Riverwood was a nice enough little town, but Haldis wasn't looking forward to sifting through a crypt for something that might not have even been there.
"Your court wizard needs a map of burial mounds?"
"Aye."
"What for?"
"I'm not sure. I typically don't involve myself in what he does, if his projects aren't political in nature. He'll be able to explain it to you far better than I ever could. "
"Alright."
So, here she was, preparing to head up into a pre-Dragon War crypt with some soldiers that she'd never met and an axe that she didn't know how to wield. She shrugged off her worries of not knowing how to fight. She had her Voice, and some of the most uncouth men to walk Mundus ended up becoming Tamriel's greatest war heroes. King Olaf fought half blind! It could not have been that hard!
And so, in that morning of Last Seed, she and the excavation team's soldiers ascended to Bleak Falls Barrow. The head of the excavations was a bitter wizard by the nearly Aldmeri name of Farengar. He had a condescending way of speaking that made Haldis's jaw clench in irritation, and a lazy slur that suggested he had been drinking.
"So the Jarl thinks you can be of use to me?" He thoughtfully stroked his wiry sideburns. "Yes, I could use someone to fetch something for me." He paused. He chuckled darkly. "Well, when I say fetch , I really mean delve into a dangerous ruin in search of a tablet that may or may not actually be there."
Haldis perched her hands on her hips. "The Jarl mentioned it had something to do with burial mounds… What does it have to do with dragons?"
Farengar's lips quirked up, amused. "You see, when the stories of dragons began to circulate, many dismissed them as mere fantasies, rumors . Impossibilities! One sure mark of a fool is to dismiss anything that falls outside his experience as being impossible. But I began to search for information about dragons - where had they gone all those years ago? And where were they coming from?" He then gestured to one of the tents in his little encampment where a hooded woman in road leathers was standing, looking around like a thug on watch for guards. "Through my little associate over there, I learned of a Dragonstone said to contain a map of dragon burial sites, supposed be in the ruins."
Haldis nodded. "Okay… and what do you need me to do?"
"Well, you said you're a Dragonborn, yes?" Haldis nodded again. "Well, I need you to help my soldiers through the ruins. See, one of those brutes woke up the dead inside, and now they're all afraid to go in. If they have someone like you with them, it might give them the push they need to get that stone. Are you following me?"
"I am-"
Farengar cut her off and shooed her away. "Splendid! Then off into the ruins with you. The men are posted just by the door. Bring it back to me, and I'll make sure you're paid."
"But wait, I-" He gave Haldis an expectant look. Haldis shut her mouth. She puffed, and she went trotting up the stairs to Bleak Falls Barrow, with the personal note in mind to not take the word of any wizard seriously, if she could help it. On her way up, she caught a look at the hooded woman Farengar was talking about, but not much of one, for the woman's mouth and nose were concealed under a scarf. She was no Redguard, though.
Haldis didn't think much of it, and continued up the slope.
Bleak Falls Barrow was a huge ruin, looking down on Riverwood from the peak upon which it was built. A series of stone arches shielded it from the blazing sun and Skyrim's brutal winter weather. Even though it was only the middle of Last Seed, the bite of the cold from the altitude was sharp and ripped right through Haldis's coat. From what she'd read, deeper caves were actually quite warm. At this point, Nord or not, she hoped it was true.
The soldiers were camped out by the entrance to the ruin, guarding the doors, it seemed. Some of them drew out from their tents at the sight of her. Their murmurs rippled through the encampment.
"That's the Dragonborn?"
"Look at her, she's puny…"
Haldis took a deep breath and held her head high as she passed them. Fake confidence, they'll eventually respect you…
She stopped by the doors and turned to face the soldiers.
"Well, I suppose we have a Dragonstone to retrieve," she called out. They all gawked at her. She swallowed the rising lump in her throat and puffed her chest out. "We have our orders from Jarl Balgruuf. We need to find what Farengar needs so we can do our part in dealing with the Dragon Crisis. Are we going or not?"
The men all exchanged glances. Some sighed. Some murmured. But they all stood, and they followed her inside.
The temple was freezing, not having seen the light of day in thousands of years. Cobwebs littered the place and a mix of frost and dust covered every stoney surface. The ceiling of the entryway was tall and the room was open, only to quickly narrow into a bottleneck that led into the rest of the barrow.
A handful of the guards circled around her as they marched into the ruin. The rest of the soldiers, about fourteen of them, followed closely behind.
"M'lady," one beckoned. Haldis looked at him. "The others are sayin' yer a Dragonborn. Can you Shout, like they do in the old tales?"
She shrank back a little. "Um… yes. Yes, I can."
His eyes lit up with a childlike wonder. "Can you show us?"
"Um-"
One of the other soldiers came up and smacked the first one upside the head.
"We're not here to ask questions, idiot," he snapped. "If she can Shout, great. If not, it's none of our business." The first soldier scowled a little, but made no comment.
The soldiers in the front guided her and the rest of the group further down into the ruins through narrow, winding tunnels. They were all well-lit by sconces ignited by the excavation team, but not even flame could rid the lower reaches of the temple of a stench most foul. It smelt like a mix of the contents of a goat's bowels, rotten fish, and sour milk. Haldis was about to ask what it was, but one of the soldiers beat her to it.
"That smell…"
"Looks like the Draugr are up and at it again…"
She frowned and looked to the bitter guard. " Draugr ?" she echoed.
The burly man shuddered a little. "You haven't heard of Draugr?" Haldis shook her head. "They're men who were real wicked in life. The gods cursed 'em after they died and won't let 'em stay dead to go to Sovngarde." Haldis stared at him.
"I've heard stories of the ancients ascending to lichdom so they could come back to life later, but I never thought they were real…"
The first soldier chimed in, "Well, we thought they were just stories, too, until Ivar got his face eaten off by a walker. You put 'em down, and they get right back up a while later." Haldis started to feel sick.
Someone else pitched in from the rear, "I heard they're afraid of fire!"
"Gunnar, you might be thinkin' of vampires…"
Haldis didn't even ask about vampires.
The other soldiers shrugged. Some waved torches.
"I say we burn everything in here after we're done, then, just to be sure. Place gives me the creeps…" A few of the others chattered in agreement.
At the end of the tunnel, there was an open room, half-heartedly lit by torches. Long, humanoid shadows were thrown on the floor from beyond the doorframe where they were yet to tread. Haldis stopped, as did the rest of the team. While they weren't attacked, the sound of grinding teeth and choking breath echoed throughout the chamber. The smell was ungodly.
"How many were in here before?" she breathed.
"Five or six," whispered the bitter soldier. "There might be more here, since they might be expectin' us. How should we do this?" Haldis's throat tightened. "Lady Dragonborn?"
"Uh…" She poked her head around the doorframe to have a look. Seven figures were in the crypt, some slumped over, some wandering around. They were tall, taller than even most Nords, lean and rotten. All of them were armed and grouped mostly in the middle. She sucked back to face the soldiers, and fought to think of what to do. "Maybe… we can surround them from here. Half of you go along the wall on this side, the other half go on the other, and you can fight them back into the middle."
The soldiers looked at each other. Some shrugged, some nodded.
"Alright," the bitter guard murmured. He pointed at six of the men and then at the far wall, then waved for them to follow. They stalked into the chamber.
The Draugr began to growl.
Feebly, Haldis led the other half along the nearest wall.
One of the Draugr screamed, alerting the others, who howled along and came charging out of the darkness.
Their little group of seven split into uneven halves and assaulted either portion of the excavation team. Three came running to Haldis's group. Before she could even think to do a thing, three of her soldiers bolted in front of her to clash with the undead guardians.
One of the Draugr tore right through its opponent's side with a strike from its axe, then moved on to another soldier. Said other soldier managed to deal a crippling blow to the Draugr's head with his mace, sending the heathen down to the floor. The other two were still in a struggling deadlock, wrestling and fighting for control. They managed to fight them off rather quickly; one of the undead had its head bashed in with a flail; the other had a sword driven down its gullet. They both fell.
Haldis looked over the heads of her half to the others; they had been victorious, undead corpses scattered around them. She then gazed down at the fallen soldier. Her innards twisted and cramped up. The victim was the one who had talked to her initially. The childish glint in his half-opened eyes was gone, and his mouth hung ajar and rimmed with blood. Her toes curled in her boots.
"M'lady!" She perked up. It was the bitter guard. "We need to keep movin'. What do you want us to do with the bodies?" Haldis looked over the rotted corpses that littered the floor.
"I… Try burning them. We can't have them trailing after us."
The guard nodded and signaled to the others with a wave. "You heard the Dragonborn!" Three soldiers with torches came over and held their torches to the bodies of the Draugr.
Before long, the bodies were aflame and reeked even more like burning, rotting meat. It was an oddly sweet aroma that pressed at the back of Haldis's throat. She pulled her scarf up over her nose to block it out, for she was starting to retch.
"Alright, we need to keep moving," she called, and she started towards the dark end of the chamber. The soldiers called their acknowledgements and followed after her. The bitter soldier jogged up to her side.
"We'll come back for his body later." She nodded numbly.
The group continued further into the catacombs. As they delved lower and lower into the mountain, screams could be heard echoing through the halls. Some of the soldiers stopped.
"What the…"
"Haknir! Bjorn! Soling! Is anybody there? Help me!"
"That don't sound like a Nord…" one of the soldiers said.
"Did someone slip past us?"
"I dunno. We didn't make it this far before."
Haldis strained to see ahead into the darkness. There was a faint, bluish light at the end of the tunnel. With one glance over her shoulder, she went jogging down the hallway towards the light. That light turned out to be an entryway into a massive chamber full of webs. At the far end of the chamber, a short man was tangled up in a swaddle of silk, screaming for help.
He caught sight of her. "Wait- You're not Soling-" he coughed. "Doesn't matter. Get me down! Please!" Haldis looked down the hall at the soldiers that followed after her, then back at the man. She bolted out into the chamber towards him. "Hurry! Hurry! Before it comes back!"
She gazed up at him warily when she stopped in front of him. "Before what comes back?" The man suddenly looked at the ceiling. His ashen complexion went as pale as the snow outside, and he started shrieking. Haldis looked, then spun around to behold the enormous arachnid that emerged from a crack in the ceiling.
She fumbled for the axe hitched on her belt and backed up against the wall.
The spider, taller than a man and as wide as six standing shoulder-to-shoulder, dropped down to the floor. Venom dripped from its fangs. Suddenly, it lurched with a scream and whipped around to the entrance of the chamber; the soldiers all had their crossbows out and had fired into the spider's back.
"Dragonborn! While it's distracted!" the bitter soldier cried. Haldis snapped out of her terror and went running for the spider's backside. She crunched the sharp edge of her axe directly into its abdomen. Some kind of white humor spewed from the breach, and it started yowling and bucking. One of its many legs struck her in the belly and sent her flying into the wall.
"Don't let it near her!"
"Aye!"
The soldiers came hauling into the chamber, and they looped around either of the spider's sides to surround it. They all charged at it at the same time and began hacking away at its limbs.
The wretched beast thrashed and managed to throw some of the men off it, but thirteen on one was too many. As Haldis got up from where she'd been thrown, the spider started to crumple under the ceaseless ripping and tearing of the soldiers that mauled it. When it stopped moving, the soldiers backed away to reveal a mangled carcass that curled whatever legs it had left into its body.
"Ah! Sweet breath of Arkay!" the man in the webs babbled. "You did it, you killed it! Now cut me down before anything else shows up!" Haldis went back up to him after retrieving her axe and went to start slicing at the silks, only to be stopped by two of the soldiers.
"Wait a minute…" one growled. The Dunmer shrank back in his bindings.
"That's the thief that snatched Lucan's claw!" the other accused.
Haldis looked at them. "What?"
The first soldier stabbed a finger into the thief's chest. "This little bastard and his ragtag crew'a bandits robbed the general store in Riverwood!" Haldis glared at the thief.
"If that's true, why should we cut you down?"
The thief kept struggling. "Because I know the way through the rest of the barrow!" he declared. "And because of that arachnid, you can't get my claw, or any further into the ruins without cutting me down."
Haldis raised a brow. "Claw?"
"Yes, yes, the claw! The claw, the markings, the door in the Hall of Stories- I know how they all fit together! If you cut me down, I can show you. You won't believe the wealth the Nords hid there!"
Haldis looked at the two soldiers, shrugged, and wedged her axe into the silk, then sawed it down until it cleaved through. One of the men mirrored her until the silks loosened enough that the thief fell to the ground with a wheeze. The solider that stood idle suddenly lunged forth and grabbed the Dunmer by his ponytail.
"Where's the claw at, elf?" he snarled. The thief wailed. Haldis shoved the soldier to get him to let go.
"Don't hurt him! He's been through enough!" The soldier instantly dropped the thief, to which the thief ducked through the silks and down the hidden passage behind it. Haldis bit her tongue.
The bitter soldier stuck his sword through the wall of silk to cut rest of it away, then filed through it to chase after the thief.
"Get back here, you little grey-skinned ass!"
Haldis and the other men ran after him.
They trailed through more crypts and tunnels until they were spat out into a long, well-preserved hall. The walls were intricately decorated with detailed carvings of what Haldis recognized as the various Wights of Nature, animal totems, that Arngeir told her about. At the end of the hall was a massive door with three semi-circular crests bearing the totems and a metallic dias in the center. Before that door was the bitter soldier, the thief bloodied and beaten at his feet. In his hand was a golden statue, about the size of a man's hand, shaped like a dragon's claw.
Haldis very gingerly walked up to him, cautiously eyeing the dead thief.
"Is… that it?"
The guard nodded. "He said something about symbols on the claw before, but I'm not sure if this is a trap or not. Seems too easy…" Haldis took the claw from him when it was offered, and she looked it over. On the palm of the claw, there were three symbols of the Atmoran totems, a bear, a moth, and an owl. She looked up at the door's crests; they were each in a similar style. She touched one of them, pressed it, and to her surprise, the crest turned clockwise to reveal another crest hidden by the rest of the mechanism.
The soldiers watched her as she matched the crests on the door, bear, moth, owl, to the ones pictured on the claw. Nothing happened.
"Try usin' the claw in the middle thing…" She turned the claw around, holding it by its wrist, and pressed it into the dias. The claws molded into three buttons, the dias turned. A pause. The hall started to tremble. The door began to shift, sinking down into a grove in the floor to reveal a chamber beyond it. It stopped moving when the doorway was totally clear. Haldis took a deep breath, and she crossed the threshold. The men behind her followed.
In the chamber beyond, there was a single sarcophagus laying in the middle of a platform, and nothing else.
"This is the main chamber, isn't it?"
"Where's the Dragonstone?"
"Farengar said it might not even be her…"
There was a loud crack! that echoed throughout the chamber. The unit jumped.
"What was that?" one of the soldiers queried.
The sarcophagus crackled. Several outward dents appeared, each with a deafening clang! The sealed door burst open. The soldiers leaped back out of the way. From the sarcophagus reached out a long, bony hand, which gripped the rim to support the rise of a hulking Draugr. The other arm emerged holding a long pole-axe, which planted itself into the ground to allow the rest of its master to surge up from the coffin. The thing had to be eight feet tall, towering over the men that all gaped up at it in fear and awe. It stood upright at the side of its resting place, its teeth groaning, rotten muscles flexing away thousands of years of sleepy stiffness. It smacked its lips, cracked its neck.
Its eyes started to gleam.
One of the soldiers sprang from the group with a battlecry, his longsword raised over his head. In one smooth movement, the Draugr geared up with its axe, struck the soldier down, and followed through with a wide sweep. The soldier, cleaved nearly in two, was thrown by the blow to the other side of the room.
Haldis could practically smell the fear overcoming the rest of the unit. The Draugr looked back at the soldiers and took a step.
"Pahlok joorre!" it gnarled, and it raised its axe again. The soldiers all scattered to get out of the way, but some were too slow. Haldis was well out of the way and turned just in time to watch the Draugr swing its weapon again and catch two more with a devastating blow. The soldiers went flying, blood and whatever else shouldn't have been seen out of the gut splattered all over the wall behind them.
Haldis brandished her axe and skittered over, out of the way, when the Draugr came running after the soldiers hiding by the other side of the sarcophagus. It grabbed ahold of one soldier that couldn't get away with that incredible reach and tossed him down to the floor. Haldis bolted up behind the creature and slammed the head of her axe into its back, only to earn a hard slap that sent her crashing into the floor.
"Kren sosaal, vahdin!"
Haldis stared up at the Draugr in a daze, looked over at her war axe, which had fallen some feet away; too far. The Draugr raised its axe.
Before she could even think, the word fell out of her mouth, "YOL!"
White-hot flames surged out of her throat to engulf the Draugr. It screeched and fell to the floor to roll around in an attempt to put itself out. Before it could get back up, Haldis leaped up from the floor, grabbed her axe, and started hacking away at its neck and face.
By the time the flames eventually extinguished, the thing's head was in cabbage-like chunks all over the floor. She heaved to catch her breath, her legs wobbling, and she swept the back of her hand over her forehead, only to find with a jolt that there was a cut in her temple; blood was smeared across her knuckles.
She resisted the aching urge to cry and just focused on calming down; she couldn't cry in front of all those men, not then.
"Lady Dragonborn! Look!" She perked up and looked; one of the soldiers was standing over the broken sarcophagus, a hefty stone slate in his hands.
The trip back was uneventful. Haldis helped the soldier haul the Dragonstone back to an elated Farengar, and the others dealt with the bodies of the slaughtered guards. After everything was wrapped up and Farengar had a report for her to take back to Jarl Balgruuf, Haldis then spent the rest of the night heaving her guts up into the White River.