Unlikely Rescuers: Falkreath pt. 3
Arn was dreaming. He had a visceral knowledge of it, but somehow...couldn't escape it.
In his dream, miniature versions of Elisif and Ulfric argued frantically with each other over things that made no sense.
"He needs more straw!"
"No, he doesn't. He just drank too much water!"
Then, both midgets seemed to run around him, occasionally stopping and ordering him to lay down, which he was powerless to resist, so they could run across him, both hopping and stomping deliberately on his stomach each time.
Amidst this madness mixed with darkness and pain, Arn finally cracked his eyes open in a gray, murky darkness.
He felt...off...like nothing was where it was supposed to be.
Since all he saw was gray darkness looking up, he tried to turn his head, but quickly made several revelations.
Firstly, his head was completely wreathed with pine needles...as if someone had constructed a semi-circle of them and wedged it around his head.
Secondly, there was a searing pain in his shoulder that shot down his arm, and a sharp pain in his side as well. It would have made him groan in agony if the spasm of his stomach hadn't also caused him to feel queasy and liable to unleash the contents of his stomach.
Thirdly, the face of a little Breton...or maybe Nord girl appeared in his vision as she leaned over him and stared with surprise into his open eyes.
"Hith eyeth are open!" she lisped eagerly to someone Arn couldn't see.
Almost immediately, the face of a little Redguard boy joined that of the little girl and looked with surprise at Arn, who stared back at them with surprise.
"Who-who are you?" Arn struggled to speak, realizing his jaw was swollen considerably, and based on how much it hurt to talk, was probably broken in at least one place.
"I'm Thigrid" the little girl lisped in reply, brushing a clump of stray raven locks out of her face.
"I'm Cyrus" replied the little Redguard boy, his eyes widening as he looked at Arn contorting his features in pain while he labored to sit up.
Once Arn got himself into a sitting position and used his one good hand to remove the wreathed pile of pine needles from around his head, he got a much better sense of where he was at.
He had been laying on a slab of stone, and they were inside a cave of gray stone, explaining the mostly gray darkness around them.
Panicking for a moment, he realized his weapons were missing. His mind started processing what had happened and he jumped up with a start, both sending pain shooting down his left side and thumping his head against the rock ceiling.
"Ow...damn!" he growled before remembering there were two small children standing right in front of him "Uh...I mean...this is crammed...isn't it?" he massaged his head as he looked around more.
He'd been about to give Lydia orders in front of that barricade...and...that was all he remembered. How did he get here? Where was here? And more importantly...what happened to Lydia?
"Wh-where are we?" Arn muttered, testing his weight on his feet again.
"Thith ith our cave" Thigrid replied.
"Is your name Sigrid or Thigrid?" Arn asked, wondering how bad her lisp was before she frowned slightly at him, as if it was obvious.
"Itsth Thhhigrid" she insisted.
"Yeah, it's Sigrid" the boy replied, still gawking at Arn.
"Well...uh...where is this cave at?" Arn queried, cautiously limping toward the opening.
"In the woodth" the girl lisped in reply before the two children cautiously followed him over to the entrance.
Arn glanced out carefully, but nothing looked familiar...just...thick wooded hillside with a river running by not far away through the brush. He could tell the cave they were in was built into the sloping base of some mountains, but where and which ones was anyone's guess.
He vaguely remembered a river running out of the mountain near Knifepoint Ridge. Maybe this was the same one...maybe not...but what had happened to make him end up here?
Running through the possibilities, his mind settled on the one and only possible reason: Sinding. Sinding must've betrayed them.
"Did you find me here? How long have I been here?" Arn spun to ask the surprised children.
"You were in the river with a bunth of branthes. You jutht been layin' there for two whole dayth" Sigrid answered.
"You got me out of the river?" Arn turned to her.
"Thort of" she shrunk back a little, now that Arn loomed over them and was no longer the lethargic thing on a slab of stone.
"Your pet deer saved you!" blurted the Redguard boy with wide eyes, aghast at Arn's apparent ability to control deer...
"Wh-what?" Arn muttered, wondering for a moment if he was still dreaming.
"We thaw you in the branthes, floating down the riffer..until a biiiiiiiiig, whiiite deer came out of the woodth" explained the little girl with wide waves of her small arms.
"It jumped in the river and used its big horns to drag you out and then it just...slowly walked over and plopped you here" continued the boy, pointing at the cave opening.
"We were thcared...tho we didn't go out until it left" explained the little girl.
Arn scratched his head, trying to make sense of it, but no matter, he had more immediate problems to worry about.
Sensing their growing fear of him and his own panicked fear over Lydia's fate, he took a few deep breaths to calm himself before gently easing himself back to a seat on the slab of stone he'd awakened on.
"I'm...uh...my name is Arnsmyth Bulgoar. You can call me 'Arn'" he sighed, trying to calm himself and focus on what to do next.
The two children just looked at each other before turning back to him.
"I'm...the...uh" he puzzled for a moment, wondering exactly how to explain to them what he was doing as the Dragonborn.
"I...uh...hunt down Dragons...and help people" he muttered, wondering if that made sense to them, or just sounded foolish.
"But Dragons are soooo big" the boy exclaimed.
"No one can kill the Dragonth. They're too big" the girl frowned at him "Are you lying to uth?"
"No" Arn tried to insist without sounding argumentative.
"You can't kill Dragonth" she insisted with a tone that suggested what he said was outlandish, even to a child's ears.
"Yes, I can"
"No you can'th"
"I can so"
"No you can'th"
Arn huffed for a moment, scrutinizing her returning frown before wondering if somewhere Sheogorath was laughing at his plight: Weaponless and alone, trying to convince two children that he was a mighty warrior.
Mighty warriors didn't need children to save them, and arguing was only wasting time.
Arn had been so panicked over Lydia and his own fate that it only just now registered to him that the two small children were living alone in a cave in the wilds.
"Wait...Why are you here alone? Where are your families?" he asked, looking them over with concern.
On closer inspection in the gray gloom, Arn could tell they were both very dirty and very thin. Sigrid wore what looked like a burlap bag with holes cut for her head and arms, while Cyrus wore tattered, baggy pants and a loose shirt. Neither of them really wore shoes. They both had rags wrapped around their feet all the way to their ankles and tied with strips of hair or twine.
Cyrus looked like he could be 7 or 8, but the girl looked a little younger.
When Arn asked them about their families, they both huddled closer together and neither of them answered at first, Sigrid growing very emotional and threatening to cry before Cyrus shushed her and turned to Arn.
"The bad men took them" he explained.
"Who are the bad men?" Arn asked, beginning to put things together.
As if in answer, they heard a woman's scream echo far away outside the cave.
Arn immediately moved to the entryway, though it caused him a great deal of pain.
Peering around, he couldn't see anything, but straining his ears, he could hear the faint sound of fighting...shouts...whinnying of frightened horses...another scream...a man this time.
Arn was tempted to investigate, at least see what was going on.
He felt a soft tug on his good arm, prompting him to turn and find Cyrus looking up at him with a terrified look.
"Don't go out there! The bad men are out right now! It's not safe!" he whispered, tugging Arn back toward Sigrid, who was huddled on the floor.
"It's not safe...it's not safe!" they both whispered at him.
Arn slowly allowed Cyrus to tug him back over to where Sigrid was before Cyrus joined her huddled on the floor.
Much as he didn't like to admit it, they were right. It wasn't safe.
Without any weapons, hobbled, and his left arm next to useless, he was no good in a fight. He might not even be able to escape if someone saw him, and if he did...would it draw attention to the children's shelter?
Just as Arn was pondering these things over, Cyrus got up and moved to the opening, and pulled a large bush across it, blocking access to anyone and blocking any real visibility in or out.
Sitting there, Arn was versed enough in sleeping in the wilds to double check his surroundings.
Looking into the gray darkness to the left, Arn couldn't see any back to the cave.
"How far back does this go?" Arn asked the worried children, gesturing to his left.
"Once you go past Simon's bed, there's a door, but we blocked it" Cyrus replied.
"Wait, who's Simon?" Arn queried as he rose and slowly felt his way back in the dark.
"He's another one of us. He's sick and sleeps all the time now" Cyrus answered, beckoning Arn back.
Arn ignored his beckoning and moved back in the dark until he felt a pile of rubble and rocks in front of an ornately carved door.
He supposed there was no way to open the doors with all the rubble in the way, but it was yet another question mark in a long line of them.
He hadn't seen or felt anything to indicate another child was sleeping in the vicinity, but since it was so dark, there was no way to tell other than feeling, and he had no desire to terrify a sleeping child by suddenly being grabbed in the dark.
Moving back to his own slab, he observed the two children huddle fearfully and whisper among each other.
Very gingerly, he slowly unlatched and removed each armor piece he could. It was painful getting his breastplate off, and it was even worse trying to get his left gauntlet off, but there was no other way to get at the injured areas.
The children simply stayed huddled on the floor, mostly watching him with big eyes, but occasionally glancing back toward the doorway in fear.
The first order of things would be to get healed. His potion pouch was gone, along with anything else that had been attached to his belt. That only left the slow process of repeatedly using magic healing, waiting for recovery, and then repeating the process until he was fully fit.
A battle mage or a powerful healer could have gotten the job done in less than a day, but Arn was neither of those.
He exhaled loudly and closed his eyes, pushing all his fears for Lydia, pains of his injuries, and uncertainties of his own predicament out of his mind as he focused entirely on healing.
Slowly, the soft bluish light glowed from his right hand as he slowly healed all the way up his left arm.
The children were not expecting this, and quite amazed, though they still stayed on the floor watching him.
Arn continued healing all over every part that pained him until he felt all his energy gone and slowly leaned back before pulling his armor pieces over him as a makeshift blanket and drifted off into dreamless sleep.
Cracking his eyes open in the steely cold air of the morning, Arn fully expected sharp pains as he sat up, but instead felt a little tired, but otherwise normal.
Moving his arms and torso one way and then another, he was surprised to feel perfectly fine.
Even his jaw seemed reduced to normal size.
It didn't seem possible for his injuries to be healed in so short a time. He'd only applied one round of healing treatment, no potions, and as far as he knew, it had been only one night. The aftereffect hangover should have been at least several days, if not a week.
He was so surprised by this development, that it took him a few moments of testing his movement out before he realized something was wrong.
The children weren't there.
Glancing toward the mottled darkness that was the back of the cave, Arn considered feeling around for them, but just as he was considering the options, both Sigrid and Cyrus came skittering into the cave with their small arms clutching dark shapes close to their ragged frames.
As they knelt on the floor, Arn knelt down to see what they had.
They both sat down and huddled together, shivering in the cold air of the winter morning.
Arn had thought they were just cold, but as he kneeled down, he saw tears streaming down the cheeks of both of them, sniffling and shaking as they clutched dirty pieces of jerky, cheese, and some bread in their small hands.
"The...the only time the bad men aren't out...ith..e-early...in...the morning" Sigrid sobbed.
Arn looked her sadly in the eye, hoping she hadn't stolen it from their camp, as she extended a broken off piece of the dirty cheese block toward him.
"You w-w-want th-thome ch-cheethe?" she tried not to sob.
Arn gently took the piece of dirty cheese and ate it without complaint before gently sitting next to them and drawing them close to him on either side to help them warm up and allow them to cry out whatever fears plagued their poor hearts.
After they seemed to calm down some, Arn slowly rose and began putting his armor back on.
He would have to thank Eorlund Graymane again next time he was in Whiterun. The enchanted ebony armor continued to hold up against surprising amounts of punishment. There were some scratches on it, but otherwise it remained in perfectly functional condition.
Stretching again to double check his healing, Arn turned and knelt down by the children again.
"I am going to go have a look around. No matter what you hear out there, and no matter who calls out. You stay put in here until I get back. In fact, make sure you pull that bush in front of the opening after I've gone, okay?"
They both nodded at him with bleary eyes before he turned and departed the cave.
It was snowing again, but Arn had to guess it was the start of the morning based on where the sun was. There were no seeming landmarks anywhere. So after a brief roundabout of the cave opening area, he set off sneaking down the river, hoping to find some sort of sign of where he was at.
It didn't take him long before he ran into a road and a bridge across the river, but no signs that denoted anything.
He was startled into further alertness by the snarl of an animal from up the road and back to his left.
As he crept through the brush alongside the road, it wasn't far before he spied what the commotion was.
All across a section of the road, a broken cart lay battered on the cobblestone. Supplies lay scattered all over along with several dead bodies as a small pack of wolves clumped around several of them, chewing and gnawing at the flesh left exposed from the armor.
Arn crouched down and scanned the scene before him.
It was surely the result of a bandit attack, and now Arn knew for sure that the 'bad men' the children kept referencing were what he had suspected. Unfortunately, that wasn't all.
Whoever these unfortunate people were, the bandits had laid into them mercilessly. There were the broken bits of two carts and a number of broken boxes and crates, their contents spilled in the snowy mud and stone of the road.
Two armed men lay dead by the carts, while another so poorly mangled by the wolves Arn couldn't tell who or what it was lay on the other side. Further off the road, Arn's stomach nearly retched at the sight of a two dead Nord women, naked and tied bent over a downed tree, their hands tied to their ankles, leaving them in a grotesque 'U' shape for whatever sordid things the Bandits had done. One of them had her stomach ripped open by something. The other had an arrow through her skull.
A horrible realization dawned on Arn then.
The children had both seen all of this.
That's where they'd gotten their food from. That's why they'd been crying...not just because they were afraid.
The wrongness of it all brought tears to his own eyes as he crouched and looked sadly again at the gory scene in the road, his breath vaporing out amid the falling snow.
After getting his own tears under control, he looked back toward the sloping mountainside near the road.
Sure enough, on the side of the mountain on the side where the road snaked by, there were the remnants of an old tower barely visible through the snow and trees.
A fortified perch to see far down both stretches of road, controlling the only way across a river and perhaps a pass through the mountains, of course that's where the 'bad' men were...Arn surmised as he slowly sneaked closer.
Arn was careful, but even he was surprised by the stealth of their lookout.
It was a female Khajiit laying in a worn out spot on the ground between two bushes, her head peaking out barely from beneath their branches. It also helped that her fur was the same dark brown as the branches of the bushes.
Creeping just off a path that the bandits had clearly worn up the side of the mountain to get around to the tower's approach, Arn had just rounded a tree when he looked to the right and saw her.
Unfortunately, she spotted him at the same time.
With no weapons, Arn needed stealth until he'd sufficiently armed himself.
"TIID KLO UL!"
Time slowed to a crawl as Arn burst out of the underbrush, picked up a large stone, and bashed the frozen Khajiit lookout in the head.
Time returned to normal as he delivered a finishing blow to the back of her head before glancing around quickly to make sure no one heard.
Dragging the body back into the brush, Arn was annoyed to only find the bandit armed with a dagger and small bow so custom tailored to the Khajiit's smaller arms, that Arn eventually gave up on it and just strapped the dagger on before continuing.
Further up the path, there was no hiding since it ascended up onto a stony platform that rounded the mountainside into the partly broken down tower.
Edging his way slowly forward, he heard some snoring around the bend, and raised voices higher up in the tower.
As he edged around, he spotted a lone man sleeping half in a bedroll with another Khajiit woman carefully crouched next to him, riffling his things.
"TIID KLO UL!"
Arn slowed down time again as he darted around the corner, dagger in hand.
Acting quickly and decisively, he used his acquired dagger to cut the throats of both before time sped back up again.
Unfortunately, even as he was trying to get at the man's sword in his bedroll, another bandit, this one an orc, appeared in the doorway to the tower.
"Hey! Hey!" He hollered, pulling a axe from beside the doorway and rushing Arn, who merely turned to face him with a surprise of his own.
"FUS RO DAH!"
The wave of force hit his attacker with merciless effect, crunching bones, cracking his armor, and sending him flying back through the doorway as the entire tower shook with the force of the blow.
Knowing stealth was no longer an option, Arn quickly got the steel longsword out of the dead bandit's bedroll and charged in through the tower entrance.
And not a moment too soon either. Even as he made the doorway, he heard two arrows clink off the stone behind him.
He quickly found himself face to face with three rapidly waking bandits trying to grab armor and weapons as they had just jumped out of their bedrolls.
Arn fell on them with a merciless zeal, his simmering anger with this state of things burning into a cold rage.
Wielding a longsword in his right hand and a dagger in his left, he quickly carved up the first after parrying a weak sword slice.
The second might have gotten the better of Arn if they had committed to the attack, instead of using measured, planted steps as they swung an axe at Arn that he didn't remember seeing.
Arn leaned away just in time to avoid the slice at his neck and shoulder, bringing his sword up in an arc to catch the axe wielder's hand on the follow through.
He screamed in pain as Arn's longsword scythed into his wrist, dropping the axe before Arn stepped beyond him, engaging the third as he sliced the neck of the second with the dagger in his left hand.
Terrified after seeing what happened to his comrades, the third bandit kept backing up with a sword and shield until he bumped a large bookshelf.
Arn didn't have time to wait, others were no doubt on their way down and he would soon be flanked if he wasn't quick.
In a calculated attack, he lunged in, sloppily locking swords, but keeping his on the inside enough to push the bandit's away. Keeping the bandit's sword locked in a sloppy struggle, Arn made him forget about using his shield. Using his other hand, Arn simply snaked the dagger up over the shield as he leaned against it and stabbed the man in the face.
Arn turned and spotted another on the staircase aiming a crossbow at him just in time to duck as the bolt flew by and impaled the hapless bandit he'd just stabbed.
"NO!" the bandit, a surprisingly older man yelled as he turned to run up the stairs, likely heading to cover to reload.
Arn never gave him the chance. Racing forward, he lunged and used his dagger to stab the bandit in his legs as they neared the top of the rickety stairs. As the bandit turned back over to swipe at Arn with his unloaded crossbow, Arn batted away the blow with his longsword which he used to lunge forward and run him through the neck.
Rolling the body off the stairs to the floor below, Arn heard the slow creak of someone trying to sneak somewhere on the floor just above him.
Looking at the stairway opening, he surmised there was probably at least two waiting to ambush him up here.
Considering his options, Arn finally went back down and grabbed the fallen wooden shield from one of the dead bandits and sheathed his dagger, though it had served him well so far.
Looking at the stairway opening, he got an idea, a gruesome one to be sure, but Arn was in no frame of mind to spare anyone. Looking around, he found one of the bandits with a nearly severed head. Using his sword, Arn finished the job and after pulling the hair back into a ponytail just to give it a different look, Arn deliberately crept up the creaky stairs, making sure anyone above would hear the noise.
Then he slowly stretched out with his hand and ensured the head slowly peaked over the edge of the entrance.
For a second, nothing happened, then, as Arn had suspected, the twangs of bows sounded and Arn's puppet head went flying from his hand as it was pierced by two arrows.
Quickly, Arn ran up and into the room, hoping to catch the archers before they could reload and aim.
Two men with longbows jumped with surprise, apparently thinking they'd dealt with the problem. Arn batted aside the longbow of one and proceeded to run him through while the other quickly stepped back and knocked another arrow.
Arn turned to face him in the act of pulling his sword loose just as the bandit aimed.
"ZUN HAAL VIIK!"
The bandit's bow went flying out of his hands across the room along with the arrow.
Standing there stunned, he could do nothing as Arn laid into him with a shield bash to open him up for a slice across the neck.
Striding deliberately up to what he thought was the last level of the tower, Arn was surprised to find a man in mage attire carefully eyeing him from behind a spell shield.
"I...I am Feorus the Cyclone. I...am-m a m-mighty mage. Y-you will bow to me" he tried to sound imperious as he slowly stepped out from the partial bits of rubble he'd been behind.
Arn eyed the man for a moment silently, letting the sight of his ebony clad, bloodsoaked form and wrathful gaze work its effect on the clearly already flustered and fearful bandit leader.
The bandit leader looked around wildly before suddenly collecting himself.
"Surrender now, or I will fry you like a piece of raw meat!" he spat indignantly.
"FUS RO DAH!"
Arn was sick and tired of this. His wave of unrelenting force hit the mage just as he tried to step closer.
With no armor, the close proximity, and Arn's rage channeled into the shout, the unrelenting force obliterated the mage's shield along with the mage himself, blowing a hole in the tattered top of the tower in a dark red splat of gore.
"No" Arn sneered at the empty air.
Thankfully, that was all the bandits, but the surprises weren't over.
There was a large amount of coin and other valuables locked in a chest under the stairs. There were also a decent collection of weapons Arn perused before selecting the best replacements until he could find the weapons he'd lost at Knifepoint Ridge.
The other major surprise came in the form of a journal that the Bandit Leader, this Feorus the Cyclone, had kept. Arn tucked it away for later, but it promised to shed some light on where they were.
Grabbing only the supplies he and the children would need, Arn returned to the road, shooed away the wolves, and quickly buried what was left of the poor souls who were the last victims of these bandits.
Returning to the cave opening in the early afternoon, Arn was relieved to find the bush still there and no tracks in the surrounding snow.
"Cyrus, Sigrid...it's me, Arn. I've brought supplies back. I'm coming in now" he gently declared before shoving the bush aside and ducking inside the opening.
Even though he had announce himself, the two children were not prepared for his bloodsoaked state, and Sigrid screeched fearfully and Cyrus waved a stick threateningly at him for a moment before he kneeled down and dropped all the things he was carrying, showing them his open hands.
"Don't worry. Everything's fine now" he assured them, as Cyrus slowly lowered the stick and they both stared at his blood-spattered armor with wide eyes.
"W-what happened?" Sigrid murmured.
"I made sure the bad men will never bother anyone again" Arn replied as he began opening up some food containers to hand to the surprised children.
Author's notes:
1. Until they reunite, I'll be bouncing back and forth between Arn and Lydia's perspective, but it won't always be a whole chapter like this is.
2. If you've ever been out in real wilderness that you're not familiar with, it's hard to stress how easy it would be to get lost and the ramifications of doing so, particularly if the terrain is all the same.
3. Sigrid's lisp primarily shows up when she tries to say anything with an 's' sound, though a few other times on things as I felt a real lisp would. In my mind, it sounds fine, but I'm not sure if it comes off right reading it.
