(AN: Did you really think that last chapter was the end? Oh no, not at all. Even in my original draft of the story, this chapter was always going to appear in one way or another. Initially I had hoped that Elder Scrolls VI would be out and we'd know exactly how Skyrim ended, and this story would end with the potential for more as Sigrun closes her family's world and creates the world in which ES6 happens. But that's not going to happen any time soon [what with World of Warcraft knock-offs ESO and Fallout 76 eating up all of Bethesda-Zenimax and god Howard's time and resources!].)

Thoughts of Home

There was a blinding white light, and then Sigrun's eyes saw a carpet of purple and scarlet before them. The carpet led to a great throne that sat under a large tree covered with mushrooms. Before the throne was a table decked with many delicacies. All of this, Sigrun slowly became aware of, was inside a palace with a great vaulted ceiling. Looking over at the table, she saw, sitting on the throne, an old man seemingly engrossed in his dinner.

"I took the liberty of cutting out a virgin's tongue and stuffing it in your mouth," the old man said in a high Colovian accent. "You can thank me by speaking."

Sigrun gasped. She could speak again!

"Where am I?" she asked.

"In my summer palace in my little plane of Oblivion," remarked the old man. "True, it's still winter on Nirn, but I like to do things out of season. Doesn't make sense otherwise." He let out a laugh and continued eating.

Sigrun tried to stand, but found that she was still weak.

"What happened?" she asked.

"I pulled you from the brink," the old man said. "Now, you don't have a lot of time, but that's nobody's fault but yours. So should we get down to business or do you want to waste your time with questions?"

"Who are you?" Sigrun asked.

"Ah, so I see we're going on with questions, then. Well, unfortunately for you, I'm not Hermaeus Mora, so I can't give you all the answers. All I am is a crazy old god who has too much time on his hands and far too much interest in mortals for his or her own good."

Sigrun felt the urge to cough, and suddenly the palace disappeared. She was standing in a room that was wholly white: white walls, white floor, white ceiling. The only thing not white was her, the old man in his colorful doublet at his table, and the dark red blotches of blood that were pooling up on the ground between her hands, pouring from her mouth. The feeling of chills and weakness suddenly hit her again like a blow to the face.

"Had to give us a change of scenery," the old man said. "Haskill would bitch and moan for an era or two if I got blood on the carpets again."

"What's...happening?" Sigrun asked.

"Surely you must have guessed by now," the old man said. "If I may go as needlessly outside of the splendor as old Vehk himself, there are beings beyond your knowledge who have seen your trials and know better what you're suffering than you do!" He laughed, and then procured from his pocket the dead god's head.

"I have to thank you for this," he said, presenting the head to Sigrun. "The little shit actually thought he could become a god! Now...now he'll make an excellent decoration for my mantelpiece." He put the head onto the dining table, next to a wheel of cheese, and sat back down at his throne. "But surely you must have guessed it, at some point, in your travels? Running about, trying to save the world, the child out of time, all these aches and pains happening just as you're reaching out to take victory by the balls?" He laughed, then suddenly went serious again.

"I had a feeling you wouldn't be able to figure it out, even here, at the very end. They wanted to intervene sooner, but I had too much confidence in you: just as I had in my bloodline. Of course, one can hardly fault a mother for watching after her own children as you yourself can attest to."

"What?" Sigrun gasped.

"I was a mother myself, in another life," said the old man. "But you, you've quite mantled Mara herself by giving your life's force up to save Skyrim. Quite admirable of you, I must admit."

"You..." Sigrun breathed, as more blood began dripping from her lips. "You mean that I'm..."

"You're dying, Sigrun," the old man said ominously. Then, shifting demeanor, he went into a very casual, conversational tone. "Well, I mean, you're a mortal. Dying is sort of what you do. But you're dying faster than most mortals anyways."

"How?"

"How?" he asked. "What kind of absurd question is that? Did you really think you could just saunter through time and change the past with no repercussions to yourself? That cock-less unfunny twat Vehk practically spelled it out for you in his endless rambling about fucking the world with his cock-spear."

Into Sigrun's mind came a phrase uttered by Vivec during their duel, at the time dismissed as pure insanity: Your actions have zero-summed yourself, confuting your own existence.

"What does that mean?" she asked.

"Well, did you really think that the Dwemer became gods when they tampered with the Heart of Lorkhan?" asked Sheogorath. "I tell you, they zero-summed themselves. What that is? I don't know: I actually became a god when I learned the secret. But essentially it means making yourself nonexistent. I mean, some people I give a good whack on the head with the Wabbajack manage to figure it out, just as how they'll eventually figure out that the sun isn't a hole in the sky. And those that the world calls mad figured it out, but they had it all wrong. They believed that the Dwemer just painlessly disintegrated into neat little piles of dust. But being atomized, ripped apart by forces beyond your comprehension, is much more painful than anyone could possibly conceive."

"Please!" Sigrun begged as more blood poured out of her mouth. "Make it stop."

"Oh, I can't stop it," said the old man. "I'm not Akatosh, I haven't got any power to command the jills to not erase you. And even if I could, I'm not exactly the one to be begging for mercy before. I left my own daughter behind to save Cyrodiil from the Greymarch! If that's not absolutely cruel, unusual, and utterly bonkers for a mother to do, I don't know what is: and I'm the fucker whose job description is crazy shit!"

"Is...is that?" Sigrun asked. "Do I just...die? After all I've been through? After all I've done?"

"Life isn't fair, little lass," the old man replied. "Do you think it was fair for me to run away and play god while Romana grew up without her mother? Do you think it's fair that one man can leave so much destruction in his wake and go out because his head was up his own arse?" At this, the old man reached over to a candle on his table and plucked the flame off of it. The tongue of fire danced in mid-air above his hands, unbound by the wick, but still burning.

"There he is," he said, gesturing to the flame. "No one's ever sold their soul to eight different beings. I could only imagine how...painful that is. Does he spend holidays with me and then go off to Coldharbour and the Myriad Realms to be ball-gagged and butt-fucked by Sanguine and Molag Bal, or does he exist eternally as a half thing in each realm, experiencing all the joys and terrors all at once?" He laughed. "Oooh, scary!" He flicked his fingers and the flame went back to the candle, and he turned back to Sigrun.

"It's never fair," he replied. "Nor is it fair that a girl tries her best to undo all the mistakes of the past, only to undo her own life in the process."

"Help!" Sigrun gagged as another large amount of blood poured from her half-open mouth.

The old man paused. "I was afraid you'd ask me for my help. I already told you I can't do it. You could, though?"

"Me?" she weakly asked.

Sheogorath stood up from his throne and, walking across his table, came to her side and gestured behind her. Turning around as much as she could in her weakened state, Sigrun saw with horror the great white door that Tiraa and Arvela had used.

"They didn't make the door," he explained. "They thought they did, but it wasn't them. It was Crixus all along. He wrote it down in a book: fascinating read, it was. He finally learned his lesson in the end, though too late to do much...except for this." He pointed to the door.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Between it and you," he said. "It's the last two things remaining from your world. You could step inside that and go back to just before you left and force yourself not to go."

"Can't I..." Sigrun breathed. "...fix it...so I won't die?"

Sheogorath tutted disappointingly at her. "Always looking for an easy way out, even here at the end. I'm afraid it's not that simple: it can't give you more life, it doesn't work that way. That was the trade-off your brother made, when he made this plan."

"Bjorn?" she gasped.

"Yes," said the mad god. "He was hoping that it would be his life to be so gallantly sacrificed, in return for the salvation of Skyrim: but then you wasted what was left of his life and his burden fell upon you."

"Then what good will...this door do me?" she spat, and more blood came out.

"You can't add on more life to this life," he said. "But if you went back and kept yourself from going back in time, you wouldn't zero-sum yourself."

"I'd...be alive..." she muttered.

"Well, for about three or four months," he replied. "Basically until all the shit that you ran from catches up to you again."

"There's no other way?" she asked incredulously.

"There's already been one Dragon Break," Sheogorath said. "You don't want to make another Dragon Break inside the first. It'd take divine intervention to keep you from being removed; and, unfortunately, all you have right now is me."

Sigrun at last broke down and wept: tears and blood streamed from her eyes as she did. There seemed to be no choice in the matter at all. She could either go into the portal and stop herself and Jonna from going back, in which case she would live out the next three months until Crixus destroyed the Empire and the world of men. Or she could not choose and die in the world she had created. Not much of a choice. She slammed her fist onto the ground, but then to her horror her hand went numb and she could move it no more.

"I can give you a push if you'd like," Sheogorath replied. "Like I did with your memories. Can't be making decisions as a drooling imbecile. But you should make a decision quickly: your strength is fading fast." Sigrun said nothing, but began crawling towards the door on what remained of her limbs.

"Is that really the choice you want to be making?" Sheogorath asked. "I know, I know, I'm cheating here, but she asked me to bring this to your mind."

"She?"

"You do realize what you'll be doing if you go in there," he said. "Everything you've done since your return to the past will be undone, forgotten. All the good you've done, all the evil you might have prevented: all wiped away. Can you live with all the people you'll let die over your choice?"

Suddenly Sigrun froze in place. Not because she ran out of strength, but because it suddenly made sense. You let them all die. The words she had heard in her sleep over and over, repeated until madness. That was the severity of the choice before her: if she stepped into the doorway, she would live...but they would all die. They. Who were they? Suddenly the effects of her month of journeying was coming in full force upon her: she could feel her right leg painfully snap as if slammed against the ground by a dragon, and blood was pouring out of her mouth once again. There was no time to waste. She had to make a choice: her life or every life in High Rock, Skyrim, Hammerfell, and Cyrodiil.

She halted. She couldn't go through with it. What would she have to say for herself before the Hall of Shor? As much pain as she was going through, she knew that she couldn't live with herself if she let everyone die for just a handful more months: whoever they were. Yet again the memories were dripping out of her as freely as the blood pouring from her mouth and, now, nostrils.

"There's a good girl," Sheogorath said. "Your mother would be proud of you, as would your grandmother...and Valeria would be proud of you."

But Sigrun was not listening. She cared not for praise at this point: it meant little to her, dying in a strange place, far away from home.

Home. 'A Nord's last thoughts should be of home' was the old phrase. Home could be on the other side of that doorway, so close and just within her grasp. No, she told herself. You made your choice, don't look back. Mustering up her strength, she turned herself over and lay on her back, her eyes looking upward to the white, endless ceiling.

"Will it...hurt?" she asked.

"Certainly," the old man answered. "But I wouldn't know: I've never died by atomization. Not that you'd know what that means, of course."

Sigrun didn't respond, but tried to bury her pain. Her mind was reeling from the agony and she couldn't clearly recall anything. Names floated in and out of her mind - Eirik, Erik, Mjoll, Jonna, Lydia, Bjorn, Lucia, and others - but she couldn't place them to anyone in her memory. Nor could she intelligibly speak or bring to mind anything that had happened in her entire life, not to mention the past few months. What was her home? Did she even have a home? Did she have a home if she didn't exist?

Since she couldn't keep her mind on home, her thoughts drifted back to her body and her surroundings. Her right leg and right hand were broken and immobile. There was so much blood pouring from her nose that she couldn't breathe through her nostrils anymore, and blood pooled around her head from the back of her head as well as her mouth. From the tips of her toes to the top of her broken head, she was shaking violently. For some reason, her chest felt like it was collapsing: every breath was harder to push out than the last one.

Above her she could see, in the endless abyss of the white ceiling overhead, the white hawk flying down from on high, barely visible against a glistening aurora. She knew the hawk, though she couldn't think of how or why she knew what it was. It had something to do with a lake, a sword, and killing a false god. Then it came back into her mind: she had done those things. Her cracked, blood-stained lips twisted into a smile: she had done so much since that morning on the shores of Lake Ilinalta. It was coming back to her; not all at once, but slowly by degrees. She had walked backwards in time, slain the Dunmer god Vivec, and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. It seemed unfair that she would have to die, even though she had done so much. Still, no victory without sacrifice. Would she go to Sovngarde once her heart stopped and her body went cold? She hadn't died in battle: would that bar her from entry?

As if in answer to her prayers, the hawk floated over her and circled three times: how it flew in this place she couldn't tell, for she could not hear the wind. At last it came near to her, but did not land, and a sword appeared just inches away from her left hand. Her left hand reached out and gripped the hilt of the sword as tightly as she could, till her fingers ran white from loss of blood. If she was going to die, she would die with her sword in hand like all true Nords.

Slowly the memories began to trickle back into her mind, and for a brief moment, she could glimpse the past again. She saw herself on the shores of Lake Ilinalta, her old home. She saw herself and Jonna sparring, then brawling, then fighting in the shield-wall. She saw their faces again: Eirik with his thick beard, Mjoll and the scars of her long journeys, Lucia's cleft chin, Bjorn peering at her from behind a large musty book, Jonna's blue eyes and wide smile. And then she saw Erik, as he had been in her dreams. If there were any blood left in her body, she would be blushing to think of him seeing her like this: broken, emaciated, bleeding out, and dying. Dying at last. She had hoped to spend her final days in battle, going down with Jonna at her side. Now where was she? She was away, she had left and lived yet still. When would her end be? Hopefully not for a good many years. Her mind wandered to Susanna, brought back to life in the Hall of the Dead in Windhelm: she had been on her way towards the Whale-Bone bridge before they pulled her back. Where was it? Where was Tsun? Why couldn't she see them? Was she not...

A hoarse rasp escaped Sigrun's parched lips, and it was over. There was nothing beautiful about her ending, broken and bleeding, far away from home, all alone in the end: nothing poetic, nothing triumphant. Even her last thoughts were filled with despair.

(AN: Nothing to say here. See the next chapter.)