Dardeh stood over the body of a man he’d had to kill in order to survive, wishing he hadn’t needed to do it, shaking his head. It had been bad enough needing to put down five people before this one: three outside and two in the large entry room.
He had been quietly watching the fellow approach a lever before a gated archway when the man, inexplicably, had turned around and roared toward him like a cave bear protecting its cubs. He’d had no chance to do a thing aside from draw his swords.
The barrow had been so long abandoned that dust flew with every step. The air carried the faint smell of death, but death long past; mostly it smelled stale and dusty. Huge roots had worked their way inside, covering the ceiling and floor, breaking down what might have once been beautiful stonework into crumbling debris. After taking down the two bandits in the entry, Dardeh had worked his way through a series of S-turns and ended up here, staring at the lowered gate.
There was an interesting thing before him, a line of three movable pillars with animal symbols on them and triangular notches at the front of their bases. Three animals: a bird, a snake, and a whale. Set into the wall high above the gate were two plaques of the same size and shape as the pillars; a third had fallen from the center point of the wall to the floor below. Snake, snake, whale.
I’ve heard of these things, Dardeh thought. Rotate the pillars so that they match the insets. Because if I don’t, that lever is going to spring some kind of trap when I pull it and I will wish I hadn’t. He’d never actually seen one of these barrows before; the ruins near Markarth were primarily much older Dwemer places that looked much different than the old Nordic burial mounds, both outside and in. But he’d talked to plenty of people who had rummaged around in these Nordic ruins, trying to find valuables to sell on the black market. There was a wide variety of men who ended up working in a mine, after all.
He twirled the pillars, wondering yet again why he had agreed to come rooting around in this massive old place just to find an ornament for Lucan Valerius, owner of the Riverwood Trader. He was supposed to be running up the road to Whiterun. The poor man had been so distressed, though, concerned that his sister was going to take off after the thieves herself, and the sister was clearly no fighter. And there he was, freshly armored, with new hilts on his swords, ready to go, and he must have looked like just the guy for the job.
Sometimes he wondered whether it was easier for the guys who just didn’t care. But he did, and that’s all there was to it.
The lever lifted the gate and Dardeh moved forward into the massive barrow. There was a chest, just in front of him, and he peeked into it. It held a few coins and a silver ring. Offerings for the dead, perhaps? The coins were tempting; he really needed some; but he just didn’t feel right about looting burial places. It was one thing to have taken what the bandits had stored in what was obviously their own chest. This was different. He sighed and moved down a wooden circular stairway. When he was about halfway down, three skeevers erupted from the shadows. They weren’t difficult to put down, but he shuddered. Hope I didn’t catch something, he thought. We’ll know in awhile.
He moved forward, through a dusty, cobwebbed chamber and into a hallway.
“Hello? Is someone coming?”
Dardeh pulled his bow and crouched. I don’t know if that’s someone friendly or just another bandit but I’m taking no chances, he thought.
“Is that you Harknir? Bjorn? Soling? I know I ran ahead with the claw, but I need help!”
Ok, here’s where Lucan’s claw is. Dardeh sighed. I hope he’ll hand it over without too much fuss.
The corridor ahead of him was completely blocked by cobwebs, but a few quick slashes with a saber cleared them out. He drew his bow again and edged forward.
“Ahh! Not again! Get it away from me! Get it away! Kill it!”
Dardeh peered around the corner just in time to see a gigantic spider descending from an opening in the ceiling. He’d fought plenty of big frostbite spiders before, but this one was of a truly ridiculous size. He drew and shot as quickly as he could, but the thing landed and scuttled toward him, spitting its poison at him.
He backed up into the corridor and kept firing. This bow he’d made for himself was of inferior quality, and slow to draw, but it was at least a way to fight the damnable thing without getting in range of its prodigious fangs. He buried at least a dozen iron arrows into it, all the while barely able to hear himself think for the bandit’s non-stop howling. I’m trying to kill it, man. Give me a moment, won’t you?
Finally he had the beast damaged enough that he was able to draw his swords and finish it off. No sooner had it dropped to the floor when the bandit started yelling again.
“Get me down! Cut me down! Don’t leave me here, for Arkay’s sake!”
Dardeh looked up. Yes, there he was, the noisy bandit, strung up like a prize deer waiting for the roasting. The spider must have been in the process of wrapping him up like the other obviously human packages littering the floor. Dardeh shuddered, and approached the man.
“Alright. I’ll cut you down. But I’m here for the claw. I know you took it. Your buddies out in front said as much before they died. Tell me where it is and down you come.”
“Yes, yes,” the Dunmer said, squirming around in the webs. “The claw. I know all about it. The claw, the markings, the door in the Hall of Stories. I know how they work together. Help me down and I’ll show you! You won’t believe the power the Nords have hidden there.”
Power? Dardeh thought. All right, I would have expected to hear “riches,” or “treasure,” not “power.” But it doesn’t matter. I need the claw, I need to get it to Lucan, and I need to get out of here and up the road to Whiterun.
But as soon as the man dropped to the floor, he sneered at Dardeh, turned, and ran away. “You fool. You think I’m going to share the treasure with anyone?”
Dardeh stood with his mouth open for a moment. There it is. Treasure. Of course. I went through all that and this is his reaction? I should have known better.
His ire began to rise. I must have gotten this from my father, he thought. Ma would never get upset over something like this but it sticks in my craw. I’m having Lucan’s ornament, like it or not. He followed, swords drawn, ready to take the Dunmer down if he needed to. The chamber opened into a standard Nordic burial chamber.
But the dead… they weren’t, necessarily. Or at least not completely.
Ahead of him, the bandit shrieked. The other sound he heard was a guttural noise, not quite words but not quite animal calls. Then there was the unmistakable clash of a sword against a shield.
This wasn’t the first time Dardeh had seen or fought a draugr. Sometimes they were shuffling around in the abandoned parts of the old mines he and his fellows had been sent to investigate, trying to find fresh veins to dig. There were never many of them, and usually they could be taken down with an arrow or two. Here, though, there were multiples of them coming at once, some casting spells, some swinging massive two-handed weapons that could crush a skull if they connected.
Dardeh whirled and ducked, did his best to dart away from the weapons. He used the stone support pillars in the corridor for cover, drew his bow, and picked off one of the less-well armed draugr. There was a lethal-looking gate of sharp spikes, folded against the wall but clearly linked to a round pressure plate on the floor before it. Dardeh jumped out from behind the pillar to attract the attention of a big, still mostly-bearded Nord draugr, then turned and leaped over the pressure plate and past the gate. The draugr was not so nimble. It shuffled forward and stepped firmly onto the round stone. The gate crashed into it with a sickening crack and tossed it backwards into one of the remaining creatures, both of them landing on the floor. Dardeh put several arrows into the last man standing, then drew his swords and jumped the pressure plate again, to finish both the draugr struggling to its feet and the one bristling with arrows.
And there, lying in the midst of the heap of dead draugr, was the bandit he’d been looking for. So who’s the fool now? he thought. Run away from me right into a mass of undead with heavy weapons. All in the name of what – a few coins?
He knelt and looked through the man’s things. Sure enough, there was a large, oddly-shaped golden ornament. Why Lucan had called it a dragon claw was curious to him. It was the size of a claw belonging to a large bird of prey. Nobody alive had ever seen a dragon until, well, a day ago, and that dragon’s claw was big enough to pick up an entire large man. Dardeh examined it carefully, turning it around and then flipping it over. On the underside were three circles with animal shapes: bear, moth, owl.
“All right, some kind of puzzle again. At least I recognize the animals.”
The man also had a journal in his pocket. His name had been Arvel, it seemed, and his wisdom was that if you had the claw you had the answer in the palm of your hand.
“Nice. The palm. Ok, let’s go see what this does.”
Dardeh stood, rotated his shoulders to loosen them up, and headed down some stairs into a circular chamber full of interred bodies. Some of them began to stir. He stabbed them to death – or rather, back to death – before they could attack; all but one, who moved himself out of his niche, started casting frost magic, and swearing. At least it sounded like swearing, to Dardeh, because he had no idea what it was saying in its dusty, guttural way.
He had no choice but to just push forward through the frost and hack at the thing, even though his arms were aching from the cold. It was reasonably easy to dispatch once he got to it, but he was completely exhausted. He needed to stand and massage his arms for a solid five minutes afterward to warm them back up again.
Ahead of him was a narrow corridor with swinging blades that looked as though they could slice a person in half without a problem. Dardeh looked down at himself, with his stocky body, and sighed. I hope there’s enough space in between them because that’s the only way I’m getting through there, he thought. He watched them swing. Back and forth, back and forth, get the timing, back and forth, and then stepped forward to the reinforced space between the blades. The blade behind him was so close that he felt a breeze as it passed through its arc again. Dardeh gulped and repeated the procedure until he stepped out into the clear.
After that, things started to blur together for him. Draugr, standing in place, lying down, or exploding from old sarcophagi, were simply everywhere, no matter into which room he moved. Some he took down with his swords, and some with arrows. Two burned to death when he used his bow to drop a hanging lamp into an oil slick on the floor. One room had a stream flowing through it and out into a tunnel barred by a metal gate. After he had dispatched the draugr that came out to greet him he found a chain that raised the gate; then he wandered down the tunnel.
This really doesn’t look much like a barrow anymore, he thought as he moved through a rough cave. The stream dropped over the edge of an opening, blocked by more of the huge roots that grew elsewhere, at the far end. He could see light shining down from above. It was clearly a deep pit; and when he had navigated through a passage to it he found snow-covered ramps leading down to the bottom. And another draugr, shuffling back and forth and waving a sword.
He took careful aim with his bow and dropped the creature with a single arrow, then made his way to the bottom of the pit. Some previous soul had dragged a chest down here, put it up on a ledge out of the water, and then apparently met an untimely demise at the hands of that draugr. The skeleton that remained was draped over the ledge as though in the act of trying to open the chest. This one, Dardeh thought, I will open. There were coins in it, and he scooped them out gratefully before walking back up the ramp.
His path led him back into the barrow proper through several more chambers, another set of swinging blades, through more draugr, up a set of wooden stairs and across a stone walkway, and finally to a large set of wooden doors.
“I sure hope I’m getting near the end of this,” he murmured. “I’m getting tired and I need to make it to Whiterun soon. I promised Gerdur.” He pushed the doors open.
This chamber had intricate pictures carved into the stone walls. It was too dark for him to tell exactly what tale they told, but he knew they had some inherent meaning. The Hall of Stories, that’s what Arvel had called it. At the far end was a huge stone obstacle with three concentric rings and a central metal plate containing three holes. There were animal insets on the rings.
“Ok, this should be easy to figure out,” he said, turning the claw over in his hand again. From top to bottom the animals were a bear, a moth, and an owl. He reached for the outermost ring and rotated it until the bear was on top, then followed suit with the moth and the bear. The claw’s toes clearly would fit into the central disc.
Here goes. If I’m wrong, I’m dead and I’ll have had a couple days more than the Imperials intended me to have.
He pushed the claw into the disc and turned it.
There was a great rumbling and grinding, and slowly the stone began to drop into a depression in the floor. It shed dust and stone particles as it went, making him cough, and he shook his head at himself. You would think a guy who works in a mine would know enough to cover his nose, wouldn’t you?
Beyond the gate was something the likes of which he had never seen, not even with as much time as he had spent underground. The gate opened into an enormous cavern dominated by a huge, curved wall at the far end. A the top of the wall was an engraving, similar to the carvings Dardeh had seen in other places, sometimes poking up from the wisps of ancient ruins in the hills of the Reach – stylized dragon heads with open mouths. Stone steps curled up and around the left side of the cavern, beside a ritual offering table on the platform just in front of the curved wall. Between light streaming in from an opening in the ceiling and the pair of flaming braziers at either end of the platform, the area was bright. Water flowed in from several locations around the edges, forming a stream midway through the cavern.
“What… in the name of the Nine… is this?” Dardeh breathed, moving forward, startling a flock of bats that rushed toward the door he’d just entered. Someone had built a stone bridge over the stream at some point; he crossed it, heading toward the curved wall which he could now see was covered with markings. As he got closer, he started to hear something.
It was chanting. The wall was chanting. Or something about the wall was making him think of chanting, he wasn’t sure, but the sound was calling to him, pulling him forward. As he approached the level of the platform, a small area surrounding a set of marks in the center of the wall began to glow blue.
“What the…?”
He didn’t have time to finish his thought. A sarcophagus just to his left burst open and an especially angry-looking draugr rose from it.
Dardeh grabbed his swords and moved forward. He slashed at it with each of them and then stepped back, just out of reach.
The draugr leaned forward and made an enormous noise. It was the same sound the black dragon had made at first, the same word but with less power, and it pushed Dardeh back several paces before he caught his balance rather than throwing him to the ground. He rushed forward, roaring his own answer, and whirled into the draugr. It hammered down at him with a greatsword that left cold in its wake but missed Dardeh’s shoulder by just a hair; Dardeh turned and slashed with both of his father’s swords.
The draugr staggered a bit, but then stood and shouted again, a sharp, angry, metallic noise, and Dardeh’s left side scimitar flew out of his hand. He yelped in surprise; but there was no time to look for the weapon. He flew at the beast, snarling, and lashed out with a flurry of furious strikes, using both hands on his remaining scimitar to help guide it. The draugr dropped at last.
He looked down at it while he stood, panting, thankful yet again for his own strength and the training he had gotten on his journey through Hammerfell and High Rock. The sword hadn’t gone far; it had flown down into the depression caused by flowing water, and he retrieved it gratefully. The thing disarmed me, he thought. With its voice. That’s terrifying.
But his attention was once again drawn by the chanting and the glowing mark on the huge stone wall. He moved toward it.
The rest of the world fell away. There was only Dardeh, and the wall, the chanting, and the word in some language he didn’t know.
Dardeh’s mind burned and sizzled, the blue light seeming to flow into him somehow with an energy that made his skin tingle the way it had when the dragon spoke in Helgen. He could almost, almost hear the light – not just the chanting – as well as feel the sizzling. It was not painful, but it was distinctive, unlike anything he’d ever felt before. It was as if some vital connection had been made in his head, one that had been so very close to being made before, like hands reaching out for each other across a gap but not quite close enough, fingers stretching and stretching until finally they met in a powerful clasp. It was like water building up behind an obstruction until finally it broke through, flowing into the place beyond. It was as though his mind had continued to grasp for the meaning of that dragon’s first word as it had done in Helgen for the entire time since, and the light – this blue, pulsating light – was suddenly illuminating its meaning. And he stood in awe, shaking, not quite able to believe what was happening but knowing with every fiber of his being that he now understood.
Fus. The word is Fus, he thought. That’s what the dragon at Helgen said. It’s what this draugr just said. And I know what it means. It means…
Force.
I know what a dragon said.
I don’t know why, but I know what a dragon said and what this word means.
Talos guide me.
