The silence that followed was somehow more deafening than the battle.
Broken only by the breeze caressing its way across the battered and brutalised plains, as it gently fanned the thousands of tiny spot-fires lazily smoldering, the land had fallen silent. Bells echoed faintly from Whiterun, but it was almost deathly quiet in the wake of the dragon’s demise. Of the soldiers who had sallied out of the city, only a handful were left alive and they stood in stunned awe at the sight before them.
From the moment that the dragon had appeared, to the moment that it died on Kaius’s sword, was handfuls of minutes at the very most. In that time dozens had died, the fortress had gone from being somewhat damaged to utterly destroyed, and for hundreds of metres around the remnants of the battle remained. Some areas burned or had been blasted into great furrows of molten rock and glass, while other portions were torn, shattered, ripped up, or even covered in ice. For several seconds that dragged on for what seemed to be hours, those few who had survived looked on, struggling to believe that the creature had been slain.
A roar, this time born of a nordic and not draconic throat, broke the stalemate of shock and disbelief, making Sofia jump and almost caused her heart to stop beating as one of the huskarls roared triumphantly. The others quickly followed suit with battle cries, the pounding of weapons on shields and war-wooping chants at the sight of the enormous creature brought low. Even Irileth, having remained behind with the last of her soldiers, roared a trilling dunmeri battlecry into the sky, her reserved nature cracking and showing the fierceness of her heritage. Only Sofia and Kaius remained quiet. Sofia uncharacteristically so, as she watched her companion finally managing to retrieve his sword by tearing it free of eye, brain and skull.
Blood covered the grass for hundreds of metres around. Some was from those who had died to the claws, fangs and words of the dragon, but a large amount had been sprayed in the creature’s final moments. Enormous pools of blood were beginning to pool into the ground around the giant corpse where it leaked from stilled arteries and veins. Before she even realised what she was doing she was moving toward the fort and Kaius, picking her way around the tiny handfuls of burning grass tufts, crunching over channels of dragonfire formed glass and laughing as all the tension flooded from her.
Some of the others were following, the chorus of war cries and triumphant yells echoing as they honoured a man who had slain a legend. A chant of ‘drakd?dare’ was soon taken up by some of the huskarls as they proclaimed Kaius, ‘Dragonslayer,’ but most were reacting with laughter and shock as the realisation that they had survived began to sink in.
“There are easier ways to show off if you wanted to get my attention.” All the tension was pouring from her, the thrill of a battle and a fight that she sought almost as regularly as alcohol flooding her veins with pleasure that settled into her belly. Usually, after fights with the likes of bandits or her occasional barrow-dive, Sofia would specifically seek out someone of the opposite sex to sate a hunger that only fighting could bring out in her, and this time was no different. If anything it was more intense, and she briefly considered propositioning the man who had just slain a dragon to scratch that particular itch, at least, right up until she got close enough to see him clearly.
His face was scratched and already beginning to bruise from the numerous stones, rocks, pebbles and other debris that had been kicked up during his clash with the winged reptile, his clothing was scorched and in more than one place smouldering where his wards had proven insufficient. Several portions of his armour, even his recently purchased steel plate pieces had been bent, warped, or otherwise dented sometime during the battle. For a moment she was also left wondering whether he had somehow bitten and fed upon the creature by the way his mouth and goatee was drenched in gore. That was at least until a pink stained smile and a cough brought up another mouthful of blood to hack onto the ground.
“Let’s not do this again.” He remarked, half in bitterness, half in jest as he knuckled his mouth with the back of an ash and flame scorched glove, revealing that his nose was also profusely bleeding from the effort of sustaining magicka during the battle. “I don’t care what we’re doing tomorrow, but I’m sleeping in.”
A flicker of movement caught Sofia’s eye, and her heart skipped a beat as she instinctively thought the creature had somehow survived a sword to the brain, but it was as unmoving as the ruined fort. Instead it was a glint of light, a mote of energy that burst into existence between them and the cooling corpse of the beast, that appeared and died like a firefly in the night. Another appeared and faded, followed by another, and another, in ever increasing numbers until they no longer began disappearing.
The footsteps at her back announced the presence of other survivors, but they too came to a halt, looking about at the increasing swarm of glittering, swirling lights that were birthing and dying in droves in the space between them and the dragon’s body. They were multiplying, almost as though they were breeding amongst themselves, and it was quickly apparent that Kaius was somehow attracting them.
“Uh… Kaius? What did you do?”
His expression at her query was wordless, staring between her and the storm of lights connecting him to the corpse with his surprise mirroring Sofia’s and that of the soldiers nearby. In the years that she had spent within the halls of the College of Winterhold she had never seen any magicka remotely like this, and it didn’t even feel like anything she had experienced before. She could feel magicka in her mind, usually like fingernails scratching the inside of her skull but this was different. This was a plucking, yet pulsing wave of energies and powers that pushed against her soul, as much as the ethereal storm pushed against her flesh.
Hands tugged at her arm, one of the huskarls pulling her back as Kaius was left standing in the epicentre, trying and yet failing to affect the swirling lights being drawn to him with a ward. It bypassed the magical protection, protection that only minutes before had held out against dragonfire that was capable of effortlessly melting rock.
Flesh began to melt, muscles slithering and evaporating and the pools of draconic blood bubbled and spat as the dragon’s corpse began converting into energy. It was rippling and shuddering, almost as though it was being stripped apart, millimetre by millimetre by some invisible, ethereal pull emanating from Kaius.
Multicoloured tendrils coursed across and through the ground, wrapping around Kaius’s legs like the creepers and vines that grew in the depths of Falkreath Hold. It ensnared him, gripping him tight, burning away the slick blood of the dragon that had stained his body a deep crimson, and adding it to its billowing mass.
Through the halo of crackling power, almost invisible in the eye of the storm, Kaius was roaring, straining against the energies that bound and compressed him but something had changed. The lights were no longer surrounding and swirling around him but were now ripping into him, surging through skin and muscle and bone with all the force of the dragon’s shouts. His roar was no battle cry, or demented laugh of someone facing a challenge, but one of pure, nerve-frying agony. The sound was more horrifying, more visceral than those men who had died before at the teeth and fangs of the dragon, and there was nothing Sofia or the others could do except watch as he screamed continuously in a storm of power.
In the lights flowing from the dissolving remains of the dragon, Sofia soon found herself seeing things taking form from the impossible shapes within. Unfurled wings, a roaring mouth and head of scales and fangs ripped free from its physical remains and rushed towards and through Kaius, all the while silently screaming in mutual agony.
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Wrapped in the spectral energies of a twisted draconic essence, Kaius continued to scream, hands clenched into fists, throat raw and straining, and every vein protruding as a second draconic essence appeared. It tore out of his body, a second, similarly powerful draconic essence somehow ripping out of his flesh the same way as the first had from its physical remains. The two ethereal beings came together, wrapping around each other in a central vortex like a pair of winged snakes in an eight story tall spiral. Iron-clad scales writhed and twisted around each other, jaws snapped and bent at impossible angles and wings rippled and extended as they both merged into one, singular dragon-light.
It was only through a fevered glance to the closest huskarl and the others nearby that Sofia realised that she, and she alone was seeing what lay within the storm of lights. The arcane was unfathomable and unreachable for most, and historically and culturally the Nords had little interest in the magical arts at the best of times. Everyone around her were stuck in place, staring at the pain and agony Kaius was undergoing and the power flowing out of the dragon and into him, but she was the only one that could see the impossibilities centred around her companion inside of the glowing storm.
There were dozens upon dozens of individuals; men and women alike that flickered and writhed and changed so quickly that trying to see individual features was like trying to hold back a river with her hands. In the centre though, surrounding Kaius as though he was possessing the ethereal being, was a creature that Sofia recognised. A dremora; a humanoid creature of oblivion of hatred and rage and yet it was screaming, mirroring Kaius’s stance and actions perfectly as a strange, twisted shadow of the man surrounded by the swirling lights. Somehow it seemed that the being and Kaius were one and the same, separated only in this moment by the increasing swarm of other humanoid figures, until literal thousands overlaid themselves in a migraine-inducing blur.
For a heart stopping instant and with a wave of nausea, Sofia gasped and recoiled in horror as a new, horrific being unfurled from within the storm. It was utterly different in size, shape and appearance to all the others she could see with her arcane sight. A creature born of darkness, from the depths of her worst nightmares. Great spindly legs as long as mountain pines unfurled from an abdomen as twisted and horrific as the spider they slew in the barrow. Furred chitin and spines encased segmented limbs and black, arachnid flesh covered every centimeter of the enormous creature, that somehow was merged horrifically into something undeniably feminine. It was larger, far larger in fact than the frostbite she and Kaius had slain in Bleak Falls Barrow, and matched the dragon essences in size but it was somehow even more horrific to behold. There were no fangs or a dripping maw set in a head covered with a multitude of eyes but instead, a tall, massively proportioned head and torso of an impossibly beautiful elven woman jutting out of the spider’s body. A perfect mixture of beauty and horror, that thankfully lasted for a mercifully brief time before vanishing from her mind’s eye.
As quickly as it had begun the light faded, leaving those few witnesses blinking away the glowing lights that danced in their eyes as though they had looked at the sun. There was awe in their expressions though, or at least in the expressions of the few whose faces weren’t hidden under their helmets and chainmail aventails. Sofia had no idea what exactly had happened, but the building pressure in the back of her mind heralded an oncoming migraine that no amount of alcohol could dampen, and no hangover could match.
This time the silence lacked even the remnants of the breeze as they stared at the Man who had slain a dragon and had been at the heart of an impossible storm. He was standing, somehow through nothing more than sheer willpower with bloody froth bubbling on his lips and staining the front of his breastplate that had been cleansed of the dragon’s blood. Sofia had no idea what, or even how it all happened but the dragon’s body had changed. Its skin hung in great curtains, bones poking through in places but otherwise holding it aloft like a macabre tent. Not a single drop of blood, or a single trace of flesh, muscle or organs remained behind as though the dragon’s corpse had been picked clean and decayed over literal months instead of the minutes since its death.
“K-Kaius? Are you okay?”
He had no answer for her, and Sofia couldn’t even tell whether he was even aware of his surroundings or where he was, appearing to be in a complete daze and unresponsive as the ground shuddered again.
A new wave of fear lurched through them all as the ground shivered with another earthshaking pulse similar that had heralded the coming of the dragon and as fearful eyes gazed skywards they witnessed something that was somehow worse than another pair of wings. The Throat of the World, the greatest and holiest of mountains in all of Tamriel was shaking as though it was imitating its more volcanic cousin of Red Mountain on far away Vvardenfell, its sides heaving as though in anguish.
The slopes of the mountain shuddered as avalanches slid down the jagged knife wounds of cragged valleys where no tree or shrub could hope to cling to existence. Swirling white streams hundreds of metres wide flowed like a liquid down the slopes, reminding Sofia of the half frozen waves breaking against the rocks and cliffs under the College, but unlike those waves there would be no stopping these. Entire forests were annihilated and practically wiped from existence as the avalanches reached the mountain’s base, tearing ancient pines from the ground like saplings and burying them under dozens of metres of snow, stone and soil. Far to the east beyond Whiterun, the billowing clouds announced that the Valtheim pass had taken the brunt of one of the several avalanches, and judging by its size there would be no passing through that route for some time to come.
Rippling across the surface ahead of the avalanches though was the true horror, another pulse of incomprehensible energies expanding out from the six kilometre tall mountain like a boulder dropped into a pond. It snapped trees at the base of the mountains as it passed, gradually growing weaker the further it travelled, but still whipping the grasses and soil into a billowing storm as it came. The World-Storms that consumed the northern Holds of Dawnstar and the Pale every winter seemed insignificant to such a force that rushed towards the ruined fort and watchtower, and they all braced as the ground began to shudder and shake.
Despite all their preparations, including some of them throwing themselves to the ground and covering their heads, the wall of power arrived with a force that made the dragon feel insignificant. It knocked the wind from their bodies, throwing some down next to their more prepared comrades and while it violently staggered Sofia, somehow she managed to keep her footing. She had been punched and kicked in dozens of bar brawls less than the force of the energy pulse, feeling the dust, dirt, ashes and handfuls of embers being thrown into her face as it rushed past.
This was not a single, solitary pulse energy but in fact words. Sounds of elemental fury and meaning that forced their way into her mind and left her ears ringing as they passed. A trio of words, spoken as though one and yet shaking the world to its very roots.
"DO-VAH-KIIN!"
The thunder rumbled off into the distance like a fading summer storm, leaving only the distant echoes of the mountain shaking itself awake. Billowing up around its base and the rising foothills, the last vestiges of the avalanches finished their plunge into oblivion and silence, true silence fell across the land.
Shock and terror were familiar emotions for all who had survived, but of all the reactions the one that Sofia didn’t share was the sudden, and strange reverent, almost religious awe that the surviving huskarls and fyrdmen around her were displaying. In the distant rumbling as the words continued their relentless passage across the face of the province, the survivors picked themselves up in stunned silence. It was all too much, impossible to comprehend, but soon a word began to be whispered in hushed tones.
In her life Sofia had heard men speak the names of gods and ancient heroes in reverent awe. She had even heard them speak the names of their various patron deities while they and she were locked in the throes of passion, but nothing… Nothing had ever matched the tone of those around her, as they spoke a title as ancient as the legends of the dragons themselves.
“Dragonborn…”
Visibly twitching, Kaius turned slightly to gaze upon the majestic heights of the mountain, frothy pink bubbles and thick streams of drool and blood ran down his chin like the snow that had wrought ruin on the mountainside. With his eyes struggling to focus on the source of the thunderous shout, his mind finally gave up the struggle to remain conscious, and he pitched forward onto his face.
Blood of Dragons Volume 4 - Dragon Rising
