Middas, 8th of Sun's Dawn, 4E203

Deep down where it was dark and cold and still, a mountain of earth pressed upon Deirdre. Ten thousand tons of it, it seemed. She was trapped in an impenetrable tomb; embedded, with earth in the cavity of her chest and the sockets of her eyes and cemented around every bone, all the way to the tip of her long tail. She had no skin to warm her nor any fire in her chest, in that suffocating place without air or light.

But she heard a voice. His voice, great and terrible, and her flesh began to knit itself into being as she clawed her way up through the earth. She crashed through the ceiling of her tomb into the fresh air, and sucked a gust of breath into her lungs as into a smith's bellows, stoking her inner fire.

There he was above her, huge wings flapping, scales black as pitch and eyes as brilliant a crimson as their father's.

Father's? she suddenly thought.

This was not right.

She kept moving, thrusting out her wings to shake the earth from them, scattering dirt into the air. But this wasn't right; they weren't really her wings. This felt like her body, but it also didn't. Her body was—

Was she supposed to be bigger than this, or smaller? And why did trying to remember fill her with panic? Was this body overwhelmingly stronger than hers—or disgustingly weaker? Powerful, or pathetic? Why couldn't she remember? Why did this feel so utterly wrong?

The sensation of her chest burning snapped Deirdre awake. She wasn't breathing.

Gasping, rolling from her back to her side, she forced her lungs into their regular motions. They seemed to have forgotten how to function without her conscious effort.

Even after the awful strain had eased from her chest, Deirdre did not feel right. She did not feel that she belonged inside herself; she was twisted and unnatural and unable to escape the wrongness of her own skeleton.

Anxiety squirmed through her as she wrapped a blanket around herself and left her room. She walked toward the main hall, but stopped before her bare toes could cross the stark line of light spilling into the hallway. Somewhere beyond that line, genial voices conversed.

A hot surge of liquid filled Deirdre's eyes. She sat with her back to the wall and hugged her knees. Trying to cry silently, she prayed she could simply absorb the feeling of belonging from the Companions in the sitting area.

Several seconds passed without Deirdre feeling any better, and then a silhouette appeared on the lighted section of the floor.

"I thought you went to bed," said Aela.

Deirdre turned her face in the other direction, but a sniffle gave her away.

Heavy footsteps tromped across the floor, and Farkas's hulking shape plopped down in the shadows beside her. For a moment no one said anything. Aela sat on the floor in front of Deirdre and sighed.

"What's wrong, Dee?"

Deirdre dropped her face into her knees. How to explain? Could she? Did she even want to?

"I wish I could just stop dreaming," she finally croaked. "Like you."

The pause that followed was too long, until Aela asked in a strange tone, "Like me, specifically?"

"Like the Circle, how none of you dream."

"Who told you we don't dream?"

Only then did it occur to Deirdre that Vilkas might have revealed too much about the Circle. Come to think of it, he'd been feverish when he'd claimed they didn't dream. Maybe he wasn't supposed to have mentioned it, and maybe she wasn't supposed to talk about it.

"It was Vilkas," Farkas answered for her. "Right?"

Deirdre's eyes filled anew with tears. She swiped at the ones that spilled over. "Yes. He—used to talk to me about my dragon dreams sometimes. But he doesn't anymore b—because—" She paused to take a hitching breath. "I'm an—nnoying."

Farkas's arm came around her. "Did he say that?"

Deirdre nodded, wiping her face with her blanket.

"What a dick," Aela declared.

Farkas said, "You're not annoying. He didn't mean it."

Deirdre shook her head. Vilkas had definitely meant it. Sentimentality made him uncomfortable, and she'd been sentimental. He didn't like people feeling sorry for him, and she'd felt sorry for him. And she suspected that she was particularly annoying precisely because of who she was—a weak girl frequently in need of his help. Someone like Vilkas didn't need help from someone like her.

But, even so …

"He's not nice to me anymore," she quavered.

"Was he ever?" Aela asked, as Farkas's arm gave Deirdre a gentle squeeze.

"I thought so. But now I—I don't know, I just annoyed him too much. And I keep hav—having these dreams. I keep—I'm so tired of them. I'm so tired."

Aela made a sympathetic noise. "Well, that's sort of how Vilkas is. Don't take it personally."

Deirdre had not raised her head once during this exchange, and she ducked it down even further against her knees, curling up even smaller, feeling stupid and scared and exhausted. Uncaring about how childish it was, she admitted, "I miss Gerdur."

After a beat, Aela quietly said, "Yeah."

Farkas lightly jostled Deirdre. "We don't need Vilkas though, right? What happened in your dragon dream?"

Deirdre pictured the black dragon in the air above her, and how his voice had made her flesh spawn into existence. For someone who called himself "the end," he was oddly keen to pass out the gift of resurrection.

"If … I ask you something," Deirdre began, "can you answer without—telling me it's strange?"

"We're used to strange," Aela said. "You're not going to shock us."

Deirdre bit the inside of her bottom lip. She didn't think she would shock them. But she was almost sure she was about to ask something that revealed a disturbing amount of ignorance.

"Your ignorance continues to astound," Alduin had said. "Has knowledge of me crumbled so much?"

Steeling herself, Deirdre tentatively asked, "Have you heard of Alduin?"

Silence answered her. Deirdre refused to lift her head and see how the dim light illuminated their expressions. She was too afraid they would be looking at her like she was a stranger.

Aela said, "Are you sure you—You said you grew up in Helgen. In Skyrim."

Deirdre tensed. She said nothing.

"Alduin," Farkas began slowly, "comes from old Nord legends. He's a dragon. The firstborn son of Akatosh, so, very powerful, but … evil."

A chill ran up Deirdre's spine. Alduin had claimed to be the first-born of something called "Bormahu." Was that another name for Akatosh? It must have been.

Then in my dream, when I thought his eyes looked like Father's—

"What else?" she almost whispered. "About Alduin?"

"Well, it depends on the legend," Farkas said. "One story says he conquered the world with his dragon army, and enslaved all the mortals, and was king of everything. Until the goddess Kyne—or Kynareth, the Imperials call her—took pity on man, and taught some Nords how to Shout like the dragons, and they used the power to slay him and all the other dragons. And that's the reason we don't have dragons anymore. Except I guess they're back now, so …"

Aela added, "He's a monster to frighten children with. 'Be good, or Alduin will jump out of your nightmares and gobble you up as you sleep.' That kind of thing. Did you really never hear stories about him?"

Deirdre's heart was thumping too loudly. She ignored Aela's question; she couldn't answer it. She thought of what Alduin had said: "I am the rightful Lord of this world until I see fit to consume it utterly, as is my birthright and my duty. I am the end."

"The World-Eater," she said, the syllables thick in her throat.

"Yes, that's what we call him. Some legends say when the time comes for the world to end, he'll eat all of Mundus."

Deirdre curled her hands to her heart and felt it beating through her chest. She could not allay the dread pressing in around her. They spoke about Alduin so casually, as if they really thought he was nothing more than a story. But he was real. He was real, and no one but her seemed to know.

"He's the one in my dreams. Sometimes he talks to me. The dragon from Helgen—it's Alduin. It's him."

"Excuse me?"

"It's Alduin," Deirdre rushed. "The World-Eater. He told me that's who he was. He told me he's the end. He told me—"

"Wait, wait," Farkas said, his arm tighter around her. "You think your dreams are real, right? You think Alduin is really—talking to you? The God of Destruction?"

"Yes. He's raising the other dragons from the dead, and he says he's Lord of the world. He's going—I know, he's going to enslave or kill or—or something—"

"Stop," Aela interrupted, placing both hands on Deirdre's blanket-covered feet. "Breathe. Just—You don't know for sure that it's real. What if it's just a recurring nightmare?"

"I don't want to dream about him anymore," Deirdre said, voice breaking. "Why me? Why does he want to kill me? Why do I—I'm—"

Choking up, Deirdre stuttered into weeping. Farkas patted her head with the hand not around her, a little too rapidly to be truly soothing.

"Listen, it's fine. If—if it's really Alduin, then there's bound to be a Dragonborn showing up. Right? That's the other Nord legend, that a Dragonborn would rise up to face him if he ever returned. If there's one there's the other, and he'll slay Alduin, just like the old heroes did. Or it's not Alduin, and it's just a dragon. And people are learning how to kill them anyway."

Deirdre swallowed, and hiccuped. "A Dragonborn? Like M—Martin Septim?"

"Sort of. It's a person who can slay dragons and steal their power. The Dragonborn can Shout like a dragon, even better than someone like Ulfric Stormcloak."

Ulfric. Deirdre's thoughts spun, the Jarl of Windhelm's face swimming up through the whirlwind. A hero, who could Shout? Slay Alduin? She'd seen what Ulfric could do to a Frostbite spider with a single syllable. Maybe—

"Maybe i-it is Ulfric," she thought aloud, and the second she did so, the idea lit up inside her like a beacon. She inhaled, and held the breath, and let it shudder out of her. "What if it's Ulfric?"

The Companions were both quiet, Farkas pausing his head-pats, then resuming at a slower pace.

Aela moved her hand from Deirdre's foot to her arm. "Listen, you're tired. You need sleep. Tilma's still doing some mending—Would it help if I stayed with you?"

Deirdre's whirlwind thoughts veered to a foggy, warm place, with a solid heartbeat in her ear and strong arms around her, and a feeling of safety. A place she couldn't go to now, which was more questionably real than any of her dragon dreams.

Wordlessly, she took Aela's hand and nodded.

Turdas, 9th of Sun's Dawn, 4E203

Deirdre woke the next morning to the sound of Aela snoring in her ear. She extricated herself from her blankets (not an easy task, with Aela halfway tangled in them), and crawled over her out of bed. Tilma was stirring in the next bed, and Deirdre murmured a greeting and bid her to sleep a little longer if she needed.

The quiet in the mead hall was strange that morning. Pensive. Or maybe that was Deirdre projecting.

As she went through her morning routine, she pondered what Farkas had said about Alduin, and about the hero he said could defeat him. The Dragonborn.

He'd said the Dragonborn was a legend like Alduin. And since Alduin was clearly real, the Dragonborn should have been too. And he could slay Alduin. And if Alduin was really planning to eat the world, to end it, and the Dragonborn stopped him, the Dragonborn wouldn't just be a dragonslayer. He'd be the savior of the world.

But I thought "Dragonborn" just meant being "born" with the dragon blood. I thought it was some sort of magical blessing from Akatosh to the Septims, since they were emperors. Isn't that why Martin Septim could turn into a dragon and fight the Daedra? But then, the Dragonborn would have to be a descendant of the Septims, and they're all dead. And it couldn't be Ulfric. But then—

Her head was all ajumble. She needed to ask Farkas or Aela more about the Nord version of a Dragonborn, because it was clearly not quite the same concept from her book about Martin Septim. She wished she'd thought to talk to Gerdur about it back when she'd first read the book. Gerdur would have been able to explain without faulting her for not knowing something so apparently basic.

But the two people Deirdre wanted to question had to leave shortly after breakfast for a contract, and she couldn't bring herself to delay them just to satisfy her curiosity. Apparently aware of Deirdre's thoughts, Aela approached her before departing, and lowered her voice so only the two of them would hear.

"About last night? Let's talk more when we get home."

Deirdre nodded and pasted on a grateful smile. As Aela hesitated, Farkas, blessed with the same awareness, came up beside Deirdre and hugged her to his side.

"Everything's really gonna be fine," he promised.

Unconvinced, Deirdre patted his breastplate. "You should get going. Be safe."

He released her, exchanging a look with Aela as she beckoned him toward the door. The pair gave her a simultaneous final glance before they walked out.

"When are we leaving, Vilkas?" Ria asked, stretching her arms beside the fire pit.

Vilkas was rifling through his contracts notebook in the sitting area. "I'm thinking about noon. We don't have far to go."

Deirdre glanced at him. If he hadn't spent the last several weeks either completely ignoring her or speaking to her in clipped, impatient tones, she would have simply asked him about this Dragonborn thing. But as it was, when he happened to sit up and meet her eyes, she pressed her lips together and headed toward the kitchen.

She was understandably surprised to hear footsteps enter the hallway behind her.

"Deirdre," Vilkas called.

She stopped and looked over her shoulder. Why was he wearing such a disgruntled look on his face? How could she have possibly annoyed him this time? She hadn't even said anything.

"Yes?" she asked, copying his tone.

He paused as if debating his response, then blurted, "It's not Ulfric."

She waited for an explanation, but none came. She said, "Excuse me?"

"The Dragonborn. It's not Ulfric."

Deirdre froze. Like a slap, the thought hit her that he'd somehow overheard what she'd said to Aela and Farkas. Had he heard the parts about him? How? They'd practically been whispering; even if he'd been in the sitting area with the rest of the Companions, nobody's hearing was that good.

Or Farkas just told him about it, she realized. Of course. Right. He couldn't possibly have heard. Farkas must have told him about her Ulfric theory. She wished he hadn't; she'd thought it was implicitly understood that it was a private topic.

"Who—Who asked you?" she defended clumsily.

Vilkas had the nerve to look even more disgruntled. "No one."

Irritation flitted through her. He finally deigned to have a conversation with her after his perpetual bad mood, and it was just to correct her? Just to tell her she was wrong and make her feel stupid?

She only just managed to hold her tongue in check, schooling her voice to sound unaffected. "Well, fine. If you're so knowledgeable, how do you know it's not Ulfric? Because he's not a descendant of the Septims?"

"No."

Deirdre could not for the life of her interpret his expression. Sort of frustrated and reluctant, like he was talking to her against his will. But he had initiated the conversation!

Who's the annoying one here? she thought, and snapped, "Why not?"

Vilkas exhaled harshly. "The Septims were all Dragonborn because of their covenant with Akatosh. But outside the Septims, being Dragonborn just means you were born with the soul of a dragon, and the blood of a dragon, in a human body. It isn't always hereditary; sometimes it's completely random. It could be anyone."

Deirdre found herself turning fully toward him, annoyance subsiding a bit. "You mean … anyone anyone?"

"Pretty much."

"Then—it could be Ulfric."

Vilkas crossed his arms. "No, it couldn't. Because he had to train with the Greybeards to learn how to Shout. The Dragonborn can Shout without training, just like a Dragon. And, the Dragonborn is supposed to be a selfless hero. Not a power-hungry revolutionary.

Just like that, Deirdre was annoyed again. "Ulfric isn't power-hungry!"

"Of course he is. People who aren't power-hungry don't try to take over a country."

"He's doing what he thinks is best for Skyrim!"

"And himself."

"Argh!"

Deirdre whirled away, took two furious steps closer to the kitchen, halted, and spun toward him. "Why are you being like this? You used to be—Why are you being so mean to me?"

A curious thing happened to Vilkas's expression: it went completely blank. As he spoke, the words were unnaturally emotionless. "Deirdre, I treat you the same way I treat everyone. It's not my fault if you're overly sensitive."

Deirdre felt a blow to her chest—a stinging stab that diffused through her abdomen. And she was confused. He was lying; he was not treating her the same way he treated everyone. Why had he come into this hallway? Why had he pursued this argument? Why did he make it an argument? And why was he lying to her face about it?

"Aela was right," she bit out, pointing at him. "You're a dick!"

Vilkas just stood there, tall and blank and infuriating, not even giving her the satisfaction of arguing so she could yell at him some more. She was debating whether to yell anyway to provoke him, when the sound of knocking came from the main hall. Deirdre stared at Vilkas until the knock came again. Someone was at the front doors.

Deirdre huffed. She strode past Vilkas, who didn't move aside to make room for her. Ria was still standing by the fire pit; she gave Deirdre a mildly concerned tilt of the head as she walked by. Deirdre just shook her head and took a calming breath before opening the door, expecting to see a courier.

Instead she found her face at chest-height to a lean male figure—someone startlingly tall, towering as high as Farkas, but lacking his bulk. The figure was clad head to toe in black: a long black tunic with gold trim, polished, knee-high black boots, and an expertly-fitted black leather coat with unique straps across the chest and gleaming gold clasps. As Deirdre's eyes ran from bottom to top of this figure, she came to the face under the black hood. Golden-skinned. Angular. Eyes narrow and dramatic, with irises a molten, magical yellow.

Her world stopped. She was sucked into the eyes—those of an elf.

A High Elf.

There was a High Elf in a black uniform on her doorstep.

There was a Thalmor agent on her doorstep.

"Good morning," the elf said, in a deceptively smooth, refined accent, as he peered into her eyes and smiled. "I take it this is the mead hall Jorrvaskr?"

Deirdre's breath stopped. Without a second's thought, she slammed the door shut. She stumbled back, head starting to swim. Strong hands grabbed her shoulders from behind.

"Holy shit," Vilkas swore. "That was one of the Thalmor."

Deirdre's breath came back, but too fast. What was a Thalmor agent doing at Jorrvaskr? They had to be there to arrest someone. But how? Who? Why? Why again?

"Vilkas," she breathed.

He gripped her shoulders tighter, then spun her to face him.

"Vilkas," she said again, her eyes stinging.

"Calm down," he ordered.

Another series of knocks echoed through the main hall, making her start.

"He's going to arrest someone," she panicked.

"No he's not." Vilkas took Deirdre's face between his hands and made sure she was meeting his gaze. "Breathe. Think. Provoking the Companions would be a disastrously stupid move. The Jarl wouldn't be able to let it slide, and it would set off a political shitstorm. He's not arresting anyone. Not today. All right?"

Deirdre latched onto his logic. He was probably right; the Companions were too revered for the Thalmor to dare harm them outright. Jarl Balgruuf would be forced to respond and Nords across the country would be up in arms, probably flying to the Stormcloak banner in retaliation. The Thalmor wouldn't tip the scales of the war like that. Would they?

The next round of knocks was insistent. Deirdre's breath hitched, and Vilkas drew her abruptly to him, ducking her forehead against his chest.

"Breathe," he repeated. "Right now. Take a deep breath."

Deirdre clasped the front of his shirt and forced herself to obey. She drew in a deep breath twice more, focusing on the reassuring clasp of Vilkas's hand on the back of her head. When the next rapid knocks sounded, she did not react.

Vilkas's chest moved with a breath of his own. "All right. I'm going to answer the door."

He released the back of her head, thumb moving to her cheek. Deirdre looked up at his face.

Nine Divines, she thought. I was mad at him two seconds ago.

Vilkas frowned. The look appeared, to Deirdre, to be one of guilt. Maybe he also regretted picking a fight?

He swept his thumb over her cheekbone before sighing through his nose, shaking his head, and moving past her to the door. Before he opened it, Deirdre noticed that Ria had come closer, and was staring at her. She didn't have time to make sense of Ria's bewildered expression before the door opened, accompanied by a cold breeze.

Deirdre tensed, eyes darting to the elf. He was still there, and his smile had vanished.

"Pardon me," he said in a hard voice.

"You're pardoned," Vilkas retorted. "What business do you have here?"

"If you would be so kind as to not shut the door in my face, I will tell you."

"Door's open. Speak."

The elf clicked his tongue. His vivid yellow eyes slid past Vilkas and found Deirdre again.

"I must discuss a matter of grave importance with a young woman who is reported to be living here," he said, while maintaining eye contact.

Deirdre stiffened.

"And why would that young woman want to discuss anything with you?" Vilkas asked.

The elf's eyes did not deviate from Deirdre's. "I am certain she will want to discuss this with me," he said evenly, "because it is in regard to two individuals currently in Thalmor custody, with whom she has close ties—Hod and Gerdur, of Riverwood."