Reality shattered with a scream. Golds and silvers, and reds and blues collided to form a technicolour headache like a metaphysical bomb. Explosions of dusk and dawn threw themselves into a frenzy and roiled and toiled with anger and war and peace and nature. The top of the sky met the trenches of the sea, and everything became one and then a million, and then more.
All the gods made a grab for her, but one got there first.
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The first thing she felt was the cold – bitter and dry and grating against her bare skin. She felt fear and then pain, blossoming from her head to her wrists, to her ankles. The cluttered noise of voices and the rocking of a wooden world. Something smelt damp, like sweat mixed with wintry earth.
With open eyes, she saw whites and greys. With closed eyes, she saw more: the red of fire, the blue of midnight, and the green writhing of something far more insidious.
The real world jolted, and she returned to one reality. A kind face filled her vision. It asked questions she didn’t have the answers to. A scared face searched between them for pity. And an angry face scowled, non-verbally.
In the other reality, wings the size of mountains burst unnatural eardrums and sonic swords clashed with claws. Words spoken in tongues loud enough to rupture monstrous throats fell on oceans ablaze.
And then there was fire everywhere.
Two red orbs reduced her to child-size as her death roared and hell fell from the sky.
But she was saved by destiny. It pushed her into the arms of that kind face. An explosion of rubble and a fall onto bare hands shocked oxygen into her brain and for a split second, her thoughts were coherent: she had to escape.
But the madness returned.
A laugh punched her from hundreds of mocking maws, silenced only when a sword arced through the air and sprayed the infinite void with black-green oil.
But the sword was right in front of her, as an arm gripped hers and dragged her bruised knees across frozen dirt ground.
“Stay close to the wall!” Hadvar’s voice was real, somehow her captive and her saviour. She held onto that as her mind threatened to launch itself back into the non-physical war taking place beyond her consciousness.
A collapsing tower; a long fall onto splintered wooden boards; a blast of heat; the spike of cold snow on bare toes. The shouts of men, women and children being turned to ash.
The slam of a huge wooden door.
She was thrown into the quiet of an interior space, as noise muffled and wintery rushed in from behind.
Breathless and alone, she staggered into a circular, two-floor room with no visible way up, and cold flagstones glistening with blood and condensation in the candlelight of an overhead iron chandelier. It swayed as the ground shook, again.
A muffled roar from the other side of the town, outside.
Scrubbing dirty, numb hands on exposed arms, she wrestled some body heat back. If she hadn’t been shivering relentlessly, the sight of the dead body would have stopped her completely.
Clumsily piled partially on and partially under a small wooden table and chair, the bulk of a soldier lay limp. In the still, musty air of the tower interior, she listened for any signs of laboured breathing, but heard no life apart from the chaos beyond the walls.
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With a deep, shaky breath, she crept up to the body, her fears conjuring images of a trap – the man leaping back to life and bludgeoning her to death. But no such thing happened. The dead man was truly that – dead.
“Okay. Okay. Oh boy.” She tensed a knuckle and felt the bite of rough leather on her wrists. The man had an axe at his hip – he’d died without a fight. Had he staggered in following a death blow? There was no blood anywhere.
She could use that axe to free her hands, but she’d have to move quick. Otherwise…
The noise unmuffled and a gust of wintery air rushed in behind her, coiling around her ankles and snaking all the way up her back and down her arms. She gasped in shock and whipped round in time to glimpse that deadly white beyond for a second before the door was slammed shut.
And out of the gloom came rushing the kind-faced soldier. She recognised his dirty blue robes, covering quilted furs and the glimmer of worn chainmail.
Through the smoky candlelight, she watched as he ignored her and walked over to the dead man, instead. He knelt, a single blonde braid falling loose across his face as he lowered his head in what looked like a prayer. He muttered something, but his words were lost to the gloom, and she became acutely aware of her shuddering breath in the sudden quiet. Even the noise from outside the tower had seemed to dip.
In the low light, she recognised his dirty blue robes, covering quilted furs and the glimmer of worn chainmail.
Ralof wasn’t scared. His eyes were wide, his muscles tensed and untensed, but he wasn’t terrified, like she was. These were the mannerisms of a fighter – not a knight or a trained professional, but a rebel soldier – one who cherished the art of war like it was second to eating and sleeping. One who had been tied up on a prison cart for too long. When he spoke, it wasn’t with fear, but with awe. A reverence for the experience. It made her feel sick. But somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to entirely disagree with him. That massive black shape, rending death and destruction with no effort expended…
“The harbingers of the end times,” Ralof had said.
Next to that void in her skull, she stored the memory of being perceived by those glowing red eyes as they reduced her to an ant. She stored the memory of the roar as it echoed around the mountain bowl, and the earthquake as it collided with the ground barely ten metres from her face.
Somewhere within, that roiling battle tumbled around her psyche. She staggered as red wings – not black – thrust upwards, away from those disgusting oily chains. That pain. She felt it from her fingers to her toes, in her chest and her brain.
Another roar brought her back to the room as something landed on the roof. Dust and debris fell, knocking the chandelier into another frenzy and sending shadows fleeing across the floor.
“Come here,” Ralof said above the din. “Let me see if I can get those bindings off.”
He produced a small dagger – a flash of sliver in yellow light – and beckoned. Glancing at the ceiling, she didn’t dare keep him waiting.
Back and forth, back and forth, back and –
The blade cut through and she wrenched feeling back into her shoulders, tearing at the leather binds, loosening them over her wrists and dropping them to the floor.
That other war threatened to breach her soul, again, with a sudden rush from her brain to her stomach and then she vomited onto the flagstones, and her vision flooded with black.
The metallic smell of blood greeted her when she came to, and two dead bodies lay on the ground, wearing the ugly brown leather armour of her captors. In a flash of blue, Ralof picked her up and they were running. Each jostle, stair and turn sent her mind spinning across plains of fire-blackened sea, impossible large and viscous, radiating a sickly green that eroded her corneas and threatened to infect that fleshy lump of neurons and electric signals that made up her self. And that eye turned onto her – and then there were ten of them; a hundred; more. And something laughed a horrible, gurgling laugh.
The next Imperials they found were in a storeroom. They’d been shoving supplies into a bag as Ralof had sprinted in, a war cry from his throat. She stood by the door and watched as he cut the pair down, easily, in a spray of crimson.
As they bled out onto the flagstones, one still gurgling through a slashed throat, she stepped over them, avoiding Ralof’s pooling handywork.
Against her cold-weakened skin, the course leather of her clothes was torture. To even call them clothes was generous. The tough and dubiously stained brown leather tunic and matching trousers were ill-fitting and rubbed her in every crevice.
The following memories were even more fragmented. There was the warmth of a calm fire, the dry bite of stale bread shoved in mouth, and the rumble of the battle above. Shouts and roars and death reached her from two existences.
And through the winding stairs and blackness of unperson, those eyes followed. Tentacles bit at her ankles and plunged teeth into her shoulders. She screamed but no noise could fend off this threat. They stole from her, sapping her essence, diffusing it into little glass jars labelled in writings beyond her comprehension. Her name, her love, her life – absorbed into a great eldritch depth she didn’t have the lunch capacity for.
It would have stolen more if it hadn’t been for the dragon.
She woke up for lightning. Through stone and dirt, she felt that crack of violence before she actually saw it.
“A torture chamber…” said someone in hollow voice, and the air pressure dropped.
She thought she yelled, but there was so much noise that it could have been any of the countless entities that currently fought for her soul’s attention.
But she felt it – an unnatural force corralled and enslaved by the hate and malice of empire, of ego, of a lust for violent power.
Her fingertips buzzed in yearning. Thousands of faceless grins approved.
The spark was put out with the cleave of an axe head.
There were cells, and flagstones underfoot. Water rushed and an arrow whistled. Someone died.
“Was Ulfric with you?”
“No, he must have escaped another way.”
She blinked again and the end was in sight, and she was guided to it by bad omens of gore and shouts. Snapping at her heels, one slip would render her helpless to those horrible, hungry limbs.
Her feet were wet.
Cold, white, blue sky – that fresh air hit her system like a sledgehammer. She could breathe at last.
She vomited again, and collapsed.