I’m completely lost, Dardeh thought, looking around at the steam rising from green pools of mineral-rich water. I missed my turn somewhere. This is not Ivarstead. The ground was hard-packed, mostly bare, with a few evergreens struggling to keep their grip on the soil and, judging by the number of dead and dying limbs on them, losing the struggle.
The roar erupted from beyond the hill where he was standing, just out of sight behind the trees. Dardeh groaned.
“Well, damn,” he muttered. “I can’t just leave the thing flapping around out there, someone could get killed. I wonder if I can take it down by myself.”
He drew his bow and moved slowly to the top of the rise, scanning for any kind of movement. Off to his left, it was, and at a fair distance, circling around the top of a hill. Dardeh crept toward it, trying to stay behind rocks, below the crests of dirt mounds. There wasn’t a lot of cover, truly, and it made him nervous.
The closer he got, the more obvious it became that the abnormally sharp peak of the dragon’s hill wasn’t a peak at all; it was a curved stone wall with a prominent, carved top. It’s just like the one in Bleak Falls Barrow, he thought. Another one of the dragon words? I wonder if I can get close enough to it to find out. He took another few steps toward it, and then immediately regretted it.
The dragon spotted him and flew toward him, spewing gouts of frost.
“No!” he yelped. Dardeh looked behind him and spotted a clump of three trees. They weren’t very large trees, and there was nothing else around them to add protection, but they were the only cover anywhere within sprinting distance. He made for them.
The dragon was faster. The frost hit him from behind, and he howled as he felt himself freezing, his legs fighting his commands to move. He gasped, trying to catch his breath, fumbling in his pack for the few healing potions he knew were in it.
I’m not going to make it. If it slows me down any more my heart is going to stop, too. I’m going to die right here.
The dragon went hurtling over his head, its momentum carrying it past him; it banked left and headed back toward the word wall. That was what saved him; the dragon was too good at what it did best.
He got in as close as he could to the largest of the trees, wishing that he’d been able to buy that frost resistance potion from Arcadia back in Whiterun. It had been right there on the shelf, too, and he’d looked it over but had decided to buy more healing potions with the pitiful few coins he had. He didn’t really want to use those potions now; he really wanted to save them for an emergency.
Dardeh knew the most rudimentary of healing spells. He had only a bit of magic in him, just barely enough to cast the spell, but his mother had insisted that he learn that one spell, “just in case.” He had used it exactly one time before when he’d gotten careless in the mine and chipped out a large chunk of rock that had landed squarely on his ankle, nearly mangling it. He’d been glad of that spell then, and he was glad of it now as it spread soothing warmth through him. He was still hurting by the time he ran out of energy. But he was alive, and that was more than he’d expected just a few moments earlier.
The dragon was howling, shooting gouts of frost down at the ground at some target Dardeh couldn’t see. Well, he thought, I might have considered getting out of here and coming back when I was better equipped, but someone is having a rough go of it over there and I can’t just leave them. The only possible approach he could see was to work around the base of the hill and come at the dragon from the far side of it. He might not make it in time, but there wasn’t another way; he had to try. He stood and dashed for the cover of the rocky back side of the hill.
It was fairly slow going. The dragon spotted the movement as he ran, and flew overhead spewing frost; but Dardeh flattened himself against a large boulder and managed to dodge the worst of it. Still, he had to heal himself before continuing. The dragon made several more passes at him. Once, it stopped in midair and hovered, close enough that Dardeh could hear it breathing. He gritted his teeth but couldn’t help crying out as the frost reached around the curves of the stone and sapped his strength. Gods, but that hurts, he thought as he cast his spell yet again. Worst of all, his steel armor seemed to retain the cold, even after the damage had stopped. Much more of it and he was going to start shivering uncontrollably and be just as useless as if he’d gotten blasted by the dragon directly.
The beast left him alone for a few moments after that, and he was able to run around the hill to a better vantage point. There was the dragon, strafing its targets: a giant and two enormous mammoths. The giant was bellowing back at the dragon, shaking its club in the air, seemingly oblivious to the damage it had to be taking.
The dragon landed, snarling and snapping. The giant ran forward with a speed Dardeh had never quite grown accustomed to; nothing that large should be able to move that fast, but giants could, and so could the mammoths they herded. Dardeh stood and began firing arrows as quickly as he could draw; steel arrows, this time, purchased from Adrienne Avenicci in Whiterun. They weren’t the best arrows in the world but they did more damage than iron ones, and he could hear the dragon grunt whenever one of them buried itself between its scales.
The dragon snapped and thrashed its tail at the mammoths. It was fading, that much was clear. Dardeh drew his swords and rushed forward, attacking its wings. The beast turned its head toward him and without thinking he shouted at it – FUS erupting from deep inside him as though he’d been born to use the word. The dragon’s head snapped backwards, caught in the force, giving Dardeh just enough time to leap onto its neck. He slashed and beat on it, and then stood, stabbing down into its brain, just as the giant’s club smashed into its shoulder. Dardeh vaulted down from the dragon’s neck and rolled clear as it crashed to the ground.
As it had happened in Whiterun, the dragon’s carcass began to burn and crackle, and the light and power rushed into Dardeh. He shook, again, overwhelmed by the enormity of the sensation and wondering yet again why this was happening to him. But he didn’t have time to ponder it more deeply.
The giant must have thought he’d stolen its kill. It raised its club, swinging it in circles, and bellowed at him.
Oh damn. Get away.
Dardeh sprinted as hard as he could for the hill behind him. There was a clear path up it on one side; but if he went there, he knew the giant was going to follow and would overtake him. Instead, he bolted for the rugged terrain he’d hidden in earlier, and scrambled up and between the rocks, where he crouched, gasping for air, trying to keep his panting as quiet as he could. He heard the giant bellowing; and then, after a few minutes, he heard the thudding of its footsteps as it lost interest and wandered back to its mammoths.
Dardeh stood, and worked his way to the top of the hill.
“There it is,” he breathed, as the word wall began to glow and radiate the same blue light he’d seen in Bleak Falls Barrow. He approached, and reached out to touch the wall, this time, feeling the grooved stone as the word flowed into him with light and sound. Fo. The word was Fo, and it meant frost. That dragon had been shouting Fo, and something else besides that Dardeh had been too distracted to pick out.
FO.
He practiced it once, and watched a cloud of frozen air shoot out across the stone before him. He grinned, and started down over the hill to find his way to Ivarstead.
______
High Hrothgar was a long way up.
Dardeh had wondered, a couple of times, whether he was really going to make it all the way, between the cold and the extra weight of the supplies he was carting on behalf of a nice man named Klimmek, from Ivarstead. And then there’d been a couple of bears and a frost troll. That troll had given him one of the toughest fights he’d ever been a party to; it had a long reach and hit hard, and only a fortunately-timed Fus and a quick scramble up the side of the mountain had given Dardeh an opening to take it down, from above, with his bow. He was carrying its hefty pelt now, as well, and was more than delighted to drop Klimmek’s package in the chest just outside the monastery’s imposing front entrance.
He sighed in relief and stepped inside. The place was huge, and gray, with lofty ceilings and gorgeous carved stone. It was also silent, and seemingly empty. He looked around, cleared his throat, and was about to call out a hello when an elderly man with a gray beard, in dark gray robes with a dark gray hood, moved silently out from a side hallway and down the half-flight of stairs toward Dardeh. Three other silent figures whispered into the hall from other entrances. It was a bit eerie.
“So,” said one of them. “A Dragonborn appears, at this moment in the turning of the age.”
Dardeh looked between the four figures, wondering what he should say. Yeah, it’s me? How do I speak to these people? And then he started speaking, and a torrent of words came rushing out. These men know about me, he thought. Maybe they can make sense of it all.
“I’m here because you called for the Dragonborn. It seems that’s what I am, at least that’s what the people in Whiterun seem to believe. I have no idea why this has happened. I surely didn’t do it on purpose. And I’ve had two dragons, now, which I’ve been a part of killing and then I… absorbed their power. I know two of the words now. I’ve used one of them and I’ve practiced the other. I don’t know how I do it; it just… happens. Can you help me understand this?”
The man nodded. “First let us see if you truly are Dragonborn. Let us taste of your voice.”
Dardeh was annoyed. Call me all the way up the hill and not believe me? I’ll show you my voice, all right.
“FUS!”
The man who had been speaking staggered to his right and one of the others, standing directly in the line of Dardeh’s voice, staggered backward and actually cried out. The first of them approached Dardeh.
“Dragonborn. It is you. Welcome to High Hrothgar. I am Master Arngeir. I speak for the Graybeards. Now, Dragonborn, why have you come here?”
Because you called me? What kind of question is that? Dardeh thought. What he said, though, was “I’m hoping that you can help me learn what has happened to me.”
The next minutes – how many he could not judge — were a blur of words, both in their own language and the language of dragons. He had the inborn ability, they said, to focus his energy into a Thu’um – a Shout. They taught him “Ro,” meaning “balance,” and Master Einarth somehow surrounded him with light and energy of the kind he’d absorbed from the dragons, the energy he needed to understand Ro. They made him practice combining Fus and Ro to strike targets; he was embarrassed when he not only dispelled the targets but sent baskets on the other side of the hall flying through the air. Unrelenting Force, they called it, and he needed another word to fully master it. Those two words by themselves were considerably stronger than just the one, and Dardeh was sure the Shout would be useful to him.
Then they took him outside, to the courtyard, where Master Borri taught him “Wuld,” or “whirlwind,” and gave him the understanding of it as Einarth had done with Ro. He stood beside Arngeir, waiting for Master Borri to Shout open a gate across the snowy expanse, then shouted “WULD!” and found himself propelled through the gate, stopping only because there was a large stone pillar blocking the steep drop down the mountainside.
I can’t believe I just did that. That was the fastest I’ve ever moved, in my whole life.
One of the drawbacks of being a bulky man was that he wasn’t particularly quick on his feet, and being able to move like the wind was… It was exciting. Exhilarating. He turned back toward the Graybeards, grinning.
Master Arngeir looked properly impressed, and slightly subdued, as if he hadn’t expected to have reason to be impressed. “Your quick mastery of a new Thu’um is … astonishing. I’d heard the stories of the abilities of the Dragonborn, but to see it for myself…”
Dardeh ran his hand over his head. “I… don’t know how I do it. I’ve always been able to use my energy like that, in a battle, shouting – but I don’t know how. I just do it. And I never had dragon words until now.”
“Dragons have the inborn ability to use the Voice, and to absorb the power of their slain enemies. A few mortals are born with similar abilities.” He raised one eyebrow, as though he’d trodden this path many a time in the past. “Whether it is a gift or a curse has been a matter of long debate. But there is no question that you are one of those. What you have already learned in a few days took even the most gifted of us years to achieve.”
Arngeir shook his head. “But do not let your easy mastery of the Voice tempt you into the arrogance of power. That has been the downfall of many who came before you seeking knowledge.”
Something about that tickled Dardeh’s mind. Who did he mean? “Are there other Dragonborn, then?”
“Whether you are the only Dragonborn is not ours to know. You are the only one who has been revealed so far.”
All right, Dardeh thought. I am one of a kind? I don’t know how I feel about that. What am I supposed to do with all of this?
And then Arngeir tasked him with retrieving the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller, in the ancient barrow of Ustengrav, to serve as the final test of his abilities. Dardeh was slightly annoyed again. He had the ability to use Fus, and Ro, and Wuld; and Fo, although they’d not heard him use it. He had the ability to absorb a dragon’s power. Why did he need to prove himself?
Dar. Be patient. You’ll know why when the time is right.
Dardeh smiled to himself, and sighed. Yes, Ma. Don’t be tempted into the arrogance of power, he thought. I don’t know what else is out there, or why I can suddenly do this, and I need to be open to learn. He suddenly remembered Ulfric Stormcloak as he’d looked, sitting in the back of the wagon, his mouth gagged. This kind of power would be a terrible thing in the hands of the wrong person. He hoped that Ulfric was actually an honorable man. For all I know he could shout me off the side of the mountain, he thought. But he is not Dragonborn. I am. I still don’t know what it means.
“Thank you, Master Arngeir,” he said, nodding. “I’ll be back.”
He took a moment to munch on a piece of bread and some cheese, and then started on the long trek back down to Ivarstead.