17.12.25 | clearing out my wip folder with yet another edition of skyrim dudes in profile: this time i'm trying to give some greater variety to lost grandad club the greybeards.
since we can only speak with arngeir, the others do feel a little flat so i've tried to give them some individuality. i wanted to see the guys who raised ulfric, at least in part.
it took me a couple of tries to find a version of borri that i liked and i ended up tearing through the page so i had to draw the final version all squished up in front of einarth and so it looks like einarth is just glaring daggers into the back of borri's head 😆 and they can't talk without using the thu'um so they're just thinking those things at each other really hard.
(i headcanon that they'd develop some kind of sign language to communicate mundane things to one another but you can't do that when one guy is facing the other way)
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"You are an exception to our order's every stricture, Dragonborn," says Arngeir in farewell, handing her his own stout walking-stick. "Your power, your Voice, is a gift from the gods. So long as you use it in service to their purposes, you cannot stray from the Way."
His pupil of two months shoulders her traveling-pack. She's young, Arngeir thinks, watching her straighten beneath its weight: not so young as his last student, who had come to him in childhood with three wolfskins on his back, but new. Untried. She looks at him with a strange, belligerent eagerness, her face a sun half-eclipsed.
"How should I know," she says, her smile like the shimmer on the snow, "how the gods wish me to use my Voice?"
"For tutelage in the Way, you climbed this mountain." Arngeir does not smile back. "For the answer to that question, you must climb down again."
The Dragonborn, accustomed to such answers, makes a rueful face. She kneels to him in the way of her far folk, her knees crunching in the snow—then springs up to kiss his cheek, heedless of her burdens, in a way that is only her own.
"I'll return with Jurgen's horn," she promises, then grins. "And more parsnips for Borri's stew."
Breath and focus, Arngeir reminds himself, and does not grimace. "No more parsnips."
"Ripe cloudberries!"
"They'll be more than ripe," says Arngeir, "by the time you bring them back—"
"Honey, sadonvum," says the Dragonborn, walking backwards, "for your tea!"
Her housecarl, dressed for travel and waiting with dogged patience at path's edge, catches her before she can fall down the Seven Thousand Steps. At the sound of the Dragonborn's laugh, the wind that knifes through High Hrothgar stills, then swirls up the snow of the forecourt in a delighted dance.
Not even then does Arngeir smile. He watches his pupil of two months, not long enough to learn a single tenet of the Way, start down the mountain—a tempest of his tutelage, like the one who had shattered Markarth with his thu'um.
Behind him, the door of his monastery scrapes. Someone tugs his sleeve: Borri, who has always, since they were boys, walked through snow with a hart's silent tread.
I do not think that one, he signs with ancient hands, will Shout High Kings apart.
"No," Arngeir agrees, his troubled eyes lingering on the Steps. "No. But what will she do?"
* * *
The Dragonborn does a cartwheel in the first open field she meets, or tries to; her pack overbalances her, and she flops into the heather with a whoop.
"The sun!" she says in greeting, and basks in the warm grass. A vole dashes across her hand. She beams at it, half-drunk on freedom and the sweet lowland air, and hails it in the tongue of voles and dragons: "Lok vah, malfahdon!"
Lydia prods her with a foot. "My Thane, we have leagues to travel today—"
The Dragonborn grins and yanks her legs out from under her. The wrestling-match that ensues is brief and unheroic: they crash through the heather, startling a family of grouse, and then Lydia is sitting on the Dragonborn's chest.
"Don't be cross," she laughs, seeing the look on her housecarl's face. "Aren't you glad to be gone from that mountain?"
"Yes, my Thane," says Lydia with utmost patience, breathing hard, "but—"
"No more parsnips!"
Lydia's stubborn scowl wobbles.
"No more parsnips," she concedes, and ducks her head to hide a smile.
Her hair tickles the Dragonborn's nose. Something tugs in her chest, as though a lock of it has snarled around her heart.
"Look," she says, smiling. "Everything listens, down here. Not like those lazy mountain stones." She stretches her arm across the sunlit grass, cupping her hand in invitation. "Malfahdon!"
The heather rustles. The grass parts. The vole, quivering with terror or joy, crawls obligingly into her palm.
[send me a number, and i'll write a microfic using the word or phrase!]
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Master Arngeir, having to deal with the Imperials, Stormcloaks, Thalmor, and Blades inside High Hrothgar: Sorry, everyone, I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: They choose the wisest person present to speak to.
