» Thu Apr 02, 2015 1:20 am http://i.imgur.com/Ibra6jz.jpg
Skyrim was a land of many songs. Some were long silenced, others long suppressed. The dragonborn sang at the Throat of the World, Alduin’s end, master of life and death, and she would listen to nothing, would give memory to no song but her own. But sometimes songs hear each other, remember themselves, and return.
Prologue
That was the year the world screamed. Of pain and injustice, terror and triumph, liberty and anger, the cry rose in the proper place; in the shadow of the Throat of the World, Skyrim’s greatest mountain. That nation broke with the spring, blooming blood as its native Nords ripped away the clinging tendrils of a relic empire grown of their own seed but long since uprooted.
As any vine will claim fragments of the rock it climbs when cut loose, so there were those in Skyrim who thought unity more important than liberty – or, perhaps, who sighted a truer enemy in the distance. And so the clans turned upon one another and the legions marched, and the Nords donned their battle furs and cloaks of storm. And from grim Windhelm in the eastern sleet to high Solitude on the frozen marshes of the west, the roars of battle raged.
This in the hoarse gasp of an aborted apocalypse, for Alduin the World-Eater, wyrm of the end-times, was only newly slain by time’s ordained hero; Brital Stone-Stander, dragonborn. A mason, born of masons, she took up sword and shout in the fog-forests of Kreath, in southern Skyrim, when her dragon’s soul awakened and Alduin first took wing. For three years she stalked the north from Rift to Reach, hunting down and devouring dragons and all their power. Her voice was truth; what she spoke became real in the manner of dragons, historians, and Nord heroes of old. Some said she was really a man, but these she argued into a meaty pulp and fed to birds.
After many skirmishes and retreats, Brital forced the World-Eater into Heaven, and there she slew him with great relish. But though none of the assembled dead could understand why, this victory turned bitter in her maw, and she fled the field in anguish. For a time her way was lost, and those who knew her would say only that she trod all the paths of the soul, light and dark, forgotten and forbidden. In her absence, Alduin’s remaining kin ravaged the length and breadth of Skyrim, reclaiming their ancient crevices and eyries and tearing new treasures from the holdfasts of humanity. This was not a good time for mortals.
In the spring of that year, the dragonborn did at last return, grim and scarred and swimming with secrets. She withdrew to the heights of the Throat of the World, and there she spoke with a new voice, binding all dragonkind to roost with her above the earth. The wyrms removed, humanity wasted no time in turning upon itself, and screams of dragon terror turned to screams of human horror as the rebel king, Ulfric Stormcloak, led the children of the sky against the Empire. Both sides begged aid of Brital and her kin, but their only answer were the storms that gathered ever around the mountain’s peak. The dragonborn shouted ceaselessly there, running the world shimmer-thin with impressed reality, cracking the sky unto lightning and glimpses of Misrule. Her words were a constant rumble in every pass and pale of the north, threaded through with a keening wail just above hearing.
In autumn of the previous year, an Orc rose as Archmage of the Clever College in Winterhold; one http://i.imgur.com/839i6o8.jpg. Nearly ninety and almost completely deaf, Lagat spent much of that spring and summer either soothing the dogs, cats, weasels, and rabbits made high-strung and uneasy by the dragonborn’s brooding or seated at her desk, penning a tome’s worth of letters in her slow, precise script. The rest of the time she could not be found, even by scrying spell.
These letters went out by imp-courier, winging their way across Skyrim and beyond, to be cast at the stoops of hovels, mansions, tents, ship cabins, and caves alike. Sometimes the imps thought to revenge themselves once their geas was broken by molesting either recipients or message, and sometimes the recipients thought of their own accord to skewer the courier for a convenient lunch, but they usually met no good end.
Those months saw many travelers on the roads to Winterhold and across the College’s gated bridge – of all cultures and creeds, even unto privateers and merchant princes of the south, but in race they were primarily Orcs. Alone or by couples, families, and even clans, they entered the College and made their honor-offerings to the Archmage, not even taking time to first tend the wounds taken from ambushing legions or Stormcloaks. Then they vanished utterly.
The students and teachers of the College both found this exceedingly unusual, but for all she still corrected their spellwork and scolded their unlaundered linens as she had since she was merely their Headmistress of Maids, Lagat had grown strange of late. So they noted the cattle and the anvils and the sacks of fungal inoculum hauled from the Orcish strongholds and thought they must have come to stay somewhere in the College, but they gave not a peep where the Archmage might hear or see (for she did read lips). Besides, they knew her to have dealt with demons and Psijiics and delved all the secrets of the Dwarven ruins beneath the earth. None were eager to question her.
Not even when, at midsummer’s height, she left the College entirely, stomping out on her own in the middle of a squall off the Throat’s spiraling storm-strands. She took the road as readily as she had ever done, and told none of those she left behind what errand demanded her personal and private attendance in the midst of a civil war.
The Nord rebels had gone to guerilla by then, pulling back to the high mountain passes, striking quick and hard from tiny, secluded villages where none knew or cared the names of the Empire’s Eight Divines. Only Windhelm, ancient seat of the Nord kings, still stood fast with them, and even it perhaps not for much longer. The Empire withered on the stone of its foundation, true, but its legions were fed and reinforced by southern farms spared the same dragon wrath that scourged Skyrim, and their Elven allies were more than happy to bolster their forces against entrenched Nord warbands with elite captains and wrath-wizards. The rebels bled, but so did the Empire’s legions, and land was gained and lost without any hard change.
The Empire’s generals schemed an end to the bloody stalemate as the summer died. Thalmor spies planted false reports of a major delivery of Imperial provisions scheduled to pass through Hammerfell and into Falkreath. When Ulfric’s bear-browed warriors fell upon the covered wagons in their full force, desperately hoping to cut off the Imperial supply routes, the gleaming shields and swords of legionnaires bit back with red relish, and general Tullius himself rode up from the Kreath to complete the ambush.
In the end, the rebels were slaughtered to a man, but with Ulfric’s voice at their forefront they rallied and left a trail of gore all the way down out of the mountains and into the misted vale. The legions stopped them finally in Falkreath town itself, but they too were broken on the will of desperate men. Two more armies were added to the Kreath’s great grave that night, and two nations laid low.
That same night, the Throat of the World fell silent for the first time in nearly nine months. Dragons and dragonborn turned their gazes from high upon the ruin that humanity had wrought, taking wing from the Throat down to Brital’s childhood fog-forests, bathed in new blood. The dragonborn walked amidst the carnage unto the corpse of Ulfric Stormcloak, and she lifted the Jagged Crown of dragonbone from his brow and replaced it upon her own. Any glee foreign powers might have had at the outcome of that battle was dashed then with a single word, as Brital Stone-Stander spoke, breathing new life into every broken body before her. Rebel and Imperial alike gave newborn fealty to her then, to http://i.imgur.com/2LmLtpq.jpg.
Screams of triumph and shouts of battle – a noisy land, is Skyrim, and that year most of all. Unkind to those with sensitive ears. But beneath the ground, through caves and ruins more usually filled with chorus and rhythm, a timeless silence crawled north to the king of a long repressed race. In the ancient subterranean cities of the Dwarves, http://i.imgur.com/DEzc8m8.jpg carried hope drawn from the well of the unknown.
We will begin her story much earlier, however, when she lay banished and alone in the decrepit Dwarven city of Rkund, far to the south. And although that was the year the world screamed, we shall end with its opportunity to weep.
