#nikulas

Frea gripped the haft of the Dragonborn’s hammer, scanning the shadows. “Show yourself,” she said, then, in halting Dunmeris, “I am no enemy.”

“Nor am I yours.” Their voice was impossible to gender, ash-warrior deep but with a rising lilt, and their words were so heavily accented with the salt of Morrowind that Frea struggled to pick them out.  Their figure, when they crept into the faint light, was equally illusive; swathed in ragged robes, they could have been any dirty pilgrim, any ash-strewn refugee. A gleam, a whisper of their crimson eyes darkly glittering among cheeks of purest purple twilight peeked from beneath their hood. Streaked with sooty lines, neat and swirling, leaping and darting in the uneven light, their face wreathed in tattoos was a hearth of black flames. Monstrous and divine, their inkwreathed features had her on the back foot, old Skaal ghostrites rising like undead in her mind. “For now.”

“You were at the gate, with the coins,” Frea realised aloud, “You followed us!”

“You,” the Dunmer corrected. Their hips shifted, and Frea was suddenly, alarmingly certain that the cunning tilt of their hand concealed a drawn knife. The nearby brazier cast a ruddy gleam over their forge-fire eyes. No matter how many times she saw the lowland elves, their uncanny red eyes and bruised skin put her in mind of nightmares, of demons from her father’s stories, skulking wild-eyed and violet-lipped round the Skaal camp and stealing away the unwary to the bowels of their deathless tombs. This one was a finer example than most. “You’ve been asking questions.”

“I have,” said Frea, warily, keeping the hammer steady. She kept her eyes on the Dunmer’s hips and feet, watching for any minute shift of weight that might signal an attack. They stood lightly in the shadows, forward on their toes, like a well-trained fighter. “Do you have answers for me, stranger?”

“Ask,” said the Dunmer, their ink-worked brows flat, “and we shall see.”

“I seek knowledge of Miraak.” The Dunmer’s face remained perfectly still, not a twitch, not a breath to portray recognition. Too still. “You know something! You must tell me!”

“With a weapon like that, I’m sure you can say more than I.” The Dunmer’s ruby eyes lingered on Frea’s white-knuckled grip around the hammer's haft, then flicked back up to her face. In a tone so carefully neutral it could only be a trap, they added, “Wherever did you come by it?”

“It was a gift,” Frea said.

“A gift,” the Dunmer repeated. They tilted their head, the patterns on their cheeks abruptly reminiscent of tears. Their lips, however, smiled, flat and cold as unforged stahlrim. “Your …friend… was generous.”

“Tell me what you know of the Traitor,” Frea pressed, losing patience. She hefted the hammer, its creaking weight surging up into her ready position, the enchantments worked along it tingling into her nailbeds, craving to be used, to be wetted with blood.

The Dunmer flinched, true fear flickering over their laconic face. Blades flashed, quick as cutclaw moons, poised to rend the air. A tense breath caught behind their tongue, they hissed, as if with great difficulty, “I do not wish to fight. You have the better of me, warrior.”

Their teeth gritted audibly as they lowered their blades.

Frea did not lower Laataazin’s warhammer, no, not when it was working. Instead, she took a heavy step forward, chasing the Dunmer against the wall, and raised the blunt, brutal head until she could see the silvery metal reflecting in the Dunmer’s wide, frightened red eyes, like a blooded knife.

“Then speak,” Frea growled. She heard herself as if from far away, felt in some distant place appalled at her own behaviour, but the greater part of her clamoured with rage, boiled over with hatred for that cursed name and the grief he had caused.

The Dunmer licked their dry lips, turning their cheek from Frea’s display. They said cryptically, “I know dragons have come again to the ashlands.”

“You have seen them too?” She couldn’t help but step closer, almost crowding them, feeling answers so close she could taste it. Their hands came up as if to ward her away. Their nails were lacquered a royal purple, the colour of poison.

“They roam far over Solstheim’s skies!” said the Dunmer, eyes on Laataazin’s hammer. “Of old, I know this: Miraak was served by three great dragons, and three I have seen.”

“Where?” Frea demanded. “At the temple? Elsewhere?”

The Dunmer seized the advantage of her distraction to slip under her arm and away, quick as a fox. Frea spun, but the Dunmer was shaking their head, stepping back into the shadows. “Old tombs sleep lightly,” they warned, melting into the darkness, “the dead will have their vengeance, warrior.”

“What do you mean?” Frea demanded, but as she took two steps forward she found on the wall. She circled round with a curse, searching for a hint of ruby red, but there was nothing. She was alone, the Dunmer gone as if they had never existed. She kicked a stone, ineffectually, her anger dying a sullen and chill death.

Ash in her throat, Frea swung the hammer into its strap on her back, placing a hand on the splintered wood of a nearby house for support.

“I’m sorry,” she said to the empty shadows. “I wouldn’t have hurt you, I just need to know.”

---

After her run in with the mysterious Dunmer, Frea wandered Raven Rock, sticking to the pools of firelit torches. The afternoon was deepening, bruises fleeing across the sky like the heel of a godly hand pushing slowly into the horizon until the sun sunk under its weight. She spoke to what few she could find on the streets, but few stopped to look her in the eye, and none answered her questions. The name Miraak brought nothing but glazed eyes and mild confusion, the occasional comment about dragons, Dragonborns, and the banes of living in interesting times. One young woman, rosy of cheek with lips of fresh lavender, caught Frea’s hand and pressed it to her breast, and in a soft voice entreated her to be careful beyond the walls, for all the mountain-people had been taken over as dead, and walked as ash-men now.

Frea had thanked her and left, not in the mood to correct her with her skin tingling from the softness of the other woman’s hand, and her heart sore from the fear she had placed in the mysterious Dunmer’s eyes. It was then with exhausted hope and stumbling feet that Frea overshot the tavern and made her way instead into the temple.

She had not meant to come in, and hesitated at once in the doorway when she smelled the richness of the burning incense the Dunmeri used in their rites. It was smoky and pungent, full-bodied as myrrh. The walls gleamed with the chitinous pearl of classic Dunmeri architecture, smooth as a babe’s skin and lit with thousands of small candles floating in liberal pools of wax. They were smokeless, but Frea’s eyes itched from the heat, the incense, the multitude of worked-soft orange tapestries threaded with Daedric symbols. She recognised the language by dint of its dissimilarity to her own; where Skaal-tongue was, though infrequently written, harsh, spiking lines made for ease of chiselling, closely mimicking the dragon-tongue carved in the rockfaces of their old settlements, Daedric flowed and oozed, curved and coiled, demanded the luxuries of brush and thread to shape.

The soft call of the priest embarrassed her as she thought to flee, and instead Frea brushed aside the beaded curtain, already sweating in the heat of the numerous fires. It was bright enough to almost have her wish for her snow-goggles. There was a presence within the temple, watchful and cold, that preyed upon her awareness like a frost snap foretold by closing flowerbuds. This is not for you, it said, and Frea could not help but agree.

“Welcome to the temple of the Reclamations,” said the priest, warmly. He turned from where he knelt immersed up to the elbow in the hearth, and when he caught sight of her, he blinked a little. “Oh, hello – Skaal.”

“Aye,” she said, an answer to his non-question, and the priest raised a brow. It was peppered with grey, unusual enough for one of the ageless elves. His hair was all steel, and his face had a creased quality to it, like twine too kinked from years of use to ever lie straight.

“We don’t worship your All-Maker here, Skaal,” he said, “I must ask you take those practices outside. The shrines of the True Three have been profaned enough by the false prophets.”

“I did not come here for worship,” Frea said. Something of her annoyance, her discomfort with the many presences within Raven Rock, must have crept into her voice, because he gave her a look. Deflated, Frea worried at the string that held her gloves to her belt, the rough knots lumpen and familiar under her touch.  “I came for – information.”

“Information?” the priest stopped his communing with the fire, and rose to face her. He flicked his fire-stained fingertips like Frea would with water, scattering sparks that glowed cherry-red on the smooth floor for half a heartbeat, like tiny stars. “What lore does a Skaal shaman-in-training need of a temple Dunmer?”

“You know I’m a shaman?” Self-consciously, Frea undid the toggles that held her fur hood to her neck and loosened it, grimacing as it peeled away wet with her sweat. She took a sip from her water-skin, the cool water a balm to her heat-muddled mind.

The priest fearlessly dipped his hand into the heart of the fire, rolling the embers around his knuckles. He said something in a strange dialect of Dunmeris she did not know, and then smiled at her confusion. It was a kind smile, grandfatherly, but Frea cast her eyes away, ashamed by her rudeness. She had come here to Raven Rock seeking information, yet been curt and cruel with its people, simply for not being Skaal, for not being her father. The priest’s patience felt undeserved.

“I know your father, if you are Frea of the Skaal. He described you to me many times. They call me here Othreloth the Elder.”

“Oh,” she said, absorbing this.

She had not known that Storn had kept contact with the daedra-worshipping temple priest of the lowland elves. No Skaal trafficked with daedra, knowing that Herma-Mora was always watching, waiting for a moment’s opening to trick their elders and steal their youths, with his liquid-eyed demons and their violet tongues. She wondered why her father had chosen to invite such scrutiny on himself after his dire warnings to her, so oft repeated it had given her nightmares. The temptation to ask pressed at the tip of her tongue.

Yet, she did not want to learn from Othreloth things about her father that she had not known, and there was no polite way to ask why Storn had excused the risk of consorting with daedra this elf revered. She should have learnt Storn’s reasons from him, if she ever would. But all Frea had now was memory of the lessons he had been able to give her, and the mysteries of men who had known parts of him she had not.

She spoke through a lump in her throat. “My father is dead.”

Othreloth’s hand stilled, his bony wrist licked by flame that would never burn him. A tired divot cut his forehead into a ripple of wrinkles, his depressed mouth downturned like wax melting from the base of a candle.

“I am… grieved to hear that,” he said, quietly but with a sincerity that made Frea immediately warm to him. “May your god keep him.”

“Aye,” said Frea. A stilted beat passed, lost to Frea’s vivid recollection of Storn’s grisly death between the pages of Herma-Mora’s cursed book. ‘I am Waking Dreams,’ it had whispered to her, as her father opened it, ‘do you ask the True Enquiry? Do you seek revelation, or puppetry, by forces beyond your ken?’ In horror, she had turned away, and so missed the first appearance of Herma-Mora. But the Prince’s sepulchral glee, the horrible sounds of his tentacles stabbing through her father’s body, the wet gurgle to his gasp – that, that was engraved upon Frea’s very soul.

 “I did not answer your question,” Frea said at last, shaking herself free with bitter determination. She was holding her mind-warding amulet when she came back to herself, and brought it to her lips to kiss its smooth surface.

“No,” said Othreloth, heavily.

“Tell me, what do you recall of Miraak?”

Othreloth’s spine stiffened, and his cherry-red eyes sparked. The fire behind him rippled with ominous pops and cracks, its lambent tongues fierce as the sudden doubling of the attentive presence Frea felt, lurking in the cracks of the temple like spiderwebs. Othreloth strode to the beaded curtain Frea had passed through and checked behind it, as if he feared the Traitor stood right there, waiting to pounce.

“He has not … returned?” Othreloth asked her, in a hurried whisper. “I do not know if Councilor Morvayn can deal with that as well…”

“I do not know,” said Frea, honestly. “Since my father’s death, I have sensed … strange passings in the world around us, and not days past I saw dragons roosting in the temple. We came to observe the Stones.” She hesitated, because as she spoke the priest looked more and more stricken. “Have you seen anyone enthralled by them?”

“No,” he said, relaxing a little at a question he could answer. “We have had no trouble at all, nor have I heard of any, since that Dragonborn came through. I believe that if any could stop that creature, it would be he. The gods would not let such a quest fail; a hundred and one incarnates rose to take the challenge, but there was only one Nerevarine, when the Sixth House swept plague across Morrowind... You are too young to remember, Skaal, but I know the god-touched when I stand in their presence, and I felt it when he came to our temple, to offer his sorrow for disturbing our ancestors.”

“I believe Laataazin was true,” said Frea. Hesitantly, she unstrapped the hammer and held it out, as if an offering, thinking of the mysterious Dunmer’s fear of it in Frea’s hands. “They gave me this, to protect my people, while they did battle against the Traitor.”

“An evil weapon,” said Othreloth, eyeing it with distaste. “But a noble cause.”

Frea was not unblooded, she had killed reavers and wildfolk before, but lodging an arrow into a coughing man’s throat or splitting a temple with her ice-axe was nothing like what Laataazin had done with this hammer, easily as breathing. Bodies simply shattered when Laataazin – when the Dragonborn – had fought to kill as they swept through Miraak’s temple, like the world reordered itself around their wake, unknitting bone and tearing muscle almost before they had a chance to. The cultists that lurked there had been dead from the moment Laataazin had stepped on Solstheim, but their awakening to that fact had been bloody and brutal.

Like a war machine, like the gods’ perfect instrument of death. Yes, Frea understood what Othreloth meant, when he called the Dragonborn god-touched.

Try as she might, Frea had never quite regained her youthful, careless confidence in battle after watching that. Then, she had thought that the worst potential conflict could offer was injury or death, and not the systematic dismantling of anything that did not hold the shape of suffering, and nightmares so rich it truly felt like she dream-walked to some other reality. Yet, Laataazin had fought on Frea’s side, for the sake of Frea’s people. She did not feel guilty about doing what she had to save them, about bringing Laataazin to the temple, it was her duty.

The hammer was supposed to be heavy. A reminder, that she would always do what she had to do to protect the Skaal, no matter the cost. But what was she protecting the Skaal from? Yes, there were mutterings at the Stones, but she had never purified them, never drawn Herma-Mora out of the network written under Solstheim he had perverted. Dragons flew, but they had flown before Miraak had risen. Laataazin had left no cultist they had seen alive, and none had been seen exiting the temple since by Skaal hunters and scouts. Frea could not believe so evil a creature as the Traitor would not seize the opportunity of Laataazin’s absence to cause havoc.

“I found someone, who said something about the dragons …” She trailed off, looking at the grooves carved into the metal, where blood would flow, the thirsty shimmer of the soul-fuelled enchantments, and wondered for the first time whether carrying the weapon that slew gods and dragons was affecting her. A renewed burst of shame at her threat of the mysterious Dunmer she had met in an alleyway, menacing them as if she meant to fight to kill closed her throat. She was a shaman, a Skaal, meant to live in harmony with the All-Maker, raising a blade only when called for. She wasn’t a godkiller. A shaman’s path was not that of a warrior’s.

“I do not know if I am looking simply to have an enemy to fight, or to be sure,” Frea confessed. “I cannot … I know my friend would not fail, after my father’s sacrifice.”

Othreloth approached her and laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. His other covered her grip on the haft, his soot-stained palms warm as sunbaked rocks. “The Skaal lost much, did they not?” he asked gently, and Frea nodded, expression tight. “Grief can make the wisest heart see signs that are not there, Frea of the Skaal.”

“I know what I have seen,” Frea began defensively, but he shook his head and gave her another one of those achingly kind smiles, as gentle and as unthreatening as thistledown.

“I do not doubt you,” he said. “Do I think it might not be what you do? Yes. These things take time.”

He supported her to lay the hammer down against the wall, and then took her hands as she rolled her shoulders back, marvelling at being free of its weight. Barely a day she had carried what the Dragonborn had, and her back ached. Othreloth met her eyes, and spoke earnestly, his accent strengthened in his passion.

“It took many years to disband the temple of the false prophets, even when the Nerevarine slew the false ones and drove off the Liar Poet in the wake of Baar Dau’s fall.” Othreloth squeezed her hands, then slowly rubbed her arms and shoulders. His clever fingers, lit with heat from the fire that burned in his elf heart, soothed pains she had not even noticed were there. Frea sighed, rolled her head to one side so he could reach her neck.

“This … Miraak, from what I know, was no small creature. Death leaves … echoes in its wake. Perhaps his spirit has not yet found his way to his new beginning. We live again in a time of legends, and the dead are restless, these days.”

“Aye,” said Frea, quietly. She turned her chin to permit him to reach the other side of her neck, to soothe it with the press of warmed knuckle to her muscle. Glancing over the many urns that lined the wall, squat pots of ashes with names Frea could not read written on them in spidery inks, Frea absently tried to count them and stopped when she numbered above ten-and-twenty.

“The dead wait to be interred,” said Othreloth, and she started. He had followed her gaze and offered her a smile hollowed by sorrow. “There are only two of us here at the temple, too few.”

“You have lost many,” Frea said, moved to grasp his shoulders as she would a Skaal who suffered, who needed comfort, the anchor of touch and companionship, and Othreloth nodded, his eyes grave. He did not push her away, but Frea released him quickly, his birdboned body raw with the deep internal heat of an ember an unutterably odd sensation when she felt only a thin layer of his robe covering his skin.

“And we will lose more to this curse,” he said, returning to stare into his fire. Gently as a lover, Othreloth slipped his hand into the embers and drew out a handful of white-hot coals, wreathed in fire up to his shoulder. It snapped in his eyes like a memory, like a final exhale, when he glanced over his shoulder to meet her eyes. “Raven Rock is troubled, Skaal. You would do well to not linger here, if you could.”

“Thank you for the warning,” Frea said, truthfully.

He held her gaze for a long, silent breath. “Come,” he said, at last. “Tell me the names of those you lost, and I will speak them to the fire.”

Grasping her amulet, Frea closed burning eyes. Othreloth did not push, but waited for her to master herself, his silence that of the crackling cookflame, earnest and life-giving, fending off the snows. Forcing space round the lump of coal in her squeezing throat, Frea whispered, “Miraak took from us much, Elder.”

“You know as well as I that it is a heavy burden we carry,” said Othreloth. “But we are no more free to refuse the care of the people than we are the call of faith. It is in times like these that we need our people around us, Skaal. The mer alone at his campfire cannot stand forever against the tiding of the dawn.”

“Aye,” said Frea. With a watery smile she sat at his side by the fire he lit to his gods, and spoke the stories of the dead Skaal.

---

Frea ended up being very late to meeting with Nikulas at the tavern, but with a lighter heart. Her time with the temple priest had softened the hard rind around her heart, and now her tears had flowed freely, she longed for little more than a flagon of cold ale and sleep. She hoped to find him quickly, though she knew that regardless they would be overnighting in Raven Rock, crammed beneath lowlander roofs that blocked the All-Maker’s chilly breath.

The tavern’s warm hit Frea like a blow, heating the tear trails on her face. She swiped them, sniffing, and looked around. The Retching Netch was dim and smoky, smelling strongly of spilled alcohol and sweat, and packed with patrons. More than a few were huddled together with a particular look of shellshock in their eyes, nursing one cup between a group and casting fearful glances towards the doors. The mood was equally raucous and sombre, unreal and over-vivid with the grim pall of penniless desperation.

 Frea’s nose wrinkled. It had been some time since she had last time to visit the tavern, and she could not say she had missed it. Laataazin had swaggered up to the bar and drank through half the night while Frea rolled herself in her too-hot furs and wished to be beneath the auroras, fallen into restless nightmares about knife-eared demons prowling the shadows of the village cookpit, taking the minds of her people one by one while she howled voicelessly at them to run.

Politely toeing off her boots at the door and leaving them on the rack provided, Frea mournfully glanced around and offered a silent prayer to the All-Maker that they would still be there when she returned. The house shoes provided were too small for her large feet, and pinched at her toes as she padded downstairs in search of her missing companion.

“Hail,” she said to the barman, who squinted at her with the bloodshot confusion of the overworked and under-sober.

“Welcome to the Retching Netch, sera,” he said, “I’m Geldis. What can I get you?”

“Ale,” said Frea, leaning against the counter despite her better wisdom. She glanced around vainly while Geldis rooted about under the countertop for an unopened bottle. “I’m looking for one of my people…”

“Ah, the northman lad?” Geldis interrupted. “Couple of copper, for the ale. Boy’s off in the back, with that conjurer who hired Teldryn. Say, what have your people have need of old Teldryn? Not his sword, I hope, if I had the coin I’d be all but tying him to the doorstop, with these deadwalkers about.”

“Thank you,” said Frea, squinting in the direction he pointed and spotting the fringe of Nikulas’ messily braided hair. “I’ll go find out.”

“Good luck to you, friend.”

She found him sequestered away with two strangers, his pale face gleaming with sweat in the candlelight. It was stoked to unbearable heat in the Netch, and Nikulas had ditched both his furs and his shirt, squatting next to a blushing elf in carefully pressed sunshine yellow robes. Another Dunmer, grizzled with tattoos on his cheek, sat against the wall, clad in full chitin armour with his helmet cocked over his thigh, grinning wryly around the rim of his sujamma as Nikulas flexed to the delight of his young new friend.

“Nikulas!” called Frea in her sternest voice, unable to stop her own smirk when the boy leapt out of his skin. “Who’re your friends?”

Red from his ears to his waist, Nikulas bolted to his feet and yelped out a greeting, so much the sheepish hunter caught fraternising instead of tracking that Frea could not help but laugh. He bore it with good humour, red-cheeked but smiling, and greeted her with a kiss on her cheek when she finally recovered her breath.

“Shaman Frea,” Nikulas waved between the four of them, “this is Talvas, he’s from a mushroom tower across the ashlands, and this is-“

“Teldryn Sero, best damn swordsman Morrowind’s ever seen,” the chitin-armoured Dunmer broke in, eyeing Frea foot to chin and offering her a lazy wink that had her own cheeks warming. She disguised it with a gulp of her ale, hurriedly looking away. Teldryn chuckled, a low, gravelly sound that made Frea’s gut twist into startled knots.

“All Maker’s blessings,” she said, pointedly to Talvas, whose pinked ears twitched, endearingly sheepish.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly, “I’ve – um. Hired Teldryn. Already, sorry. I’m not looking for more swords… unless,” this was said with a nervous look at Teldryn, “do you think we will need more?”

“Serjo, if you aren’t careful, I’ll start taking offence,” said Teldryn drily. He drank deep of his cup, his glittering eyes visible above alert as a hawk’s, laconic as a great cat’s.

“Right,” said Talvas, “Sorry, then.”

“We are not for hire,” Frea said, casting an amused glance at Nikulas, who flushed up red at her implication. She squatted next to him, shrugging off her top layer of furs and swinging Laataazin’s hammer against the wall. She pressed the ale to her forehead, savouring the cool glass against her flushed skin. “We are Skaal, passing through.”

“I told you that,” Nikulas muttered.

“Oh – I thought all the Skaal were…” Talvas stuttered, but Nikulas steamrolled over him.

“Frea, they’re going to investigate the walking dead spawn. Talvas here is from the other side of the island, right? Where the mushroom lord lives. I thought he would be worth – talking to.”

“… Master Neloth is a Telvanni wizard, not a mushroom lord,” Talvas corrected in a sulky undertone.

Teldryn abruptly took a gulp of sujamma and stared at the ceiling like a man trying very hard not to laugh. With his eyes crinkled up merrily at the corners, the high arches of his tattoos pulled high along the blade of his cheekbones, accentuating the shadow of his jaw. He had full lips, for an elf, just barely shaded by the dark crinkle of facial hair, presently slightly dampened by an errant drop from his drink.

Irritated with herself for noticing, Frea pulled herself together and sat forward on her heels. “Tell me, wizard. What of the Stones?”

“The Skaal Stones?” Talvas blinked. “Well, they’ve not been doing much. Whispering, mostly. But they’ve been rather annoying, obstructing my master’s attempts to triangulate…” He stopped, his hands flying to his mouth.

“Triangulate what?” Nikulas asked, oblivious to Talvas’ pallid cheeks and pinned-flat ears.

“Well, never mind that,” said Talvas, hurriedly, “Just – certain, nexi of…”

“Nothing?” Frea interrupted, stopping Talvas’ freewheeling panic. “There can’t be nothing. Did you not scry at the Stones…?”

“-Why,” said Talvas, indignantly, “what kind of wizards do you take us for, ignoring magical anomalies in our own backyard? The Telvanni have quite disavowed this Stones business as nothing more than fancy – a collective delusion…”

“-I care not for the mushroom lords,” said Frea, scowling at Teldryn when he lost the battle for composure and barked out a laugh, “tell me – have you had any dreams? Felt the presence of the enemy closer?”

“You can’t expect me to talk of all my master’s movements and research!” Talvas cried, “Why – you could be anyone, you could be Redoran spies, Master Neloth is quite firm, quite firm, on this point…!”

“I -!” Frea broke off, and inhaled slowly, reaching for the composure she had reached with Othreloth besides the fire, her resolution to be kinder. She smoothed her hands deliberately flat against her knees, and tried again.

“Forgive me,” she said, meeting Talvas’ eyes. “I am the shaman of the Skaal, it is my responsibility to watch for the movements of the Traitor Priest Miraak, who corrupted the Stones to cause the plague of dreamwalkers. Believe me, I have no interest in the power squabbles of your people, I wish only to save their lives from a threat they may not see coming. That it is why it is important that you must tell me if you have seen anything amiss. Have you heard anything at the Stones? Seen dragons – one with a lame leg?”

Talvas shook his head, and Frea sighed. In the silence that followed, Teldryn slurped his drink loudly, grinning when they both blinked at him.

“What a crowd,” he said. “To think, the mummers have me paying pennies.”

“The threat of the Traitor concerns you too!” Nikulas flared, and Frea closed her eyes and exhaled through her nose. She grabbed the back of his neck, the locks there unpleasantly damp against her palm.

“Nikulas,” she said. “My apologies, friends. This has been a trying time.”

“Yeah, and everyone keeps saying we’re dead,” said Nikulas heftily. He quelled when she shot him a look, and Frea removed her hand to steady herself against the grimy tavern floor as she drank deeply from her ale.

Watching this interaction with some bewilderment that Frea could not place, Talvas steepled his fingers carefully.  “I am sorry too. So – you haven’t been having trouble with the walking dead at all?”

“No,” said Frea, “We met an ash-spawn on the way down.” Nikulas shuddered illustratively. “Have you?”

“Some,” said Talvas. “Actually – we,” he gestured to Teldryn, “are going to go have a look at one of the old draugr nests. I have to … find something for my master.”

“Not that we aren’t glad to see you still kicking, Skaal,” said Teldryn, raising his cup as if to toast her. “But there’s a lot more barrows up north.”

Rocking back on her heels, Frea took in the tavern around them. Knots of skinny, tired people, even a few off-duty guards, drinking like they had no wish to remember the day, all packed in together. The urns along the temple wall, dozens of dead yet unburied, and Othreloth’s kindness. There were little walking dead along the high rise of the mountain passes where the Skaal hunted, yes, but Frea was a shaman of the All-Maker, and where his sun shone and his winds blew, she walked.

It might not be the Traitor she had set out looking for, but there was a problem here, and it would not be right to walk away.

She sucked her teeth regretfully, then sighed. “I will go with you to this tomb. I wish to see what is happening with the dead.”

“Teldryn has the rights to the loot, except what I need,” said Talvas, but she saw his eyes brighten at the idea.

“I don’t need payment,” said Frea. “And I have no interest in the tokens of the dead. My concerns are the living and the land.”

Teldryn’s ear flicked, but he made no protest when Talvas looked to him, seeking permission.

“Alright,” said Talvas. “Well… alright.” He slumped with relief, some deeply held anxiety uncoiling. “Come and be welcome then. The more the merrier, in a draugr tomb.”

His soul rampaged in his chest, howled at the confines of the thick earthen ropes of muscle that bound skin to skeleton, blood to bone, mind to matter. He wailed at the horrible, cruel inevitability of a creature of air and fire, frost and sky, beyond all fragments of soul made form, chained within the lugubrious hell of a mortal body. His soul had not been meant to be a man, and each step he took was shadowed with the terrible loss of what Akatosh had taken from him – his claws and teeth, his strong wings to bear him far away, his lashing tail and his serpent’s eye – all for the sake of fate.

But he was Miraak, mightier than any god’s plan for him, stronger than any restless ghost or dragon, and he mastered his own fate. And so he lay there, his dragon-borne heart pounding a war rhythm in his chest, and he ate Krosulhah’s soul.

In dreams, he was Krosulhah, and he was magnificent. He knew it, he breathed it, he lived it. He was the lord of secret sorcery, the subtle manipulation of the mind, and the harsh glaze of sun on autumn ice – deceiving in its solidity to the eye, treacherous beneath. Flight was a dream to him, he knew nothing of cages, the earth no more a prison than his immortal body understood the concept of nightmare.

Scents of warm-home-heart tickled his nose as he lazily chased a thermal in a rising arc. The kind gusts belled out his regal blue-white wings, until he stretched each wingtip and felt them cup each halfway around the world. Far below, the rugged tip of the new land of fahliil basked in the spring sun.

Fresh with melted ice, the Sotkol joore-nest was so dark and brazen against the fading snowheights of the strunmah Krosulhah had chosen that the rounded roof seemed smeared with ash, as if a firebellied Dov had saw fit to free its followers from another winter. Bossy Kruziikrel, come to flaunt its ruby foe-teeth, and boil Krosulhah’s cold waters with its fiery scales until the soothing seas itched too terribly to lie in, would do that if only to steal Krosulhah’s favourites away. But no rival had seen fit to poach from Krosulhah’s flock.

No, today was a good day, wrought in spring-sun warmth that scattered droplets of icewater along Krosulhah’s shimmering silver spine. His garlands of frost were melting, under the heat of this southern sun, and as his next lazy downbeat sprayed cold rain across the stubborn crags of the mountain, he marvelled.

To the bitter north, there was no season of spring, or of summer, ground away by the passage of time. Krosulhah, born from the heaving seas of the world’s birth, remembered the creation of all seasons, how winter shook itself in first snapping and snarling, and out of its corpse grew fresh shoots, game that was fun to chase, and the joore.

Futile, summer-bright things, with soft teeth and softer paws. Such quiet voices they had, that they needed whole packs to sing with the resonance of dragons. Friendly, fearful creatures, living like termites in the dense warrens of cave and tree, their small eyes glittering in their flat faces like tiny gemstones. They did not glow, like a dragon’s eyes did. Instead, a joor reflected the light that was around it, one of the qualities that had made them so perfect for their great purpose.

Atmora’s endless winter was no trouble for ice dragons who loved the snow, but – Krosulhah tucked his wings and fell like a spear hurled from the heavens towards the sea, and the waiting chasms of gnashing rocky teeth beneath the waves, guarding the labyrinthine seacaves snarling through the rugged map of this part of Keizaal – it was not dragons alone who loved the Dov.

Dukaan was waiting for him when he breached the black water, seafoam gilding the pure icicles that clung to his argent jaw, the mighty forking of his submarine frill crowned by an impressive thicket of ice and emblazoned with chill that made him glitter as if he were crusted with precious gems. The glow of his own eyes scattered moontossed beams around the smooth walls of the seacave, catching in the rigid lines of swirling decorations carved with clever joor paws until it seemed as if the whole rock wall was alight, alive, with the ripple of waves. Only joore could turn rock to water, with nothing but shadows and the light of a dragon’s eyes.

His breath curled out ahead of him in a foggy plume of white. Dukaan’s scalloped silvery mask, so like Krosulhah’s own scales, paled with ice crystals that hung heavy in the mantle of white fur around her shoulders. Beneath it, her eyes glistened, bird-black as onyx.

“Beautiful one,” she said, spoke smooth and true, like any good joore raised to the dragon tongue did, “I am awed and ashamed to kneel before you, in such humbleness as I do.”

Krosulhah lashed his great tail, driving his spiny body further up into the sea caves beneath Sotkol and emerging from the chill water. He fanned his wings, billowing gusts of cool air up the passageways cut large enough for even a dragon to pass through and ruffling Dukaan’s robes. She had left him just the perfect amount of space to settle on his ebony sharp claws and diamond-plated chest, just close enough that he could arch his spiny neck to press his scaly snout to her chest without having to wriggle forward at all.

How well she knew him, from tip to tail, from scale to soul.

Her small arms came around his jaw, deft claws painted silver as his reflexively seeking the soft patch of scales under Krosulhah’s throat for a good scratch. The tips of Krosulhah’s wings sagged as he melted under her attentions, careful to angle the sharp prod of his tusks away from her delicate flesh. Her robes rumpled and fluttered as if caught by stormsung winds when he exhaled a greeting breath.

She blew back, more of a chin jerk of her flat face than any breath, captured as it was in her mask. Her eyes gentled at him, all that unbearable softness on display; how careful a Dov had to be, to avoid hurting them with their fragile skins and their bodies full of a thousand pulsing things, without a single one of which they withered away into a sleep that they could not be woken from again. Precious, momentary things, as warm and lovely as the sunlight’s dazzle on bright wings, between the onward march of the clouds. And so he greeted her with breath and air, and not with fire.

“Drem-lok,” Krosulhah rumbled with pleasure, “di-sonaak, Dukaan.”

“Hail, Krosulhah,” she returned, and tipped forward until her slight weight rested against his nose, negligible to dragon as large and strong as Krosulhah. Her warmth cradled the sensitive, flexible scales of his head, too hot to be borne, if it were not for her. She sighed. “What news from the north? Has Al-Du-In caught wind of our plans?”

“Niid,” Krosulhah said. “I think not. Yet. Faasnu Kruziikrel has been given a new priest. Fah yol mey. After much whining.”

“The fearless one should perhaps stop killing them, and then would not need more,” Dukaan muttered. Her blunt claws scratched under his chin with a surge of vigour; even with strangers, she felt their loss, she felt for their pain. Krosulhah wondered where she put it all, in that small chest with its rabbit-thudding pulse counting out the scant seconds of her life. “No matter how convenient it is for our smuggling operations.”

Krohsulhah snorted a laugh. He thought Dukaan would govern the joore at Kruziikrel’s nest better than Kruziikrel did, and this was a fine joke, to imagine her giving mighty, flaming Kruziikrel, impatient with everyone, orders that must be obeyed, weak as a kitten. How could a joor control a dragon? They were such small creatures, barely any teeth at all. But they spoke a dragon’s tongue, and their hearts were steadfast and strong, stronger even, Krosulhah thought, than the Dov. But without a dragon’s Voice, their will was still dependent on a dragon’s indulgence to listen.

“You speak with the mind of a joor, but a Dov’s sense, dii. I do not think this one will last long.”

“What mask does he bear?” Dukaan asked. She rose, and after a quick, guilty look behind her, pulled off her own mask to press a quick kiss to Krosulhah’s horn. Her fur spilled out her face around without the voluminous hood to keep it back; always so much more than Krosulhah expected there to be. He swore it grew every time he looked away. Such was the nature of mortals, constantly changing.

Obligingly, he bent his neck to allow her to climb up his spiny shoulders, and find a perch there with her clever hands wrapped around a spare spine. Nimble and quick, these joore, and how quietly they could move without the earth lumbering through each of their heavy steps! Dukaan’s small claws tickled when they skated along the ridges of his polished scales. Some joore did not even have that much, and were small and weak all over, full of warm blood and soft meat. But not his Dukaan, no. She smelled perpetually of cool snow, and never minded his chilly scales even in the longest arc of winter.

“Faaz, rok los…” Krohsulhah’s mind sought a glimpse of memory as Dukaan scurried about on his back. She was a warm spot on his back, right over the vulnerable place where his neck joined his body. When she had settled herself, a loose rope wrapped around Krosulhah’s neck, she tapped his scales.

The flash of a mask came to him, the strange, oily scent the priest had carried following quick after. Like snorting sparks, it had stung his nose with the briny memory of the madness that lurked in the deeps. Though he had worn many bells in his robes that jangled and clashed together harmoniously, the little joor had been slow on his feet, and his eyes submissively lowered. His will was already broken despite winning for himself a mask of the favoured, and every step drug against the tidal current of the deep, and his rattling breath was the whisper of wind through fallen leaves. Of dead things, of decaying things, of the strange, still sleeps of the joore, wherein they would never wake but only dream.

Kruziikrel would be through with him in barely a year, Krosulhah thought. Firebright Kruziikrel, bragging and gloating, immense and majestic, saddled with this sad little creature, whose very breath seemed to hum a discordant note in a song? No, Krosulhah suspected he would barely live long enough to allow Dukaan to take advantage of the chaos of his arrival to steal away precious joore from the talons of unworthy Dov. On the heels of this recollection, Krosulhah remembered the name.

Pleased with himself, he ruffled his wings. “He is Miraak.”

---

---

The maw of Raven Rock was set low beneath the vast scowl of its walls, the teeth of its portcullis scraping the drifting hills of ash. As Frea and Nikulas crested one such shifting, powdery hill, the bonemould-clad guards slammed their spears down into a jagged ring of spikes. The close eye of the sun hanging like a spectre over the ashy clouds wreathed their bristling spears into individual points of fire. Each fearsome helmet hid sharp red eyes that were as cold and hard as rubies.

“Halt!” one shouted.

Placatingly, Frea raised her hands. The strap that secured Laataazin’s hammer to her shoulder dug into the meat of her muscle and ground against the bone.

Nikulas glanced sidelong at her. He had been carrying his bow in hand, like any good hunter ever watchful for a flushed hare or snowfox. As he fumbled to hastily copy her, he dropped it. The bow hit the ash with a muted thump, the string snapping back against the wood.

He cringed. Frea pursed her lips and kept her eyes forward, Nikulas’ blazing cheeks like summer sun in her peripheral vision.

She offered a silent prayer to the All-Maker that Nikulas had not cracked his bow. The Dunmer bows Frea might find to replace them in town were built for slender elven proportions and were made to be regularly drenched in oils and set alight. Nikulas’ thick human fingers would struggle on the small grips, and it would never shoot as well cold.

But beyond the practicality of conserving the Skaal’s limited resources, there was something in the air here she didn’t trust. Suspicious xenophobia, Frea expected that, but not raised weapons. It had never gone so far as that before.

The clumsy disarmament eased some of the more undisciplined guards, and a few spear tips closer to the back dipped to rest gently on the ash. No doubt they would be hastily taken up if the captain scowling at them from under his bonemould helm turned.

The young were the same everywhere, it seemed.

“Hail,” she called, in her clumsy Dunmeris. She knew only a few words, enough to announce who she was and that she meant no harm. She had never been tasked with hunting or trading with the lowland elves and so had never had occasion to learn more than the basics, though travelling with Laataazin who understood barely more than she and could not speak at all had brushed up her skills.

At her shout, a wave of relief swept through the guards; even the less green ones slumped. At the captain’s gesture, the ring of spears raised, put up against bone-plated shoulders with a deathly rattling.

“Hail, stranger,” he said, “Welcome to Raven Rock.”

The guards formed two neat rows for Nikulas and Frea to pass through. Stepping into the shadow of the Bulwark, Frea swallowed around a lump of apprehension.

Even Nikulas’ vibrating eagerness died into a wary sort of unease that matched her own as they passed under the towering walls of the Bulwark. No seasoned hunter was he, but he didn’t need to be one to feel that Raven Rock had all the tense exhaustion of a trap in waiting.

The huge walls loomed over her, pressing her into the vast dark heaviness of their enfold. The air was noticeably hotter inside, almost clammy with a thick shimmer that clustered round the dun, dully shining carapaces of the houses, bone, shell and chimes of carved wood, unmoving in the listless still. The fields that pressed up against the walls of the Bulwark like the rolling crumples of patchworked furs were fallow soil, dark and picked bare.

Braziers were lit at every corner, burning with sweet perfumes that cloyed the air. The townsfolk haunted the alleys between the dusty gutters, half-choked with ash that was normally swept away. There were more than Frea remembered, rangy and lean as wolves. Sunken into tight, pinched faces, the knots of their bellies, their spirits flickered and glowed like banked coals.

She stumbled into the gaze of one elf counting coins in the shade of a sprawling trama root. Quick as an arrow, the coins vanished in a silver flash, and their slender hands with nails painted poison purple crept into the ash to curl around the hilt of a wicked-looking dagger. Outlined in the dark shadows of tear-tracks, their eyes burned as they lingered on Frea’s weapons.

The attitude was quiet; subdued. No one talked. There was no laughter or song in these streets, only the whispering of the ash and the silent, persistent sense of being watched.

Purposefully, Frea struck out across the town, towards the Earth Stone. The sea breeze chilled her cheeks as she crossed the boardwalk, her boots echoing hollowly. The Earth Stone sat a little away from the nearby buildings, still with half-risen barricades and guard posts that stood empty, like eyesockets dotting the walls of tombs. It was not completely unattended; a single Redoran guard was slumped over a rickety chair, snoring into his helmet.

Careless. Frea bit her tongue and tasted salt flecked on her lips.

Nikulas’ footsteps were silent as a cat’s behind her as Frea skirted the guard and slipped into the barricaded area around the Earth Stone. Dark water sloshed over her boots, and she grimaced. Nikulas nimbly hopped over to the ring of stone that hugged the very plinth of the Stone, risen like grave marker to the smoky sky. Squaring her stance, Frea leant back against the barricades and crooked a rune of mage-sight, the third finger of her left hand against the pad of her thumb, over her eye.

The glistening leylines of the land superimposed themselves over her sight, threads woven round the swollen nexus that was the Earth Stone. The magic here pulsed and roiled like the ocean not too far from its lonely hill, disturbed as a kicked nest. It dragged deep, through hollow chambers of ancient rock, through the very twisting foundations of Solstheim itself. The blood of the All-Maker pounded through the tributaries that had been cut here by Frea’s ancestors long ago, risen into glowing pools of energy clustered around each Stone, invigorating the earth, purifying the waters and sweetening the sky. The whole island sung through these Stones and the Skaal that watched them. To the learned shaman who knew how to read them, the Stones had once whispered of everything from the tiniest forager to the greatest tree, the silent humming of the mountains, the dead men that slept in their cold tombs, the vast network of power that stretched over Solstheim together like links in a great chain.

But now, all they sang was one word. One name.

Miraak.

His touch fell upon her soft as snow kissed her cheeks, but there was no will there. Just – presence. Awareness, like she was being watched, in the same slow way the moons observed the passing of the stars and the interminable dancing of fireflies. Mortal lives, flickers of light against the encroach of void, dark as ink and deep as memory itself.

Uneasily, Frea took a step back, out of the inky water around the base of the Stone, certain that in the dim waters that oozed there she had caught sight of Herma-Mora’s eye.

“This needs cleansing,” she muttered.

Hand straying to his bow, Nikulas peered into the water suspiciously. Frea doubted he could shoot an arrow anywhere helpful, but she understood the desire to face the unknown with a weapon in hand. “Is it this bad at the Wind Stone, too?”

“You can sense it?” Frea eyed him, but he did not seem any different, if a little nervous.

Avoiding her wary squint, Nikulas rubbed the back of his neck. He checked his fingers, as if expecting blood – or maybe ink – to have stained them. “It’s – louder here. I hear him.”

“You hear him?!” Frea grabbed her amulet subconsciously. The flicker of her father’s magic was calming, but it warred with a creeping and persistent guilt. She only had the one, after all, and one had not been enough without Laataazin’s aid. Amulets, weapons, and all the wisdom of the Skaal hadn’t been enough. This time, they had to be, there was nothing else. “… What is he saying?”

Nikulas shifted from foot to foot. He pushed the hood of his fur parka down, revealing a pale face that was glossing with sweat. The brisk, salty wind chapped his cheeks, but it could not hide the tips of his ears turning red. His tongue darted out to wet his lips, anxious as a watersnake caught in a rockpool by stirring seas.

“Just…” Nikulas squeezed the grip of his bow until his knuckles turned white. The stretch-blanched skin over his knuckles stood in harsh contrast to the hectic flush brimming in the hollow of his throat, his wrists, all the places where vulnerable blood gathered. As he stood motionless, his eyes glazed and his pupils narrowed to pinpricks, as if he stood before a great bright light that Frea could not see. He began to sweat, drips sleeting towards his dampening collar. He held his body too rigid to shiver. Like even breathing would be too much.

“I hear his whispers,” he breathed, “… and there’s music – singing – just far away, but I can… I – I feel like flying.”

He scuffed one of the carven lines worked into the base of the circle around the Stone’s base. A tingle worked its way into her aching bones where her skull met her spine. The trapped energy hummed restlessly, visceral as a shudder caught under her skin.

Something… stirred.

Acting quickly, Frea yanked Nikulas’ arm. He toppled half-over, yelping as he splashed foul water up to his knee, but Frea did not pause until she had towed him out of the stone circle, past the barricades and the sleeping guard.

Seizing him by the shoulders, Frea shook him. Anxiously, she searched his face, fever-flushing darkly, the hair on his temples curling with his sweat. His oak-brown eyes were muzzy. He blinked at her, trying for a wobbly smile. Nearly hoarse with relief, Frea released him and whirled around to hide her face. For a moment, she’d thought – well, it didn’t matter what she had thought.

Groaning, he sagged against the barricade wall nauseously, one arm creeping around his stomach. He touched himself like a stranger to his own body, a faint grief or virulent relief pinching his mouth as he ran human hands over his nose, his cheeks, gripped at his belly. “Oh, that does not feel good.”

“We should leave this place,” Frea managed to keep her voice clear, though cool, though fear threatened to strangle it, she could not alarm him, she could not. She could not risk bringing to his eyes, so young and bright with a hope yet to be crushed out, the dreadful fear she had felt those nights at the Stones, shaking numb limbs and feeling around her neck the necklace that warded her like a lodestone for the prayers of her people. “Are you well, Nikulas?”

“Aye.” Nikulas leant over and spat illustratively in the dirt. He plastered on a rather wan, but brave face. “Aye, see, no hammering from me. I’ve got your back, Frea.”

“Alright,” she said. She worked her jaw around the words, feeling them thick and awkward in her mouth. A headache crept into her temples and banged there like incautious shutters. Her stomach did not want to relax from its tense nest of snakes. She wanted, badly, to be away from the Stone. “But tell me if you start to hear anything again.”

“Aye, shaman,” he said lightly, but his eyes were serious.

As he followed her away from the shrine, Frea caught him glancing over his shoulder and rubbing at his ear, as if to remove the phantom feeling of lips against it, did not speak of the wordless surge it roused within her. She kicked a stone against the foot of the guardsman as they passed, already several swinging strides away by the time he spluttered himself awake.

She did not think this place should be unguarded. No more were the Stones watchful guardians and earthen protectors. Not for the Skaal, and not for the people of Raven Rock.

“Those… whispers,” said Nikulas as they left, “That’s what Oslaf and the others heard, wasn’t it?”

“No,” Frea said tightly.

Her boots came down aggressive and sharp on the hollow chitinous planks boarding the ashy dust of the pathways, and she forced herself to slow down. They were attracting odd looks. Skaal weren’t a common enough sight in Raven Rock to go without notice anymore. They hadn’t been since before Miraak’s curse had started stirring in the Stones, and they had rather more on their mind than trading furs for spice and lowlander coin.

The guards were watching them warily, their hands on their belts loosely fingering weapons. The guards had never been the friendliest of Dunmer in Raven Rock, but they had usually treated newcomers with distant politeness. Perhaps Frea owed her chillier reception to the fact she no longer walked at the Dragonborn’s side. The world had seemed colder, greyer, without Laataazin in it, somehow less full. They had this air of gravity and purpose about them that made any chore into a quest, an adventure, a legend.

The heft of their warhammer on her back restored the weight of their company, but not the wonder. Or perhaps that had been Frea’s own brand of foolish youth, when she had still thought that saving the day would be enough to undo the night that had ruled before it.

Frea’s absent mind had taken them unconsciously to the forge district, where she did most of her trading when she was in town. The tradesfolk of Raven Rock were always friendlier than anyone else, welcoming fine Skaal craftsmanship. Here, at least, she was greeted with gruff nods and the occasional thin-lipped smile.

“Am I going to start dreamwalking?” Nikulas asked quietly from behind her, drawing her attention to the uncomfortable silence that had settled between them.

Grateful to be drawn out of her thoughts, Frea smiled at him. It was a thin, drowned thing. Nikulas’ dark eyes furrowed up, unsure how to take good humour from her. She touched his elbow, trying for reassuring instead of staid.

“No, I don’t think so.”

His answering smile came out like the dawn. “Thank you, shaman.”

Frea looked away from his innocent warmth and tried not to think about the fact that as long as Frea held the only amulet resistant to Miraak’s powers, Nikulas could be commanded to work the Stones whenever he liked, and Frea would be none the wiser til she found him, hammering away.

The clang of metal on metal answered her thought, and Frea jumped. She found Laataazin’s hammer all but materialised in her hands, digging into the meat of her palms bruisingly. Her bare fingers looked muddied and cold, childlike, curled around the heavy haft. The Raven Rock smith, a wiry, pale human from far across the sea, glanced up at her. His canny eyes were sunk low in his skull, mounded with exhausted wrinkles.

“Ahoy, Skaal. You want your weapons fixed up, you’ll have to wait. Guards’ order came through first.”

“Oh, we weren’t here to trade…” Nikulas started, but Frea approached the smith, caught by the stick of iron he was scrutinising. Sensing a conversation, the smith, Mallory, shoved it back into the coals.

Closer to the forge, the heat was fearsome, fire-salts popping and crackling in the hearth like chattering atronachs. Flame-treated Dunmeri weapons would not melt in any ordinary fire, at least, not without frost-salts to weaken them first. Frea knew that much, from Baldor Iron-Shaper’s grumbling when the Skaal brought back treated weapons from trade. The Skaal were no witch-elves, they did not conjure atronachs and daedra and slay them for their heartfires and skin-salts. But Frea’s own war-axe had been made with fire-treated quicksilver folded round a steel blade, and it had cut through the searing attacks of enemy Dunmer as if their fires were water.

“That blade has been sheared in half,” Frea interrupted. “… Of metals I know, only stahlrim could do this, and we do not make it frequently. Who cleaved that sword?”

“I ain’t paid to ask questions about dead folk’s blades, Skaal.” Mallory wiped his brow and set down his hammer. “Truth be told, I’m glad to see some of your sort about town. I’d had you all figured wiped out long before now.”

“Wiped out?” Nikulas demanded.

“Aye.” Mallory squinted at them. “The ‘spawn was bad enough before. Still, will you be wanting anything?” He looked admiringly at the hammer Frea had forgotten she held. “Aye, I’d pay you to get my hands on that beauty.”

It simmered when he looked at it, as if the death-enchantments within the metal sung for the blood that fuelled them. If he recognised the intricate carvings of twisted dragons, he said nothing, but Frea shifted it uncomfortably over her back anyway. She wasn’t here to talk about the Dragonborn.

“No, friend,” she said, as graciously as she could manage. “We came to see if the curse of Miraak continued to affect your people.”

“Miraak?” Mallory scratched his chin. His nails rasped against his unshaven cheek. “Can’t say as I remember where I’ve heard that before…”

“The Stones!” Nikulas burst in, insulted. “The Traitor came and took everyone’s minds while they slept, and they laboured away for hours – tens of us died!”

Mallory’s expression flattened, his cracked lips pressing in a thin line. “Ah, the Dragonborn’s business at the Stones? Your pardon, but I’d figured that was in the past now.”

He turned away from them, straightening some tangles of leather that coiled over the workbench behind him. His nimble hands made quick work of the knots, but he kept his eyes focused on the table. Frea read hesitance in the line of his shoulders. His reticence ignited anger in her heart.

“In the past?” Frea repeated, nettled, barely recognising the quiet threat in her voice as her own. “Bare weeks have passed, smith. Our bodies are still not yet feeding next summer’s worms. Have none of your people’s scouts kept watch on the temple?”

“Aye,” said Malloy, his unease a twitch in his sooty cheek, “Well, I never lost anyone personally, really, lass.” He shrugged defensively. “I gave the Dragonborn free servicing when she fought that mind-thief, because of Fethis, asking on account of his missing associate. I’m a smith, I fix weapons and armour. There’s enough dead about to break good steel against without needing to go looking in the tombs for them.”

He glanced over his shoulder and his eyes tightened, lingering on something just past her. As subtly as she could, Frea stole a look and spotted a loitering guard on the corner. The guard was sagging against a wall, bonemould armour ashblown and long spear shortened by a foot. With a start, Frea recognised him from the gate. Had they been followed?

Nikulas’ arms were crossed over his chest, weight set back on his heels belligerently, but his ire was focused on the smith. His hunter’s ear had caught no stealthy step behind them, or he would have alerted her, surely. Frea touched her amulet, and forced herself to relax her shoulders.

Mallory cleared his throat. “Well, if you ain’t here to trade, I got to ask you to move along. I’m busy.”

“Aye,” said Frea. “All-Maker’s blessing, Skaal-friend.”

It came out bitter and sharp, and she frowned at herself as she turned away. Storn would have kept his good humour, navigated the conversation with calm. Frea represented the village every time she left, she owed them better. The amulet’s magic hummed against her clutching hand, cool as a breath of frost.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Mallory absently, clearing a space on his workbench, “Shadows guide you.”

As they stepped away, the guard came up behind them, proffering his broken spear and engaging Mallory in such rapid muttered Dunmeris that Frea hadn’t a chance of eavesdropping on.

“We should check the town out, huh? Maybe someone else has noticed something,” Nikulas suggested brightly, and Frea nodded. “I wonder why’d they think we all died.”

“Aye,” she said. “I mistrust this.” She glanced around. It was midday, but the market was empty. Dust blew in scattered puffs across the chitin planking, tracing patterned eddies. Frea lingered on them, convincing herself she did not see runes scribed in the ash’s senseless scrawling. A merchant was sat hollowly on a nearby crate, staring into the neck of a bottle of shein. In the shadows of an alley, crimson eyes glittered against dark tattoos. They seared her like a brand, watching, waiting.

For her to be alone?

“We should split up, Nikulas.”

“Huh?” Nikulas turned and looked over his shoulder obviously, making her wince. “Why?”

“We will cover more ground,” Frea said. She thought the people were obviously wary of them together. It was a trick she had played with Laataazin once, after all, it was hard to get information from star-struck locals without one of them playing distraction.

Locals speak freer if guards are gone, Laataazin had told Frea. No true Nord trusts his jarl these days. I suspect these folk aren’t so different.

“If you need me, light an arrow and fire it.” She smiled, humourlessly. “Or scream.”

“Aye, shaman,” said Nikulas nervously. “I’ll meet you – uh…”

“The tavern,” said Frea, pointing to the sloping roof of the Retching Netch, just about visible, “in an hour.”

He nodded, not comfortable with the plan but deferring to her. But when Frea searched the alley for a glimpse of those red eyes, he clasped her bicep. Halted, Frea thinned her brow. Nikulas did not let go.

“Are you all right, Frea?”

She blinked, nonplussed. His kindness hit her delayed but with a sudden burn in her throat that hurt to swallow around. She was fine, of course she was. His hold on her was steady, and his root-deep patience was embracing as the comfort of a fire on a cold night, and all at once, Frea felt the unsteadiness she had been refusing to acknowledge buckle her knees.

Pulling her into a quick hug, Nikulas squeezed her to him. She buried her face into the fur of his parka and breathed in his warm, familiar scent. One of his tattered braids tickled her cheek; she would offer to help him redo them later, she promised herself, like a Skaal should.

Stepping back felt like wrenching the very heart of herself away.

“I will be fine,” Frea told him, the only one of her people for miles. “Go.”

The smoke from the sputtering candles spat and hissed over the fatty tallow. Last year’s rendering, stinking up the village with the vast cauldrons bubbling away, had produced squat, greasy candles. Too much moisture. It had been a hot year, and the snow had fallen as rain, miring the mountain paths thick with mud. Skorn had sent Frea on a long trip to pray at the Sun Stone for the will of the All-Maker. She remembered that spring, sweating under her furs as she struggled triumphantly back up the path to the village to his smiling approval. She had been proud, back then, to be trusted with such a task alone.

The movements of the village outside were only a wooden wall away. She could hear the crunch of boots through the snow, the metallic bang-bang-bang of Edla driving nails into her leaking roof, the murmur of voices rough and warm and familiar. Coughing, too, a nasty wet gurgle as Oslaf fought the winter in his lungs, and Aeta’s giggles as she played a throwing-sticks game. Inside the dimness of her hut, the furs of her hood fluttered against her cheek with each harsh exhale close to a sob. The stiffness of her knees was distracting, but not enough to cloak the hollowness that dogged her like a ghost.

“Father,” she prayed. “All-Maker, guide me. I know not what we should do.”

She closed her eyes and tears sprung then, like they had been lying in wait. Warm and wet, they rolled down her cheeks like a compassionate hand. The All-Maker’s touch, like that day at the Sun Stone, as if the clouds had parted to shine brightly on her perspiring forehead.

If it had been any other, Frea would have counselled them to look to their faith, reminded them that all things ended eventually. That although her father was dead, his strength lived on in her, in the house he had maintained, the forests he had kept watch over, the people he had loved. The Skaal who were dead had never died so long as their loved ones still drew breath against the harshness of the winter, but when one suffered, they all carried the pain in their breast. They were interconnected, not just because of their way of life, but because of their reverence of the All-Maker, and the great breathing of the world they lived in. A shaman’s duty was to learn to listen to that heartbeat – but it was difficult, so difficult, when hers was wounded.

Still, there was some comfort to be found in the familiar motions of prayer and tending the shrine, and when Frea had cried herself out the weight on her heart had not gone, but it did feel less heavy. The shadows of the snow-foxes dancing in the light of the candles made her smile, genuine, if watery.

She sat up and wiped away the salt crusted on her cheeks, and as she did a silver glinting caught her eye. It was the Dragonborn’s warhammer leaning against the wall, dented and scratched from breaking the skulls of dragons, but still shining fiercely with the foe-slaying enchantments wrought within its steel. Beside the shrine, the warlike artefact radiated a cold kind of violence that felt unfamiliar and icy to Frea’s hands. This was not of the earth of Solstheim, and it had bathed deeply and well in the blood of Laataazin’s enemies. There was a certain weight to an object that had been wielded by a person of great power, to an object that could only be a killing weapon. Edla could not fix her roof with a hammer this large and heavy, and no quick hunter’s kill could be slit with its warped claw, polished with a deadly gleam that spoke of how many eyesockets it had been driven through.

She took it, her spine popping as she stretched, and felt the unfamiliar weight of the mighty hammer strain her shoulders. She remembered that steel shine reflecting the uncanny brown-red of Laataazin’s deep and worn eyes when they had pressed the heavy haft into Frea’s hands and bade Frea use it to protect her people.

“Do not fail,” Frea had said to them, and Laataazin clapped their fist to their chest and promised to return. Frea had trusted them, then, but she did not know what to think when dragons flocked in the sky like carrion crows above Miraak’s temple.

Surely, if Laataazin had returned triumphant, they would have slain the wyrms. It hurt Frea to think of Laataazin avoiding returning to the Skaal, made guilt needle at her heart. She had been curt with them, at the end, her father’s blood still wet on their hands. Perhaps Frea was the reason that the Dragonborn had not returned. Perhaps the warhammer was farewell, as much it was guardian.

Her knees popped as she stood, protesting the extra weight of the warhammer that Frea slung over her back. Frea imagined that her steps were heavier and louder with the Dragonborn’s gift shadowing her shoulder, as Laataazin’s had been, thunderous and world-changing.

Frea could not hunt a dragon alone, and send it scurrying into the sky with a few bone-shattering blows. But Frea could take the Dragonborn’s example and their gift, and use it to protect her people. After all, she was not alone. The whole of the Skaal were with her, and the All-Maker, and her father’s memory.

The sky was dark when she emerged, lit by the flickering sparks of the firelight. The meeting of the Skaal was already in full swing, but all hushed conversation stopped when Frea entered Farani’s hall, eyes drawn to the fearsome warhammer over her shoulder. They were all there, the adults of the village young and old, Frea’s family well-worn and familiar as the grooves generations of feet had polished into the floorboards of Farani’s hall. There was night-bread roasting on the fire, filling the hall with its yeasty scent. Fresh-faced Nikulas, flushed in the fire’s warmth, was nibbling on a spare twizzler of chewy bread. He started guiltily when Frea’s gaze swept across them and met his, as if he feared briefly being sent back to the house with his supper like a naughty child.

They all recognised the warhammer, of course they did. There had been no one like Laataazin Dragonborn on the whole of Solstheim, and though their energy was dark and their path had strayed far from the All-Maker, they had led them to free the Skaal with this very hammer. Yet still, Frea saw surprise and unease on their firelit faces like a wall of stones across the path.

“Frea,” said Farani, “Come, join us.” She made no mention of Frea’s lateness or Laataazin’s warhammer, though her sharp eyes lingered on the shadow it cast over Frea’s cheek. Or perhaps, the still visible smears of redness around her eyes from her grief.

Morwen made space between herself and Baldor, who grunted shortly. He was armed too, with a sword the pommel of which jabbed her ribs when she squeezed in next to him. Frea was jammed between two heavy bodies with her toes pointing towards the fire, yet all her body could muster was a persistent, creeping chill. The warhammer’s weight wanted to bow her spine, and it was an effort to keep her posture straight and commanding under that and the expectant silence of the Skaal both.

“Chief.”

“You have all heard the shaman’s news,” said Farani, looking over them steadily. The beads in her braided hair gleamed dully.

The shadows of the fire darkened the wrinkles on her face, like they were a bas-relief from the rubbings the lowlander scholar Tharstan would take around the old temple ruins, streaky charcoal images of fearsome serpents and writhing wyrms, and the monstrous men that served them. To Tharstan, a wonderful story, to the Skaal, a grim warning. They had always known the Traitor’s trickeries were not yet done. Had not they fended off the gloam-eyed seekers of Herma Mora for generations, ordinary people who had been stolen from themselves, bleeding tell-tale ink over Skaal blade and Skaal wit?

“Dragons,” grunted Deor. Beside him, his wife Yrsa worked quietly on a torn shirt. He held the string and tugged free more when she reached the end of her row. “We have all heard tale of them, by now. Do we call council for every grizzly that ponders the strength of our walls? They are no business of ours, so long as they stay their claws.”

Frea’s heart sank, as a chorus of muttered agreement followed the woodcutter’s words. The Skaal, though uneasy, were a wounded people. They were no more eager to rush into another battle than they were to acknowledge one was happening. She wanted to rail at them – look, look, there are the signs, this is not over! But she could not blame them. Frea did not want to believe it was not over, though her heart knew it, with every grief-slung beat.

“He speaks true,” said Wulf. The scar that bisected his eye seemed to frown in the low light. “There is no wisdom in borrowing trouble we need not. Let the wyrms nest together in the accursed temple. They will move on shortly enough, there is not food enough for them all here.”

“Dragons don’t need to eat,” Frea said softly. Silence when she spoke, and she tried to catch Deor’s eye. He avoided her stare, his lips disappearing under the bush of his beard. Dismayed, she cried, “You cannot seriously think this means nothing at all! The Dragonborn spoke to me of more dragon-lore than any of you, and they do not flock together, not unless someone makes them! Is a dragon a dog, to be turned out when he steals from the table? If we do not act –“

“Frea.” Farani spoke strongly, and Frea flushed as she realised her voice had been growing louder.

“Chief,” said Morwen, glancing at Farani. Farani, suddenly appearing very tired, gestured for her to speak. Morwen addressed the fire, but none struggled to hear her words, intensely as she spoke them. “A sleeping trap is still a trap. Frea’s right. For now, they don’t seem interested in us. You want to bet on that continuing? No – take a party and hunt them. We drive them out, make sure that temple is properly empty.”

“To kill unnecessarily is not our way,” said Wulf, sternly, only belatedly glancing back at Farani for permission to speak. Morwen’s anger was sudden and bright, but she held her tongue at Farani’s gesture. Newcomer to the Skaal she was not any longer, but she took personally still any accusation that she was less a Skaal than any of them.

“I, for one, wouldn’t mind knowing if that foul magic is gone from the temple,” Oslaf muttered. “Are we still in danger of losing our minds to the Stones or what?”

As one, the Skaal looked to Frea. The weight of the warhammer on her back seemed to triple, until Frea had to lean forward onto her elbows to offset it. The bones of her elbows dug into the meat of her thighs painfully; she had lost weight. Her heart was almost as heavy as the hammer when she said, “I have not sensed direct manipulation of the temple or the Tree Stone since…”

She trailed off, a dozen ends to that sentence popping up in her mind. Since this all began, since I watched my father die, since my friend disappeared, since you all started to look to me.

Thankfully, Farani nodded, not needing her to specify. “So, the Traitor’s whispers appear, for now, to have stopped?”

“Here,” said Frea, helplessly. “We can all see that it has. I cannot tell what is happening in the rest of Solstheim. My connection to the land has been … challenged, of late.”

Someone snorted, and Frea white-knuckled her fists, and did not look up. She did not want to see which of her people had laughed at her pain, even as the meaty sound of an elbow jabbing into ribs assured her she was not alone in that grief that made it hard to hear the song of the All-Maker’s peace.

“Wait,” said Tharstan, slowly. Frea was surprised to see the scholar at the council, but she supposed in a question of dragons his collected lore about their history might have been deemed useful. “Direct manipulation? Does that mean …”

“It’s not gone?” Oslaf interrupted, in alarm. “Whatever he did to the Stones-?”

“It’s not,” Frea confirmed. “The energy the efforts of our stolen people raised there is aimless, since the Dragonborn destroyed his direct hold, but it has not yet dispersed back into the ground. I do not know why.”

Farani raised a hand to pre-emptively quell the storm that arose, and when whispers surged irrespective of her gesture she commanded, “Quiet!”

The echoes died loudly against the walls, hushing the Skaal, and proving the aptness of Farani Strong-Voice’s name. In the silence that fell, still as summer-woods, she sighed. “You said you recognised one of the dragons, shaman.”

“Yes,” said Frea. The use of her father’s title – now hers – subdued her. “It served Miraak. I was there when Laataazin drove it off.”

Farani closed her eyes, as if Frea had driven a dagger into her heart. “You suspect the Dragonborn failed.”

That caused a riot of questions and accusations, and through it Frea stared at the chieftain and felt something inside her freeze brittle-sharp. It cracked when she took in her next breath, and each thump of her heart felt as if it bounded against a thorny cage of icicles lodged in the muscle. Her hands shook when she clasped them in her lap.

Frea had not suspected, not truly, but now in Farani’s voice it seemed so much more real a possibility. But the Dragonborn – dead, and Miraak freed? No god would let that come to pass, Frea knew that. And if the Traitor had survived, the temple would not be quiet. The end would come upon them as swift as dragon’s wing.

“I do not know that,” Frea said quietly, but no one was listening.

“-go to the temple and find the fetchers,” Morwen was saying loudly, to the enthusiastic agreement of Oslaf, much to the irritation of Wulf, whose cheeks had bloomed a choleric red.

Finna, sat across from Frea in the circle, tossed the contents of her tankard onto the fire. It exploded in a fountain of sparks, and the rich reek of Skaal mead billowed up in the smoke.

“For the love of the All-Maker,” she snapped across the din, “You will wake the children with all this noise.”

“Settle, hear me speak,” said Farani, and the Skaal turned to their chieftain for her verdict.

“I agree that the time is not right to provoke the beasts by attacking the temple,” she said, and when Morwen opened her mouth angrily she continued, with a sharp look, “But nor do I conscience doing nothing. It concerns me that we know not what happened to the foe’s work upon the rest of the Stones. I would ask of you to go from the village and find the answers that elude us here.”

“I will go,” Frea said immediately. “I have been travelled the land most recently, and I am best suited to know if something remains amiss with the All-Stones.”

Farani inclined her head, but before she could speak, Baldor broke in. “Forgive me, chief,” he said, in his gruff voice like the creak of his own forge from disuse. He had been quieter, ever since his capture and subsequent escape from the sun-elves in their black and gold, and he had never been a garrulous man to begin with. “But you hold our wisdom, lass. If you don’t come back…”

“We can’t lose you!” Yrsa gasped, and her hand dropped swiftly to her belly with a clack of her needles.

“You will need to defend the village,” Frea met her eyes, reassuringly. “In case the dragons do attack.”

“Aye,” sighed Farani. With the formation of a plan beginning, the Skaal began to relax, and the tense atmosphere was slowly dissipating. Morwen grumpily tore off some of the roasting nightbread and stuffed it in her mouth. Inadvertently, Frea’s stomach clenched at the warm, homely smell. She had not eaten. “But that does not mean you should go alone, shaman.”

“Um.” It was Nikulas. He looked mortified at the attention of the chief, but though he fidgeted he spoke clearly, as a Skaal should. “I’ll go with her.”

“You’re a child,” said Edla, dismissively, and Nikulas blushed.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” he demanded, “And I can fight. I’m fast. Faster than any of you.”

“That much is true,” said Wulf, with a belly-laugh that made his shoulders shake. “Lad has the step of a hare.”

“And the shot of one,” added Morwen, to the warm amusement of the gathering.

“He may go,” said Farani, acknowledging Nikulas’ surprised thanks with a smile, then to Frea, “Well?”

“We will take supplies for two weeks’ travel,” she said, “If we are not returned by then…”

“Aye,” said Farani Strong-Voice. “All-Maker be with you both.”

---

Morning found Frea on the road as promised. Her pack was full, her armour donned, and her eyes tired, glazed from another sleepless night in her empty house. Her father’s dust-gathering bed haunted her with its silence, and she almost looked forward to unrolling the bedroll tucked tightly next to the threatening spire of Laataazin’s warhammer over the snowfields that wound their way like a great white skirt around the lower flanks of the mountains that night.

Nikulas trotted along behind her, far too eager for the morning’s earliness and the grimness of their quest. He veritably bounced along on the safe path to the Tree Stone, and Frea could feel his excited energy like a geyser’s spin behind her back. Thankfully, he knew to keep quiet as they skirted the Tree Stone with a wide berth, creeping low to the ground like thieves in case the dragons were about. Frea saw no shapes in the sky, but not three meters from the Stone they found a fallen tree.

It had been shredded as if by vast claws larger than Frea’s entire body, and each cut was clean as if a hot knife through butter. The bark was charred, and when Frea laid a hand on it, it was disturbingly warm. Recent, but the dragon who had done it had been quiet enough that no sentries had spotted it. Or long-burning, perhaps. Worst of all, one end of the tree looked as if it had been gnawed by mighty teeth – and was covered in peeling, vinegary splatters that Frea did not have to examine to know were ink. Herma-Mora’s poison in dragon jaws. That was no good sign.

She and Nikulas exchanged a look over the smoking tree. He had paled under his hood, and for a moment, Frea considered sending him back to the village. But she had no hope of changing Farani’s mind without word from the other Stones, and though he was clearly alarmed, he was too young and stubborn to go without a fight this close to home.

Against her better judgement, they pressed on, and made good time away from the temple of Miraak and the creatures that hid in its dark depths. They were climbing down one of the cliff paths that wound like snakes round the sheer mountainsides when he spoke up.

Frea was concentrating on where she was going, not wanting to fall in front of Nikulas, who, in the fashion of youth, was quick as a squirrel over the icy rocks. It had been some time since she had taken this path herself – it was faster, but it tested the nimbleness of even the most sure-footed of the Skaal. There was no way that she could have taken the Dragonborn, with their dizzying seizures and lowlander’s stride, down this path for Skaal mountain-bred.

“What were they like?” he asked her, and surprised, Frea overbalanced. She grunted, and planted her feet to keep from stumbling down the ragged path. A pebble rolled free and bounced down the rock face, and she grimaced at each dull thud and crack it made on its way down.

“Who?” she asked, though she already knew.

“The Dragonborn,” Nikulas clarified, impatiently.

Frea exhaled slowly and carefully edged her way round a protruding lump of ice. “A soldier,” she said, eventually, weighing the words in her mind, “with a great burden. Skaal-friend, perhaps, but no Skaal.”

Nikulas absorbed this, hopping lightly after Frea. A spray of gravel from his passage drummed against her boots.

“Do you think they’re coming back to help us again?” he said. When Frea remained quiet, he added in a boisterous tone she wasn’t sure which of them was meant to reassure, “We don’t need them, anyway.”

Frea said nothing. At her continued silence, Nikulas wilted. They didn’t speak again for a long time.

Their pace was steady though, and Nikulas was a helpful travel companion, pointing out quicker paths and steadier routes. He had a hunter’s eye, too, twice Frea saw his hand start to his bow before some creature she had not yet spotted bounded across their path. He spotted the figure first, too, as they made their way through the snowfields, thick with tumbled rocks and jagged sculptures of ice.

“Shaman,” he said, and touched her elbow. “Do you see…?”

He pointed, and Frea followed his gaze to see a dim outline, vaguely person-shaped, weaving drunkenly about on the path ahead.

“Hello?” Frea called, but there was no response. She frowned, thinking of how hypothermia could take a mind’s reasoning.

The figure lurched closer, and as it parted the thick mist her heartrate picked up. She knew these, had faced them before with the Dragonborn at her back. It moved oddly, like it was like clay instead of a person. It bent in the wrong places, too fluidly for a creature with human joints. What might have been flesh once was pushed up and shoved in random places, mounded as if it had been cast from a collapsed corpse and then got up from the floor that had cushioned it.

Its grey mouth opened and closed like a gasping fish caught in a paroxysm of once-life, and it hugged itself like a crying child. Ash flaked from it like shedding skin, so it left a little trail as it came towards them.

“What … is that?” Nikulas breathed, appalled.

He sounded sick. She didn’t blame him. The wretched creature made her nerves jangle, like breathing in poison-dust, and sweat spring out on her forehead. It was unnatural, tortured, undead. Frea grabbed for the Dragonborn’s warhammer. She was almost too revolted by it to pity it, but there was something in the way it began to reach for them, its clumpy fists wavering as a newborn’s, that cut her as much as it horrified her.

I’m sorry, she thought, all I can to is put you out of your misery.

“Ash-spawn,” she said. “Don’t let it hit you, they’re strong.”

It stumbled towards them, unsteadily, its eyeless head bored with two blank dark holes that had no tear ducts with which to weep. There was a red stone embedded in its chest, she could see its muted glow through the layers of ash and grime that made up its twisted body. It pulsed, like a heartbeat, but far too slowly.

She heard Nikulas rattle an arrow from his quiver. From the sound, she guessed his hands were shaking.

“We must put it down,” said Frea, remembering how Laataazin had tried for several hours to pacify one of the ‘spawn. It never worked for long. They were as relentless as waves on the shore. “Do it cleanly.”

“Aye,” gulped Nikulas.

Frea readied the warhammer, widening her stance to adjust to the weight of the cumbersome weapon. She had, just in case, her hand-axe tucked into her belt, but it felt right to use the gift Laataazin had left her. The hand-axe had always been helpful for scaling the sheer ice-cliffs, but Laataazin’s warhammer was that: a war weapon. Just the sight of it had made enemies quail in Laataazin’s powerful hands, in Frea’s, she hoped only that it might help her avoid a needless fight.

Nikulas nocked, drew, aimed – and missed. The arrow clattered off a rock, and Frea heard Nikulas swear, but the ash-spawn was on them.

Laataazin’s warhammer was easier to swing now, as if it hungered for violence. Frea howled as she brought it over her head and crunched it down onto the ash-spawn’s shoulder. The ashy shell shattered inwards. Dust exploded, and Frea coughed as her eyes were stung with the bitter smoke that billowed from the ‘spawn’s wound. This close though, with a hammer like this, she didn’t need to be able to see to score a hit. Frea’s muscles burned as she swung the hammer back for another go, feeling her grin distorting her face as the lethal weight cannoned through the air. But before her swing could connect, Nikulas fumbled with his bow and shot again.

This time, his aim was perfect.

An arrow sprouted from the side of the ash-spawn’s face, and with a dusty groan it collapsed in on itself. With nothing to stop her momentum, Frea stumbled into the ashy remnants, accidentally kicking the strange stone that had been embedded in its chest far into the snow. She rolled her shoulders and slung the hammer back over her shoulder.

“Good shot,” said Frea, electing not to mention the first one.

Nikulas grinned; she could see his pride in his puffed chest. “Thanks.”

“I have not seen one this far north before,” she said, “Normally, they haunt the coast by the wizard’s tower, far away.”

“They are not common then?” Nikulas asked with bald relief, and Frea smiled.

“Not to my knowing, no.”

“Thank the All-Maker!”

Frea broke and chuckled. The sound was weak and strained, as if some part of Frea had forgotten how to make it at all, and died almost as quick as it came. But Nikulas beamed, and when they started walking again, the silence felt a little more companionable than before.

Raven Rock’s walls were visible through the drifting ashfall when they stopped for the night in a small Skaal-camp normally used for trading. Nikulas erected their tent in a rocky lee while Frea laid wards that would sing to her through the earth if any would pass into their little sanctuary. They lit no fire that night, warmed well by their exertion, and dined on snow melted in Frea’s fire-cupping palms and good food brought from the village. Nikulas spoke a little, but when Frea did not respond to his overtures he lapsed into thoughtful contemplation of the sky.

It was a mild night, the stars covered by soft clouds of ash that dusted down slowly. Hazy outlines of the double moons pierced the blanket of the warm, muted darkness that passed as night below the mountains.

“Soon,” he said to her, as she unbuckled her armour, “I will be the furthest from home I have ever been.”

Frea looked at him, the uncertainty in his brave, excited smile, and didn’t have the heart to tell him it did not grow any easier.

They jostled together in the single tent. Nikulas fit well in the circle of her arms, his scruffy hair tickling her nose when she breathed. He smelled of sweat and lye-soap and home. Frea closed her eyes and felt his warmth like a bittersweet balm. The tears were swift and silent, and she cried in gasping breaths for her empty house and her dead father, and the many Skaal who would never feel the warmth of a kinsman’s embrace again. Though Nikulas said nothing, he cautiously tightened his arm around her, and that was enough.