And So The Eagle Conquered 015 (Patreon)

The people of Whiterun were tense, a pall of worry and anxious anticipation cloaking the entire city and resting heavily on every pair of shoulders inside of it. Word always traveled fast, especially when that word came on the heels of a jarlskona riding at break-neck speed -with only a fraction of the escort that she had left with- straight through the center of town to reach Dragonsreach as quickly as possible.

When that word was the knowledge that a dragon -a different dragon than the one that had destroyed Helgen not a week ago!- was attacking the outlying farms, and the jarl himself was leading the relief force from Whiterun to the aid of the mysterious Constantine Valerius in driving it away or killing it?

Well, that sort of news didn’t merely travel fast. It practically flew, spreading from the gates to the marketplace to the Bannered Mare and back again before the dust of Elisif’s horse had even settled in the courtyard of Dragonsreach.

Carlotta Valentia had closed her stall the moment she’d seen the muster begin, gathering her daughter close and murmuring reassurances that neither of them quite believed as she had hurried home. The walls were teeming with soldiers and volunteers, one last line of defense if all should go wrong, and everyone else were finding the deepest, least-wooded holes that they could to hide in. It was a nightmare for all involved, nothing less, and Carlotta couldn’t help but lament it. Whiterun was meant to be safe, firmly opposed to any sort of civil war and staving off everyone that might try to force the issue through the threat of abandoning their neutrality in favor of the opposing side.

And yet here they were, hurrying out of the market square while a beast out of children’s stories descended on the fields and farms that had stood for dozens of generations, and no army, no walls, no careful political neutrality could stop it. Somehow, she very much doubted that dragons gave a damn about treaties or trade routes or the delicate political balance her jarl had spent the better part of a decade maintaining.

She pressed her daughter’s face against her hip, one hand smoothing over dark curls in a gesture more for her own comfort than the girl’s, and watched the gates -surrounded by the crowd that had gathered there despite every reasonable instinct and argument screaming at them to flee deeper into the city- as she made her way home. It was foolish, she knew. If the dragon came, if it flew over the walls the way it had at Helgen, neither distance from gates nor depth of root cellar would do them a damn bit of good.

And it wasn’t like they could flee the city, not with as close as the beast was. Unlikely as the walls and roof of their home protecting them might be, getting caught out on the open road was a guarantee of death. A slim chance of survival was still a chance, and she would roll the dice and trust the gods.

Not to mention the fact that, as a mother, if her daughter was going to die she wanted it to happen in their home. Where she felt safest, most comfortable, most loved. Where she couldn’t see the beast descending on them, where her last moments wouldn’t be filled with terror at the sight of her killer.

The next hour -perhaps two, it was hard to keep time properly in a circumstance such as this- had crawled by, painfully slow. No dragon presented itself, no roar nor wave of heat arrived on the wind, and ever-so-tentatively her heart lightened and her outlook brightened ever-so-slightly. Perhaps, as impossible as it might seem, man had managed to defeat beast?

When the sounds outside her house finally changed, it was Mila who noticed first, her small ear pressed against the shuttered window despite Carlotta’s best efforts to keep her away from it. Mila who straightened up suddenly -giving her mother a not-so-small heart-attack- before whirling around and making enthusiastic beckoning motions even as she shushed the already-silent shopkeeper.

“Mama! Mama, come listen!”

Carlotta…didn’t think her daughter would sound quite so enthusiastic if whatever it was that she would hear would be bad news. She was a smart girl, forced to grow up earlier than Carlotta would have ever wanted, and she was sharply aware of how to monitor the moods of a crowd. Hope winning out over caution, the elder half of the pair made her way over to press her own ear to that same window and listened hard. It took her a moment -a very long, agonizing moment- before she heard it, and her breath caught in her throat when she did.

Cheering.

Not the wailing panic she had braced herself for, not the screams that would have meant the worst had come to pass, but cheering, ragged and disbelieving and growing louder by the second as it rolled up the street from the direction of the main gate. Spreading from neighborhood to neighborhood, she would guess, as people heard the noise of it all and investigated, and she wasn’t going to do any different. Turning to her daughter, she saw that Mila was already scampering from the door, and after an exasperated -relieved- chiding, allowed the nine year old to pull it open and lead the way outside.

The street outside had transformed since she saw it last and it was continuing to transform even now, with doors flung open and neighbors spilling out into the lane in various states of undress and disarray, all of them wearing the same stunned, hopeful expression that Carlotta was stubbornly keeping from her own face. Old Hulda from the Bannered Mare was already halfway down the street with her apron still tied about her waist, and the Battle-Born boy —young Lars, whom her Mila was a bit too fond of for any protective mother to be entirely pleased with— came sprinting past with a whoop that had absolutely nothing to do with dignity and everything to do with relief.

“Lars! Lars, wait up!” Mila shouted after her friend before looking back up at her mother and tugging at her hand, small fingers surprisingly strong. “Come on, Mama! Come on, come on!”

Carlotta let herself be pulled along, her heart hammering with something that was no longer dread but a fragile, disbelieving hope, and the crowd around them thickened with every step closer to the market square. Shutters banged open overhead. Voices called questions back and forth, none of them quite loud enough to be answered before the next was shouted, and somewhere ahead a horn sounded, three short blasts that she recognized from her girlhood as the old signal for a victorious return from battle, one so rarely used these past years that she’d nearly forgotten the sound of it.

By the time they reached the square, it was already packed with bodies, more pouring in behind them with every passing moment, and Carlotta found herself craning her neck along with everyone else to see past the press of shoulders toward the gate. Word rippled backward through the crowd in fragments, passed mouth-to-mouth and chaotic to a syllable, but that word -for all its chaos- seemed positive.

They killed it. The Jarl lives. The Valerian. that last one repeated over and over, growing stranger and more insistent with each retelling, until it wasn’t merely ‘the Valerian’ anymore but a title, an invocation. Damn near a prayer.

Dovahkiin.

Carlotta knew that word, of course. She might not be a pure-blooded Nord but she had been born and raised in Skyrim, and she had been in the tavern enough to have heard a dozen bards or more sing that ancient song. She glanced down at Mila, whose small face was alight with an excitement that hadn’t yet learned to be wary of things she didn’t fully understand, and found herself smoothing the girl’s hair back from her forehead more out of habit than any real concern.

“Mama, what does it mean?” Mila asked, tugging again at her sleeve, and Carlotta was considering how best to answer that question when there was a great roar from the crowd, which parted like an ocean before priest to reveal those that had gone to fight the dragon. The jarl led them, battered and swaying slightly in his saddle but sharp-eyed and whole, his huskarl at her place of honor to one side and his niece on the other. Then the Companions, blood-stained and grinning as fiercly as ever, roaring back at the crowd with their battle-worn weapons held high, but it was what came behind them that drew every eye and had blood thundering deafeningly through every pair of ears.

The dragon.

Or perhaps, it was more accurate to say, what remained of it.

It came into view slowly, dragged rather than carried given its great bulk, the great bones of it scraping and shuddering against the packed dirt of the road with a grinding sound that send a shiver down her spine. Ropes crisscrossed the vast ribcage and the wing joints, spiralling down the length of it’s long spine, each of them tied off to saddle-horns or looped around the straining shoulders of soldiers and farmhands alike who leaned into their burden with the particularly grim, satisfied determination of men and women who had, against every reasonable expectation, lived to drag their semi-divine enemy home rather than the distinctly less pleasant alternative.

Gods above, but it was massive. The damn thing stretched from one side of the street to the other without more than an inch to spare, she would swear it, and she could see the way it’s bones had been bent and bound to make even that much possible. The skull alone was the size of a large cart, jaw hanging slack, and she’d guess that -with it’s wings spread wide- it would be several times the size of Jorvaskr.

And there, perched atop the ridge of its spine, riding it and looking every inch the conquering hero, sat the mysterious Constantine Valerius. He made quite the sight, and no mistake, with blood streaking his armor -his visibly scorched and battered armor- and all, but he still sat astride the thing’s bones with a casual ease as he grinned at the crowd.

A crowd whose cheers redoubled when they saw him, and a chant was taken up. That ancient, oh-so-heavy word.

Dovahkiin! Dovahkiin! Dovahkiin!

It rolled through the square like a tide, gathering strength with every repetition, Carlotta was pretty damn sure she -and the rest of the city- were going to go deaf for a week at least, and felt Mila’s small hand tighten in her own, felt the girl bouncing on the balls of her feet with an excitement that had nothing to do with cognizant understanding and everything to do with the infectious, overwhelming relief of the crowd around them.

Carlotta found herself swept up in it despite herself, her own voice joining the chant before she’d consciously decided to add to it, and she watched the man atop that impossible corpse with something between awe and a strange, unplaceable unease. He looked like a hero out of the old songs, blood and ash and all, but there was something in the set of his shoulders, the way his gaze swept the crowd rather than simply basking in it, that spoke less of triumph and more of a man taking something heavy in.

Like a man gaining a newfound awareness of…responsibility.

And it was that which gave her unease, because the gods were not kind to heroes…and they never called up a hero unless the world itself was in danger. Maybe he was the Dragonborn of legend, but what would that mean for Tamriel, for Nirn? The last time the gods had interfered so directly in mortal affairs, the Oblivion Crisis had been the cause. And with that only 200 years passed…well, the world had not even come close to recovering from it all.

The dragon came to a halt in the middle of the market and the ropes were dropped as grooms were waved forward to take the exhausted horses as their riders dismounted and gathered around the corpse. Balgruuf tiredly raised an arm, calling for silence that took well over a minute to finally come.

“People of Whiterun!” the Jarl’s voice, though roughened by exhaustion and the ash still clinging to his throat as much as it clung to his armor, still carried quite easily across the square and the houses beyond it. An old soldier’s trick, so useful from his days as a Tribunus Laticlavius and honed to a fine point from giving speechs on the steps of Dragonsreach in the days since his father’s death and his inheritance of the throne. “Today, your city stood in the shadow of a nightmare that our ancestors thought long since passed from this world a thousand years passed! Today, that shadow was answered as it was then: with steel, with courage, and with the love of hearth and kin!”

Another roar went up, and Balgruuf let it wash over the crowd for a long moment before raising his hand again, quieting them with the patience of a man who had been at the center of far, far rowdier gatherings than this one.

“Eleven of our own did not return to see this victory.” His voice dropped, and the crowd’s fervor dropped with it, an uneasy hush spreading outward like ripples in a pond as the people were reminded amidst their jubilation that no victory of such size could possible have been bloodless. “Eleven brothers and sisters that rode out with me, and twenty more that stood with the Valerian at the Western Watchtower. Heroes, one and all, whose names will be carved into the walls of Dragonsreach itself and who in this very moment walk the halls of Sovngarde! Hail the victorious dead!”

“Hail the victorious dead!” the crowd echoed back, ragged but sincere, and Carlotta found the words leaving her own lips before she’d quite decided to speak them, Mila’s small voice piping up beside her own a heartbeat later as their hands squeezed one another’s gently, instinctively. There was a long silence, a handful of solemn heartbeats, before he resumed speaking.

“But I will not stand here and pretend that grief is the only thing worth speaking of in a moment such as this.” He drew himself up, and despite the visible weariness in his frame, despite the way his left arm hung just a fraction stiffer than the right, there was iron in his bearing that reminded Carlotta why this man’s father, -and his father before him, and so on through the generations- had held Whiterun through wars and disasters that had broken lesser holds entirely. “This dragon came to test us, to see if the strength of the mortal races has faltered in these many long centuries. Slaves he thought to make of us, slaves and fodder and toys to kill at his leisure!”

“And we put paid to that! We weren’t the prey today, no matter what the beast thought! We were the hunters!” Aela interjected from her place amongst the fighters, fierce and proud, and a roar went up in response as Balgruuf grinned broadly and nodded his agreement, before sobering again and continuing.

“But I will not lie to you, my people, and say that the day would have been won with the strength of Whiterun alone. Were it not for a man unknown to us all until barely a week ago, I -we all- would be dead and the plains and valleys of Whiterun would be a nest of evil.” he turned, arm coming out in a sweeping gesture to the man still sitting atop the bones. “Constantine Valerius, the man whose advice saved the lives of many hundreds of people in Helgen and whose actions directly saved the life of my kin, Elisif, during its destruction. The man who sent her to safety once again as he led Imperial soldiers and guardsmen of the Hold against a monster of myth, who battled it alone when the last of them had fallen, and who saved my life when it tried to devour me whole. The man who, by the will of the gods and by the acclamation of the Greybeards, stands before you as Dovahkiin. Dragonborn.”

They’d known it, of course. They’d proclaimed him as such themselves, not minutes ago, hadn’t they? Who else could he be, with the thunderous shout that had rolled across the plains -and that must have been the Greybeards, though she hadn’t understood the word they’d spoken thanks to how deeply within the house she and Mila had been- and the skeleton he now rode? But even knowing that, there was something so very different about having it said aloud by their jarl.

At the invitation, for that is what it must have been, the man in question rose to his feet, balancing easily on his perch in spite of it’s less-than-stable nature, and looked around at them all.

“My friends, my fellow citizens of Whiterun. Those that, like me, call not just Skyrim or the Empire home, but Tamriel itself!” he greeted, shifting slightly as if he wanted to pace before remembering exactly where he was and just why such a thing would likely end badly. “I will be honest with each and every one of you: I never expected to be here, nor did I ever expect to find myself as some sort of legendary figure. But I am here, and though I am far from legendary, I won’t lie to you and pretend we are not living in difficult times. The Greybeards have called, and I will answer. I have no doubt that I will be charged, as the Voices of old, with pushing back the dragons to safeguard the mortal realm. But I can no more do it alone then, than I did today. Nor can any of you do it alone.”

He paused, either to catch his breath or let the words sink in Carlotta didn’t know. Perhaps both, as speech-speakers so often did. He gestured to the men and women who had fought alongside him, the men and women from all walks of life and all loyalties of nation or creed. When he sppoke again, his voice had softened, grown solemn, even sad, though it carried easily all the same.

“Even in Riverwood, as far removed from the politics of Whiterun as can be, we are not immune to the way this land of ours has split of recent years. It breaks my heart, to see kith and kin turn on one another when there are enemies at the gates.” and was there perhaps a note of censure, there, and more than one person stiffened or scowled or frowned in shame and shuffled their feet. “But those who fought beside me didn’t care for ideology, or banners or creeds or matters of faith. They cared about stopping a threat far beyond any such concerns, and without hesitation protected one another and fought together to defeat this monster on which I now stand. I ask each and every one of you to emulate that example, because I cannot defend this world if the men and women I am meant to defend -and rely on- are more interested in slaughtering one another than in preventing the end of everything.”

His eyes swept the crowd again, as they shifted and murmured and considered his words to whatever degree that they were willing in a moment such as this, and she took a look around at her neighbors. Many of them, she was gratified to see, looked somewhat ashamed as a result of the oblique chastisement. Which was exactly what those words were meant to be, she was positive about that much, and all the better in her opinion. She loved this land, and she loved the Empire. The last thing she wanted to see was for both to tear themselves apart the way the Thalmor would doubtlessly love to see happen.

Besides, the man had a point. How could he fight off the dragons, or expect anyone else to do so, if they were all too busy slaughtering one another?

“I will fight. I will bend my every effort and every tool at my disposal to this war -and make no mistake, a war it will be, for our lives and so much more!- without hesitation and without regret. Blood, sweat, and tears, all spent in service of the greatest of causes.” he declared, building towards a crescendo, arms spreading wide as if to invite an embrace. “So I ask of you: will you stand with me, brothers and sisters, one and all? Will you stand shoulder to shoulder, with one another and with me, and fight? Will you risk it all to bring this world just one more dawn, one more day of life and light and laughter?” he stomped a foot on the skeleton behind him. “I have made my choice. I have charted my course, and here I stand, for I can do no other. Will you do the same?”

For a moment, the square held its breath. No one wanted to be the first to speak, somehow, but no one wanted to be the last either, and they were paralyzed by the indecision. Then Mila’s small voice — high and clear and utterly without doubt — rang out into that silence.

“Yes!”

It was such a small thing, a child’s voice thrown out into the vastness of the people-filled square, but it was enough to break the stillness. Enough to end the silence. A roar followed it, ragged and swelling, voices tumbling over one another as everyone present voiced their own confirmation and agreement, and Carlotta was amongst their number. How could she do any less, why would she want to do any less?

“I declare a day of mourning today, and a festival of celebration on the morrow! Let all of Whiterun honor those that died to give them safety, and let all of Whiterun celebrate their sacrifice! Go, my brothers and sisters, my people! Mourn those that have been lost, and prepare for the days to come!” Balgruuf finished, the dismissal a clear but polite one, and as the crowd dispersed Carlotta watched Valerius ‘dismount’ the skeleton and strike up a conversation with the man.

She could only imagine the contents of that conversation, and in that moment she was bizarrely and powerfully glad to be nothing more than a single mother running a food stall. Let the kings and generals and heroes of the world deal with saving that world. Her focus would, as it ever should be, on her precious daughter.

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