exclaimed, stumbling backwards into the large doors that barred Zahrassa from entry. Zahrassa gripped her throat with one hand and pushed the other onto her chest, hunching over as her screaming lungs made a desperate attempt at freedom. With every heavy breath she drew feeling like tiny knives on the back of her throat, she slowly turned to look up at the guard.

"Can...I go in...now...please?" She wheezed, moving the hand on her neck to cover her mouth as she coughed and sent more pain tearing down her lungs. Kharjo reached over and daintily pat her on the back while the guard looked her over for several long, cold, painful minutes.

"Alright, fine, but just the Dragonborn!" The guard finally said. "The rest of you lot have to wait out here."

"As her housecarl, I'm afraid I can't agree to that," Lydia huffed, crossing her arms much like Zahrassa had done just a few moments earlier.

"Then no entry," the guard shrugged.

"It'll be...fine...Lydia...just wait...I'll be back..." Zahrassa continued to wheeze, finally standing up straight and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Gods I hate Shouting.

"...fine. But if anything happens to her, I'm jumping the wall!" Lydia snapped, glaring at the guard.

"Your funeral," the guard shrugged once more, pushing the massive metal door into the city open. "Now go, before I change my mind!"

"Thank you...so much," Zahrassa gasped, slipping past the door and flinching when it banged shut behind her. Much like Helgen last month, she was once again completely on her own. At least here no one would try to cut her head off...she hoped.

Once she managed to compose herself and quiet her loud wheezing, she surveyed the darkening street around her. There were two Nord men and a Dunmer woman standing outside of the inn, arguing about something that Zahrassa had a hard time hearing over the wind and banging of the sign hanging over the doors to the inn.

"You come here where you're not wanted, you eat our food, you pollute our city with your stink, and you refuse to help the Stormcloaks!" The shorter man yelled, shaking one of his fists.

"But we haven't taken a side because it's not our fight!" The Dunmer woman protested, placing her hands on her hips. Zahrassa inched closer so that she could hear better.

"Hey, maybe the reason these gray-skins don't help in the war is because they're Imperial spies!" The taller Nord in shabby brown clothes said.

"Don't be ridiculous!" The Dunmer cried.

"Maybe we'll pay you a visit tonight, little spy. We got ways of finding out what you really are!" The shorter Nord said, much louder than he had been speaking before.

"Not while I stand, you won't!" Zahrassa snapped, drawing the attention of the two men onto herself. The Dunmer woman gave her a grateful look and scurried off without another word. The two men began to approach Zahrassa, who fought off the urge to flee. She was the Dragonborn, they couldn't do anything to her! Though it probably wasn't smart to yell at two men who were twice her size without the usual backup being around...Damn, this is going to be Maven Black-Briar all over again, isn't it?

"Well, well, well, what do we have here?" The shorter man asked, looming over Zahrassa. The beggar man stayed back, regarding Zahrassa carefully.

"Just a kid, Rolff," he finally said, turning and walking away. "Just leave her alone."

"So how did a cat get into the city?" Rolff asked, ignoring the beggar.

"The guard let me in because I needed to see the Jarl," Zahrassa stated, crossing her arms and glaring up at the now-angry Nord.

"Oh, you're going to see the Jarl alright, he'll love to see this," Rolff sneered gleefully, grabbing Zahrassa's arm and starting to drag her along.

"Get your hands off of me!" She shrieked, trying to wrench her arm out of his grasp to no avail. There were people walking by as Rolff tugged her along that would stop and stare, but not say or do anything. "Let me go! You have no idea who you're dealing with!"

"A stray cat, that's what," a passing guard muttered. Zahrassa flattened her ears against her head, starting to hiss angrily as she doubled her efforts to dig the back of her toes into the cold stone ground as if it would stop this man from dragging her through town. The wind bit through the fur on her face as she leaned backwards as far as possible, struggling to get away and planning to stab everyone who just stared at the kid being dragged away by a grown man without doing anything.

Her attempts at bringing the man to a halt were proving futile, so she finally stopped trying to root herself into the ground and, as a last ditch effort, grabbed his arm with her free hand, leaned forward, and planted a warning bite on his arm. Rolff yelped and immediately let go, sending Zahrassa sprawling onto the ground. The feeling of the hard ground nearly brought her back to Helgen, but before she could process that she had landed on it, Rolff had grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and thrown her over his shoulder.

"No biting! We don't bite Nords!" He snapped as she started thrashing and screeching wildly, the memory of being shoved around by the Imperial soldiers starting to come back and overwhelm her senses.

Why is everyone just sitting there?! Why won't they help me?! To Oblivion with all of you! She thought aggressively as she writhed in Rolff's grip, viciously hitting his back, savagely kicking his chest, and attempting to turn her head to an angle that she could properly bite him at. It was hard to see what was going on around her, since she was so consumed in her desperate attempts at freedom.

A large metal door opened and she soon found herself surrounded by bright firelight and warmth. She could also hear a bunch of men discussing something, then suddenly stopping mid conversation once Rolff stopped walking.

"PUT ME DOWN RIGHT NOW!" Zahrassa thundered, bringing both of her fists down on Rolff's back at the same time, making him jolt.

"Rolff, what is this?" A man with a deep, gravely voice asked.

"A cat that somehow got into the city and bit me!" Rolff said gleefully, as if Saturalia had come early.

"Because you grabbed me and started dragging me around!" Zahrassa snapped, hitting him in the back with both of her fists once more. "Now put me down!"

"She was claiming that she needed to talk to Jarl Ulfric," Rolff continued. Zahrassa slowed her aggressive striking, her arms and legs beginning to tire.

"It must be important if she was allowed into the city," the gravely-voiced man mused.

"I'll go fetch him," another man said, and then a door slammed.

"Can someone please get me back on the floor?!" Zahrassa sighed, exasperated and close to tears.

"I don't think so, cat," Rolff said. "You're too violent. We don't want you making any more trouble!"

"DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?!" Zahrassa screamed, lifting her head and slamming it into Rolff's back. "I AM THE WORST NIGHTMARE OF THOSE GIANT FLYING LIZARDS THAT HAVE BEEN TERRORIZING YOU PEOPLE! YOU NEED ME TO BE VIOLENT OR YOU'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!"

"Rolff, explain this!"

Zahrassa lifted her head and started to squirm once more the moment she heard the newcomer's voice and footsteps as he entered the room.

"You remember me? Please say you remember me! And make him put me down!" She gasped, getting her second wind and struggling against the Nord that was still refusing to release her. "Make him put me down!"

"Put the child down, Rolff," Ulfric sighed.

"But my Jarl, she-"

"I don't care, I said put her down!"

Rolff grumbled and released his hold on Zahrassa, who rolled off of his shoulder and plunged to the floor, laying there as still as possible as she looked up at the ceiling for a few minutes before carefully sitting back up to survey the room. Her dark headscarf slipped off of the back of her head, revealing the sloppy braid of flaming red hair.

There were four men in the room, two of which Zahrassa did not recognize. The room itself was small, the center being occupied by a table with a map of Skyrim containing numerous little red and blue flags that were pinned down on certain locations. Ulfric was standing on the opposite side from Zahrassa, leaning slightly over the table to see her better.

"Good to see you again...I think?" She said, tilting her head.

"I see that you managed to make it out of Helgen alive," Ulfric responded, standing up straight and crossing his arms. Rolff looked as if he had just been hit on the head with something extremely heavy. Zahrassa's ears turned and flattened at the mention of Helgen, her vibrant green eyes unconsciously narrowing the slightest amount.

"I don't like talking about it," she muttered.

"Understandable,"

"What's going on?" Rolff demanded.

"Butt out, will you?" Zahrassa snapped.

"Ysrald, please take Miss Little-Wish upstairs. I'll be up to speak with her shortly," Ulfric ordered one of the unknown men.

"Yes sir," Ysrald responded, slightly startled as he stared at Zahrassa. Zahrassa staggered to her feet, still sore from her rapid trip to the ground thanks to Rolff, and followed the brown-haired Nord through another doorway and up a flight of stairs into a darkened corridor. The guards that were patrolling stopped and stared as they saw the Khajiit trailing behind Ysrald, quietly asking each other how a cat got into the Palace of the Kings, let alone Windhelm. Zahrassa did her best to ignore them as Ysrald opened a blue, metal door into a small sitting room and motioned for her to to enter. Absentmindedly pulling her headscarf back up over her hair, Zahrassa walked through and looked around.

"...thanks?" She finally said, looking over her shoulder at Ysrald.

"The Jarl will see you shortly," he said, beginning to shut the door.

"Wait!" Zahrassa yelped.

"What is it?" Ysrald asked, opening the door again so that he could give Zahrassa a confused look.

"I have three friends waiting for me outside of the city that will be worried about me if I don't return soon," she said, nervously wringing her hands.

"I'll tell the Jarl."

With that, the door slammed shut, leaving Zahrassa alone once more.

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I don't know how long I sat there for, but it felt like forever. Luckily, it was a small sitting room with a warm fire and chairs instead of a cold, cramped jail cell, which I was almost certain I was going to be thrown into when Rolff first dragged me into the palace.

It was pretty dark in the room, save for a single candle on the table and a small fire in the fireplace. I was tempted to light the unlit candles but decided against it; I figured that I was already in enough trouble and I wanted to avoid potentially causing more. Instead I just took my cloak off and just sat in the dark, waiting and trying not to think too hard about anything. It was very nerve wracking, but I was kind of glad that I got to see a somewhat familiar face from when I was a kid.

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The door creaked open, making Zahrassa look up from her intense study of her claws. They immediately sheathed themselves back into her fingers when she saw that it was Ulfric standing in the doorway, her throat locking up as she tried to sit up straighter than she had been. Erisla's voice from when Zahrassa had first met Ulfric began to echo in her head as they made brief eye contact.

"Sit up straight, smile nicely, be polite, answer any of his questions clearly in your best Tamrielic, and don't be nervous," Erisla's voice called from the distant memory, but Zahrassa was so nervous she could only manage the "sit up straight" and "be polite". It would be a miracle if her brain let her open her mouth without feeling like she was going to burst into tears at any moment.

"Why are you sitting in the dark?" Ulfric finally asked, stepping into the room and closing the door behind him. Zahrassa shrugged and nervously balled her hands into fists in her lap, the dark green fabric scrunching up with them. I climbed up a dragon's neck just to stab it in the eye two days ago, why am I feeling so scared right now?

The room gradually filled with light as Ulfric lit the other candles around the room, the flames of one of them reflecting in Zahrassa's large, glassy eyes as she focused all of her concentration on it.

"Sorja, why are you here?"

Zahrassa looked up from the gentle flame to see Ulfric had sat down in the chair directly across from her and was staring intently.

"I don't know where to start," she mumbled after a very long, tense pause, looking down into her lap and studying her fingers, "so much has happened since they left."

Ulfric settled more into his chair and interlaced his fingers, placing them in his lap and looking Zahrassa up and down. Zahrassa tilted her head and stared at a dark spot on the wooden floor near the fireplace, determined to avoid eye contact for as long as possible. Earlier that day she had been excited to get to Windhelm and finally see a familiar face from her youth, but now that she was there, a whole flood of long forgotten emotions started to break out of the bottle she had stowed them away in. She was not normally an overly emotional person, but this recent and almost constant bombardment was leaving her weary and feeling battered. Now it was almost easier to punch a bandit in the throat than to actually talk about her feelings. Her normal tactic of always staying positive and burying the negativity was starting to become ineffective now that her life as she knew it was beginning to unravel before her very eyes.

"My real name isn't Sorja," she finally said, still refusing to look up. "My birth name was Zahrassa. I go by that now. And...well, remember that really loud Shout back on the twenty-first? The one that made the entire province shake?"

"Yes, I remember it quite well," Ulfric responded, "but what does it have to do with your origins and why you've showed up unannounced?"

"I'm the Dragonborn, sir," Zahrassa answered quietly. Ulfric adopted a similar stunned expression that so many had given her before upon hearing these words and Zahrassa finally chanced a look up before returning her focus onto the dark spot on the floor. Silence fell over the two as the fire crackled and sent sparks sailing into the air, one nearly landing on Zahrassa's tail.

"I always thought that the Dragonborn of legend would be...taller," Ulfric finally said in response, leaning forward in his chair so that he could get a better look at Zahrassa. Zahrassa kept her eyes on the dark spot as a small ember floated out of the fire and landed in its center.

"So did I,"

Silence once more.

"Why here?"

"Because you're the only familiar face from when I was younger that isn't dead, missing, or smack in the middle of Imperial territory being played with like a puppet," she stated, finally lifting her head a fraction of an inch. No thanks to you, I probably wouldn't be in this mess if you had kept your damn mouth shut...literally.

"We've only met twice, Sorja, and years apart. That hardly counts as knowing each other."

"Well, I don't exactly have any other options right now. I'm not exactly strong enough to climb up the tallest mountain in Tamriel to talk to a bunch of monks that could kill me with one word," Zahrassa snapped, "I'm scared half to death because everything and everyone is trying to kill me and I don't know what else to do! I'm a fifteen-year-old kid, for Kynareth's sake!"

With that, she buried her face in her hands and began to sniffle quietly into them. Before Ulfric could react, there was a knock at the door. Zahrassa looked up to see the door creak open and a short servant woman with dark blonde hair appeared in the frame.

"Sir, there is an irate woman demanding to see someone named Zahrassa and she won't leave," the servant said.

"I assume that this would be one of your friends that Ysrald mentioned to me?" Ulfric asked Zahrassa, looking from the servant woman to Zahrassa. Zahrassa stiffly nodded her head before wiping her teary eyes with the back of her hand. "Tell her that I will speak to her shortly."

"Aye," the servant said, closing the door and scurrying down the hallway, leaving Ulfric and Zahrassa in yet another uncomfortable silence broken only by the crackling of the fire.

"Where have you been all these years?"

"I never left the province," Zahrassa answered, not looking away from the small flames. "They gave me to a trade caravan four years ago and just...left. It was fine, but then we got separated, and now here I am."

More silence.

"I heard about what happened with Torygg," Zahrassa rambled, "and the whole Shouting thing, and I figured that Windhelm seemed like a safer place to go instead of the top of a huge mountain when I found out what I was. That's why I'm here."

"You think that I can train you instead of the Greybeards?"

"...yes," Zahrassa said softly, finally looking up from the fire.

"I'm sorry, Sorja, but-"

"You can't," she sighed, hugging her knees to her chest and resting her forehead on them as a crushing wave of hopelessness began violently smashing her over the head.

"Is there anything else you need that I could help with?" Ulfric asked sympathetically, unsure if he should try to comfort the sniffling girl in front of him or not; dealing with emotional people, especially young girls, was not one of his strong suits.

"Why can't I talk about what happened at...with the dragon...I can't...?" she choked, unable to bring herself to even say 'Helgen'. "There are times I even can't remember it, but I dream about it all the time."

"It was a terrifying situation for someone as young as you to be in," Ulfric said after a moment of thought, "but you'll eventually get over it. We all do."

That made Zahrassa feel somewhat better, but she still felt as if there was a mammoth standing on her chest. She briefly remembered her conversation with Madena in Dawnstar and how Madena had said she couldn't even listen to talk of the Civil War without flashing back to the Great War; she certainly didn't seem like she 'got over it', even though the Great War was thirty years ago. If it takes more than thirty years to recover, is it even worth it?

"Your father was the exact same way,"

Zahrassa lifted her head and finally looked Ulfric in the eye. "H-he was?"

"Yes, he was. He refused to speak of the war for many years, and I am going to assume that he never told you anything about his time with the Legion."

"He never said much about it," Zahrassa remembered, flashing back to moments in her childhood when she would come across an old piece of Roghild's armor stashed away in the cellar and Sigirek would nervously tell her to put it away. Roghild would tell Zahrassa stories of shenanigans with his fellow soldiers, but any questions about the war itself were deflected with "I don't remember" or "I'll tell you when you're older".

Now Zahrassa missed Roghild more than ever, and she put her forehead back on her knees. He had always helped her when she missed her mother or needed advice, and she needed that more than ever.

"It gets easier," Ulfric said when Zahrassa didn't say anything else for a while. Tears forming in the corners of her eyes, she lifted her head once more to speak.

"Promise?"

It was yet another request that Ulfric couldn't fulfil.

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I actually felt a lot better after I sat there and cried for an hour straight (no thanks to Ulfric, who just kind of sat there like an idiot the whole time I was sniffling away), but I'm still reeling. I just want my parents, or the Little-Wish's, or someone that can hold me and tell me everything will be alright. Lydia and Faendal are more of the "awkward pat on the head until they stop crying" kind of people and Kharjo is too realistic.

Maybe I am, too.

- Zahrassa

A/N: Life threw a nasty curveball and landed me in the hospital just a few days after Christmas, hence my sudden absense. It was a rare genetic condition that runs in my family firing a few warning shots saying that if I don't start taking medication for it now it'll try to kill me. I'm okay now, but it was very frightening and I just didn't have it in me to write for a while.

However, now that I'm back at school and medicated so that it doesn't happen again, I'll have more time to write since my cats and other video games won't be competing for my attention. I'm also in a fiction writing class and the professor said that yes, fanfiction is acceptable for assaingments (then went into a whole spiel on how writing fanfiction is a great jumping off point for beginning authors), so you guys will probably be getting a whole flood of stuff very soon, either as part of this story of small prequel one-shots from the past.

As for my Orthodox Christmas present, it's still being worked on. I was in the hospital full of tubes, after all.