The werewolf ran north along the road that hugged the western bank of the Darkwater River, searching for prey. He didn’t know how long it would be before the change back to human form would come but in the meantime he was restless, the desire to hunt still coursing through him in spite of the carnage he’d just left behind.
It was an exceptionally dark night; and yet somehow in spite of their waning phase the moons had once again managed to exert their influence over Chip’s inner nature and force him into this, his alternate form. He’d felt the change coming this time, and had been able to escape Windhelm before being spotted by its guards or people on the road. He’d changed somewhere on the banks of the river, cursing his inability to control the transformations but grateful that he was out of the way. After that he’d crossed the road, staying just above it in the hills.
But he was hungry. And when he’d crossed over the White River near Fort Amol he’d been practically maddened by the faint scent of humans and mer nearby. There’d been nobody outside the fort. Across the road, though, was a cave. He knew that cave. People were in that cave – bandits, no less; and they had no reason to expect mercy from a werewolf. He ran to the edge of the small pool that fronted the entrance and skirted around it, sniffing the air eagerly as he moved into the cavern.
What had followed was nothing short of slaughter. It wasn’t that he’d taken no damage. Not at all; in fact, he’d been injured badly several times, and only the ring from Solstheim had kept him alive while he searched for more victims to consume. But he’d run through the place killing each and every occupant including, in one room far at the back of the cavern complex, a saber cat that had been caged up and was none too pleased with the commotion once the bandits nearby let it out.
He’d eaten them all.
With each kill, with every body he opened, every heart he ripped from its moorings, each bit of muscle and sinew he swallowed, he felt stronger. He could feel Hircine’s attention on him, could feel his favor increasing. When he’d been on his way back out of the cavern, having not found a key that could unlock the back exit, he’d discovered something new about his condition.
He thought he’d killed all of the bandits, but as he entered the enormous, water-filled cavern across which only a narrow bridge of rock remained, he looked up and saw two more patrolling a platform set high against the wall opposite him. They saw him, as well, and began running toward the far side of it to drop down in front of him.
He roared up at them.
To his utter surprise, there were suddenly two more figures directly beside him. One was a wolf, snarling and snapping at the bandits approaching them; but the other was a werewolf, tall and dark-furred. Both of them had a red aura about them, and both of them attacked the bandits the moment they jumped down onto the pathway. It hadn’t taken long for the pack to dispatch the bandits. By the time they were done, the two other wolves had begun to flicker, and fade; and they howled over the corpses before they disappeared. Chip moved in to stand over the bodies in their stead.
And he had eaten them all.
He’d emerged from the cave feeling much more satisfied than he could remember in his short existence as a werewolf. He also felt much more in touch with his inner self, more able to consider his next movements than he had before. He needed to get home, to make certain that he had enough arrows and potions to embark on the hunting spree Hircine had asked of him. With that in mind, he’d turned right, heading southeast along the roadway toward Darkwater Crossing.
A wolf howled a warning to him as he neared the village, for there was a lone soldier patrolling the road just outside its entrance. Chip tried to step aside, to pass the soldier without incident, but he’d forgotten in that moment that he was a werewolf. The soldier attacked, as he should have expected. He swiped hard at the man and sent him flying, then finished him off and consumed him. As the soldier should have expected.
He needed to continue up the road that doubled back to the west and climbed up the escarpment toward Nilheim. From there he would head east again, past the old Rift Watchtower and up the hill to his home. It was a steep climb, up the switchback, and he was grateful to have a longer stride and larger muscles in this form than he did as a human. He thought back to Sinding’s dismissal of his human form as weak, with mashing teeth only good for chewing cud. He was beginning to understand that. This was glorious.
Wolves howled a greeting from beside the road, about halfway up. Chip turned off to the side, behind a large boulder and a small grove of pines, and followed his nose to where he’d heard the wolves. In the shelter of a dirt-bank overhang, three gray wolves stood guard over the carcass of a freshly-killed deer. He touched noses with them, reading their unspoken invitation, and fell on the deer. Its meat was sweet and good, and as he finished his meal the wolves howled their approval once again.
He turned to leave them. Suddenly the pain took his breath away as, once more, he underwent the change he had no way to anticipate.
Once back in his human skin he breathed deeply for a few moments. I wonder when I’ll ever get used to that. Wow. Good thing my brothers here recognize me still, or I’d be in trouble.
“Thank you, lads,” he said quietly as he headed out to find the roadway again. He squinted up at the sky. It was still surprisingly dark; but for him to have changed it must be dawn, at least in areas not shaded by the bulk of the mountains. As it turned out, by the time he spotted another group of wolves chasing down a fox, the sky had begun turning a rosy hue. He was peaceful, and full of meat, and happy with himself.
He spied a goat standing on the rocky outer edge of the escarpment, and felt a powerful urge come over him. He must hunt. The bow called to him; the need to take as many animals as he could with it overwhelmed his senses. He drew the bow, nocked an arrow and fired almost before the goat had a chance to register his presence; and as it groaned and fell to the ground Chip felt a warmth in the bow that made him smile.
That’s one.
A few moments later and farther up the slope, there was a second goat. He killed it and gathered its pelt together with the rest he intended to offer to Hircine, and then continued on his way, up toward a cave he’d seen many times before but had never explored.
By the time he reached the cave, birds were waking to their daily routines, calling out to each other both from the trees on the mountains above him and from far below. He slowed to a stop and stared, curious, at the opening to the cave. There were sharpened stakes lining the upslope side of the entrance; anyone jumping from the cliff above would meet a quick end on them. On the outward side were a carefully arranged deer skull, a brazier, and two totems – goat heads impaled on posts – the meaning of which he wasn’t certain. The entrance itself was an inverted V, an archway made of heavy timbers. The thinking part of his mind told Chip that he should simply be on his way, get to his home, and prepare for his hunting trip. The part of him that viscerally needed to experience the power of the bow in his hand told him to go in.
Go in; because there may be things to hunt. And who knows when we may pass this way again?
He took a long drink of water as he pondered. Then he nodded and stepped into the cave.
As was so often the case with the many caves dotting the mountains of Skyrim, there was a very dark, long, and narrow passage through the rock toward a dim light at the end. Movements of the earth and the action of water had hollowed out these places over time; and animals or groups of people unwelcome elsewhere enlarged the spaces, taking up residence in the shelter of the stone.
The ones with light at the end of the tunnel are the ones you have to look out for. I wonder who’s down here.
There were two sharpened stakes at the very end of the tunnel, with something bloody atop each. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at in the dim lighting: goats, or skeevers, or something even less pleasant. He was glad they were there, though, for they blocked what otherwise would have been a likely-fatal fall down into a very deep hole. A dirt ramp hugged the wall to his right, leading down into the pit. At the bottom was the relatively fresh carcass of a deer that had obviously been spooked into the cave and had run off the end of the ledge, not knowing what was beyond.
Chip hadn’t gotten very far down the ramp when three skeevers attacked, running single-file up toward him. He wasn’t afraid of skeevers, but he had a healthy respect for their ability to carry diseases; so he began firing at them instantly. He was too quick, in fact. His first and second shots went far wide and over the heads of the rodents as the first leapt into the air at Chip’s face. He swatted it backwards with the bow and then fired another arrow, catching the second skeever in line directly in the forehead. The first jumped up again, only to meet its own arrow. With the path cleared, the third skeever brought its own attack. Chip took it down with a single shot.
More.
Chip held the bow out at an angle in front of himself and looked at its twin skulls in curiosity, as if the message had come directly from them. “So you’re going to speak to me now, is that it? Very well then. More it shall be.”
A tunnel led away from the deer. In this one, at regular intervals, someone had fastened the taproots of spriggans to the wall. Chip frowned. He didn’t like spriggans; their unreasoning attacks on anything that wandered by made them dangerous. It also exposed them to retaliation and death, unnecessarily in many cases. Once a spriggan had its attention on you there was nothing to do but run away, or kill it. This display, though, meant that many spriggans had been killed – or sacrificed.
And that means I need to watch out. Something strong enough to kill this many spriggans is not something I will be able to defeat easily.
The tunnel took a sharp left turn after some distance. Torches burned in wall sconces along both sides; and at the end of the tunnel their increased light revealed something Chip had hoped not to see. There, in the large cavern he’d expected to find, was a hut built in the same shape as the cave’s external entrance had: large timbers embedded in the ground some feet apart but bent at an angle to meet at the top like an inverted V.
Witches. Great.
He thought he could see a person moving around inside the hut, although his view to the left side of the cavern was partially blocked by a wall, a blind constructed of hide. A huge effigy sporting a massive set of elk antlers nestled up against a stone pillar between him and the hut. He almost started across the opening but then stopped, sniffing the air. He blinked in surprise. Right in front of him was a large frostbite spider, so close to the same color as the blind that he would not have noticed it if not for his enhanced sense of smell.
He dropped back a few steps and readied the bow, which seemed to hum eagerly in his hand. His first shot was a solid hit; but his arrows were only of generic steel and it was a huge spider. It reared up into a defensive posture and turned, looking for him. More troubling, though, was the witch in the hut behind it, who heard the commotion and cast an armor spell on herself, then a ward spell.
“What was that? Did you hear something?” she cried out.
A part of Chip’s mind laughed. I’m not a mage, lady. I won’t be casting a spell you can block with a ward.
Chip slipped back into the tunnel. To his surprise, the spider scuttled off to his left, behind the skin blind; it hadn’t actually seen him. The witch followed. He was about to congratulate himself on having an excellent chance to surprise both of his adversaries when, to his dismay, a second witch emerged from the right.
“Is someone there?” she called.
Damn!
He was holding his bow at the ready, though; and as the first of the witches came back into view he released the shot, his gaze snapping back up to follow the second witch. The first shrieked. Her flimsy robe had not been enough to deflect the arrow or prevent it from piercing her heart, not even with an armor spell. He swiveled just slightly to the right and shot twice more at the second witch who was standing almost still, looking around in confusion. She groaned and dropped to the cavern floor. Chip was just about to draw a deep breath and relax when another skeever barreled out of the shadows to attack him. He tsk’d and buried an arrow in the rodent’s eye socket.
The spider had re-emerged from behind the blind. It disappeared behind the effigy, completely out of sight. Chip had been backing slowly down the tunnel while shooting at the witches and now had no choice but to advance once more. He crept slowly into the opening, to where the nearer of the two witches had fallen. The sound of the spider skittering across the floor helped him locate it on the far side of the cavern; this time a single arrow was enough to finish the job.
“Alright then. Let’s see what we’ve got going on here.”
He searched the witches’ hut, taking a few rare alchemy ingredients and a staff resting atop a stone slab, and retrieving the arrows from the various bodies he’d felled. He had the strong sense that there was more in this cavern, though, and worked his way around the dark edges of it until he nearly stumbled into another tunnel. This one twisted around to his left, leading to an opening that he stepped into for just a moment only to leap backward when a trap, powered by a soul gem, fired an ice spike at him.
That was close. Guess I heard it just a second before it fired.
He dislodged the soul gem with an arrow and collected it. The tunnel continued around a corner to the right; and from it he sensed a familiar scent. There were spiders ahead.
The tunnel wound in a serpentine pattern through the mountain and emerged into another tall chamber, dominated by a central pillar of stone. A light source on the far side of the pillar revealed that attached to nearly every surface were gigantic, glistening eggs. Chip peered into the mists ahead and saw shapes moving slowly around the pillar.
Well here’s our “more” to slay. I just wonder what else is up there. I guess there’s no time like the present to find out.
Chip’s first shot felled a small spider. His second completely missed the next target, and he growled as he saw the light reflecting off fangs glistening with poison, their owner hidden in the deep shadows. He fired again, in the general direction of the fangs, and heard the arrow connect, though he couldn’t tell whether he had killed the spider. Movement beyond drew his fire once more. This time he knew he’d made a kill, for the movement ceased.
He waited a moment to be sure nothing else was within striking range before stepping back into the open. The light he had seen beyond the pillar was a series of torches marking the way to another small chamber with more spider eggs and two small spiders, easily dealt with. He frowned in confusion. Why light a spider’s brood chamber? It made no sense. It was only after he moved farther into the chamber that he had his answer. Another wall-mounted torch illuminated a pull chain.
Call me crazy, but if there’s something beyond here that needs a stone slab door to protect it then I am going to want something more substantial than steel arrows to fight it with. Dwarven, maybe.
He pulled out his dwarven arrows – he didn’t have many, so he tended to save them for tough battles. He reached for the pull ring and hesitated. Perhaps it would be better to be even more prepared. He had harvested plenty of spider venom along the way; this he used to poison his bow. Then he tugged on the chain and watched as the rock slab rose. He inched down the tunnel and peered around its edge into the chamber beyond.
It was a large cavern resembling the first he’d gone into, complete with a hide blind, a central pillar of stone and, at the far side, a peaked witches’ hut. The single occupant he could see in the hut wasn’t moving; so he aimed cautiously, holding his breath, and fired. She dropped without so much as uttering a sound.
He could smell her, as well as something else around the corner, possibly behind the blind, dead and decomposing. He wrinkled his nose. There were definitely drawbacks to having a werewolf’s sense of smell, and that was one of them. The only thing that was worse than a non-fresh kill was a vampire, at least so far in his experience. Indeed, as he searched the witch’s chamber for anything of value he spotted dead goat parts, old bones, and other unsavory, smelly things that he was pleased to leave behind when he spotted another opening.
He smelled water ahead of him through the opening, as well as more dead things. There was a ramp, presumably to keep one’s feet dry. Poles sharpened to a point lined the edge of every bit of dry ground that he could see. But most importantly, he could see that there was a large iron cage directly in front of him, a spriggan inside it moving listlessly around the tiny enclosure.
Chip frowned. He didn’t like spriggans; but spriggans were creatures of the wood. They did what they were supposed to do, and that was to protect the groves. They were dangerous, but only because they were so good at their gods-given task. They didn’t deserve to be caged; not spriggans, possibly more than any creature he could think of.
I don’t know where you are, spriggan-killer, but you’re dead.
A tiny scratching sound caught his attention and he swung left, stepping forward until he could see past the caged spriggan. There was another witches’ hut on the far side of the space; and against the relatively bright light inside it he saw the silhouettes of two beings. One was clearly another witch. The other was something he’d hoped not to encounter any time soon, but which he recognized: a hagraven.
He had a small number of arrows of an even higher quality than the dwarven ones. He quickly moved those into an easily-accessible position and poisoned the bow again, aiming first at the hagraven and then at the witch.
Hagraven is going to take some concentration. If I take out the witch first I won’t have to split my focus.
He made a perfect shot; the combination of the more powerful bow, the arrow, and the poison gave her no chance to survive. She dropped to the floor, and the hagraven screamed its grating, raspy scream. He fired one arrow into her, then another; and then, seeing her raise her clawed hand and begin gathering magic, he stepped backward looking for an exit.
And got tangled up in the wall of sharpened poles.
The points were too high to hurt him standing at ground level, but the poles were close enough together that he couldn’t squeeze through and high enough that he didn’t dare try jumping over them. He fumbled about, looking for some way to get over them or around them; and then a massive fireball exploded just to one side of him.
The force of the blast, plus the added adrenaline of his own fear, shot him up and over a chunk of stone next to the poles. Without knowing how he’d done it, Chip found himself in the water on the far side of the poles and, most importantly, below the hagraven’s line of sight. There was an open channel of water around the cavern’s edge, to his left; and he swam down it as quickly and quietly as he could, creeping up onto the dry surface at the far end.
Turning back toward the cavern entrance, his heart pounding, he panicked just a bit. He could see the witch’s hut and an enchanting station. He could smell the dead witch. He could see the cage, and the spriggan inside it. But he couldn’t see the hagraven.
Where is she? Where is she? Where…
He pulled the bow up before him and loaded an arrow, squinting into the dim light, until finally movement, a shape coming in his direction, caught his attention. He loosed the arrow without thinking about it.
As if by some miracle, the arrow buried itself in the hagraven and killed her. He knew this only because the light of magic in her hand dropped, and then vanished; for he could not see her body. He stood, trembling from the aftermath of the panic.
“How in Oblivion did I make that shot?”
He looked down at the bow in his hand and a slow smile broke across his face. “I understand. I am a hunter. Hircine’s hunter, or at least I may be. Thank you.”
He moved through the cave, checking for valuables and taking for himself a few feathers and a claw from the hagraven. Then he approached the cage. The spriggan was buzzing angrily inside it.
“What am I going to do with you, hmm? I ought to shoot you, since I’m a hunter. And yet…” He thought about speaking with the aspect of Hircine that had emerged from Sinding’s body. Hircine had been interested in the hunt, not necessarily in which party was ultimately successful. Chip rubbed his chin for a moment, thinking hard. Then he came to a decision.
“I’m going to try to open this cage for you,” he said, not knowing whether the spriggan could understand him or not. “It wouldn’t be much of a hunt for me to shoot the prey inside an enclosure. Nothing noble or exciting or even very interesting about that, and I can’t imagine my lord Hircine would care for its outcome. So,” he continued, pulling out a lockpick and working on the cage door, “I hope you’ll keep that in mind. I’m looking for fair play here. I’m letting you go. If we meet out in the forest some other day, the hunt will be on. You can hunt me, and I can hunt you.”
The lock clicked, and Chip opened the cage door to the sound of eager buzzing from the spriggan. It moved to the cage’s opening and stopped, as though waiting for him. He nodded to it, hoping he was understood, and backed away. Then he turned and trotted out of the cavern the way he’d come.
Not far out of the chamber where the cage had been, Chip spied a side room he’d not seen before and stepped into it, only to be greeted by a huge frostbite spider lowering itself from the ceiling. He smiled to himself. Here was his reward – and Hircine’s – for not having killed the spriggan. A spider this large would surely be a worthy offering, and it would be good sport besides. He shot at it once, twice; and then turned tail for a dark tunnel as the beast spat stinking, cold poison at him.
The next few minutes were not necessarily good sport. They were more like a deadly battle between Chip’s bow and the spider’s fangs, Chip’s meager healing magic and the spider’s venom. Chip did a lot of scurrying and hiding. He wasn’t proud of that but it was utterly necessary if he wanted to survive. And, he realized, he did want to survive. He wanted to go see his father. He didn’t want Brynjolf to be approached some day by some other hunter bearing the few things from his corpse that would identify him. He didn’t want his father or his mother to be left wondering what had happened to him, to say nothing of his sister Qaralana, or his uncles and cousins Sofie and Lucia. So he ran, and dodged, and shot his bow.
He reached into his quiver and pulled out the nearest arrow, not caring which type it might be. He shot toward the spider, which still fared much better than he did himself. And then he jumped in shock as a blue ball of conjuration magic fired noisily next to him. From it emerged a wolf that began attacking the spider, viciously, snarling and snapping.
“What?”
He shook his head, realizing that he had no time to waste pondering what had happened. He found his steel arrows once again and unloaded several of them into the giant spider. Just as the wolf blinked out of existence, he fired the arrow that finally ended the beast.
“Wow.”
Chip looked at his supply of arrows and realized that the last one he’d used prior to returning to steel was one of the arrows he’d constructed at Hircine’s shrine, on Solstheim.
They will serve you well. That’s what Hircine told me. And he was right!
“Yes!” he shouted in utter glee, filling the cavern with sound that bounced around, echoing back to him and making him laugh out loud. “I’m a damned hunter!”
He retrieved as many arrows as he could, from the spider and the floor of the room, and then headed back to the cavern entrance, grinning all the way. It was time to get home and take stock.