Two months to Skyrim and so I, naturally, am telling stories about a game that came out in 2002. Well, technically about an expansion pack that came out in 2003, which I suppose is somewhat more recent.
You still remember the day she stepped off the boat from Khuul, newer to Solstheim than Fort Frostmoth and looking for a taste of her native Skyrim. She is a Nord, fair-haired and light-eyed, but not the comeliest of women. The youthful lines of her face have been eroded by harsh weather and hard living. She is a hunter. She can drink most men under the table, as you learn the first night you run into her at the tavern.
Her mannerisms are not the most sophisticated, but neither are yours or those of most guards at the fort. She is pleasant enough to talk to or get drunk with and she's around the tavern often—she goes there to sell her pelts and buy mead. You aren't sure where she's set up house on this frozen hell of an island, though you suspect she may not be kidding when she says she lives under a rock.
She speaks of many interesting things. Before she came here she had spent time on Vvardenfell, and she's brought some odd stories with her. The Ghostfence has vanished. The blight is no more. Dagoth Ur has been defeated. And the Nerevarine, shortly after his victory at Red Mountain, has fallen into obscurity.
"Can't remember his name," she tells you one night over a jug of greef. "He's Hlaalu, though, I can tell you that much. I heard from a guy who heard from a guy that he came out of Narsis. 'Course, that guy also said he could turn himself into a durzog, a cliffracer, and a three-legged guar, so he might've been talking out his ass!"
You have more pressing things to worry about than the fulfillment of some ancient prophecy—like the miserable weather—but according to her the Nerevarine is all anyone can talk about on Vvardenfell. He had remained in the public eye for a scant week or so after killing Dagoth Ur and then simply disappeared. The rumors are flying thick as flies over a carcass: he's left for mainland Morrowind, he's left for Cyrodiil, he's left for Akavir. He's staying in an Ashlander camp. Before he even came to Vvardenfell, he made some high-ranking noble angry enough to put a House Wars contract on his head and the Morag Tong finally caught up with him. He was never really a man at all, only Nerevar Indoril's spirit made temporarily corporeal, and now that his mission is complete he's returned to Aetherius. None of this affects your life, but it's something new to talk about and is therefore of mild interest.
But eventually the alcohol dries up, leaving you and everyone else regrettably sober, and your visits to the tavern first dwindle and then cease altogether. There are rumblings of mutiny at the fort. Why would Carius order the shipments to be stopped? He knows that drinking is the only pleasure you have left here, that it was the one thing keeping everyone in line. The guards of Frostmoth are not the devoted, loyal soldiers he might wish for. You are all ex-criminals, every last one, and while some of you may be petty thugs, thieves and drug addicts instead of rapists and murderers, you all have reason to dislike the Emperor you've been forced into serving. Alcohol was the bargaining chip that he used to buy your cooperation. Without it, nobody will work.
The following months are long and miserable without the one vice that you all had in common. You've tried the local mead but found it impossible to stomach. Most of the other soldiers can't stand it either. All of you are too used to drinks from the mainland.
You're surprised when the Nord comes looking for you, or rather any of the soldiers she used to drink with. It is the first time that she has entered the fort and she looks ridiculously out of place with her wolfskin clothes and bearskin armor and a hunting spear on her back, like an Ashlander in the Imperial City—a savage trying to pretend she's civilized. "Hey!" she says when she sees you, striding over with her chin held high. Her boots track mud and snow all over the floor, laying a trail of cold slush in her wake. "Have you lot bought up all the alcohol and run off with it, or what? All I've had the last few months is mead. I like mead, but this is getting kind of ridiculous!"
So you tell her. About the shipments being cut off, about the widespread assumption that Carius is messing with all of you, about how angry everyone is. By the time you're finished, the Nord is angry too. The soldiers of Frostmoth aren't the only ones inconvenienced by this alcohol shortage.
She's going to find Carius and give him a piece of her mind, she says. That makes you laugh. None of the guards have dared to do that yet, even as fed up as you all are; he's an intimidating man. You tell her where to find him anyway, figuring that she'll go up to his room, get mud all over it, yell at him, and either be arrested or kicked out. Then he'll be in a foul mood for a while, but it will at least give you something to chuckle about over dinner. She might even come back and share the whole story with you if she doesn't end up in the dungeons.
Carius doesn't throw her in the dungeons. You're on wall patrol the next day when you see her enter the courtyard below in a hurry and disappear into the Imperial Cult shrine, moving with an air of purpose—a curious sight, but not interesting enough to stay with you for very long. You forget all about it until you enter the mess hall that evening and someone thrusts a bottle of Cyrodiilic wine into your hand. The Nord has ended the drought with Carius's blessing and many of the soldiers are lauding her as some kind of hero. They've taken to calling her Alcohol-Bearer, a play on the Nordic title system—it is a mantle she accepts with amusement and perhaps a touch of pride. Rescuing a battalion of unwilling soldiers from their own sobriety may not be an accomplishment on the same level as the Nerevarine's, but that doesn't matter terribly. Here, it is enough to make her a celebrity overnight.
Then the wolf-men attack and nobody feels like celebrating anymore. Carius goes missing in the aftermath, leaving you all to tend the wounded and pick over the skeleton of Frostmoth on your own. It keeps you busy. There have been casualties, many of them, and it's hard work digging graves in the frozen earth. You can't walk fifteen feet through the courtyard without tripping over a pile of rubble that used to be a wall.
Saenus Lusius, newly returned from a weapons smuggling investigation, makes noise about sending search parties to find the captain but no one is willing to go. It seems likely that he's dead, and if he's not he's probably still with the monsters that took him, and none of you want to fight them again. If he lives, it's up to him to find his way back. The only support Lusius receives is from the Nord, who, upon hearing that Carius's own men have abandoned him to the werewolves, is so disgusted that she says she'll find him herself. She leaves, her spear gleaming in the weak afternoon sun, and does not look back. The fort settles into a new routine in her wake, rebuilding a little every day, and bit by bit you manage to recapture some feeling of normalcy.
One night there is an explosion on the northern end of the island, so huge you can see it from the fort. In its wake a pillar of flame lights up the dark velvet sky, turning it bright as dawn, and does not subside for days. You—and, indeed, everyone else—regard it with a mixture of amazement and unease but have no wish to investigate. When the moons run red and the Mortrag Glacier collapses in the distance, its deathscream echoing across the island, many of you talk about leaving. Solstheim is falling apart at the seams and you've no desire to be there at the very end.
But the boats have stopped coming. You're all trapped.
The Nord returns before any ships do.
You'd presumed her dead by now, a week after the glacier fell, and from the looks of it she very nearly is. When she enters the fort she walks with a limp and is leaning heavily against another Nord, a huge man with a bear's head on his own.
"Carius is dead," she wheezes without preamble when she sees you. You're not terribly surprised.
"Let's get a drink," she says.
The tavern is warm and smoky, as it always is. It smells like alcohol and, in some corners, like vomit. It's even more crowded than usual, full of disillusioned priests and soldiers shirking their posts, but that's not out of the ordinary these days. The Nord has a jug of greef and another of sujamma before she's ready to talk. She starts from the beginning, and the deeper into her story she gets the more bizarre and implausible it seems. A Daedric Prince took the captain, as well as several others and herself? That sort of thing happens in stories about anonymous people in far-off places, not to anyone you know.
Even so, you feel your skin crawl when she describes Hircine's maze.
"I found Carius just outside the antechamber, in the outer ring," she says. Her voice is steady, but she's looking at the dark liquid in her jug as she speaks and her grip is tight on its wide neck. "He still had his sword and most of his armor, but it was dented and he looked in a bad shape. He said that if we went through the maze together we'd have a better chance of escape, but he could barely walk, let alone fight. I tried to convince him to wait while I broke a path for us, but he wouldn't..." She trails off, gulping more of her drink. "Well," she adds at length, "it probably didn't matter anyway. The hounds would have found him sooner or later." Her laugh is bitter and hollow.
"We made it a fair distance. I took point, so I was usually the one the hounds saw first. They're horrible creatures—but I guess you'd already know that, wouldn't you? Quick as lightning and stronger than the Udyrfrykte. But you can kill them. If you plunge a spear into a werewolf's chest he's going to stop breathing eventually. We made it a fair distance," she repeats, as if this is something important. "Then we went around a corner and there was a whole pack of them waiting for us. Must have been seven or eight."
Her hand has gone white-knuckled. She stops to have another draught.
"They saw us before we saw them. I wasn't even sure what'd happened at first. One minute we were walking, the next we were surrounded. All I could see were claws and snapping teeth, and they—they closed in and just attacked."
She stops talking. She finishes her drink and her friend orders her another without comment. He won't meet your eyes or hers.
"Thanks, Ingmar," she mutters, and although her voice still doesn't waver you can see that her fingers are trembling. She's scared, as big as she is, as strong as she is, as fearless as she'd acted before. Hircine's hunt has changed her. It's broken something inside of her, something she's tried to fix but can only shore up in the cold light of day when there aren't any shadows for phantom monsters to hide in. She hasn't been sleeping well; you can see that in her bruised eyelids and tired gaze. Her injuries must pain her, but the horror of remembering is far more acute and it will take longer to heal. Was the Nerevarine like this, worn and haggard and aged decades by the death he'd seen? Did the Hero of Daggerfall sit in a tavern with enough alcohol to drown a horse, desperate to tell his story to whoever would listen? Do heroes always feel alone in a crowded room simply because no one else can understand the things they've been through?
"When I heard Carius scream, I knew it was over for him," she says finally and very, very quietly. "I saw him go down out of the corner of my eye. They were worrying at him like he was a ragdoll, and...something in me snapped, I guess. This was the Hunter's Game. Good men were being torn apart by werewolves for Hircine's amusement.
"Dying in battle is the best way to go for a Nord, you know. Your spirit flies right to Sovngarde." She pauses. "Not too many people know that yet. I do, and I thought I'd be meeting Shor at any moment. It made me angry and it made me scared to think that I'd get this far only to be killed by a pack of filthy wolf-men—and then what? What would happen to the rest of Solstheim?
"So I wouldn't die. I kept fighting, and they kept coming, one after the other, a wave that felt like it would never break. They tore my armor to shreds and then moved onto the rest of me, and they ripped and they pulled and my spear couldn't be everywhere at once but I tried,d'you understand, and I tried to get to Carius but there were too many of them. I hurt everywhere and it was so hard to move." She lifts the new tankard to her mouth but swallows without drinking from it. The shaking in her hands has become more noticeable. "There was a point when it stopped being about living to confront Hircine and started to be about living long enough to kill every last hound in my way. I'd settle for that, and somehow..."
"Somehow, she did it," Ingmar finishes for her. He sounds admiring but his face is solemn.
"Yeah," she agrees, staring at her drink again. "Somehow I did. When the last one finally collapsed I almost went with him, but then I thought of Carius and I couldn't. I just...couldn't. What if he was still alive? It was a crazy hope, but if he was still breathing I needed to do something to help him. That gave me my last burst of strength, enough to crawl over to him, but it was so cold in the maze that he was already stiff.
"So, so cold," she repeats. Those three words are breathed out, whispered one after the other, like a dying gust of wind. "I was cold. I was cold.I didn't understand it until I looked down and saw the hounds had ripped my stomach open. I'd left a trail of steaming guts behind me and I was feeling their absence."
A glass shatters on the floor behind the counter. "Merciful Stendarr!" the barmaid moans, horrified, and quickly finds somewhere else to be so she won't have to listen anymore.
The Nord doesn't even seem to notice.
"I've never been good with healing magic—any magic, really. Didn't learn, didn't have a knack for it, didn't want to. Kyne, I wished I did that night. I laid there next to Carius's body, helpless, knowing I couldn't get up and walk away from my own intestines. I'd die of blood loss or shock and now I wouldn't even get to Sovngarde."
She looks up now, her eyes narrow, and in them is too much rage and sorrow for one person to bear.
"Why is it," she starts, her voice choked with sudden anger, "that everyone around me always dies? Covis, Ulfgar, even that damned necromancer Aesliip...Carius...Tharsten Heart-Fang." She shudders when she speaks Heart-Fang's name, though you don't find out why until later.
You ask her how she still lives after being eviscerated. She smiles a horrible, pained smile.
"I always keep a little tailoring kit in my pack. When I'm out alone I can't bring my clothes to a seamstress to have them patched up, so I learned how to do it myself. I still had my pack with me since I'd gone to sleep without bothering to undress. I..."
She stops to brace herself against the memories she's about to speak of. Ingmar pushes her drink towards her. She ignores it.
"I'm not sure how I got the needle threaded. I was more than half dead by then, probably. Everything was grey and sort of fuzzy and I couldn't hear anything except a ringing in my ears. I couldn't think so well either. Just staying focused was—
"Have you ever been awake for a couple days in a row? Do you know how hard it is to keep yourself on track when you're that tired, how you'll start forgetting what you've done or needed to do or even what you're looking at because sleep is the only thing your body can think about? Dying felt like that. I told myself I needed to do this or I'd never get up again, but I couldn't feel anything about it. I looked at my organs there on the ground and I didn't feel any sort of attachment to them, didn't worry about what they were doing there. It was like they weren't mine anymore."
Here she goes silent again, and almost ten minutes pass before she manages to recollect herself.
"It's probably a good thing it was so cold down there—my blood clotted up and froze before I could lose all of it. But my...my organs froze too. I had to pry them off the floor before I could stick them back in. Kyne," she says again, "it was like I'd shoved a pound of ice into my stomach. I don't know if putting them back even did any good.
"I got myself stitched up. I don't remember doing it, just that with everything else broken and the agony in my stomach I couldn't really feel what I was doing to the outside of it. And then I must have passed out, because the next thing I knew I was opening my eyes and thinking, how am I still alive?"
When she awoke, Tharsten Heart-Fang had been there.
"My brain still wasn't working right then, so I don't remember what he said, exactly. It all sounded like it was muffled through a thick cloth and his face was swimming in front of me. But he said...I think he said that he was Hircine's chosen." She finally has another gulp of her drink, then slams the tankard onto the counter so hard that the greef inside slops up over the rim. "That double-timing bastard was passing himself off as a respectable man while he was working for the Huntsman!" she growls. "When he shifted on me I thought it was over, but even though I knew I should be dead my blood was boiling and I wanted to put my spear through his heart more than anything in the world. So I did. I don't think he expected me to fight back with the state I was in. It's probably the only reason I'm still here, to be honest."
How had she made it through the rest of the maze, after all that had happened? The question makes her grimace, but she answers.
"Nerves and blind determination, that's how. I found Karstaag in the Huntsman's Hall. He'd been ripped apart by the hounds. They were scattered around his body like ragdolls, so I guess he gave as good as he got. I'm glad they all killed one another, really. I don't think I could have taken them on and had anything left over for Hircine. It wasn't like I had much left in me to begin with."
Her silence this time is even longer than the previous one. Ingmar gets up to find the absent barmaid, and when he returns with the nervous woman in tow she carries a tray full of roast meat from the kitchen. The Nord picks at it somewhat unwillingly, as if she has no appetite but knows she ought to eat anyway.
"He didn't attack me straight off," she says after working her way through half a boar leg. She chews methodically, slowly, unenthusiastically. You remember seeing her dine in the tavern almost every night, what feels like a lifetime ago, and she was never a delicate or reluctant eater back then. Her table manners were worse than yours and she always belched to show her appreciation for the cook. Now she seems not to enjoy her meals at all. "Instead he asked me—he asked me what I thought a hunter's most important asset was, his speed, his strength, or his guile. You know what I told him?"
She gives up on the leg and drops it, wiping her fingers on her pants rather than sucking the grease from them as she normally does.
"I told him to go fuck himself."
The entire tavern has gone mute and her words fire into the still air like the report of a canon, harsh and shockingly loud. Though most of the other patrons had not eavesdropped on your conversation at first, more concerned with their own talk, every ear in the building is at attention now. Scores of disbelieving eyes are fixed on her; you can feel the weight of their collective stare on your body even though they're all, without exception, looking past you.
You shift uncomfortably, and Ingmar frowns at the nearest onlooker, but the Nord betrays no hint that she cares about them one way or another. They may as well not exist for her.
"Not the smartest thing to say to a Daedric Prince, I guess," she says into the oppressive quiet. "But I—"
She pauses a brief moment, then laughs. There is no more humor in the sound now than there had been earlier.
"It doesn't matter what stupid thing I said to him, does it? You already know how the story ends."
Yes, you do. You ask her to continue anyway, partially because you want to know but mostly because she needs to finish telling it, needs to finish lancing the wounds that Hircine has left in her brain and her heart. You can see it in her eyes and in her brow and in her still-shaking fingers, which clutch one another in a hopeless attempt to maintain some semblance of composure.
But her face closes up. She shrugs and looks away from you, continuing to hold her own hand. Her fingers are even more restless now, the right toying with the left, pushing at a ring you have never seen her wear before. It is silver, its head set with the carving of a wolf's face, the band unornamented.
"I pulled this off his sorry corpse," is all she'll say, indicating the spear she now has with her. It looks nothing like the one she'd had before, a great, dark-shafted billhook with a crystalline barb, sharp and curved and dangerous. It glimmers faintly, putting off an internal energy that sets your teeth on edge. You do not know what magics Hircine chose to imbue his spear with, but, whatever they are, they feel powerful. "It's not much of a consolation prize," she adds darkly. "It won't bring anyone back and he won't stay dead. But I'm keeping it. Maybe I'll take it to Vvardenfell and throw it into the crater at Red Mountain so he'll never see it again."
What is she going to do now? Will she stay on Solstheim? You want to ask but the words stick in your throat. She has been through a hell that mortal men are not equipped to deal with, and you have pressed her once already.
She seems to know your thoughts anyway. Or perhaps she wants to speak of her plans for the future more than she wants to speak of Hircine.
"I think," she says, to her tankard more than you, "that I might head out to Lokken for a while once I'm better, do some hunting that won't involve werewolves."
She empties the tankard and then staggers to her feet, catching the bar to steady herself. Ingmar rises as well but is waved off. "Need to take a leak," she grunts, and he settles back but watches her departure with concern.
"I worry for her," he tells you once the silence has grown awkward, "but the Skaal will keep watch over her for as long as she needs. She is Blodskaal. She is the Unflinching. She will always be welcome among us." After that he says nothing else, just raises his chin, waits patiently, and refuses to look at you.
They leave once she returns, heading out into the snow and the wind, and you do not see either one of them again. She has passed word of Carius's death along and tried to find some sort of absolution in the telling of her story, no longer the ebullient Alcohol-Bearer but instead the Unflinching, the Nord who had fought a Daedric Prince and his infernal entourage and won, broken in every way imaginable yet somehow still alive, and now she is done with Frostmoth. So are you. Once the ships are running again you put in a request for transfer, to Ebonheart or Moonmoth or, gods help you, to Fort Darius, and while the letter of rejection you get back does not actually have "ha ha" written on it you think it might as well. The Legion is not withdrawing from Solstheim and you, as a criminal, have no leverage to obtain a better posting.
And so you are there several weeks later, once more pulling rampart duty, when a wolf that is not a wolf cries out from Hirstaang Forest to the north. You heard the werewolves when they stormed Frostmoth and you will never be able to mistake their howl for an ordinary animal's; it's too low, too guttural, too full of rage. Your blood runs cold and you draw your weapon unthinkingly, gazing out into the darkness. Your heart is pounding and your chest has gone tight, stifling your breath. Where are they? Why have they come back?
There is no they, however. Only one werewolf roams Solstheim tonight, and it does not call a second time. At first you wonder how it escaped extermination, but when several days pass without so much as another whimper you begin instead to wonder where it went.
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