Winterhold was a tiny, bleak, frigid place, made up of only a few buildings aside from the Jarl’s longhouse. On the northern side of the road through its center, most structures had collapsed. At the end of town, beyond the tiny inn, a long, precarious stone bridge led to an enormous structure resting on a slender pinnacle of rock. This bridge had lost large chunks of its supporting structure; how it stayed there, hanging in midair, was just shy of miraculous as far as Dagnell could tell. If she walked to the edge of town near the collapsed homes and looked down she could clearly see huge, man-made stone blocks lying at the edge of the Sea of Ghosts far below. So the stories about part of Skyrim collapsing were true. And the enormous building could be nothing other than the College of Winterhold. The amount of land that had fallen away from Winterhold and from around the College was almost beyond comprehension. And she could see no evidence of it, anywhere.
Dag turned from the cliff face and headed to the inn. She needed to get out of the blizzard that was forming. She also needed to find Enthir.
It wasn’t hard to find Enthir in the midst of all the Nords. He was a Bosmer wizard, even-featured and with a cultured voice.
“Yes? What is it?” he said as she approached.
“Karliah sent me,” Dag told him, slipping Gallus’ journal out of her pack.
“Karliah!” Enthir shifted to being all business in an instant. “So she’s finally found it. Do you have Gallus’ journal?”
Oh, Dag thought. I see. These two have been trying to figure out what happened to Gallus for a long time. A College mage who is close to the thieves.
“Yes, but there’s a problem. We can’t read it.”
“Let me see,” he said, and took the journal from her. After skimming a few pages, he chuckled. “Oh that Gallus. A dear friend, but always too clever for his own good. This journal is written entirely in the Falmer tongue.”
Falmer? Dag immediately heard Brynjolf calling out “Buy my genuine Falmerblood Elixir! Only twenty septims each!” She shook her head. They had a language? “Can you translate it?”
“No,” Enthir said, “but I think I know who might. Calcelmo, the court wizard in Markarth. He’s the foremost scholar on the Falmer in all of Tamriel. A word of warning, though: Calcelmo is fiercely protective of his research. Getting the information won’t be easy.”
Dag frowned, exasperated. “Why in the world would Gallus have written his journal in Falmer?”
Enthir smiled. “For one thing, there are only a handful of people in Tamriel who would even recognize the language. For another, before his death Gallus was working on something big, some sort of heist requiring an intimate knowledge of the Falmer tongue. Sadly, we never had a chance to speak of the details.”
“So how did he learn it?”
“From the same person I’m sending you to. Calcelmo. I just hope that the materials he used to learn the language will still be available to you.”
Dag sighed. “I needed to go to Markarth anyway. But first I need a drink. May I sit with you?”
“Of course,” Enthir said, smiling.
Dag got herself some warm mead and food, and took the seat beside Enthir. “What can you tell me about Gallus?” she asked him. “I’m learning little snippets here and there.”
Enthir talked for some time. Gallus was a brilliant scholar, but an even better thief. They had met when he caught Gallus trying to rob him; Gallus had stalled him with a question about his research and the two had struck up a genuine, deep friendship as a result. It was clear to Dag that Enthir had considered Gallus a dear friend, admired him a great deal, and was still truly devastated at his loss all these years later.
“But Falmer language, Enthir,” she asked him. “I don’t understand. I thought the Falmer were just creatures of some kind. They have a written language?”
No, he told her, they were not discussing Falmer as they currently existed. Originally they had been what were known as Snow Elves, an advanced, beautiful race of mer with a culture rivaling those of the Altmer, Dunmer or Bosmer. But in ages long past the Dwemer – the dwarves – had enslaved the Snow Elves, tortured them, and imprisoned them in deep caverns with little light. Over the centuries they had lost their sight and become the grotesque, twisted, destructive beasts they were now – capable of organized action, possessing enhanced hearing and scent, but destructive and deadly. Enthir’s tone changed as he was describing the Falmer.
“I’ve lost many good friends to those creatures,” he said.
“It sounds like they were the victims,” murmured Dag. “But that doesn’t make it any less difficult to lose people.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he admitted. “It’s far too easy to forget the suffering they endured.”
They talked well into the evening, and Dag promised to return to Winterhold as soon as she found anything that might help translate Gallus’ notes. She rented a room at the inn. I’m going to be just as warm as possible, even if I’m miserable, before I head out onto that ice tomorrow, she thought as she drifted off to sleep.
The next morning, Dag found the steep, icy path leading under the College’s bridge and followed it down to the shoreline.
There were no carriages from Winterhold. Maybe she’d found the limits to Nord tolerance of cold, and none of the drivers wanted to sit out in the extremes of weather. West of Winterhold was basically nothing but an ancient broken glacier, anyway, running all the way from the mountains to the Sea of Ghosts, not the type of terrain one drove a carriage through. She didn’t know the area at all, but she did know that there were great crevasses in a glacier, cracks big enough to swallow a mammoth; there were snow trolls and ice wraiths and more of the huge bears she’d encountered near Snow Veil Sanctum, and she wanted nothing to do with any of it. It would be cold and probably dangerous at the shoreline, but at least she’d skirt all of that. She intended to make it to Dawnstar. Maybe she could hire a carriage there.
Dag had lived with the effects of ocean on the climate, all her life. That much water usually kept a place milder than it would otherwise have been, milder than even a day’s march inland. When the great storms rolled in across the sea it could be brutal, but even so the coast was usually the best place to be, in her experience.
This was not a place that was within her experience. It was desperately cold along the thin strip of land tucked between the glacier and the ocean. Even though there were isolated patches of tall grass, with barnacles and clams hugging the exposed sand spits, the icy wind sweeping in off the water went through every layer of clothing and seemed to bite into her bones. There were islands offshore, the rugged survivors of the great collapse that had taken most of Winterhold, and between them and the shore was pack ice that made the wind even colder.
There were horkers down here at the shoreline, and not the fat, lazy, annoyed type she had met in Solitude. These were aggressive, jealous of their territory. Fortunately they had the same slow, blubbery bodies, and she was able to outrun them. But there were also a great many of the large, vicious wolves she’d run across north of Windhelm. They were persistent, too; no flame magic would dissuade them. She exercised her blades over and over again. In spite of how beautiful the wolves’ coats were, she didn’t want to take time to skin them. If she came back this way, she’d be able to find the route just by following the trail of carcasses.
Dag pictured the bright yellow of the trees around Riften, and the soft breeze rolling off Lake Honrich, and laughed at the thought that she’d wanted to keep moving south to get to a warm place. If she ever got back there, she’d be happy just to have another shot at her warm tub. But thinking of Riften didn’t help; all it did was make her more anxious. I don’t know what’s going on there, she thought. Has he already gone back and poisoned their minds? Will I return and find that I’m going to be hunted for the rest of my days as Karliah has been? Will I ever see my friends again?
Odd how they all felt like friends now, even the annoying and arrogant Brynjolf. It hadn’t been long past that she’d felt trapped in the Cistern and the Guild against her will. Now she wanted nothing more than to help bring them some kind of raw justice for having been betrayed and lied to.
It took more than a day for Dag to pick her way along the shore to Dawnstar. She had managed a few hours of rest along the way by building the biggest campfire she could wrangle, just outside a crack in the ice that blocked some of the wind. It hadn’t been anything like real sleep; but she was rested enough to continue.
Walking into Dawnstar was a relief. It was a small town, clustered around a lovely natural harbor, and it was the hold’s capital, but it was very small. She found the inn, got a warm drink and a warm meal, and sat down to enjoy it. It was then that she learned the awful truth: there were no carriages from Dawnstar, either. Sometimes drivers would drop passengers off on their way to Solitude, or Whiterun, or Markarth, but they never stopped long enough to collect new fares. She checked at the docks; perhaps she could book passage to Solitude from here. A man with a lovely Falskaar brogue that gave her a twinge of sadness told her that he could take here there, to Falskaar, but that was all.
It was going to be a long walk to Solitude. She would go there, she decided, and hire a ride to Markarth; because if she walked all the way to Markarth, Mercer would have time to kill everyone in the Guild before she got back.