"And the Scrolls have foretold

Of black wings in the cold

That when brothers wage war come unfurled"

-"Sons of Skyrim"

The dragon's landing shook the entire keep, as well as the ground around it. Everyone in Maggie's field of vision staggered. Those townspeople still outside all began screaming. Tullius called to his troops.

But the dragon didn't move. Not at first. For a moment that seemed to drag on forever, it simply perched there, surveying the town and the terrified people below it.

Maggie's angle provided her with a perfect view of the creature. Jet-black scales. Wickedly curved talons. Fangs that must have been as long as her arm just poking out of jaws that could swallow a horse and cart whole. Double-curved horns that sat atop its head like a crown. There was little doubt in Maggie's mind at that moment that these creatures had once ruled most of the known world.

But the eyes were the worst part: at least the size of dinner plates and brilliant crimson in color. Those eyes spoke of centuries of tyranny, of towns dyed red with the blood of the slain, of the horrible, fiery retribution that would be visited on those who refused to bow.

And as they fixed themselves on Maggie, she felt a chill run through her body, as though her very soul was being pulled away. Just looking at this dragon made her feel small and helpless. But part of her, the same part that felt right at home in the body of the dragon from her dream-world, couldn't help but admire the power and the majesty of the being before her. And, of course, the wings.

"Come on, kid. The gods won't give us another chance."

Ralof's voice jolted Maggie out of her stupor. She realized that she was lying on the ground. At some point, she'd rolled off the block and hadn't even noticed initially. The dragon was still staring straight at her.

Was she about to become this dragon's lunch?

A firm hand suddenly grabbed her and hauled her to her feet, and in that moment, the atmosphere in the square was completely changed.

As Maggie stood up, an Imperial archer loosed an arrow, which bounced off the scales on the side of the dragon's neck.

It suddenly tipped its head back and roared to the sky. It was not the first time Maggie had heard a dragon's roar, but this one was far louder than the others.

The sky turned orange. Before anyone had a chance to react, a ball of fire streaked overhead and struck a house. The screaming began anew.

"You okay?" Ralof asked Maggie. It was he who'd pulled her to her feet.

"Well, I'm not dead," she said. "At least, not yet."

He started to pull her down the street towards the secondary keep. They hadn't gone five steps when another fireball streaked down and struck the ground right in front of the main keep, in the courtyard they had just left. At least five people were reduced to charred corpses instantly.

The dragon took to the air. Flames rushed from its mouth, incinerating a row of houses, even as a third fireball landed on the other side of town.

Maggie's mind raced as Ralof tugged her down the street. She'd faced some drastic situations in her life. Nothing like this, but she'd learned to keep cool under fire. She could survive this.

Several other Stormcloaks were already in the secondary keep, gathered on the ground floor and in varying states of shock.

One man was sitting against the wall, head in his hands. "This can't be happening, this can't be happening," he whispered over and over.

"But it is," Ralof said.

"I thought they were just legends," added another Stormcloak.

"Legends don't burn down villages." That was Ulfric.

"So what do we do?"

"We can't fight that thing. It's suicide," put in a third soldier.

"The Imperials are trying," countered the second.

"Let them burn."

"We should be concerned with getting ourselves out of here," agreed a fourth.

"Any idea how we do that?" asked the first man, finally standing up.

"The main gate's probably locked in case of escape attempts," said Ralof.

Ulfric listened to the others talk. Maggie was pleasantly surprised to see him listening to his troops to such a degree.

Finally, he turned to her. "Do you have anything to say?" he asked.

Maggie thought for a second. "Well, what are the chances there's an escape tunnel under the main keep?"

"Better than our chances against that dragon," Ralof said.

"So should we start running that way?"

"Everything between here and there is on fire," Ralof said. "We wouldn't make it."

"So, now what?" asked yet another soldier.

Maggie looked toward the spiral staircase that led up to the top of the tower. "If we can't go out, we could try up."

"That's as good as any other idea we've got."

Maggie started up the stairs as several Stormcloaks rushed past her, seemingly desperate for a way out. Maggie walked near the outer wall of the stairwell, listening to the sounds outside. The dragon's roars and the sound of its breath mingled with the screams of Imperial soldiers and the occasional explosion as fireballs continued to fall from the sky.

They were just over halfway up the tower when the outer wall exploded inward, as the dragon stuck its head through the resulting opening, grabbed a screaming Stormcloak in its mouth, and flung the man away. Two others were buried under the rubble.

Maggie flattened herself against the exterior wall of the tower and willed the dragon not to notice her. She was close enough to it to reach out and touch those ebony scales, or, if she'd had her bow, to easily put an arrow in one of those crimson eyes.

Finally, the dragon withdrew its head. Maggie looked out through the hole it had left behind. This was the far side of town from where the dragon had landed initially, but this side looked just as bad. Most of the buildings were burning. None was intact. There were charred bodies in the street.

The house next door had had its roof caved it, but much of it was not yet burning. Jumping to it didn't seem impossible. The Stormcloaks Maggie had thought were right behind her were nowhere in sight. The ones in front of her were dead.

She took a few steps back, then got a short running start and jumped without hesitation.

The single moment she was airborne seemed to last several minutes, long enough for her brain to wonder whether or not she was going to make it at least four times.

And then she hit the wooden floor of the house's second story.

For a moment she was worried she'd gotten herself trapped, but then she saw a gap in the wall that looked big enough to squeeze through.

She did, dropping to the ground outside the house.

Maggie took in the scene before her. The other end of the street, where the main keep was and where the execution was supposed to have taken place, was obscured behind a sheet of flame. The air was filled with the smell of burning wood and flesh.

In the middle of the street, a young boy crouched beside his fallen father, imploring the man to get up. Only a few feet in front of Maggie, two Imperial soldiers behind an overturned cart were trying to coax the boy toward them and to relative safety. One of them held a very familiar bow.

She joined them in their hiding spot. "I think he's in shock," she supplied. "The kid, I mean."

"So we gathered," said one of the Imperials. He looked at her. "Still alive, Breton?"

"For now. Someone's going to have to go out and get him."

"Are you volunteering?" asked the soldier holding the bow. He was the one who'd been reading off names earlier.

"I would be if I had my bow back," she said, reaching for it.

"This is yours?" he asked.

"It's got my initials carved into it," she said, pointing. "MM. Magdalyne Marcheux."

The soldier looked at where she had indicated, where there were indeed two M's carved into the wood.

He was about to hand it to her when a shadow fell across them. The dragon flew overhead and landed on a house at the far end of the street. Its eyes seemed to linger on the boy and his father.

The soldier hurriedly offered Maggie her bow, then pulled the quiver off his back and gave that to her too.

There was only one arrow left. "Sorry," he said.

"I'll only need one," Maggie said as she pulled it out.

Maggie darted out from behind the cart, keeping low to the ground as she zigzagged back and forth across the street.

When she reached the boy, she ducked down beside him.

"Hi," she said. "Are you okay?"

"Papa won't…" the boy started, and then he flung his arms around her neck.

"I'm going to get you out of here, but I need you to trust me. Okay?"

"Okay," he said, wiping tears from his face.

"See that cart back there?"

He looked. "Yes."

"When I say, I need you to run toward it as fast as you can. Can you do that for me?"

"Okay."

Maggie looked up, trying to gauge the dragon's location, just as it glided down from the house and landed in the street. With the flames behind it, it looked like something from the deepest levels of Oblivion.

"Go," she hissed.

The boy took off running.

Maggie stood up and stared at the dragon. She notched her single arrow in the bow and took careful aim at one of those eyes.

"An arrow in the eye will kill anything," she whispered, and then let the arrow fly.

It was a fantastic shot. The arrow flew straight and level. It looked perfect, right up until it bounced off the ridge of scales above the dragon's eye.

"Shit," she whispered.

And then the dragon opened its mouth.

Maggie turned and ran for her life back down the street, certain she was about to feel white-hot flames licking at her heels.

When she finally dove behind the overturned cart and looked back, she saw the father's body was on fire.

"Papa," whispered the boy.

"That was a stupid idea," Maggie muttered.

"That was an amazing shot," said the soldier who'd had her bow.

"I missed," Maggie pointed out.

"I don't know many archers who could have even gotten as close as you did at that distance."

"If fighting dragons is about to become a regular thing, then we could really use someone in the Legion with your skills," added the other soldier.

"Not a chance," Maggie said. "Why would I join the people who just tried to kill me?"

"That was the captain and General Tullius, not us. As far as we're concerned, you've more than earned a pardon."

"And we'll vouch for you if it comes to that."

"I have other things I have to deal with," Maggie said. "Maybe in a couple months."

The dragon suddenly took to the air again, disappearing behind the wall of fire that obscured the main keep from view.

"So, any plans for getting out of here?" Maggie asked.

"A couple."

"Good. I'll stick with you for now, then."


They were moving toward the far side of town when a familiar man in blue-edged armor went running past them.

"Ralof!" cried the soldier who'd been holding the list, as he drew his sword. "Traitor!"

"The other man slowed down, skidding slightly in the dirt, and turned to face them. "We're escaping, Hadvar," he said. "Don't try to stop us."

Then he noticed Maggie. "Friends of yours?" he asked her.

"I could ask the same of you," she said.

"Whose side are you on?" Hadvar demanded.

"I'm still trying to figure that out myself." She was indeed. Both had been nice to her. Neither seemed like a poor choice of traveling companions. But there would no doubt be some amount of pressure to join whatever side she did end up going with. And if it came to that, if she did end up staying in Skyrim for a while and did get caught up in the civil war, the Stormcloaks were preferable, if only on religious grounds.

She turned and joined Ralof.

"Welcome back, kid," he said to her, and then the two of them turned and kept running.

"You can say goodbye to that pardon," one of the Imperials called after her.

Ralof led her down several side streets before stopping in front of a small stone building. Being stone, it was mostly untouched by the flames that had claimed or were in the process of claiming all the nearby wooden structures.

"I forgot about this at first. It used to be a storehouse, and it's connected to the main keep by a series of underground rooms."

A now all-to-familiar roar sounded from somewhere hidden by the flames and smoke. Ralof hurriedly pushed the door open and pulled Maggie inside.

"Are you from here?" she asked. "You seem to know people in town."

"No," he replied. "I'm from Riverwood, It's relatively nearby."

"Never heard of it."

"You wouldn't have. It's small."

The room on the other side of the door was dimly lit, but Maggie could still make out the dead Stormcloak lying on the floor.

Ralof rushed to the man's side. "Damn Imperials," he said. Then he turned to her. "Take his armor and weapons."

"What?" Maggie asked.

"If we end up having to fight our way out, you'll need better protection," he said. "You can use a sword, right?"

"I mean, I can. I'm not very good."

"Good enough."

Maggie went over to the dead soldier. Getting the armor off was challenging, but after a few minutes she was wearing a chainmail shirt and sword belt over her tunic. Of course, her bow and quiver were still on her back.

Maggie and Ralof headed down the stairs on the other side of that room, and then turned the corner into a hallway lit only by the occasional torch.

"Can you give us some light?" Ralof asked. "You're a mage, right?"

"Are you saying that just because I'm a Breton?" Maggie snapped.

"Can you light up this hallway or not?"

"No, actually. I can barely make…" A ball of flame materialized in her right hand. "…fire."

Ralof raised an eyebrow.

"That's how this usually works for me," Maggie explained. "I can only do magic when I'm not actively trying to. And it's going to be hard to fight if I'm holding fire in my hand."

"No, it won't. Sword in one hand, fire in the other."

"But as soon as I can find some arrows, I'm going back to the bow. And then it will be impossible for me to fight and provide light."

"Good point," Ralof said, grabbing a torch from a wall sconce and lighting it from the flames in Maggie's hand.

Putting the flames out proved slightly problematic, as Maggie wasn't completely sure how to cancel a spell without casting it, and throwing fire around in here didn't seem like the best idea. Fortunately, simply closing her hand into a fist and willing the fire to go out did the trick.

They kept moving down the hall. The room at the end had three Imperial soldiers standing guard.

Ralof announced his presence by flinging his torch at one of the guards, and then charging in. Maggie instinctively reached for her bow before remembering that she had no arrows. She grabbed her sword and charged in after him, very much against her better judgment.

One of the three Imperials pulled out a bow of his own and started shooting, although not well. The other two moved to engage the attackers. One went for Ralof. The other came at Maggie.

She had no time to react. The Imperial, a woman, was far more experienced than she, or at least far less rusty. It was all Maggie could do to deflect the blows away from her throat. One nicked her shoulder, leaving a small wound.

She was being pushed back, she realized. Towards the wall, where it would become even harder to keep this woman's sword from striking something vital.

Maggie remembered the trick she had used against the bandit back in Hammerfell and continued circling after dodging the next blow, trying to get behind her opponent. Unfortunately, it didn't work this time. The woman spun, slamming her blade into Maggie's guard.

"Traitor!" she snapped.

"I haven't betrayed anyone," Maggie replied.

"Right," the woman snarled, lunging forward.

The next thing Maggie knew, she was lying on the ground with the point of a sword inches from her nose.

"Any last words, Stormcloak filth?" In her anger, this woman apparently hadn't even noticed that Maggie wasn't a Nord.

"Not again," Maggie muttered.

The woman raised her blade.

Suddenly, the woman staggered, and Maggie saw her chance. Without thinking or wondering what had just happened, she leapt up and rammed her blade up under the woman's breastplate, and then quickly yanked it out and turned away so she wouldn't see the look in the dying soldier's eyes.

Maggie looked around the room and saw that Ralof had dispatched both of the other two soldiers in the time it had taken her to deal with one. He had also retrieved the torch, which was still lit.

Maggie looked at the blood on her blade. Oh, she hated killing.

She looked up just in time to catch the quiver of arrows that Ralof had thrown to her. There were ten arrows in it, and Maggie immediately dumped them all into her quiver. They were metal, not wood with metal heads like the ones she was used to. They would fly differently when shot, but Maggie was more than confident in her ability to adapt. It would be temporary anyway. She could make more once she made it to a town that wasn't this one.

A rumble sounded above their heads.

"We need to keep going," Ralof said. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Maggie said.

"You seem uncomfortable."

"I hate being underground."

That was only one of the reasons why she was uncomfortable.


They headed out a side door and farther down the tunnel. Or maybe they were already in the main keep. Maggie couldn't tell. The cut on her shoulder stung a bit, but she ignored it. It was far from the worst injury she'd ever sustained.

It got hotter as they walked, as though the ground directly above them was on fire, the heat somehow funneling downwards instead of up.

Imperial soldiers attacked them twice, but Maggie easily picked them off with her bow, gritting her teeth the whole time and trying to ignore her own disgust at having to take more lives, which was made harder to do by the fact that she kept having to pull the arrows out of the bodies in order to conserve her limited supply.

Finally they emerged into the basement of the keep proper.

The dungeons.

Maggie reeled back and covered her nose in disgust at the smell. Blood. Death, Excrement.

She could immediately tell that far too many people had died here, and only after enduring things that no one should have to go through.

One wall of this room was lined with cages. All of them had dead bodies inside, most still sporting the now-familiar Stormcloak armor and insignia. But the body on the far end was wearing mage's robes.

She rushed over and found that her sneaking hunch was correct. The man was a Breton. Or had been. He had the light build and dark hair common to her people. The robes were in the familiar style, but not the familiar color. The mages she'd seen in Wayrest had usually worn brighter colors, reds and greens and blues. This man's robes were brown.

If he was a Breton, then that meant that the Thalmor probably weren't responsible for this. They tended to hold Bretons in higher esteem than the other non-Elf races, due to the old stories about Bretons' natural magical capabilities coming from having some measure of Elvish blood. Of course, if the man had been backing the Stormcloaks for whatever reason, then the High Elves would have seen more reason to have him tortured, not less.

There was, oddly enough, a spellbook on the floor of the cell. It was supposedly possible to learn a spell simply by reading such a book, and the chance to learn a new spell quickly and easily and thereby add to her dismal magical repertoire initially piqued her interest before she remembered that Nords weren't particularly fond of mages.

Lini's magic teacher had despised spellbooks, regarding them as "the easy way out," allowing the learning of a spell with almost no effort, provided the person had the aptitude.

Maggie again contemplated taking the book, just because such tomes tended to fetch quite a bit of money from the right buyer, but that plan too was stymied, this time by the still-locked cell door. Opening locked things without the key was not Maggie's forte, and after scanning the room and finding no implements suitable for the task, she decided it wasn't worth it.

Ralof's sudden cry reminded her where she was. She spun around just in time to see two Imperial soldiers come through the door behind her and attack him.

At the same moment, a third soldier came through the other door, only a few feet from Maggie, and swung an ax at her.

She barely dodged, pulling out her sword as she did. She didn't like her chances, even less so than in the earlier fight. Her father's lessons about fighting against someone using a heavier weapon like an ax had amounted to a single bit of advice: blows from such a weapon were meant to be dodged, not parried.

Maggie dodged another blow, then a third. Fortunately for her, ax swings were slower than sword swings, due to the greater weight of the weapon.

But then she slipped, in a puddle of blood that could well be the only one in the room that hadn't yet dried.

The man loomed over her, ax at the ready, and Maggie couldn't help but think that the gods particularly disliked her today, when a sword erupted out of the man's chest, and he slumped to the floor, revealing Ralof.

He extended his hand and helped Maggie up.

"Thanks. How did you deal with two soldiers that fast?"

"You mean the two Imperial rich kids who fought like they'd never swung a sword before in their lives?"

"Oh."


The rest of the basement was empty. It seemed as though all the other Imperials had already made themselves scarce. Or died.

Whatever the reason, Maggie and Ralof encountered nothing more dangerous than a few unnaturally large rats, which the locals apparently called "skeevers."

It was Ralof who found the trap door.

Both of them descended down the ladder into the cool, damp underground caves. Ordinarily Maggie would have described the area as awful, but the cool air was welcome after the burning town.

It was also pitch-dark in the caves, aside from the small amount of light provided by the torch.

"You're really not very good with a sword, are you?" Ralof asked as they walked.

"Give me a break," Maggie retorted. "I haven't trained with anything but a bow in six years."

Ralof raised an eyebrow, barely visible in the torchlight.

"Before today, I didn't even carry a sword."

"And you hadn't ever killed people either, right?"

"No. That I've done before."

"Really? I wouldn't have figured."

"Well, watching someone die because of you is not something you ever get used to."

"I disagree. You hesitate for a moment after each kill, while what you've done sinks in. On the battlefield, that'll get you killed."

"Well, then, may the gods grant that I never find myself on a battlefield."

Ralof seemingly had no response to that, and so the two continued on in silence.

Silence that was quickly broken by a roar.

Maggie couldn't see the source of the sound, but her first thought was that it was the dragon. She quickly forced herself to calm down, and when the sound came again, she realized that it was a bear's roar.

"Can you see anything?" Ralof hissed.

Maggie's supposedly preternatural eyesight didn't make any difference in this case. In the dark, her eyes were no better than anyone else's.

"I can't, but I know what sounds animals make. That's a bear."

"Let's see if we can sneak past."

"It's already smelled us. That's why it's roaring."

"What do you recommend?"

"Well, it's kind of hard to tell with all the echoing, but it sounds like it's off to that side of the room." She pointed to the right. "There's a small chance we'll be fine if we go around the other side."

They slipped into the room, moving as quickly and quietly as they could along the wall on the left side.

They were halfway across, when Maggie heard the sound of heavy footfalls that were not hers or Ralof's and were moving quickly toward them.

"Shit!" she cried. She grabbed Ralof's arm and pointed at where she hoped the bear was. Ralof flung his torch at where she pointed. It landed about fifteen feet away, illuminating a large and very angry brown bear, which quickly skidded to a halt when it realized fire was being thrown at it.

Ralof started to run, but Maggie grabbed him by the arm again.

"Don't act like prey," she hissed. "Don't run. Back away slowly."

They did, backing away from the bear, which was left standing in the cave giving the thrown torch a rather quizzical look.

They were now without a light source, with no way whatsoever of obtaining a new one. Fortunately, the path from here on was relatively straight, and, more importantly, quite short. They saw daylight after one more turn.

The first thing Maggie did after emerging into the light of day once again to take a moment to enjoy the warmth of the sun on her face. Even though, the trip through the tunnels hadn't lasted that long, she was in no hurry to repeat it.

It seemed to be roughly midday, but she didn't have time to confirm that before Ralof grabbed her and pulled her behind a rock.

Just as the dragon flew overhead.

Maggie once again couldn't help but take a moment to admire it, before her common sense caught up and she was reminded of what this creature had just done.

"It's heading west," Ralof observed. "Toward Whiterun. And Riverwood."

"Isn't that…" Maggie started.

"My home."


AN: When a dragon attacks Helgen, Maggie finds unexpected allies in both sides of the civil war...

No journal entries in this chapter for obvious reasons. They'll be back in chapter 5.

If anyone's curious about why I bothered to include that bear, I used it as a way to show Maggie's knowledge of wildlife.