Sundas, 9:10 AM, 31st of Last Seed, 4E 201
Whiterun
Intellect. The ultimate decider in success or failure. Nord warriors liked their strength, and elven mages liked their magic, but all the talent in the world was worthless if one didn't know how to put it to use.
A dragon, a creature of ancient myth, was attacking the Western Watchtower. But Irileth and her associates passed through Whiterun at a brisk striding pace. This wasn't as inappropriately slow as it seemed. The reasoning was twofold: One, running upon the stairways and cobblestones of Whiterun was generally ill-advised, and two, the sight of the Jarl's housecarl, the court wizard, and a band of men-at-arms all sprinting frantically through the city could very well induce a mass panic.
Given the circumstances, a mass panic wasn't entirely unjustified. Even Irileth herself observed that she was feeling much more fear within her than normal for a fight. But dragons were not eternal spirits. They were living creatures of flesh and blood. And in her experience, if a creature lived, it could die.
The moment her group exited the city gates, they broke into an all-out run. A giant, winged silhouette was circling around the Western Watchtower. Smoke was rising from it.
The Western Watchtower lay just under a mile beyond the city walls. Its original purpose was unclear—common speculation was that it had once served to deter raids from the Reachmen—but it was now used as an outpost and lookout point for the Whiterun Hold guards. There were usually about half a dozen guards on duty there at any given time.
The first report of this dragon had come from one such guard. Irileth did not know what fate had befallen the other five. They would find out soon enough.
Or, depending on fate's whimsy today, they would find out too late.
Irileth, Farengar Secret-Fire, the man from Helgen, and a handful of city guards. All of them, running like their lives depended on it. That was likely the truth.
This winged silhouette was truly a dragon. Its roars were echoing over the plains. Every now and then, it swooped over the tower and bathed the stone masonry in a jet of flame from its mouth.
Irileth wondered if her Dunmer blood would be enough to keep that from killing her instantly. If anything, she supposed, it would only prolong her suffering.
Once they approached close enough, the dragon stopped looking like a silhouette. Its scales were a lustrous warm gray, dark against the bright blue sky. No one had seen these creatures in thousands of years. Under other circumstances, it might have been a thing of beauty.
But today, it was only a thing to kill.
Intellect. The ultimate decider in success or failure.
There was no engaging a flying target with melee weapons. For everyone but Farengar, and possibly that man from Helgen, they would be stuck using bows and arrows.
The dragon moved faster than any creature could on land. And its fire-breathing attack was a guaranteed kill on a direct hit. No blocking, no dodging. The only safe place was inside the tower.
First they had to actually get to the tower. Most likely, not all of them would make it. But also most likely, at least a few of them would. An acceptable risk.
Still keeping her eyes on the dragon, still sprinting as fast as her legs could carry her, she called out, "Ready arrows! And spread apart!"
The truth was, they were already quite spread apart as it was. After a near-mile of travel, even a tiny difference in running speed would add up. She would have given Farengar further instructions in particular, but she suspected he was too far behind to even hear.
Still, she took her own bow in hand, and nocked a single, steel-tipped arrow. Still running. Still heading right for the tower. The dragon circled high into the sky, out of view. Perhaps this could work after all.
Behind her, the man from Helgen shouted, "DOWN!"
Irileth instantly dropped flat onto her chest. Her forearms skidded into the soft earth. A thunderous rush of air blew over her back. She looked up to see the dragon not a stone's throw ahead, flying away, its clawed feet outstretched.
It had meant to grab someone. Possibly Irileth herself. Well done, Helgen-warrior.
The steel arrowhead had gotten stuck in the ground. It would have taken about one second to pull back out. Irileth didn't have one second to spare. She picked up her bow and sprinted the rest of the way to the tower.
There was burning debris everywhere. Burning wood scaffolding, burning dry grass. She could feel the heat on her face even from a fair distance away. It forced her to take a crooked, erratic path to the tower's entrance. Up the steep, rough stone ramp, up the short staircase at the top. In through the open doorway.
Four uniformed guards were hiding in here. One was down on her back, unconscious, on top of a bedroll, her helmet removed. Her right arm was burned black from the wrist to the shoulder. It turned Irileth's stomach to see.
The other three said something acknowledging to her, but she wasn't listening. She moved out of the way as the Helgen warrior came in after her, and some of the city guards after him. The Helgen warrior knelt down over the guard and started casting restoration magic.
He was probably better at it than Farengar. Faint praise, admittedly, but still.
There wasn't much in here besides the guards. A few bedrolls, one of them obviously occupied, a small table with place settings and chairs, and a stone spiral staircase up to the roof. It was spacious enough in here to accommodate all of them comfortably, but only just.
Besides the guards themselves, nothing in here would be much use against the dragon outside. But the only thing they needed of this tower was a fireproof shelter. A place to regroup and counterattack.
The Helgen warrior stood up. The guard was still unconscious, but her arm had returned to a healthy pink. That had taken only a few seconds. There must have been a staggering amount of magicka involved just now. Irileth considered herself duly awestruck.
But as he stood up, he said, "That dragon is going to move on to the city if we don't keep him busy."
And he was right. Irileth had been starting to wonder the same thing. The dragon moved faster than any of them could. It had every opportunity to ignore them and carry on to Whiterun. And if it were injured badly enough, it could simply flee.
A challenging situation, to say the least of it. Irileth needed time. They were here in the tower, but until they devised a proper counterattack, they were effectively trapped.
"Very true," Irileth said, before turning to the guards who had followed her in. "You two," she said, pointing at the pair closest to herself. "Get up those stairs. Start feeding that beast some arrows. But don't stray too far out onto the roof."
She didn't feel the need to explain why. They'd all seen what the dragon's fire could do. But the guards obeyed her order all the same, and proceeded up the staircase with their bows at the ready.
Then she turned to the Helgen warrior. "Traveler. What are you planning on—"
At that moment, Farengar Secret-Fire came stumbling in through the door. He didn't verbally announce himself, but he was breathing so hard and loud that he may as well have. His hood had fallen down at some point. Irileth had never seen his face so red.
She asked, "Farengar, are you all right?"
Farengar didn't reply. He was busy panting.
"Listen," said the Helgen warrior. "I have a plan. You just have to keep that dragon near the tower."
Up above, Irileth heard the sound of bowstrings twanging. The guards had begun loosing arrows on the dragon. That was good. That meant the dragon was still close by enough for them to attack it. Hopefully, it also meant the dragon would stay around to try and deal with them.
They'd bought some time, but not much. It was time to prepare to truly strike back. And this fellow in the nice steel armor was saying he had a plan.
"Explain your plan," Irileth said.
The man replied, "I'm going to kill the dragon. Keep it close."
Intellect. The ultimate decider in success or failure.
Irileth had never seen this man fight before. He'd successfully obtained the Dragonstone from the ruins of Bleak Falls Barrow, but no one had seen how he'd done it. There was little reason to believe that he, of all people, would be capable of killing the dragon single-handedly. All Irileth could plan for was that he would try.
The mindset of a dragon wasn't like the mindset of a mortal. Maybe they were too fearless to consider fleeing, regardless of how a fight unfolded. But again, there was no reason to believe so. There was simply no way of knowing how this dragon would react to them. As long as this dragon was in the air, it could retreat in the blink of an eye if it saw fit.
Even the deadliest archers in the world would be useless against an enemy who could simply fly out of their reach. A different approach needed to be taken.
Intellect.
"The rest of you," she said, as the Helgen warrior started up the staircase. "We'll head back out into the open. Target the dragon's wings. We're going to bring that beast down to our level. Make use of the rubble, stay out of its fire. Move."
"By your orders," said one of the guards. She didn't even know which. But just like that, they all filed out past her, through the doorway, readying their bows and arrows.
On the way out herself, Irileth tapped their court wizard on the arm with her free hand. "You too, Farengar. We need your spells."
Farengar trailed after her like he was going to fall over then and there. "I don't care. Burn me alive. Just don't make me run any more."
The fire outside had spread. All of the brush was ablaze now. Seemingly the entire tower was surrounded in a wall of flame. The smoke was pouring into the air, making it hard to see, hard to think. And the heat—Irileth didn't just feel it on her face. She felt it through her armor.
What a good day it was to be a Dunmer. This must have been twice as bad for the guards.
Somewhere up above, the dragon was roaring. Irileth nocked and drew an arrow, and tried to follow the sound. It was going from left to right very quickly. Which meant—
The dragon swooped into view, as massive and furious as ever, circling from the right side to the left. Irileth was ready. She let her arrow fly, and half a dozen others joined it. No doubt, at least some of them would strike the dragon's left wing. A snapping jolt of lightning cut through the air and struck its exposed flank.
At least Farengar was trying.
In response, the dragon let out a blood-curdling roar—of dismay, of pain? Who knew—and wheeled around to the right. Making a wide, low 270-degree turn. Coming to face them. Every time it beat its wings, the flames on the ground beneath it fanned outward.
Irileth loosed another arrow in the dragon's direction as it made its turn, though she was sure she'd missed. There was no way to know if their arrows were even piercing this creature's scales. She hoped that the webbing of its wings would be at least possible to damage.
She hoped for that. But she planned for the dragon to retaliate entirely unscathed.
Sure enough, when the dragon came around to face the tower entrance, it slowed to something like a halt, beating its wings steadily, hovering in the air. Looming over them all. It filled practically the entire sky.
Irileth felt the fear within her suddenly surge. She observed it, and then set it aside.
The dragon was looking at them. Just looking. In a moment, it would open its mouth, and a jet of fire would come out. Irileth took a deep breath in. At least she could call for the guards to dive out of the way.
Another shape entered her peripheral vision. For a split second, Irileth didn't realize what she was looking at.
Then, for another split second, she realized she was looking at the warrior from Helgen. Directly over her head, in midair, just off the battlements of the tower roof. Arms outstretched, sword in hand.
That son of a bitch was jumping off the tower.
Onto the dragon.
He landed on the dragon's neck. And then Irileth lost sight of him. The dragon jerked backward, flailing its wings in the air, twisting and turning. It roared once again, flying this way and that, into the smoke, back around the tower, up through the air. There was no following it.
Suddenly, the dragon reappeared, right in front of the tower. It then immediately crashed into the ground. There was a deafening boom. The earth shuddered beneath Irileth's feet. It didn't simply crash, it skidded, twenty, thirty yards across the grass, until it shuddered to a halt. But it was still alive and struggling. And the man in steel armor was still clinging to its back.
It had landed too far away for Irileth to see what was going on. She bolted down the ramp, ran straight through the flaming brush—she ran through the flames, yes, she was fine, she could take the heat—and started to reach for another arrow.
But she didn't get there in time to help. She just got far enough to watch the fight end. The man raised the glinting steel blade above his head, pointed downward, like a dagger. Then, with a cry of effort, he plunged it into the back of the dragon's skull.
Intellect. One could use it to beat the odds when all else failed. Or one could completely ignore all strategy and literally leap into the fray.
The latter approach had just resulted in a dragon being killed. Perhaps it was time Irileth re-evaluated her sense of combat.
Something strange was happening up ahead. Somehow, the fire had spread to the dragon's own flesh. It was starting to burn, as though from the inside out. Its scales were peeling away, and bright orange flame was spreading beneath. Across its entire body.
Then it started to change. An energy was building up inside of it. Irileth didn't need to be a master of the arcane to know this was something magical. Something was flowing through the air. Curving around from the dragon's body to the mortal sitting atop it. It looked ethereal. And it was growing, and sharpening, until all of a sudden, a whole whirlwind of wispy white streams of fluid light was rushing forth.
And then it was gone. The dragon had been reduced to a gigantic skeleton. The warrior from Helgen sat limply on its spine.
Irileth wasn't particularly well-versed on the ways of dragons. But she knew enough to understand that this wasn't normal. No one talked about a dragon burning up and magically sending all but its bones into whoever killed it. Still, that was something for somebody else to worry about. The dragon was dead. They'd completed the mission they'd been sent out here for.
She called out, "Are you all right?"
The man slumped over and rolled off the side of the dragon's skeleton. He landed on all fours. Very slowly, he picked himself back up, at least enough to sit on the ground. By the time Irileth made it over to him, he was resting his back on the dragon's ribcage.
And it was truly massive enough to do so. It looked just as huge up close as it had from afar. The creature's skull seemed even bigger than that of Numinex, the one hanging above the Jarl's throne in Dragonsreach. The ribcage that the man rested against was spacious enough that he could have sat inside of it.
It occurred to Irileth that Farengar would go absolutely mad at the chance to hold onto some of these bones. That would be fun to watch.
The man looked up at her and said, "What in Oblivion just happened?"
"You killed a dragon, that's what happened. Here." Irileth held out her hand to help the man up. He took it with a grateful smile.
Irileth couldn't remember this man's name. She wasn't sure if he had ever said what it was, and she didn't care to ask. She knew him as the man who had brought the news of the attack on Helgen—as far as anyone knew, the sole surviving first-hand witness of the event. More recently, he was also the man who had carried out the retrieval of the Dragonstone, whatever that was for. And now he was the first person in recent memory to slay a dragon.
Perhaps it was a little late in the relationship for her to ask him what his name was again.
"Thanks," the man nodded, before looking back at the skeleton. "Are the guards all right?"
"Last I checked. No fatalities. You did some remarkable healing work."
"Thanks again. All right, look, uh… I don't know what just happened here. This dragon is a skeleton now."
Irileth shook her head. "It doesn't matter. We must return to Dragonsreach immediately. Jarl Balgruuf will want to know what took place here."
"I want to know what took place here," the man said, a touch irritably, before sighing and rubbing his hand over the back of his neck. "Something just happened to me. I don't really know what it was."
"We can talk about it in Dragonsreach. Let's go." Irileth waited for the man to start walking, then joined his pace.
It happened after about half a minute.
First she felt the rumble. Beneath her feet, like when the dragon had crashed into the ground. An instant later, the thunder hit. A single, deafening clap, like a crashing wave, traveling through the air, through her ears, through her bones. And then she heard the voices. All in unison, from everywhere around her, they shouted one single word.
"DOV-AH-KIIN!"