Skyrim is the property of Bethesda Softworks. Now we start to get into the older sections of I, Legionnaire. Did anyone else do the Civil War quest line and think that it could have been more? It felt like all you really did was knock over a few underpopulated forts in the middle of nowhere. That's what fanfiction is for I suppose.
"We're in position," Ghent's quiet voice said in my mind.
I gave a mental nod and looked down on Markarth one last time. The capital of the Reach was without question the most dangerous holdfast in Skyrim. It was easily among the most intimidating fortifications on all of Nirn. The city was built at the utmost corner of a coombe where Mount Ragn, upon which I stood, met Hag's End to my south. The wizard's tower and balcony were the only parts of Understone Keep not protected beneath the near vertical shoulders of the mountains above it. From there steep stairs and narrow winding city streets led precipitously down to the great wall: a Dwemer-crafted fortification nearly twenty feet think, sixty high, and built with such care that millennia after its completion, a person could not wedge the tip of a knife in the seams. From the gate, the road issued and wound its way between two mighty towers and around the end of a wall eight feet high on the downhill side, itself anchored by two lesser towers. A whole battalion of Stormcloaks and 500 Markarth Guardsmen held the fortifications with ease. The rest of the Stormcloak division in the Reach was two days away in castles on the Falkreath and Whiterun borders.
Below all this the 25th Colovian Legion camped overnight after an inhuman forced march. Even as I gazed down, desultory rocks and darts flew from the camp into the city's fortifications. Their behavior seemed pointless to everyone involved. 5000-odd soldiers were not going succeed where whole armies would struggle for years to force the city by siege. I had no intention of letting the battle go on that long.
"Go!" I shouted. Four lines fell down into the nearly sheer valley below. The first four climbers: Aela; Jenassa; Faendal; and Derkeethus, one of my few Arigonians, made their way down. The reptilian man eschewed rappelling entirely. Instead his hands and feet stuck to the rocks, letting him scramble downward on all fours like his species' smaller relatives. They were the best marksmen I knew. The four climbed down the mountain with extra lengths of rope and their bows.
The distant legion kept the eyes of the city looking east, not up. I let my point men get more than half way down before sending the next four down. The four archers reached the narrow ledge above Vilindrel Hall where I had sent Ghent, Vorstag, Farkas, Argis, and Erik the Slayer under the guise of protecting my property during the war.
It felt like a reasonable excuse: If I was a neutral party, I would have done the same thing. Neither I nor anyone else in Skyrim held any illusions concerning what would happen if so much as a single legionary cohort broke loose inside the walls of a resisting city. The soldiers' appetite for violence would go on until it was checked by avarice, distracted by lust, or subdued by fear of legionary discipline. No matter how many men and women were summarily executed or tied to a cross outside the camp, the habit of rapine persisted.
Once in the city, my men had snuck onto the roof of the Temple of Dibella with long coils of rope and set up targets. The archers with thin guide lines grafted to their arrows aimed carefully at their marks. My heart was in my throat. I had deliberated long and hard on when to use the Voice. Keeping silent improved the odds that all four arrows would find their targets and the heavy cables could be hauled back up and anchored. But if so much as one guard looked away from the legion shooting away at the walls, my plan was ruined.
Four arrows fled from four bows, barely visible lines hundreds of feet below. Recalling the words I had learned at Skuldafn, I waved the third group down and Shouted to the sky, "Sturn bah qo!" The wind instantly shifted and sped up, snatching at the hangings of my armor and pressing my hood to the side of my face. Grey clouds gathered and darkened in the east, billowing toward us with ominous speed. The air beneath them became a grey blur from the downpour issuing beneath the sudden thunderhead. I hooked myself to a line and started to rappel down as the four archers slid down the zip lines into the waiting arms of my men in the city.
The rain was torrential and icy cold as I unhooked myself from the rappelling line. Thunder clapped overhead, loud enough to shatter rock. The wind gusted treacherously as I fastened my harness to one of the zip lines leading onto the roof of the temple now invisible, but not more than 200 feet away. Checking the line's anchor one last time, I lifted my feet up and slid into the greyness of the storm I had called. For a moment, it seemed like my ride would go on forever, just myself hanging onto the inch-thick cable in the swirling grey and thunder around me. Seconds later, I felt the jolt of Ghent's ward slowing me down. It was still a forceful shock when Farkas brought me down by clotheslining me across the chest.
The infiltration was going well. Three Companions had scrambled down the back of the roof and made a hasty line at the top of the stairway leading down. Other Companions had forced the nearby guard tower, killing or subduing the soldiers within after Morgan's explosive door-breaching. The five men I had sent to catch us were holding up well. Farkas in particular seemed immune to the bodies crashing into him every moment. Ghent cut a heroic image, holding the critical warding spell up with arms spread wide to slow the arrivals as the gusty winds tore at the cloak around him.
I jumped down from the roof to await the next four arrivals, "To the keep!" I commanded, drawing Revenant and igniting her as nine Companions fell in behind me. The others would follow or go to planned stations in the city. We checked before the bronze-colored doors into Understone Keep. The two guards outside the door had not been able to reach for their swords before I compelled their surrender. I leaned on the double doors, hung long ago with such carefulness that I ought to have been able to push them inward with my hands. Yet when barred from within, they might as well have been a solid part of the cliff face. I looked to Morgan and twitched my head. She nodded and her hair caught flame as she began to concentrate.
The mighty doors of the keep failed under the assault of Morgan's fiery eldritch blast. Torn from their hinges, they fell to the floor with a crash. Framed in the wan grey light of the torrential storm outside, we stepped forward to meet the first real resistance to our assault. The most expensive mercenaries the Silver-Bloods could buy arrayed themselves before their master and briefly withstood our onset. Blades and magic flashed and the result hung in the balance until more Companions came in. Battered and angry, I approached the Mournful Throne where Jarl Thongvor Silver-Blood sat with his Imperial steward and the Stormcloak commander in attendance. His housecarl was a part of the bloody mess at the doors.
"Submit, Silver-Blood," I demanded, my white blade melting a hole in the stone floor where I let the tip hang low.
"Imperial bastard!" The Stormcloak commander raged, his war axe rushing at me in defiance. My pre-battle Stoneflesh spell and rapid use of a ward blunted the axe. I stabbed up through the chain and leather over the officer's stomach; pushing up through his heart and shoulder, until the hilt touched his belly and skin smoldered around the white-hot blade. I withdrew Revenant and stepped out of the way of the falling corpse.
"Submit, Sliver-Blood," I said again.
Thongvor sneered at me and leaned back on the great throne of Markarth. "Cyrodiil trash. I am the Lord of Markarth!" he roared, "The Reach flows with the blood and silver of my family. Here I am and here I remain!"
I felt not the slightest hint of resistance or remorse when I shoved the tip of my shimmering saber through Thongvor's heart. I pushed in deep, pinning him to his precious Mournful Throne.
The silence at the dais was disturbed by a commotion at the bottom of the stairs behind me. A well-dressed man was struggling furiously between Vilkas and another Companion. "Thonar Silver-Blood," I called out to him from my place in front of the throne, "When last we spoke, didn't I ask you to find better uses for your money and power?"
"You upstart shit! What have you done? I'll make sure you never leave my mines again!" The younger Silver-Blood brother yelled at me.
"I asked you Thonar, use your wealth and power for something better and what do I find? Slavery? Supplying the Legion's enemies? These are capital crimes! Even if I wasn't an officer of the Legion I'd move against you. You fucking idiot! At least the Black-Briars have the decency to keep their crimes discrete!" I really didn't hate the man, but I couldn't let him off like I did last time.
"You're the one who chose to meddle in my affairs Ieago! Despite that I chose to compensate you well," Thonar replied.
I shook my head, exasperated. "I can't deny that Thonar, but I can't look the other way twice." I looked to Vilkas, "Bind him. And don't let him out of your sight."
At that moment a rumble of voices issued from the antechamber of the keep. I looked up to see dozens of soldiers in Stormcloak and Markarth colors charge through the shattered doors. I pushed Thonar aside without another thought and ignited Revenant once more. "Companions! Rally and charge!" I bellowed above the noise and used the Thu'um once again, "Fus ro dah!"
The soldiers following the charge were smashed by the resulting wave of flesh, leather, and iron. Still more poured in from the icy storm outside. The Companions met the defenders' counterattack with measured strides and masterful strokes. Vilkas and I were the first to collide with the mass of enemy soldiers. The white of Revenant's blade blurred in the dim light to match the grey of Vilkas' Skyforge claymore in the speed of my attacks. Vilkas fought with a silent, ruthless fury. His sword cut down like a cleaver on his foes, cracking helmets and ripping chainmail. Beside us, the Companions drove the counterattack from the keep.
I checked at the fire-blasted doors. Looking out I saw the rest of the Companions at the guard tower. Aela was safe on her perch above the temple with the other archers. A pile of shattered bodies was heaped at the base of the stairs where Farkas and those under his command threw them back. I took this in with a glance and looked back at the enemy before me. It was a large group standing in a downpour of sleet and freezing rain. Thunder rolled overhead. Bolt after bolt of lightning grounded on the metal spires of the Dwemer city, making the several hundred men and women on the steps cringe. I wondered why they didn't charge. My voice was raw, my muscles ached, and my ears rang from the clash inside.
It dawned on me slowly that those soldiers did not see a scrawny, spent Cyrodiil standing in a shattered fortress. They stood in a torrent of freezing horizontal rain. Their Jarl and commanding officers were dead. Their keep, thought to be the strongest citadel in Skyrim, teemed with their enemy. And they were looking at the man who had brought it all about. A man who wore the scales of a dragon as his battle armor and scowled at them from beneath a low, dark hood. A lone man who wielded an unstoppable silvery blade that hissed when sleet struck it. A man who used a terrible, terrible Voice.
They were terrified of me. As frightened and helpless as I had felt almost two years ago in Cyrodiil when the Thalmor came to exterminate the Knights of the Nine. I stepped out and waved for the Companions to wait behind. They filled the door behind me as I strode to the mass of soldiers. The defenders waivered and pulled back from me. I pulled my hood back. Shields went up. Stances deepened. I switched my blade off.
"Jarl Thongvor is dead!" I cried in a cracking voice, "The commander of the Stormcloak garrison as well! The city is under the government of this Quaestor of the Imperial Legion until Jarl Raerek returns to claim his nephew Igmund's throne! Guards, as a Thane of the Hold I bid you go to your homes! In the coming days I will call on you to return to your duties, to keep the peace and police your city! Stormcloaks, I command you to lay down your arms and open the gates of the city. Then you will submit to the Empire's custody!"
For a minute they stood there staring up at me. I rolled the hilt of my weapon nervously, not knowing what was in their minds. After a long minute, individually and then in groups of twos or threes, men and women in Markarth livery melted away. As if sensing this, rebel swords, hammers, and axes began falling to the ground or were flung into the many swollen streams of the city.
Relief flooded into me as the early spring storm I called began to abate. "In the name of the Emperor, I accept your surrender soldiers of Skyrim. You are prisoners of war, entitled to all lawful protection."