Chip was nearly flying by the time he scrambled his frantic way out past the Whiterun stables and crossed the road. He’d never run so fast in his life; and yet as deeply as he breathed, as often as he’d run before, he simply couldn’t maintain speed for long the way his sister could. He slowed to a stop between and just past the Pelagia Farm and the western watchtower, gasping for breath, doubled over with his hands on his thighs.
I have got to get there. Now! I have to get to Uncle Dar!
Now I understand why Da loved being able to run fast. It had to have been like being set free from…
… wait.
Chip stood, even as his heart continued pounding, and glanced about in all directions to be certain nobody was watching. He started thinking about what it felt like to shift into his more powerful, much faster form. It had always started with his heart pounding, just as it was doing now.
I don’t know whether I can do this on my own, or whether it always has to be at night, but if there was ever a time when I needed those legs, it is now. I have to…
He gasped, nearly screamed, as the sudden pain ripped through his chest and was followed by the now-familiar cracking, breaking-and-reforming sounds of bones shaping themselves into those of the huge, red-coated werewolf. From deep inside the great creature he felt its overwhelming urge to howl and willed it to be still, to move, to run, just as hard and fast as it could.
There was a path straight ahead of the wolf, up over the side of the mountains that marked the boundary between Whiterun Hold and Falkreath Hold. Chip knew that this was a longer, tougher route than it would be to simply run down the road to Gavrostead and turn up the hill to Mammoth Manor; but the werewolf headed straight for the mountains. It would stay away from the city guards that would hunt it down on sight. It barreled up the switchbacks, into the snow, and crested the top of the hill. In front of it was Bleak Falls Barrow.
He knew of Bleak Falls Barrow from Dardeh. Long ago, Dardeh had delved into the barrow to clear out the bandits and draugr, and to retrieve the gaudy yellow claw-thing that still sat collecting dust on the Riverwood Trader’s counter. The problem was that this barrow continually attracted more bandits, and they often patrolled the plaza outside the barrow’s ancient doors.
Such was the case on this day. The werewolf heard a woman’s voice yelling “What was that?” and raced up the stairs toward the sound. As he reached the top step, an arrow flew out from the left and caught him square in the shoulder. He ran snarling toward the archer, then raked the claws of his powerful right paw across her neck. She crumpled into the snow and he finished her with his teeth, devouring all that he could before the shouts of two more bandits sounded from behind him.
He snarled at them, rushing the first man and knocking him off his feet back against the stairs leading to the plaza. This man was stunned, the breath knocked out of him. He writhed in the snow for a moment before the werewolf ripped his abdomen open and feasted on his entrails. The final bandit, an archer, approached slowly from above. The werewolf grinned at him, dashed forward, and flung him off the platform with a powerful blow. The man flew through the air and over the side, striking one of the stone buttresses about halfway up and dropping to the snow like a stone himself. By the time the werewolf reached him, the bandit was dead. The werewolf ate him, too. The whole encounter had taken only a few moments, but the wolf felt strengthened, renewed, and more powerful. It dashed down the far side of the mountain to the edge of Lake Ilinalta and headed west at top speed.
From somewhere inside his alternate form Chip admired the decisions that the wolf had made. The north side of the lake was unpopulated. He would have to swim to get past the ancient, mostly-submerged ruins about halfway down the lake’s length; but overall this route was likely the safest of any they could have taken.
He arrived at the westernmost tip of the lake still in werewolf form, waiting to return to being human Chip before he could rush in to find out whether his uncle lived or not. For that was what he feared most. His parents feared for Dardeh’s health. Dardeh had been visibly ill the last time Chip had seen him. Even Farkas had suggested something might be wrong. It was vital that he get in there.
As if in response to his agitation, and without any warning whatsoever, his body doubled over with the pain of reverting to his human form. When he was able to breathe again, and see again, Chip hurtled across the last few yards of distance and vaulted onto the back deck, bursting unceremoniously through the door.
“Uncle Dar?” he shouted, realizing too late that he should have lowered his volume inside. He crashed in through the storage and smithing room, and out past the kitchen.
There were three people there, chuckling at him. Roggi stood in front of the fire. Chip looked him over, quickly, and decided that the man looked like he’d been through Oblivion in the last few days but was otherwise alright. As he had expected, his sister was in the chair farthest from the fireplace, quiet but all in one piece. And in the other chair, bathed in firelight, was Dardeh. Chip felt the horrible, crushing anxiety he’d been feeling drop away in a rush so overwhelming that he thought for a moment his legs might give out from under him.
“Yes, here I am,” Dardeh said, grinning up at Chip.
Chip felt as though he’d run headfirst into a boulder. His mouth fell open. Dardeh’s greeting had been a wispy, rasping, pitiful imitation of the deep sounds he usually made. Chip swallowed hard, trying to force his own voice out past the knot in his throat.
“Your voice! Are you sure you’re alright?”
Dardeh nodded. “Yeah. I’m fine. Or at least I will be. I’m just going to be a lot quieter than I used to be.”
Roggi touched him on the arm. “We need to talk, Chip. A lot happened just before you got here.” His gaze flickered to the side and Chip’s followed.
“Qara!” He grinned happily at her. “Da told me that Ma sent you because she was worried too?”
Qaralana nodded, slowly. “Yeah. She did,” she said quietly. “I got here yesterday.”
Chip’s grin faded as he saw how pale she looked. He looked back and forth between Roggi and Dardeh, his brows furrowing into a puzzled frown.
“Ok, so tell me what’s up. Da sent me to Whiterun to fetch Lydia. But Farkas says she’s in High Rock.”
Roggi burst out laughing. “See, Dar? That’s how bad it was. You know it’s serious when Brynjolf threatens to sic Lydia on us.”
Dardeh’s eyebrow rose. “Farkas, eh? How is that old man doing these days? It’s been years and years since I’ve seen him.”
Chip was about to blurt out a smart remark about Farkas looking younger than either Dardeh or Roggi, but paused. If Dardeh didn’t know that Farkas and Vilkas – and Kodlak, for that matter – were werewolves, he wouldn’t know they hadn’t aged. He’d already had his own father poking at the edges of the truth. Chip simply wasn’t ready to deal with his family knowing that Dardeh wasn’t the only supernatural being in it anymore.
“He’s, uh… fine,” Chip said, looking at Qara and then shooting a quizzical glance at Roggi. Roggi shook his head. “He most definitely remembered Lydia, in very glowing terms.”
Dardeh had been taking a sip of whatever was in his tankard, and sputtered, nearly choking, at that comment. Roggi stared at Chip for a second, then looked at Dardeh; and the two of them started roaring with laughter.
“Well, doesn’t that figure?” Roggi said between guffaws. “All these years we’ve wondered… “
“Good grief,” Qara mumbled. “I don’t even want to know.”
Chip found himself snickering, too. “Well, Vilkas didn’t seem awfully pleased by the reminiscing, either. I may still be a bit wet behind the ears in that department but even I don’t need it spelled out.”
Dardeh nodded. “You even smell a bit like a wet dog, Chip. Don’t tell me you swam to get here?”
Chip had to suppress a shudder at the sound of Dardeh’s voice, a shadow of what it had been; but he also didn’t want to give himself away. “Yeah, actually I did. I took the shortcut up over the mountain, which didn’t save much time when I fell in trying to get around Ilinalta’s Deep. Sorry about that.”
“Well,” Roggi said, “It’s good that you’re here. Get something to drink and we’ll all have a talk. There’s no other way you’ll ever understand why Dar sounds the way he does now.”
It was hard for Chip to judge the passage of time as he learned what had happened earlier. Roggi talked, mostly, reminding him in broad strokes about Dardeh’s journey from Markarth to Falkreath, via Helgen and High Hrothgar. Dardeh interjected here and there, his raspy voice filling in the gaps that Roggi wasn’t clear on, or had gotten wrong. Eventually the story ended up at the previous afternoon, when it had become clear that somehow the mantle of Dragonborn had passed from Dardeh to Qaralana.
“So do you have any questions, Chip?” Dardeh asked quietly. “You two will need to pass the information on to your mother, and she’s – well you know she’ll want details.”
Chip rubbed his chin. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do. Why us? I mean our family? Why not, I don’t know – Harald’s family? I mean King Ulfric can Shout, why wasn’t he Dragonborn? He’s a full Nord, not half-and-half like the three of us.”
Roggi shook his head. “We don’t really know for sure, Chip,” he said. “But Dar had a few answers from some interesting places, a long time ago.”
Dardeh nodded. “You two don’t know much about your grandfather, right?”
“Not a lot,” Qara agreed. “Only that he died when Mama was tiny, and he wasn’t really around for you.”
Dardeh nodded again. “That’s right. But would it surprise you to learn that I met him, a couple of years before you were born, Qara?”
“I… thought he was dead then?” Qaralana said, frowning.
“He was,” Dardeh told them. “I met his ghost. And he told me that I had to kill ‘both of them.’ He wouldn’t specify who.” Dardeh then embarked on the tale of Dadarh, and Jine, and how their parents had helped break a curse to put an entire town of Alik’r settlers to their final rest. He told them how he and Sayma had returned later, to give Jine his last wish. “Jine told us that we had to end it.”
“So wait,” Chip interrupted, not quite following. “You said the first one you had to kill was Miraak.”
“The First Dragonborn. Right. After that I was called the Last Dragonborn. And then I killed Alduin, the World-Eater. I thought that he was the ‘other.’”
Roggi nodded. “I thought that, too. But Dadarh – your grandda – said that the ‘other one’ was Ulfric. He…” Roggi sighed. “He was Dark Brotherhood. He had a contract, and he failed when he was killed himself.” Chip exchanged a confused glance with his sister. She doesn’t follow this any more than I do. It’s just too confusing.
“Then Roggi and I and your Da fought another enemy,” Dardeh said quietly. “He was trying to become the new Emperor, back before Ulfric was High King. I thought that maybe once he was gone, that was the end of it and I’d never feel that voice telling me to ‘finish it’ again. But I was wrong.”
This time it was Roggi’s turn to gasp. “What? What are you talking about, Dar? I thought that had stopped years ago!”
Dardeh looked into the fire and sighed. “It did stop, for awhile. When it started up again, well… I didn’t want to worry you about it. I kept it to myself and thought about it. When it started getting really bad again I had my answer. I had to kill the first Dragonborn, Roggi. The ‘other one’ – the one we were looking for all these years – was the Last Dragonborn.”
There was dead silence for a few breathless moments. Chip’s mind was racing. All of this had been a huge amount of information to absorb in one sitting and now the implication was that his Uncle Dardeh was…
“You are not going to kill yourself, Uncle Dar! I won’t allow it!” Chip blurted out.
“And neither will I,” Qara announced quietly.
Roggi knelt in front of his husband. “Dar…”
Dardeh chuckled, and reached out to touch Roggi’s face. “I’m not going to leave you, silly. But I did what had to be done. I killed the Last Dragonborn. He no longer exists. There’s just me. Dardeh. I told you why. I had to break Herma Mora’s hold somehow. He had Miraak, and he almost had me. Did have me, to some degree, really. You saw it. Remember those three guards at the battle of Whiterun?”
Chip watched Roggi reach up with his own hand – shakily – and touch Dardeh’s cheek in return.
“Yeah, I remember, Dar,” he said solemnly. “You’ve thought about this for a long time, haven’t you?”
Dardeh nodded.
Qaralana cleared her throat. “But if Miraak was the First Dragonborn and you were the Last, Uncle Dar… what does that make me?” Her eyes were pleading for an answer as she stared first at Dardeh and then at Roggi, back and forth.
Dardeh smiled, and reached across the space to squeeze her hand. “I guess that makes you the Next Dragonborn, Qara. And we won’t know why until the gods show us why. All we can do is prepare you for whatever it is.”
Qara sighed. “I hate this. I don’t know why it’s happened to me. Why not Chip? Why not… Daddy? He’s big and strong and I’m small. Small-ish. For a Nord, anyway.”
Chip had to bite his tongue. Because Da’s a reformed vampire, that’s why. His power was something different. And I – I am a werewolf, and Lord Hircine’s tested champion.
And I don’t understand why, any more than Qara understands what’s happened to her.
Chip headed downhill through the grasses, listening to Qara follow. He was not altogether sure this was a good idea. On the other hand, he had promised Farkas to take care of this problem, and Qaralana’s presence might make it go faster.
They were on their way to the cleft between two tall outcroppings of stone, the entrance to an ancient burial mound. Dardeh had been there before, he had told them; he and Roggi had sent them on their way with an idea of the layout and a healthy supply of cure disease potions.
“So you need to… what, exactly, in here?” Qara asked as they approached the cave opening.
“Kill the vampires. Specifically the leader, but I think Farkas wants them all gone.”
Qara nodded. “Well, at least that makes picking a target easy. If it moves, kill it.”
“Exactly. Try not to get too close, though.”
“You don’t need to warn me,” she said, smirking. “You need to stay clear, yourself.”
Chip grimaced. “Yeah. I know.” Not that a vampire is going to do anything to me unless it gets its fangs in my neck. And I’ll turn before I let that happen. My fangs are bigger.
Chip slipped into the tunnel and blinked as his eyes adjusted. The dim light came from a brazier atop a raised platform at the cavern’s far wall. There were a number of such platforms, each holding a sarcophagus. A cage dangled over the center of the room. He could tell that this was a place of death; it smelled like the cellar he’d found near the lake’s shore – a scent that said vampires were here. Chip readied his bow, easing out toward the end of the tunnel.
Just in front of a massive stone support pillar was another brazier. Beside its warmth, and silhouetted in its light, was a lone person seated on a stone.
He took careful aim at the vampire, feeling the energy from his bow flowing up into his arms, and smiled grimly as he released the arrow. It was a solid hit, but not a finishing blow. The vampire shrieked and jumped up from her seat, but not quickly enough to escape the arrow Chip sent flying in the next moment.
I wasn’t lying when I told them I was an archer and they wouldn’t find many better. Now to finish her off.
He didn’t get a chance to fire another arrow. The vampire went running away behind the giant pillar and casting a spell. Chip moved forward with his bow drawn; but before he could get into position Qaralana ran down the stairs ahead of him, drawing a huge breath as she went.
“FUS- RO DAH!”
The sound Qara made was skull-splitting. Dust flew. Chip cringed and clapped his hands over his sensitive ears, watching a shock wave radiate outward from his sister and wincing in pain until the echoes of the sound had died a bit. Out of the dust, a skeleton wielding a war axe emerged to swipe at Qara. That was all it took to set Chip back in motion, firing a quick shot that dropped the skeleton. There was another, though, with a huge sword.
“Look out!” Chip yelled, trying to shoot the skeleton but pulling at the last minute, as Qara darted past the creature. The shot went wild and clattered into the darkness. Chip ran down the stairs and toward the pillar, and breathed a sigh of relief as Qara whirled to disintegrate her adversary with a quick blade strike.
“No more!” the injured vampire cried from a dark corner. Chip watched in satisfaction as Qara finished it off with a quick burst of flame. One last skeleton shuffled out from the corner toward Qara; but Chip already had an arrow nocked and almost nonchalantly used it to drop the undead beast.
“There. Done,” Qara said.
Chip raised his head and sniffed, sampling the air. “Not quite. There’s another one in here somewhere. I’m guessing the back room Uncle Dar told us about,” he whispered.
“How do you know that?” she asked, frowning.
“How did you do that Shout?” he replied with a wolfish grin. “Come on, let’s go check.”
Qara poked him in the arm, but followed him up a set of stairs toward light that shone from behind an open sarcophagus. As he’d expected, there was a roughhewn tunnel behind the former coffin. It doglegged to the right, and opened into a chamber holding a large cage, of a size that could hold a human – or a lycanthrope. To the left of the cage was another form.
This has to be the guy we’re after.
Chip fired two arrows in quick succession at the vampire. After the first, it rose with a startled cry. After the second, it laughed and said “I will feed again, today!” Chip’s blood almost froze. Two arrows from this bow – especially when the first had been a surprise attack – should have been enough to at the very least have this vampire on his knees. But it wasn’t.
By the Nine, how strong is this one? Was Da this strong?
Qaralana pushed past him and ran toward the vampire, yelling “Oh no, you won’t!” and casting flames at it. It turned toward her with a terrible smile and said “I knew I smelled mortal blood!”
Qara yelped as an ice spike caught her in the shoulder. That was enough to shake Chip back into action. He shot the vampire again. This time it went down on one knee as Qara rolled to the left, but raised its hand and cast a spell. To Chip’s dismay, what had been an indistinct lump in the corner slowly rose up, revealing itself to be a reanimated bandit.
“Well, ain’t this a surprise?” she said. Chip glanced sideways at his sister, but the vampire was still trying to regain his footing and Chip took that opportunity to shoot and kill the undead bandit. She dissolved into a pile of ash on the floor just as the room exploded into sound again.
“FUS- RO DAH!”
Chip nearly howled in pain from the volume. Qara had Shouted the vampire down onto his back, and had missed a dagger blow, striking the metal cage instead with a loud clang. Chip stepped back and aimed his bow just as the vampire rose to his feet. This time, the single arrow was enough. The vampire moaned and dropped to the floor.
“By the gods, Qara,” he said, shaking his head. “You shouldn’t do that inside. It’s hard on the ears!”
“I don’t even know how it works,” she said quietly. “All I know is I wanted him down, and the Shout happened. But since when are you so sensitive to noise? You’re the one Mama was always hushing.”
Chip chuckled. “Yeah. Sorry. It’s just… wow, it’s hard to get used to the idea of my little sister being Dragonborn. No doubt about it, though. That Shouting stuff can’t be confused with anything else!”
“That was some pretty fancy bow work, too, if we’re trading observations,” she said with a grin. “And that’s a pretty fancy bow! Where’d you find that?”
Chip had begun making the rounds of the room, gathering up anything that looked valuable. “Solstheim,” he said as nonchalantly as he could. It wouldn’t do to give away his secret. People hated werewolves. “I went there to see what was what after Uncle Dar started talking about Solstheim, and I ran across some werebears. They were guarding a shrine that had this sitting on top, so I took it.” He knelt before a locked chest and started working at it. After the third broken pick, he swore.
“Here,” Qaralana said, laughing and pushing him aside. “I’m the one who’s had training. Let me do it.” She knelt where Chip had been and, a moment later, stood and waved at the now-open chest. “There you go.”
“Showoff,” Chip said. “I guess that’s what I get for refusing to be the good lad and following in my Da’s footsteps.” If they only knew.
“Hmm,” Qaralana said, almost absently, as she also moved about the place taking alchemy ingredients. “Well my heart’s not in it either, training or not. In fact, that’s what I was talking to Mama about when she sent me here.”
“Anyway,” Chip said, straightening up after sliding the book he’d flipped through back into its shelf, “I guess I need to go talk to Farkas about the vamps, but…”
Qara shook her head. “We need to get home first. Tell Mama and Daddy about what’s happened. They at least need to know Uncle Dar is ok. I don’t even know how to bring up what’s happened to me.”
Chip thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. I agree. The vampires will still be dead in a few days. Let’s go get the carriage from Whiterun to Riften.”
They left the cave and strolled southeast, toward the farm beside the east-west route across the hold. Chip was dying to tell his sister about what had happened to him in recent weeks. He wanted her to know about the trip to Solstheim, and why he’d specifically gone to find the werewolves, and how he’d found out something important about their family that, for all he knew, might be related to what had happened to her, as well.
“I wish I understood why all of this happened, Chip,” she said, almost as if she’d been reading his mind. “I’m really confused.”
He chewed on the inside of his mouth for a moment, and slid a glance in her direction. Off to their left, he could see the giants that lived in the area, herding their mammoths through the tall grasses; but it was Qara who worried him. Qara was usually all smiles. Right then she looked as though she had the weight of the world on her shoulders.
“Well it looks like it has something to do with our bloodline. I don’t understand it, but it’s the only thing that makes any sense at all. Listen,” he said at last, just as they drew near the farm. “I… don’t think you should worry about Da. Telling him, I mean. I’m pretty sure he’ll understand what it’s like to be… different.”
Qaralana looked at him and raised one eyebrow. “Really? What makes you say that?”
Chip took a deep breath. He wasn’t sure it was his secret to divulge, but after all, Brynjolf had said that lots of people in Riften knew about his past. “Well, see, not long ago he told me…”
And then it was as if the very gates of Oblivion had opened before them.
“Is someone there?” Qara yelled.
“Please! Someone, do something!” a man called at the same time, from the farmhouse’s porch. Chip whirled to see what was going on and found himself facing into a blast of flames. His eyebrows began to singe; he yelped and rolled back out of the way, barely missing being struck by a blade that hit the stone beside them instead. He caught a brief glimpse of dark armor and looked up to see that it had been Qaralana whose flames he’d found.
“Sorry!” she yelled, swinging her own blade at the assailant.
Chip reached for an arrow and fired off a short-range shot at the Argonian who was attacking him; but in his confusion and surprise he had selected one of Hircine’s arrows. The projectile itself grazed the Argonian, but just beyond it a werewolf materialized, howling at the skies. The Argonian turned in confusion, looking for the wolf, and was met by Qaralana’s Shout.
Chip reached for his blades, not trusting bow combat in quarters that had suddenly become very close in spite of being outdoors. The Shout had the Argonian flat on her back; the wolf was slashing at her and Qara was attacking with flames again. Chip rushed into the battle, slipping around Qara’s left side to sink both of them into the Argonian. She went down, and the noisy explosion and rush of energy told Chip that his mother’s shortblade had harvested another soul.
Was that…an assassin?
He had only that moment to think before two dogs rushed into the area. The ground shook. Chip scrambled backwards, only barely avoiding being flattened by the huge thigh bone wielded by one of the giants he’d seen only moments before. He saw the giant’s gaze fixed firmly on Qaralana and knew the situation was dire.
What? Why?
“Qara! Look out!” She must have struck the giant with her Shout, or singed him inadvertently. We’re in such trouble now!
The conjured werewolf, having finished off its Argonian target, lit into the giant eagerly and loudly. Chip took one more step backward and felt the ground shaking again. His heart dropped. Just when it seemed nothing could have gotten worse, the second giant rushed in to protect its kin.
The giant’s club struck the ground again, raising a huge plume of dust but somehow missing Qara by a hairsbreadth. He heard her grunting, trying to get out of the line of fire; but there was a substantial tree directly behind her and she had nowhere to go. The two dogs were barking and snarling – at whom, he couldn’t tell. The giants were shouting whatever imprecations giants favored. The werewolf was howling. And just to add a final touch, the beehive on the tree just behind the battle had been disturbed and angry hornets were swarming the area. It was a mass of noise, and dirt, and Chip couldn’t tell whether his sister was still alive or had joined the assassin in the pile of black armor on the ground.
What can I do? If I use my bow I might hit Qara! What can I…
Suddenly he remembered the staff he’d gotten in the Hunting Grounds. The totem.
Use this staff to call forth the spirit of the Wild Hunt when the need arises.
He couldn’t imagine a greater moment of need.
Chip grabbed the staff and hammered it down, sinking it solidly into the ground before him. A great cloud of conjuration energies exploded beside him. As the arrow-conjured werewolf dashed toward him out of the knot of battle, there appeared a cluster of shapes, all howling in a cacophony of noise: a werelion, a werevulture, a werewolf, and two werebears. All of them turned and attacked the giants in a mass of confusion the likes of which Chip had never seen. Not even in Hircine’s Hunting Grounds had he been near such a battle.
It seemed as though only a second or two had gone by before one of the giants, the nearer to Chip of the two, fell over onto its back. Chip had only a fraction of a moment to absorb the fact that it was down, that Qara had broken free and the other giant was chasing her, and that at least two of the werebeasts were heading that way. As the werevulture watched, he ran to the giant and attacked with his blades, finishing the creature and wincing once more at the explosion of sound as Grabber harvested another soul.
He turned toward the battle just as Qara Shouted again. He watched in disbelief as the second giant flew up and completely over the well’s crossbar, landing hard on its head near Chip and the werelion. Qara started casting healing on herself, the werelion ran forward to slash at the giant, and Chip stepped in to finish it off.
And still the battle had not ended. He couldn’t tell what they were attacking, but Qara and the werebeasts were running east along the road, yelling, snarling and roaring as they went. Chip rose from the giant’s side, shuddering, and after a moment of peering after the battle, pulled the totem from the ground. Whatever was left was probably wolves or saber cats, and they could handle those. He watched the energy spheres flare and die again as the conjurations dissipated.
So that was the Wild Hunt, Chip thought as he trotted slowly eastward to meet Qaralana, who was still healing herself. I thank you for your boon, Lord Hircine. Without it, I probably would have no sister.
Qaralana stared at him as he came alongside her. She glanced at the totem strapped to his back, and sighed.
“Let’s get going,” was all she said.
“Yeah. Let’s.”