4E 202, Northeastern Battlements of Shor's Stone
Ulfric Stormcloak
"Dragons!" one of the men called out. "More dragons approaching!"
"What?!"
"The ones we've killed, my Jarl! They're coming back!"
Ulfric's face contorted to a frown as the sounds of battle began ringing around him once again.
What had happened? At one moment, the battle had all seemed victorious. The next, the numerous dragon corpses that riddled the fields outside of the walls—and even the ones inside—rose up once again.
As the Stormcloaks began running around, picking up their arrows and remanning whatever ballistae survived the onslaught, Ulfric slowly ambled through the battlements, putting down Galmar by one of the crenellations.
Galmar's hand had been cut off in an earlier fight against Krosis, but the Dragon Priest was slain. Looking back to that part of the wall, Ulfric grimaced at the sight of a whole section being frozen solid. Despite having only one arm, Krosis was a dangerous mage, and more than a hundred Stormcloaks had paid the price.
A grunt of pain had Ulfric turn back to his right-hand man and oldest friend. Ulfric furrowed his brow at the sight of it. Thankfully, due to being frozen, the wound had sealed instantly, which meant that Galmar had no risk of bleeding out and dying.
"Wipe that look off your face." Galmar said. "My arm is more than worthy of a price to kill one of those blasted Priests."
"Aye," Ulfric said, taking one of the potions of healing from Galmar's pouch and handing it to him. "But not this much."
Galmar just snorted as he bit the cork and spat it out before drinking. "Stop wallowing. I won't die just from this. The fight's not over yet. Come on, the Stormcloaks need their king."
Clenching his jaw at that, Ulfric grabbed Elegance and rushed out.
Despite having heard the cacophony of dragon roars, the situation was not as bleak as he had thought. Aye, some of the dragons rose again, but it was obvious that whatever magic or Thu'um was used to raise them needed time to consolidate.
The coalition of Skyrim managed to kill half-a-dozen on the get go, while the Dragonborn's bronze dragon killed another three alongside the Dragonslayer who now rode him.
That left eleven, who flew on uneven patterns among the skies as the reincarnation took hold. One of them came for Ulfric and his men, a raspy roar coming out of its mouth as Ulfric called, "Stormcloaks to me!"
A little under forty men answered his call, the only ones remaining of the Stormcloaks on this section of the wall. The rest of them were spread amongst the towers and the rest of the walls, not that Ulfric knew how many survived.
The ones here lined up on the battlements as they aimed inwards towards the city. The dragon, a rather large one with an obvious lethal wound where a ballista bolt had pierced through a gap in the scales where the body met the wing, ambled towards them.
"Loose at will! Bring that dragon down!"
Ulfric had lost his bow in the chaos against Krosis earlier, so he had to rely on the three dozen archers he had. Just as the men were about to loose their bows, another roar marked the arrival of another dragon, who came from the southeast and flew towards them like an arrow.
Ulfric reacted. "FUS RO DAH!"
The shout tore from his throat that had pain racing across his chest. Ulfric staggered, but two of his Snow-Hammers held him from falling as the archers around them unleashed a rain of steel upon the beasts.
Blood spewed from his lips as Ulfric looked up. Thankfully, his action bore merit, for the second dragon had been pushed back and crashed upon the ground beneath, where he could see Jarl Balgruuf and Grogmar leading two Automaton Guardians and diving upon the dragon.
The first one who charged them instead found itself dead once more, with more than fifty arrows piercing its eyes as it dropped dead to the ground.
Ulfric straightened, spitting blood from his lips. His chest burned with the kind of deep, radiating ache that went beyond muscle—the Thu'um had a cost, and he had been paying it all day.
Only the Dragonborn seemed immune to it. He had watched Kiera from a distance earlier in the battle, unleashing shout after shout as though the power cost her nothing. Her physiology was simply different. The Greybeards could do the same, he knew—there were techniques, ways of breathing and gathering the Voice that mitigated the damage—but he had left the Order too soon to learn them.
He turned away from the thought.
The battle on the northeastern wall had settled into a brutal rhythm over the following stretch of time—attack, repel, regroup, attack again.
Two more of the risen dragons had come for this section of the wall in the hour since Alduin's resurrection shout, each one requiring every arrow his men had to spare and more than one desperate Unrelenting Force to drive them back or buy the archers enough time to bleed them down.
His Snow-Hammers were his most reliable men in those moments. Where the regular Stormcloaks needed a beat to react, the elite warriors of his guard were already moving—shields up, spears out, forming a hedge of steel against the raking claws and snapping jaws that came over the battlements.
But Talos, even they were flagging.
He saw it on the set of their shoulders. Each one started to move a half-step slower, started to plant their feet instead of pivoting, exhaustion marring in their bones.
Battle fatigue. It came for every man eventually, even the finest among them.
Ulfric himself was not immune.
His sword arm burned. His lower back had been knotted since the fight with Krosis. The blood he kept spitting was a reminder that he had used the Voice more times today than in all the siege of Bthardamz. His Shouts had been powerful—he was no common Voice-wielder—but he was not the Dovahkiin, and his body had been reminding him of that distinction with increasing insistence.
He pressed forward regardless.
A king led from the front. He had believed that since the day he first picked up a sword, and he would keep believing it until the last.
"My Jarl." Hulfden, one of his Snow-Hammers stepped up beside him, voice low and measured. Hulfden—a veteran of a dozen campaigns, one of the steadiest heads Ulfric had. "Our scouts report two more incoming from the north. We lost all contact with our men stationed on that wall."
"How far?"
"Maybe half a minute."
Ulfric exhaled once through his nose. "Send word to Frorkmar's archers on the south tower. If the northern tower men can hold the attention of the first dragon for thirty seconds, the crossbowmen should be able to hit the second before it reaches the wall."
Hulfden gave a short nod and moved.
Ulfric turned back to his section, eyes moving across the battlements. His men were tired, but they were holding. The discipline he had driven into the Stormcloaks over years of campaign was paying its dividends now. Tired men who were disciplined could still fight. Tired men who were not were just bodies waiting to fall.
A distant boom rolled from the southeast, then another.
Ulfric's jaw tightened.
The battle out there had been rumbling with that quality all day. The Dragonborn against Alduin.
He couldn't see it from here. The northeastern wall and the field to the southeast were separated by the whole breadth of Shor's Stone, and the angles were wrong. Smoke from the city's battle-damage filled in whatever gaps the walls didn't create.
He had caught glimpses earlier—brief flashes of multicolored lights in the sky above the city's southern edge that he suspected were the Dragonborn's Dragon Aspect—but that was all.
Whatever was happening down there, it was beyond his knowledge and his reach.
That was its own particular kind of difficulty for Ulfric. He was not a man who had ever been comfortable trusting outcomes he couldn't influence. But there was a time to recognize the limits of what one man could do. The Dragonborn would either succeed or she wouldn't, and the best thing Ulfric could do for her was to keep the risen dragons occupied so they didn't pile onto whatever she was already fighting.
Another half-hour passed through the grinding labor of trying to kill things that refused to easily. The two dragons from the north were taken down—one by the crossbow volley, the other requiring Ulfric himself to hammer it with Elegance when it got over the wall and landed in the street below, pinning a cohort of Hold Guards beneath one wing until Ulfric and three of his Snow-Hammers opened its skull with enough sustained force to finally drop it.
He could barely move his sword arm afterwards, but he kept fighting nonetheless.
One of the healers was binding a cut on his lower abdomen—a claw had caught him across the seam, just shallow enough not to be serious—when one of his men called out.
"My Jarl. Something in the streets below."
Ulfric turned.
From the northeastern battlements, he had a view down into one of the broader avenues that cut through this district of the city. The street had been mostly cleared—the undead pushed back, the rubble of collapsed buildings shoved to the sides by Automaton Guardians earlier in the day.
But there, a massive werewolf came around the corner at the far end of the avenue in a bounding leap that covered thirty feet in a single stride.
Ulfric squinted as he spotted a figure on his back, clad in Dawnguard armor with a warhammer across his back. Isran, the Dawnguard's leader.
Not seconds later, Vermithor appeared from the south. The so-called Bronze Fury descended, banking hard as his wings threw up a spray of snow as he came down low over the avenue.
The werewolf slowed, and Ulfric watched as Gerron Ironbreaker dropped from Vermithor's back to the street below in a rolling dismount, landing already moving, crossing to Isran in three strides.
The exchange was brief.
Isran reached into something at his side—a wrapped bundle—and handed it down to Gerron. A few words were exchanged, too distant for Ulfric to catch even a syllable. Gerron took the bundle, nodded once, and turned back.
Vermithor waited, hovering low over the street. Gerron grabbed the harness and hauled himself up onto the saddle in a single practiced motion and Vermithor was already climbing before he was fully seated.
The Bronze Fury banked towards the southeast.
Ulfric watched them go until the bronze shape of Vermithor was swallowed by the grey haze of smoke and winter sky that hung over the city's southern edge.
He breathed out from his nose as Ulfic turned the scene over in his mind.
He had no idea what in Oblivion the bundle nor where it had come from. He had no idea what was happening on the field to the south, beyond the distant sounds of a battle that had been rattling the air for hours.
But he knew enough to realize that whatever exchange required Gerron Ironbreaker to personally intervene better be the answer to all this madness.
Whatever was in that cloth better be the answer to all this madness.
Hulfden stepped up at his shoulder. "My Jarl. Orders?"
He turned back to the wall.
"We hold this section," he said. "Focus all arrows and bolts on the remaining dragons and keep their attention on us."
He looked at the sky where Vermithor had disappeared.
Whatever happened next, it was in other hands now.
…
4E 202, Field outside of Shor's Stone
Kiera Fendalyn
She had been in the air all day, and Alduin had been waiting.
That was the thing she had learned in the past few hours, something she did not expect from the World-Eater. It was not his size or power that made him a threat, but his patience.
Alduin had never struck her as patient. He had always seemed like force made manifest, unstoppable and immediate. But on the ground, stripped of flight by the Dragonrend shout and denied the open sky that was his natural domain, he had become something else entirely. Something deliberate and calculating and most of all, dangerous.
He had remained steady despite being cornered by the Dragonborn and a Vampire Lord who was the chosen of Meridia.
She had felt it in the way he moved. The slow, methodical rotation as he tracked both of them, never fully committing to one angle, never overextending the way a lesser opponent would when they grew frustrated.
Even grounded and wounded as he was from Vermithor's opening fly-by and the earlier assault. He was thinking.
The World-Eater had been fighting since before the First Era. He had killed things she couldn't imagine. Which was probably the most frightening thing about him, in the end. He was a being with literal centuries of experience, a true advantage he has over her that could not be matched through power alone.
She had Dawnbreaker in her right hand and Dragon Aspect still blazed around her, but she could feel the torch burning down to its last third.
Dragon Aspect was not infinite. Even with the souls of Odahviing and Durnehviir having amplified her reserves at the moment of their deaths, the shout's duration was not endless. She had pushed it past its natural limits already. Every additional minute was borrowed time.
She could not afford to be patient.
On the other side of Alduin's massive form, Serana stood in a form that surprised her. She wasn't there when her friends fought Harkon, so she had no reference point to what it would look like. Even the few vampires Kiera had fought and slain as a Vigilant never showed such a dangerous ability.
The crimson of her eyes had dimmed to something colder, the pupils sharpening, and behind the irises, a faint white light had begun to glow that had nothing to do with Molag Bal's gift and everything to do with the other power that lived in her now.
Meridia's mark. Even in the Vampire Lord form, it was there.
Kiera met those white-tinted eyes and they nodded at each other. They knew what needed to be done.
Before they could, Alduin launched himself without preamble.
The speed Kiera had attributed to him carried his lunge across the snow-covered ground in a surging movement that was half-charge and half-pounce, the great head sweeping low and then snapping upward with his jaws open wide enough to swallow a horse whole.
Kiera was already airborne, the Dragon Aspect's enhanced speed letting her burst backward and upward as the jaws closed on empty air below her boots.
She was not fully clear.
One of the blunt horns above his upper jaw caught her across the hip as he continued the motion. It was only a glancing impact, but one that was done by a creature the size of a small keep.
Kiera spun, Dragon Aspect absorbing the blow, but her trajectory went wrong and she came down faster than intended, landing hard in the snow and rolling.
Up. Up. She drove herself upright before she'd fully processed the pain, which would come later.
A sharp decline in temperature had her turn to Serana, who unleashed a breath of frost that wasn't the Thu'um, but the Vampire Lord form gave her a version of it that was ferociously close—a sustained torrent of freezing magic that hit Alduin broadside as he followed Kiera's trajectory.
It didn't stop him, but it gave her a half-second of hesitation as the cold registered in his ancient nervous system, scales paling slightly along his left flank where the temperature extremity had hit.
Kiera was already moving.
"WULD NAH KEST!"
The Whirlwind Sprint carried her along the ground at a speed that turned the snowy field into a blur, closing the distance before Alduin had fully reoriented from Serana's attack. She drove Dawnbreaker upward as she passed under his neck, aiming to keep his attention fractured, and the blade opened a long, burning gash along the underside of his jaw that made him wrench his head away with a snarl.
She got past him, and turned as Alduin raised his head and looked at her, and his red eyes were not angry.
They were interested.
"You have learned since High Hrothgar," he said, his voice carrying that resonance that pressed against the inside of her skull no matter how many times she heard it. "The Dovahkiin I faced above Paarthurnax's mountain did not move like this."
"I've had time to practice," Kiera said.
"Geh." A low rumble that might have been a laugh. "Indeed you have."
He turned—far faster than she was ready for—and his tail came around in a horizontal sweep that Serana barely escaped by throwing herself skyward on her wings. But Alduin was not done; the sweep had been a feint, the true attack was the follow-through as he spun his body and drove his shoulder into the cluster of frost atronachs Serana had summoned, destroying them all simultaneously in a single crashing impact that sent chunks of ice scattering across the field.
Serana landed thirty feet back, wings buffeting against the momentum. Even in the Vampire Lord form she was breathing hard—the enhanced healing factor of this state had been closing the cuts and abrasions from the ongoing fight but the pace they were keeping was faster than even accelerated vampire healing could fully compensate for.
Kiera pressed forward.
She did not give Alduin the moment to reset.
"ZUN HAAL VIIK!"
The Disarm shout hammered into Alduin's forelegs, an unconventional application, but the shout didn't require a weapon to disrupt.
The force of it staggered his front left leg enough that his footing on the icy ground went briefly uneven. She was on him in that half-second, climbing the shoulder joint with the Dragon Aspect lending her enough strength to make the move viable, driving Dawnbreaker down into the gap between neck-plates where the scales thinned.
The blade connected. Alduin's roar was immediate and deafening.
Then his neck whipped sideways.
She held on for one terrible moment before the force of it threw her clear, and Kiera tucked as she flew through the cold air and came down in a controlled roll that still rattled every bone in her body.
By the time she righted herself and rose back to her feet, Alduin was already turning. The wound at his neck was bleeding, but she could see his divine nature already working at it, not closing it so much as refusing it.
A wound from Dawnbreaker wouldn't heal outright, but he would sustain it far longer than any other mortal could.
Serana came in from his flank while his attention was on Kiera, and what she unleashed was not frost this time. She drove both hands forward and the lightning that erupted from her palms was not Destruction magic's standard crackling blue—it was something infused with that white Meridian glow, a blinding bolt that burned brilliant against the grey sky and slammed into Alduin's left side with enough force to leave a visible char across three scales.
Alduin's head whipped toward her with a snarl. A real reaction, that. Not calculated.
He was hurt.
But he was also done being tested.
"VEN GAR NOOS!"
The Cyclone shout erupted from his maw in a howling vortex that screamed across the field and forced Kiera to abandon her advance, breaking left as the winds tore at her, the Dragon Aspect's fortification straining against the raw atmospheric force.
She carved a path out of the cyclone's edge rather than trying to hold against it, using the shout's momentum to swing her wide, buying distance.
When she looked back, she saw that Serana had not gotten clear.
She had used her wings to escape, and she had gotten mostly out of the shout's path. One of the vortex's outer arms had caught her, and she came down hard in the snow thirty yards away. She recovered, wings snapping wide to catch herself before impact was total, but she came up slower than before.
Faster healing or not, even Serana had limits.
And Kiera felt Dragon Aspect giving ground. The quality of light around her was still bright, but marginally less so. She had the souls of two slain Kruziik amplifying her reserves, but the battle had been going for a long time.
Alduin seemed to realize it as well.
He turned toward her, and there was something in his red gaze that she had not seen before today. Was it acknowledgement, or respect, she did not know. Nor did she care for it if it came from him.
It was only for a moment, then he lunged again.
She went left as the jaws came down, but he had anticipated that as the head swept to track her.
Dragonflesh came up in her free hand in a flash of instinct just as the fangs came down on her.
A cry of pain left her mouth as the jaw clamped down. Luckily, her shields held. Dragon aspect enhanced dragonflesh was enough so that the fangs didn't pierce.
But the force didn't care about piercing. The weight of his jaws closing on her, even with the magical reinforcement intercepting the fangs, drove her straight into the ground with a pressure that was staggering. The snow compacted to frozen earth beneath her. Her vision went white at the edges.
She could not get out.
His jaws tightened as another cry of pain left her mouth. Alduin pressed harder and harder, the biting force growing by the second.
That's when the world turned bright as lightning came in two simultaneous bolts, blazing white with Meridia's light, slamming into the soft underside of Alduin's belly with a loud detonation.
The field shook. The shockwave rolled through the ground and through Kiera's compressed body and through Alduin's ribcage in the same instant.
Alduin's jaws opened as his head wrenched back with a bellow of pain.
Kiera drove herself upward through the gap, tearing free of the compacted snow and took to the air, landing ten feet away in a crouch and roll with Dawnbreaker already raised.
Her chest heaved, but her grip was steady.
She looked up, Alduin had rounded on Serana.
The retaliation came immediately, he dropped the World-Eater's dignity and simply charged, the tail sweeping around in a vicious horizontal arc.
Serana threw up a solid barrier of frost in the last instant, cushioning the blow, but it was still the World-Eater's tail. The barrier shattered and she was launched backwards through the air, wings snapping wide and failing to fully arrest her momentum before she hit the ground in a rolling tumble that carved a long furrow through the snow.
She came up bloody.
The vampire healing was already working—Kiera could see it at the cuts on her face, closing in real time—but it wasn't fast enough to matter right now. Serana rose to one knee, one wing hanging at a wrong angle, and raised a hand. Two more frost atronachs blinked into existence in front of her, charging without hesitation.
Alduin spun.
A single motion, and all the atronachs exploded.
Everything in a twenty-foot radius scattered.
Serana was thrown back again by the shockwave, rolling and finally staying down, breathing in sharp pulls. Her form was still the Vampire Lord's, which meant she wasn't fully out of it yet.
Kiera was moving before the thought fully formed.
"YOL TOOR SHUL!"
The fire breath hit Alduin across the back, a torrent of orange flames that brought exactly the reaction she needed. His head came around with a snarl, red eyes swinging back to her, the true threat, the Dovahkiin with the Dawnbreaker and the Thu'um.
Serana used the moment. She pushed herself to her feet, wings unfolding raggedly, and launched herself into the air, gaining altitude; she was slow however, the flight erratic from the wounded wing.
But she got away from his immediate range, which was what mattered.
Kiera faced Alduin, their eyes meeting.
Just the two of them, again. The fated opponents.
The field around them was utterly ruined. Scoured and churned and scattered with the detritus of a fight that had been going for too long on both sides.
Kiera's Dragon Aspect was burning lower than she would have liked. Her arms ached from Dawnbreaker's weight, not because the blade was heavy but because she had been swinging it for hours. The Dragonflesh had taken the brunt of Alduin's bite and held, but it had dissipated the moment she had gotten clear.
The Dragonrend shout would wear off any second now. Alduin's wings had been flexing for the entire fight, testing the compulsion's fading grip. He would be airborne again soon. That would change everything, because as formidable as Kiera and Serana was in the air, fighting a dragon in his natural element was a categorically different problem from fighting a grounded one.
She needed to ground him again before he lifted.
Dawnbreaker alone was not enough to end this. She had known it since the second hour of the fight, when the wounds she dealt stopped slowing him the way they should have. His divine immortality was too deeply threaded through him. Meridia's fire could hurt him, could harm him, but it couldn't unmake the nature of what he was. And she needed to do something more than simply grind him down.
Something that could unmake him, something she didn't have.
She kept moving, kept pressing, kept landing Dawnbreaker strikes in the gaps when she found them and using the Thu'um to create the gaps when she didn't.
"JOOR ZAH FRUL!"
The Dragonrend shout slammed into Alduin for the second time as his wings had just begun to spread, and the mortal compulsion crashed down over him again, forcing the wings closed, driving his head down. She could feel the strain it put on the time limit of Dragon Aspect, but the way he staggered with a sound that was genuinely furious made it all worth it.
"You persist," he said.
"Tenacity is a Dragonborn virtue," Kiera replied, rolling under a foreleg swipe and coming up inside his guard to drive Dawnbreaker into the joint above his knee. The golden flame scorched deep. He wrenched the leg away and she let the blade come with her, keeping her footing.
From above, Serana descended again, her white lightning searing into his back, keeping the divide of his attention active. The lightning wasn't as powerful as the one earlier, but it was enough to force him to track two threats neither of which he could ignore.
It was working, not perfectly. But it was working.
And then she heard it, a sound so familiar to her ears. The specific quality of Vermithor's wings at speed, the thunderhead approach of the Bronze Fury when he was coming fast and intentional and committed—
"QO SPAAN LOK!"
The lightning that hit Alduin was black this time, coming in like a hammer from the Divines.
The World-Eater was driven forward, his enormous body lurching, his feet carving long furrows through the frozen earth as he was pushed by a force that demanded he move. Fissures split the ground radiating outward from the impact point, the frozen earth cracking in a web of black lines.
Alduin forced himself to stop and shook himself as smoke rose from the burns on his back.
He turned his head.
Kiera was already looking.
Vermithor had pulled up, banking hard, the Bronze Fury's amber eyes alight. And from his back, Gerron dropped.
He hit the snow like meteor, rolling with the impact as an explosion of snow burst upwards at the moment he landed. He came up moving, crossing the churned field between them in long strides. His hand was extended toward her, holding a bundle of dark cloth, bundled tight around something that pressed shadow out through the wrapping like smoke through a closed fist.
"This is for you," he said.
She took it, blinking, before tearing the cloth away.
The Ebony Blade lay in her hand.
She remembered studying about them in Cyrodiil, during her training as a Vigilant. The Webspinner's weapon, forged for betrayal and shadow and the careful unmaking of things.
It pulsed once against her palm, and Dawnbreaker responded.
There was a resonance between the two weapons, like two strings plucked at different ends of the same instrument. The golden flame of Dawnbreaker brightened a degree. The shadows from the Ebony Blade deepened.
Kiera raised both blades.
Dawnbreaker in her right hand, its golden flame blazing steady and clean. The Ebony Blade in her left, shadows coiling from its edge with unhurried purpose. Where they existed together, the light and the shadow didn't cancel each other out. They braided. Gold threading through darkness, darkness giving the gold depth, two things that should have been antithetical existing instead as a single resonant whole.
Her Dragon Aspect blazed.
Alduin looked at the two blades.
And for the first time since the battle began, Kiera saw something in his ancient red eyes that she had not seen before.
Not fear. Nothing so simple as that. Alduin was the Firstborn of Akatosh; fear was a concept beneath his notice.
But recognition. An awareness of what those two blades together meant.
He narrowed his eyes.
Kiera's boots found their footing in the torn snow.
At her back, Gerron was already moving to the side, raising the Mercury Hammer. Above them, Serana descended, Meridian lightning gathered in both hands.
Kiera exhaled once.
Then they charged.
…
AN: The two halves of the field finally converge.
We're finally here in the main event, the battle to end all battles. This chapter was almost six thousand words, that's like the length of two chapters in one.
The Kiera and Serana fight just kept on going, truly I didn't expect it. Fight scenes are usually a struggle for me, but this one just went on and on and on. Kiera and Serana have lacked a proper fight scene together where it was just the two of them, and they complement each other well.
Serana's nuking potential as a sustained ranged bombardment and Kiera's front-line Thu'um-and-blade aggression is exactly the dynamic I wanted to show. But even then, Alduin remains genuinely threatening throughout, he's been fighting since the Merethic Era, and he fights like it.
I debated whether or not to split it into two chapters, but then thought against it. I think this would fit better than just splitting things and breaking the tension.
12 advanced chapters are available on my P-word. Chapter 131 should be available by the time this chapter is posted. Just look up my name, TeemVizzle, and you'll find me.
For free users, you can get 2 chapters ahead instead if you're interested, just sign up and you can get other first chapters for free for a few of those fics (Game of Thrones, Young Justice, and One Piece).
Cheers lads.