XI. Consequences
Oh, Talos and all the divines! What has happened here? Jorrvaskr has been attacked and Kodlak is dead!
Aela and Torvar were still standing battle-ready on the mead hall steps with Silver Hand corpses at their feet.
Where have you been!? Vilkas spat the words at me with a mixture of fury and anguish.
I was out doing Kodlak's bidding, I replied softly.
I hope it was worth it, because you weren't here to defend him.
What could I say to that? It was worth nothing now. If Kodlak was dead, his dream of Sovngarde had died with him. And I had only a satchel full of bloody, stinking hagraven heads to explain my absence.
The old man's body lay inert on the floor next to the mead hall’s huge central fire pit. I could see no obvious injuries, yet without a doubt, the great Kodlak was gone from our midst. It was almost as if the energy of his warrior’s spirit, once brimming Jorrvaskr to its rooftop, had left an excruciating emptiness and no way to recover. Farkas and Njada knelt by his side but said nothing. None of our other shield-siblings had died, but nearby Ria tended Athis, wounded and shaking from the shock.
And the fragments of Wuuthrad had been taken by the Silver Hand.
The call for vengeance began to rumble through the building.
We would make them pay for what they'd done.
You and I are going to Driftshade Refuge, Vilkas said, his face close to mine and his eyes full of blood.
***************
Driftshade was the last sanctuary of the Silver Hand. The place was crawling with them, and the farther in we went, the more vicious the fight.
As we opened the door to what would be the last room, I saw myself as through other eyes fighting the strongest Silver Hand leader and falling under the pounding blows of his warhammer. Would this be my end? Would I awake to the hunting fields of Hircine as Kodlak feared? Suddenly, I had a visceral connection to his sense of urgency. But then, how odd. I looked again and saw that the battle had not yet begun. The enemy had not seen us, and there was time to make the day ours, for Kodlak.
I found the fragments of Wuuthrad scattered across a rough-hewn tabletop, as if in his final hours, the Silver Hand leader had been trying to fit them together like so many puzzle pieces. I gathered them up and we left Driftshade, quiet as a tomb.
**********************
Now we had the fragments of Wuuthrad, but what were they in their shattered state besides reminders of our loss?
And then there was the farewell to Kodlak.
A massive funeral pyre sat atop the Sky Forge smithy, and there the old man's body waited to follow his spirit in release from this world. I would have thought all Whiterun would be present to mourn Kodlak's passing, but the group was small...only the Companions, Eorlund Gray-Mane, the priestess from the Temple of Kynareth, and Jarl Balgruuf. This was my first sight of Balgruuf. My mind flashed with thoughts of Helgen and the black dragon and whether I should have already gone to Dragonsreach. I'd heard no more reports of dragon attacks. That day had begun to feel like a story I'd heard long ago, more imagination than reality...unlike the scene before me which I could only wish might be undone by turning my attention elsewhere.
The Companions have their way of dealing with death among their number. Warriors more than anyone have to make peace with sudden, violent loss. A funeral reminds them all that life is fragile and often short, but they have one another to get them through. Before the unlit bier, Aela spoke of grief and weeping, but the final intonation, voiced by us all, told the living to take their leave. Then Aela set the funeral pyre alight, and the living flames consumed Kodlak’s body.
I suppose that's what funerals are for, to say good-bye to the dead and to help those left behind reorder our lives around the new absence where once there was someone we love. I can’t say it worked very well for me. Where would the Companions go without their Harbinger….without Kodlak?
The group of mourners slowly began to disperse. Aela called for members of the Circle to meet in the Underforge to grieve our last together. At this moment, I did not feel like a member of the Circle. Everything had happened so quickly since I left for Glenmoril. And I couldn't shake the feeling that the others thought I was partly to blame for it all in some way. If I had not been away, would Kodlak still be alive? If I had gone to the Jarl instead of Jorrvaskr when I first came to Whiterun, would he? What an unbearably heavy burden. I have to believe that accepting it vastly overestimates my ability to affect the flow of time and trial. How can we make our way through life under the shadow of such questions and their endlessly accusing answers? We can only act upon what we know. Perhaps it’s a blessing that we don’t know some terrible things set to come upon us, or even that we don’t know what we don’t know. Prophecy can be a worse curse than oblivion.
As I turned to follow Aela down the steps away from the Sky Forge, Eorlund asked me for the fragments of Wuuthrad I had recovered from Driftshade...and one more piece that I didn't have.
There's a fragment Kodlak always kept close to himself. Look in his quarters, Eorlund said. You must go, I cannot bear to do it.
I had never seen the halls of Jorrvaskr empty, but they were silent and still when I entered. Searching through Kodlak's possessions made his death real to me in a way that even the fiery end of his body had not. He was gone. No Companion would have considered invading the privacy of Kodlak’s room before today. Now he had no need for his clothes or his books or anything else left here in his quarters. I found the fragment....and a journal Kodlak had left on his bedside table. Maybe it was still a violation of his privacy, but I read what he had written there.
He told of a dream journey to the gates of Sovngarde. At death, every harbinger since Terrfyg who first let the beast blood into the Companions had been dragged away, willing or not, by Hircine's spirit wolf into the Daedric lord’s Hunting Grounds, but Sovngarde's gatekeeper Tsun signaled a choice to Kodlak. In the dream, a stranger came to fight the wolf alongside Kodlak. This dream was obviously the source of the concerns that led Kodlak to send me after the Glenmoril Witches. I was so very sad for the man.
Then I turned another page, and suddenly I understood what had been going on at Jorrvaskr all this time. Kodlak had voiced his concerns to the Circle--Alea, Skjor, Vilkas, and Farkas--and this understanding of the werewolf's ultimate fate had divided them. Aela and Skjor saw nothing worrying about Hircine's Hunting Grounds, and they did not welcome Kodlak's questioning of the beast blood. Vilkas and Farkas, on the other hand, sided with Kodlak, the three forging a pact of abstinence from transformation.
I had been an unwitting pawn in this struggle for souls, taken up by Skjor and Aela to strengthen their position.
And now I knew why Farkas was so reticent to say much after what he'd done in Dustman's Cairn. He was ashamed of having broken his agreement with Kodlak and Vilkas....and he didn't want to lead me down a path that they had already rejected.
I kept reading. And I was quickly reminded why it isn't a good idea to peer into the uncensored thoughts of others. You might see them discussing things a little too close to home. Kodlak was convinced that I was the warrior in his dream, the one fighting Hircine's wolf alongside him in his striving to enter Sovngarde! And when I accepted the beast blood and joined Aela and Skjor in their personal war against the Silver Hand, Kodlak was concerned not only for me, but for what counterstroke might hit The Companions in the wake of this vendetta. He knew....he knew everything.
I learned one thing more. Kodlak believed that I would be the one to succeed him as Harbinger. He'd hoped to have years to share with me the wisdom he'd spent a lifetime accumulating. Obviously, now that was not possible. And me as Harbinger? I'd been a Companion for a relatively short time. I was not qualified for this role, and the rest of The Companions would surely agree. I took the journal. No one else need ever see this.
**************
Inside the Underforge's hidden grotto, I found Alea, Vilkas, and Farkas engaged in painful discussion:
The old man had one wish before he died, and he didn’t get it, simple as that.
Being moonborn is not the curse you seem to think it is, Vilkas, said Aela.
You're free to think so, Vilkas replied, but Kodlak wanted to be clean from the beast blood, to meet Ysgramor and see the glories of Sovngarde. He's been denied all that.
And you avenged him, Aela said with quiet force.
Farkas, silent until now, spoke as last: Kodlak didn’t care for vengeance.
Those were the most powerful words anyone uttered that day—and from Farkas, the man always making jokes about not being the smart one.
The fight now drained from his voice, Vilkas replied, This is not about vengeance. It’s to honor Kodlak. We all agree he deserves that, don’t we? If we can help him cleanse his soul, even in death, I say we must go to the Tomb of Ysgramor and do it.
Aela, finally seeing past her need to defend the beast blood, agreed: You’re right. That’s what he wanted, and it’s what he deserves. But the tomb has been closed for over a thousand years. The ghosts of Companions past may not want to be disturbed. Regardless, to open the tomb we need Wuuthrad, and it’s in pieces.
As the sound of her words echoed in the chamber, Eorlund entered the Underforge with the first smile of this terrible day. Now you have it, he said. Like any other tool, Wuuthrad can be repaired. This is the first time I’ve had all the pieces to work with.
The reborn Wuuthrad was a hefty double-bladed battleaxe meant to be swung with the power of both arms and a strong back. It shown with an unearthly radiance, and at the center of its ornate head, a screaming face with sharpened ears stared at the wielder in terror.
Legend says this axe has special appetite for elves, Eorlund said. I’ve never handled anything quite like it. He held out the weapon to me: You’re the one who has carried the fragments, and I think you should be the one to carry Wuuthrad now. No one objected.
It seems that the hagraven heads may still be of some use after all.
