4E 202, Fields outside of Shor's Stone
Gerron Ironbreaker
They all charged at Alduin at once, Gerron on Kiera's right as she brandished the two blades in front of her.
Serana was in the air above, palms alight with white lightning as Vermithor banked hard overhead, circling for another pass, the Bronze Fury's amber eyes fixed on the World-Eater.
To his credit, Alduin didn't even flinch the slightest.
He narrowed his red eyes, planted his feet in the churned snow, and met them head-on.
The first exchange happened in a collision that sent whatever snow remained in the ground to sprawl. Kiera drove both blades upward in a crossing strike that Alduin turned his head to deflect on the thicker plating above his jaw.
The Ebony Blade's shadow bit at the scales and the golden flame scorched the gap between them, and the snarl that came from Alduin was deep and different from anything he'd voiced in the prior hours. These two blades together reached him in a way that nothing had before.
Gerron came in on the flank, putting two rapid magicka blasts from the Mercury Hammer into Alduin's shoulder joint as Kiera pressed the advantage. They cracked against the scales hard enough to drive the entire shoulder back, forcing Alduin's weight to shift.
It bought Kiera two full seconds of undefended neck, enough for Dawnbreaker to draw a long burning line down the side of Alduin's jaw while the Ebony Blade found the underside of his throat and stayed, the shadow eating at the edges of the wound as Kiera held it there a full second longer than was safe.
Alduin let out a roar of pain and ripped his head sideways.
Kiera was launched clear, rolling in the snow, already pushing herself upright before she'd fully stopped.
Gerron knew not to press. While the injury was real, it still was not enough to take him down, and getting close to Alduin in this instance would have been a mistake.
He circled instead, keeping himself at the flank, keeping the pressure divided just as Serana swooped in.
She clawed open a portal as three storm atronachs burst out in a single motion, all three erupting above Alduin's back, driving their discharge directly into the wounds Kiera and Gerron had already opened.
The combination of lightning in fresh wounds produced a reaction that was grimly satisfying.
Alduin's whole body lurched.
"ZUN HAAL VIIK!"
The Disarm shout from Kiera was aimed not at a weapon but at his forelegs — a technique Gerron had seen her develop in the past hour, using the shout's destabilizing force to knock Alduin's footing on the ice rather than strip an arm of its blade. The left foreleg buckled, Alduin's chin dipping toward the ground for a half-second.
"QO SPAAN LOK!"
Vermithor's black lightning hit from directly above, the strike amplified by the height of the dive, slamming into the space between Alduin's shoulder blades as he was already off-balance.
The snow around the impact point vaporized on impact. Fissures cracked outward through the frozen earth, black lines radiating eight feet in every direction.
Alduin went down on one knee. For the space of a single, held breath, the World-Eater was on his knee in the snow.
Then he rose, a mountain of black scales, and when it turned his gaze across the field, it swept them all with a look that Gerron had come to recognize as the closest the Firstborn Dragon came to genuine anger.
"FEIM ZII GRON!"
Alduin's form shimmering and going spectral for two full seconds — and every hit they landed in those two seconds passed through him entirely, Kiera's blades, Gerron's hammer blasts, Serana's frost — all of it phased through and came out the other side as nothing.
Alduin used the window to reposition, circling wide to the left with a speed that his size had no right to produce, and when the ethereal form collapsed back into flesh he was coming from a new angle that put Serana directly in his path.
"YOL TOOR SHUL!"
The fire breath became a wide sustained torrent that hit Serana and Vermithor simultaneously as Vermithor was coming in low from the opposite direction. Serana threw up a barrier that took the brunt of it, though it shattered in under a second. But that second was enough to deflect the flame's worst heat. She was launched backward by the force of it, tumbling, one arm raised to shield her face.
Vermithor was not so lucky.
The fire breath caught his right wing, and the cry of pain Vermithor made cut through the noise of the whole field. He banked hard, pulling away from the flame, and Gerron could see the scorch damage on the wing membrane, a long blistered line across the inner surface.
Gerron moved without thinking.
He put himself in the space between Alduin's continued advance and Serana, both hands on the Mercury Hammer, full charge. The thrusters lit and the hammer hit Alduin square in the face.
It was not the smartest thing he had ever done. But it worked, in the sense that Alduin's head came around toward him, and that was the point. Keep the attention divided. Keep him tracking three things at once.
What he hadn't fully accounted for was that Alduin, unlike any opponent Gerron had ever fought, was capable of taking a Mercury Hammer blast to the face and simply deciding to ignore it.
The red eyes fixed on him.
"The Dragonslayer they call you," Alduin said. "How preposterous."
Gerron broke left and jumped, an act that carried him fifteen feet sideways as Alduin's jaws closed on empty air. He rolled, came up, reached for the hammer — and saw the massive forelimb already coming down, not trying to catch him but simply to flatten him to the ground under pure overwhelming mass.
Gerron dismissed the hammer and took out Mehrunes' Razor in the same instant, blade up.
Volsung's ward flared the moment Alduin's full body weight drove him into the ground. The earth beneath him cracked as Gerron's entire world became darkness and compression and the high shriek of the ward absorbing what should have been instant death.
But the Razor was between them.
The blade drove upward through Alduin's scales at the point of impact, punching through. The wound it opened was not large, but the Ashen Curse took over the moment that it did.
Alduin screamed as his flesh began to rot and turn to black ash.
The pressure above Gerron shifted violently as Alduin wrenched himself sideways.
"Gerron!" Serana screamed.
Suddenly, the weight was gone, and Gerron laid in the imprint of his own body within the ground. His chest felt like someone had placed a building on it and then taken it off.
He coughed. Blood on his lips. He spat it and pushed himself upright.
Volsung's ward had saved his life. The ward was not going to be saving his life again for a while, he could feel it, the enchantment cycling slowly back, damaged and depleted. He resummoned the Mercury Hammer on instinct.
Ahead of him, Kiera was already there.
"WULD NAH KEST!"
She lunged forward like an arrow, both blades crossed before her, and hit Alduin in the side of the neck at full force. The Ebony Blade's shadow drove into the ash-edged wound the Razor had already opened, widening it, and Dawnbreaker's flame poured in after.
Alduin was sent sprawling.
He hit the ground hard, one wing crumpling sideways, that enormous body finally skidding through snow and frozen earth for a full twenty feet before he stopped.
The silence lasted about one second, then he pushed himself up.
Of course he did.
Gerron was on his feet. He could feel his ribs complaining with every breath — not broken, thanks to Volsung, but bruised deep. The motion of breathing was something he was going to be thinking about for the next several days.
He looked at Serana. She had recovered from the fire blast, standing thirty feet back, chest heaving, one arm marked with a burn that her healing factor was already closing. The Vampire Lord form had faded entirely, leaving her in regular vampiric strength. Still formidable. Markedly less so than twenty minutes ago.
The wound on Alduin's throat was staying. Gerron could see it from here — the Razor's ash-edged cut combined with the Ebony Blade's shadow meant it was not healing the way the earlier wounds had healed. His divine immortality was working at it, but it was working against something that had been designed specifically to undercut divine natures, and the combination of Mehrunes' Razor and the Ebony Blade together was something Alduin had likely never encountered in all his ancient years.
The World-Eater stood.
He looked across the field.
Something was different in his calculation. Gerron had been reading opponents for long enough to know when a fighter had run the numbers and found them unfavorable. Alduin was still the World-Eater. He was still standing. His wounds were severe but not mortal — not yet, not while his divine mandate remained.
But the blades together were undoing that mandate.
And the combination of Mehrunes' Razor and Kiera's two blades in concert was changing what this fight could produce.
Alduin spread his wings.
Gerron's blood went cold.
The Dragonrend had worn off entirely — he had known that for several minutes, had been tracking the fading of it at the edges of Alduin's movement. And now, with his wings unfurling, the World-Eater was making his decision.
"JOOR ZAH—"
Before the Dragonrend completed, Alduin moved first, launching himself up into the air.
The downstroke of his wings created a wind that threw Serana from her feet, knocking snow and debris in every direction. And Alduin was already climbing, already above them, banking northeast with the speed of a creature doing what he was built to do in his natural domain.
Gerron tracked him with his eyes. He was moving northeast, a direction that would take him to the Velothi Mountains.
"He's running back to Skuldafn!"
"Vermithor!"
Kiera's shout preceded the Bronze Fury's descent by about half a second. Vermithor came in low and fast, one wing favoring the undamaged side, but flying without hesitation. Gerron grabbed Serana under the arm and ran — three strides, harness, up — and Vermithor was already climbing before they were fully seated.
Serana landed heavily against him, and he felt her hand go to his ribs before he could say anything.
"How bad?" she asked, her voice completely stripped of everything except the question itself.
"I've had worse," he said, which was mostly true. Serana pursed her lips before sighing.
Gerron reached into her pouch and passed both items to her, a health potion and a magicka potion.
"Drink."
"Gerron—"
"Both of them. You're running on empty."
She paused. Then the sound of a cork, and another.
"Thank you," she said, quietly, after a moment.
He put his hand over hers where it rested on his forearm. She turned her hand and squeezed. He squeezed back.
Above them, Kiera was upright in the saddle, both blades still in hand, eyes locked on the black shape pulling away through the grey sky above the Velothi peaks.
The Dragon Aspect had faded just seconds ago, and without it she looked exhausted and definitely worse for wear. Her armor had been dented in many places, with a split lip and a burn along her forearm.
"QO SPAAN LOK!"
Vermithor's black lightning erupted forward, the beam crackling across the distance toward Alduin's retreating form. Alduin twisted in the air and the lightning passed close enough that it scorched the tip of his wing but did not connect solidly.
Gerron put two Mercury Hammer blasts after it.
Alduin rolled through both, fluid, aerial combat instinct fully engaged.
Then the sky darkened.
The clouds that had been overcast all day suddenly thickened, gathering with unnatural speed, and from above, Alduin's voice rolled down like thunder.
"STRUN BAH QO!"
The Call Lightning shout transformed the sky into a weapon. Bolts struck the ground around Vermithor in rapid succession, each one aimed not at the dragon but at the air, creating a killing field of atmospheric lightning that forced Vermithor to bank left, bank right, climb, descend, wings working hard to keep them out of the strike pattern.
Gerron held on.
Serana's hands were already shaping a ward above them, covering the entirety of Vermithor's back. It was just in time too, for a pillar of lightning descended right onto the ward a second later. Thankfully, it held.
Kiera's voice rose over the thunderstorm.
"LOK VAH KOR!"
The Clear Skies shout split outward in all directions at once. The gathered storm clouds tore apart, shredded by the Thu'um. Blue broke through the grey as the lightning ceased.
The sky was clean and open.
And Alduin was ahead of them.
Far ahead, now. The window the storm had bought him was significant. Vermithor was wounded, and carrying three people—Gerron himself in full ebony plate—didn't help matters. Alduin was in his element, unburdened, with nothing ahead of him but the peaks of the Velothi range .
Gerron watched the gap widen, but merely sighed and sat down as there was nothing else he could do but wait.
Behind them, Shor's Stone was becoming smaller and smaller. Nothing more than a dark cluster of stone and smoke against the white of the Rift, the Ebony Palace's towers just visible, the curtain wall like a ring around it. Fires still burned in a few places. He could see the faint shapes of people on the walls, and the distant forms of what might be dragons lying still in the outer fields.
The city looked like it had been through the end of the world.
Which, he supposed, it had.
He turned back to the sky ahead, where the black shape of the World-Eater was growing smaller against the mountain peaks.
Serana's hand was still in his. She had been pushed past her limits today and she was still here, still upright, still with her eyes open and tracking forward.
He tightened his grip.
She tightened hers in return, without looking at him, eyes on Alduin's retreating form.
They had the sky ahead of them, and the city behind them, and somewhere in the peaks ahead was a dead fortress waiting to become a battlefield again.
Vermithor's wings beat on, carrying them forward.
...
AN: Here we go! The battle against Alduin. This chapter was supposed to encompass all the way to Skuldafn, but it had grown way out of proportions. Even this single chapter was over 2.5k words. All together? It would've been over 6k.
Which was why I decided to just split it. The next chapter will be out tomorrow, so I hope you look forward to that.
Chapter 131, the epilogue, has already been posted on my P-Word page, along with several other fics that's out. A Game of Thrones fic as well as continuing the Dark Swordsman is the plan for the next bout after Skyrim.
Cheers guys, see ya!