When Lydia woke in the morning, it was to discover that she had draped herself across her thane during the night; her head rested against his shoulder. The man in question was already awake, if he had ever slept, but he seemed in no hurry to escape the situation. She gave him a sleepy smile.
"By Ysmir, that was a good night," she mumbled, yawning.
He groaned.
"You're having too much fun with that one… but it really was, wasn't it?"
"It was. And I'm the only one who knows there's a new Ysmir walking around… I've got to make up for all the others who don't have the chance to worship you – or mock you."
"Of course, of course," he nodded, in false seriousness. "But if you abuse your knowledge too much, I might have to take advantage of a little secret I know about you… Lover."
She smacked his chest, fairly hard, but her face had a smile on it.
"Somehow I wouldn't mind that as much anymore, I think," she whispered.
"Well, you certainly earned your sign last night," he said. She smacked him again.
"Well, my thane, what's your birthsign, then?"
"The Lord," he said.
She groaned. "I knew it. I knew you were going to be a Lord. The guards had a dirty limerick they used to chant at me that involved a Lord and a Lover."
Volund snorted. "Well I didn't hear any complaints about the benefits of my sign last night," he said.
She pretended to consider very seriously. "Hm… what are the traits of a Lord, again? 'Stronger and healthier than most?' I'm not sure I noticed anything like that last night. Maybe you should try again…"
He growled playfully and rolled over.
XxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxX
It was noon before the pair emerged from Breezehome, dressed again in plain clothing. Their cooking supplies had been delivered the night before, but neither of them had thought to buy food, so they headed once more for the Bannered Mare.
Inside, they found Legate Rikke and a few other ranking Legionnaires eating a hasty meal. Volund and Lydia chatted a bit with the Legate. She and her men were, as it turned out, about to leave the city for their next campaign against the Stormcloaks.
"The Legion needs you, Dragonborn," Rikke said before she left. "Come to Solitude; sign up. Help us win this war." She clapped him on the shoulder and followed her men out the door.
"Tullius is a smart man," said a voice from behind Volund. He jerked slightly in surprise, and Lydia tensed to jump out of her seat if necessary. The voice went on undisturbed.
"He'll get this war sorted out with or without your help. There's another matter that needs your expertise – if you're really Dragonborn."
The speaker was a small woman with an intelligent gleam in her eye. Her face looked forty or fifty years old, but she wore full armor and carried herself like a woman in her prime. A Breton, Volund decided. She was blonde and thin, with a sword at her hip of unfamiliar make.
"Who wants to know?" Volund finally asked.
She shook her head. "It doesn't work like that. I know everything there is to know about you, at least as far as this city is concerned. You're the new thane, who helped kill a dragon and who helped win a battle, and who can shout. Problem is, anyone can learn to shout. I need more proof than that. If it turns out you really are Dragonborn, I'm on your side, one hundred percent."
Everything about her said she was keeping secrets, but Volund played along. "Ok, say I cared what you think of me. What kind of proof are you asking for?"
"I need to see you absorb a dragon's soul."
"Look, lady," he laughed. "I've seen exactly two dragons in my life. One's already dead, and the other's been gone for over a week. Where am I supposed to get another one to kill?"
"I know where."
XxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx
It was snowing in Kynesgrove when they arrived the next day. The woman from the Bannered Mare, who still wouldn't tell them her name, walked ahead of them, moving quickly for someone with such short legs. Volund followed behind her, and Lydia walked beside and slightly behind him.
He glanced over at her for perhaps the thousandth time this trip and grinned; she rolled her eyes at him but returned the smile. Adrianne had done an excellent job in the craftsmanship of their new armor, but she had made Lydia's much more… form fitting than her old armor had been. Lydia had almost rejected it when she saw it, but Volund's expression made her laugh, and she tried it on. She had moved around in it for a bit, and then finally accepted it, to Volund's surprise; she claimed it was much more comfortable than her old armor had been. Their mysterious contact likely would not have waited for it to be changed, anyway.
The new armor, coupled with the new developments in their relationship, made it hard for Volund to focus on anything but Lydia. She didn't seem to mind at all. In fact, she often found ways to subtly egg him on whenever no one was watching. By necessity, the pair was getting quite good at going from shameless flirting to a professional, no-nonsense façade at a moment's notice – which they did again as the woman in front of them stopped and turned around suddenly.
"Ok, the burial mound is just on top of that hill. We should be able…"
A thunderous roar shook the sky, and villagers began to stream down the path from the village. The three travelers ran up the path, instead, only to find a huge black dragon flying above the burial mound.
"That's the dragon from Helgen," Volund whispered.
"Are you sure?" the Breton hissed.
"It's not something I'm likely to forget!" he returned.
"Sahloknir, ziil gro dovah ulse!" The black dragon spoke.
"Why is he just hovering…" the Breton began.
"Sshh! Let me hear!" Volund interjected. The stranger and Lydia both looked at him in confusion.
"Slen tiid vo!" the dragon Shouted.
"Slen tiid vo," Volund repeated. "'Let your flesh defy time…' That's what's bringing them back to life! Wherever that dragon came from, he's clearly bringing his friends back to…"
The ground shook, and a massive skeleton clawed its way out of the earth, glowing flesh beginning to appear on and around the bones.
"Alduin, thuri. Boann tiid…"
"FUS RO DAH!"
Volund's shout hit the black dragon, but did not seem to disturb it greatly. It turned to face him. To Lydia and the other woman, what it said was incomprehensible, but to Volund, the words held meaning.
"Ah, the mortal pretender. Your soul is weak, and your Voice weaker still. You are not of dragon-kind."
Words in the dragon language sprang to his mind, and Volund answered in kind.
"Nevertheless, you seem to have heard of me. I can't say the same of you." Lydia and the stranger stared at him, eyes wide, as he spoke like a dragon, his voice booming.
"Mortal fool! I am Alduin, lord of dragons, ruler of this world, returned at last to resume my rightful place. All will serve me, or sate my hunger, at my pleasure. Bow before me and I may keep you, for a time, as an amusing pet."
"This is bad," Volund whispered in the common tongue. "This is very bad."
"I have no time for your indecision. Sahloknir, kill the mortals."
"Yes, my lord," the other dragon replied.
"Time to fight!" Volund said. He breathed a sigh of relief as Alduin began to fly away, but quickly realized they were far from safe. Sahloknir, his flesh fully reformed, breathed a jet of flame at the humans without even bothering to take to the skies. His target dove for cover behind a large rock outcropping. As the fire blast continued, the Breton simply seemed impatient.
"What is going on?" she yelled.
"Ok, well, I have good news and I have bad news," Volund said. "The good news is that we know how dragons are reappearing now! Oh, and also, I can speak their language for some reason. Bad news… that big black dragon we just saw? That's Alduin. He's going to eat the world, I think." The fire blast abated, and Volund vaulted over the steaming rock and charged at the dragon.
Lydia followed an instant later, her sense of duty overriding her conscious thought processes about the end of the world. The Breton crouched against the rock for a moment longer, lost in overwhelmed thought.
"Well, damn," she finally said. She stood up to join the fight.
Three giant claw marks already scored the brand new shield that Volund held. A deep gash in the left wing of the dragon seemed to be what he had given in return. Lydia, meanwhile, had somehow managed to climb on top of its neck. Her sword hacked at the scales on its head.
Sahloknir, enraged, tried to shake the woman off of him, but this distracted him from his other assailants. While Lydia dropped her sword and hung on for dear life, Volund dove underneath the dragon and began to stab upward at its stomach. It screeched unnaturally.
"Motmahus mal lir! Dir pogaan dinok!"
It attempted to crush him under its foot, but the Breton had finally joined the fight, slicing into the membrane of the dragon's unhurt wing. It shrieked again, and threw her back with the bleeding appendage, now useless for flight. Lydia dropped off of its neck and rolled across the ground toward her discarded sword. Volund, finding the scales too hard to do real damage to even on the beast's stomach, had emerged from beneath it and now approached its head with his shield raised, hoping to somehow repeat his tactics with the first dragon.
Instead of lunging, Sahloknir took in a deep breath and Shouted.
"Yol Toor Shul!" Flames began to spill from its mouth and race toward the Dragonborn. With only a split second of life before him, Volund reacted without thought.
"FUS RO DAH!"
The force of his shout tore through the fire blast like a whirlwind, gathering it and dragging it along as it impacted the dragon's open mouth. The intertwined shouts seemed to blow into the dragon, disappearing down its throat. It shrieked in pain for a third time, flailing helplessly about and beating the ground with its feet and wings. Eventually, it stilled, its eyes glassy. Volund sprinted to it and swiftly stabbed down through its eye to be safe, but it did not react. A moment later, its flesh, so newly regrown, boiled and erupted again.
Volund inhaled the power of a second dragon. As the energy danced around him, Lydia once again saw a spectral crown of the same substance appear on his head. The Breton looked on, jaw wide. Soon enough, the soul and the crown both faded and drew back inside of Volund, and a hush fell over the area.
"Well, I guess I owe you an explanation," the Breton said. "My name is Delphine, and I'll tell you everything I know. I'm not sure it's enough to stop the end of the world, though."
The Dragonborn remained silent; it was Lydia who finally spoke, her eyes glued to Volund's worried face.
"We'll find a way."
Author's note: Alduin's first line – "Sahloknir, your dragon soul is bound to me forever." Volund translates "Slen tiid vo" correctly – "let your flesh defy time." Sahloknir's first (interrupted) line is "Alduin, my lord. An age of time…" (in the game, he goes on to say "An age of time has passed since you broke the power of the ancient kings." The rest of that conversation wasn't really important to the story). His line during the battle is "Slippery little worm! Die many deaths!"
Other author's note: So, the Greybeards say that when you absorb a dragon's soul, you "can absorb a slain dragon's knowledge and life-force directly." While I'm not going to try to stretch this to mean that a dragon's soul will grant all the shouts that dragon knew, or any of the dragon's specific memories or anything, I AM going to assume that any given dragon would have a fairly fluent grasp of their own language, and that this is the type of "knowledge" the Dragonborn can harvest. Once Volund absorbed his first dragon soul, he began to be able to comprehend the dragon language on a conversational level, though he still can't use the words as shouts without a) finding out, somehow, which words are combined in which order to make a given shout, and b) absorbing enough souls to power the shouts. That said, in my story, a single dragon soul will unlock all 3 words of a given shout, or as many of the words as Volund knows at the time. A really powerful dragon's soul might even unlock more than one whole shout. This is for two reasons. I think it makes sense, given that a shout is a single unified phrase. Also, I don't want to write (and you don't want to read) the 60+ dragon fights necessary to power all the shouts otherwise. Practically speaking, this all means that Volund will now know the full fire breath shout. He knows the three words and the order they are said because he just heard Sahloknir shout it at him; he knows what the words mean; Sahloknir's soul will unlock the full shout for him.
I feel that there's likely even more complexity to the process of absorbing dragon souls, but that can wait till later in the story.