Pale {The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim}

Chapter I: Bound for the Block {Astrid}

ACT I

CHAPTER I

BOUND FOR THE BLOCK

{ASTRID'S POINT OF VIEW}

If I am dead, I do not know it.

And if I'm alive, I certainly don't know that either.

Caught between the land of life and death slumps a girl with sullen blue eyes, greasy brown hair, and a sunken face. Sagging, she is limp, tired, hungry, hasn't eaten in four nights, and is wearing nothing but a gown stained red with her own culpability. She is going down a road. Heading someplace finite. Someplace nonnegotiable. Someplace pale and cold and bleak and decided and irrevocable.

Someplace where they're going to take everything she has — from her head, to her soul, to her body, to her breath — and strip it all away.

This girl will never be the same if she makes it. She will start her new life on the run, or end it with a broken promise. Everything begins where everything ends, and today, this girl — eighteen with a buried dream — is ending.

I wake with a start.

In and out of consciousness, but now I breathe life. Pale blue eyes flutter open, and I see the world. A mist shrouds me; the land looks like a canvas. Painted in the faded color of the trees, the waning grey of the morning sky, the sharpness of pebbles beneath the wagon... and bam, I jerk upward.

Bump, bump, bump. I wince, followed by a shiver. It is cold, very cold — cold, cold, cold — and I can taste my own blood. Sweet, metallic. A sharp dagger, a new ax, a hot forge. It all feels like home. The coldness, the judgmental eyes, the blood, the feelings, the hurt. I ran away from something bad, into something worse. Something unknown. Something... isolated.

I am alone in a rumbling wagon, my insides shaken like my mother tosses her salads. But then I am startled by three men: two across from me, one by my side. Startled, but not scared.

I am never scared.

One is big and brawny and muscular with long blond hair and eyes that are a cloudless sky I cannot look into. Can't trust, don't trust, won't trust. That has been my mantra, on repeat for my eighteen years. Can't trust, don't trust, won't...

"Hey, you," the man says.

The wagon trembles at the sound of his voice. So do I.

Him: "You were trying to cross the border, right?"

Me:

"Walked right into the Imperial ambush," he says. "Same as us. And that thief over there."

Now my attention is on a man with slick auburn hair stopping at his neck and a widow's peak that travels to his nose and back. Muscular, but at the same time, scrawny. Birdish. He is a Nord, much like the one speaking. Much like me.

It hurts looking at him, so my eyes go to the snow. Imperial ambush or not, they would have gotten me sooner or later. Me, or my body. I can imagine the twisted faces of my parents, somber eyes distorted with sadness and red cheeks streaked with tears, a woebegone mother with that solemn brown gaze, and my father — for once in his life, crying — with his daughter's head in big hands. My sisters: grieving, feeling sorry.

And me: headless, wearing nothing but a blood-stained wedding frock with my hands behind my back. I see my skull detached at the block, and my mouth in a hard, straight line, my eyes black and soulless, my skin scarred, my face rotting, my humanity gone, a life all to ashes. I will be dead within the hour. And there is not a thing I can do about it.