sickener // skyrim fanfiction

1: Riverwood

[ cw: substance abuse ]

Spring is making itself known. Above her, the trees sway in the cool breeze. The fresh tang of pine sticks in the back of her throat. It's refreshing. With white fingers, she works the bushes on the mountainside. She pauses briefly and rolls the berries over in her filthy, piece-of-shit hands. Her nails have weeks of dirt beneath them. She is sorely overdue a wash and has rashes and spots that can testify to that fact. The wells in the villages are still frozen and the White River, flowing noisily down below, is too cold for bathing. She has no doubt, too, that there are bags beneath her eyes, although she has not seen her reflection for a long time.

She spent three weeks (or was it a month?) on the tundra near Dawnstar when winter arrived. She could deal with the snow and the scarcity of game. The scarcity aside, every elk, moose and deer she shot was little more than a sack of bones. It was the winds that got her in the end and forced her southwards, here, somewhere between Helgen and Riverwood.

"Never seen anything like it," a sailor had told her on the shoreline up north, where she was looking for crabs. "In all my life. Can barely get a boat out." He was an old man, too. His face was puffy and swollen and his beard was crusted with ice and snow. His large, gnarled tree-root hands didn't shake in the cold the way that hers did as she worried at the knots in her line.

The locals - the ones who saw her, when she was skulking about Dawnstar and the villages - called her the mushroom girl. She'd arrived mid-Hearthfire, the best month for fungi. If you needed something - Namira's Rot, Mora Tapinella, she'd get it for you. Most people, like the sailors and the peasant farmers, they knew what things were, what they did, what they needed them for. But finding them was another question. She never really knew what people were doing with them. There was more than one incident where she was pulled behind a hut or into a shed and coin was pushed into her hand and questions were asked in hushed voices. Deathcap? Sickener?

Doesn't grow here, she'd lie.Too far north. Too wet.

But it soon became too cold for fungi of any kind (although she'd made sure to dry out the Liberty Caps at the fireside, for a steady supply) and now she's here, picking the last of the snowberries from bushes that the birds have already stripped.

Said birds are nowhere to be seen. This morning when she rose, the forest was loud and vibrant. She spent the night hidden beneath the roots of a fallen tree which, ripped from the ground, had created a shelf and a hole beneath, curtained with twigs and moss. For the past hour - maybe two hours - there has been deathly silence. While she is doing her best to ignore it (perhaps there is a buzzard or an eagle nearby?) there is a tense unease at the bottom of her stomach. No farmer's carts have passed along the road further down the mountain, nor troops of soldiers, nor travelling beggars.

She pauses again, rubs her hands together, inspecting the berry stains. Down on the road, there are footsteps. From the bushes, she watches. A man, his blond hair and face smeared with black soot, running. He wears Stormcloak armour and there are rope burns around his wrists. She thinks, for a moment, of running down the slope to apprehend him, but what if she is caught by Imperial soldiers and branded a traitor for fraternising with the enemy? But something is wrong - no birds, this man, and now the distinct smell of something burning.

"Hey!" She start to pursue him, knocking stones and tripping over weeds as she slides down the incline. "Hey!"

The man does not stop and disappears quickly. Did he hear her? He must have heard her. And then - overhead - the sound of beating wings. A wind whips up dirt, stinging her cheeks and her eyes, pushing her down onto her back as she slips and falls. She lies there, dazed and winded, and watches as a hideous shadow above blots out the sun for a split second. She can feel the sight being burned into her. Directly over her body is a pitch black shadow of a lizard with wings, larger than a house. Her breathing stops altogether. It soars overhead, slicing through the sky, and she watches paralysed as it travels away and over the top of the mountain.