Chapter Text
Ariadne was silent in the back of the cart. With her were three Nords, all men, two blond of hair and one brown.
Many questions were floating around in Ariadne’s head as the cart staggered over the cracks in the brick road, many of which would forever remain unanswered. How did I get caught? Who attacked me? How was I seen? How close did I come to the border? Where is Shadowmere? And most importantly, where in Oblivion is my bow?
“You’re finally awake,” one of the fair-haired Nords commented as Ariadne’s eyes wandered across the thinning forest that she considered throwing herself out of the cart and into to escape. “For a moment, I thought the Imperials had captured a dead woman.”
A dead woman.
Maybe she was.
“You walked right into that ambush…” The Nord stated. “Just like the rest of us.”
“There wouldn’t be any ambush if it weren’t for your damn war!” The brown-haired Nord pointed out angrily.
“We’re all brothers and sisters in binds now, horse-thief,” The first man growled in response.
Ariadne held her tongue.
“What happened to him?”
She turned her head slowly to face a gagged man sitting slumped against the corner of the wagon, and without another word from either party in the previous conversation, she immediately knew who he was.
“If Ulfric’s here, that means—”
The gates of the small Falkreath town opened up to the caravan of rickety wooden wagons, all being watched over by tall, golden-skinned Thalmor agents that stood on the gate’s bridge.
“End of the line.”
Ariadne had already made her peace. When the carts pulled into the village and came to a final stop, she had no reason to fear when a heavily-armored Imperial captain was calling the names of her’ traveling companions’.
“Ralof of Riverwood.” The blond Nord came forward and walked past the captain and her assistant without even passing them a glance.
“Ulfric Stormcloak of Windhelm.” The gagged man with braids in his hair walked past his comrades.
“Lokir of Rorikstead.”
“You don’t understand!” Lokir, the brown-haired Nord, protested at the calling of his name. “I’m not a rebel!”
That was when he began to run. As soon as he took off, confidant and swift, he was shot down by an archer standing atop one of the guard towers.
“You’re not on the list,” the assistant told Ariadne while her eyes locked onto the bleeding corpse of Lokir. There was a single arrow pointing out from his side, just beneath a rib. Ariadne immediately felt a feeling of bitterness come across her like a chilling wave, although it was not from the sight of a fresh corpse.
Her eyes followed the strands of the arrow’s feathers that twitched and waved just so slightly in the wind like little blades of grass, and she could take comfort in the familiarity of it. Nonetheless, the sight made her have to rethink coming to terms with her early death.
You still have a chance! A voice in her head screamed. Find a bow! Find any arrows! You know these woods better than anyone, you can make it out!
“What’s your name, Wood Elf?” The captain demanded harshly.
“Ariadne Valdain.” She said it with a snarl.
The assistant wrote that down. “I’m assuming you were trying to return to Valenwood from across the southern border?” He asked her. “Unfortunate. We’ll have your remains sent back to your homeland promptly.”
Ariadne did not have the patience or time (obviously) to tell him that she was not really from Valenwood. He was correct about the first half of his assumption, however. She had been attempting to travel there.
She had been attempting to escape.
“To the block, elf,” the assistant told her, his voice oddly gentle.
She obeyed.
When everyone was in their places, the captain brought forward a Priestess of Arkay dressed in the traditional orange and yellow robes that the Skyrim worshippers so often wore. “As we commend your souls to Aetherius, the blessings of the Eight Divines upon you—”
“For the love of Talos, shut up, and let’s get this over with!” One Nord grumbled bluntly. He brought himself forward and knelt before the headsman obediently, although his words reeked of defiance. “My ancestors are smiling down at me, Imperials, can you say the same?”
The axe came swinging down before he could say another word.
“Next, the elf in the Hammerfell clothes!”
Ariadne stepped forward without any further prompt to do so. She knelt, and she tilted her head to the left, facing the massive guard tower that she passed on her way here.
“What in Oblivion is that?” The voice of the Imperial General rang loud and clear through the walls of the town in question of something Ariadne could not see.
“Sentries, what do you see?”
“Gods, it’s a dragon!”
A bellowing cry came from the clearing clouds which parted to reveal a large, black serpent, winged and sharp-toothed. As the headsman raised his axe, the dragon landed on the guard tower to Ariadne’s left and let out an unintelligible shout.
In the middle of the afternoon, the sky grew midnight black, and flaming stones rained from the clouds from which the great beast descended just moments ago. Without haste, Ariadne pushed herself up from the block and stood, finding herself among more dead than alive.
“WHAT ARE YOU? BLIND?” Someone yelled, causing Ariadne to turn her head. “MOVE IT!”
A Nord woman dressed steel armor carved ornately with images of wolves and dragons shoved Ariadne forward, pushing her through the burning village and into one of the stone towers. She immediately slammed the door shut, as if that would stop a dragon.
“I knew it!” The woman muttered to herself, kneeling to the ground and pulling a knapsack off from her shoulder. From it, she pulled a worn-out leather notebook and flipped through the yellowing pages, clearly distressed by something inside. “I was right.”
“We don’t have time for journaling,” Ariadne interrupted her with newfound vigor. “Who are you? Why did you save me?”
The woman looked up from her open notebook. She looked unlike most of the Nords Ariadne had seen, with bright red hair rather than blonde, and emerald green eyes that wrinkled at the sides. “Loki.”
“Why did you save me?” Ariadne asked again.
The red-haired Nord furrowed her brow. “I wasn’t going to leave a disoriented, helpless person at the block to die.”
Helpless? Ariadne considered questioning it. Yeah, sure, I was a little helpless. I’ll give her that.
“We don’t have time for conversation,” Loki told her all of a sudden, shoving the book back into her pack and throwing it quickly over one shoulder. “If we don’t get out of here soon… Unless… No, I wouldn’t have time.”
“What?”
“It’s nothing you should be concerned with.”
Loki began running up the stairs as Ariadne stood in the belly of the tower, watching the strange woman rush up the first twenty steps.
Suddenly, with enough force to nearly knock Loki off the staircase, the side of the tower located in the middle of the stairs was blown out by a plume of dragon fire. Loki, nonetheless, seemed unphased, as if she had fought hundreds of dragons.
“Alright, I guess that makes things easier for us…” Loki sighed, standing beside the gaping hole in the tower wall. “Jump.”
“You’re insane,” Ariadne immediately responded. “I’m not jumping from anything.”
“Then I saved you for nothing.”
“What? I’ll be fine on my own! I’ll find a way out of here, probably! A way that doesn’t involve jumping out of a burning tower!”
“Jump.”
Next thing she knew, Ariadne was standing with her toes over the edge of the hole. Before her was an inn set ablaze by burning fire, crumbling and sizzling. “Do I just—”
“Please just jump.”
“So, I just—” Ariadne kicked her foot out in preparation, but she still clung to the side of the tower with shaky, sweating hands. “Jump?”
“Yes.”
The dragon flew past the tower and strafed the tone with a blast of its ancient flame, burning the wooden roofs of houses and melting the quarried stones that made up the walls and roads. “When?”
“Now.”
“What if I land in the fire?”
“Put it out.”
“With what?”
“Choke the fire. Cover it.”
“What the high-holy fuck does that mean?”
Ariadne felt hands against her back at the moment she least expected it and clawed at the heated air as she plummeted towards the open roof of the inn, falling like a rock being thrown into a pond. She hit the weakening wood with a loud SNAP and fell through its grasp, collapsing to the second floor of the inn along with some fractured planks of oak.
Through an aching pain present in her right shoulder, Ariadne pushed herself up. “Where is…”
In a similar although much more dramatic fashion, Loki fell from the inn’s upper level, falling beside Ariadne with a loud CLANK rather than a SNAP.
“For a second, I thought you went around.”
“Are you…” Loki pushed herself up, clearly struggling to stand. She reached out a wide hand covered by a steel gauntlet as though Ariadne was supposed to take something from it. “Hurt?”
Ariadne took her hand. “I’m fine. I’m not so sure about you, though.”
Loki released her hand and approached the place in the burning inn where the door and a hole in the wood met. “We need to get out of here before the Imperials get a grip of the place.”
“Against a damn dragon?”
“No, I mean…” Loki made a run for it, and Ariadne followed. “STOP!”
She shoved a hand over Ariadne’s chest and pushed her back as the dragon landed, blasting its fire into the rest of the inn. For some reason, it ignored Loki and moved on, taking flight just as soon as it had landed. “The Imperials may oppose your escape,” Loki told her as she continued on.
Ariadne didn’t think it appropriate to continue their conversation as a dragon burned down the village and plucked soldiers from off the ground like they were rabbits in the talons of a hawk. Through screaming, half-mauled civilians and distressed archers running out of arrows, Loki led Ariadne through the village where the world had begun to end. She made a series of split-second decisions that made Ariadne’s head spin, knowing full-well that she could never.
“Just through here!” Loki yelled as Ariadne ran close behind. She pushed open a wooden door leading to a stone keep and held it open, her head whipping to the side when the dragon landed right in front of her. “COME ON!”
Ariadne wasted no time, jumping into the keep and falling to the ground as Loki slammed the door shut and pushed a nearby table against it.
“What if someone needs to get in?” Ariadne asked, still on the ground.
Loki didn’t indulge her. She simply walked over to a metal chest and pried it open, revealing several familiar items. “How many of these are yours?”
“The bow and bag are mine,” Ariadne responded, using a wooden chair to pull herself up. “Oh, and the dagger.”
“Dragonbone,” Loki chuckled as she threw the weapons and bag down before her new companion. “Seems appropriate.”
Ariadne brought the bow over her shoulder and tightened the quiver around her hip. “How do you know I don’t just make knives out of human bones?” Ariadne questioned. When Loki did not respond or show any signs of amusement, Ariadne added, “maybe that’s not appropriate for now.”
“How did you get wrapped up in this mess?” Loki asked as she pulled an iron chain. A wooden gate lowered and broke, although it had stopped at a point low enough that it could be easily stepped over. “You definitely aren’t a Stormcloak.”
“How do you know?” Ariadne pried, following Loki through a dimly-lit stone tunnel. “I could be a Stormcloak officer or something. Maybe I’m Ulfric’s bastard daughter. You wouldn’t know.”
Loki remained stone-faced and unamused. “Elves can’t join the Stormcloaks.”
Ariadne paused. “Are you a Stormcloak?” She asked. “Is that where you got that armor?”
“No.”
It was a simple answer, but Ariadne wanted more than that. “Why are you in Helgen?” She asked. “Or, were, I guess.”
“You never answered my question.”
Ariadne ran her honey-colored fingers across the old stones of the hall. “I was trying to cross a border and got caught up in a battle. They mistook me for a rebel.”
Loki’s head slowly turned to face her. “Where were you going?”
Ariadne was not one for answering repetitive questions. Loki seemed trustworthy enough, and Ariadne could tell that she didn’t have anyone to go back home and gossip to. There was a certain hard demeanor that she possessed that keyed Ariadne into her love and family life, present in almost all silent, armored warriors.
“You were going to Valenwood.”
Ariadne looked over, but Loki’s gaze now faced forward. Their metal boots clanked every time they hit the stone ground, sending an unsettling echo throughout the dark, dank chamber that seemed nearly unending. “Quite an assumption to make, isn’t it?”
“It isn’t an assumption.”
Ariadne sighed. The two of them came to a destroyed section of the tower’s cistern that revealed a cave just as dark and wet as the hall it was attached. Loki lowered herself down from the brick floor into the cave, struggling to keep herself from falling as she held onto the ledge and fumbled for a foothold.
With a single swift leap, Ariadne was on the rocky ground, awaiting the descent of her strange savior. “Do you need help?”
“No.” Loki’s feet hit the ground stiffly, with her knees locked rather than bent. “The exit should be through here.”
Ariadne followed close behind, humming quietly as the tall, stoic Nord woman maintained her aloof silence. She walked stiffly towards the light at the end of the cave, standing up uncomfortably straight for absolutely no reason. Ariadne couldn’t imagine looking like a living statue all the time, with her shoulders pulled back and tense eyes locked ever forward. If Loki weren’t her savior, it would bother her to no end. Ariadne wasn’t one for overly serious people.
“Did you know that dragon would come?” Ariadne finally asked.
The irritating sound of Loki’s metal boots connecting with the ground grated Ariadne’s ears and echoed through the cave. There was no answer from the red-haired woman, even when shadows faded into light and the two survivors of Helgen’s failed Stormcloak execution exited the dank cavern from which they had come.
Ariadne leaned against a nearby boulder, staring up at the blue sky dusted with gentle clouds and took several heavy breaths of relief. When she turned her head to the side, she half expected Loki to have stopped walking. “Where are you going?”
Loki halted and looked back. “I’m leaving.”
Ariadne shot up from her stone. “What?” She questioned. “After all that… Shouldn’t we at least tell someone? You know… Like the Jarl?”
“He won’t know what to do. I’ll handle it on my own.”
Ariadne furrowed her brow and ran up to Loki’s side. “You’ll ‘handle’ it?”
“Yes.”
“Who are you, exactly?” Ariadne demanded, her tone dire. “You knew the dragon would attack Helgen and you think you can ‘handle’ it on your own… How?”
“You’d best be on your way,” Loki told her harshly. “This isn’t your business.” She made a futile attempt to speed up but was slowed both by her armor and by the small, tan-orange hand that gripped her forearm.
“I’d say it is my business now,” Ariadne told her.
Before Loki could argue with that sentiment, she pulled her arm away so quickly that the edge of her gauntlets nicked Ariadne’s finger. At first, Ariadne assumed she had done so out of frustration and rage, but Loki did not scold or berate her at all. She grasped the side of her arm as it tremored while breathing through gritted teeth.
“Your arm!” Ariadne exclaimed nervously, reaching out to the woman’s wrist. “You were burned!”
“Don’t touch it,” Loki growled, pulling her arm away.
“Give me your hand,” Ariadne said softly. “I know how to treat burns. You’ll be fine. Just let me get your gauntlet off.”