One of the Stormcloak soldiers got impatient with the process.
There had been an odd, hollow sound, distant but somehow managing to fill the air around Helgen. It made everyone edgy for a moment, but the General had instructed his people to ignore it and get on with the executions. They were trying, the Imperials were, to give the prisoners their last rites, which Dardeh thought was actually a fairly generous gesture on their parts.
“As we commend your souls to Aetherius, blessings of the Eight Divines upon you; for you are the salt and earth of Nirn, our beloved…”
“For the love of Talos!” the soldier cried, disgusted. “Shut up and let’s get this over with!” He tossed himself down onto his knees and one of the Imperials used a foot to push him forward onto the block. “Come on, I haven’t got all morning. My ancestors are smiling at me, Imperials. Can you say the same?”
Well, Dardeh thought a moment later as the man’s head rolled forward into a basket, you had enough of the morning to get by with, it would seem.
The man directing the executions pointed at Dardeh.
“Next prisoner! The Redguard!”
Of course, Dardeh thought. The Redguard. That’s me. Well, Ma, I guess I’ll see you again sooner than I had expected. He started moving forward, slowly.
The sound filled the air again, closer. Dardeh and everyone else looked up and around, but the sky was just as vividly blue and serene as it had been all day.
“There it is again,” the Imperial directing Dardeh said. “Did you hear that?”
“Yes,” Dardeh murmured. “What is that?” Not that it matters at this point, but I want to know what it is.
“I said, next prisoner! Nice and easy. To the block.”
Dardeh sighed. All right, all right. I see how it is. He dropped to his knees and silently prayed, as best he could; not a formal prayer, but if a soul was going to depart its body some kind of pious thoughts ought to happen first. Mighty Talos, I hope I’ve done well by you. I’m sorry for my failings. I hope to meet you in Sovngarde.
And then everything went crazy.
There was another enormous roar, this one close enough to feel as well as hear.
“What in Oblivion is that?” General Tullius yelled.
“It’s in the clouds!”
Dardeh twisted himself around. First in his line of sight was the bulk of the executioner, his wicked axe raised high and about to come down on Dardeh’s neck. He stopped, though, and stumbled away as a gigantic crash came from the direction of the keep’s tower.
People started yelling, running. The mothers and children who had come out to watch the Imperial soldiers chop off a few heads started screaming.
Everything around and under Dardeh shook with the impact. He looked up. Settling down onto the roof, with plumes of dust rising around it, was a nightmare in the flesh. It was huge, black, with blazing red eyes and wings that more than spanned the width of the tower.
Dardeh wasn’t sure how he knew it was a dragon, but he couldn’t imagine any other creature from life or legend that it might possibly be. As he watched, as soldiers ineffectually fired arrows that didn’t quite make it to their target, the creature stretched his neck, opened his mouth vertically and made a huge, deafening noise.
Dardeh’s skin tingled. Or maybe it was his brain, or fear speaking from his gut. Maybe he was imagining it. But he could have sworn he heard a word. That thing just said something, he thought. That wasn’t just a roar, that was a word. It had meaning, meaning that was tantalizingly just out of Dardeh’s reach even as his mind grasped at the edges of it, trying to make sense of it.
And the word had sent a dozen men flying backward into the city walls. Some of them weren’t moving. The cart Dardeh had been in had flipped over, its horse along with it, and the chest that held his swords was right there, so very close; he could have gotten to it except that his hands were bound and he wouldn’t be able to pick up the swords even if he could get the chest open somehow.
The dragon roared again, a different set of words, and suddenly the sky filled with dark clouds. Huge boulders began raining down from them, crashing through the thatched roofs of homes, taking down parts of the city’s walls and any person or animal they came in contact with. The dragon fought his way back into the air and began strafing the town, spewing fire with every pass. Every timber, every plank, anything that could burn was burning, and anything that couldn’t burn was being pelted by the huge chunks of flaming rock. The air filled with thick smoke. The sound was deafening. Horses, men, women, children, all were screaming, shouting orders, crying out as bones were broken, skulls crushed, bodies burned, and they all ran for shelter that disintegrated before their eyes. Over all of it, the hideous high-pitched keening of the dragon’s fire breath overwhelmed the senses, creating even more havoc.
Dardeh scrambled up to his feet using the executioner’s block for leverage, and saw Ralof beckoning him to follow. “Hey Redguard! Come on, the gods won’t give us another chance!”
Dardeh looked at the cart, then back at Ralof. Arrrgh, he thought, I have to move. If I’m dead, it won’t matter what kind of swords I have. Maybe I can salvage them sometime later, if I’m not a pile of ash by then. Ralof knows the area. I don’t. He ran for Ralof, toward the base of the tower.
They were almost there when the dragon dropped to the ground between the tower and the city wall, and began incinerating anyone unlucky enough to still be in the unprotected area between. Dardeh dashed into the opening at the base of the tower, just ahead of the flames, and found himself face-to-face with Ulfric Stormcloak.
He stood with his mouth open for a moment. Ulfric had been ungagged. He had an even colder, harder expression than he’d had before.
Ralof ran in behind him, shouting.
“Jarl Ulfric! What is that thing? Could the legends be true?”
“Legends don’t burn down villages,” Ulfric said in one of the most resonant voices Dardeh had ever heard. “We need to move. Now!”
In some quiet little corner of his mind that was not consumed by the need to stay alive, Dardeh marveled at that voice. There was something about it that gave him the same sensation he’d had when the dragon had spoken. Some day he hoped he would be alive enough to consider it more deeply.
Ralof yelled at him. “With me! Up the tower!”
Dardeh ran for the stairs and was about two-thirds up them when the outer wall exploded inward, crushing the Stormcloak soldier who had preceded him, and dislodging stones that rolled down the stairs toward him. The huge, terrifying head of the dragon poked through the hole it had made, and roared again.
He heard three words this time. Yol. Toor. Shul. Why am I hearing words? What does it mean? He had no idea, but he knew those were the words.
A great gout of flame erupted from the dragon’s mouth, a high, shrieking, physically painful overtone accompanying the roar of the flames themselves. Dardeh winced.
“Woah!” he yelped, scrambling backward down the steps as fast as he could go without falling. The words mean something about fire, I suspect. He huddled next to the wall until the dragon disappeared, then slowly crept up to the hole it had left.
Ralof appeared beside him and pointed out the hole, toward the nearest burning building. “See the inn over there?” he shouted.“Jump through the roof and keep going!”
“Um…” Dardeh began. Jump? With my hands bound?
“Go! We’ll follow when we can!”
Dardeh jumped, because there was nowhere else to go. He twisted his ankle a bit and singed himself on one of the burning timbers of the inn, trying to balance against it when he landed, but he was largely intact and made his way out of the wooden building toward the keep. The confusion was deafening, overwhelming, and he didn’t know which way to turn to make it through the collapsed, burning buildings. The Imperial soldier who’d been keeping track of names spotted him and called out.
“It’s you and me, prisoner! Stay close!”
Dardeh spied Ralof near the keep and made for him instead. I don’t much care for Stormcloaks, he thought, but I’m surely not ready to step right back into the company of the man who was directing me to the chopping block.
“Ralof, you damned traitor!” the soldier yelled. “Out of my way!”
“We’re escaping, Hadvar,” Ralof shouted back at him. “You can’t stop us this time!”
So you know each other, like Ulfric and Tullius know each other. That’s good to know, Dardeh thought. Just – get us out of here, Ralof. We’ll discuss the merits of the civil war later.
Stepping into the small entry chamber of the keep was eerie. The relative quiet made Dardeh aware that his ears were ringing. They could still hear the chaos going on outside, but it was muffled.
Through the doorway into the circular base of the keep’s tower, there was a Stormcloak soldier on the floor. Ralof checked him for any signs of life, shook his head and said, quietly, “We’ll meet again in Sovngarde, brother.”
Dardeh frowned. There’s something about Ulfric that sets my teeth on edge, that’s one reason for not joining the Stormcloaks. And this is the other reason I won’t join you, he thought. I couldn’t bear having to bid my brothers and sisters in arms goodbye like this, one after the other, not knowing whether or not it was truly for a just cause. It’s too hard.
It was even harder when Ralof cut his bindings and told him to take the dead man’s armor and weapons.
“You’re joking with me.”
“Do I look like I’m joking, prisoner? You need to stay alive, and he doesn’t need his gear any more. Put it on.”
Dardeh looked down at himself. The rags he wore wouldn’t stop a skeever, much less an Imperial soldier trying to return him to the rank of prisoner. He sighed.
“You’re right. And my name’s Dardeh.”
“Right, then. Hurry and put the armor on, Dardeh, and take a few swings with that axe.”
The armor was a tight fit, as big through the chest as Dardeh was, but it definitely was more solid than his rags. Still, he felt somehow unclean wearing it. As soon as we get somewhere with a smithy, he thought. I don’t care how basic it is, I’m having something else.
A war axe wasn’t his favorite weapon; it was heavier than he was used to and slower to swing. Dardeh had never fought much more than saber cats and wolves for most of his life, with a bow and arrow if at all possible, from high atop a rock where sharp fangs and claws could not reach. Always take the high ground, he’d been taught. Always. But there’d been no high ground, to speak of, in many of the places he’d visited on his long path to the border, so he’d learned to use his mass and his muscles to compensate. The axe would have to do.
Voices from near the keep’s entrance told him he was going to have a chance to use that axe sooner than he’d hoped.
“The Imperials!” Ralof hissed at him. “Take cover!” They moved to either side of the entryway, readying their weapons.
“It’s the prisoners!” Dardeh heard. “Get them!”
A group of three Imperials rushed into the room and attacked. Even with a dragon destroying the world outside, these stubborn men still wanted Stormcloak heads, and they saw two Stormcloaks before them.
One of the soldiers came at him crying “die, Rebel!” his sword high above his shoulder, ready to crash it down onto Dardeh’s.
Saber cats, Dardeh thought, have much sharper claws than this soldier attacking with a standard issue Imperial sword. I can do this. He gathered his breath, released it in the huge, dark roar he’d found helped focus his energy, and used his mass to swing that axe in a whirling attack. When it connected with the man’s neck, it neatly severed all but a tendril of skin. The man dropped like a stone. Dardeh looked down at the huge pool of blood spreading out around the corpse and felt his stomach rise into his throat. Gods, he thought. This is not what I left home for. I’m not a soldier, I’m definitely not a Stormcloak, and I don’t want to be here.
Ralof’s shouts brought him back to himself. He had both a foot soldier and an officer on him, and while he was clearly a talented fighter there were two of them on him at the same time. Dardeh stepped behind the foot soldier and used both of his hands to bring his one-handed axe down just as hard as he could manage. It bit into the man’s chest and took him down. In the meantime, Ralof blocked several swings from the officer with one of his axes and then finished him with the other while the he was on a backswing.
After that, things were largely a blur. Getting out of the keep again turned out to be nearly as much of a struggle as getting into it had been. They fled down into the tower and then, after the dragon collapsed another wall and boxed them in, through the stores room and into a torture chamber – a place that made Dardeh queasy. Killing your brothers in battle was bad enough. Making them suffer, purposefully? That was just sick.
They met a ragged little group of Stormcloaks inside, and Ralof attempted to form all of them into some kind of cohesive unit; but another wall collapsed behind them leaving Dardeh and Ralof alone to find another way out. A tunnel led them to a cavern full of spiders, and a bear, and finally an opening to the outside world. They hid for a moment, watching the great black dragon fly away down the river valley and disappear; then they ran as quickly as they could for the nearby town of Riverwood, home to Ralof’s sister Gerdur, hoping they were ahead of the remaining Imperials.
Except that no Imperials had come down the south road. Nobody had. It was almost as though Dardeh and Ralof were the only two survivors.
Dardeh sipped at some water and listened as Ralof told his sister and her husband about what he’d been through.
“I can’t even remember the last time I slept,” he said.
Now that they were safe Dardeh could see that it was so, could see the exhaustion creeping up on Ralof.
“The Imperials ambushed us outside Darkwater Crossing. Like they knew exactly where we’d be. That was … two days ago, now.”
Dardeh listened closely. Ulfric had ordered them to stop fighting, Ralof told them. He hadn’t wanted them to die for nothing. That was good; perhaps Ulfric did care about his men. But weren’t they really dying for nothing anyway, fighting a war against people they had grown up with and cared about? I don’t understand politics, he thought. I don’t like war. And I want out of this armor.
And then there was the dragon, Ralof told them. His family erupted with questions, crowding around him. A dragon? A real, live dragon like the legends?
Dardeh sighed. He’d resented Ralof all the way out of the keep and down the mountainside. Ralof had given him orders, acted as though he didn’t know how to do a single thing, and assumed that he was a Redguard and not a Nord. He’d first said they should split up, once they emerged from the cave, and then either complained that Dardeh wasn’t moving quickly enough to keep up, or nagged him to join the Stormcloaks. Ulfric this, Ulfric that, and when he’d asked “do you really think Ulfric had anything to do with the dragon?” Ralof had backed down a bit and admitted that he didn’t really know. Dardeh didn’t know where the dragon had come from. But Ulfric had been bound and gagged, and had been in that cart for two days, according to Ralof’s story. No. Ulfric had nothing to do with summoning a dragon that came close to killing him, too.
But Ralof was used to giving commands and to keeping his men safe, and Dardeh had to give him credit for getting them out in one piece. And all of it, including a dragon attack, in the face of some kind of betrayal, by some kind of mole. No wonder Ralof had been irritable, as tired as he was.
I feel bad for being so annoyed with him, Dardeh thought.
Dardeh tried to pay attention to Ralof and his sister and brother-in-law but his mind kept roiling and he kept pacing back and forth behind all of them. I don’t want to be involved with Jarls and wars, he told himself. They bring out the worst in people, including me. He thought again of the first soldier he had killed, and his stomach turned. I killed good men today. Not bandits, but good, caring, honest men doing what they thought was their duty. I never wanted to do that, not ever. That’s why I didn’t join the damned war. All I ever wanted to do was mine the mine and look after Ma. There are families who have lost someone special, today, because of me. Look what it’s made of me.
Gerdur asked “…and Ulfric?”
Ralof laughed and told her that Ulfric would be fine. I wonder, Dardeh thought, forcibly pulling himself back to the present. He had said “we’ll follow when we can” and had then shown up in the keep’s courtyard by himself. He grinned. I’ll bet old Ralof here knows exactly which direction Ulfric went, and the fewer people who shared that knowledge, the better.
Gerdur offered Dardeh the key to their home.
“Stay as long as you like,” she said. “But please, the Jarl of Whiterun needs to know about this. If you can get to him and let him know I’d be grateful.”
Dardeh didn’t quite know what to say. That dragon, if it had been headed to Whiterun, could have been there, eaten the whole city, and returned by now, as fast as it was. Whatever damage it was going to do must have been done. Still, he nodded.
“Of course. I was heading to Whiterun anyway, truthfully. I’m looking for someone…” and for what felt like the thousandth time, he began describing what he knew of his sister, not really expecting an answer.
“I haven’t seen anyone like that,” Gerdur said. “But ask in Whiterun. It’s a much larger place and most everyone ends up there sooner or later, if they’re travelling.”
He stood and stretched. “Thanks, Gerdur. I need to make myself some armor so I don’t stick out like a sore thumb and then…” And then I need to get back to Helgen and get those swords. “Then I’ll go to Whiterun.”