Not Alone (A Skyrim Fanfiction)

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

     Cold.  That was the first thing I noticed, and I wondered if one could feel cold in Sovngarde.  I didn’t remember feeling the sensation when I had fought Alduin with the warriors of old, but then I had been a bit busy at the time.  People didn’t go to Sovngarde merely to sightsee.

     This cold was a dry sort of cold, the kind where the snow would not stick if you tried to ball it up in your hands.  It wasn’t a bone chilling cold, nor yet the kind where you could tell it was cold but the temperature didn’t really bother you.  It was just… cold.

     Then I remembered Miraak.

     My eyes flew open and I jolted into a sitting position, then instantly sank back with a groan at the sudden blinding glare and agonizing pain.   I spent the next minute or so lying on my back with one hand pressed over my eyes, waiting for the pain to die down again.  After what seemed ages it finally did, and I tried sitting up again, much more slowly this time, and pried two fingers apart to slowly get used to the light.  Before I could entirely see again I managed to push myself to my feet, ignoring the stabbing jolts in my shoulder.  I staggered a bit, still disoriented, then my vision finally cleared.

     I was in the middle of what had once been the Skaal village.  Turning around and around like a drunkard, tears came to my eyes as I looked around me.

     It was Helgen all over again.  The charred wooden posts of what had once been huts poked up out of the ground like the ribs of a dead animal, some still flickering with small bursts of flame.  The previously hard packed ground was churned up into slush by great claws, thrown into piles and tinted black and red by the soot and….

     Blood.  Blood was everywhere.  As I dazedly turned around, it seemed as though every single villager had either been torn so completely to pieces that the body parts were strewn across the entire width of the village or else their charred and blackened bodies were lying in various grotesque positions of agony and death.

     I fell to my knees and threw up.  Shakily I wiped my mouth with my left hand since it hurt too much to use my right and staggered back up.  I couldn’t stay here.  I had to get somewhere, tell someone….

     Tell them what?  That I had just unleashed a threat that may possibly be greater than even Alduin the World-Eater had been? 

     This was all my fault.  I had gone on many quests full of peril and difficult choices, but in all my time as Dragonborn, nay, my entire life, I had never screwed up this badly.  I may have gotten into plenty of scrapes and occasionally dragged others into them with me, but I had never done anything like this.  Miraak was so bitter at his former dragon masters that he was going to use his power to take out all his anger on the world, and I had been unable to stop him.

     I had to get to Raven Rock.  If they decided to execute me when they found out what I’d done, well then, let them try.  I wanted to warn them, but that didn’t mean I would just bow down to death.  I had laid my head on the chopping block once and vowed I would never do it again.  Not that I could pose much resistance in this state….  Speaking of which, why wasn’t I bleeding to death?

     I looked down at the place where I had been stabbed.  Green vines were tightly wound around my torso around the Thieves’ Guild armor, so tightly in fact that I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t noticed before.  I could still see the tip of the spike poking out between the vines.

     Hermaeus Mora, I realized with an unpleasant shock.  I tried to pry a couple fingers under the vines, but they were too tightly constricted even for that.  Why did he save me?  The answer was obvious.  His previous champion had gone rogue, and he wanted his new one to clean up the mess.  I supposed I should be grateful for him saving my life, but all I could really think about right now was how much it would hurt to cut the vines away and pull the spike out.  And of course, the second I did that my shoulder would once more be pouring rivers of blood.  Better to leave it like this until I could reach Raven Rock.