"When the other Dragonborn takes her gauntleted hand in her gloved one to point at the statue of the dragon that crouches high over the altar, it is the same. Recognizeable. Always the same. Akatosh. Alduin." When you try to slay an aspect of the God of Time, time shatters. The Elder Scrolls lie. The Dragonborn can be anyone, even at the same time. It is a matter of belief. This fic was born from too many discussions of the relevant lore; I am the first to admit that it is far, far too meta and rather self-indulgent.

Rated for bloody violence, including eye removal.

Warning: Character death

Disclaimer: If I owned this 'verse, I would have a lot of money, and the lore changes that get lampshaded wouldn't exist. Everything except the characterization of Niamh and Etain belongs to Bethesda.

I.

"We'll give you credit: you broke Alkosh something fierce, and that's not easy. Just don't think you solved what you accomplished by it, or can ever solve it." – R'leyt-harhr, Tender to the Mane, in Where Were You When The Dragon Broke?

Riften is a crappy little pit of a city, and when Niamh finally comes down the stairs of the crappy little tavern (armor finally shed, fingers still tingling with the lingering wisps of telekinesis that she'd used to peel the steel and pale dragonbone from her body by herself), she's not expecting anything more than ale. Crappy ale to match the city, too, so it's with relief that she slides a few Septims across the bar for a cup of mead.

And it's with a more familiar sense of dread that she sees the barkeep's slit-pupil eyes go wide.

She's seeing what everyone else sees, what Niamh can't seem to avoid these days – her face in the mirror, the shock of too-bright red hair and too-bold freckles that have surely made it into all the songs by now. The black-singed tips of her fingers on the coin and the Archmage's signet ring like a gaudy little trophy on her right hand. And the scent of metal and arcana and blood that hangs around her, too, that she cannot – cannot ¬– seem to scrub out of her skin.

"Apologies for not recognizing you sooner, milady," croaks the Argonian, and she gives a little half-bow, the kind that makes Niamh cringe. "Anything you want is on the house. Anything for the Dra-"

"No," says Niamh. Her voice used to be sweet but now it rasps around the edges, a rattling sword-edge in a throat burnt by words it was never meant to speak. She holds out a hand, palm down. Quiet. Peace. "No, you don't have to do that."

"But you –"

"Please."

The Argonian's throat bobs but she relents, lets Niamh slide a larger pile of coins across the counter and leave a few moments later with stew and cheese and a heel of bread. It is the tavern's best bread, she can tell, and the cheese comes from Cyrodiil and is worth far more than what she's paid. But at least no one had shouted – hah, shouted – her title. At least the bard in the corner was not singing the song about her.

She'd heard that song in every inn in Skyrim, it felt like. All exaggerations, all praise for things she had not done yet and still hasn't. It used to make her laugh. Now, she spends far too much time wishing her aim was sharp enough to set lute strings on fire.

She settles at an empty table in the corner and busies herself with the flaky bread and underpriced cheese and tries not to think too much. And when someone else approaches the table, lays a hand on the back of a chair, she contemplates throwing the stew in his face.

If he starts fawning over her, if he ever says the word Dragonborn, she'll set it on fire first. She really will.

"Can I sit?" he asks, and at the accent of home she looks up.

Imperial – and not even Legion – and that itself is a rarity, here, unfamiliar, as is the smile on his face. It's the crooked little smile of someone not seeking work or worship, the kind that says company with a question mark at the end. It has been far too long since she's seen that. She realizes – almost laughing in surprise – that he does not know who she is. And that his eyes are lingering on her face and the red shock of her hair for reasons that clearly have nothing to do with what he's heard in a song.

It should bother her.

It doesn't.

And besides, his accent – can I sit? – is all the flat mercantile tones of Cyrodiil, of home, and it's for that reason more than any that she rasps out a "'yes, of course."

The shortsword at his hip bangs awkwardly against the chair when he does, and she can tell that he's not used to wearing it, but he pretends like nothing's happened as he gestures at her plate. "How'd you get Keevara to give you the Eidar? I asked and she said she'd been out for a week."

She realizes a second later that he's talking about the cheese, responds "really?" another second before she remembers that her mouth is full. It comes out "rrrnnrry?"

The man grins. It's crooked. "She must've just been hiding it for the pretty ones, then. Can't blame her. Word is she's having a hard time paying her protection money."

The flirt doesn't register. The last part does. Niamh swallows and hisses "shit."

"Hmm?"

"Thieves' Guild? Thieves' Guild protection money?" He nods, and she starts digging around in her pocket. "Blast it, I'm paying her more, then, I didn't realize –"

"Hey –" He lays a hand on hers and she jumps, sparks flickering around her hair. "Hey, calm down. Take care of it later, alright? She's…touchy about this kind of stuff."

"Shit, " she repeats, eyes down. It takes her a moment to relax. To slump. "Divines, I hate this city," she mutters, running a sparking hand through her hair. "I can't walk more than two feet before smacking into the fetching Thieves' Guild or stepping on someone's toes."

"Charming place, isn't it?" the man chuckles.

Niamh's response is to sip her mead. He shrugs, takes out a Septim and starts playing with it, flipping it over his knuckles. Making it vanish at the top of a toss, pulling it out behind his ear, casual and clever. She watches his fingertips flicker. They are all black-seared and burnt, and she points. "Destruction magic?"

A grin. "How'd you guess?"

She waggles her own fingers at him in response and watches a smile break across his face. "Oooh, a fellow mage! You'll put me out of business, you know. I've got a bit of a monopoly on the burning-things-to-a-crisp business in Riften."

"Do you now?"

"Mmm-hmm." He holds out his hand. "Marcurio."

She takes it. "Niamh."

"Niamh," he repeats. She watches him sound it out. He tastes the flat Cyrodiilic-tinged vowels in his mouth, kisses the v at the end overlong before it leaves his lips. "Neeeev. Niamh." He tilts his head. "Damn, that sounds familiar. Have I heard about you?"

"No," she says quietly, shrinking back, a traitorous edge in her voice. "No."

But his eyes have fallen to the Archmage's ring on her left hand. "Oh," he murmurs, pointing. "You're – you're – "

"Y-you're thinking of someone else."

"…Am I?"

Niamh nods. "Absolutely," she manages. Her throat is dry and cracked and burnt, and all the mead and crap ale in the tavern could never wet it. "Can you…can you teach me that coin trick?"

Marcurio stares at her. For a moment, she can tell, he is not seeing her. He is seeing the legend, the magic-stains on her fingers and thrum to her voice, the sharp white bones worked into her armor that's lying upstairs, the shadows and stories of wings. But it is only a moment. And then he gives himself a little shake and sits up straight and smiles, crooked again, ordinary and wonderful. "There's a price," he tells her, serious.

Niamh stiffens. She thinks of dragons, of outlawed gods and Stormcloaks, of the way that everyone seems to want something of her. And then he smiles and points at her untouched Eidar cheese. "Can I have some of that?"

"…That's the whole reason you came over here, isn't it?"

"Absolutely."

And Niamh is laughing, hand over her mouth like it shouldn't be allowed, and Marcurio is as well. He nabs the cheese from her plate and she is laughing and he's the one to pay, improbably, when they somehow run out of mead, buying two cups to replace her one. The Septim – his – is flashing across his fingers and across hers and she discovers, to no surprise, that she is utter shit at coin tricks, no dexterity at all, and she explains this with stories of triggered traps and teachers set on fire by wayward aim as the tavern quiet and empties out. He tries the Archmage ring on for kicks and then tries to run away with it, and she is laughing as he trips on the grease spell she lays for him at the door and goes splat as well when she tries to help him up. She laughs until it hurts her throat, until she doesn't notice. And when the tavern is dark and she finally trips and stumbles upstairs to her crappy bed, she takes him with her.

It will not die.

That is what Etain thinks as she presses herself flat against the inside wall of Whiterun's tower, gouts of flame roaring past her and crisping the hair on her exposed skin. It will not die. The dragon has taken so many wounds, sword cuts to belly and breast and blows from axes that bounced off its scales as if it were made of stone, has dashed men to pieces against the ground and flown off again even though she swears its wings are torn to shreds. It has taken arrows, too, quiver after quiver full. Arrows from the guards who came to the tower with her (now dead) and those who were here before (also dead). They stick under scales, in its wings, between its teeth. One of them swivels from the blind and bleeding ruin of an eye.

Etain touches her own face, tracing scars with fingers she can't see. She remembers the pain of that, the way she'd fallen to her knees with half the world a red blur. The helplessness. Any other creature would be crippled by now. Food for crows. Food for Sithis. Dead. But this is a dragon, and it will. Not. Die.

This is what the Dragonborn is for.

But the Dragonborn is in Riften, improbably – the city she said she'd never visit, festering Thieves' Guild pit that it is, the city she openly loathes, Etain can't imagine why she'd be there now – and the dragon is here, and by the sounds from outside it seems that it and Etain are the only creatures still left breathing.

Damn it.

Damn her.

She is going to die here, probably, certainly, because it will not, and there is nothing to be done.

Etain swallows hard, nocks her final arrow in the string with hands that do not shake. She breathes a prayer, not caring if anyone will hear because there is no one to hear, just her and her death, death out there dreadfully wounded but proud and alive, and she watches with her good eye and waits for death to come snarling through the doorway. A breath, then two, then ten, and it does not.

There is nothing to be done.

She raises the bow and turns on her heel, sighting out the door and down the length of the arrow at death crouched in the field, claws digging furrows in the ground and blood smoking from its ruined eye. It is the left eye, some part of her notes, like hers, and there is something about this that is so horrifically perfect – they stare each other down, her with hands steady on the bow and the dragon with a snarl growing between its jaws, something like the very word for fire as it opens its mouth –

And her arrow takes it in the very back of the throat.

The dragon arches, spasms, shakes, its snarl coming out as a cough of blood and smoke. Etain can only stand there in disbelief and triumph (and something, almost, like disappointment) as it crumples. It crashes to the ground. She imagines the earth shaking, imagines that she can see something like respect in its remaining eye as it goes dark, as a shudder wracks its body and it finally – finally –

Her legs are made of wood as she comes down the flame-black tower steps, bow gripped tightly in her hand and shock surely naked on her face.

It has taken two guard platoons. It has taken all her arrows. And the dragon is finally dead.

And she is not.

She walks up to the corpse like a woman who is asleep, and she falls to her knees.

The earth beneath her hands is damp and black with blood. The smell is familiar. Comforting. Home. And she is shaking with pent-up terror, surely – it must be – the dragon flicking in the corner of her one good eye, colors all bent and strange. She is cold with shock, hot with the memory of fire, giddy with the heady rush of being alive, I survived this, why did I survive this –

She raises her head and she screams.

It is a word, almost – not a word – something that had burnt her throat with the need to get out, something huge and dark, all age and other and – FORCE –

She hears gasps. Hears shrieks.

Open her eyes and watches FORCE canter away into the sky, scattering crows in its wake.

"You – you're –"

"Mara have mercy –"

"Dragonborn."

The too-late reinforcements are clustered around her, daring each other to get closer, and the words –

The words they're saying are in another language.

They are not making sense.

"You're Dragonborn."

"How -?"

"But Niamh –"

"She shouted! Did you see that? She shouted! She used the Voice!"

"Just like the legends…"

"But there already is a Dragonborn!"

Someone grabs her, someone lays a hand on her shoulder, and Etain stands, whirls, spits at him – spits blood – and she runs.

"Dragonborn!"

She runs.

Her bow is clenched white-knuckled in her fists and her leathers are creaking and protesting as she runs, she sprints towards Whiterun – no – away from Whiterun, damn it all, away. Faster than she had just minutes before. Faster than she ever has in her life. Sprinting through fields and farmland as if the dragon is still on her heels. Because it is, it is – it did not die – it will not die –

Her breath comes harsh and sobbing in her throat and it is in her, it is. It is.

"Dragonborn!"

She cannot breath and she cannot see where she is going, half-blind with sweat and soot and the need to get away, to – to –

Hands grab her. Strong hands catch her by the shoulder and turn her and knock the last of the breath out of her, shove her to a broken wall. Hold her there. Etain snarls, soundless, reaches down by reflex to –

"No."

A blow to her wrist, sharp and precise, and the knife goes spiraling out of her hand.

Etain stares, breath coming in ragged gasps, as the world swims into view –blue, a ragged claw slash, a battle-cry painted across a familiar face. She manages a wordless whine, fights against the other woman, but Aela does not back down.

"What happened," she asks. It is not a question. One hand tightens on Etain's shoulders as the other rises to touch her face. It is half gentle reassurance and half look at me, a low command. "Etain – tell me what happened."

She does not respond, because the words are just words with nothing behind them and they do not makes sense. Because she still cannot breathe.

"Don't run from it," the other woman is saying. Hand on her face, her cheek, fingertips stroking the grooves of scar under her left eye, reminder and comfort all at once. "Etain? Running from what's hunting you never solved anything. What happened?"

"I," she manages, "I – I'm – Dragon-"

She wretches and Aela lets her go, leaps back as she falls to her knees and coughs, and coughs, into the dirt and then into her hands, coughs up the last lingering trace of the FORCE in her throat. It tastes like fire. Tastes like death.

And when she finally stops and moves her hands away, they are spattered with blood.

Niamh puts her head in her hands.

She has been sitting on this bench for an hour. Surely. Long enough to slap away two pickpocket attempts and not notice the third (a hundred-Septim note is gone, enough to buy a steel sword or a family's food for weeks, a fortune in this shitty town and a pittance for the Dragonborn). Long enough that she doesn't even notice the stink of sewage and fetid water under her feet. She hates this town. She does, she hates it, but she thinks that if she sits here much longer she could end up getting used to it, and she hates that thought most of all.

It's enough to get her to stand, to straighten her robes – no armor for this – and to give the orphanage door her best challenging stare.

"Right," she tells it, "I'm going in."

A beggar snickers, and she realizes belatedly that she has actually said this out loud.

It is not, she rationalizes, that she's frightened of an old woman. Not at all.

She is far more frightened of a little boy in an abandoned house, crouched with blood and viscera in a circle around him, stabbing a heart over and over with a dull glaze in his child-wide eyes.

She is far more frightened of walking up to this poor old woman and telling her what she has seen.

How is she supposed to tell a charity worker that the Dark Brotherhood is out to kill her? How does anyone hear something like that?

But it's been an hour. The door – not a Dwemer portal, not a Daedric-temple ruin, just a battered Riften door – isn't getting any less threatening. And the beggar is still snickering.

Dragonborn. Right.

She nods, and before she can rehearse her speech once more in her head (Ma'am? You have to believe me! I swear I'm not crazy! He was sitting in a pile of entrails!), she walks up and raps smartly on the door.

One of the orphans answers it, a little boy in a too-big tunic, and he cowers under the blaze of her hair. "Whoa – are you really the Dragonbo-"

"PleaseGrelodIneedtotalktoher?"

The boy blinks at her and Niamh blushes, clears her throat. "Er – tell Grelod I want to talk to her, would you? Privately."

As he runs off, she consoles herself with the fact that she cut him off before he could announce her to the whole bloody street.

She lets herself in, steps into the chilly little foyer and closes the door behind her. It takes three tries before it sticks. She shifts from foot to foot, waiting, trying not to grimace at the stains on the walls and the gouges in the floor. Tries to tell herself that the shadow she saw on the boy's cheek was not, could not be, a fresh bruise.

This is Grelod the Kind, after all. And these are children. And rumors say that the old woman is pushing ninety.

Niamh snaps herself out of it. She can hear the patter of feet upstairs, the thump of a cane, and the boy's voice in rising tones that make her wince.

"No, I swear, I swear! The Dragonborn is here! She wants to talk to you! She's got the hair from the song and everything!"

"Don't tell lies! Haven't I told you what happens to little boys who lie?"

"But it's true, I swear! She's right – Aaah!"

Thump of little body hitting a wall, sliding to the floor.

Niamh puts a hand to her mouth.

"Don't – tell – lies!" And each word is another crack, cane on flesh, another sharp cry. "Why would the Dragonborn ever speak to you? You worthless – little – piece of –"

Niamh is up the stairs before she realizes that she's moved.

The door is open and the old woman is standing over the little boy with her cane in the air, there is blood on the cane, there is fire in Niamh's hands, there is rage in her throat and her voice and there is fire and her hands and her aim is off, she means only to startle the woman but the blood is on the cane and there is rage in her Voice and her aim is off, has always and will always be off and the curtains are burning. Grelod is burning. Grelod is burning and screaming a horrible scream and the boy, the boy, the boy is fine, bloody but fine, she pulls him away from the old woman who is shrieking as she burns and the air is beginning to smell of cooked flesh and oh Divines forgive me there is nothing she can do for her now but send more fire –

She cover's the boy's eyes with one hand and she casts, she casts, flames leaping from her hands, until Grelod is no longer screaming.

And then she crumples against the wall and covers her face with her soot-black hands as the children gather and begin to applaud.

"I didn't mean to," she whispers, again and again. "I didn't…"

The air is thick with the smell of death.

"Don't tell anyone," she manages, voice shaking, unable to look at the children as they laugh and dance around her, skip two-by-two over the smoking body. "P-please, you can't – I didn't mean to –"

Because she could deal with this properly, deal with this legally, but…

But…

"Tell them you don't know what happened. Please. Tell them you don't know. This didn't h-happen."

This did not happen.

She leaves the orphanage in a daze, smelling like fire and blame and death, stumbles back toward the Bee and Barb and falls shaking into her rented bed. This did not happen. She is Niamh, Dragonborn, Archmage, Last Hope of Skyrim (so the songs say), the right arm of General Tullius and the sure-to-be-has-to-be-savior of them all. She does not cook old woman where they stand while children watch and cheer.

And so she forgets.

And when Marcurio hands her a letter a few days later, shrugging when she asks him to describe the courier ("I dunno, shady-looking, seemed to know even less than I did"), she rips it open and blinks.

"We know," reads Marcurio, peering over her shoulder. "Huh." He kisses her cheek. "What? You've got some deep, dark secret that I don't know about?"

"Plenty, but none that I'm telling you," Niamh chuckles. "I have no idea. That's the worst attempt at blackmail I've ever seen." She crumples the note and burns it in her palm, yelping when Marcurio reaches over and pokes to make the fire turn green and flare two feet high.

And that is the last of that. They spend the evening chatting and drinking – more than they should – and if her last ale tastes odd it is only because she is so tired, if it tastes a bit over-sweet or a bit like herbs it is only because she is so, well, drunk. She shoes Marcurio away at her door, begging exhaustion, and if the room is tilting a little –

She falls asleep before she hits the bed.

"Etain?"

She pretends she doesn't hear.

Shadowmere snorts and tries to twitch her off as she tightens the second billet with far, far more force than necessary. "Sorry," she mutters, and the horse responds with a whuffle and an anxious paw at the ground.

We have to go.

"I know."

"Etain!"

She hunches her shoulders against the shout and mounts. Shadowmere is already moving before she's even set in the saddle, and Aela stands in the stable door, arms crossed, face starkly furious.

"So help me," Etain snarls, reigning up sharply. "I will ride you down."

"No you won't."

"Try me. Now is not the time, Aela. Move."

"No." The taller woman lifts her chin. "We're going hunting tonight," she spits, and if there is an odd tilt to the word, an odd cadence, Etain can't quite catch it. "Hunting, properly, you're going with – Farkas –" A tilt, a cadence, an edge that is feral and almost dragon-like in its rawness, predatory – "You can't run off!"

"Watch me." Shadowmere rears, snorting, and Etain can barely keep her seat but Aela, damn her, does not flinch and does not move. That's what it takes to make her spit. "They killed Astrid! They – the fucking Legion, somebody, they killed her! She's dead! A-and now they're marching – S-Sithis – they know, they're marching, a-and I think everybody got out to Dawnstar but –"

And if any of this is confusing to Aela she doesn't show it, damn her, damn her and that slash of clawmark paint that makes Etain's blind eye sting and burn whenever she looks at it, damn that set of her jaw and the cant of her shoulders and damn, damn her –

"- But I have to make sure! I have to be there. And I have to kill them!"

"You," Aela snaps, winter-cold, "against an entire Legion patrol. I don't care what you are, you'll be butchered like a pig. Why."

"Because they killed Astrid! And I have to kill them!"

"You will die."

Etain gives a little laugh. Her hands are so tight on the reins that her nails are digging into the skin, she can smell the blood, it makes her laugh. "I don't care!"

Aela snarls.

She snarls.

She snarls and Shadowmere is bucking and Etain is falling, falling, hits the hay-strewn dirt with a yell and scrabbles out of the way as the horse backs away from the door, head down, red eyes wild with fear at the –

Wolf –

Dark, long-limbed, clawed, body hunched and weight on only two of its limbs as it snarls at Shadowmere and backs him into his stall, as it turns to look at Etain and she can see the faded slash of a three-claw mark in a pattern of darker fur on its muzzle.

The wolf stares at her a moment, panting, and then it is Aela, it is Aela standing there as normal Aela with her normal rough-cut armor and the normal cant of her shoulders that Etain loves and hates, normal lines of blue-green paint across her face, her hands up in a gesture of calm, a gesture of peace.

Etain backs away on her hands until she hits the wall of the stable, Shadowmere snuffling in fear on the other side.

"It's okay," Aela murmurs. "It's me." Her lips tighten. "That wasn't how I wanted to tell you."

"You – you're a –"

"Yes."

The silence grows large and loud enough to swallow them whole, fur and all.

"They killed Astrid," says Etain at last. Her voice is quiet and carries an edge that is growing more and more familiar, the edge of words that aren't meant to come from a mortal throat. "And I need to kill them. I need to."

"You mentioned Sithis."

She lifts her chin. "I need to."

"Want to?"

"Need."

Aela studies her and then steps up and holds out a hand, and Etain – no hesitation, because if this is death then this is death – takes it and lets the woman pull her to her feet. Watches as she lets her go and puts her hands up again. Calm. Peace. They eye each other across a distance that seems so much longer than an arm's length apart.

"So," says Aela at last, crossing her arms, "Who's this Astrid?"

"My boss. My friend." Etain rubs a hand over her mouth. Turns to look at Aela with her bad eye – it's not quite looking away, but she's not looking at her, which is the important part. "More than a friend, if she wasn't…yeah."

Not interested.

Dead.

Married.

There's a cringe there, and a too-late spike of jealousy. She thinks of Arnbjorn. Thinks of the wolf-smell that always hangs around Arnbjorn, that same haze of blood and musk and leaf and wet dog that permeates all of Jorrvaskr, the smell of Aela, and she wonders how she didn't notice before.

There are so many things that she didn't notice.

Aela seems to be thinking the same, because she's quiet, because Etain glances back over just enough to see her eyes flicker. Sizing her up, almost. Predatory and yet very much not. And the cant of her shoulders and hips is somehow bolder, different. "So…"

"Yeah."

A nod and a flicker of a smile. "Where are you in such a hurry to ride to?"

"…Falkreath." More or less.

"No. You can't get there in a day." Etain starts to protest, and Aela shakes her head, cuts her off. "You can't." A sigh, and she holds out her hand, again, and Etain takes it, again – it is a hand, not a clawed paw, callused on the fingers and knuckles from archery and knife-work, warm and dry and very much a hand, and the other woman's grip is as firm and quietly commanding as ever. "Come with me."

That night she does not seek vengeance, and she does not die.

That night she tells Aela about Astrid, and about her work. About Helgen and looking up to see death in the sky. About the raw terror of running from the corpse of the dragon at the Whiterun tower, the instinctual nothat feels ridiculous, now, when the other Dragonborn has done so little and done so much wrong.

And she tells Aela about her scar and her blind left eye, the Imperial Legion raid on the last Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary high in the north of Cyrodiil, the Khajiiti Brother who'd been bought out and turned on her with blade and claw. The healer who'd found her had given her two options. Magic and peace, and darkness, and an empty crumpled lid; or pain that left her seeing shadows and staring white.

"Of course you chose pain," Aela chuckles, running a fingertip over the puckered skin underneath, the ragged pits on her face from her Brother's claws. The rasp of her drakeskin glove is rough against her face but underneath it is the hand, the warmth, human and Aela and very much here.

"Of course," she agrees. "I survived."

The huntress dips her fingers in a pot of red paint and traces the lines on Etain's cheek, the ragged tears on half of her, the dragon and the beast snarling through for all to see.

That is the night she tastes her blood.

Unlike the last one the College had sent her to, this tomb in the mountains near Solitude is mercifully empty of dragons.

It is just draugr, draugr and more draugr, rattling bones and blue-bright undead eyes, the ancient Nord patterns on their armor destroyed under centuries' of dents and dust and rust. The one that Niamh is fighting wields a chipped old sword that is the very twin to the one over her mantle in Windhelm, all runes and jagged edges and old. He swings it high and she catches it on her flat and sweeps it away, punches the thing in the neck with a gauntleted fist that crackles with flame. The skull clatters to the stone floor, the body soon after.

It is the last of them.

The thought stays with her for only an instant because then there are more of them, maybe half a dozen streaming out of the battered stone doors toward her, and Marcurio shouts a warning. Niamh bakcs across the narrow tongue of a bridge over the steaming sulfur water until she is shoulder to shoulder with him, steel-and-bone armor flush against drape and robe. They have done this enough that they don't need to glance at each other, and so, they don't – they cast, her with one hand and him with both. The bridge crackles with lightning, burns with too-bright fire, roaring and hot and glorious, and five of the six draugr do not make it across the bridge.

She drops into a low guard against the one that does. It comes out of the flames swinging wild, heavy curved axe in his skeletal hands. The reach is no match against her own sword and so she steps back, winces, braces herself –

Shouts –

FORCE –

And the draugr is flung away from her, off the bridge and into the yellow steaming rush of the sulfur river, gargling at her through a fleshless jaw as it's swept down the tunnel and out of sight.

Niamh sheathes her sword, and Marcurio takes his fingers out of his ears and starts to applaud.

"Ass," she teases, trying to hide the way it wants to end in a gag, trying to ignore the raw ache in her throat. "It's not that loud."

"Yeah, it bloody is. Hurts my ears." Worry flashes across his face – light, but still there. "Hurts your throat too, you said."

"It's getting better."

That is a lie, but he lets it slide. She does not look at him. Thinks of her long talks with Arngeir that set her coughing blood as she shouted at the wind over and over again and he watched with concern in his eyes, of his longer talks with the rest of the Greybeards where she listened at the closed door and heard them speak a language that she was supposed to understand and yet, impossibly, couldn't. Finite, they said, and mortal. Too much, flesh, soul, consume. Time. Words that had made her shrink on tiptoe from the door and stare at her ceiling that night, sleepless. Made her find a shrine to Akatosh in the morning and get on her knees, prayers turning to insults as she cursed the Divine for giving her a Voice that her body couldn't bear to use.

But those were the kind of thoughts that had made her run all the way to Winterhold to hide, and Niamh pushes them out of her mind.

She hop-skips across the bridge, over the pitted and blackened shards of smoking draugr bone, and Marcurio follows. There is a Word Wall here, somewhere. She can tell. Feel the dragon in her blood, under her skin, on her lips. If she is not careful she will begin speaking in a language that will break the ceiling above them like an egg.

They search.

And they search.

"You sure about this?" Marcurio asks, after a few minutes of poking for secret panels, peering at stones. "I mean, maybe there's just a dragon waiting outside. Messing with you. Could be."

"I'm sure," Niamh murmurs. It's another lie. She is not sure, not really, less sure than she's ever been, and minutes go by with nothing more until she's almost ready to – ah.

She looks up.

It is on the ceiling, clever thing. Clean long lines and precise little twists and dabs of claw marks, cuneiform, cut deep into the rock. A language that the academic in her loves and the rest of her loathes, because she can read it and because she can't, because it lives under her skin and writes her into songs. Writes her into legend. Out of time.

She reads.

It is hard, this time. It is like reading a language long-dead, as if she's never used it herself or heard it shouted at her with flame and claw and scale, as if she's hearing it through the rush of sand in an hourglass. But –

She can read, and the word is hers, and Marcurio is there to catch her when she sways and looks away. And that is enough. That will have to be enough.

They do one last check of the tomb for survivors and then they settle by the sulfur water. He strips her armor off of her and piles it by the bank, and they sit in the stinking fumes, grateful for the warmth after hours of chilled stone and bone.

"I like this part," she murmurs, turning a chip of runed tablet over and over (she will take it back to Winterhold to be translated, sometime after the end of the world is over). "The tombs. The temples. Discovering things. I even like the dragons, sometimes. They're…"

"Terrifying?"

"Interesting," she laughs, elbowing him in the ribs. Trying not to think of Helgen and the raw terror of hearing the air around catch fire, of running with bound hands away from that horrible shape of destiny and wings. "But yeah. That too." And she bites her lip, looks away. Looks up at the words that are so strange to read. "I just don't like the – the politics of it. You know. Tullius is trying to turn me into a bloody symbol, and I'm not..."

"You're Dragonborn, dear. Soul-too-awesome-for-your-body and all that. I think it comes with the package."

Niamh closes her eyes. But she can still see those words on the ceiling, the claw-marks from long ago, black upon the grey. "Sometimes I don't believe it."

Aela watches her work.

The man is hiding nothing. That much is clear. Etain is standing over him in leathers black as night, as Sithis Himself, black cloth pulled tight over her face and hood shrouding low, staring at him with fury in one eye and blank judgment in the other. There are blades in her hands and blades laid out in a circle at her feet, some clean, some not. Blood dots the grass, some of it his, most of it not, and a werewolf crouches in the corner, the flesh from one of his comrades caught between her jaws, and she does not take her eyes off him.

Etain is surprised that it took this long to start him screaming.

"What did you find?" she asks, for the fifth or fiftieth time, "what did you find in the Brotherhood Sanctuary?" She knife slides across, slides down, just under his skin. Peels a strip away. It is a tiny blade and the strip is no wider than the width of her smallest finger, and his scream hangs electric on the air like the scent of a storm.

"Nothing," he shrieks, voice high and pitching higher. "Divines, I swear, nothing -!"

He is hiding nothing and he knows nothing. She doubts he was even there when the Legion raided the old Sanctuary (and found it empty, of course, evacuated, books destroyed, Night Mother spirited away, nothing for this unlucky man to find and even less for him to confess). He knows nothing. But this is its own perfect and personal kind of vengeance.

She asks again. Again. By the end she stops, drops the charade of exchange and simply takes – skin, nails, the symmetry of his face. His eye, carved out with the curving tip of a knife that she has always wanted to use for this purpose, perfectly shaped to slip just inside the socket of bone.

It is his left eye, of course.

It is that kind of vengeance, too.

By the time Etain takes his life he has forgotten words, and her hands are slick with blood. She dries them on his cloak. Hears footsteps behind her, two instead of four, and turns to see Aela returned to herself again – the woman gives the wet patch of ground a careful berth as she approaches, and the light in her eyes is difficult to read. Approval, perhaps. Or disapproval. They are, in the end, so similar.

"I take it back," she says, a light and half-forced laugh in her voice. The blood in the air is making her smile, sharp, and Etain can see that she's not quite comfortable with that. Not in this skin, certainly not like this. "I've seen you savage. I never thought I'd see you cruel."

"You've seen me savage?" Etain chuckles. She catches the woman's hands in her own and drops a kiss to her knuckles. "When?"

It is a dare, and she takes it as such.

They run through the night as wolves, lean and dark and silver-lit under the moons, loping along the riverside in the first dustings of Frostfall snow. They chase each other over hills and through forests, howling, and when they descend (by chance, by happenstance, by want and need) upon a camp of hapless humans it is neither cruelty nor vengeance, not of any sort. It is hunt and savagery and survival. Predation.

It simply is.

"I hear them talking," says Aela, as they lie in the ruined camp in human skins and watch dawn break over the trees. "They're saying someone like you can't be Dragonborn. Not someone slinking and quiet like you. Not proper Dragonborn." She grins. It's red. "It's like when I thought you couldn't be a Companion. I don't think I believe them."

Etain stretches out on her back. Part of her is searching the fading night sky for familiar constellations. Part of her, scarred and lean and wolfish, is searching the familiar constellations for the shadows of wings. Searching, always.

"I don't think I believe them either," she laughs.

It tastes like a challenge.