[A/N]: Sliiightly earlier update because I have the Joy of Morning Classes(tm). Additionally, we're over the 500 view mark, woohoo! Thanks, all you wonderful readers, reviewers and lurkers! And now, shenanigans.

CHAPTER SEVEN

~THE FOUR-HUNDRED AND FIFTH STRIKE ~

"Die, you filth!" Lokil screamed – and proceeded to do so when a crossbow bolt blossomed between his eyes.

Solen reached him just as the vampire flopped to the ground, and glanced back in annoyance. "He was mine, Celann!"

"Wrong." Celann strode after him, reloading his crossbow. "You killed plenty back in the upper caverns. That one was mine. For Adavald."

Solen glanced back to the tiered platforms across the chamber, where the body of the slain Vigilant lay, throat fresh-opened in a pool of his own blood. They'd arrived only in time to hear his vampiric captors execute him. "All right," Solen supposed, putting up his blade. "Can't argue with that."

Celann walked up to Lokil and put a second bolt into the vampire's face. "You certainly can't."

With Durak and Rayya having dispatched of the vampire Lokil's other two cronies, and Irileth and the other Dawnguard busy securing the upper Dimhollow caverns against any more vampires and Draugr, they now had the subterranean cavern – and the peculiar dais it contained – to themselves. It was easily the most fascinating and unique thing about the whole crypt. "Strange-looking thing this is, ain't it?" Durak grunted, as the four of them spread out to examine the strange, immaculate circular platform of peaked arches they found themselves standing within. "What d'you reckon this is?"

"It's old stone, isn't it?" said Celann, kicking up dust under his boots as he studied the markings on the floor.

"It's more than that." Solen ran his hands thoughtfully along one of the arches. "This is ancient. Not Nedic, not Nordic. I almost want to say it's some form of elven... you see decorative arches like this all the time around the Summerset Isles."

"Thought you said you came from Hammerfell?" asked Celann.

"He was born in Alinor," Rayya explained. "Left it pretty young with his uncle, but they still made port around the Isles now and then."

"Somehow I doubt the High Elves wandered all this way north to build this under a mountain," Durak growled. "And somehow I really don't think that matters. It contains the vampire artifact. That bloodsucker and his coven wouldn't have bothered with Adavald or killed Tolan if it didn't."

"Stupid man," Rayya muttered, recalling how they'd found Tolan's mangled body within the first chamber of the Crypt, "but at least he died brave. Solen, any thoughts on all of this?"

"Lokil gave me plenty." Solen counted them off on his fingers. "Orthjolf, our wanted murderer, isn't a coven leader and isn't acting alone. He answers to some even more powerful master vampire named Harkon. I think this Harkon is the one orchestrating all these attacks across Skyrim, and Orthjolf and that Vingalmo who got mentioned are his lieutenants of some sort. Lokil thought by finding this artifact he'd elevate himself to the same or higher influence before Celann put a bolt in his face. Clearly that implies this artifact is more than important, it's a game-changer. I guess vampires enjoy their politics as much as the rest of the mortal world."

"That's all well and good, piecing that together from what we overheard before you sneezed," said Rayya, "but I meant this room."

"Oh." Solen rapped his knuckles against one of the many empty braziers that lined the circular dais and resumed his slow lap. "It's clearly some kind of puzzle. First of its kind to me, though. I didn't really go crypt-diving in Auridon. But; if this is an elven ruin, I'll bet my horse there's magic involved in unsealing it."

Durak bounced his crossbow thoughtfully on his thigh. "Vampires use magic, and sounded like they got no further for all the extra time they were here and whatever they dragged out of Adavald."

"You're an elf," said Celann, in a bright moment of revelation. "You said these are elven ruins. You do some magic."

"I said they might be." Solen arched his brow. "And you told me you didn't care who built this because it didn't matter. And are you assuming I can do magic just because I'm an elf?"

"That was Durak, and because you're a High Elf," said Celann, "and you set things on gods-damned fire by yelling at them."

"Shouting," Solen corrected, "and the Thu'um's all I got. I've been to the College of Winterhold, trust me, I'm a stump. You, on the other hand, are a Breton."

"And?"

"You're half-elf. Technically. You make some magic."

"I'm not a mage!"

"See how it sounds?"

"Boys!" said Rayya, exasperated. "How about you make yourselves useful and figure this out?" She stood in the centre of the room beside a short pentagonal pillar about the width of an outstretched hand. "Whoever built this didn't leave this here by accident."

They crowded round it. It was unremarkable aside from the black iron dome affixed in the top. There was a dark cavity within the tooth-like prongs. "So," Celann said, "who wants to volunteer?"

"Volunteer what?" Rayya frowned.

"Pushing it. Putting something in it. I dunno. Maybe something goes in it? Did we miss any old relics?"

"Not that I saw," said Solen, "and I have a knack for finding things to put in slots in crypts."

"He really does," Rayya remarked, "it's quite convenient."

"Convenient, of course," Celann sighed, "gods forbid if we run into any inconveniences –"

Durak's gurgle snapped their heads around. Blood gushed from his throat, ripped open from ear to ear. The Orc's eyes rolled into his head as he collapsed boneless to the floor. His killer, dressed black as a shadow, flicked scarlet drops from the shimmering edge of a silver sword.

"Durak!" Celann bellowed. He jerked up his crossbow and fired. The ambusher pirouetted neatly – the bolt hissed an inch past their cowled head – and two throwing knives were sent hurtling into Celann's padded chest as the attacker finished their turn, cloak aswirl. The Breton staggered, dropping his crossbow.

Solen and Rayya drew their blades and rushed the attacker, only for them to vanish on the spot. "LAAS," Solen barked, and his searching eyes frantically skimmed the room for a life-aura out of place. He wasn't fast enough – the warning hadn't even formed on his tongue before the attacker popped back into view and drew a red smile on Celann's throat.

"Bastard!" Rayya surged forward, but the black-clad rogue skipped backwards, calmly avoiding the twin lashes of her blade. They were smaller than her, small enough to roll under the blades and smash their heels into her hip and knee, buckling her. Their elbow cracked into Rayya's temple as her head came down, and she hit the stone floor hard. She didn't get up.

Solen hardly processed the black-armoured rogue bearing down on him, silvery sword in one hand, dagger in the other, with an entirely silent and ruthless stride. At the last second his wits returned, his body moved faster than his mind, and Eldródr whirled in a deadly sweeping scythe, arresting his attacker's momentum. Yet it hardly daunted them; they slipped into his backswing, and Solen heard the dagger scrape a scar into the metal plate over his kidney. Fast, he thought, be fast, and fell automatically into the sword-dancer's step – drawing circles with his feet, his blade never really still as he kept his fleet opponent in his view.

But that was a hard thing to do when they kept disappearing on the spot. They vanished like smoke around Solen's next lunge, then felt the knife scrape again at his armour, probing for weakness. Enough of this. Solen drew breath for a Shout, and instantly the black rogue rematerialized in front of him. Solen didn't see the green knot of magic clenched tight in their hand until it was launched at him.

Surprise and instinct made Solen put Eldródr up in an attempt to deflect the spell's brunt, when in hindsight he should have used the Thu'um to make himself immune or get out of its way. The instant it touched the blade, a locking sensation raced down his arms and spread swiftly through every fibre in his body. Solen couldn't unclench his hands if his life depended on it, and within two seconds he couldn't move anything; he overbalanced and collapsed to the floor, completely paralyzed. He could breathe a little and move his eyes, but that was all. He couldn't even make a sound.

The surprise attacker appeared in the corner of Solen's view, still on silent feet. Solen felt his helmet tugged off his head. He strained, but his body refused to answer, his Voice frozen in his throat like a choking lump of ice. Solen had never felt so horribly, utterly helpless, and when the attacker leaned over him and brandished the dagger blade between his eyes, Solen realized this was it. He was dead. He was going to be.

But one second after another trickled by. The attacker tilted their head, as if deciding where to begin. Impossible to see who was under the cowl, to even find the eyes of his would-be slayer and glare defiance down. Solen racked his mind with the time left to him, but no memory within or out of Skyrim placed an acrobatic knife-throwing spell-slinging black-leather assailant in his life, or anyone like them. Yet more seconds trickled by, still no mortal agony or crushing blackness, and Solen's dread morphed swiftly to anger. Who was this person taunting him by dangling his life in front of him on a dagger's edge? Who sent them? Thalmor? Snowborn? Some back-alley mobster from Sentinel calling in some forgotten debt? A relation of someone he'd killed, out for vengeance? Why are you waiting? Show your face, dammit! Who are you?!

The blade disappeared, but not into him. The attacker unhurriedly grabbed his head and turned it carefully so it lay on one side. Anger became confusion. What are you doing...? They were backing up a pace. Solen had a good view of their boots. They were nice looking things, he thought idly, looked well-made, right before one of them swung at his face with severe velocity.

The stars came out.

It took Solen quite a while to piece himself back together after he woke up; the first piece being that he was awake and very much not dead; he was lying on his face, which hurt abysmally; his legs were somehow higher than his head; oh, he was lying down a stairwell; wait a moment, what stairwell?

Solen jerked his head up. This had been one flat floor when he'd lost consciousness, yet here he was lying in a crumpled, drooling heap at the bottom of a stair-ringed pit, with the floor cracks aglow in eerie purple light. This was definitely the same arched dais in Dimhollow, wasn't it? Those arches were familiar, so why were the braziers burning, and where had the stairs come from, and that monolith underneath that pentagonal column with the hand stuck in it?

Oh, Solen thought blankly. We've sunk.

He also belatedly realized he could move again. Solen dragged himself upright, clutching his face to make sure it stayed on. His nose was broken and one eye was almost swollen shut. He looked around with the remainder, piecing things together. The circular platform seemed to have sunk eight feet downward, judging by the height the centre column was now. The monolithic sarcophagus was what it had revealed, but whatever treasure lay inside was long gone. Celann lay beside the monolith with empty gaping eyes. His severed right hand was impaled in a gruesome spike that jutted out of the pentagonal column, from between the teeth of that iron dome. Durak was sprawled on the topmost step above, and Rayya was –

"Rayya," Solen moaned, and staggered to his wife's side. He feared the worst, she lay so still, yet when he gently turned her head to his he felt her breath across his cheek. Thank Tu'whacca. He almost sobbed in relief. He patted her cheek gently to rouse her, but she was still adrift somewhere in the constellations, by the cloud persisting in her flickering eyes. The back of her headwrap was bloody where her head had hit the stone.

The rogue. The final piece locked into place with all the force of that boot in his face. Solen gritted his jaw and glared at the monolithic tomb again. Empty. Artifact gone. Stolen under their noses – under his broken, kicked-in, deliberately-not-dead nose. Solen had never been so stung with indignity and rage. Celann and Durak dead, murdered in cowardly combat, Rayya nearly among them, and he should have been lying in a pool of his own blood but – you left me alive on purpose!

That was going to be the thief's biggest mistake of their life.

"Solen!" Irileth's commanding cry rang through the quiet cavern. "Solen, report! What happened here?"

A chorus of feet drummed across the footbridge. She'd brought the rest of the Dawnguard with her. "Irileb," Solen called back, in what was the most piteous yet ridiculous rasp he'd ever heard himself utter. He pulled himself together, as much as one with a stuffed nose could. "Irileb!" he shouted, as she and the other Dawnguard appeared under the arches. "Look abber Rayya. I'm goin' abber dem."

If they hadn't been surrounded by their dead comrades, they probably would've laughed. Except Irileth, who never laughed on principle. "What happened here?!" she snarled.

Solen snatched up his helmet and where Eldródr had fallen. "I'll ebblain later."

"You'll explain now! Solen! Solen!"

Irileth was fast, but Solen was faster. He leapt up the broad tiered steps and faced a second, larger footbridge leading to the yet-unexplored side of the chamber, where it seemed the crypt continued – knowing crypts, leading to a back door. Solen heard Irileth dashing for him and shot himself out of the Dunmer's reach for good measure. "WULD NAH KEST!" The Whirlwind Sprint carried him right across the bridge and almost into the high wall on the far side. Solen slammed on his helmet and took off up the stairs.

Solen heard Irileth shouting still, but put it out of his pounding mind. The thief's trail was plain as day. They'd had to fight their way out of the ruins with the artifact, and clearly they were capable, to have put down gargoyles. Gargoyles. Solen almost stopped and stared, caught off-guard by such unexpected familiarity. He didn't think there were any outside of Hammerfell, although these things were much smaller and stouter than the ancient stone sentinels guarding Anka-Ra ruins. Briefly he wondered which kind had come first.

Into the next chamber. Draugr. All dead. Well, one of them was twitching slightly, but the rest had been hacked into limbless torsos or impaled with ice spikes, melting slowly in the musty air. The rusted gates were opened, the hidden doors unsealed.

Into the next chamber – all right, this one was worthy of the title amphitheatre. Stone steps everywhere, dead Draugr and dismembered skeletons littered all over them. In the centre of the room was an upraised platform, full of empty thrones. Solen ran the length of the room around a step and almost stepped in the ashy puddle of something that might have been a Dragon Priest. As if the artifact and his dignity had not been enough, the thief had robbed him of all the fun at the end of the dungeon crawl –

– and then he heard the oh-so-familiar whispering chant. "Gob bam it," Solen muttered, as he caught sight of the Word Wall in the shadows of the top-right corner. Really, of course there was a Word Wall here, where wasn't a Word Wall when Draugr crypts were involved?

Well, it was on the way out, and he wasn't about to leave ancient wisdom behind to moulder for his non-existent successor. Solen sprang up the steps, nearly knocked his teeth out when he misjudged the height of the last ledge, picked himself up and staggered against the Word Wall's scintillating blue rune. Normally he did these things with a little more anticipation and ceremony, but today he slammed his palm into the luminescent stone and unceremoniously quaffed the power into his soul like mead at a drinking contest.

Gaan. The Word didn't so much Shout within him as warble. Solen had no idea what it meant, but since he almost fainted on the spot, he supposed it had something to do with draining energy. Learning a Word's meaning usually meant feeling some clue to its effect, which meditation or a helpful Dragon translator revealed. Good, splendid. Solen peeled himself away. On with the chase. He'd meditate on it later.

Into the next chamber – no, not a chamber. Corridor. Stairs and gates. All of them open. They led uphill and into a snow-blown tunnel. Outside.

Straight into a blizzard, or snowfall that seemed intent on turning into one. Solen was almost swept off his feet. He caught himself on the rime-slick cave mouth and stepped out into the snow. He didn't recognize this part of the world – had the Crypt run straight through and popped him out the other side? Snowy pines dotted the slopes; stubborn, frosty bushes clung around the roots. There was no chance of seeing the horizon in the worsening weather, with night falling fast on the mountain – Solen couldn't tell if they'd been in the Crypt for half a day or a day and a half. For all he knew they could've been, depending how long he'd been kicked out of action. Long enough for any tracks the thief might've left in the snow to be swept out of –

No. Not quite – in the last of the light he saw a string of footprints outlined in the snow, being filled in fast, wending their way down the pine-wooded slopes. There's still a chance. Solen threw his head back. "LOK BAH KOOR!"

The winds died and the snowfall stopped – or at least these things should have happened, if Solen could pronounce the second Word of the Shout properly as Lok Vah Koor. "Bah," he growled, pinching his nose, "Bah!" He only aggravated his injury further. "Bam thing," Solen growled, and Shouted again. "LOK BAH KOOR!"

He thought the wind died for a moment. Maybe that was wishful thinking. Solen's fury returned full-force. "When I finb you," he vowed in tones of dire vengeance, "I'm b'eaking your nobe firb. Then I'm S'oubing you ob a clib." Thus, in the failing daylight, in unfamiliar terrain, unable to subdue the weather, and on his own, Solen charged off in pursuit.

Ten minutes later he decided that was the poorest decision he'd made in his life. With one eye almost completely out of commission and not a torch to his name, he kept losing the tracks, and the snow only kept falling. Ten minutes after that, he lost them for good. No amount of pacing, retracing or cursing revealed them again. Three repetitions of the Aura Whisper Shout (with the most strangled annunciation of Laas in the history of the Voice) revealed a mountainside barren of any life force but his own. To top it all off, the snowfall was thickening, and he still couldn't pronounce that stupid Word.

Solen had to admit defeat. It was something he hadn't had to do often or in a long time. He hated doing so. He was the Dragonborn, wasn't he? He was the one who defeated, not got defeated. That was how having an obscenely powerful Thu'um worked. Not that it'd done him much good against that wretched black-clad rogue with the paralyzing touch. One spell had left him on the ground like a severed marionette...

"Bam it," Solen muttered again, and plonked himself petulantly into the snow. His face still throbbed, especially his nose, all of it somehow hurting worse in the cold. He mulched some clean snow in his hand and pressed it against his nose and swollen eye. The blistering cold shocked some common sense back into him and brought him out of stinging anger into frigid reality – he was exposed on a mountainside in the Pale, at night, alone, well on course to freezing to death before the sun rose. And that was nothing compared to what Rayya was going to do to him when she heard about this reckless escapade.

"Okay," Solen said aloud. "I'm goin' back." He scraped the snow off his face, got up, and then realized in his mad haste to follow the fading tracks of his tormentor, he'd completely neglected his pathfinding habits. He'd left no marks on the tree trunks, taken no note of visual landmarks. In short: he was exposed, alone at night, on course to freezing to death, and lost.

"Brillianb," Solen muttered, around chattering teeth. "Jus' brillianb, Solen. Seben years of Skyrim trabel really showin'. Fan-blooby-tastib."

Well, heading uphill was probably as sensible a place to start as any. He'd run downhill most of the way. Solen set off at a waddling trudge, sinking up to his knees with every step. He resigned himself to a long nocturnal march calling for help. He wrapped his cloak tightly around his shoulders and looked up to attempt the Clear Skies Shout again.

Which was how he saw the pair of giant descending talons half a second before he was hoisted into the sky.