And So The Eagle Conquered 14 (Patreon)

The road to the Western Watchtower had never felt so long.

Lydia counted seventy-three riders behind her, give or take the stragglers still catching up from the rear, and every single one of them rode as though the Princes themselves were on their heels. Perhaps they were. It seemed a fitting day for it, she supposed, given that they were riding into battle, ill-prepared, against an enemy from a time of myth.

She kept her eyes forward, on the dust and the road and the distant mountains she knew loomed over their destination, but she was intensely, acutely aware of the man riding at the head of the column. She’d always looked up to her uncle, loved him, respected him. She loved her father, of course, but there was something more about Balgruuf. She’d seen it since she was a child, seen him rule well and wisely and even with the love and respect of his people, but until today she’d never seen the warrior that he’d been some twenty years past.

Now there he rode, heavily armored with Vindhǫgg’s wicked blades strapped to his back, not a sign of the careworn administrator to be seen. Of course, she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed his change in demeanor, not in Dragonsreach and not anywhere along their journey since. Whispers, and words far louder than whispers, had followed them through Whiterun.

People remembering the War, the battle of the Red Ring. Old soldiers, the sort that had fought alongside him in those days, disappearing into their houses and reemerging with armor that didn’t quite fit anymore and weapons that had started to dull from disuse. Retired veterans, one and all, but each and every one of them was determined to follow their Jarl into battle once more, even before they knew the full details of the threat they would be facing.

With those details? They were only more determined. So far as they all knew, they were following their Jarl in a hard ride towards a hard battle, to provide with reinforcements a man that -like they- had once served in the Legions. A man that had secured the safety of Elisif the Fair and without hesitation taken command of the escort to draw the dragon’s ire onto themselves rather than letting it fall onto the fleeing civilians or their farms.

It was, Lydia thought grimly, precisely the sort of story that made for good songs and bad tactics. Men rode faster and struck harder when there was glory to be won, but glory had a way of getting people killed just as readily as cowardice did, and she found herself praying to whatever Divine might be listening that the veterans behind her hadn’t forgotten quite so much as she feared they might have of what real war actually cost.

Though she imagined that, if she voiced such a worry, they’d -justifiably, perhaps- remind her that they’re the ones that had fought in a true war, and perhaps she shouldn’t worry about them forgetting something that she hadn’t truly learned first hand for herself.

Of course, there was a matter of greater importance on her mind than the…potential brashness of her allies. That matter being Constantine himself. The realization that he was not a werekin of some kind, like the Companions, but instead a vampire had been something of a surprise, though a part of her remembered certain novels that she had read and muttered that perhaps it wasn’t so surprising at all. She might have even been frightened by that discovery, having seen what he did to destroy the final enemy of the barrow, if it wasn’t for how calm The Huntress and Skjor were around him. There was no way that the pair didn’t know, hadn’t know the entire time, exactly what he was, but they’d seemed to have no issue being in close proximity to him.

That, more than anything, had settled her own misgivings. Whatever the Companions truly were beneath their gruff exteriors and their tavern songs, they were neither fools nor cavalier to the point of stupidity, and they would not have walked into -and out of- a remote location like Bleak Falls if they hadn’t had some measure of faith in him.

She shook her head, ever so slightly, inside her helm as their cavalcade rounded a curve and followed a slope downwards. He hadn’t asked her to keep his secret, hadn’t demanded it of any of them, nor had he demanded that they ask him no questions about his nature or his past, but they had all respected it all the same. Even before they had reached Riverwood and been surrounded by the support group that had followed them there, they had each of them seemingly sworn themselves to silence, a silence she fully intended to keep save for, perhaps, telling her uncle of his nature.

He had done nothing to deserve a cruel exposure, and everything to earn a great deal of leeway, and she was prepared to give him exactly that. She…

The sight of a straggling group of injured guardsman and legionnaires slowly making their way towards them broke her from her thoughts, and she threw up a fist in the universal sign for a halt only half a heartbeat after her father did. As those behind her clattered to a halt, mounts whinnying or bellowing in displeasure at the sudden deceleration, she nudged her mare into a walk as her uncle, Irileth, Skjor, Rikke, and the leaders of the Grey-Mane and Battle-Born contingents moved into earshot of the wounded men and women.

“Decurion, report!” Balgruuf barked at the least-injured looking officer, a Breton legionnaire whose armor was streaked with blood from the wounded man she’d been half-carrying down the road.

The woman straightened as best she could, the arm not supporting her comrade snapping up in a salute that trembled with exhaustion and adrenaline rather than fear. Blood matted her dark hair to her temple, and there was a long, shallow gash along her cheek that had bled freely down her jaw and throat, staining the collar of her linen under-armor the color of rust.

“Legate, Jarl, sirs!” Her voice cracked, then steadied through sheer will. “Decurion Marcia Ancharia, Third Cohort. We were part of the escort that engaged the dragon near the outer fields of the Pelagia Farm, drew it back towards the watchtower. It’s—” she swallowed hard, taking a shuddering breath “—it’s still there, my Jarl. Still fighting. The Valerian ordered us to retreat when our injuries became too much.”

“Ancharia,” Rikke cut in sharply, bulling her way forward a bit as she addressed her subordinate. “how many did we lose? And how many still stand with him?”

“Eleven dead, Legate. Nine more wounded past fighting, myself among them, and maybe half-a-dozen still with him.” The decurion’s jaw tightened, and Lydia could see the effort it cost her to keep her voice level, to keep from swaying where she stood. “The dragon, its not…it’s not some beast, sir. It’s clever. Baits a charge, then breaks off before the archers can loose more than a volley. We tried to box it in with the terrain near the watchtower, used the stonework for cover, but it just—” She made a helpless gesture to illustrate her point. “It just leaves. Circles back when it pleases, and it was mocking us the whole time, sirs. Speaking to us in this…this terrible voice. The things that it was saying…it was having fun, sirs. We weren’t a threat, a fight. We were entertainment.”

Balgruuf’s face went hard as flint, the lines around his eyes deepening into something that Lydia had rarely seen there before. In fact, she’d never seen him like this, that she could recall. Even when he’d been rendering judgment or wroth from bandit attacks or pointless squabbles that disrupted the peace and safety of the hold, he’d been at least moderately affable. But now? Now he was cold and hard and there was a fire burning in his eyes.

“And Constantine is still fighting?” the legate pressed, a note that Lydia recognized quite clearly lurking somewhere deep in her voice, and the golden-haired frost witch couldn’t help but glance at her sharply. It was the same note that Elisif’s voice had held, the same note that could very well be in her own voice when she spoke of the man, were she a bit more expressive than she was normally wont to be in public, and in spite of the circumstances she felt a surge of irritation. One that was quickly ignored as the decurion responded.

“He was, Legate, when we broke off. Still on his feet, still fighting, though I’ll not lie and say he looked untouched. He’d taken hits that should have put a normal man in the ground three times over, and kept getting back up.” Ancharia’s eyes, glassy with pain and exhaustion, found Lydia’s face for just a moment, something like awe flickering there despite everything. “He ordered the retreat himself, my Lady. Made us go. Said he’d hold it as long as he could, gave those of us still standing time to get the wounded clear. But sirs, he very well could be alone against that beast now, and if he is…”

A roar, deep and rolling, filled the air, followed closely by three claps of thunder, both interrupted her and puncuated her half-finished plea, and Balgruuf straightened in his saddle.

“Then we need to join him. Make for the Pelagia Farmstead, wait there for aid.” the jarl of Whiterun growled, looking over his shoulder and raising his voice into a below. “Last man in the line, ride for Whiterun! Healers and aid to the Pelagia Farmstead! The rest of you, with me! Ride!”

The column surged forward again, hooves thundering against cobbled stone, and Lydia dug her heels into her mare’s flanks to keep pace at her uncle’s shoulder. The wind tore at her braids beneath her helm, carrying with it the acrid tang of smoke and the scent of lightning, and -more than that- a great outpouring of magika.

Then they crested the last rise, and the whole nightmarish tableau was laid out before them.

The Western Watchtower, which had defended this stretch of the road for centuries without faltering -she’d grown up hearing stories, as a little girl, of how it had held against an Oblivion gate for days before aid had arrived!- was a ruin. Half of its upper battlements had been sheared away entirely, the stone crumbled and blackened where dragonfire had swept across it, and the remnants still burned with a sullen, stubborn orange glow despite the damp cold of the air coming off the mountains. Bodies lay scattered near its foundation, and her heart clenched at the sight of them, too far away to see how many -if any, Divines help them all!- were still alive.

And across the road from that shattered husk of stone, in what had once been a modest stretch of pasture and was now a blackened, smoking scar upon the earth, stood Constantine.

He was alone.

Whatever six had remained with him, whatever handful the decurion had spoken of, were nowhere to be seen amid the churned and cratered ground. Lydia’s stomach dropped through the floor of her own chest at the sight of him standing there, sword nowhere in evidence, both hands wreathed with magika she could feel from here as he clawed -there was no other word for it- thunderbolts from the very air itself and hurled them at the dragon that was circling him even now.

Thunderbolts that were perhaps one of the most powerful magical attacks she’d ever sensed -their potency was beyond anything Farengar could ever dream of producing, equal or greater than anything she ever had, and bright enough to sear her eyes even at this distance- and were aimed perfectly at his enemy…and, to her eyes, accomplished absolutely nothing as both simply washed across the dragon’s scales.

Well, perhaps not nothing, the beast gave a roaring sort of shriek in response and writhed briefly in the air, but that was all, and she swallowed heavily at the implications therein.

If a dragon could shrug off magical attacks of that magnitude as though it were little more than an irritation, then the beast’s hide was tougher than anything she had ever heard of, tougher than anything she’d ever read about in any of Farengar’s bestiaries, and that meant Constantine had been fighting an essentially unwinnable battle for however long it had taken them to reach this point.

“Divines preserve him,” she breathed, and beside her she heard her uncle utter something considerably less pious under his breath as he took in the scene with the eyes of a man who had commanded soldiers in many nightmarish scenarios, hated all of them equally, and was fully aware that this one surpassed them all.

The dragon -which couldn’t be Alduin, he was not as Constantine described him, and Nine help them all, but that meant there were more dragons!- wheeled overhead with almost lazily, and she could see the moment it spotted them. Then it was banking hard as another bolt seared past it’s flank, close enough to singe scale but not to really strike it, and its voice —male, deep, rolling, edged with something horribly like amusement— rumbled down at Constantine in words she couldn’t understand but understood perfectly regardless. It was the voice of something that had already decided the outcome of this fight and was merely curious to see how long its prey would keep dancing before the end.

That decurion had been right. The dragon was being entertained by all of this.

It banked around again, starting to circle around the backside of the tower, and Lydia didn’t need to be a prophet to foresee it’s next move: it intended to strike at their column. Whether from martial prudence or to force Constantine to watch as some extension of it’s sick amusement, she didn’t know, but ultimately it didn’t matter.

What mattered was that seventy-odd riders, veterans or not, were nowhere near properly position to face down a dragon, and she’d be damned before she let any more of her people become fodder for the beast’s twisted sense of sport.

“Break formation, get off the road!” she screamed, frost-laden magika already starting to swirl around her as she wheeled her mare hard to the left. “Scatter, don’t bunch up! Archers, find cover, don’t stand in the open!”

Whether it was her voice, or her uncle’s thunderous, bellowed confirmation a heartbeat behind hers, or even simple animal instincts honed by battle, the column obeyed. Riders peeled off in a dozen directions at once, breaking the tight formation that would have made them such an easy, devastating target, and Lydia felt a fierce stab of pride even through her terror as she watched each and every one of them not a step back, but forward.

There was a flicker of movement, a blur of motion, and Constantine vanished for a moment and reappeared ahead and to the left of her. She felt her skin tingle, the hair on her arms standing on end, as a great upswelling of magika swirled around him like a storm…and then his voice rolled across the plains, unnaturally loud and echoing in her soul as much as it did her ears.

“Joor! Zah! Frul!”

Before her astonished eyes, the dragon flinched.

There was no other word for it. It baulked in it’s charge, as it passed the tower, and rolled away from Constantine. It rolled away from him, and she heard the violent snap! as it’s wing plowed into the stone and broke. The roar it let loose, this time, was neither mocking nor menacing, but a higher-pitched shriek of pain and rage, and as the tower collapsed -now missing a large portion of one side from the impact- it plowed into the ground amidst the rubble.

All was silent for a moment, before her uncle let out a roar of exulted laughter.

“The Valerian has grounded it! Charge! For Whiterun!” he bellowed, and charge they did, with answering shouts.

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It had been a desperate gamble, there was no other way to describe it while remaining fully honest. I’d known the words, of course -Dragonrend was the most famous Shout outside of Unrelenting Force, and rather memorable as well-, but I lacked the ability to put any true power behind them. Whether I was the Dragonborn or not, I didn’t yet know -though I damn well would, one way or the other, when Mirmulnir was killed-, but whether I was or not I couldn’t currently use The Voice.

But I’d needed something to turn this fight in my favor when it turned out that dragon scales were rather more magic resistant than I had expected them to be. Which, in hindsight, had been foolish of me. Stupid, even. Dragons fought one another primarily with The Voice, which was pure magic, so of course they were heavily resistant to magical attacks!

At any rate, desperation was the mother of creativity, and in this case that creativity resulted in one particular thought: ‘If I pour as much magika into the air as humanly possible and yell the words as loudly as possible, can I bluff enough to cause an instinctual reaction that will give me an advantage?’

Apparently, the answer had been yes, and thank the Divines for it.

Not that I really had the time to marvel at that particular fact, though the discovery -and the result, hopefully- would certainly put a smile on my face for some time to become, because now I and my recently arrived allies were going to have to deal with a ground, furious dragon that was smart enough to have stayed undiscovered and unkilled for several thousand years.

This was our opening, our chance to take advantage, and I wasn’t the only one that saw it, because the sound of shouts and the pounding of hooves made it quite clear that Balgruuf -and wasn’t he a hell of a sight, eh?- was leading his people onto the attack. Well, I’d be damned if I let them finish this fight for me, especially if I wasn’t sure they actually could finish it.

I surged forward, boots tearing furrows in the scorched, debris-riddled earth as I closed the distance at a pace no horse could hope to match, and Mirmulnir’s head swung around with a snarl, one wing dragging useless and broken across the ground while he tried to lever himself upright on the other. Good, he’d be a hell of a lot slower now, have a harder time turning or doing damn near anything else. And he was bleeding too, though not as badly as I might have hoped, with blood that was dark as tar and hissed faintly where it struck the soil pooling beneath the open fracture of his wound.

“Joor! Sosnaak! You dare to speak such words in the presence of your gods?! You dare to let your wretched tongue shapes the Thu’um?! I shall burn you until even your ashes no longer remain, and burn your city in turn!” he roared, pain pitching and edging every syllable, his furious eyes locked onto me as steam leaked around the corners of his muzzle.

“Well, you’re certainly welcome to try. I survived Alduin’s little tantrum, so…” I started to remark in mockery, only to be cut off by an outraged snarl and a lunging snap. I jolted back a handful of yards, laughing from exhilaration, adrenaline, and delight alike. “Oh, you didn’t like that, did you?”

“You dare speak his name?” Mirmulnir hissed the words, sounding nearly as serpentine as a good half of his appearance suggested, the fury in it so absolute that for a heartbeat I almost regretted the taunt. Almost. His good wing flared, talons gouging deep trenches into the earth as he tried to drag his ungainly bulk around to face me fully, and I shifted again to make sure I was both remaining out of range, and his back was moderately turned towards the onrushing cavalry. “Alduin is the First-Born, the World-Eater, the one all dragons bow before! You are nothing! A worm that crawls-!”

However it was he’d intended to finish, he didn’t get the chance, because Balgruuf’s force slammed right into him, and everything turned to utter chaos.

Spears bit into his flank in a ragged line, most skittering off scale that turned even the finest steel, but a few —those wielded by veterans, those with the most experience and the quickest wits— found purchase. Mirmulnir screamed in rage and pain and wrath alike, an ear-splitting sound that sent horses rearing and men scattering even as Balgruuf himself, astride a war-charger that didn’t so much as flinch, brought Vindhǫgg around in a two-handed arc that took a chunk of meat the size of a dinner platter from the dragon’s side.

“For Whiterun!” the Jarl bellowed again, and gods help me, the older man was grinning like he’d found his youth again in the middle of a killing field. Which he probably had, nothing quite got the blood flowing like fighting for your life, especially for an older veteran ‘put out to pasture’ like he probably felt most days. Shouts and cheers echoed him as those he’d brought, encouraged and emboldened by their jarl’s success, his courage, and the obviously injured nature of their enemy, closed the range in an effort to find and target weak-points.

They quickly discovered that a downed dragon, though it might -as a certain film once famously said- was eventually a dead dragon, it was not a helpless dragon. Nor were its fang-filled maw, Thu’um, and wings the only weapon it possessed. Mirmulnir twisted, and though it was a far from graceful movement, it was more than enough for him to bring his tail to bear on a half-dozen of his interlocutors.

Three died instantly, their bodies turned into little more than a smear partially-contained by their armor, and two more had sustained injuries that could very well be permanently crippling even with magical healing.

The sixth, a Battle-Born by the look of the broken-mask sigil on his shield, managed to throw himself from his horse just in time, and I made a note to buy the kid a beer. Good instincts, better reaction speed. He’d go far like that.

“Watch the tail! Focus on the wing, cripple him! Don’t bunch up, keep moving!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, planting my fist in the wound that Balgruuf’s axe had created and channeling another lightning bolt directly into Mirmulnir’s blood and bone, getting a very satisfying convulsion before I was forced to flicker away as he exhaled a plume of fire that would have killed another half-dozen of our people if it wasn’t for the wall of ice that Lydia conjured in its path. Even still, the ice was vaporized instantly, and more than a few voices exclaimed in pain as superheated steam plumed in the middle of the formation. Spotting a certain bookish killer, I drew her attention. “Aela! The archers! Aim for the eyes, the inside of his mouth!”

I almost told her to watch her shots, to beware of friendly fire, but there was neither the time nor the necessity. She was damn well aware of the necessity of making sure that she didn’t shoot her own allies, and reminding her would be a pointless waste of breath and a distraction both. Likewise, she didn’t waste any time verbally confirming anything that I’d said, instead focusing her efforts in yelling orders at the handful of men and women still primarily armed with a bow while peppering the dragon’s face with arrows.

Trusting that she would do her part, that Lydia and Balgruuf and everyone they’d brought with them would keep doing their parts and hopefully survive in the effort, I turned my attention back to my responsibilities: helping kill Mirmulnir and, hopefully, proving to myself and my allies alike that I was, in fact, the Dragonborn of legend. Because this was my final chance. This was my last hope. The thought that, in a world where game mechanics did not exist, it wasn’t some Word Wall in a barrow that would be the first hint that the player was more than they seemed. No, it would be by killing my first dragon and consuming it’s soul that my dragon soul and dragon blood would be activated.

Or it wouldn’t happen at all, and I would probably die out here on this scorched field, one more nameless casualty in the footnotes of a war that hadn’t officially begun yet, my sisters left to fend for themselves in a world of dragons and Thalmor and vampire clans that would use them without a second thought.

Not exactly a comforting thought to have while dodging a dying god’s tail and teeth.

Mirmulnir’s remaining wing lashed out again, this time in a desperate, scything arc meant to clear the space around him more than actually harm anyone, and I felt rather than saw two more riders thrown from their saddles by the sheer air pressure. The dragon was flagging, moving even slower and less-deftly than he had been before, and thank the Nine for that. But I was perfectly aware of the fact that wounded-and-trapped animals were often the most dangerous, and a wounded-and-trapped demi-god -for want of a better description- would only be more dangerous still.

“Zu’u lost nid! I am not so easily slain, worm!” he snarled, twisting his long neck to strike like a rattlesnake, jaws snapping shut on empty air where I’d been standing a half-second before. He’d gotten closer, that time, and the blast of fire he let loose an instant later incinerated three men that seemed to have thought that being behind me was the safest place to be.

Poor bastards, though I didn’t really have the time to mourn them at the moment. Their killer was exhausted and damn near to being on his knees -literally and metaphorically alike- and I didn’t even have a goddamn weapon anymore, my trusty bastard sword a broken, half-melted scrap of metal that I’d lost the better part of an hour ago.

And my magika reserves weren’t doing amazing either. Being what I was, they were greater than damn near anyone else could possibly ask for, but they weren’t inexhaustible and they hadn’t been topped off to begin with. The problems that came along with being a vampire that hadn’t been able to feed even off of an animal for no small amount of time because of a distinct lack of privacy and opportunity.

No, as bad as the dragon was looking, I wasn’t doing much better, and it was far more likely that a mistake would be fatal on my part far sooner than it would be one on this.

Then there was a flash of pale hair and gleaming steel appeared at my flank, and I found Lydia there, sword in one hand, the other wreathed in the same powerful magic that had frozen a hundred draugr shut in their tombs. She didn’t spare me so much as a glance, her attention fixed wholly on the wounded god before us, but her voice carried clear over the roar of battle and the dragon’s furious snarling.

“You’ll have to forgive me the interruption, but it looked like you could use a helping hand, Constantine!”

“Wouldn’t say no to it!” I shot back, already moving, already pooling lightning in my hands and taking aim at the bastard’s eye in the hopes that, perhaps, several thousand volts of electricity directly to that semi-vulnerable orb would provide a bit more success than most previous attempts.

The bolt struck true, fortunately and thanks almost entirely to how damn close I was, sizzling against the soft tissue of Mirmulnir’s eye. The sound he made as a result was as gratifying as it was bone-chillding and ear-rending, and Lydia was already moving, her blade flashing out to open a thin and shallow gash along the exposed flesh beneath his jaw where the scales had cracked from Balgruuf’s earlier blow. She didn’t stop there, though, because she flash-froze the blood that started to spill from the wound into jagged spikes before shattering them, ripping the injury open wider from the inside.

Mirmulnir bellowed, thrashing his head away from the both of us, and for one admittedly exciting moment the two of us were fighting in perfect concert, her ice and blade opening wounds that my lightning and bare hands could then punish. It was, I thought distantly even as I ducked beneath a snapping claw, a rather beautiful thing to experience, and made me feel terribly attracted to her. More than I already was, anyway.

Then the beast’s tail, forgotten in the chaos of the moment, whipped around low and fast, and I heard Balgruuf’s warhorse scream before the Jarl himself was airborne, thrown clear from the saddle to slam into the churned earth with a rather sickening thud.

He didn’t rise, though he tried to leverage himself up with his elbow, his eyes unfocused from concussion.

Mirmulnir’s ruined eye swiveled, some primal and vicious instinct -or, perhaps, a recognition that the man in the finest armor with the finest weapon was our leader- recognizing an easy kill, changed targets in an instant, his head drawing back for the finishing strike, jaws gaping wide enough to swallow a man whole.

I didn’t think. There wasn’t time to think, only to act, and I had vanished from Lydia’s side before she could do more than let her eyes widen with horror for her uncle’s safety. The world narrowed to a handful of things: Balgruuf’s crumpled form, the dragon’s descending head, and the axe -Vindhǫgg-, lying on the ground beside it’s master.

My hand closed around the haft as Mirmulnir’s head began to snap forward and I spun, bringing it arcing up and around for a strike of my own as his teeth soared over my shoulder. A strike targeted -a feat only made possible by my inhuman nature- on the greatest vulnerability that the dragon possessed: the wound, the gap in his armor, made by Lydia.

The ancient, enchanted Skyforge steel bit deep into the raw, unscaled meat of his throat, driven by every ounce of strength I could muster and the momentum of my own inhuman speed, and Mirmulnir’s forward lunge did the rest of the work for me, his own weight and momentum driving the blade in deeper than my arms alone could likely have managed. Black-red blood erupted in a fountain, spraying across my chest and face in a literally searing wave, and this time the sound the dragon made was not a roar or a shriek.

It was a gurgle. Wet, choking, and final.

His head slammed down into the earth not a foot from where I stood, his body following a heartbeat later with a tremor that I felt through the armored soles of my boots, and for a long, suspended moment, nothing moved. Nothing even breathed, each and every one of us that were still alive waiting to see if he would move again.

He didn’t move.

The cheers started, a ragged and tired thing. Tentative, almost, as if no one could quite believe that we’d actually won the fight. That those of still alive had survived winning the fight, but my focus wasn’t on the exhilaration of survival or victory. It was on that corpse, my nerves on fire and my breath held in my lungs.

Then I felt it. The pulse, like a heartbeat. A feeling, but one that perfectly matched the sound the game had made whenever you killed a dragon and it’s soul was about to be yours. Around me, shouts of triumph turned to confusion as fear as the Mirmulnir shuddered and shook, spirals of light pouring out of him to sink into my flesh.

The world went white, then gold, then a color that was as much everything as it was nothing.

On it’s heels came…sensation. It wasn’t pain, exactly, though there was an edge of something that could have become pain if I let it. It was a pressure, immense and all-encompassing, as though the whole of Mirmulnir’s existence —every century of flight, every word of the Thu’um he had ever shaped, every scrap of memory and every idle thought— was being forced into a space that was far, far too small for it.

And that space was my soul.

My knees buckled. I heard myself make a sound I didn’t recognize, something between a gasp and a snarl, and then the light was gone. Just as quickly as it had begun, the entire event was over, leaving me on my hands and knees and struggling to breath in the ringing silence, the eyes of half-a-hundred people pressing down on me.

Then, from the south-east, a thunder rolling across the plains:

“Dov-Ah-Kiin!”