Legends Yet Grown: Chapter 3

This chapter was edited by EVASayajin

Chapter 3: The Dragonborn Comes

I peered through a dense thicket, ignoring the thistles poking against my skin.

“What do you think?” I asked Brutus.

He shifted, pulling against my grip with a whine. I had a hand buried deep in his scruff, or else he’d already be halfway up the hill. I saw hints of a wooden watchtower half hidden through the trees.

I’d started this morning with a face full of stinky dog, before climbing out of the hollow we’d slept in. Walking through the morning had worked out most of the stiffness, and things had been going well until Brutus had suddenly started sniffing the air. I’d pulled us off the road and into the woods, and shortly after, we’d found the watchtower.

I could try sneaking past it on the other side of the road, but then I might lose my dog.

Instead, I stuffed my supplies under a boulder and pulled the mace from my belt. “Don’t die, boy.”

Brutus whuffed.

I let go him go.

He darted up the hill in a spray of dirt and leaves, baying. I scrambled after him, over bushes and around trunks. The undergrowth thinned up the hill, letting me pour on the speed. Brutus barked, twice, coming to a stop at the base of the tower. I slowed as he circled something on the ground, looking back over to me with his doggy face.

Closer, I could see the top of the platform, no movement. At Brutus’s feet, a body. Judging by the smell, it had been there for a while.

I stopped, eyes tracking up the tower again, then the woods. I saw nothing but trees and planks of wood, but that didn’t mean I was safe here.

“Come on boy.” I whistled quietly. “With me.”  Someone must have trained that dog, because in a beat he was glued back to my calf.

Someone had built a ramp up the tower. The planks wrapped around it once at a shallow angle, made of rough cut wood that creaked beneath my feet and scratched against Brutus’ nails as we climbed it. I took the last turn at a sprint, mace raised in front of me to block.

The top of the tower lay empty save for the wind.

I picked my way across the platform, mace dangling by my side. There was a railing around three quarters of the tower, and a thick rope, taut, tied twice around a corner post. It’d been a while since my dad had taken me to the job site, but I still remembered him telling me to stay away from ropes. Dale lost a leg to a rope break. Leaning over the side of the tower, I saw a pile of skull-sized rocks held up on a wooden ramp. The rope held the ramp up, but if cut it would send a small avalanche down upon the road.

I shook my head in faint wonder. “Handicapped accessible towers, woodcutting fronts, and a bunch of boulders rolled up a hill in the middle of the forest? These are the most industrious criminals I’ve ever seen.”

I turned my gaze out across the forest. “No way we were sneaking past, boy,” I told Brutus. From this vantage, I could see right through the canopy for maybe a hundred yards in each direction. It would be impossible to creep up on the watch tower without being spotted, but somehow the man at its base had still died.

The lone bit of good news was a brown smudge on the horizon, a thin haze of distant spoke and maybe rooftops.  I let out a long breath. “Think that’s Falkreath?” I asked Brutus. He barked once, rubbing his face against my rough pants in the way dogs do to get something out of their eyes. I nudged him back. “Later. We should keep moving.”

The body at the base of the tower wore a rough iron chest plate so stained with blood I wouldn’t wear it even if I could get the thing off. Something had torn his guts out, but it hadn’t been interested in the meat. Vaguely, I remembered that was a bad sign.

The only thing worth taking was his coin purse. When I picked it up, a note stuffed behind his belt fell out, the corner stained with old blood.

At least this world had high literacy rates.

“Come on.” I jerked my head at Brutus, stuffing the note and the coins into my own purse and tossing the bloody one. “Let’s get out of here.”

Maybe the worlds most industrious bandits would clean up after me.

I jogged back to my supplies as fast as I could pick my way through the underbrush. Less than two days in this dimension, and I’d been almost killed by soldiers, dragons, wolves, and woodsmen. The last thing I needed was to add another large predator to the list.

I managed that pace down the road for a little less than an hour, before coming to another fork, with a signpost. One of the names I’d never heard of, the other hopefully said Falkreath, but I could only read half of it. When the sun crept towards evening and my feet couldn’t take anymore even in my pilfered boots, I sat down on another one of those crumbling walls on the side of the road.

Brutus walked behind it, stretching out behind me to roll in the grass. I gave him the rest of the jerky, and poured out some beer for him to drink. Filthy thing lapped it up. I huffed. “This is probably terrible for you.”

Brutus barked, sniffing at the barrel as I put it away.

I munched on my own apple and flicked open the bloodied note.

“Boss,” it read. “Something moving in the woods north of Falkreath. Got the elk giving it a wide berth. I think it’s stalking the watch tower. Tomorrow, Woldin and I are going to try stalking it. Could use some help.

--Ter”

I pursed my lips.

Maybe it had been interested in the meat after all.

With that thought, I found my feet didn’t hurt nearly so much.

It was about evening that I found a small brook running out of the woods along the road. Brutus got another drink. I didn’t trust it, but I paused for long enough to let the frigid water run along my feet. It was bliss, and the crisp air drank the lingering droplets greedily, leaving me dry. Water was a good sign.

With my boots back on, I stood. “Think we can make Falkreath tonight, boy?”

Brutus panted happily, looking up at me expectantly.

“Yeah.” I said. “Nothing for it but the walking.”

The road grew more maintained as the sun sank closer to the horizon. I saw signs of newer cobbles pounded into the dirt where old ones had broken or been washed out. The walls on either side of the road grew more common, more repaired. Brutus padded along next to me without complaint. Eventually, the woods broke into fields. Many of them lay fallow, some were half planted. I paused, peering into the darkness at might be a house, or just a large, squat hill.

As the last of the day slipped slowly by, it looked more and more like I’d have to beg a place to sleep from a farmer, or else risk another night curled up under a tree. Then, right as night fell in truth, I crested a hill and saw torches in the distance. Their light made the men holding them stand out in stark relief.

“Oh thank god,” I whispered. I hiked my bag back over my shoulder, and forced away the ache in my feet for another hour. I thought it would be full dark by the time I reached those distant gates, but tonight a moon rose, then a second.

A single look towards the sky stopped me dead. Over my head, I saw a massive silverly blue moon, so much larger than the one I’d looked up at all my life. And the stars, there were…I remembered stargazing, back at nature camp. It felt like ages ago, before my powers, before everything that mattered in my life, but I still remembered the sky. How many stars there were.

I remembered, in the dark of a world with no name, how the sky had been full of so many stars. I’d looked at them, in their thousands, as I waited for death, and felt every bit how small I was, compared to a vast universe that stretched out beyond even the farthest beam of light.

Looking up at this sky, I felt like I could count those old stars on my fingers. Looking up at this sky, those old stars seemed just as small as I.

Two moons blocked out a quarter of the sky, big and close, and bright. Beyond them, the sky glimmered thick with stars like someone had taken every stone from a river and replaced them all with diamonds. I stopped, staring upward with my new eyes, at new stars. They twinkled down upon me, a billion billion shimmering lights.

What world was this? I’d thought it was some Earth, some dimension Contessa had found to keep me in. But all of those stars...

Was one of them Sol? Was one of them my sun, with my Earth spinning around it?

I stared skyward, and found no answer.

Brutus bumped my leg, and I jerked my gaze back to the cobbles. The moons were so bright I could see cracks in the stones, and I had to press pressed a hand against my chest to stop it from pounding.

“Sorry boy,” I said. “I thought…I thought I was closer to home.”

Brutus whined, pushing his head into my thigh hard enough I stumbled.

“It’s okay.” I patted his side, eyes returning skyward. Even knowing, it was so much, so grand.

“We’re just…so very small.”

I looked away. The night air had stolen my body heat while I’d stood there, and I found myself shivering. In the distance, the torches seemed as far away as the stars.

“Come on.” I started walking.

With two moons of light, it was easy to make out the road, and as I grew closer I saw the timber wall more clearly. Thick posts of wood, wider than I was, ringed what was starting to look like a small city. The roads led up to a large wooden gate, with two people on either side of it. They wore what looked like scaled armor and tabards. A large brazier full of logs burned on one side of the road, and as I watched one of the guards threw another cut log into it with a shower of sparks.

I slowed at the sight of their swords and spears, metal glinting dully in the firelight.

Brutus panted happily, looking up at me as if to say, ‘see, we made it!’ I envied his optimism.

“Made it where though?” I asked. Then shook my head again.

I approached the gates at an even pace, mace left hanging at my belt. After about a dozen steps, one of the guards spotted me.

“Hold there!” His voice came rough and deep, with a tinge I couldn’t place. “A wild dog and a wilder woman come out of the darkness? You’re a bit far from the Reach, traveler.”

The other three men laughed.

I quirked my lip. “Ran into some trouble on the road!” I called. We stood about thirty feet apart. “Wanted to make Falkreath rather than spend a night under a tree.”

“Aye well, wouldn’t we all be so lucky to have a bed instead of a tree,” the man called back. “Come closer then, and tell us about this trouble.”

I picked my way towards the gate carefully, Brutus at my side. “Any chance I could have this conversation inside the walls?”

“Gate’s closed for the night.” He shrugged, carless. “Five gold toll to open it up.”

I frowned. “And I guess they just put four of you out here to collect tolls from poor fools that get stuck on the road.”

“You guess pretty good for a poor fool,” he replied. This close, I heard the others laugh.

“There was a dragon, too,” I said. “In case that’s something worth telling someone about.”

This time, the men laughed louder. “Oh, aye,” the one to the other side of the gate said. “A dragon was it? A great beast with wings to blot out the sky? Did it steal your clothes?”

They laughed again.

I rubbed a hand against my face. This was going great. “You know what, fine. Here’s your five gold.” I dug around in my coin purse and pulled out the bribe.

“Now that’s a sound I like to hear.” The first guard took them fromme, his eyes smirking through the holes in his masked helmet. “Try not to spout any more lies of dragons, ey? Most won’t take it so nice.”

“Sure.” I was entirely confused, but clearly these men weren’t going to help me any. “So do you get the extra coin, for being such an upstanding guardsman?”

“Naw.” He thumped the butt of his spear against the gate twice. “Fifth is for the gate man.”

“A pleasure.”

“Like I said. Don’t make trouble,” he said again. I just nodded, and shuffled through the gate as soon as a man on the other side cracked it open. “And stay off the skooma!”

The gate shut on the laughter of his fellows.

The guard inside looked me up and down, before returning to his chair, next to the wall.

“Any chance there’s an inn, or a tavern open this late?” I asked.

He grunted. “You can get a bed at the Dead Man’s Drink.” He pointed. “Can’t miss it.”

“Thanks.” I nudged Brutus with my shin, and started down the road.

At least they hadn’t tried to kill me.

You really couldn’t miss the Dead Man’s Drink. Two stories tall, with a stable under a wooden walkway. The smell of manure alone would have stopped me dead. The building had a thickly thatched roof, and light peering out from underneath the door. I could hear the voices, shouting and laughing.

With one last sigh, I climbed up the steps to the door and shouldered my way insi—

The door thudded. I stepped back, grabbed the rope handle, and pulled it open with a sharp jerk. “Stupid fucking doors.”

If every conversation stopped the moment I walked in, I might have lost my mind, but thankfully, no one cared about a dirty woman and a dirtier dog walking into bar. I stepped to the side of the thick knot of tables, closer to the fireplace set in one of the walls.

At the bar, an older woman met my eyes. “You’re a new face,” she said. “Valga Vinicia, citizen. And if your dog shits on my floor, you’re cleaning it up.”

Lovely.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” I slipped into a stool next to the bar top. I kept a hand close to Brutus, but he just curled up at my feet, more comfortable here than I was. “Do you have a room?”

“Always space in the cemetery!” She laughed. “But I do. Ten septims a night, comes with a bowl of stew. One more gold and I’ll throw in a bone for the mutt.”

“Better deal than the guards,” I muttered.

She gave me a sympathetic look as I dug through my coin purse for eleven more coins. It left my remaining funds worrying light.

“Ran into Jolkvir?” She slid the coins behind the counter and grabbed a questionably clean wooden bowl. “He’s usually on the night watch.”

“He didn’t grace me with his name.”

“Sounds like Jolkvir.” She slid the bowl to me, along with a bone and a crust of rich brown bread. “For your troubles. I know how these nords can be.”

“Thank you.” I ate fast enough to almost burn my mouth.

“Drinks are extra though!” She gave me a mock frown.

“Brought my own.” I pulled the remains of my cask from my sack. “If you spare a mug you can have the barrel after.”

She laughed again, rough and loud. “Maybe you’ll do better here than I thought.” She passed me a hand carved wooden mug that I filled with ale before tearing into my food.

Apples and raw potatoes gave me a whole new appreciation for a meal so hot it scorched my mouth.

Valga leaned casually over the bar. “You look like you’ve seen some trouble, friend,” she said.

I paused, chewing over the implicit question along with my food. I swallowed. “Bandits on the road,” I replied. “And sleeping on it.”

“Aye.” She nodded. “That will ruin any woman’s day.”

“I’m surprised you came up all the way from Cyrodil, when there’s a war on.” She looked me up and down. “By yourself as well?”

“Didn’t have much of a choice.” I shrugged. “Trying to make the best of it.”

Another flash of sympathy flickered over her face, and she started to speak, before another man called for a round of mead at the table. I turned back to my food, and all too soon it was gone. I sopped up as much as I could with the bread.

Beneath the stool, Brutus gnawed happily away at his bone.

My bread had a rock in it. I ate the rest of it anyway.

At some point, Valga came back to the bar. She noted my empty bowl, and made me another without a word.

I stared at it.

“Thank you.”

“Us Imperials need to look out for one another,” she ran a rag over the counter. “Especially in these times.”

“I appreciate it.” I turned back to the stew, taking in another steaming bite. After a moment, I looked back over at Valga. “Not to sound like a bumpkin,” I started. “But are dragons a thing, in this corner of the empire?”

She laughed. “Dragons? What brought that on?”

“I…thought I saw one,” I said. “Or something that looked like it.”

“Hasn’t been a dragon in Skryim since the first age, to hear some tell it,” Valga replied. “But the Nords love to talk about their proud history. Even claim that the Emperor’s own bodyguards were once an order of dragon slayers.” She shared a commiserating look with me.

I felt a little bad, letting this woman think we shared a home, but it wasn’t hard to put a confused expression on my face. “That’s certainly…something.”

“I think they have a song about it.” She wrapped a mug on the bar. “Delacourt, Let’s hear the song of the Dragonborn!”

At the far end of the bar, a man with a lute stood, grinning. “I’d be delighted to!” He propped a foot up on the nearest bench as the rest of the tavern stomped and cheered. He plucked a few beats, and the tavern went quiet, almost reverent. I felt a chill go down my spine, then, he sang:

“Our Hero, Our Hero, Claims a Warrior’s Heart!”