Ustengrav was a nightmare.
It had been bad enough finding the place. He had somehow managed to go too far west, and had been resting near a lovely little cabin nestled on a grassy shelf partway up the southern slope of the mountains when a dragon had swept down and blasted him with frost. That battle had taken what felt like years, up to the top the pass, bit by painfully cold bit, using more magic to heal than Dardeh would ever have imagined he would cast in his lifetime. In the end he had come away with a substantial pile of coin from the dragon’s lair and a new word: “Haal,” or “hand.” He was certain that he’d heard the word before, in Bleak Falls Barrow, when the draugr near the exit had disarmed him. And he had learned something useful; if he timed his own shout carefully enough he could interrupt the dragon from uttering its own, giving him just enough time to fire one more arrow before the beast flew away and out of range.
That’s how the Ustengrav nightmare had begun. It wasn’t so much that there were enemies trying to remove his head at Ustengrav, both outside and in, but that there were so blessed many of them. There were bandits camped outside the old ruin, one already dead near the iron entry doors. The two sword wielders gave him no real problem. One, though, was a mage, who inexplicably shouted “I’ll see you burn!” while casting frost spells. Dardeh ducked behind the lean-to they had erected, and picked the mage off with arrows, but was still damaged enough by the frost that he needed to tend his wounds with magic once the fight had finished.
Inside, on a stairway, there had been more dead bandits, killed by the two necromancers camped out at the far end of the large room into which the stairway emptied. Dardeh had tried to creep past them so as to avoid a fight, but the attempt, while well-intentioned, was pointless. He was not ever going to be a thief; that much was clear.
What had been a lot closer to disaster was the battle between two mages and three draugr, one of which was a spellcaster, going on in the next room. He’d lent a hand to the mages by taking down the frost-casting draugr, only to be set upon by the fire-casting mage. He had no speed with which to dodge; the draugr’s frost attacks had slowed him down to a crawl. By the time his scimitar lodged itself in her chest, he had needed to wrestle several healing potions out of his pack and use every bit of magic energy he possessed in order to continue on his way.
And then there were the skeletons. And more draugr. They were everywhere. Up stairs, over walkways, in sarcophagi, erupting out of wall niches – simply everywhere.
Dardeh was nearly beginning to feel nostalgic for the hot, stuffy air in Left Hand Mine when he found a chain on the wall and pulled it. A stone slab lifted up into a recess in the wall, and he found himself peering down a long, rounded corridor that looked like nothing so much as a passage made by an enormous worm. It wasn’t carefully carved, like most of the spaces in the barrows he’d seen, but rather a rough-hewn, curling pathway, uneven enough that he had to balance himself against the raw stone walls several times as curiosity drew him forward. The stale, dusty air spoke of long years of disuse. The passage wound downward, over and past some steps, and around in such a way that he completely lost any sense of direction, and then finally emptied into a small chamber containing a single chest.
“Odd,” he’d murmured, opening the chest. Inside were a few coins, a healing potion that he scooped out and added to his pack almost without thinking, and something else: a set of steel plate armor, full save for a helm. It was of fine construction, and would offer him much better protection than what he was wearing at the moment even though it was scratched and dented and needed repair. He had stared at that armor for a long time. The dead cannot use healing potions, he thought. That’s why I took it. But this? This belonged to someone’s ancestor; can I really take this and feel right about it? Then he thought about learning the healing spell. Just in case. And he had used it, and used it, and used it and would be very, very dead if not for it. This plate armor would cover his arms and legs to a much greater extent than the steel he was wearing, and only the gods knew what he might need to be protected from, just ahead. Just in case.
So he had changed into the plate armor, right then and there. It was a good fit, after a few minor adjustments, and it definitely covered more of him than his own armor had. He bowed his head. “Thank you,” he murmured to whatever wisps of spirit might yet linger in the room. “I will put it to good use, and will try to make you proud.”
He had put it to good use, too, almost immediately. After he had returned to the main barrow he had found pressure plates that launched gouts of flame. He stepped right on them. The plate armor and its underlying cloth and furs had kept him from the torching he so richly deserved for not paying attention, though he did feel a bit singed around his feet. “Idiot,” he had grumbled. “Look where you’re going.” A miner, someone who had to constantly watch for shifting, cracking stone, and he couldn’t remember to watch his own footsteps.
There had been spiders, more draugr, and finally an opening blocked by roots, overlooking a truly gigantic cavern with stone and dirt ramps branching across it at different levels. He had worked his way down, to the floor of the cavern, and to another word wall. “Feim,” it was. Fade. It flowed into him. This time there had been no immediate danger around the word wall, and the sensation of absorbing Feim was lofty, soaring, and peaceful because of it.
On the far side of the cavern from the wall and across a long dirt ramp was a series of three gates barring the only exit aside from the one he’d come in. Three stones stood before them, conical but for one flat side, and that side would light as he stood next to it. Each stone raised a different gate, but only for a moment, not long enough to move through all three. He tried. He tried probably a dozen times, walking around the stones in different patterns, running, jumping. He simply wasn’t fast enough.
Finally, as he stood staring at the gates, it dawned on him. “Oh for Talos’ sake,” he groaned. “Did I not just learn a shout for this?” He backed up, started sprinting, and as the first gate rose, Shouted.
“WULD!”
And through the gates he flew, up the stairs within them, and out the other side, grinning from ear to ear. Will I ever get used to that? It’s like flying!
Beyond the gates were more fire traps and more spiders. Big ones, they were, but nothing he couldn’t handle, especially by luring them onto the flames and using his bow from a safe distance.
Dardeh stepped through a gate and into a chamber, its floor flooded but with a stone bridge to what looked like an ornate coffin at the far side. This must be the place, he thought: the tomb of Jurgen Windcaller, founder of the Graybeards according to Arngeir. Odd that a man associated with the highest mountain in Tamriel should be interred in the lowest part of a barrow located at the edge of a marsh, so deep that the water flowed in. And somewhere near that coffin, he thought, is the Horn they asked me to bring back to them.
Dardeh started forward. The room rumbled and shook, the water roiled, and four of the enormous, stylized dragon heads common across Skyrim rose from the water, two on either side of the walkway.
“Ysmir’s beard!” Dardeh stepped backward, startled.
He froze, half expecting some long-dead draugr, perhaps the shade of Jurgen Windcaller himself, to emerge from the coffin. Nothing happened. He eased forward, a bit at a time, and still nothing happened. So he walked, slowly and carefully, across the stone walkway.
There was the likeness of a raised hand atop the coffin’s lid. That had to be where the Horn was.
“This is it. Finally.”
But it wasn’t. Dardeh’s heart fell as he neared it. In the hand’s uplifted palm, in the place where the horn clearly should be, was a rolled piece of paper. He opened it, and read. “Dragonborn – I need to speak to you. Urgently. Rent the attic room at the Sleeping Giant Inn in Riverwood, and I’ll meet you. A friend.”
“NO!” Dardeh shouted, even his normal voice resonant enough to make the stones of the cavern ring. He hurled the note to the floor, fuming in his frustration. “All this way, and it’s not here? And I have to go back to Riverwood?” He stood, staring at the floor for a moment, trying to control his temper. He shook his head, looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath. All right. I just need to go back to Riverwood. There’s no use getting upset about it. The only other thing I have to do is search for my sister. Whoever is there in Riverwood has the Horn. I just have to do it.
____
He was trudging south again in the dark, through the light snow, the air so cold that his breath froze as he breathed, its moisture creating a thin layer of ice in his beard. Dardeh was glad, at moments like this, for the Nord half of his heritage. He might not have been as resistant to the cold as someone who was full Nord, but he was at least comfortable on a night like this so long as the wind wasn’t blowing.
He hadn’t intended to go quite so far east. He had intended to return to Whiterun the same way he’d come, but instead found himself nearing the tiny mining town of Stonehills when he heard the voices. Shouting, the clashing of weapons, screams, all a good distance ahead of him. He dropped into a crouch and crept forward, slowly, to the edge of the roadway he needed to cross, waiting until there was quiet once more before rising to take a look.
There were bodies lying in the road.
He ran forward. Six of them, Imperial soldiers, dead there on the road in front of him. They’d been mangled, but it was cold enough that their blood had frozen almost immediately, leaving no great pools on the ground; they merely lay there, their gaping wounds hard and stiff, open eyes staring out into the void, some with faces frozen in expressions of pain.
A lone Stormcloak soldier emerged out of the darkness to the west, his footsteps crunching on the snow, and passed by Dardeh as he stood staring at the corpses.
“Faithless Imperials,” the man growled, and kept on walking down the road, toward Windhelm, toward Stormcloak headquarters.
Dardeh’s head snapped up and he stared at the soldier. Faithless Imperials? That’s all you can say? What would he have said about you if you were the one on the ground?
The sounds of more men approaching caught his attention, and he turned to see a small patrol of six, maybe seven men in Stormcloak armor. They walked through the dead Imperials, stepping over them as though they were nothing more than fallen branches in the roadway, never so much as looking down at them. One of the soldiers, an older man with a craggy face and graying beard, actually stepped on one of the corpse’s arms; he grunted and kicked it out of his way, then continued down the road.
Dardeh stood there watching the Stormcloaks walk away, staring, his mouth open. He looked back down at the Imperials.
These were living men until a short while ago. Men with families. Wives, maybe; children, perhaps. Mothers and fathers, if they were fortunate enough to still be alive. And you just walked over them as if they were rubble.
He was certain that if he walked down the road to the west, probably not very far, there would be more bodies, probably wearing Stormcloak blue. Did the Imperials look at them like refuse, as well? Probably, he thought. He remembered the soldiers at Helgen, attacking each other when they should have been running for their lives from a thing nobody had seen in an Age or more; Ralof and Hadvar, who knew each other by name, who might even have been friends once, threatening to kill each other. He looked at the line of Stormcloaks, receding as they moved away, and snarled.
What good is it to fight for something you believe in if you can’t even remember that the people you disagree with care about their lives as much as you care about yours, and for the same damned reasons?
Did you abandon your very souls when you agreed to fight in this godsforsaken war?
What good is it?
He stood for a long time, staring first at the dead Imperial soldiers and then looking down the road to the east, long after the last Stormcloak in line disappeared into the night. Then he frowned, shook his head, and trudged toward the mountains.
Just beyond Stonehills Dardeh found a pathway leading up, and south, in the direction he needed to go. He followed it up the mountainside to a wide set of stone stairs; and when a second set of stairs branched to his right curiosity took him up them rather than south into the pass. The stairs emptied onto a large stone platform, dominated by one of the ugliest statues he’d ever seen. Mehrunes Dagon, the daedric prince of destruction and revolution, was perched on the mountainside like an obscene gargoyle, guarding a shrine and a ritual table.
“No thank you,” Dardeh muttered, unable to suppress a tiny shudder. It was, however, a magnificent view from this spot. He took a moment to walk around the platform, taking it in. The snow prevented him from seeing very far, but he could easily envision what it would look like from here on a sunny day.
Just to the west were the tops of more stone pillars, not a part of Mehrunes Dagon’s shrine but something else altogether. Leave ‘em alone, he told himself. Just head back to Whiterun. But he couldn’t; he needed to see what was there. He worked his way around the mountain by hopping from rock to rock and found himself just above another large, level platform, with another ritual table.
And then he found himself dodging flames. An enormous golden dragon had been resting so quietly that Dardeh hadn’t seen it; it lifted itself from the word wall on which it had been perched, and seemed determined that Dardeh was going to roast alive in his steel plate. “By the Nine!” Dardeh yelped, scrambling down onto the platform and behind a broken archway next to the word wall. The word chanted at him incessantly, even as he bobbed in and out behind the wall to shield himself from the dragon’s attacks, to Shout at it, and to fire as many arrows as he could.
The dragon landed in a thundering crash just as Dardeh darted out into the open, hoping to use his scimitars to finish it off. The dragon had other ideas, though, thrashing and turning in circles, enveloping Dardeh in flames. He shrieked, and rolled forward, just off the platform, pulling his bow and easing himself up just high enough to fire at it. The dragon crept closer, snapping and snarling; Dardeh backed down over the rocks, firing as fast as he could. After reaching after him with one last snap of its jaws, the dragon recoiled from an arrow sinking into its brain through the eye socket. It fell to earth, bursting into flames.
Dardeh crouched on the side of the hill, absorbing the dragon’s energy and trying not to inhale the scent of singed fur and cloth from his armor. Finally he stood and made his way to the word wall. “Krah,” he read as its energy joined that of the dragon inside him. Cold. Like Ro, it was a word to combine with one he already knew, and he practiced it.
“FO-KRAH!” A substantial cloud of frost billowed out over the dragon’s skeleton. Once again Dardeh grinned. Someone is not going to enjoy that, at some point.
But he was hot. His steel plate had been scorched, and some of its underlying cloth and leather was a mess, nearly gone. He peeled himself out of it and back into his steel armor. It can be repaired. I’ll visit the smith as soon as I get back to Whiterun. He hopped back over the rocks to the shrine of Mehrunes Dagon and set out to the south.