Ustengrav was in the northern
reaches of Skyrim, somewhere between the holds of Morthal and Dawnstar. Merill
stopped briefly in Morthal for a quick meal, but the village was quiet and sad
in its snowy marshes, and she did not linger long. In some places, a break in
the trees would give way to the wide stretch of icy water that was the Karth
River, dominated by the great cliff on which the great city of Solitude
sprawled. She paused once or twice to stare up at the palace’s rounded arches,
the wolfs-head flags that fluttered from its walls before she pushed onward.
Old Nordic barrows dotted Skyrim’s
landscape, ancient burial grounds for long-dead heroes. The barrows were once
guarded fiercely and reserved for only warriors of the finest tier, but that
tradition had long since died, leaving them stripped bare by graverobbers to
become lairs for necromancers and bandit clans. There had been one such crypt
an hour’s walk from their cabin, and Merill and Nalimir used to hover around
the stone doorway, daring one another to go in. When Merill finally decided to
brave the crypt, they found the ancient door sealed fast and ran giggling away,
shrieking at the idea of spirits clawing at their heels.
Ustengrav was just on the edge of
the marshes, a wide circular hole in the ground. Two bandits had set up camp
outside it, cloaks draped over their shoulders to ward off the chilly, damp fog
of the marshes. It was nearing evening when Merill arrived, and the mist had
begun to settle over snow-brushed mud, coupled with the gnarled, leafless
trees, tall brown grasses, and flickering green torchbugs that were staple to
Skyrim’s marshes. Brelin used to tell them stories about the marshes, strange
and quiet and full of mysteries – it was said that Will o’ the Wisps lurked
among the icy bogs, luring travelers deep into the frozen mud and letting them
die there.
Merill crouched low in the grass,
silently drawing an arrow from her quiver. The stacks of broken-open chests and
a dead horse beside a nearby cart revealed the campers as bandits, likely set
there to guard Ustengrav’s entrance. Merill had to wonder if this horn Arngeir
had sent her for had been long-pillaged. She nocked the arrow, hooked her
fingers around the bowstring, and inhaled sharply as she drew it back, aiming
for the first bandit’s head.
Merill let out a breath and inhaled
again, angling the arrow right just slightly, and released it. The arrow spun
silently through the air and struck the back of the bandit’s head. He crumpled
off his seat without even a sound, and his companion stumbled up, drawing his
blade and staring around. Merill swiftly drew another arrow and put it through
his chest, sending him sprawling to the mud as well. She glanced around to be
sure there were no more bandits guarding the tomb and ventured to their
campsite, taking whatever she could find that was useful and pulling her arrows
from their bodies before descending into the pit that marked the entrance to
Ustengrav.
A cloud of dust sprang up as Merill
shoved the door open. She found herself in a low-ceilinged tunnel lit by sputtering
oil torches. The floor was strewn with rubbish and broken bits of pottery, and
faded carvings spanned the length of the dirty walls. A dead bandit lay
facedown just inside the door, dark stains marring the stonework around him and
a festering sword-wound in his back. Merill had dealt with her share of dead
animals, and she had a feeling that the smell from the body should have been
much stronger. But it was cold in the tunnel, unnaturally so, and she proceeded
without pausing to loot it. What the hell
am I doing here?
The crypt seemed to be mostly
cramped tunnels littered with yellow bones and pottery shards connecting larger
chambers filled with stone coffins and carved with timeworn depictions of
battles fought and won. A group of necromancers had apparently taken up
residence in the tombs, explaining the torches that should have been long cold.
Merill managed to shoot down most of them from the shadows, sending them
crumpling to the stonework before they had a chance to summon a ward.
At some point in her ventures
through the dark crypts, Merill shot down a silhouette that seemed to fall
rather…unnaturally. When she crept out from the dark for closer inspection,
Merill realized that it had not been a necromancer at all, but rather a
humanoid shape, an emaciated undead with burning blue eyes, half-rotted armour,
and white hair that hung in patches off the sagging skin of its scalp. Merill
turned the creature over with her boot, reasoning that it must be a draugr, the
living corpses of Nords set to guard their burial sites until the end of time.
She pulled her arrow from the creature’s head, a shiver racing up her spine.
She did not like being here. It felt wrong, somehow, a desecration to her
ancestors. Whoever they were.
As she descended deeper into
Ustengrav, the air grew colder, the necromancers fewer, and the draugr greater.
She was able to take down a number of them with a single shot, but others gave
her trouble, immediately sensing where she was despite her best efforts to stay
hidden and charging toward her, forcing her to stumble backward rapidly loosing
arrows until they fell.
She began to lose all sense of time
in the freezing tombs, focusing only on getting past the fierce draugr that
guarded the way. Her fingers began to cramp with the cold, and forcing her to
breathe heavily on them between shots to try and warm them. Brelin had once
bought her a fine pair of thin leather shooting gloves for New Life, but she
imagined those had burned in the cabin with all her other things.
At some point, Merill pushed open
another door and found herself on a great precipice over an enormous cavern,
great gaps in its ceiling filtering down weak beams of moonlight. Snow fell
gently through, melting as it touched the mossy floor of the cavern where
evergreens stretched high along an underwater lake throwing up steam from the
hiss of a great waterfall. The cavern was crisscrossed with bridges of stone
and rotting wood, and Merill could see some sort of narrowly-curving wall on
the cavern’s floor, thick with carvings and of a different stone than the walls
around it. Anxious to investigate the wall, she decided the path was too long
and dropped down beneath the precipice, carefully navigating the heavy stones
as she made her way down to the cavern’s floor.
Merill’s boot touched moss and she
hopped down, slinging her bow over her back and lowering her hood to stare up
in wonder at the sights around her. The pool must have been a hot spring, for
it was far warmer here and a gentle, calming mist had settled over the ground.
She walked slowly through the glade, staring up at the breaks in rockwork above
where a tiny sliver of Masser, the great older moon, was visible through the
clouds.
As Merill drew closer to the wall,
she realized the carvings upon it were words in the dragon-tongue. She
approached slowly, almost reverently, and as she did so, she saw some of the
letters begin to burn with the same bright fire she had seen on the floor of
High Hrothgar and on Farengar’s tablet. All else began to darken save the words
shining on the wall, and a great wind filled her ears. Merill drew closer to
the wall and knelt, resting one hand against the burning carving. The stone was
warm to the touch, comforting, and Merill felt her head spin slightly as the
glow faded and the rest of the chamber became bright again.
She knelt before the word-wall for
some time, feeling safe and content there, and, after a while, drew out
Farengar’s tattered dictionary, sitting back to see all the words on the wall.
Noble
Nords remember these words of the hoar father – it is duty of each man to live
with courage and honour lest he fade forgotten into darkness.
“Fade,” she muttered, staring at
the words that had burned out at her. “Feim.” Merill rose to her feet, tucking
the book away, and turned from the word-wall, closing her eyes and letting Feim rise in the pit of her stomach,
course through her blood, push up through her chest and her throat till it
rested on her tongue.
“FEIM!”
At once Merill felt a change in
herself, a sort of ripple that went through her body. She peered down at her
hands and realized she could see the mossy ground through them. Something in
her mind told her that no harm would come to her in this state.
The Shout did not last long,
though, and she glimmered back into existence a short while later. Remembering
her task at hand, Merill reluctantly left the warm, comforting floor of the
cavern and its silence behind as she climbed back up to explore Ustengrav’s
depths further.
The cliffs around the great cavern
were almost entirely populated by draugr guardians. Merill moved through them
smoothly, managing to take them down before they could do her much harm. A
number of traps and fire-pots dotted the area as well, making Merill thankful
for the days when Brelin had trained her to watch for poacher’s traps hidden in
the snow. The fire-pots hanging above pools of oil she found particularly
useful, as a single arrow directed at the rope binding the pots to the ceiling would
send them crashing down, engulfing the unfortunate draugr below in flame.
It seemed like some time before
Merill finally reached a grand door she assumed led to the final chamber of the
crypt. She shoved the heavy doors open, sending down a spray of dust and pebbles.
Merill stepped into the dark hall, staring around with an arrow nocked and
ready. The tomb was built in a shallow pool of water, and the ripples sent
shimmering white reflections up onto the crumbling stone ceiling. A wide stone
walkway cut through the water, leading to a round platform at the end of the
chamber where Merill could see candles flickering over a great stone coffin.
She lowered her bow and replaced
the arrow, sensing no harm in this area, and started across the walkway. As she
moved, four great dragon-headed pillars rose from the water, shaking down more
dust from the ceiling. The dragon heads seemed to stare down at her as they
rose, water pouring off their curved snouts and into the pool. Merill reached
the great coffin and returned her bow to her back, leaning down to read the
inscription in the flickering candlelight. She blew dust from the etchings and
leaned closer, slightly surprised that it was written in Daedric script rather
than the dragon-tongue.
The four corners of the tomb were
guarded by stone dragon-heads, and the centre of the stone rose up to form a
claw-like hand, cupped as if to hold a horn. The hand, though, held only a
grubby roll of paper. Puzzled, Merill checked the floor around the coffin and
found nothing but a few more burial urns and scraps of cloth. She glanced
around the chamber uncertainly, then pulled the bit of paper from the stone
hand’s grasp and unrolled it, holding it up to a candle to see.
Dragonborn
–
I
need to speak to you. Urgently.
Rent
the attic room at the Sleeping Giant Inn in Riverwood and I’ll meet you.
-A
friend
Merill crumpled the letter in one
hand, glaring around the dark chamber. So someone was keeping tabs on her.
Having her followed. Merill held the note over a candle flame, letting it flare
up and burn to ash. She had thought she was more careful, quicker to catch on
when she was being watched. But someone had evaded her gaze, been following
what she was doing even at the peak of the Throat of the World.
Merill kicked a shard of pottery
into the water, letting out a frustrated snarl. All she wanted were answers, an
explanation, any hint about why this was happening, and why to her. I never asked for this, she thought
sourly, finding a door at the back of the chamber that led her back out into
the dark marshes of Hjallmarch. She stared south to where she knew the Throat
of the World loomed over all Skyrim, thinking of Arngeir standing on the
southern cliff with her, his hand on her shoulder for one brief sliver of a
moment.
…or
you can forge your own path, use your Thu’um to help us understand why the
dragons are returning and help to stop it, if need be.
With the echo of the old monk’s
words reverberating in her mind, Merill turned her steps south again and left
the silent marshes behind.
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