It was absurdly dark when Chip returned to the Hunting Grounds – a thick, red, silent darkness he could almost taste, as though someone had thrown buckets of blood across the faces of the moons. It was good that he knew the area between the landing pad and the shrines fairly well now. Still, it was a bit like stepping from blinding sunlight into a cave. He moved very slowly and carefully down toward the west side of the path, hoping his eyes would adjust soon.
The shrine clearing was empty. He considered the two shrines on the left and decided that the outside one – the vulture – would be his target. Birds might be quicker than the enormous swine he’d fought before, but they were much smaller; and he could definitely do with an easier set of prey. To be safe, though, he poisoned his bow before passing under the arch into the long passage west. He had to get to the birds before he could kill them, and experience suggested that he might meet any number of foes before that.
He kept just off the path, moving instead behind the trees and boulders along the side but stepping back onto the path every few moments to peer ahead. It wasn’t too long before his caution paid off; movements at the limit of his senses had him drawing his bow, slowly and carefully. The arrow he loosed struck home, and the groan told him that target had been another human hunter. There was a second voice, though, that cried out as the victim fell. Chip scuttled back into the undergrowth and up a boulder, to prepare his bow again and wait. The problem, of course, was that while he was well-hidden he couldn’t see where his adversaries were, or how many there might be. He frowned, and stopped to consider his options.
When he’d returned to Skyrim, it had been only for long enough to stow the heavy armor he’d picked up, and to test out some of the staves he’d taken as trophies. One of them had, in his testing, conjured up first a werebear and then a werewolf. Either creature would do to draw out the enemy and create a distraction. He aimed the staff toward the open path and fired it. The purplish circle of conjuration magic produced a wereboar: huge, ugly, and smelly.
As Chip had hoped, both a werebear and a hunter attacked it, moving closer and into view for a moment before retreating into the foliage. He heard the two were-creatures exchanging snarls; the wereboar flew backward and had to struggle to regain its footing. Chip used that moment to fire toward the hunter but groaned as he realized he’d used one of his special arrows and conjured a wolf.
The wolf, though, pulled the hunter’s attention away from the other battle. He backed into the clear, raising his two-handed weapon overhead for what was going to be a huge blow against the wolf. Chip fired at the hunter; his arrow struck at the same moment the wolf leapt forward to snap at the man, and the weapon clattered to the ground as the man dropped dead.
Chip swiveled left atop the boulder to locate the werebear, only to discover another human hunter in the mix. The man rushed toward Chip; but coming as he had from the relative brightness of the clear path into the deep shadows, he was effectively blinded.
“Where are you?” the man growled as he stepped within a couple of arms’ lengths of Chip’s bow.
“Right here,” Chip announced, loosing the shot he’d readied from the bow he’d prepared with poison. The hunter, already wounded, dropped like a stone as soon as the arrow struck him.
Chip heard the werebear roaring, and froze for what felt like several lifetimes waiting for it to become quiet again before slipping down off the boulder to examine his kills. He retrieved as many arrows as he could and had a sip of water before pushing tentatively down the path again, bow at the ready. He hadn’t gone far before once again the shadows moving across the path ahead gave him a target. After striking it solidly once, Chip planted himself in the middle of the path and waited until the werebear was close enough for him to see its glimmering eyes; then he buried an arrow into its chest.
He continued west, watching the cliff beside him and spotting at least one perch he could use in a scrape. It was still quiet, and he’d almost become casual about pushing through the forest when an oddly-shaped figure ahead of him stopped him dead in his tracks. At first he thought it might be another human hunter, wearing some sort of long coat and a light-colored fur helm; but then he realized that no hunter would look that tall at this distance. Furthermore, the figure seemed to hold no weapon.
He backed into the deepest shadows and crept forward by inches until at last he was able to climb atop a boulder and get a good look at what lay ahead. As had been the case on the east side of Hircine’s realm, there was a clearing: a junction, of sorts, between the paths leading to the werevultures’ territory and that of the werebears, each of those paths marked by a trilith. In the center of the clearing was a huge boulder, near which Chip spotted two more hunters and the enormous figure he’d seen earlier. He stared at it, his mind running through all the possibilities, and came to a horrified conclusion.
That’s not a wereboar. It’s not a wolf, and it’s definitely not a werebear.
That’s a damned werevulture. I thought the vultures would be, I don’t know – vulture sized.
I am a fool.
Given the number of adversaries, Chip decided to use the staff once more. He tried to get a good look at what he’d conjured up – a bear, perhaps – but chaos reigned as soon as it appeared. He shot once, at what looked like a werebear; but a second later saw the gigantic vulture heading straight for him. He turned to flee and yelped as an arrow caught him in the left shoulder; it didn’t go in very far thanks to his armor, but still he was grateful to have noticed the escape route up the side of the cliff. He jumped up it, yanked the arrow out of his shoulder and healed himself before trying to spot the enemy.
“When I find you, you’re dead.” The hunter moved out of the trees, his ward spell shimmering.
That’s just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Why announce your position when you know the guy you’re hunting is just as good with a bow as you are?
Chip aimed at the ward spell and waited. As the hunter stepped fully out from behind the shelter of a tree he shot and killed him.
Not far behind him, a werevulture approached Chip’s position. He swallowed hard as the thing moved closer, trying not to panic. What he’d initially taken for a light fur helm was in fact the white feathers of the beast’s head and long, craned neck. It was the height of a tall Nord at its shoulders, and half again as wide; and its beak looked deadly. Feathers spread back from outstretched limbs with hagraven-like claws at their tips, in a disquieting combination of human arms and bird wings.
There were two werebeasts, as well as one more hunter, converging on the spot the first hunter had gone down. The man was easy to take out; like his fellow, he made enough noise to make targeting him a simple affair. Once he was down, the werevulture and its companion, a werewolf, moved away and out of sight.
Chip once again waited until it was silent before moving forward. His heart raced; there were at least two wounded werebeasts somewhere just in front of him and he could see neither. A blow or two from either of them would kill him, and he didn’t know from which direction to expect the attack. He pulled out his staff again and fired it; and then grinned as what would have, under normal circumstances, seemed like a huge brown cave bear ran ahead.
As he’d hoped, the bear flushed out the two werebeasts. He landed a solid hit on the vulture, but the three creatures were so entangled in their battle and moving so quickly that they were back in the deep brush again almost immediately. Chip moved back up onto the side of the cliff as it got eerily quiet; he didn’t smell a fresh corpse, and he didn’t hear anything. Suddenly a purple ball of magical energies flared up, far ahead of him. The bear he’d conjured had led the werebeasts on a chase out of the woods near Chip and into the open before falling.
The werewolf approached his position first, undoubtedly drawn by his scent. Chip smelled the werewolf, too; it was badly injured, so if he could just get a decent opening it would be easy to finish off. He extended all his senses and tracked the animal as it neared him and then turned, moving away toward the clearing. He slipped back down to ground level and followed, carefully, climbing back atop a rock when he was just outside the junction.
The werewolf was near the central boulder. But as Chip lined up a shot, the werevulture appeared from his left and lurched its way between him and the werewolf. Chip fired at it instead; and, as he’d hoped, it had been badly injured already. It collapsed onto the pine needles and was still.
Chip raised his bow again, and his gaze, and was horrified. While the werewolf he’d been hunting was still in sight at the far side of the clearing, two other vultures had moved into range.
Damn it. Back up to three. I just wanted to take out that werewolf. It’s got to be almost dead already.
He retreated to safety again and watched the werevultures criss-cross the area, looking for him. They were huge, and deadly, but they clearly weren’t very bright. He used one of his wolf arrows to place a distraction on the trail just beneath him.
To his complete astonishment, the werewolf and one of the werevultures chased the conjured wolf across Chip’s field of vision to his right, back toward the beast shrines. The other werevulture followed; and then stopped, just opposite Chip.
May as well take a potshot at this guy while I have the chance.
He could tell that he struck it, because he did not hear the arrow clattering off rocks, thudding into a tree, or thumping into the soft pine-needle floor of the passage. But the werevulture didn’t die; he could see its slight motions as it breathed. He shrugged, and fired again three times in quick succession. At the third arrow there was a slight moan as the beast breathed its last and sank to the ground dead. Chip descended to ground level and crossed the path, stopping just short of the corpse.
That’s the ugliest thing I’ve seen in a long time. And it smells bad, too.
Well, now what?
He could turn back. He could follow the two weres that had run back to the shrines, and make sure they were gone. Or he could continue down the path to the west, to find the alpha werevulture.
An involuntary shudder rippled up his spine. It was hard to contemplate what it might be like to face an entire group of these creatures. They might be huge and ungainly, but from what he’d seen they were very, very fast. And he was pretty sure he didn’t want to be anywhere near their beaks.
He was afraid of the vultures, and hated being afraid. So he gritted his teeth and turned left, down the path to the junction, past the dead werevulture, and through the trilith to uncharted territory. If he was here to prove himself, by the gods he intended to prove himself.
A few minutes later he slowed, stunned by what he saw. There was a huge, pointed arch partially visible in the ruddy mist; unlike the ones he’d seen earlier, it was intact. In the midst of the tall pines it was difficult to get a sense of its scale – at least until his eyes were drawn by motion on the forest floor. There were at least two figures there, he thought, if not more, and all of them looked incredibly tiny beneath the arch.
Chip took aim at them and released an arrow. His first target had been a human, judging by the shape that fell; but he hadn’t quite killed him. He didn’t dare stop to admire his own handiwork, though; for the other shape he’d seen was a werevulture, which rushed down the path toward Chip. There was another stone ramp of sorts directly opposite him, so he dashed across the path and scrambled up it to get in a shot at the vulture.
As it headed toward him, so did three more humans.
Where are they coming from? Is Hircine determined to kill me off? Is that it?
Or maybe they’re just others who think, like me, that they’re the best. Well I’m going to prove them all wrong.
He managed to move even higher up the cliffside, and turned to see one of the hunters beneath him. The man was wreathed in the glow of some magic and positively reeked of rage. Chip had been near other men who had that same energy, before; usually from patrols engaged with an enemy. Whatever it was, it made the man easy to track; so Chip readied a shot and lobbed it downhill just as the hunter tried to duck behind a tree. The arrow had plenty of distance to pick up momentum and slammed solidly into him, killing him instantly.
“Is anybody there?” another of the hunters yelled.
“Well obviously there is, you moron,” Chip said aloud, hoping the hunter wouldn’t hear him at this distance and yet wishing in part that his disgust would get through. “Arrows don’t just appear out of thin air. You’re being hunted.”
He changed positions, looking for the other men, but they were well concealed by the nearly uniform brown hues of the forest, overlaid with red moonlight. What he did find was a werevulture. Its white head drew Chip’s gaze like a beacon; and two quick arrows later, it was dead. Another came waddling across the open spaces between trees. Chip chanced a shot at it, but his arrow clattered off the rocks; he could hear the hunter and knew the man was in the same general area, but couldn’t spot him.
They’re behind that rock. Time to get a better position. Or… I could insert a little bear into the festivities.
The bear was exactly what he needed. Manifesting in one of the small open spots between rocks, it roared at the hunters and drew them out immediately.
He changed positions yet again and took another few shots at the vulture, whose white head made it hard to miss. He missed the hunter, in spite of coming very close. And then the activity moved behind a tall rock outcropping, and the bear’s growls ceased. Chip scrambled down the side of the hill and up onto the outcropping, trying to get a bead on his prey; but all he saw was the vulture’s huge form between branches as it ran back toward the junction. He could only assume that the final hunter had followed suit.
Again he was faced with the choice: follow them back and finish them off, or push on toward the alpha’s territory. This time, Chip sighed and eased his way into the shadows on the path’s southern side, following the prey. At the clearing’s edge he waited, peering into the darkness, until motion caught his attention. It was one of the hunters, wearing light-colored animal furs; and a single arrow caught the man by surprise and finished him.
Chip had just enough time to pivot slightly to his right and draw again, for the werevulture was on a beeline for him. He shot once, then turned and fled to higher ground once again, the vulture literally breathing down his neck. Inexplicably, though, as soon as he’d leapt up onto the rocks it ran away, back across the clearing and up to – but not into – the foliage at its edge. It was a simple matter for Chip to send two arrows across the open space and into the vulture.
Good. I won’t be surprised on my way back.
He’d gotten past the corpses of his previous kills, well down the long passage toward werevulture territory, when he spotted the next pair. As expected, they followed him after his first surprise shot, until he climbed up onto the cliff face; then they turned away, leaving themselves wide open.
I don’t understand this behavior. Are these not men, within their beast form? Do they not reason? I know I do, even if I’m not at my best as a wolf. But surely I would not turn my back on an adversary who had the high ground. Would I?
He was able to kill the nearer of the two vultures with a couple of quick arrows across the distance. The other started toward him. Once he had a stable footing atop the rocks, he drew and aimed. He sent his next arrow zipping across the distance between them and skewering the beast’s heart.
I wonder if that was the alpha.
No, couldn’t be. I’m not even near their territory yet. Must have been scouts.
He headed down the pathway flooded with ruddy moonlight. The forest and the scattered boulders on either side of it were thinning out dramatically with every step he took; though he tried to stay in the shadows it was obvious he would soon be out in the open. Just before the passage became another huge box canyon, he reached a place in which the knee-high grass was a lush, beautiful green, smelling of growing things and rich brown soil; and he was just about to run out into it in joy when a random movement stopped him short. Yet another pair of werevultures stood directly in the center of the passage, blocking his access to the canyon.
He scurried back into the deepest shadows he could find, and got behind one of the boulders for cover. As he expected, the vultures followed him for a short distance and then turned back toward the canyon; but he stepped out from behind the boulder and aimed toward the sky, sending a very long shot up the passage and dropping it into one of the pair. They turned back toward him and started running; he slipped back into the darkness and took a position between some of the largest pines.
The problem, at this point, was that he’d killed so many werevultures and hunters on his way that it was nearly impossible to tell which shapes on the path were the living creatures and which were those corpses that had simply sunk to the earth, semi-upright, when he’d killed them. He took aim at one of them, but hesitated; then he swung right and looked at another, taking aim on it. Finally, a third werevulture stepped out from behind the shorter shrubs and walked toward Chip’s left side. This one was definitely alive; so he let fly once, twice, and a third arrow finally brought the beast down, taking up a lifelike position just behind one of the other corpses. The remaining live werevulture was just a bit farther down the path. When he fired at it, it headed toward him; so he slipped across to the other cliff face and turned to shoot it again.
To his horror, it became obvious that there were two more werevultures, not just one. Both were very close to him. He was so flustered by this realization that he missed four shots in a row. The only good thing to be said about it was that the arrows flew far beyond the vultures, drawing them back down the path away from Chip.
As he followed them, his heart kept skipping beats; he would round a boulder and find himself face-to-face with a white-topped hulk, only to realize that it was a vulture’s carcass. A few moments later he would draw his bow, nearly releasing one of his arrows into the corpse of another. Finally, even missing several more shots, he was able to drop a long-distance arrow into one of the vultures followed a moment later by one that pierced the skinny neck of the second.
He stood and shuddered for a moment, taking another drink of water and wiping his brow with the back of his hand. He’d been afraid, but he’d pushed through it and persevered, and that was good. None of the corpses he checked as he made his way through the lane, though, was that of the alpha werevulture. It seemed to him as though there were more of these creatures than there had been of the others. And perhaps that made sense. Perhaps, like all birds, these gigantic ones gathered in large flocks. It stood to reason.
Glad this wasn’t the path I chose on the first visit, though.
Chip pushed past the lush green area at the end of the lane once more, and gasped.
The undergrowth disappeared, leaving just a soil and needle-covered surface beneath his feet. There were only a few more widely-spaced trees ahead of him, certainly not enough to offer any real cover.
And in the center of the canyon was a thing he never would have expected to see here in Hircine’s realm. A pair of huge, pointed arches sat at either end of a graceful stone bridge, over what he could not tell. Between him and the bridge, but also at either side of each of the arches, were great stone carvings, effigies like the stylized dragons so common in Skyrim, but these more closely resembling birds.
What is this?
He moved across the open space toward the remnants of some long-fallen trees, glancing back the other way to be sure there were no adversaries waiting to leap out at him. All he saw was a dead stag placed like an offering before the nearest of the effigies. He crossed back to the right, glancing up to see that the approach to the bridge was actually a wide, and thus far empty, staircase. Still, even as quiet as it was, Chip didn’t dare simply walk up the steps. Instead, he moved past the stag offering and out onto the boulders to the bridge’s right.
Looking back at the bridge, he saw a vulture sitting quietly on it, far enough down the span that he’d never have seen it from the staircase until too late. He shot it once, twice; and it descended the stairs out of his sight. He moved cautiously up next to the bridge and waited, and within a few moments the werevulture appeared again, crossing in front of him. He snapped one more arrow at the creature; and it, like many of the others, simply sank to the ground, still semi-upright like a feathery monument to its former self.
Chip had no desire to be surprised by what was on the other side of that bridge. He took a moment to search his pack and found that he’d brought a weak invisibility potion with him. It wouldn’t protect him for long, but potentially long enough for him to get across the span. He downed the potion and crept up the stairs onto what he had expected to see, a nice wide bridge surface. What he had thought was a pair of arches was actually four of them: one at each end of the stairways and one each on either side of the central gap.
Then he came to the center.
It was narrow, no wider than the central span of Valtheim Towers and certainly not as well protected. There was only a tiny lip of stone on either side to alert a person’s feet that they were at the edge. And below – well, Chip looked down, carefully, into a dizzying drop, a sheer, jagged crack in the surface that led down to a bottom he could not see. His head swam for a moment, and he jerked his gaze back up and ahead, so as not to lose balance. He wasn’t in any danger; but had he slipped off the side he didn’t know how long he would fall.
And he didn’t want to find out.
There was a wide crack in the stone bridge’s bed, not too far before the end of it; while the structure seemed sound enough the half-inch wide crack was enough to have Chip’s heart pounding. He felt certain the potion was about to run out. There was nothing waiting on the wide, safe stone platform ahead of him, so he darted forward and threw himself onto it in a rolling motion, just as the magic expired around him. He sat quietly for a moment, breathing slowly and carefully and waiting until he felt settled before moving.
At the end of the platform was a wide staircase that echoed the one he’d come up to get there. It led down to ground level, where there was a short, flat expanse before another set of steps led to a raised platform. A lone arch just before the canyon wall at the far side of it served as a backdrop to a huge construction of logs, leaves and hay. Had these been normal-sized birds, in a river canyon in Skyrim, Chip would have immediately recognized it as a vulture’s nest; but this was bigger than the entire footprint of Froki’s cabin in the Jeralls.
There were at least two werevultures there, possibly three – Chip couldn’t tell for the mist – and he knew one of them had to be the alpha. He didn’t want to take them on from the bridge. There were far too many opportunities there for him to stumble backward, or sideways, off the stonework and down to his death. He knew he’d always been taking this chance: if he were to die here in Hircine’s realm, neither his parents nor his sister would ever know what had happened to him. But there was something far more immediate about the danger, to his mind, with an unsurvivable fall just steps behind him. Instead, he hopped down onto the rocks to the left of the bridge and readied his very best arrows. He took careful aim at the bird just in front of the nest, for it seemed likely to him that it could be the alpha claiming the nesting rights.
Let my aim be true and my arrow strong, Lord Hircine. I take this bird in your honor.
It seemed like a lifetime that the arrow flew across that expanse. Whether it was the element of surprise or the voiceless prayer that helped, he didn’t know; but it finally buried itself in the bird’s chest and, to Chip’s complete delight, killed the beast. He took no time to celebrate, though; there was another werevulture at either side of the corpse. He shot twice more, and then realized there were three more werevultures coming for him, not just two. He backed down from the high spot he’d been on and crept as near the edge of the ravine as he dared, turning back to see the three of them clustered in the spot where he’d been just a moment before.
The next few minutes were much the same as the long trek down the path to this place had been. He would wait until the vultures massed in an open spot – they seemed to favor the nest platform – and shoot one or two arrows into them. Then he would change positions. He marveled at how resilient they were, for even after two arrow strikes they would not fall. He also marveled at how stupid they were, easily drawn away from him by a shot fired over their heads into the open. One of them got uncomfortably close, once; so he used his staff to summon a werewolf, and an arrow to conjure a regular wolf. While the two conjurations fought the werevultures he took every shot he could manage. One of them went down on the rocks. The second ran back to stand in front of the nest, making itself an easy target and falling to what was the third arrow in its body. And finally, just as he was about to drop his bow in exhaustion, Chip saw the last werevulture heading toward the front of the nest platform and made a lucky shot that finished it off.
Chip was exhausted. Dragging. His arms were on fire from so much shooting in such a relatively short period. He would come back here and explore again, some day; but right now he ran to gather the alpha werevulture’s heart and make a beeline back toward the shrine. There were no more foes blocking his way back, this time; nothing to interrupt him as he placed the great heart on its spike.
He sighed in relief.
“Well, I thought I might do the last bit today as well. But no. I may be Hircine’s hunter – maybe – but right now what I really want is a mug of warm mead and a long sleep.”
He made it back to the summoning circle and saluted the area with a grin before blowing the great hunting horn to take himself back to Skyrim.