Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Timeless sea breezes,
sea-wind of the night:
you come for no one;
if someone should wake,
he must be prepared
how to survive you.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

~~~~~~~

The white at the top of the world blurred with the agony screaming through Faolan Snow-Strider’s body, and faded with his waking thoughts.

It could have been hours or weeks since the ambush. He wouldn’t know the difference. The world was an expanse of winter and rock and gray sky, heavy clouds shuttering out the daylight. Every time he summoned the strength to open his eyes, they were in a new place. Ordinarily, he’d have been able to tell the time of day, or glean some idea of their location from the landscape.

Then again, ordinarily he wasn’t bound hand and foot, frozen surer than a ship in ice with a spell that turned his muscles leaden, and at the mercy of the worst headache he’d ever had.

The headache was almost a mercy - it was a distraction from the burns, at the least. He couldn’t move his head to assess the damage, but his flesh felt raw, as if flayed from his body. The cold biting through his leathers numbed the pain of his wounds, but brought with it its own gnawing, dull throb of agony. The bundle of a gag in his mouth dried his mouth terribly and set a thrumming ache through his jaw. Dimly, he was aware of a dozen cramps developing in various unpleasant places across his body, an artifact of however long he’d been restrained in the same unnatural position.

That unnatural position happened to be trussed in the back of a sled like a hunter’s catch, tied in more places than he could count and still crushed under the weight of the spell that had rendered him frozen earlier.

By the time he awoke for long enough to take stock of his predicament fully, the sled had stopped moving - a mercy, given the churning nausea that had made itself known when he’d tried to take in the spin of snow and rock and sky around him. Now, they were still. Light flickered in the corners of his eyes - fires, cutting through the gathering dark. Whether night had fallen or a bad storm was brewing, he couldn’t be sure - though, since they seemed to have stopped on the open tundra, a storm was unlikely. He could tell by the lack of trees rustling in the wind and the wide-open sky above. Somewhere behind him, something dimmed the roar of the wind. The snap of canvas told him it was a tent. Around him, though not crowding him, he caught the snuffling and panting of dogs, and snatches of conversation in the lyrical flow of Altmeris.

A tough position - but he lived his life in tough positions. There was a way out, if he could only be clever enough to find it. Clever, or quick, or lucky--

“Oh, good.  You’re conscious,” said a voice that had become far too familiar.  “I was beginning to think I’d been a little overzealous back there.” 

Not lucky, then.

A shadow fell across him, blocking the warmth of the campfire against his skin.  Blue eyes gazed down at him from a serene, golden face. Beautiful, admittedly, but in the way a looming thunderhead was beautiful. Faolan tried his hardest to glare at him, but the movement felt as though he’d taken a hammer to his temple, setting his head throbbing anew. A thrill of fear rushed down his spine.

“Don’t take me the wrong way,” the Commander continued, his voice as pleasant as though they were merely discussing a favorable turn in the weather.  “There aren’t many mer alive who could absorb the electrical output of twelve trained mages at once and still be recognizable afterward.  I salute your resilience, I truly do.  Not that you’d concern yourself with my opinion.”

Faolan tried to speak, found his tongue frustratingly hindered by the cloth bundled into his mouth, and settled for a growl instead.

The Commander’s face grew a touch more serious.  He stepped up to the sled and crouched in the snow beside Faolan.  “Here’s how this is going to work,” he said quietly.  “I’m going to take that gag out of your mouth, at which point you will have two choices.  Either you and I can have a discussion, during which I might even be inclined to answer a few questions for you, after which you’ll be fed and given treatment for those burns…or you can attempt to use the power of your voice on me the moment your mouth is free, in which case you will be immediately electrocuted and paralyzed again for the next several hours.  I trust you understand your options?”

Faolan weighed them. His first instinct - indeed, the one he would have succumbed to if the Commander had already removed the gag - was to Shout the Commander to pieces. He could turn him to ash, but where would that leave him?

Bound. Alone on the wastes, save the company of Thalmor agents with a fanatic loyalty to their Commander. Injured.

So he nodded once, choking on bitter pride, and resolved to hold his tongue.

The Commander’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly, searching Faolan’s face.  Whatever he found there must have satisfied him, because he reached forward and - with a few deft motions - yanked the gag out of Faolan’s mouth before leaning back, out of the limited range of Faolan’s movement.

Faolan let the icy glare he trained on the Commander speak in his stead. Privately, he wasn’t certain his aching jaw would shape around words. 

The Commander’s eyes never left his face.  “You’re a difficult mer to get ahold of, Snow-Strider,” he said, watching Faolan with a quiet intensity.  “You’ve led me on an interesting chase these past few months.  Out of curiosity, how much did the eyes from that statue sell for?”

Faolan kept his silence for a lingering moment, just to watch the frustration coil tighter behind the Commander’s icy gaze. “All this for some baubles? Throwing around lightning wasn’t necessary to make an offer, y'know.”

“Are you implying you would have sold to me if I had asked?  I thought your standards were higher than that.”

“Who’re you to say I wouldn't? Coin’s coin.” Faolan laughed, then did his best to hide a wince at the pain radiating along his jaw, as if he'd been chewing hot coals. “You didn't drag me halfway across the Pale to chat business.”

“Of course not.  I’m dragging you across the Pale because several months ago, you slaughtered several of my agents to steal a few sheafs of paper from an embassy.  Then you did it again under the streets of Riften, and again in Markarth.  You didn’t think I’d forgotten about all that, did you?”

“You must’ve, since you just threw more of your gods-damned agents at me.”

The look in the Commander’s eye grew ever so subtly sharper.  “I had to make sure it wasn’t a fluke,” he murmured, his tone as smooth and hollow as rotten ice.  “Was it good reading, at least?”

Despite himself, Faolan’s brow furrowed. For a heartbeat, the Commander’s meaning eluded him. Then he remembered - Calcelmo’s museum, the bursts of anti-magic cannons, the way the High Justiciar’s weight had felt atop him, and…the stone. The Falmeri language. Scribbles of runes Faolan hadn't the foggiest hope of reading.

Not that the Commander had to know that.

“There’s gotta be easier ways to start a book club, Commander.”

“I could say the same to you.  Did you ever actually read any of the documents you stole from either of those places, or were those just jobs to put coin in your pocket?”

Faolan’s face flushed with sudden anger. To have everything he'd worked for, risked his life and those of his friends for, reduced to a petty accusation…

But the Commander wanted him to be angry. He could all but see Madia standing in the snow, dark eyes calm and clear, telling him to cool his dragonsblood and think. If they wanted him furious, if they wanted him rash and foolish and hot-headed, he couldn't succumb to the indignant fury sparking along his nerves.

And so Faolan managed a smile that burned the sore muscles of his cheeks, looked into those ice-shard eyes, and forced an edge of flippancy into his voice. “Wouldn't you like to know?”

The Commander raised a mild eyebrow at him.  “Believe it or not, I don’t actually have any interest in punishing your clients for your misadventures,” he said.  “Nor do I really have the time.  Tell me where those dossiers and charcoal rubbings ended up, and I can have them retrieved quietly without their disappearance ever being traced back to you.  Assuming they haven’t been dumped in a lake somewhere.”

“Am I supposed to believe that? You've gotta work on your false promises.”

“Oh, don’t be so ungenerous.  I’ve never broken any promises when it came to you.  For instance, I promised months ago that I’d get my hands on you one way or another, and now I have.  You see?  I’m actually rather good at keeping my word, when it comes down to it.”

There were several distinctly more pleasant ways the Commander could have gotten his hands on Faolan, but he chose not to mention that. Humor, a blade he wielded to cut and parry alike, would not settle the Commander's mood.

In a realization that had ice prickling down his spine, he knew it wouldn't settle his own, either.

No, this wasn't like the other run-ins they'd had, where Faolan had vanished laughing into the night. This time, he was injured worse than he'd been in years, chained and brought low in the endless white of the north. He was exhausted, worn down, closer to helpless than he'd been in years. The Commander’s expression was colder, darker. In turn, Faolan’s own anger was a blistering inferno - and alongside it, dread. Cold, knife-edge dread.

He couldn't bring himself to laugh. Instead, he got angry.

“See, it's easy to believe you're gonna arrest people. But letting them go? You think I'm stupid?” Faolan bared his teeth. “I know Thalmor.”

“Would it comfort you more to hear me say that I would bear down relentlessly on every person you know, every cobblestone you’ve ever trod over, until I find every last connection of yours and wring them dry for information?  Would that be more in line with your understanding of this relationship?”

“Yes.”

Faolan had thought he'd known what he was risking when he set foot in the Embassy all those seasons ago. He hadn't until now - or perhaps, in some years, when he'd truly lost everything to the Thalmor, he'd sit there looking back at this moment in chains on the ice and lament how little he'd known of loss.

He'd already made his choice, in ignorance or no. There was no turning back.

The Commander said nothing.  He only sat and stared intently at Faolan, leveling upon him the same piercing look of study that he always seemed to have at the ready regardless of the occasion, while the resentment simmered under Faolan’s already-burned skin.  Just as it threatened to boil over, the Commander sighed and stood up.

“You will be escorted to Solitude to stand trial for the deaths of fifteen Thalmor agents, as well as for trespassing with deadly intent upon Embassy grounds and for the theft of classified documents,” he said, sounding as though he was reciting a speech from memory.  “As your crimes against the Thalmor Embassy supersede your crimes at the provincial level in scope and severity, so too will the Dominion's jurisdiction over your punishment supersede the claims of any one Hold of Skyrim.  You will receive no premature judgment or penalty prior to your appearance before a court of the Dominion, at which time you will be given the opportunity to make a statement in your defense before a council of duly-appointed judges.”  He raised a single eyebrow at Faolan.  “Until then, you’re stuck with us.  Do you have any questions?”

The words echoed through him - trial, crimes, court. None of them were new to him, but never had he been so close to actually facing them. He’d run a half-step ahead of the law’s reach for most of his life. Finally, he’d stumbled.

“Not at all,” Faolan growled. “I understand you perfectly.”

“Good.  Laanmir, if you would be so kind.”

An older elf, wrapped in furs and with steel-gray hair plaited down his back, came forward from the shadows beyond the campfire with a large leather bag in his hand.  With a shiver of unease, Faolan looked around - as far as he could, still bound to the sled - and realized that most of the people he could see moving about the camp had fallen still and were listening to the exchange.  Coin-bright elven eyes watched him from all around, silent as a pack of creatures at the edge of a wood.

The old elf stepped up to the edge of the sled and knelt down to open his bag, sparing hardly a glance at Faolan.  “This is Laanmir, our chief medic,” the Commander explained as the healer began laying out an array of tools: bandages, pots filled with ointments, and other things Faolan couldn’t crane his neck far enough to see.  “He’ll be seeing to your injuries while you’re with us.  If you even attempt to cause him harm, I will scatter bits of you from here to Hjaalmarch for the wolves to scavenge, and you won’t have to worry about standing trial.  Do you believe that?”

Faolan said nothing. He knew, in the same way his hunter’s instincts told him when there was a sabre cat lurking in the shadows, that the Commander wasn’t lying.

Chapter Text

Over the next few days on the tundra, the Commander’s attentions rarely fixed on him again.

Not that he wasn't watching - he was, always. Every time Faolan looked around, he seemed to find those icy eyes boring into his. But the Commander did not try to speak to him again. Faolan heard his voice raised in command, telling his agents to take watch or change course or find shelter, but none of his words were addressed to him. Still, the Commander was the only one who approached Faolan closely when the time came for him to be given rations or a drink of glacial-clear water from one of the streams nearby, boiled to strip away impurities. It was always the Commander leading him twenty paces from the rest of the group and undoing the gag between his teeth. That much surprised him.

He would've expected a Thalmor of any rank to delegate the task of feeding a prisoner - much less a wielder of the Thu’um - to some unfortunate soldier. And yet every time, the Commander was there, alone.

Was that their tactic? Ignoring him until he snapped? He hated to admit that it was met with any kind of success, but the days without conversation wore on him like a river's rapids over a stone. Still, as their little caravan made its way across Winterhold, Faolan had other things to occupy his mind with.

Namely, planning his escape.

In the first two days, his ability to do so was limited. The burns from the ambush were so severe that he was halfway delirious, even after the attention of the healer called Laanmir. He'd have stood no chance in the wilds. Now, though?

His strength had crept back in, little by little. The throbbing pain of his burns had eased. The muscles in his limbs, though cramping from his hours spent lashed to the sled, felt stronger, flexed harder against his bindings when he dared to test them. 

And so he watched, and waited.

He was well guarded. He wouldn't have expected otherwise. Shouting was hardly an option - though he might've been able to rub off the gag by scraping his face against the sled, he'd never have gotten out of his bonds in time to get away. He dwelt, for a frustrating afternoon, on the prospect of freeing his voice long enough to turn himself ethereal - but it was risky. Too risky. He still had yet to manage that Shout on his first effort, and with the Commander watching him like one of Kyne’s own hawks, he would not get a second. Something in his Voice rebelled against the idea of being silent, of merging with shadow and air. For all his time as a thief, the art of truly vanishing still danced at his fingertips.

And so he watched and waited, tried his best to memorize the timing of shift changes and the faces of the agents who were stationed nearest to him, but most of all, his attention was drawn to the Commander.

The High Justiciar, for all that he was an Altmer, carried himself through the ice and snow with the same dignity he'd possessed at the Embassy.  He observed the progression of his party across the ice fields silently and with keen eyes; when he spoke, it was curt and with few words.  Voices hushed and eyes turned downward whenever he passed by.  And yet he seemed to demand no special treatment, going so far as to quietly mingle with his agents when evening fell, taking shifts on the night watch, eating the same rations they did. The same rations they gave Faolan.

The same rations the Commander himself gave Faolan.

Faolan hadn't quite expected them to feed him at all, and he never would've imagined the Commander would take responsibility for it. Yet, on their second night in the wilderness, beneath the glittering tapestry of a northern sky, it was the Commander who sat before him, holding a waterskin and a bundle of simple rations. Hard bread and dried meat - the same things a Nordic ranger might carry, the same provisions distributed to Stormcloak soldiers. He wasn't sure why he'd expected Thalmor to carry around something different.

“I assume I don’t need to repeat myself regarding the tenuousness of your position here,” the Commander was saying as he unwrapped the cloth from a square of bread.  “I’m certain you’re as hungry as the rest of us.  If I give you this, are you going to try to bite my hand off a second time?”

They were as alone as anyone could be in a camp full of soldiers: Faolan bound to his sled at the very edge of the firelight, Ondolemar seated beside him on a folded stool in the snow, his back turned to the neat rows of tents.  The eyes of his agents watched them both from around the camp’s various fires.  All around them, teams of dogs lay in silent wait, their pricked ears anticipating their own gifts of meat from the hooded northmen who moved in and out of the firelight, keeping flames lit and furs dried for the onset of the night.

In brief moments between muddied hours of pain and fitful sleep, it had occurred to Faolan that one of these men - sons of Skyrim, beastmasters in their own right, made stocky and near-shapeless by the bulk of their furs - might eventually lend him his means of escape.  Judging by the way they kept their fires separate from those of the Commander’s agents, speaking not a word to them except out of necessity, there was clearly no love lost between the two groups; probably coin was the only thing keeping them bound here.  But judging by the guarded looks they cast in Faolan’s direction, the way they snapped out a sharp rebuke at any dog who chanced to wander too close to his prison-sled…

Well.  Too early to tell either way.

In the meantime, there was the Commander, holding a piece of bread and cheese up towards Faolan’s face with an expression that seemed to Faolan half expectant, half chiding.  “I’m not untying your hands,” he said into the silence stretching between them.  “You might as well take it for what it is.”

Faolan’s jaw tightened. He said nothing.

“Allergic, are you?”

Nothing.

“Is this just a ploy to keep listening to my melodious voice?”

“You wish.”

“A religious objective, then?  If so, then far be it from me to tempt a fasting man into impiety.”

Despite himself, Faolan choked out a laugh. “Why pretend to give a shit what I want? Not that I’m fasting - but why ask at all?”

“Mostly because I’m trying to figure out how to get you to eat this so that I can put my arm down.”

“You this glib with all your prisoners, or just me?”

“I prefer to think of it as basic decency,” the Commander said lightly.  “Considering that you dropped me into the Bay of Solitude from eighty feet up, I think I’m being very polite.”

Dread thrilled down Faolan’s spine, as sure as the cold of icy water. “ I didn’t do shit. The dragon, on the other hand…”

“The dragon that you summoned, yes.  As far as I’ve judged, everything that happened from that moment forward was your doing.”

“Then you’re judging wrong.” Faolan truly hadn’t intended for Sahrotaar to touch the Commander at all - as far as he had been thinking, he’d imagined the dragon coming to swoop him up, leaving the Thalmor far beneath them. But the Commander would never believe that.

The Commander only inclined his head, his expression oddly thoughtful.  “Perhaps.  I’ve been wrong on occasion,” he mused, and reached down for something at his feet.  Instinctively Faolan tensed - but it was only a clay drinking cup, which the Commander dipped the bread into before holding it out to Faolan once again.  The sweet, heady scent of mulled wine wafted under Faolan’s nose.  “I’m curious,” the Commander said, watching the steam rise from the cup.  “Do the dragons always do what you ask, or only when it’s convenient for them?”

“Why should I answer? Sounds like you’ve made up your mind.” Hating every second of it, Faolan took the offered bread between his teeth, chewing carefully. As much as he wanted to resist, it would be a display of pointless defiance that would get him nothing but hunger. He couldn’t afford hunger, or more accurately, the weakness that came with it. Not if he wanted to escape.

Which he very much planned to.

The Commander’s face gave away nothing.  “Not necessarily,” he said.  “I have theories.  Suspicions.  Evidence.  I may yet reverse my opinion on some of them before the end of all this.  I may not.  Ultimately that depends on you.”  He dipped the bread into the cup again and held it out.  “Right now you have a golden opportunity to state your case to someone who might actually listen to you.  I can’t promise that much once we reach the Embassy.”

“Takes more than threats to make me talk, Commander,” Faolan said, drawing out the title as though the prospect of being handed to a Thalmor torturer wasn’t worthy of alarm. He pretended to consider the offer. He’d known since the day he escaped Solitude - he couldn’t give the Thalmor any information indicating that there existed dragons outside the control of Alduin. To do so would be to put them in unimaginable peril. 

So instead, he took another bite of the bread, chewed for longer than he needed to, swallowed hard, and rolled his eyes at his captor. “‘M sure there’s plenty of theories about me up at the Embassy. Why should I let you be the one to figure it all out?”

The Commander’s eyes glinted.  “Why indeed,” he murmured.  “You're an interesting mer, Snow-Strider.  A ranger from nowhere, celebrated throughout the holds as a dragonslayer, your praises sung everywhere from castles to common rooms across the province.  Popular rumor calls you a hero.  You’ve made yourself out as a champion of the people, and by and large the people seem to have taken it as fact up until recently.”  Another dip; another offering of bread.  “Imagine the people’s surprise, then, when your call brought a dragon swooping down directly over the waterfront district of a major city.  A bit of a terrifying display, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Aye? How many people died? How many houses burned?” Every god damn him, he knew how to work his way under Faolan’s skin.

“You tell me.  Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, as they say.  A man who commands dragons once may do so again.”  The Commander shrugged lightly.  “Although perhaps ‘command’ is a strong word.  The dov are not known for their subservience, after all.  Which leads me to wonder - is it you who commands them where to go and what to burn?  Or are you simply a useful asset they’d rather not lose just yet?”

The accusation stung like smoke in his eyes. Its bite was worsened by the truth that lay at its core. It wasn’t the truth the Commander was insinuating, but…

Faolan was an asset to something . The Greybeards certainly wanted it to be them, as did every Jarl in Skyrim, as did the Blades - or what remained of them. Ulfric Stormcloak most assuredly still thought it was him. Whoever had scribed his name in the Elder Scrolls had known who - or what - truly laid claim to him. Destiny was the kindest word for it.

No matter what it was, Faolan strained against its chains all the same. 

He wanted to fight, wanted to scream in the Commander’s face that he didn’t understand a single thing about Skyrim or the dragons or Faolan, but that was what the smug bastard wanted . A loss of control. Truth, to be read into his indignation and denials.

“Bet that solves this whole crisis real neatly, then.” Faolan let his shoulders rise and fall.  “Go ahead, then. Plan everything around that idea. See if you’re right.”

“Believe me, I’d rather not.”

The Commander placed the last bite of the bread between Faolan’s bared teeth, set aside the cup, and leaned forward with his hands clasped in front of him.  “Here’s what I think,” he said, so softly that his words nearly melted into the snowy blanket of the ice fields.  “I think you’re a braggart at heart.  I think you’ll do whatever it takes to get eyes on you, to get people talking about you.  The fact that those deeds have been… mostly heroic so far is a matter of luck and convenience, either of which can run out.  You hate to be told what to do.  You have no qualms with risking your life to spit in the eyes of those you disdain.  And for all you rail against those with power, you deeply enjoy having it for yourself.  As you let slip in Solitude.”

Faolan’s skin prickled with rage, like sparks bursting against him. He said nothing.

Almost like an afterthought, the Commander reached out and wiped away the last crumbs of the bread and cheese from where they’d fallen onto Faolan’s bound form.  “I find it far more believable,” he went on in the same mild tone, “that some disenfranchised rogue with a desire to watch his enemies burn would turn on the mortal world for the chance at grasping that power than that a dragon would subvert its nature to aid the slayer of its own kin.  So perhaps you have found some means of directing them for your benefit.  Personally, I think it more likely that you are an opportunist, drunk on borrowed magic, whom for some reason these dragons find more useful than harmful.  In what ways, I can only speculate.

“However, if that is the truth, then it is a tedious and time-consuming truth, one that neither of us will enjoy the consequences of.  If it’s not, then I might be making a very expensive mistake in bringing you in.  And, as I said, I’ve been wrong before.  So.”  

The Commander leaned forward a little more, his eyes never drifting from Faolan’s.  “Convince me that I’m wrong.”

The urge to defend himself was overwhelming; the urge to Shout the Commander into the snowdrifts, even more so. But Faolan’s only power lay in his silence, in the uncertainty that kept the Commander coming back to question him. The moment he was sure, one way or another, in his judgement…

“Why even wonder if I’m not what you think I am?” Faolan glared at him, a dark figure against the snowfields, coat blacker than the gathering dusk. “Why…”

He trailed off as it struck him - how much did the Thalmor know about his true nature? How much were they certain was fact, and how much had they dismissed as Nordic fairy tales? Here was a unique opportunity to find out, if he chose his words well.

“Why believe I’m anything but a monster?” Faolan pressed. “So sure about Solitude, aye? Why waste your precious time thinkin’ you might be wrong?”

In response, the Commander raised an eyebrow and looked pointedly around them - at the camp, the blue-white stretch of the ice fields, the empty sky.  “I have time,” he said simply.

“And you’re wasting it on me?”

“Has that not already been established?”

“Like I established I’m not telling you what you want to hear?”

“What I want to hear is irrelevant.  What I need to hear is whether there’s a reason I shouldn’t spend the next several weeks dragging you across the country in chains.  Left to my own devices, I’d see you hang for the deaths of fifteen of my Justiciars, but I’d prefer to have all the pieces of that puzzle before I commit to anything too exciting.”

“All the pieces? So you can do what with ‘em?” Anger was easier than the chill of fear. “Crawl into some noble’s good graces? Sail an army up here under the guise of ‘fighting the dragons’? I’m not telling you shit, Commander.”

The Commander stared at him, silent save for the long, low exhale of his breath into the frosty air.  His eyes swept over Faolan’s face, a slow searching crawl that made him want to squirm.  “Very well,” he murmured, half to himself.  Abruptly he reached for the gag that lay discarded beside the sled.  “You’ve eaten.  You’ll not starve or shrivel from thirst before the morning.  Open your mouth.”

Faolan ground his teeth together. He would give nothing up easily.

“Open it, or I’ll paralyze you and pry it open myself.  We’ll take bets on which gives out first - my spellwork or your jawbone.  What’s your preference?”

Faolan wanted to make him do it. He wanted the Commander to prove how much he hated him. But escape, or surviving after, would become nigh impossible with such severe injuries. Gods, would he even be able to Shout?

“Should've killed you at the Embassy,” he spat.  He barely got the last word out before the gag slipped between his teeth and fastened, almost painfully taut, behind his head.

“A common beginner’s mistake.”  With the gag firmly back in place, the Commander stood and picked up the folding stool.  “For the record, you’ve got it backward,” he said conversationally, shouldering the satchel of rations at his feet.  “I don’t crawl into the good graces of the nobility.  They crawl into mine.  Good evening, Snow-Strider.”  Then he left, striding evenly away and disappearing among the rows of tents without a single backward glance.

Faolan hated that he watched him go.

~~~

Faolan gave himself one rule: if no convenient moment of chaos or lapse of caution granted him the chance to escape, he would do so before they left Whiterun Hold.

They were taking him in that direction, or so he’d deduced. They’d left the ice fields proper and crossed into barren foothills, passing Fort Fellhammer earlier that day. While they hadn’t drawn close, he’d recognize its huddled silhouette on the ridgeline anywhere. Back in his Companion days, he had gone with Farkas and Aela to drive out the Silver Hand members who’d holed up in those dour walls. Idly, he wondered whether bandits had taken over in their absence, or something worse altogether.

He’d watched Fort Fellhammer fade from view, swallowed by distance and a low-hanging bank of clouds, and knew they were making for the westward pass into Whiterun. It wasn’t ideal territory, but it was territory he knew well. If he vanished into the moorlands or the sparse forests, they wouldn’t find him. It was close enough to Stormcloak territory that the Thalmor wouldn’t have any significant number of reinforcements nearby. If he got lucky, they’d veer far enough south that he could lose himself in the forests of Falkreath.

So he bided his time on the sled, and learned the routine of the patrol as best he could.

Night eventually fell several days after his last conversation with the Commander. While he still came to give Faolan his meals - always alone, and always many paces beyond the reach of the other agents - he didn’t speak to him again. Not more than curt commands, at least. And when he left, Faolan was alone with a northern night that stretched on until he could convince himself the sun would never rise.

It was hard to believe that, in the summer, the Pale wouldn’t see the glow of Masser and Secunda for days at a time. Situated as he was away from the patrol’s campfires, warmed only by a small fire the Commander had built for him, he was surrounded by black just beyond the thin orange glow. Again, he had nothing to do but sit with the dark and quiet and his own mind.

A mind that was going frantic with the need to escape his bonds.

Faolan was ill suited to idleness. On nights like this, when the stars were alight and the moons were bright enough to cast the snow in silvery-red and the wind wailed through the branches of the pine copses, his dragonsblood felt nearest to the surface. His muscles twitched against the ropes holding him in place. The waiting was worse than whatever fate awaited him at their destination. On a night like this, he ought to be hunting - whether deer or dragons, he was not meant to be still. 

The dragonsblood. For all he rankled at the Commander’s assumptions, he did love the power it gave him. He loved the rush in his veins, the pounding of his heart, the way he felt in the throes of battle or the hunt. If the Commander chose to look at him and see only destruction, then so be it. Perhaps if he could feel as Faolan felt - this draw to wild places, this might caught in his chest - he would understand.

Faolan had no idea why he wanted him to.

The Commander was still a Thalmor. No matter how often his path might tangle with Faolan’s, it could never change his nature. His still-healing wounds ached in reminder - he was here, captive and bound and injured, because of the Commander. The Embassy was still fresh in his mind. Etienne…gods, Etienne, a young thief with a gaze far older than his years. He still bore the scars of his torture, both etched into his skin and behind those haunted eyes. He was one of the lucky ones. At least he lived. Countless others did not, from Stormcloak sympathizers who vanished into the night to harmless farmhands or shopkeeps who were taken from their homes for the crime of keeping a shrine to Talos.

How many had the Commander personally seen arrested? How many had he pursued, with the same doggedness that kept him on Faolan’s trail? How many, with lesser ability to hide themselves or fight back when black-coated agents descended upon them? If the Commander could bind the Dragonborn, what chance did the Dragonborn’s wards have?

This mer was his enemy. There was no point in wanting his understanding.

So Faolan watched him - this strange, elegant mer who shared evening drinks with his Justiciars and pitched his tent amidst theirs and was always watching Faolan back - and simmered with hatred. Both for the Thalmor and for his own need to be understood by one.

~~~

His chance came on the seventh day.

They left the valley of Fort Fellhammer after four days on the ice and crossed into the mountain pass at Dunstad, skirting quietly past the fortress, traveling just abreast of a storm that threatened to snow the pass under for the rest of the year.  For two more days after that they toiled uphill, dogs and men and mer alike hauling sleds through deepening drifts and clinging to narrow switchbacks as they ascended through the mountain’s barren canyons.  The Commander still did not speak to Faolan again, though he continued to provide him with food every morning and every night.  From his place bound to the sled, Faolan saw him moving to and fro along the line as they traveled, approaching any snowdrifts that lay packed too deep for the dogs to cross and dispersing them into windblown powder with a wave of his hand.  For all that the Summerset Islands were supposed to be eternally, well, summer, the dense snowfall of the north didn’t seem to give him pause.  He never even pulled up the hood of that big black coat of his.

Mages.  It was disgusting.  Faolan hated him for it.

Only when the summit was behind them and Faolan felt the road swing downwards again beneath them did the Commander finally call a halt to their relentless climb.  Strapped down like a bundle of firewood, he craned his neck for what little view he could gather.  The south slope of the mountains sprawled around them, dotted with thin stands of pine and dustings of snow; faint flecks of it drifted aimlessly in the air.  The sharp burn of ice-scent still came to his nose, but now it mingled with the distant smells of tree sap and dead grasses, and the earthy musk of the fungus that lived in alpine soil, connecting root to root.

They had stopped at a wide bend in the road, one scooped out over generations to allow caravans and other travelers a final resting place before embarking on the bleak trek into the mountains. Faolan recognized the silhouette of the Weynon Stones looming just a little off the road to the south. Around him, the northmen were unloading their sleds.  Every cloak, sack, and scrap of meat that bore the Thalmor’s mark, it seemed, was no longer wanted.  Somewhere behind him, he heard the Commander’s voice raised in brisk exchange with the gruff tones of a sled-driver, followed by the soft, heavy jingle of a coin purse being handed over.  A rather large one, from the sound of it.

So his bounty was still worth a pretty penny.  At least he could take some small satisfaction in that.

“Ho there!  Commander!”

He was disrupted from his line of thinking by a cheerful shout.  His ear swiveled toward the southbound road.  Hoofbeats - many of them - were making their way up the trail to the camping ground.  A horse’s snort of exertion reached his ears as the nearest of the riders pulled ahead and loped up the last stretch of hillside to the flat ground where the party had stopped.  A pair of boots hit the ground.  “Right on time,” said the cheerful voice - too cheerful - now only several feet from Faolan’s sled.  “And in that weather, too.  We saw it brewing two days ago.  Well?  Anything interesting to tell us?”

“Agent Sindoryl.  I see you survived the trip. How charming.”

Despite the words, there was no vitriol in the Commander’s voice.  The other voice only seemed to carry more of a smile.  “You won’t be rid of me that easily, sir.  We’ve established that.  Where is he?”

Footsteps approached him, and two shadows loomed into Faolan’s field of vision.  The Commander’s face stared down at Faolan dispassionately.  Another elven face - some few shades darker, with an upturned nose and a more tousled shock of hair, more Bosmeri than anything - gazed at him with a sharp gleam of curiosity in his orange eyes.  “So this is the bastard,” he mused, and then cracked an unexpected grin down at Faolan.  “Fine day for a little riding, don’t you think?”

“Don’t gloat.  You had the easy task,” the Commander said.  “Until now, at any rate.  You, Nalya, Andarwë, with me.  We’ll get him on a horse.  The rest of you, get everything organized and re-packed for travel.  We’ve no time to waste.”

“Yes, sir.”

What followed was an awkward sequence of untying, grabbing, hauling, stumbling, paralyzing, and un-paralyzing as Faolan was exhumed from the sled and bundled - arms wrenched behind him, gagged twice over - onto a sturdy gray mare, its saddle studded with hooks and loops through which they fastened a formidable web of ties.  He barely had a chance to feel his legs stretch before he was held down again, bound to the saddle like wild-caught game.  The camp broke astoundingly fast.  Within minutes the entire Thalmor unit, its ranks now swelled to twice its earlier number, had mounted up and set off down the shoulders of the mountain. 

The temperatures had grown more bearable as they descended from the Pale, but the swell of troops around him presented another issue altogether. More eyes and ears meant a more difficult escape - although there were also more opportunities for confusion. He’d disappeared into enough crowds to know that much. The horse was also a better vantage point than the sled. Now, he could see enough to gauge the landscape - and his heading across it, if he could just slip free.

Dawnstar and its outlying settlements were only a few days of hard riding north from here. The seat of Stormcloak power in the Pale wasn’t terribly far.

As they rode on, with Faolan at the center of the pack and the Commander and his lieutenant on either side of him, the Commander chatted.  Well - chatted was a strong word.  His words were clipped and expressionless as he updated his newly-arrived officer on the state of their operation, but Agent Sindoryl didn’t seem to mind.  He listened with half a smile on his face.  Alone out of the agents present, he never cast his eyes downward when the Commander’s gaze fell upon him, and even cast the occasional conspiratorial glance in Faolan’s direction, as though jailer and captive alike were in on some silent joke together. 

Faolan distrusted him immediately.

They passed another day in that manner, trekking steadily southward on their new mounts in a neatly-organized pack. Faolan's strength returned in pieces - he tested his muscles every chance he got, squirming in whatever ways his bonds allowed, keeping the blood pumping to his limbs. It was a welcome distraction from the monotony of the trek. Twice the Commander called for a halt: once at midday, and again at nightfall, when Faolan was briefly released and fed before being tied into a sleeping roll and set under guard for the night.  The next morning, the Commander was there again, holding the reins of the horse that was to be Faolan’s prison for the day as the new officer and another agent approached Faolan to unbind him.  “Just get him up,” the Commander said tersely.  “We’ll feed him once he’s on the horse.  We have miles to cover yet.”

The horse, for its part, looked less than enthused, but it plodded forward all the same. Faolan cast a glance between it, and the rest of the camp - far enough away that no agent could immediately be at their Commander’s side, should he call for them. None of the Thalmor had mounted for the day, hands were occupied with breaking camp rather than palming the hilts of their weapons, and Faolan was bound in comparatively fewer ropes. By now, they’d done this several times over. Enough for it to become routine.

Enough that they would, on some unconscious level, have stopped expecting anything to go wrong.

Faolan had spent the last day working through his gag with his teeth. It was slow, uncomfortable work; his jaw cramped and fibers wedged themselves in his teeth. But he’d managed to loosen it, in increments so small the Commander’s eyes had never been drawn to the worn strands. Now, he was keeping it in place, clamped between his teeth, waiting for the right moment.

Which was now.

It was a simple plan. Shout the Commander out of reach and sprint for the hills. Find some sharp rock to rasp off his bindings, once he’d lost his pursuit. Make for Windhelm, or the nearest Stormcloak camp. As he was led to the horse, his eyes fell upon the Commander, and a Shout began to build in his throat.

Three things happened at once. The horse shied, ears flat against its skull. The gag slipped from between Faolan’s teeth. And a Word splintered the morning quiet.

“Fus--”

A Word. Because the Commander brought him to the ground before he could get out the rest.

The echo of his Word rolled through the camp like a clap of thunder.  Heads shot up; voices raised; figures in black coats came running.  The horse jerked its head back and cantered away with its lead trailing behind, its hooves a muffled drumbeat in the snow.  Faolan saw all this at a sharp sideways angle.  His body was frozen before he hit the ground.  The icy-hot crackle of the Commander’s spellwork was shot through him, freezing him in position, his jaw locked open in a snarl with the second Word of Unrelenting Force half-formed on his tongue.

Several feet beyond him, at the end of a long stripe of disturbed snow, the black shape of the Commander lay on the ground and did not get up.

Even as the other agents closed in with a flurry of shouts and spellwork, seizing his muscles further, even as his escape attempt fizzled and died, a bitter triumph ran through his veins at the sight.

“Move!  Clear the space!”

The lieutenant was shouting as bodies pressed in, striding about with his amber eyes flashing, forcing a perimeter around the scene.  Calls for the medic filled the air.  Within seconds Faolan’s view of the Commander had been obscured by the gathering of his agents.  But a whip-sharp voice cracked out above the commotion, one Faolan didn’t recognize, and the harsh rasp of it sent the flock scattering.

“Get out of the way!”

Laanmir - the medic whose eyes were lined with crow’s feet, whose long braid was more steel than black, who moved slowly and had been treating Faolan’s burns with the creeping precision of a craftsman - was running to the fallen commander.  The crowd split like a stream parting around a stone.  He all but skidded to his knees empty-handed in the snow next to the commander.  From his awkward position on the ground, still immobilized and surrounded by a cluster of agents, Faolan could see between them to the red blush of magic snaking over the medic’s bared hands like a second set of veins.

Well.  He’d never pulled out that sort of ammunition when he was treating Faolan’s injuries, that was for damn sure.

“Still breathing,” the medic called out without looking up. Faolan didn’t know if it was disappointment or strange, sickening relief that twisted his heart.

Before he could figure it out, two younger agents arrived at the medic’s side.  Their coats bore the same golden crest as Laanmir’s; their hands were alight with the same eerie spell.  They crouched at intervals around the Commander, their backs turned to Faolan.  He saw glimpses of quick movement, heard Laanmir speaking in snappish bursts to them as light flared and pulsed beneath their hands.  The swell of activity throughout the camp became background noise as he strained to catch their words above the din.

“Commencing thoracic realignment,” he heard Laanmir say.  “Ilaris, keep that lattice extended and don’t move him.  Lorin, I need a local on the left anterior and the middle lobe.  Maintain circulation.  Ondolemar, can you feel that?  No?  Good.  Keep it that way.  Realigning in three…two…one…”

Red light pulsed, and the crunch of live bone snapping into place curdled in Faolan’s ears.  Over the course of several minutes, the spell flared three more times, then four, then five.  The healers chattered tersely at each other, half their words lost in the commotion. With every muscle locked in place, Faolan had no option but to gaze at the unfolding scene along with everyone else.

Minutes passed.  The onlookers held their breath.  Faolan’s blood roared in his ears.

It could not have been more than ten or twelve minutes since Faolan’s Word had shattered the morning, but finally - through the gap between the medics’ hunched-over postures - he saw the Commander’s gloved hand raise up and wave in dismissal.

Tension melted from the watching agents.  Above Faolan, the lieutenant sighed in palpable relief.  Laanmir sat back on his heels as his assistants backed off.  The Commander sat slowly up and pulled in a deep, experimental breath, flexing each hand and foot in turn.  Faolan couldn’t focus on his expression, but his voice, when it came, was surprisingly calm.

“Well, that’s enough of that,” Faolan heard him mutter.  He stood up, rolled his shoulders, and began dusting the caked snow off of his coat.  “Thank you, doctor.  Your timing was irreproachable, as always.”

“Of course it was.  I work with you,” the medic grumbled, accepting the Commander’s offered hand as he hauled himself to his feet. “Everything moving all right?”

“As expected.”

“Good.  Don’t ask me for anything else today.”

“I hadn’t planned to,” the Commander said briskly as the doctor stalked off.  “Agent Sindoryl?”

“Don’t worry, sir, the prisoner’s well contained,” the lieutenant said.  That ever-present smile was coloring his tone again.  “Good to see you in one piece still.  How do you want him dealt with?”

The Commander, still straightening the collar of his heavy coat, glanced down at Faolan.  “Tie him in one of the carts and drag him,” he said.  “I won’t make one of our horses carry a frozen hunk of meat.  Keep him in paralysis for the rest of the day; that’ll tire him plenty.  And have someone collect that horse.”

On cue, several pairs of hands grabbed Faolan and hauled him roughly upright.  A cart came, pulled by a couple of stocky Reach ponies, and a hand from behind shoved Faolan roughly into it.  His snarling face hit the floor of the cart nose-first.  Tears sprung to his eyes that he couldn’t blink away.  Behind him, he heard someone spit in the dirt.

“Nalya.”  The Commander’s voice came a little sharp.  “Conduct yourself differently, please.”

“Sir, he nearly killed you.”

“As would I in his position,” he said, sounding bemused.  “There’s no need to act shocked.  We all anticipated it.  That doesn’t bar us from showing a little decorum, does it?”

“…No, sir.  Apologies, sir.”

“Very good.  I appreciate your concern, Nalya.  See that he’s well tied down; I don’t want any more incidents on the road.  We’ve already lost enough time today.”

“Yes, sir.”

More hands on him.  More ropes, more chains.  Eventually the call was given and the cart lurched forward.  Faolan rattled along in the back, bound even tighter than before, watching his thoughts of freedom slip away and be trampled into the mud under the wheels.

But even worse than the promise of freedom cut short was the begrudging respect Faolan had to feel for a mer who could endure the voice of a dragon with the Commander’s dignity.

Chapter Text

He’d expected to be paralyzed for the rest of the journey, frankly.

After his botched escape attempt, it would have made a bitter sort of sense.  They hadn’t fed him that morning, opting instead to leave him ensnared by spellwork in the back of the cart for hours as the Commander drove the unit determinedly forward, pushing further south into Whiterun Hold.  He’d had plenty of time, while his frozen form jostled against the hard floorboards and his weight shifted this way and that against his bindings, to entertain the thought that maybe they would stop feeding him altogether.  It wasn’t unheard of, and he’d proven himself more than capable of causing trouble, despite his healing wounds.  Would they stop treating those too, if they deemed him too much of a threat?

But no.  Surely they’d still at least feed him, if only enough to keep him alive until they arrived at the Embassy for whatever farce of a trial they had planned for him.  He wasn’t any good to them dead, or so he figured.  Not unless they had a way to make a corpse talk.

Madia does, whispered a small nagging part of his brain.  And if she could do it…

He tried resolutely to ignore that thought.  Madia’s ancestral magic was a restricted practice, known to few outside her family’s scattered enclaves.  And as much as he spat on the Thalmor’s existence, he was reasonably sure they weren’t outright necromancers.  So they were going to need him alive, right?

Still, no matter how much he tried to steel his mind against it, the thought of having his rations withdrawn wormed its sly way into the back of his mind and coiled there, cold and wriggling.  Hunger was an old enemy, one he’d scrapped with on many a desperate night before.  He knew how to be hungry.  That didn’t mean he relished the thought.

Hunger and paralysis.  Those were to be his punishment for the rest of the journey, he was sure, assuming he didn’t free himself before it ended.  He could , of course.  But assuming he didn’t.

Yet that evening when the Thalmor made camp, there the Commander was at the side of the cart, releasing Faolan’s locked-up muscles with barely a twitch of his finger to coax another portion of hard bread and smoked meats between his aching jaws.  And in the morning, the order came for Faolan to be untied.  Before he’d quite understood what was going on, he found himself gagged anew and lashed back onto a horse, the beast’s reins tied neatly off to the pommel of the Commander’s own saddle.

“Not to question your wisdom, Commander,” said Lieutenant Sindoryl, holding his superior’s mount by the bridle, “but are you sure you want this bastard riding up your…ah, following you so closely?  We could still keep him in the cart.”

“We could,” the Commander agreed, taking up the reins and swinging into the saddle.  “But this is dragon territory, and we are currently in possession of a ranger affiliated with dragons, whatever else he may be.  If we happen across one, chances are he’ll know it before we do.”

“You don’t think he’d try and trick us?  Steer us right into one?”

“If he wants to be roasted alongside the rest of us, I suppose he might.”

Despite having taken the force of a blow to the chest from Fus the day before, he mounted with no hesitation, his movement as fluid as could be.  It was fucking unfair, was what it was.  How much gold were the Thalmor throwing around daily, to afford healers like that?

He supposed it didn’t matter.  What mattered was they had them, and here the Commander was - and here Faolan was, ponying behind his horse like a child just learning to ride, as the party moved steadily across the moor.

He told himself to be patient. Were he free, and merely casing a wealthy merchant’s house or waiting in a tree along a game trail, patience would be no issue. Now, it was torture.

Every moment he wasn’t planning another escape attempt was spent studying the Commander who rode ahead of him. He was tall, straight-backed and proud on his mount, with no trace of injury showing in his bearing or voice no matter how hard Faolan looked; whatever Faolan had managed to break, it seemed they’d pretty well unbroken it. He had a light hand on the rein, Faolan couldn’t help but notice.  The towering buckskin he rode moved easily under saddle, and though his eye turned often towards Faolan and the pale mare tied close behind him, a mild touch from his rider was all it ever took to collect him again.  Up and down the procession they rode as the day wore on, scouring the party for problems and dragging Faolan with him, until Faolan was certain they were making three strides for each one of everyone else’s.  Like a mother herding a gaggle of brats across a road, he thought as scornfully as he could muster.  

Still, it was a chance to learn a few things.  Looking at it plain, he could begin to see why they all leapt to follow his every order.  Even with the Dragonborn right at his elbow - even having been broken by him barely a day ago - the Commander never flinched, never avoided his eyes when they crossed.  He only looked at him with the same evaluating gaze he laid on everything else, scanning him up and down before moving his attention onto the next target.  Even up close, something about the man was larger than life.

And yet, altogether, still too small for a mer so uncowed by a Dragonborn.  It was almost insulting .  Bound and gagged Faolan might be at the moment, but still.

For all the Commander’s icy, grim composure, Faolan suspected it wasn’t fear that kept his agents leaping to enact his every command.

There was something between this group that almost approached warmth. Had he thought Thalmor were capable of such a thing, he might have seen it sooner. As it was, it crept up unbidden - the genuine panic in their voices when his Voice had struck the Commander, the way some of them traded words with him even outside the bounds of duty.

It was maddening.

In the days that followed, his attention was split evenly between the landscape and the Thalmor hauling him through it. They were still trekking south, drawing ever nearer to the forests of Falkreath. If he could just slip free, he’d be able to vanish into the green. Perhaps of equal importance, Madia’s family lived in Falkreath - he’d have allies to run to.  Even better if Madia herself had been there, but that wouldn’t be happening any time soon.  He’d left her company behind in Winterhold the day he’d ventured out to scout what he’d thought was a Thalmor smuggling operation and found himself…well, smuggled.

That was the other thought that gnawed at him, when he wasn’t busy thinking of hunger and escape.  How long would it have even taken her to notice that he was gone?

The question haunted him as the troop rode ever further southwest, passing the looming silhouette of Whiterun City to the north.  The hills turned to fields studded with stone walls and hamlets; the roads grew more dense with travelers.  The Thalmor took to covering Faolan’s head with a sack every time they passed the rumble and clip-clop of other travelers’ wagons.  The denizens of Whiterun gave them a wide berth, Faolan noticed; he could hear the sounds of feet and carts pulling off to the sides of the road as they passed by.  How many people on this road would have recognized him if they’d had the chance?  How much sooner could this ordeal be over if just one clever set of eyes thought to take a closer look?

But they didn’t, and soon the roads emptied again as the Commander and his team left the city surrounds behind them.  Faolan fought the urge to sigh as the sack was whisked off of his head to reveal more empty stretches of moorland ahead, bathed in the cold watery sunshine of mid-morning.  Another wasted opportunity.

“Commander?  Commander!”

The lieutenant’s voice broke Faolan out of his sullen musings.  There was always someone or other shouting for his captor’s attention, but this time Faolan heard a barely-concealed edge of sharpness in the Bosmer’s tone.  He sat up a little straighter.  Lieutenant Sindoryl was cantering up the road from the back of the troupe to catch them.  “We’ve got wings off our stern,” he announced, jerking his chin toward the south, where the Jerall Mountains loomed in the distance.  “Barely visible.  She’s just circling, but that could change any minute.”

Faolan turned, followed his gaze into the cornflower blue of the sky. Far above the horizon, a pale blur - at first mistakable for trailing mist, but flying faster than the wispy clouds around it. Cold sunlight caught on scales that flashed almost blinding white, reflecting the sky. At this distance, it could almost have been a bird, perhaps one of the proud eagles that rode the thermals above Whiterun. But no bird’s plumage was that scintillating white-sky-cloud hue, and no bird moved with such sinuous, serpentine grace. 

Perhaps the currents of air shifted, or perhaps the dragon was growing curious, but either way, it broke from its idle circling and began a lazy descent over the rolling plains. As it drew closer, he caught sight of details - batlike wings webbed to its torso, metallic glints at each wing-tip that curved like the blade of a warrior from the Alik’r, a tail tipped with a similar hooked barb. The sight of it sent new urgency roaring through his veins. He was the equal of this thing descending upon them, and yet here he was, bound by mere mortals, helpless to stop the dov if it decided to make a meal of them. He almost considered making a fruitless attempt to yank free, but--

—But the Commander hadn’t moved.  Hadn’t even tensed up.  He just sat there astride the buckskin, the both of them calm as anything, watching the dragon’s slow arc with eyes half-squinted against the wind.  In the midst of the battle-fervor beginning to surge through Faolan’s blood, the Commander’s stillness was almost distracting.  “Well, she’s spotted us,” he remarked, like he was announcing that a squall of rain was on the way.  “Probably heard you running your mouth, Sindoryl.”

“Yes, well, remind me to laugh at your bad jokes later,” Sindoryl muttered.  Up and down the road, the Thalmor troupe had halted in their tracks; every eye was turned to the Commander and his second.  “Well?  What do you think?”

The dragon continued its slow drift down toward the plain.  After a moment of watching it, the Commander turned his horse back to the path.  “Fan out,” he ordered.  “We’ll go off road.  She’s on an eastward tilt; it’ll take her a while to come around on those long wings.  Give me a west-facing crescent - I want fifty paces between every rider.  Our guest and I will take center.  We’ll see if we can’t make ourselves more trouble than we’re worth.”

“Sir!”

Sindoryl gave a sharp nod and rode off down the line, barking out the Commander’s orders.  The group moved as one off the cobblestone roadway and into the field.  Faolan’s pony trotted along dutifully at the Commander’s flank, still moored to his saddle.  With surprising grace, the line of riders spread out and curved toward the west, its ends partly disappearing from view over the swell of the moors.  For his part, the Commander held at a steady walk, watching the dragon’s approach with a studying eye. 

Faolan, too, watched the dragon as it lazily descended across the moors, its shadow wavering on distant hilltops. From the corner of his eye, he kept his attention trained on the Commander. For a moment, he entertained the thought that the Commander planned to use him as a distraction - would he give up the chance to see him tried? If it meant keeping his agents safe, Faolan was half-certain he would. Were his mouth free, he might have been able to negotiate some measure of freedom for himself, at least for the moment, if for no other reason than that he’d last significantly longer as a distraction if he could defend himself. But the gag remained in place, and so he sat in silence, watching the dragon’s descent.

For its part, it hardly seemed to be in any rush. It wasn’t angling itself towards them, simply letting itself lose altitude in a wide, lazy spiral. One less familiar with the ways of dragons might have convinced themself it hadn’t spotted them. Faolan knew it had. There was simply no way for it to miss them, riding along the open road as they were. From the air, the swelling hills around them provided no more concealment than that afforded to a child hiding under their bedcovers.

Faolan held his breath as the dragon finally turned and banked overhead, its shadow sailing over the ground to intercept their path.  The glint of individual scales flashed in the sun.  Every rider that Faolan could see turned their eyes up toward it.  A few horses tried to shy from their paths.  “Hold,” called the Commander as the great serpent swooped toward them, his tone steady.

But it didn’t come for them.  It passed overhead without stopping and flapped its great wings once, twice, three times, building slow momentum back toward the sky.  As it sailed away on a gentle curve, the Commander’s eyes followed it.  “Hold the line,” he called again as its shape slowly dwindled, drifting slowly in another circle.  Faolan noted the long, winding path it took to put itself south of them once again.  Lining itself right up with us, so it is, he thought as it sailed.  Maybe we’ll be food after all.  Well, some of us.

At the height of its arc, the dragon’s great wings tilted down toward them again.  No sooner had it dropped its weight into the descent than the Commander urged his horse into a lope.  “Reverse crescent,” his voice rang out.  “Incoming from the southeast!”

Other voices echoed his order up and down the line.  The riders nearest the center of the arc surged ahead just behind their Commander, pulled in his wake like a shifting tide.  The riders on the outermost edges of the line fell back.  Just like that, the dragon was at odd angles with them again, its path set to inteecept only one or two riders at most.

Faolan’s hands curled into fists in spite of his helplessness, or perhaps because of it. Rarely in his life had he been so close to a dragon - so close, he could practically count the scales on its pale underbelly when it swooped low - and not leapt into action. The only exceptions were for the dragons that owed their loyalty to Miraak. He’d never let another approach him so closely, and yet here he was, strapped to a horse’s saddle and towed along behind a Commander who…was handling the situation better than Faolan would have guessed he could.

The more rational part of his mind wondered at how the Commander knew so readily which patterns would most confuse an airborne foe. The rest of him was locked on the dragon circling above, trembling in the saddle with a fervent tension that could not find release.

The dragon’s bulk hurtled over the southern edge of the Thalmor line.  Once again, Faolan tensed in anticipation of a fiery breath that did not come.  He could feel - or he imagined he could feel - the heat of its breath as it passed over.  A bristling energy crept up his spine.  The dragon was growing frustrated; he knew it as keenly as he felt his own itch for battle.  It flapped, rose, banked into a wide circle, and stared down at them, adrift in the wind like a ship under sail.  Faolan stared back.  The Commander rode onward, his face serene, keeping one eye on their new companion as death’s own spectre tagged along with them from on high.

It went on like this for the next few hours.  As the sun slid across the sky, so too did the dragon, sometimes near and sometimes far, while the Commander charted their course and made minor adjustments in deference to the dragon’s position.  They did not stop for lunch.  Every now and then the dragon stooped on them - testing the durability of their line, making a stab at their reflexes to see if the monotony of stress had dulled them.  It never did.  The Commander’s control of his formation was absolute.

Faolan absolutely hated being grateful for it. 

Still, he was. There was no point in denying it. His dragonsblood did not quiet - how could it, when his foe kept swooping down so close he could feel the rush of wind beneath its wings, the whistle of air parting around the tail-barb and the bladed wing-tips? He was rigid in the saddle, fingers curling around the hilts of daggers he’d been deprived of, stashed as they were in the wagon. The battle he'd been born for, dangled before him even as he was bound and helpless - he could think of few greater indignities. Gnawing as it was, anger was easier than the fear he ought to feel.

So he watched, and waited, and fumed.

~*~

The dragon left them around sunset on an empty belly.  As the light faded into the west, it turned and sailed off northward, gliding on a straight line to the horizon until its shining white-bellied shape melted into the sky.  Faolan watched it go.  He kept watching long after the distance between them would have obscured it from the sight of the others, until eventually even his eyes could no longer track it.  His battle-fever - the fire that had been simmering low but hot under his skin for hours - began to reluctantly subside, unfulfilled.

When he finally turned away, it was to see the Commander watching him in silence.  The keen look he’d worn while studying the dragon had not yet left his eyes.

Faolan returned his look, hoping the unquenched fire in his blood reached his gaze. Gods, he wanted to write their survival off as luck and nothing more, but he wasn’t a fool. Neither was the Commander, evidently. 

Where on Nirn had he learned how to interrupt a dragon’s attack flight?

The Commander took in his expression and raised a single eyebrow.  “See?  Not all of our problems need be solved with violence,” he said lightly, before turning to call to the nearest riders on either side of them.  “The beast is gone.  Gather everyone in.”

His tone was so very innocent.  But by every god, if Faolan didn’t swear he saw a trace of a smile threatening the corner of the Commander’s mouth.  That not-quite-smile hung in his mind’s eye, taunting him as the agents of the Thalmor made camp, watered their thirsting horses and passed out rations to hungry mouths that had not eaten since the morning.

It kept him so distracted that he almost didn’t notice they were being watched again.

It was barely a speck of a shadow that he saw.  Hardly more than a dust mote floating at the corner of his eye.  But he caught it, just over the Commander’s shoulder as he undid the gag between Faolan’s teeth to feed him his evening share.  He glanced away immediately, instinct prompting him to hide the fact that he’d seen anything at all, and slowly let his gaze drift back while he chewed on the offering of dried meat the Commander gave him.

It was far in the distance - a smudge against the mottled backdrop of the plains, well beyond the reach of scouting eyes.  But it was given to Faolan to see farther than most.  The sun was at rest on the lip of the horizon, ablaze in blinding orange that sent spears of light shooting across the moor; every scrubby bush and stand of grass cast its own shadow dozens of feet long.  It would have been too easy to miss the grayed woolen shawl, the dull-patterned saddle blanket, the stock-still curve of the horse’s neck and the equally motionless outline of the rider it carried.  The pair blended like rock into the landscape, their hues washed out between the brilliance of dying sunlight to the west and the colorless dark of the east.

But Faolan knew that horse and that shawl too well to ever mistake them.

It could be no other than his sister Dragonborn on the hillside, a blur of shadow on the moor. He couldn't make out her features, but few were the riders who would dare to follow a Thalmor patrol, and fewer still were those who sat with such poise in the saddle, as if they'd lived their life from the back of a horse. The horse’s own patterning was distinctive - a pale body that could blend with the sandy moorlands, limbs and face dark as night. The colors marked Zainab as an Ash’abah mount as clearly as her tack and rider. In the saddle sat Madia, face veiled by distance and her raiment alike. Her posture was unreadable. She watched them with no urgency - she was unafraid, then, of being noticed .   At least by the Thalmor.

So she had left Winterhold. How long had she followed them through the wilderness, flitting at the edge of their sight and spellwork? How long had she evaded even Faolan's sharp senses?

The sight of her brought hope, worry, and a blade-edge yearning. He refused to see her share his fate, but if she could save him from his…

Why else would she have come here?

Faolan aimed his gaze towards a nearby thornbush, watching the indistinct shadows of two birds tussling over an unfortunate insect. His own meal stuck to his throat. What was Madia’s plan? He knew her too well to imagine she didn’t have at least three by now. Recklessness was his purview, forethought was hers. That didn’t render her immune to capture - or a life spent running from the Thalmor.

He regretted, more keenly than he often allowed himself, ever involving her in his vendetta.

A few moments of chewing in rueful silence passed him by.  When he dared to look up again, the horse and rider were gone.  A furtive scan of the horizon yielded no further sight of them.  The last touch of sunlight had slipped away from the moor and was coloring the distant mountaintops pink, leaving the lowlands gray and empty.  There might as well never have been anyone out there at all.

The Commander - still sitting only a few feet away - followed his eyes to the horizon.  “You’ve been quiet,” he mused.  “Finally gotten bored of me, have you?”

“In your dreams, Commander.”

The Commander raised an eyebrow, but offered no further comment.  He simply stood and swept away the remnants of their meal - such as it was - and turned to his lieutenant, who had his eyes on Faolan.  They’d all given up on pretending not to stare him down at mealtimes ever since he’d Shouted their beloved Commander across the snowfield.  “No fires tonight,” Faolan heard the Commander mutter.  “And double the watch.  Wherever he looks or listens, pay attention to it.  I’m turning in.  Let me know if everything goes disastrously wrong, will you?”

“Always do, sir.”

~*~

The evening stretched into night, and the Commander did not turn in.  At least not for long.  Before the first moon had even risen above the distant treeline, he was back, dismissing the two agents on watch and taking up their post as they retreated.  Faolan, tied securely into the standard-issue Thalmor bedroll that had contained him every night since Winterhold, watched them go.  So too did the Commander, his ears tracking the soft footsteps of their departure until captor and captive were alone in the night.

Faolan practically felt it when the Commander’s eyes fell on him.  He kept his own slitted and breathed softly in an imitation of sleep, watching the tall silhouette through the lattice of his eyelashes.  Minutes ticked past as the moon rose higher.  Finally - apparently satisfied that Faolan wasn’t awake - the silhouette stepped away.

When he sat, it was with a soft groan of pain that couldn’t quite escape Faolan’s ears.

Faolan dared to tilt his head ever so slightly and peek past the edge of his bedroll.  The Commander was sitting several paces away on one of the little folding stools his company were so fond of, his head bowed a little.  Some of the poise had seeped out of his posture; his shoulders were slumped and his eyes closed.  Faolan might’ve thought he was praying, if not for the arm he held tucked close around his ribs, and the tense pinch of his brow.

So the Commander wasn’t as untouchable as he wanted his agents to believe.

Not that Faolan could blame him for pretending. All leaders did - Mercer lining his pockets with gold from the Vault, Delphine sending him on vague quests to prove his loyalty, Ulfric posturing as though he was the only one who could drive the Empire from Skyrim’s shores. Still, it shook something within him, seeing the Commander’s facade crack.

It should have felt like victory, and in some ways, it did. Faolan hadn’t escaped, but his captor had paid for keeping him bound. But beneath that fleeting thrill of triumph coursed something bitter and lasting. Here beneath the uncaring moons, the Commander didn’t look like the face of the Thalmor, the enemy of Faolan’s people. He looked… human . Or merish. Or some other soft, fallible thing that stole the gloating victory from his vengeance. 

Not that it changed anything.  Faolan was still bound for death by trial and execution, as long as he was stuck here.  And the Commander was still the one putting him there.

Well.  It was still a long way between here and Solitude.  Maybe he’d worm his way out by then.  Or Madia would.  One of them would figure something out, surely.

I see you, came his sister Dragonborn’s Voice on the wind, precisely soft enough to find its way to his ear as his eyes closed for real.  Don't do anything yet.  Be patient.  I am working on a plan.

Instinct had him opening his mouth to reply, but he caught the words in time. Steadying his breathing in an approximation of sleep, he watched the Commander’s silhouette through slitted eyes. If he could only tell Madia he understood, or ask her when he should ready himself for her arrival…

They were Dragonborn. It was their nature to always be ready.

And if Madia could trust that he’d heard her, he’d just have to trust her in return.

Chapter Text

His whole body ached and, like he had all morning and afternoon, Ondolemar ignored it.

It wasn’t for lack of concern.  He’d been as meticulous as he could be under Laanmir’s instruction, making up for the hard days of riding by sitting patiently every night while the old surgeon layered spellwork into his bones - bones that were, according to the surgeon, still technically broken, held together with pure magicka and not much more.  It wasn’t ideal, they both knew that.  But after days of travel, the pain was telling him nothing new.  It was easier, Ondolemar had found, to simply stay busy.

After all, there were other problems to solve.

”We’ve lost sight of them again,” Sindoryl noted, rising in his stirrups to signal to one of the outriders about a mile behind them.  “What do you think, Commander?  Should we send someone out?”

They were riding together at the head of the column, breaking the snow for the wagons as the company trudged resolutely up a hill.  Spread out on the plains behind them, the village of Rorikstead lay nestled under several inches of snowfall.  They’d spent the morning resupplying there, and Ondolemar had spent every moment of it on high alert, watching their captive for any hint of rebellion or escape.  Ever since they’d broken camp that morning, Snow-Strider had been withdrawn.  Less responsive, less defiant in the eyes.  It was subtle.  Others less familiar with him might have thought him finally beginning to wear down.  But Ondolemar mistrusted it thoroughly.

Even more so now, given the lone rider robed in grey that had been traveling the road with them since dawn, appearing and disappearing like a ghost, never closer than a few miles away.

Coincidence, perhaps.  It was no one he recognized, nor any of his officers, and they’d made no move to approach the company.  Then again, no enemy scout would.  And Snow-Strider had shown no sign of interest at all.  The absence of his attention in itself set Ondolemar on edge.  Until now, the ranger had let nothing - not even the sight of game in the distance - pass him by.

Ondolemar glanced to the eastern horizon.  It lay empty of any other travelers, mounted or otherwise.  “Leave it for now,” he said to Sindoryl after a moment.  “We’ll double the watch again tonight.  I’m more concerned with getting out of range of yesterday’s visitor.”

”Mmm.  Right.  That was a fun jaunt.”  Sindoryl’s orange eyes flicked skyward, searching habitually for a glimpse of white dragon wings.  “For what it’s worth, I thought we were pretty handy with it.  The drills paid off.”

Ondolemar followed his gaze.  They’d spent months preparing for this operation - months of selecting specific agents from the network of Skyrim’s Justiciary, months of specialized combat training, months of drilling in formation as Gilvanas fed Ondolemar reports about the strengths and limitations of the heartland’s dragons.  “For now, perhaps,” he allowed.  “The dragons aren’t fools.  They’ll catch on soon enough, and we’ll have to adapt.”

”Well, we’ve got three days until we meet Nisseia’s company at the Hjaalmarch border.  Let’s pray the dragons stay stupid until then.”

”Three days,” Ondolemar agreed, holding back a sigh.  “How is Andoril holding up?”

At the mention of their youngest agent, Sindoryl made a kind of mild grimace.  “Stubborn,” he said.  “Bit of a bastard about it whenever I ask, but he’s shown his colors.  Honestly, I think watching you get thrown by Snow-Strider shook him more than the dragon did.”  He scoffed.  “No sense of self-preservation on that one.  Either that’ll be a good thing for us or it’ll be a disaster.  Where’d we find him, again?”

”Somewhere cleaner than I found you, that’s for certain.”

“I respectfully object.  I was only adrift for a few hours.  I’m pretty certain I’m the best-smelling castaway you ever fished out of the Abecean—“

“Rider spotted!” shouted an agent’s voice as they crested the hill, interrupting Sindoryl’s defense.  “Rider from the East!” 

Ondolemar paused at the top of the ridge and turned, casting his gaze out past Rorikstead to the plain they’d just left behind.  His eyes found a trail of dust drifting over the horizon.  There beyond the village, little more than a dark outline against the pale tundra grasses, a figure on horseback was approaching the town.

Sindoryl handed him a spyglass.  He peered through it.  As the figure magnified, he began to make out details.  A pale horse with a dark face.  The rider, cloaked in dark grays and reds fit to all but disappear against Whiterun’s rocky moors. A long staff wrapped in black cloth.  The glint of a sabre sheathed at the rider’s side.  It seemed the rider that had been tailing them since sunrise had abandoned stealth entirely.

And, he saw through the glass, they were approaching Rorikstead at a dead gallop.

He felt Snow-Strider tense beside him before he saw it.  His eyes shot up to his prisoner, his hands already half-forming the spellwork to paralyze him before he could Shout again.  But the ranger wasn’t looking at him.  His eyes were fixed on the sky.

Ondolemar followed his gaze back the way they’d come.  There, beyond the lone rider, cutting a thin white line across the array of golden storm clouds gathered to the East, sailed a familiar pair of scaled wings.

“Eyes up!” Ondolemar shouted, turning Hjalti to face the oncoming predator.  “Dragon inbound from the rear!”

The unit snapped to attention as one, already prepared to move.  But even as he called it out, Ondolemar knew there would be no clever formation to confuse their foe this time - no inconvenience that would turn it from its path.  The dragon was coming in low and fast, with purpose etched in the tension of every line.  Gone was the curious, half-hungry circling of yesterday.  This was a battle lost before it could even begin.

His heart dropped.  They’d been so close.

Across the plain, the high, vaulting wail of an unfamiliar horn pealed through the air.  The rider was close enough now to see with the naked eye.  They laid nearly flat against the horse’s neck as it ran all-out, pressing a long, curved black horn to their lips.  Behind them, distant but closing fast, the dragon’s silhouette grew larger by the moment.  The horn’s cry came again, full-throated and wild.  

Snow-Strider jerked in the saddle, as though lightning were coursing through his body. His eyes were wide and dark, locked on the sky, his head turned in the dragon’s direction. At the sound of the horn, his muscles tensed further. Steel clanked as his wrists yanked, futile, against his bindings.

The nearest agents rounded on him, their hands darting to the hilts of their weapons.  The crackle of lightning came to life in the palms of half a dozen mages.  “Leave it,” Ondolemar snapped.  “We’ve more pressing matters.  Lieutenant, call our outriders in.”

Sindoryl obeyed immediately.  Light flickered at his fingertips as his spellwork sent his voice out to every agent within the mile, ordering them back to the party.  “We should’ve had warning,” he hissed to Ondolemar as the spell ended.  His eyes locked onto Ondolemar’s.  “If we ride hard, we can make it to the river canyon before it leaves the village.  It’d give us some cover.”

And leave the village to take the blow for us while we run, was the unspoken second half.  Ondolemar didn’t need him to say it.  His lieutenant’s candid stare hid nothing.

Snow-Strider’s head shot up at that. Ondolemar could feel those eyes boring into him, an accusatory green gaze that cut like the knives he so often wielded. Were he a lesser man, he would have cowered at the cold, cold rage therein.

An alarm bell began to ring out in the village below.  By now all of Ondolemar’s agents had gathered before him.  Some of them - his scouts, and most of the ancillary guard - were casting wary glances to the east.  The rest were still, their eyes trained on him.  The prisoner’s stare burned.  Ondolemar took in their faces all at a glance: faces he’d recently come to know, and faces who had worked under him since his first arrival in Markarth a quarter century ago.  A few faces who had known and trusted him even longer than that.  In all, fifty mer who relied on him for survival here at the half-frozen top of the world, and one mer they’d all risked life and limb for weeks to contain.

A dragon’s bellow shattered the plain.  Snow-Strider snarled around the gag in his mouth. His eyes were round with far more than the desperate fear which plagued most prisoners Ondolemar had seen marched into Understone Keep. Something more flickered just below the surface, an ember one gust of wind from waking into a flame.   Ondolemar’s gaze fell to Rorikstead, and there he saw tiny figures beginning to run in the streets.  The shape of their panic sank a familiar claw into his stomach.

“Sindoryl,” he said quietly, “fetch the dragonslayer his weapons.”

Snow-Strider blinked - his rage quieted by confusion.

Sindoryl only raised his eyebrows in one single, wordless gesture.  But he did not argue.  Ondolemar saw the resigned understanding in his face as he turned his horse away toward the supply wagons, and privately thanked the gods for it.

He turned to the gathered Justiciars and raised his voice over the tolling of the distant bell.  “There has been a change of plans,” he announced.  “This expedition is no longer a matter of retrieval, but of survival and damage control.  That village is the only substantial thing standing between us and a vengeful dragon for the next ten days.  When it falls, there will be no more distraction.  It has become clear to us that these plains are no longer passable, unless we have the courage and wherewithal to carve our own way out.  If the guard will withdraw from the prisoner, please.”

Dead silence laid itself over the company.  The six mer flanking Ondolemar and Snow-Strider pulled away, their weapons still pointed at the bound elf despite the bells and horns now resounding madly in the village below.  Sindoryl rode up beside him and silently passed over a bundle of oiled leather.  Even through the leather, the curve of the dragon-slayer’s war bow emanated a seeping cold.

Ondolemar raised his eyes to meet the scorching stare of his prisoner.  His prisoner, who had single-handedly slain fifteen of his agents over the past year.  Who had taken months to even begin to contain.  Who had nearly killed him only a handful of days past.  Who had killed him, except for the quick action of a skilled and vigilant few.

He let out a breath, and held the weapons out to him.

“If you are indeed worth anything to these people,” he said, and left the sentence hanging as he snapped his fingers, instantly severing the locks on every chain.

Pale hands reached out to snatch the bundle.  For an instant, Snow-Strider held his gaze and the weapons alike. Something rippled through him, setting his shoulders high, his hands ready, his eyes bright. Prisoner became warrior in an instant. Still, his eyes did not move from Ondolemar’s. 

Then a quick grin flitted across his face. “Trust me.”

He slung the quiver and bow across his back, hung the belt and knives in their proper place across narrow hips, and leapt from the back of the mare with such force that it had the poor beast shying away on nervous hooves. For all the wounds Ondolemar had seen to it that he sustained, for all the paltry rations and days spent paralyzed and bound, he did not look broken. He moved like the wind down the trail, a blur of rangers’ leathers the hue of the moors and of mist-white hair, the colors of earth and sky.  His erstwhile guards and their horses shied in his wake.

Had he not undone his bindings himself, Ondolemar would not have believed the mer running down the hill could have ever been chained.

The low whoosh of wingbeats coming into earshot grabbed his attention.  He looked out across the plain just in time to see the approaching horse and rider engulfed in the shadow of the dragon’s wings as it overtook them, plunging onward toward the town.  A second roar rattled the sky.  This time, it was close enough to reverberate through the earth.  Hjalti tossed his head in indignance.  A shiver ran through Ondolemar’s recently-healed spine.

No more time to waste, then.

He wheeled Hjalti around and urged him down the line of assembled Justiciars, herding them close.  “We’ve little time,” he called out.  “The town of Rorikstead has had no documented reports of dragon attack since this phenomenon began.  They have not the resources nor the experience to weather this assault on their own.  However, an intervention on our part may mean the difference between returning to Solitude in relative safety or being picked off one by one.  With the dragon’s attention split between the town, the dragonslayer, and us, there will be no better opportunity.  Officer Caralinde?”

“Sir!”

“The river is not far.  You will lead a contingent of our agents to the canyon.  Find a position of shelter and prepare to receive us there, or else to report back to the Embassy with all haste if we do not return.”

“Yes, sir!”

The first gout of dragon’s fire lit up the fields behind Ondolemar, throwing his and Hjalti’s combined shadows forward.  Distant screams from mortal throats rose in the wake of the reddish glow.  Ondolemar kept a steady hand on the rein and did not flinch.  “I will require volunteers only for this engagement,” he continued, scouring the faces arrayed before him for traces of hesitation.  “Any who choose to accompany our Second Officer to the river will do so with no injury to their honor.  Those who would defend their retreat and ensure our safe passage home, attend me.  Quickly!”

To their credit, the company was quick to obey.  Most of the reserve unit fell in behind Caralinde and began to move off westward at a controlled, stately pace, keeping their eyes to the sky.  A few dared to send baffled glances his way; most kept carefully blank faces.  Four of them stayed, nudging their horses forward to close ranks around him.

Not one of the High Justiciar’s honor guard moved to join the Second Officer.

Ondolemar’s heart both leaped and sank.  Even young Andoril stood his ground, pale-faced, his hands reflexively massaging the reins.

“Agent Andoril.  Report to Officer Caralinde, if you would.”

Andoril didn’t move.  “I’ll not be the only member of the honor guard to turn my back, sir,” he said, staring straight past Ondolemar at the carnage unfolding behind him.  He refused to meet Ondolemar’s eyes.

Cold trickled an icy path up Ondolemar’s spine.  You can and you will, he almost snapped.  Evidently something of this showed outwardly on him, because the riders on either side of Andoril tilted their chins down and pressed their ears back in deference.  But he bit the words back and nudged Hjalti forward, until he stood right alongside his junior agent.  “You’ll be the only member of the honor guard there to support our Second Officer through whatever comes next,” he said quietly.  “I would have you both give an honest account to the Embassy if this goes ill for us.  Do not do me the dishonor of making me ask you again.”

Andoril’s ears pressed back in mortification.  He nodded, chastened, and turned his mount to follow after the retreating agents.  His spine was stiff as a board.  “Stendarr follow you, sir.”

Ondolemar would have felt badly for him if there had been time.

With one last glance at his lieutenant’s grim expression, he urged Hjalti back to the front of the party.  Down below, the outskirts of Rorikstead were already burning. “We’ll circle around and come in from behind, over the ground it’s already covered,” he called out.  “The footing will be scorched or worse.  Be prepared to shield your mounts and watch for debris.  Do not let civilians flee to the temple.  The dragon will bring down large buildings in hopes of trapping crowds inside.  Break up those crowds by any means necessary.  Drive them out into the hills.  Redirect flames into the snow wherever possible; I want standing water in the central market square.  This is no time to reserve your magicka - we need everything you’ve got.  And for the gods’ sakes, do not get in Snow-Strider’s way.”

His agents didn’t need to answer.  He saw it in the resolute lines of their faces, lit even at this distance by the rising flames of a town’s destruction.  “Auri-El be with you all,” he finished.  “Now — with me!”

He spun Hjalti and urged him into a gallop.  The tawny stallion carried him back down the rock-strewn slope on sure feet, near-heedless of the treacherous footing.  The thunder of hoofbeats through powdered snow rose behind him as his agents fanned out like a pack of wolves, circling the town, riding in his wake toward what most would describe as a nearly certain death.

Well, it’s not as bad as it could have been, he thought grimly as they banked toward the village from the east.  We could have been walking.

Chapter Text

Snow-Strider had beaten them to the center of town.  Of all the madness that followed, Ondolemar would remember that sight: the dragonslayer standing poised in the market square, an island amidst the waves of fleeing citizens, watching the dragon wheel overhead with wide green eyes. Already, a black-feathed arrow was nocked in his bow, the gleaming tip jutting from between his fingers.  From a distance, Ondolemar thought he saw him open his mouth to Shout.  His body, still aching from his near-death, tensed on instinct.

But he didn’t hear the crack of the ranger’s Voice.  Instead, the dragon’s roar thundered over the hills, and the buildings ringing the square burst into flames.

There was no sound on the face of Nirn to rival the terrified wailing of an entire town.  It swelled up like a river in flood as thatched rooftops were swallowed by inferno.  Market stands toppled as the crowd trampled them; dogs bayed; sheep and horses broke through their ties and holding pens and barreled through the market square, running down their human masters as they sought the path of least resistance.  Hjalti threw his head as Ondolemar cantered him into the center of town, ears pinned to his skull, nostrils blown wide.  Ondolemar eased him with a touch to the neck and stood in the stirrups, sweeping his line of sight over the market square.  The air was already sweltering.  Snow turned to slurry beneath their feet.

There was no time even to draw a steadying breath.

He raised his arm and pointed wordlessly down one street, then another and another.  In a flurry of tossed manes and pawing hooves, his agents peeled away into the chaos, weaving through crowds or galloping straight onward as fleeing civilians threw themselves out of the way.  Their shouts began to fill the smoking air, sharp and clear in the din.  Ondolemar had a split second to be grateful for the reputation of fear that surrounded those black coats as citizens began to run from them on impulse, funneling away down side streets and out of the heaving plaza.  

He spun Hjalti to the north.  Looming over the plaza stood the spire of a wooden temple - the tallest building Rorikstead had to offer.  Beneath the painted wings of Kynareth’s hawk at the steeple, someone was still hauling away on the church bell.  People flocked to it through the smoke and steam, converging on the closed temple doors.  Ondolemar bore down on them, thundering past the fringe of the crowd to pull ahead.  

There were still traces of icicles beneath the eaves that hadn’t yet melted.  Ondolemar reached out his magic toward those thin slivers of cold energy as he rode.  Obediently, the ambient heat around him fled from the air and curled into his lungs.  In its absence, fractals of ice exploded across the temple doors.  The leading edge of the crowd stumbled to a halt and shoved backwards, away from its protruding shards.  Ondolemar drove Hjalti into the narrow gap.  The stallion reared and kicked out, widening the distance between the people and the threshold.  “Don’t group together!” he shouted out over their heads.  “You’ll give it a bigger target!  Scatter!”

Snow-Strider, for his part, stood amid the rushing crowd, eyes raised to the dragon above. Even in their panic, the citizens of Rorikstead passed around him like a river around a rock. For all the chaos in the plaza, all the frantic energy with which he’d rushed to the square, he had stilled to unnerving tranquility.

The dragon swooped down over the temple and its spire pointing needlelike towards its scaled underbelly, open mouth aglow with another wildfire kindling between curved fangs. Faster than Ondolemar could blink, Snow-Strider raised his bow and fired. 

The arrow all but vanished, an inky speck amid the scales of the dragon’s torso, but the beast jerked in mid-air, veering off-kilter as though struck by a battering ram. The forge-fire glow of its mouth dimmed - in shock? In pain?

It hardly mattered, as long as it wasn’t turning its attentions to the common folk fleeing amid cinder and ash. 

Snow-Strider had another arrow ready before it could recover, aiming this time in a high arc. The projectile streaked dark across the sky before shattering against a ridge of bone projecting from the dragon’s wing. It banked sharply in the sky, that crested head swinging to turn its burning eyes upon the source of the black-feathed arrow.

Most who fell beneath the dragon’s gaze would have frozen or fled. Snow-Strider came alive.

He sprang from among the last of the thinning crowd like he himself had been fired from the massive bow in his hands. His boots hardly left rumor of his footsteps upon the half-melted snow as he barreled towards the low stone smithy - one of few buildings left unconsumed by the inferno wreathing Rorikstead’s center. 

“Ven!” he Shouted in a voice to rival that of the dragon, and the air itself swept him upwards in a hectic arc that ended with his boots meeting the smithy’s flattened roof, splashing through pooling meltwater. The dragon roared in answer as it rose high into the pale winter skies, evidently taking the sound of another Voice as a challenge. One it was eager to answer.

Ondolemar wasted no time.  The dragon’s flight path was taking it up and away, for whatever brief handful of moments that might afford them.  As the crowd before the church scattered, he circled to the building, looking for any other way in.  There - a small window, its shutters hanging open.  He leaned down from the saddle and peered inside.  The light of the inferno was streaming in through a stained-glass panel on the far wall - the only glass to be seen in Rorikstead.  Beneath it, awash in hellish orange and violet tones, he spotted the rounded shapes of several people huddling.

The door was still frozen solid.  He didn’t dare undo that spell; more people would only stream inside.  The crackle of burning wood and thatch was rising in a crescendo around him.  Somewhere a child was screaming.  As he leaned into the window, a score of frightened eyes fell on him.  He opened his mouth to call out to them.

In that same moment, a thunderous cry rolled across the plaza.  The frame of the church shook.  Something huge blotted out the light from the stained glass window.  Voices from inside the church cried out in fright as the room went momentarily dark.

Once again, the entire building rattled - this time, deeper, shaking the very foundations binding it to the earth. From overhead, something cracked , like the bones of a giant shattering.

Hjalit tensed underneath him.  Ondolemar pulled back and looked up to the sky just in time to catch sight of the spire - ripped from the building - tumble out of sight behind the building.  A plume of ash and fire billowed into the sky where it fell.  A heartbeat later the ground reverberated with the final peal of something colossal and metallic crashing to the ground.  He looked to the rooftop.  The iron bell was entirely gone, leaving the top of the church standing bare and splintered, as though struck by-- 

Colossal wings blocked the sunset.  The dragon passed terrifyingly low overhead, beating frantic wings to avoid losing its lift.  Dark blood slicked the scales of its shoulder where long splinters of wood now protruded.  A drum-like voice reverberated from its throat.  Words lashed out in an antediluvian tongue, words Ondolemar couldn’t understand - save one.

“Dovahkiin!”

As his gaze was turned to the ashen sky, Snow-Strider leapt across his field of view. It should have been an impossible distance to span, but he landed atop the ruined roof of the temple.  Ondolemar saw him perched on the roof’s edge, balancing amid the skeletal remnants of the spire, all twisted stone and blackened wood. Behind him rose the remains of Kynareth’s hawk, its crushed wings framing hair the color of snowfall as he aimed his bow once more.

Ondolemar peered back into the depths of the church. Already the smoke and ash was choking the sky outside, dimming the light inside the temple even further from what it had been moments ago.  The people inside were kneeling on the floor, their arms all wrapped around each other.  Ondolemar could hear some of them struggling to breathe through sobs.  He reached an arm through the window, his heart in his throat.  “All of you, out!  Before it brings down the roof!”

“Get out of the temple!”  Snow-Strider’s voice rose above the din in an echo of his command, as loud as though he’d shouted in Ondolemar’s ear.  “Stay outdoors - go into the hills!” 

Ondolemar didn’t need to see the arrow Snow-Strider fired from his bow.  He heard its aftermath in the dragon’s snarl.  Talons scraped stone and the temple heaved beneath the impact as the dragon landed atop it.  Wooden support beams groaned beneath the weight.  Ondolemar turned back to the huddled figures inside the temple - many now openly weeping - and beckoned for them with a wave of his arm.  “You heard the dragonslayer!  Outside!  Quickly, now!”

A young woman was the first to break from the dogpile.  Shivering, tears streaking her face, she stumbled across the temple floor to the window and reached for his hand.  He hauled her through, leveraging his height from atop Hjalti, and reached out for another.  A few people had followed her lead and ere starting to crowd the window.  One by one he pulled people from the shuddering frame of the church while dragon and slayer did battle atop it.  Ducking his head at the sound of every crack and rumble, he urged the temple-goers off into the streets as their feet hit the ground.  They darted around Hjalti’s hindquarters and disappeared up the road, into the slurry of steaming mud and charred debris.

Ondolemar pulled the last priestess - aging, robed in heavy wool, terror on her lined face - into the street.  “Is that everyone?” he demanded, peering into the empty chapel.  As if in answer, a shriek cut through the crackling of burning wood and the wind-roar of dragon’s wings.  His gaze lifted to the road - there, barefoot, feet lacerated by cuts, a girl he’d pulled from the temple was running back up the street toward him.  No, not toward him - toward the hollow window of the building she’d just escaped.  “Eisa!” she sobbed as she ran.  “Eisa!  Eisa!”

Ondolemar reached down and caught her by the arm as she threw herself at the window.  She shrieked and pulled against him, turned half-feral by desperation.  “No!  Let go of me!  Eisa!”

A wet snap sounded from above.  Something, either the dragon or the elf that harried it, roared in pain.  Shingles tumbled down from the roof to land in the street, missing Hjalti by inches.  More words in the tongue of dragons, old as the sky and loud enough to crack it in half. Ondolemar kicked out of the stirrups and leaped down from his horse with a sharp whistle, still holding onto the girl’s arm.  Hjalti’s ears swiveled back to pin against his skull, but he stood guard. 

“Look at me,” Ondolemar said, grabbing the girl by both shoulders as she wept.  “Look at me . Who is Eisa?”

The girl was sobbing.  “M-my cousin--”

“Where?”

“ In—in the temple--”

“I’ll find her,” he said, pushing her up against the wall, beneath the scant shelter of the eaves.  “You stay.  You stay right here, you do not go in, you understand me?”

The girl nodded, tears tracking down her sooty face.  Ondolemar gave her a final shake for emphasis, grasped the windowsill, and vaulted inside.

Dust rained down upon him in thick streams as the roof shook. Inside, it was so much louder - each footfall, each wingbeat, each scrape of talon on shingle and blade on scales seemed to echo through his bones. Through a window he glimpsed a tail as long and thick as a young sea serpent smashing into the side of the building as the beast flailed for balance, rattling the support beams. The roof was holding up steadfastly, but a single wrong step from the pair above could change that in an instant. The light was bloody red and orange: flame filtered through colored glass, casting the wavering outlines of hawk, snake, and whale across the cobblestone floor. 

“Eisa?” he called into the chapel, arm half-raised in anticipation of something deadly coming down on his head.  He peered around; smoke was beginning to fill the room through the shuttered windows on the far side, blurring the shadowed outlines of the pews.  “Eisa!  Where are you?”

A thin, keening wail filtered into his ear.  He cast about for its source until his eyes landed on a tiny shape.  There beneath the arching stained glass, huddled against the wall, was a child lying frozen on the floor.  Her cry was high and piercing; she couldn’t be more than a handful of years old.  Ondolemar started toward her.

The building groaned, then shuddered.  The fire howled outside the window. A wordless, snarling cry issued from over groaning timbers.  Above the child, a hairline crack appeared in the glass between the wings of Kynareth’s hawk and spiderwebbed outward.  Ondolemar ran.

Like a cascade of a thousand embers pouring from a wildfire, that towering window erupted.  Ondolemar threw himself to the ground over the child as a hot wind blasted through the window frame.  Her scream muffled into his coat while glass shattered across the floor.  Carved shrines toppled from their alcoves. An enormous snow-bright tail lashed through the gap over their heads, whipping hard against the side of the building.  Its spines gouged the frame as it withdrew.  Ondolemar rose, clutching the child in his arms.  Shards of stained glass as red as fresh bone crunched under his boots as he dashed for the window he’d crawled through, whistling for Hjalti as he ran—

Only to be met at the window by a different equine face altogether.

A rider on a pale, wire-thin horse loomed outside the temple like they’d been waiting for him.  A gray wrap swathed the figure nearly from head to toe, darkened by soot.  The horse’s long black face stared him down as he reached the windowsill.  From atop it, the rider reached a hand down to him.  “Give me the child!”

The rider who’d followed them across the plain.  Her call had alerted Rorikstead to the dragon’s approach only minutes ago.  Ondolemar could see the spiraling black war horn hanging from her saddle.

There was no time to ask.  Ondolemar passed the sobbing child over the windowsill and clambered out into a street choked with blowing smoke.  Nearly every rooftop he could see was on fire.  “There was another girl,” he began, but was cut off by a cry as Eisa’s cousin ran from beneath the eaves of the temple and reached up for the child, a string of words Ondolemar could barely understand falling from her lips.  He cast around for Hjalti.

There - standing behind the dark rider, snorting and tossing his head.  His reins were in the dark rider’s hand.  “You leave this horse?” she accused him, thrusting the reins toward him.

On top of the temple, a low guttural groan accompanied the shifting of weight and the scraping of stone.  Ondolemar felt more than saw the moment something massive tumbled to the earth on the other side of the building.  The force of a heavy impact shuddered through the ground.

The dragon, he realized with surreal calm.  It’s grounded.

Not much time, then.

He barely registered his own hands heaving the girl onto Hjalti’s back.  She clung to the big horse’s mane, wide-eyed, staring at the child still held in the dark rider’s arms.  “Get them out,” he heard his voice order, ignoring the reins held out to him.  “Go on, Hjalti.  Away!”

The dark rider didn’t need to be told twice.  She and the black-faced horse swerved away as one, cantering down the road with Hjalti led behind and the young girl still clinging to the saddle.  Her cries faded as they vanished through the veil of smoke at the end of the street, headed for the open fields.

The sudden absence of Hjalti’s hoofbeats rang in Ondolemar’s skull.  Just like that — he was alone, reduced to his own two feet.

All for the better.  He would’ve hated to risk a good, loyal horse for what he was about to do.

By now water was running past him over the muddied ground - gray, sludgy water, the work of dragonfire and magecraft sending snowmelt draining into the well-trodden center of town.  With one arm covering his face, he trudged through the slurry toward the market square.  His throat burned.  The back of his coat was half in tatters.  Bits of window glass shed themselves from his shoulders as he moved, some of them coated in red even deeper than their native hue.  

He reached the corner of the temple and peered around it, searching for the colossal body he’d heard hit the ground.  By now the square was empty of life; whoever could flee had already fled.  Blackened shells already dotted the ground where buildings had stood not an hour ago.  Half of an ox carcass lay smoldering beside a collapsed wagon, which still burned.  The market was a soot-stained landscape of alien shapes.  It was eerily quiet.

No one left to scream, he realized grimly.  Either dead or escaped.

He had just enough time to throw a half-formed prayer in the general direction of Aetherius before one of the smoldering wreckages moved.

Ondolemar pressed himself back into the shadow of the temple.  After a moment he risked a narrow glance into the square.  What he’d thought was another pile of masonry lying among the destroyed buildings was shifting.  Once-white scales caught the light only dimly beneath a pallor of dust and ash as the dragon moved.  A long, snakelike neck scraped along the ground, oozing blood from a series of cuts scattered almost artfully over the flesh.  Black arrows pierced its shoulders and neck.  Its wing bones jutted at odd angles; great patches of leathery skin hung loose, nearly torn from the frame.  The long, icy river of its tail lay draped over the skeleton of a burning house.

But its black eyes still shone hot and alight from within, like banked embers.  Blood sizzled in its nostrils with every breath.  A thin, spiny jaw opened and hissed out a plume of steam as the dragon pushed its head sluggishly through the smoke, seeking any sign of movement and life.  

Snow-Strider was nowhere to be seen.

Ondolemar let out a breath and rubbed the tips of his fingers together.  A spark of static began to leap between them, flickering violet-white and tiny against the darkening scene around him.  The water in the town square looked to be at least ankle-deep by now.  The dragon’s jaw scraped through it as it scented the air; the front half of its body was damp where it lay amidst the runoff.  With the plaza empty of civilians, he could--

“I smell you,” said the dragon, its scaled lips curling around the words as if in disgust.

Ondolemar stopped moving.

“I can taste your spellcraft in the air,” the dragon went on.  Its head had turned westward, away from him, but it too had stopped moving and lay still.  Tense, like a hunting hound locked onto the rustle of a waterbird among the reeds.  “Fascinating.  Long and long has it been since I scented the magic of your kind, iceling.  Our elder brother thought you all devoured.”

The spark of energy at Ondolemar’s fingertips snapped and popped, almost inaudible over the crackling of the flames around the square.  Silently he encouraged it, letting it build as it played along the outline of his hand.  His ears swiveled, listening for the whistle of a black-feathered arrow or the rumble of the dragonslayer’s voice.  Any moment now.

“Quiet as the snow,” the dragon rumbled, still staring in the wrong direction.  The vibration of its massive throat sent ripples through the water around it.  “Smart.  Or perhaps I’ve made assumptions.  Perhaps you simply speak an older tongue.  Does this one suit you?”

The shift caught hold of the breath in Ondolemar’s lungs and held it there.  He rarely heard Falmeris anymore, save for late nights in the silence of his office, muttering it to himself as he worked so as not to forget it.  The soft, rich syllables of his grandfather’s tongue were usually a comfort to his ear.  Now they rolled over him like boulders scraped along beneath a glacier, carving him bare.

Was the creature speaking to him?

Experimentally, he picked up a stone out of the water and threw it some few dozen yards away.  The dragon jerked its snout in the direction of the splash and bared its teeth, glowing heat gathering behind them.  Ondolemar steeled himself, waiting for the roar of an inferno to billow forth.  But what left the dragon’s throat was little more than a wet, ragged hack.  Its whole frame, tensed in preparation for a Shout, shuddered.  A handful of flames coiled out past its lips and fizzled out over the water.  

Not quite at its best, then.

The dragon -- sensing that it had shown its hand -- let out a low growl.  The massive cavity of its chest shook with it.  “So you are a clever thing,” it mused, still in the language of Old Mereth.  “Cleverer than the rest of your breed, at least.”

Slowly - like the creep of a rain-soaked hillside beginning to slough off of a mountain - the dragon rolled onto its belly and heaved itself up onto the knuckles of one great tattered wing.  Pushing with its hind legs, it dragged itself forward towards the edge of the plaza, where the ashen water grew shallow.  Ondolemar’s heart dropped.  No.  Stay down.  Stay here.

But the dragon did not leave.  It halted in the middle of the square and sank abruptly back onto its belly.  Waves sloshed outward from it, rippling across the entire flooded square.  The light of the burning rooftops caught in its reflection wavered.  The dragon’s breath came ragged.

“I remember when they fell,” it said to the empty plaza, its voice nearly a purr of amusement.  “Did your elders ever tell you of that, iceling?  Do they remember the day our lesser siblings brought your forebears straight to us, carried on their backs like so many lemmings trapped on an ice floe?  Only to tumble from the skies in droves once our siblings remembered themselves?  Pah.  ‘Friends,’ they told us.  A foolish pretense from the start.  I enjoyed watching them plummet.”

Pay it no mind.  Ondolemar scanned what he could see of the plaza from his meagre shelter behind the corner of the temple.  Where in the Planes was Snow-Strider?

The seconds were slipping by with no sign of the ranger.  Ondolemar would have thought he’d be right there, swooping down upon the grounded beast in a blaze of glory that he could crow about to the next bard he saw.  As capable as Ondolemar was, capable wasn’t the blade you brought to a duel with a dragon.  The last thing he wanted was to be left fighting the beast alone.

Unless the dragon wasn’t the only one who fell, he thought.  An image of the dragonslayer lying broken beneath that great heaving mass of dragonhide flickered to mind.  He banished it as quickly as it came.  Dwelling on extremes wouldn’t help him, and besides, he’d seen how fast the ranger could move when he wanted to.  No, most likely he was rallying himself somewhere out of view, preparing for a killing blow.

That, or he was lying injured or trapped somewhere, and Ondolemar was on his own regardless.

It was damned inconvenient of him.  Ondolemar reached down to touch the water with his sparking finger and paused, hesitating.  The entire plaza was under meltwater.  If Snow-Strider was anywhere near it…

Well.  It would hardly do to electrocute the bastard again, if he was still alive at all.  But buying him a few minutes - keeping the beast here - that, at least, he could do.

So instead Ondolemar closed his fist, tucking the spark of energy into his palm, and stepped out into the open.  “It’s funny you should mention that, about enjoying the elves falling,” he said aloud, affecting carelessness.  “I was about to say the same thing to you.”

With the intense shine of a harbor searchlight, those black eyes finally shot to him.  Each was probably the size of his entire head.  A shiver ran through him, bone-deep.

“So the iceling mage appears.”  The dragon’s head tracked his movement, even though its body lay still and its flanks rose and fell heavily.  “Hmm.  Not quite as grand as the other one, are you?  Though you smell more of magic.  A trick or two, perhaps?”

The great beast still lay a good distance from him, but even from here, Ondolemar felt dwarfed by it.  He stopped several yards from that sizzling mouth.  Plenty of time to retreat, if it came to that, as badly as it was struggling to move.  Out of a sense of - what?  Spite?  Irony? - he inclined his head ever so slightly toward the dragon, never taking his eyes off it.  It wasn’t a bow, but it wasn’t nothing.

“A sense of etiquette from one so small?  Fascinating.”

“Our people were cordial with each other once.  I see no reason not to be.”

The dragon snorted.  “It speaks to us as an equal.  How grand.”

“I live to entertain.  Where is your equal, for that matter?  I assumed he’d be eager to take you down the rest of the way.”

A gravelly, hacking cough issued from the mouth of the beast.  It took a moment for Ondolemar to identify it as laughter.  “Dead or dying.  Does that frighten you, little iceling?  To be the last one?  Or are there more of you squirreled away somewhere?”

Somehow, he didn’t think the beast was referring to reinforcements.  A chill crept under his skin.  “Well, if the bastard’s dead, I suppose you’ve done me a favor,” he said, ignoring the question.  “Not that that pleases you.  

“I care not for your squabbles.”

“Oh, you’ve made your lack of care quite clear, worry not.  We’ve known that since the Fall.  Why bother, by the way?”

“Explain.”

“Your kin.  The ones who went to battle with my people against the Atmoran invasion.  Why go to the trouble of carrying mortals with them only to drop them out of the sky on a whim?”

The dragon’s lips peeled back in a ghastly approximation of a grin.  Black soot flaked away from the edges of its mouth.

“There are Voices stronger than the petty agreements of mortals, iceling,” said the beast, amusement and scorn dripping like congealing blood through each word. “And there are many things you fail to understand.  Such is your nature.”

“Such as?”

“You fail to recognize the inevitable, and the futility of your struggle against it.”

“Gravely wounded, and still you speak in riddles.”

“Do you still not understand? No matter.” Eyes brighter than any ember burned through him as the dragon exhaled wisps of smoke from between jagged fangs. “The jaws of the World-Eater will claim everything you’ve known in your brief lifespan, whether you comprehend why or not.”

“You speak as though you have no choice in the matter,” Ondolemar said.  Though its dark, hot stare set his spine to shivering, he couldn’t help but search its gnarled face, peering closer through falling ash and steam.

“Tell yourself there is a choice, if it brings you comfort before the end,” rumbled the beast. “But be quick about it.”

And then the beast lunged for him before he could say anything.

Of all the things that dragons were - enormous, terrifying, destructive - Ondolemar had never particularly counted liars among them.  Nightmares they might be, but simple ones, prideful and predictable, once you knew what to look for.  A behemoth sweeping into a town on wide wings and laying waste indiscriminately, pausing only  to shuffle through the ashes of its passing for its next meal - that he had become familiar with.  But they weren’t ambushers.  Or at least he’d assumed they weren’t.  He realized his mistake as the dragon surged forward, its entire colossal frame carried on haunches that weren’t nearly as injured as the dragon had made them out to be.  What had looked before like a reasonable distance vanished in an instant.

It was too late to realize all of this.  Ondolemar cursed himself for it even as the jaws opened wide before him, exposing row upon row of fangs.  Even as he felt himself reacting and knew with eerie certainty that it wouldn’t be enough.  The beast - bloodied, fallen, ruined - was simply faster than him.

But not faster than Snow-Strider’s arrow.

Ondolemar had hardly processed that he was about to die before it was no longer true, the dragon’s jaws snapping harmlessly shut as its head was thrown back by the force of the arrow piercing its spiked cheek.  Cursing himself, Ondolemar stumbled backwards through the water.   The dragon shrieked, sending the nearby flames trembling, and turned to bare its fangs at the source of the arrow. 

Snow-Strider perched atop the smoldering ruins of a home, covered head to toe in grime and ash but nonetheless alive. Even after being spat out by an inferno, even bloodied in several places, his eyes danced with something fervid and manic. He drew another arrow from his quiver and nocked it.  

The flare of relief that ran through Ondolemar at the sight had no business burning as bright as it did.

It was fleeting, though.  Ondolemar’s eyes fell upon the dragon once again.  White-hot indignation flashed through him, searing away all previous traces of his curiosity and boiling at each nerve-tip.  The meltwater still draining into the plaza had grown nearly knee-high as the fires burned through the snowed-in village; its black film sloshed about his boots.  The spark of electricity he carried flared up and burned in the palm of his hand.

So he let it go.

That boiling fury flashed from his fingertips, racing harmlessly down his body and into the fast-forming lake.  The water’s surface ripped apart with a crackling shriek.  The dragon’s scream sounded like steel being rent asunder.  Ondolemar closed his eyes against the white-out that blazed around him.  The silhouette of the dragon - rearing back, twisting in agony, jaws flung wide - emblazoned itself behind his eyelids.  The burn of ozone choked the air.

Another arrow, singing from the black bow of the ranger, heralded the sudden silence which came on the heels of battle.  The dragon’s scream choked and sputtered out.

The blinding light faded.  The lake steamed.  Ondolemar’s ears rang.

Snow-Strider’s boots hit the ground, sloshing through murk and meltwater thick with ash. Blood caked his left side; there was no telling whether it was his own.  Every step spoke of fire and steel, of scales and fangs, of the same age-old might that had shone in the dragon’s now-blank eyes. 

He halted about a cottage’s length from Ondolemar. The arrow nocked loosely in his bow dipped towards the muddied ground.

Ondolemar did not look at him.  He was staring at the mountainous carcass of dragonflesh before him, its jagged spines looming soot-stained through the smoke and steam like rocks along a treacherous shoreline, its head slack-jawed and half-submerged in the water.  One bloodied, empty eye socket gazed blankly up at the sky.  The fletching of a single, slender black arrow sprouted from the roof of its mouth. Steam rose from between its scales.

Scales that had begun to melt into luminous gold.

Blinking did not clear away the pall of light that descended over the dragon’s corpse, spreading scale to scale, rippling like a pond disturbed by a thrown pebble. A mer given to stubborn naivety might have dismissed it as a trick of the light - but no. It glowed too bright, less a scattering of the sun’s rays through smoke-thick air and more as though the dragon had swallowed the sun itself. 

And no illusion played by battle-weary eyes could explain the way the scales began to dissolve, curling into orange coals at the edges before melting into showers of sparks that raced upwards into the overcast sky. A being whose rage came in an inferno, consumed by a gentler flame in its last repose. Pearly bones glinted beneath as flesh turned to light that hung in the air, suspended in motes of cinder and dust. Fangs that had nearly stolen Ondolemar’s remaining years were laid bare in death, the jaw still, and yet there came a chorus of whispers in a tongue Ondolemar did not know . Even before the oppressive heat lingering in the air, he shivered.

Snow-Strider came, on feet whispering light through the fallen ash. Ondolemar tensed as he drew near, the beginnings of a ward surging to his fingertips, but the great longbow hung idle in his hand. Those eyes were focused not on Ondolemar, but on the dragon’s remains.

The whispers grew louder, came faster, a litany chanted from everywhere and nowhere. The light that drifted shimmering in the air coiled towards him - tentative at first, and then with a rush of wind that raised a gust of swirling ashes, as though they’d been given one final purpose. A blue-gold aurora gathered thick above the fallen dragon, its bones bared to the empty sky, its scales feeding the currents of power coiling about Snow-Strider.  Ondolemar backed away without thinking.

The wind picked up. Ash-darkened hair stirred about a serene face - uncharacteristically so, Ondolemar realized somewhere in the back of his mind. Snow-Strider spread his arms wide, standing light on his toes, poised as a bird about to break into flight. His head tipped back.

Gold gathered at his breast. Light poured into his skin. The whispers grew to a shout, a clear note that lingered and lingered as the dragon’s being bled into Snow-Strider’s. Framed by the light of the dying fires and the incandescence of the dragon’s power, Ondolemar saw him clearly for the first time.

Ancient - a soul too big for the body it was granted. A rumor stepping from the pages of the Elder Scrolls. Mortal, and somehow not.

So the bards hadn’t been exaggerating after all.

The glow faded in a rush of wind that stoked the smoldering embers around them and sent whirlwinds of cinders dancing across the square. The voices went silent. The dragon lay in a heap of bones, smaller in death, still upon the ground.

Snow-Strider remained.

And then those eyes, green as the dark beneath ancient trees and still steeped in brilliant gold, found Ondolemar’s own. His grip tightened, near imperceptible, on the arc of the bow in his hands. He did not raise it. The string lay slack between his gloved fingers.

But Ondolemar had seen how fast that could change.  And with the dragon dead at their feet, and the plaza empty…

There was nothing to distract either of them from the other.

You could shock him now, muttered the internal voice in his head - his own voice, but one calmer, more detached.  Make the first move.  He’s not quicker than lightning.  You could get away.

Could he?

It had taken twelve battlemages several rounds apiece to stun Snow-Strider to the edge of consciousness.  He’d been healthier then, yes.  Uninjured and rested.  Now he was bag-eyed and blood-soaked, running on adrenaline and the lifeblood of a dragon, free of chains for the first time in weeks.  And by the fierce wariness in his eyes, ready to do anything to keep it that way.

His magic hummed beneath his skin, seeking form and purpose.  His defensive instinct had his fingers on the verge of twitching into spellwork.  Deliberately, Ondolemar stilled them.  The ranger’s stare practically burned him.  Not even the slightest motion would escape that sort of gaze.

Snow-Strider did not move. Still as a mountain in the center of a world that flowed around him - rising smoke, falling ash, fires that still burned and would long into the night. Near every other time Ondolemar had seen him unbound, he'd drawn the eye with his perpetual motion - wild gestures of his hands, fluid and quick, feet never quiet. Moving like he'd die if he stopped, like the great sharks that carved through the waters of the southern seas.

This stillness was not lethal - to him, at least. This was predatory.  Now, Ondolemar suspected, he was beginning to understand something of what it meant when predator and prey both stopped moving.  Snow-Strider’s eyes rooted him to the ground he stood on and would not let go.

The memory stone vibrated in the pocket of Ondolemar’s coat.  Dimly, it occurred to him then that it had been vibrating, and that fact had only just now registered with him.  Slowly - never taking his eyes off of Snow-Strider - he raised his hand a scant few inches out to the side and traced a sigil in the air to answer it. Snow-Strider’s face grew taut, but his bow-string did not follow. That terse stillness remained.

Commander? came Sindoryl’s voice into his ear, quietly urgent.  We saw the dragon go down.  Do you hear me?  Please respond.

“I hear you, Lieutenant,” he said clearly, still watching Snow-Strider.  “What's your location?”

A faint exhalation of relief carried through the stone.  I’m with Nalya.  We’re gathering at the north edge of town with a few dozen survivors.  Andarwë’s still rounding up the others.  Had a woman ride up to us with your horse and some kids in tow.  Do you need aid?

“I’m in one piece.  Don’t send anyone in, it’s a mess down here.  Keep everyone out of the wreckage as best you can until the fires burn out.  I’ll come to you.”

Do you have a location on Snow-Strider?

Snow-Strider hadn’t taken eyes off him.  Ondolemar glanced at him, then cast his gaze downward and turned away to the east.  The ranger’s shadow stretched out long beside his own, motionless.

“No visual on Snow-Strider,” he said truthfully, projecting his tone loud and clear.  “Nor do I expect one, at this point.  He’ll be long gone in this chaos.”

You think he survived, sir?

“I wouldn’t put it past him.  Assume he’s alive and take precautions in case he decides to circle back on us.”

You think that’s likely?

“Truthfully?  No.  But be on your guard anyway.”

We’ll catch hell for this at the Embassy.

“That’s for me to worry about.  Stay safe.  I’ll see you soon.”

Understood, sir.  Be careful on your way out of there.  The stone stopped vibrating and went cold.

Snow-Strider lingered there, between snow and ash, for a moment longer. Then two. Three. His shadow remained on the ground at Ondolemar’s side.  Ondolemar stared at the dragon’s bones, his eyes never wavering from the fangs now bared in a perpetual snarl.  

Then Snow-Strider was gone, almost faster than the sound of his fading footsteps splashing through ash-thick puddles could catch Ondolemar’s ears.

Ondolemar let out the tension in his spine by increments.  With the hunter gone, he sighed and sloshed through the filthy water toward the skeletal colossus.  After a moment’s pause, he removed one glove and reached out to touch the gleaming ridge of the dragon’s eye socket.  It glared balefully up at him, a wraith looming in the gathering dark.  Not a scrap of its power remained, but Ondolemar felt its accusatory stare all the same.

Well, he thought.  I did tell him to prove me wrong.

The dragon didn’t answer.  It lay there in the center of the wasted plaza, pale bones quickly blackening with its own soot, while the water around it rippled and cooled.  Distant fires bled smoke and embers into the night, carried away on the wind like a banner heralding the fall of another town.  His ribs ached.  His shoulders felt scraped raw.

He ground his teeth, turned away, and sloshed northward out of the plaza, coughing.

Chapter Text

Faolan didn’t make it beyond the huts scattered at Rorikstead’s edge before a rider caught up with him.

He whirled around at the first rumor of hoofbeats on the slush-strewn earth, hands flying to the curve of his bow - and dropping again the instant he laid eyes on the horse and its master.

Madia sat astride her sure-footed Ash’abah mare, closing the distance between them in flying strides.  Against a sunset dulled by smoke and ash, the pair of them were little more than a smear of shadow.  Zainab pulled up only inches short of running Faolan down, snorting in hasty recognition.  A heavy heap of fabric lay in Madia’s lap; she all but threw it at him.  Soft, woolen.  A cloak, gray and nondescript.  Call your woman, came the Whisper from beneath the wrap over Madia’s face.  We must go now.

“Right,” Faolan said, absent the urgency making his heart hammer against his ribs. Something within him was turbulent, an untamed maelstrom against his ribcage - the dragon’s soul, not quite subsumed by his own, thrashing like a moth trapped within lantern-glass. He closed his eyes and turned his thoughts to her presence, bundling the cloak close to his chest. “Shadowmere? C’mon - could use a little help here?”

For a moment, nothing. Then hoofbeats, deep, thudding through the earth as though they came from a much larger creature. The shadows beneath the straw eaves of a hut parted around the warhorse, eyes glowing like embers, gloom clinging to her pelt. She came to a halt beside him, feathered feet pawing at the snowmelt.

“Been a while.” He couldn’t help but smile at her. She snorted with a toss of her heavy head.

And then he was vaulting into the saddle, leather creaking a welcome, and tossing the cloak over his shoulders. Shadowmere took off into the moors before he’d finished fastening the clasp, leaving him clinging gracelessly to the pommel as the world rocked around him.  Zainab’s hoofbeats fell into rhythm behind them.  Southwest, came Madia’s Whisper again.  To Falkreath Hold.  My family will hide us.

Faolan’s jaw tightened. “You sure that’s smart?”

Unbidden came the memory - a sawmill in Riften, the blood on his hands, the fury in Eris’ voice.

Madia, drawing nearly even with Shadowmere to ride just behind her shoulder, cast Faolan a curious tilt of the head.  You are tired, she said in a tone that left no room for argument.  The abbey is your nearest true safety.  The Stormcloaks still hold the Jeralls, and my cousins have guile enough to deter even the Thalmor.  We ride south.

Faolan’s knuckles whitened on the reins. He did not argue.

Long shadows rippled across the moors as Rorikstead dwindled behind them. Gray-green grasses swayed in the wind, swelling and falling with the lay of the land, shadows bleeding away the color of growth. Sandy boulders and patches of unmelted snow broke the monotony of moor-grass. Shadowmere’s hoofbeats thrummed beneath him, a lull at odds with the chill wind whipping his hair as she galloped along some trail only she and Zainab knew. Above, the sky was overcast. Smoke from Rorikstead carried for miles on the breeze, billowing and mingling with the ponderous clouds. The scent of ash still filled his nostrils.

He wasn’t sure how long it would take to wash out - it was everywhere, staining his hands and face and clothes. In some unnameable corner of his heart, the dragon’s soul thrashed like a rabbit in a haphazard snare, a nigh-immortal lifetime of memory and thought and meaning. The flames that had devoured Rorikstead were seared onto the insides of his eyelids - through the eyes of the thing he had slain, they roared a thousand times brighter, crackled with a song unheard by mortal ears, danced with colors he could not name. The memory of them did not block the chill of the wind tearing through his leathers as they rode.

He didn’t dare uncurl his stiff fingers from the reins to pull Madia’s cloak tighter about himself.

~*~

They didn’t stop for hours.

By the time Madia called a halt, the snowed-over plains of Whiterun were steeped under the colorless shroud of deep night.  Wordlessly she had led them over rocky ridges and across streams, splashing through water sharp and cold enough to steal all scent from their passage, the long even stride of her mare never faltering.  If Faolan had ridden atop a lesser horse, he would have been left behind long ago.  Only when sparse trees began to dot the landscape around them did she slow and raise a beckoning hand.  Here amidst the shoulder-high scrub and young conifer growth, the land dipped down into a small hollow.  It was a testament to the depth of Faolan’s weariness that he didn’t spot the tells of their hiding place until they were nearly upon it.

Not another soul in sight.  Above them, broken cloud cover sent starlight scattering faintly over the outline of the land.  They might as well be the only two people in the world.

Faolan’s legs were numb when he slid from the saddle.  His breath crystallized in the air.  Beside him, Madia slid to the ground without a word.  Despite the journey, Zainab’s flanks were sweating only lightly.  Still, in this cold, even a little was enough to endanger a horse left untended.  Without delay, Madia began pulling things from her saddlebags and dumping them on the ground.  Can you still build a fire? she asked.  When Faolan didn’t respond right away, she walked over and shook him by the arm.  Brother.  Wake up.  Her fingers were bone-sharp.

Faolan started at the touch. “Shit. Probably.”

He set about clearing brush away, cursing the numbness that had made its home in his hands, the cramps that seized his muscles when his fingers twitched from the position of curling around the reins. He tested branches that looked promisingly brown and withered, snapping off the ones that gave easily when he bent them and gathering them in the sandy earth at the hollow’s heart. His legs shook with each step. Gorse thorns snared the hem of his cloak, pricked his fingers here and there. He couldn’t bring himself to care.

It was second nature to build the fire itself - the ring of stones that housed it, the nest of feathery leaves and twigs at the center, the cone of larger branches that leaned into one another like weary companions. Without that instinct, he could not have done it. There was nothing left in his mind save exhaustion.

Behind him as he worked, he could hear the shuffling of Madia’s hands and feet as she worked Zainab over, hurrying to scrape the sweat from her thin coat before the cold could claim it.  Water splashed as the mare took long pulls from the waterskin her rider kept for her.  Madia piled blankets onto her in thick layers, then set about spilling the contents of her saddlebags across the ground.  Bedrolls.  Bandages.  Clothes.  Food.  Faolan only took proper stock of it all when Madia pulled him back from the firepit and pushed a waterskin into his hands.  Drink, she ordered.  Eat.  I will get the fire lit.

Faolan hadn’t realized how thirsty he was until water first met his cracked lips. He knew, from long experience, that gulping down liquid after a long day without could only end poorly. It took everything he had to obey his own advice. The careful sips were shocks of cold on his tongue. 

He settled onto the loamy soil, head near as heavy as his eyelids. Water sloshed in the waterskin - were his hands trembling?

“Good turn you were here, huh?” he said, half to Madia and half to Shadowmere.

The black warhorse snorted from somewhere in the shadows.  A dry rasp issued from behind Madia’s scarf, mirroring it.  I ride my ass off to make sure of it, muttered her Voice.  Two weeks we chase you down across the province without rest.  Tomorrow you will explain to me how you let them catch you, you foolish goat.

“Aye,” he muttered, waving the waterskin in her general direction. Cold splashed against his knuckles. “T’morrow.”

A slow flame crackled to life deep in the tinder of the firepit: wispy at first, then slowly gaining traction as it pulled air through Faolan’s lattice of kindling.  Madia took the waterskin from his hands and replaced it with a denser package.  The smells of bread, strong cheese and gently-spiced summer sausages caught his nose as he fumbled it open.  Don’t eat too fast, Madia warned him out of habit.  You don’t look starved, but even so.

“They kept me fed,” he told her between bites. He hardly cared what he was shoveling into his mouth - only that it wasn’t Thalmor rations, and that it was reaching his lips by his own hand. Gods, that memory was going to haunt him until he drowned it at the bottom of a flagon. “More than I thought they’d do, really.”

Mm.  They want you alive.  Better for us, at least.  Are you injured?

“Eh, probably.”

Madia huffed and stood from the fire, which burned steady and smokeless, finally beginning to throw some heat in Faolan’s direction.  She snatched up a small bag from where it lay on the ground.  Dirt and soil crunched beneath her boots as she sat down beside him and shucked the heavy cloak from his shoulders, letting it pool around him as he wolfed the food down.  Eat, she muttered again.  I will look.

Pieces of armor that had clung to him for weeks - bracers, shoulder guard, the thin linen gorget Madia herself had gifted him once upon a time - were tossed unceremoniously into a pile at his side.  Dimly he registered his friend poking at him, feeling around for broken bones, searching for the evidence of his none-too-gentle trip across the country in the back of the Thalmor’s prison cart.  At some point, a damp, heated cloth was pressed to his face.  It took everything he had not to simply pitch forward into the blessed warmth of it.

You look beaten, came Madia’s Whisper.  You are going to be black and blue.  What are they carrying you in?  A barrel of rocks?

The fingers behind the cloth were thin and sharp.  Too thin, it slowly occurred to him, after a long delay between his senses and the part of his brain that catalogued them.

For the first time, he glanced up from his food at her.  Her face was close to his, eyes narrowed as she methodically scrubbed away layers of blood, ash and road-grime.  The firelight reflected out of her eyes looked glassy and pale.

Her cheekbones stood out like razors beneath her wraps.  Where the scarf usually draped over the flesh of her face, now it hung over something much hollower.  She caught him looking and raised an eyebrow at him.  What little skin was visible around her eyes looked leather-dry.

Faolan sucked in a breath, nearly inhaled a piece of bread, and hastened to wash it down with water. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he nodded towards her. “Are you…y’know…good? That doesn’t look good.”

She eyed him more calmly than he felt she ought to.  It’s Ash’abah magic.  It’s not meant to look good.  Do not worry about me.

“Y’look like a draugr.”

I know.  I have to.  I find out you are halfway across Skyrim and I have only days to catch you?  I do what I must so that we are not stopping to rest.

Madia tipped her head in Zainab’s direction - Zainab, healthy and strong as ever, who even as she nibbled on the handful of dates and boiled eggs laid out for her was casting about the horizon with alert ears and eyes.  When I am like this, everything I consume is passed to her, Madia said.  It makes me lighter.  It keeps her strong.  You just haven’t seen me do it before.

“And you’ll be okay?” Faolan leaned forward. His own suffering, borne of captivity, was expected. Hers was not.

Of course I will.  Comfortable, no, but every Ash’abah warrior trains for this.  Comfort is not necessary.  Madia glanced to the north, out past the confines of their hideaway in the brush.  I will return to myself when it is appropriate.  When we are a safe distance from here, and can hunt.

Her throat moved not at all as she Whispered, her lips barely parting behind the scarf to let her Voice past.  Come to think of it, she hadn’t actually spoken to Faolan even once throughout the whole night, except for that one rasping laugh a moment ago.  She’d been relying on the subtle touch of her Thu’um ever since she’d caught up with him outside of Rorikstead.  He supposed he knew why, now.

“I’ll handle the hunting.” He finished his meal and leaned back on the soft bedroll laid out behind him. “You’ve done enough for me.”

A faint, unimpressed mm-hmm drifted past his ear.  It was the kind of noise Madia usually followed up with some sort of pointed commentary, but whatever it was, Faolan didn’t hear it.  In the time between one utterance and the next, his eyelids fell closed and he knew nothing more.

~*~

He woke to the grasp of a thin hand shaking his shoulder and cold, dry air in his lungs.

We must go, said Madia’s Whisper in his inner ear.  There is snow coming.  They’ll not find our trail if we leave now.

He cracked an eye open.  True enough, the sky above them hung heavy in a dense, featureless gray.  He could smell the icy crystals on the air.  At some point in the night, he’d been stuffed into the bedroll instead of left to sprawl on top of it; he had to clamber out, noting as he went the presence of clean wraps around his wrists where his bindings had rubbed the skin raw. More bindings were woven around the shoulder of his sword-arm, where falling rubble had left its mark, and on his legs below the knee, the skin beneath doubtless raw and blistered from the flames of Rorikstead. He stood with a wince, gathering his loose hair back into the leather strip Madia had left beside the bedroll.

Madia was already saddling Zainab, her layers of blankets packed under the saddle - and over it, too, to insulate its seat for the long hours Madia was about to spend in it.  In the milky pre-dawn light, her dessicated hands looked even starker - each bone a thin blade under the skin.  All of her things were stowed away except for the bedroll Faolan had passed out on, and their meager overnight fire was already buried.  He wondered if she’d even slept.  We will have to hunt on the way, she said without turning to him.  I don’t trust this side of the Whiterun border anymore.

Faolan rolled his bedding and secured it to the back of Shadowmere’s saddle. He swung himself up after it with a wince. He held out a hand for his weapons, securing them at his back and belt when Madia passed them up. “You’re right not to.”

Mmm.  It’s only two sunsets from here to the deep forest.  We four can do it in half the time.

Madia - despite her state - practically floated into her saddle.  The horizon is clear, she Whispered once she and Zainab had threaded through the high brush surrounding their camping hollow.  Let’s go, while it stays that way.

They set off into the sea of snow and swaying grasses. Low, sparse branches caught at the hem of his cloak and raked at Shadowmere’s flanks. Her muscles trembled beneath him; on any other horse, he would have written it off as exhaustion, but with her, he knew it meant restless excitement. The horizon flushed at the touch of dawn’s first rays. Rose and honey kindled beneath the gathering clouds - not yet thick enough to herald imminent snowfall, but darkening nonetheless. A faint haze hung over the moors, morning-mist not yet burned away by the sun.

On a day such as this, it would not fade.

The route they took southward was trackless, cutting through the rolling hills of the lower moors with nary a sighting of another living person.  Grass and brush became drywood and squat, coarse pines broken up by meadows as the moorland began to gently slope upward around them.  Past frozen creek beds and fallen trees they loped, the land unfurling behind them at a speed that should have been impossible, save that they were who they were: Madia, astride a mare bred to cross a hundred miles in a day, with Faolan riding at her flank atop a creature of shadow that never tired.  The rhythm of their hoofbeats drank up the miles.  Only the flight of birds overhead or the sudden startling of rabbits fleeing from their path broke the quiet.  They scanned the wilds for other game as they rode, reluctant to break their stride for such small prey.

Around midmorning, the sparse woods finally offered up something worth chasing.  It was mostly accidental.  They burst onto a sprawl of meadow together, and dozens of yards away, the heads of several deer shot up from where they’d been browsing to track their movement.  Madia looked across the field at them, then back to Faolan.  She made no move to slow Zainab, but her hand drifted toward the strung bow and quiver hanging next to her warhorn.  What do you think?

Faolan’s answer came in the curl of gloved fingers around his bow.

He didn’t draw the weapon until the deer returned to their grazing, evidently unconcerned by the horses ambling across the clearing. He cast Madia a questioning look. It was hardly in his nature to share the hunt - but then, it was less in his nature to pursue his quarries from horseback. 

Madia had no such constraints. She wheeled Zainab away, arcing across the meadow at an angle to flank the herd.  Call out your target, she said.  I’ll send them your way.

A single glance, through a hunter’s eyes, was enough to pick his quarry from the tawny-sided ranks of the herd. A doe, moving with a jerky gait that didn’t quite match the pace set by her more hale kin. The arrow that would take her life danced from quiver to string at the tips of his fingers. “The smaller one!” he called to Madia, the sudden loudness causing Shadowmere’s ears to swivel back. “She’s limping - there!”

Madia nodded her acknowledgment.  Zainab picked up speed, and they banked as one entity around the curve of the hillside, passing like a shadow around the outskirts of the herd on a gait as soft and smooth as running water.  The deer watched them with raised heads, unsure whether the presence of the distant horse and her rider warranted flight.  Beneath him, Shadowmere coiled, her ears swiveling with a predator’s interest toward the herd.

Then Zainab swerved and bolted, following a deadly line right toward the center of the herd.  They bolted, trying to flee as one toward the shelter of the nearest line of trees.  Madia swerved with them, heading them off from their easiest path of escape.  Watching her from this distance, it was easy to see the results of a life lived entirely from the back of a horse: the two of them anticipated the herd’s impulses with ease, threading through their numbers and heading off a handful of them - the lame doe included - to drive across the meadow.

Right into Faolan’s path.

Faolan raised the bow, sighted down the arrow. A movement that flowed like water. The arrowhead glinted as he aimed its path - towards the doe’s heaving flank, just behind her shoulder.

Shadowmere jolted beneath him, stride rocking as she kept pace with the herd. The arrow hissed into the treeline and vanished.

Faolan bit down on a curse and nocked another arrow.  As if sensing his frustration at the fumble, Shadowmere tensed under him, growing predatory in her gallop.  As he raised the arrow-feathers to his ear, trying to draw and shoot in time with the rocking of Shadowmere’s driving pace, the thrum of an arrow sliced the air.  Not his own—his ears tracked its course from somewhere behind him, several yards to the right, singing over the approaching drumbeat of another set of hooves.

Watery sunlight flashed on the black volcanic glass of Madia’s arrowhead.  Faolan heard the soft thud of its impact.  The doe dropped between one stride and the next, like a puppet with cut strings.

Zainab’s hoofbeats slowed.  The rest of the herd pulled away, white tails bobbing behind them as they melted into the woods and vanished.  Their quarry lay on the ground, unmoving.

“Shit,” Faolan said by way of greeting, drawing Shadowmere up alongside the doe’s stilling body. A tug on the reins quelled the nascent hunger that had Shadowmere’s neck stretching towards the deer. “Sorry. Guess I’m out of practice.”

Madia shook her head, dismounting in one fluid motion before Zainab had even come fully to a halt.  Your form is good, she said, tossing the reins over the saddlehorn and offering a generous scratch to Zainab’s withers before coming to inspect the kill.  You need only timing.  Next time, fire between the footfalls of your horse, as you fire between the beats of your heart when you are grounded.  It is the same feeling.

“Worth a try. You’d know.” Faolan joined her amid the waving grasses, far less gracefully. “Give me a moment. Then we get this thing dressed.”

He knelt to the earth - loamy and rich with scattered pine needles from the looming trees, less rocky than the soil of Whiterun proper. He laid one hand atop the doe’s cooling breast. His other delved beneath his breastplate to curl around the wings of Kyne’s hawk. “Thank you for your life. It wasn’t given in vain.”

Madia stood back a respectful distance as he prayed, keeping watch on the treeline.  When he was done, she knelt across the carcass from him, offering up her own hunting knives for the dressing of it.  It’s still strange to me how you do that, she commented as they worked, her Voice barely a tickle of a breeze at his ear.  You pray over your kills, but never over your food before you eat it.  Why not?

“Old ways, I guess. Kyne’s a huntress, not a hearth goddess.” Faolan set about dressing the kill - rolling the doe onto her back, cutting from hind legs to pelvis, then on to the jawbone.

You are never worried about tainted food?  Or do you just assume you will survive it because you are you?

Faolan’s shoulders rose and fell as he worked. “If all the rats and garbage didn’t kill me, don’t think that’s how I’m meant to go out.”

There was a distinct possibility that Faolan had already looked into the eyes of the thing that would kill him. His stomach soured at the thought. But dwelling on Alduin wouldn’t do anything to get them to Lakeview faster.

You never know, she replied, though the tone of her voice in his head was amused, with no trace of admonishment.  Maybe it’s all slowly building up in your blood until you die.  If you ever come to the desert with me, I’m going to make you do it.  You can borrow my ancestors for it.

“Deal.”

It was short work between the two of them.  Loathe as they were to stay in the open a moment longer than necessary, the long hours of racing overland were finally catching up to them both.  Faolan could see his own quiet, predatory intent in Madia’s dry hands and bent posture as they broke down the carcass, stripping it for what they could immediately use and storing what they couldn’t for travel.  Madia insisted on saving the blood; once they had scraped together a passable cooking fire, she perched herself beside it with the blood in a metal bowl, stirring dried herbs that Faolan didn’t recognize into it while it steamed.

For a while, little was said.  Faolan busied himself with spearing generous cuts of meat over the flame, listening to the dry whispers passing through Madia’s lips as she worked - spellwork or prayers, or both; he couldn’t be sure.  The smells of iron, garlic and ash wafted together with the scent of roasting venison throughout their meager campsite.  When he next chanced to look up at her, he found her sitting with her back turned to him, neatly concealing the bowl in her lap.  The cloth that usually masked her face lay folded gently on the ground beside her.

It was not the first time she had performed the rituals of her people around him; far from it. Still, he was not a mage, and practically the opposite of a scholar. He could hear the chants she spoke, see the flutterings of her fingers and the bundles of herbs and ritual objects she gathered, but it made no more sense to him than words on a page. He turned to her in full, wiping his bloodied fingers on the grass. “You alright, then?”

Madia didn’t answer.  Instead she waved him off - still with her back turned - laid down her tools, picked up the gently-steaming bowl of blood, and started drinking it with the urgency of a woman in possession of the last clean water in Tamriel.

The minutes stretched on while the entire bowl emptied.  At length she tossed it to the dirt at her side and drew in an enormous lungful of air, braced forward on her elbows with her shoulders hunched in a rare display of breathlessness.  “Fine,” she said after a few moments of gulping air.

The physical presence of her voice between them almost startled him. Still, he’d missed the sound. He smiled at her. “Good to have you back. Not that you weren’t before. Y’know what I mean.”

“I should be saying that to you,” she grumbled.  “I lose your trail at that damn sea cave, I spend days tracking you down.”  She reached over her shoulder, waving in his general direction.  “Pass me that cloth there.  Not my cover, the other one.  The damp one—thank you.  How do they catch you anyway?”

“Heard they were smuggling stalhrim - which I’m realizin’ was probably a setup. Went to check it out. Got shocked pretty bad and hauled across Skyrim and here we are.” His shoulders rose and fell. 

“Shocked pretty bad?  Is that what we are calling it these days?”

“What else would you call twelve mages throwing lightning at you?”

“I see.  Does that knock you out, or are you still awake then?” 

“Oh, still awake. If we’re bein’ honest, that bit surprised even me.” Faolan stirred the embers with the end of a stick, watching the greedy flames ripple at the disturbance.

“Mmm.  Well, now at least we know your limit.”  Madia finished cleaning up and tossed the damp rag—now faintly bloodied—near the rest of the gear that they would soon have to clean from their hunt, and reached for her scarf.  “Maybe now you will actually remember to tell me where you are going before you race off to things.  It will save me some hours next time.”

“Not the lesson the Commander was trying to teach me.” He allowed himself a thin laugh, near softer than the crackle of the flames and the sigh of the wind. “And shouldn’t my limit be what actually knocks me out?”

She gave a noncommittal hum.  “Clearly he does not need to,” she said, though her tone grew more careful.  “At least he has not starved you to death.  I expect worse from such a man.”

“He fucking fed me.” It slipped out unbidden. He gritted his teeth at the memory. “I’d’ve thought you’d be right, and he’d starve me, but…he made sure I ate. Did it himself. Divines know why.”

Madia made a half-aborted motion, like she was going to turn and face him but thought better of it.  Her hands were still busy, securing the embroidered scarf to fall completely over her nose and mouth.  Only once it was in place did she turn around.  Her hands were living-tissue soft again, Faolan noticed; her cheeks filled out the space beneath her scarf, and bright eyes looked out at him from behind its protective folds, though he could’ve sworn that flecks of dust lingered on her clothing where her hands had touched.

“He feeds you personally?” she repeats, her dark brows gracefully furrowed.  “Thalmor commanders do that sort of thing?”

“Don’t look at me. It’s weird as all Oblivion.” Faolan jabbed the stick into the coals again, with the force of a dagger piercing flesh. Something curled its claws into his stomach at the memory. He decided its name was bitterness.

“Does he speak to you?  What does he want?”

“To know if I’m behind all this dragon business.” Poking the fire did nothing to quell the restlessness gnawing at his insides. He sprawled onto his back with a sigh. Above, the first blush of dusk spilled across the sky behind the scattering clouds. He bit his chapped lip. “Probably thinks he has his answer, after Rorikstead. Or maybe not. Never told him anything he didn’t know.”

Except by absorbing the soul of a dragon in front of his eyes.

It wasn’t like Faolan could stop the essence of his fallen enemy from flowing into him like water from a cascade. It wasn’t like he could afford to pass up the power that hissed a susurrus along his bones. But none of that changed how much of himself he’d shown to the High Justiciar.

Madia leaned over to look down at him, her face unreadable.  “Tell me from the beginning.”

So he told her, because there had never been lies between them. The hour wore on, the light fast fled the northern sky, and they sat beside the fire - him speaking, her listening, their roles occasionally reversed. Something cold and heavy lifted itself from Faolan’s shoulders.

When his tale reached its end, night had fallen. Shadowmere had vanished off somewhere, and Zainab was standing watch somewhere among the tall grasses, blending quietly into the dusk.  He lay on his side in the cavorting glow of the flames, braiding and unbraiding bits of wiry late-season grass. He watched her face for any sign of emotion.

She’d given him little so far, beyond a look of quiet thoughtfulness and the occasional narrowing of the eyes.  Now, at the end of his recounting, she sat with her lips pursed in calculation.  “It is a good thing you do not kill him there in the marketplace,” she said, then frowned at herself.  “Did not.  You would kill a man who holds a life debt over you.  That is not easily fixed, even by me.”

Faolan stretched. “Y’think he honors life debts?”

“Doesn’t matter.  You do.  You kill him right after he lets you go, you invite a host of troubles into yourself.”  She paused, then shrugged.  “Of course, this is past you now.  The next time you see him…that may be a different story.”

“Could’ve stopped there from being a next time,” Faolan scoffed. By Kyne, why hadn’t he? He could’ve had the shot lined up and fired in less than the span of a breath. Not even Thalmor healing arts could restore life to a corpse with an arrow through its eye. Not unless they’d started dabbling in necromancy.

Why did that thought make his gut twist?

Madia—as if sensing his doubt—shook her head.  “You do right,” she told him.  “If not him, then someone else will come after you in his place.  I would rather fight an enemy with some honor.” 

“Well, we’ve sure got a fight.” Faolan knew in his bones that the Commander would no more let him go than Faolan himself would stop evading him. To disentangle their paths would require them both to be different people. He stared into the heart of the flames, as if the answers to questions he couldn’t even ask lay in their flickering depths. 

The bitterest of those questions rose and rose until he couldn’t bite it back.

“Think I made a mistake,” he said - statement, not query, because asking might break something unimaginably fragile. “Back at the Embassy. Back…I don’t even know when. But I got us dragged into this whole mess.”

Madia glanced up from the fire at him.  “Explain.”

“Half the reason he noticed me is ‘cause I got sloppy. Killed too many agents, took too much shit, whatever.” The air burned icy in his lungs. His breath came as a plume, like the smoke that doubtless still hung over Rorikstead. “Now he knows what I am.”

“He would learn anyway.  Now or later.  You are not the kind of man easily missed.”

“I gave him a reason to care.”

“Like you give me one?  Or Miraak?  You do not drag us anywhere.  We choose where to be.”

“And he’s choosing to chase my ass across Skyrim ‘cause I made a spectacle at the Embassy.” Faolan sighed - another billow of mist, another memory of eye-stinging smoke.

Madia rolled her eyes skyward.  “I still blame Delphine for that,” she muttered.  “The truth is that you cannot touch a moment in time more than once.  All you can do is look at it.  And even then, you should not look any longer than it takes to learn what you can.  We are here now.  We do what is needed.  No more and no less.”

“Right.” Faolan sat up, brushing bits of brittle grass from his loosely-bound hair. “Guess I’ll figure out what’s needed to keep out of a Thalmor prison when the time comes.”

When the time comes again.

Faolan tried his best not to dwell on that thought.