Dardeh shifted his pack on his shoulders for what felt like the hundredth time since he’d left Riverwood, and began climbing the steps toward the heights of Whiterun. This gods-forsaken stone was one of the most awkwardly heavy things he’d ever tried to carry, and he’d lifted a lot of stone in his day. He’d thought long and hard before taking it off the draugr’s corpse, but it had looked like it might mean something. There were markings on it that reminded him vaguely of the shape of Skyrim. He wasn’t about to haul it all the way to the College of Winterhold; but, he thought, maybe the court wizard here in Whiterun might be interested in seeing it.
He’d stopped in Riverwood just long enough to return the claw to an excited and grateful Lucan, who had gifted him a considerable amount of gold in return. Alvor had bought a few things, like the big sword the draugr in front of the word wall had been aiming at him. Dardeh hadn’t felt at all bad about taking that sword, dead ancestor or not. He’d nearly earned it with his hide. He’d started back up the road to the north, a comfortable amount of coin resting heavy in his pockets.
It was good to feel as though he could afford a carriage ride if he wanted one; but that satisfaction had been overshadowed by the lingering unease he’d felt ever since he’d climbed down the mountainside from Bleak Falls Barrow. Why? Why has this happened to me? What does it mean? It had been strange enough to find himself face to face with Ulfric Stormcloak twice in the same day, stranger still to be so close to a dragon’s snout that he could see its individual whiskers and come away from the experience whole. But this? Being able to understand dragon’s language? Why? Why me?
The road north to Whiterun was a series of fairly steep switchbacks down the side of the mountain that held Bleak Falls Barrow, and it was a strenuous descent with a heavy load on his back. He stopped for a moment, midway down, to catch his breath; and as he stood there the unease began to seep away. The place was beautiful. The Reach was rocky and steep, too; but here at the transition between the forests of Falkreath hold and the wide plain of Whiterun the river roared and hurtled its way joyfully down the slope, salmon leaping upstream through the rocks. Deer and rabbits ran in and out of the woods, across the road, and along the river. Sometimes wolves chased them. He could see birds flitting about in the treetops but couldn’t hear them over the tumult of the river. He could see the first signs of people, just at the foot of the hill, a roof peeking up from beyond the edge of the roadway. It’s so… alive, he thought. I love it. I … could settle here.
The break had given him his second wind. I don’t know what any of it means, he thought, but I’ll find out when the time comes. I’m sure of it. He chuckled. Ma’s speaking to me now. She would be saying that. Be patient, Dar. You’ll know when the time is right. He closed his eyes and raised his face to the sun, smiling, feeling its warmth as well as hers.
That sense of hope – and the awe he had felt on first seeing Whiterun and the enormous bulk of Dragonsreach rising from the surrounding plains — had carried him all the way to the city gates and here to the threshold of the Jarl’s castle. But he would still be glad to rid himself of the ridiculous chunk of carved stone he’d stumped all the way down the hillside.
The Jarl of Whiterun Hold, Balgruuf the Greater, was seated at the rear of his audience hall, flanked by his steward on his right and his housecarl, an imposing, red-haired Dunmer woman, on his left. She stepped forward, sword drawn, and stopped Dardeh before he could reach the Jarl, who was engrossed in conversation with his steward.
“What is the meaning of this interruption?” she snarled. “The Jarl is not receiving visitors.”
“I’ve come from Riverwood, at Gerdur’s request,” Dardeh told her. “A dragon has leveled Helgen. Burned it to the ground. Last I saw, it was heading this way.”
“A dragon! Well, that explains why the guards let you in,” she said. She’s good, Dardeh thought. Took no more than a moment to realize the gravity of the situation and drop her threat. “You’d better speak to the Jarl…”
“Who’s this, then?” Balgruuf interrupted. He was, to Dardeh’s eye, about the same vintage as Ulfric or slightly older, a Nord with a heavily-lined, sharp-featured face, fading blonde hair and beard, wearing fine clothing and an ornate circlet. He was sizing Dardeh up with eyes that missed not a single detail. This is a smart one, Dardeh thought. I’ll bet he was quite something to see, once upon a time, a real figure to command respect on a battlefield.
“I’ve come from Helgen,” he repeated. “It’s been destroyed, and the dragon was headed this way. Although that was close to two days ago now; if it hasn’t attacked yet there’s still time for Whiterun to prepare.” Except that this whole city is wooden. There’s not a single place in it that would survive dragon fire, especially not this beautiful old keep. “But Riverwood is in need of assistance.”
Balgruuf turned to his steward, a well-dressed Imperial. “By Ysmir, Irileth was right! What do you say now, Proventus? Irileth, send a detachment to Riverwood at once.”
The Housecarl nodded. “I’ve already begun mustering my men near the gate.”
Proventus flustered, practically choking in his attempt to speak. “My lord, the Jarl of Falkreath will see that as a provocation and think we’re preparing to attack!”
Balgruuf’s eyes darkened and so did his voice, which he raised so that it filled the hall. “Enough! I won’t sit idly by while a dragon burns my home and slaughters my people!”
Proventus backed down. “Yes, my lord. Now if you don’t mind, I will return to my duties.”
“That would be best,” Balgruuf answered, curtly.
Well now. A little friction between these two, Dardeh thought. But look at how Balgruuf handled the situation. He’s angry, but he’s still polite and respectful. I like this man. He cares about his hold. He listens to his advisors but he has a mind of his own and expects to be obeyed. No nonsense. I like him.
Balgruuf turned to Dardeh. “Well done. You’ve done Whiterun a service, and I won’t forget it.” He narrowed his eyes, looking Dardeh over. “There is another thing you could do for me, suitable for someone of your particular talents, perhaps?”
Now what, Dardeh thought. I really wanted to go speak to the court mage. He didn’t want to be rude, though, so he waited.
“Come,” Balgruuf said, rising from his throne. “Let’s go find Farengar, my court wizard. He’s been looking into a matter related to these dragons and … rumors of dragons.”
Oh! Well there we go, I’m going to have a personal introduction to the mage, no less.
Farengar, a mousy man with all the personality of a doorstop, wanted Dardeh to search for a stone tablet that might possibly be in Bleak Falls Barrow. Dardeh had to work to keep his mouth from falling open.
“A stone tablet? In Bleak Falls Barrow?”
“Yes, it is said to hold a map of dragon burial sites.”
Dardeh pulled the awkward, heavy stone from his pack, and watched Farengar’s eyes widen.
“I was just there, and found this on the body of one of the draugr who tried to kill me,” he said, grinning. “Any chance this is it? It looks like it has some kind of map on it.”
Farengar placed it on his table, grinning from ear to ear, revealing that he had some life in him after all. “The Dragonstone of Bleak Falls Barrow! You’ve already found it!” He turned to look at Dardeh, still grinning. “You are cut from a different cloth than the usual brutes the Jarl sends me! Now my work can begin – the work of the mind, sadly undervalued these days.”
Dardeh half expected him to start rubbing his hands together in glee.
“Well, I’m happy that was it. I had been hoping you would take it off my hands anyway, because it’s heavy. It looked interesting, though.”
He knelt down, rearranging things in his pack, getting ready to leave. There’s an inn down at the bottom of this hill, he thought, and I could go for a nice pint of ale and a comfortable bed. And I’ll start asking around about my sister. Maybe I’ll have some luck this time. It’s a big enough place that almost anyone might have come through here. He was just about done, standing to leave, when the frantic sounds of a person running across the wooden floors of the keep, drawing nearer, caught his attention.
“Farengar! Come quickly!” Irileth burst through the entrance to the wizard’s area. “A dragon has been sighted near the western watchtower!” She looked at Dardeh. “You should come too.”
I should come? Why…?
Farengar’s eyes lit up again. “A dragon! How exciting! Where was it going? What was it doing?”
She sighed. “I’d take this a little more seriously if I were you. Come, we need to inform the Jarl at once!”
Dardeh couldn’t quite grasp all that was going on in the next moments. People were yelling, the Jarl was handing out instructions, Irileth was ordering him to follow her and Farengar nearly had to be physically restrained from joining what seemed to be a dragon-hunting party forming at the city gates. Dardeh was simply swept along in the tide of activity. Somehow, having been in the vicinity of a dragon’s snout meant that he was an experienced dragon hunter, and they really wanted him with them. Well, I can’t argue with that, he thought. I really do have more experience with the thing than almost anyone else alive, aside from Ralof and Ulfric and whoever else survived Helgen. I don’t know what good that’s going to do me in a fight, though. I saw the dragon, not fought it. As he listened to Irileth’s rousing speech to her guards, urging them to action on behalf of all true Nords – a statement that Dardeh found amusing, given that she was Dunmer – he heard one of the guards whisper, “We’re so dead.”
Talos help us, but I hope you’re wrong about that.
The western watchtower was ancient, to begin with, leaning at an odd angle, with portions of what once must have been a much larger structure half-buried in the ground. It was also ablaze when they got there, any organic component in it fully engulfed, an echo of the horror that had been Helgen just days earlier. Dardeh half-listened to Irileth’s orders while looking around, but paid more attention to the watchtower guards who cried out warnings. The dragon had already taken two of the men, they said. Dardeh found one of them, or what was left of him, still smoldering on the grass, his head elsewhere.
That could have been me, he thought, up in Helgen. If not the executioner, the dragon; either way I could have lost my head. How did I manage to survive?
“Gods preserve us. Here he comes again!” the guard shouted.
The familiar hollow roar came from the west, through a pass in the nearby hills, and the tiny speck quickly became wings, and then the huge wings of a dragon. Too fast! Dardeh thought. We’ll never be able to hit him, he’s too fast!
Everyone there drew bows and began peppering the sky with arrows as the dragon shrieked the same fire words Dardeh had heard in Helgen. This wasn’t the same dragon; it wasn’t black, it was a golden color that he might have considered beautiful if it hadn’t been trying to destroy them all. It flew over them, almost lazily, spewing fire, clearly exulting in its own superiority, taunting them, calling out in words Dardeh could hear but could not understand aside from their smug tone. It was as Dardeh had feared; the thing was flying too fast for him to get a good shot at it; he barely could follow its movements with his eyes, much less with a drawn bow. As it had been in Helgen, the sound was deafening, confusing, terrifying.
The beast landed with an enormous crash, shaking the ground and throwing everyone off-balance. Dardeh aimed and moved forward, trying to time his shots; a couple of them were solid hits but the dragon was so huge that his iron arrows did little damage. Two of the guards rushed forward, swords drawn; the dragon reached out his head and grabbed one of them, picking him up and shaking him back and forth. The man screamed, but only for a moment before the dragon bit him in two and spat out the pieces.
Dardeh saw red.
He drew his swords and sprinted hard, around the back side of the dragon, roaring the battle cry he’d learned to summon from his very depths, and he unleashed strikes on the beast as fast as he could. As the dragon looked around to see where his attacker was, Irileth cast shock spells on it and the guards continued to fire arrows. One of them drew his swords and began hammering blows on the opposite side of the dragon from Dardeh.
Dardeh’s arms were beginning to ache as he struck, again and again, the guard’s dying screams echoing in his head. “Die!” he bellowed. “Die, you monstrous thing! Leave these people alone!”
Finally, one of his scimitars struck so deep that he couldn’t pull it out again. The dragon threw its head up and back, and roared.
Dardeh heard “Dovahkiin? Nooo!”
The dragon crashed to earth, dead. Dardeh grabbed his scimitar with both hands, planted one foot on the side of the dragon, and pulled as hard as he could; it came loose, and he fell onto his backside beside the corpse.
Then he scrambled to his feet and backed away as fast as he could. The body was beginning to burn.
“Get back! Stand clear of it!” he heard Irileth shout.
But he couldn’t move.
The body was burning, crackling, and a strange light was swirling up and around it, reaching toward Dardeh. He stood, transfixed, watching it. Then, just as the blue light in Bleak Falls Barrow had done, the light entered him, somehow, with a booming sound that he wasn’t certain anyone else could hear. It washed over him, and flowed into him, filling him with a sense of life, of power, and of knowledge. He shivered and burned and closed his eyes and wanted to cry out in fear, except that he wasn’t afraid, he was simply… in awe, and he didn’t know what was happening to him except that somehow he was … more … than he had been just a moment earlier.
Finally the light subsided, the sound quieted; and when he opened his eyes Dardeh found that he was standing beside the skeleton of the dragon, its flesh having been burned entirely away from its bones. He rubbed his eyes and shook his head and looked around at the guards and Irileth, all staring at him in disbelief.
“Dragonborn!” One of the guards breathed.
“What?” Dardeh stared at him. You can’t mean this.
Dardeh knew what it meant. His mother had taught him all the old stories. He had heard the tales of those born with the dragon blood; of the lineage, some said, of Tiber Septim himself – Talos as he had been when he was a human. The Dragonborn could slay dragons and steal their souls. The Dragonborn could speak in the language of dragons without being trained for years, the way the Graybeards in High Hrothgar had been.
“Try to Shout!” the same guard urged him.
Dardeh began to shudder.
Try to Shout?
And somewhere, from deep within him, the word he had learned in Bleak Falls Barrow mixed with what he already knew how to do, that deep, dark battle cry that had seen him through so many fights, and with the power he had taken from the dragon; and he leaned forward toward the dragon’s skeleton and roared, the power flowing up and through him, out toward the sunlight.
“FUS!”
Dust flew. The enormous skeleton moved back five, ten feet.
“A Shout! That must have been it! You really are Dragonborn!”
Dardeh heard the chattering voices behind him. He knew, with part of his mind, that they were talking about him, arguing about whether the Dragonborn was a reality or just a tale, whether it even mattered since he clearly could kill a dragon, and as usual the slurs and defensiveness surrounding Nord traditions. He didn’t care. All he knew was that somewhere, deep inside him, Fus was a part of him now. He just stared at the skeleton.
Then he closed his eyes and prayed once more. Talos guide me. Please. I don’t know what to do.
He was a Nord who had killed a dragon with his Redguard father’s swords, and who had done a thing nobody had done since the last Age.
He started up the road to Whiterun, silent, leaving the arguing guards behind.