A Good Man Goes To War, Ch 10: Awakening

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    Farkas rolled onto his side and pillowed his head on his bicep. He couldn’t get comfortable, and it had nothing to do with his thin bedroll or the uneven ground, or even the rush of the moonlit waterfall down in the cavern – matter of fact, that last one was soothing. They’d even felt secure enough to take off their armor – the gate leading to the cavern locked from the inside, and they’d slid Farkas’s sword through latches on the outer door.

     

    He rolled onto his back.

     

    After they’d packed up all their loot and scrolls and the stone from the coffin, Vilkas threw open the barrow’s back door and stopped in the threshold. “Would you look at that?” He motioned toward moons hanging like bright, overripe fruit in the inky black sky. “Can you believe it’s after midnight? Hours after.”

     

    Farkas shrugged, the day catching up to him. His back ached where that draugr had thrown him into the table, and his head ached with worry and dread. “I guess – hard to tell time underground.”

     

    “Want to camp?”

     

    “Yeah, up here though,” Farkas said, pointing to the floor of the little hallway leading outside. Plenty of room, and more secure. Plus, no wall looming overhead like some freakish, hulking gravestone.

     

    But try as he might, Farkas hadn’t been able to drive the wall from his mind so easily. Fire raining from the sky and bloody battle and great, flying monsters came to life behind closed eyelids. Drums and whispers and screams-

     

    And the words.

     

    His stomach lurched, and he forced the dried apples he’d eaten an hour ago back down where they belonged. How could mere speech trigger such vivid visions? He’d seen the same things back in the Pale after the dragon had lit him up and laughed, taunts spilling from its maw along with searing flames.

     

    It had spoken, hadn’t it? Could’ve been an hallucination – he’d been in a lot of pain. The fire alone-

     

    Enough.

     

    Farkas rolled onto his other side and stared into moonlight streaming through the cavern’s skylights. No wonder he couldn’t sleep. The brave face he’d worn for Britta and Danica and Kodlak and even Vilkas was nothing but a mask, and left alone in the dark, his worries and fears took control and ate through that mask like a skeever in a grain silo. He’d come within a hair’s breadth of joining his ancestors in Sovngarde, true. But the shadow of Kyne’s lips had darkened his forehead more than once before, and his sleep never suffered for it.

     

    No, death alone wasn’t enough. Skyrim was home to far more fearsome specters than death. For one, there was magic, and that dragon and the claw and the wall and the draugr fairly reeked of it.

     

    So, why hadn’t he stayed away? He’d been driven toward the wall and its fiery blather, sure. Compelled by it, to lay his hands on that blazing inscription. But he’d resisted compulsion before – he’d never killed a human being in cold blood, though his beastblood had stoked that desire. He didn’t indulge to excess – whether drink or food or women; he’d seen the effects of such indulgence in family and friends and sometimes even his own shield-siblings, and wanted no part of it.

     

    But that wall. He’d lost control of himself somehow, and loss of control scared him even more than the dragon. To make matters worse, he felt something when he’d touched it. Sort of a humming energy or warmth that…oozed…into his hands and his blood, and – yet another thing he didn’t want to admit: he felt good once it settled. Comfortable and relaxed, like he’d taken a long swallow of mead or soaked in a warm bath.

     

    Farkas rolled onto his back and screwed his eyes shut. Skjor’d told him once what he did when sleep wouldn’t come – he’d recite poetry backwards. Or songs. At the time, Farkas thought it sounded sketchy, like a trick to get him to look stupid so Aela could laugh and call him Ice-Brain again. But right now, he’d try just about anything. He was alone except for Vilkas, dead to the world and snoring a few paces away. Who’d hear it?

     

    Could he think of any poems or songs, though? Nothing he’d heard at the Bannered Mare seemed right, and he didn’t want Mikael haunting his dreams anyway, leering bastard of a bard.

     

    One of the women he’d met in Helgen had given him a book of love poems, and he liked a few of them, one in particular. His brain struggled to work in reverse, scanning through the verses to the one at the end – his favorite.

     

    “‘Home…my home…’ no, makes. ‘Home…my…makes…which soul the warms…’”

     

    He swore under his breath. Skjor might have been onto something after all. Talking backwards was harder than he’d thought, but his eyes did feel a little heavier.

     

    Vilkas snorted, a snuffly racket that echoed off the walls, and rolled over – bedroll and all – to rest against his brother’s side. Farkas chuckled softly and started over.

     

    “‘Home my…makes which soul the warm and…creep….will I burrow…that in so…stone…’”

     

     

     

    The sun seemed to fly across the sky faster than the twins could run down the rocky path toward Whiterun, even though Vilkas set a punishing pace, which suited Farkas just fine. Jogging down the trail didn’t leave much breath for conversation, and Farkas knew Vilkas’s tenuous control over his curiosity wouldn’t hold out much longer.

     

    And it shouldn’t.

     

    A burning, talking wall only his brother could hear? Flying draugr who’d knocked them both on their asses with nothing but a word? No, unanswered questions hung tense in the air between them like a too-tight bowstring, and Farkas didn’t expect Vilkas’s inquisitive nature to outlast the day.

     

    As well, both brothers knew the high stakes of their mission, and felt them rise with every step. Skyrim’s survival could well depend on the artifact and scrolls from the barrow. Vilkas hadn’t been able to read what was written on that stone, and didn’t dare break the seals on the scrolls – who knew what magic lurked in their millennia-old parchment? But maybe Farengar could make sense of it.

     

    They’d just cleared the shady mountain path and come out into the sun, Dragonsreach no more than a tiny speck on a hill far in the distance, when they heard it – a roar, out of the west. The brothers stopped in their tracks and pulled their swords. “Saber cat?” Farkas let a whisper of hope suffuse his voice – a whisper more than he felt. “Bear?”

     

    But even as the words left his mouth, he knew neither animal had made that sound. A reedy chuckle bubbled up from his chest and he forced it back down – damned if he’d ever imagined a day when a cave bear seemed a favorable opponent. Farkas stepped back under a draping pine at the edge of the forest and jerked his head to the side, motioning for Vilkas to join him. “If it’s a dragon, we don’t want to fight if we don’t have to. Maybe it’ll keep going if it doesn’t know anyone’s here.”

     

    Both brothers stood with their backs against the knotty trunk, listening as it roared again, closer this time. The forest swayed overhead. Vilkas swallowed hard and met his brother’s wide-eyed gaze. Wings. A dragon, then. No doubt. The dappled sun at their feet grew dark, and its shadow circled around to the clearing they’d just left behind.

     

    Thud.

     

    Birds flew from their nests in a cacophony of rustles and squawks, and Farkas watched them escape with envious eyes, fighting for purchase on shaking ground.

     

    “It landed,” Vilkas said in a choked whisper, and grabbed Farkas’s arm. “Fuck, Farkas. It’s on the ground.”

     

    “I know,” Farkas said, and looked from right to left, remembering his bearings. Riverwood was a couple of hours away and so was Whiterun. Not another village or farm or settlement for miles. “Just stay still. Maybe it didn’t see us.”

     

    Vilkas nodded and kept his back against the tree, shivering. Farkas understood – he felt the same way. His muscles quivered, the compulsion to run fast and far nearly irresistible. But he crouched instead, his left hand gripping the trunk as he silently lowered his body. He could just see the beast, sitting in the sunny clearing. Long grasses waved under wings held slightly aloft.

     

    “Is it the same…”

     

    Vilkas’s whisper trailed off, but Farkas didn’t need to hear the rest of the question. He’d wondered the same thing.

     

    Light gray body. He couldn’t tell what color its eyes were, only that they weren’t burning red.

     

    He shook his head. Two competing emotions lashed at his gut: first, relief that this beast wasn’t the huge black monster from the Pale, and second? Horror. There were two of them.

     

    Likely more, then.

     

    He stared at it, sizing it up in relation to the grasses and nearby trees. The length of its shadow in the mid morning sun. It was maybe a third of the black dragon’s size.

     

    “Vil. Can you hit that thing from here?”

     

    Vilkas craned his neck to look over his shoulder. “Not easily. I’d have to be closer for precision. Maybe fifteen paces or so.”

     

    Farkas considered strategy, should the dragon not leave. Should they have to engage. Every creature had vulnerabilities, even a dragon.

     

    He hoped so, anyway.

     

    Its eyes, large and round on either side of its face, were protected by bony brows. Bony-looking scales covered its body – were there chinks in between, anything exploitable? Its wings fluttered in the breeze, like thin, translucent leather stretched over a frame–

     

    It knows we’re here.

     

    The realization slithered its way into his gut and chilled his blood. His breath caught. He rose from his crouch and once again resisted the urge to run.

     

    The dragon hadn’t roared, hadn’t moved to invade their bolthole since it landed in the clearing. Even so, Farkas sensed its regard with every breath, every whisper. He felt his chest tighten. “It knows we’re here, Vilkas.”

     

    No, that was wrong. Something nagged deep inside, and he swallowed and closed his eyes. Farkas heard his own heartbeat in his ears, a staccato tattoo that belied his own terror, and he knew the dragon heard it, too. A loud beat thudded over his own, low and deep. He looked over his shoulder at Vilkas. Silence. Farkas shivered against the tree as Vilkas had, and forced himself to breathe.

     

    It knows I’m here.

     

    Vilkas cursed under his breath. “What do we do?”

     

    The black dragon from the Pale had lit his party up without hesitation, and Farkas expected nothing different from its kin once they made their move to escape. There wasn’t much they could do. Unless…

     

    It knows I’m here.

     

     

    Farkas reached for his shield and buckled it over his arm, trying to keep his movements slow and steady. “I’m going to distract it. I’ll stay under the trees all I can, but you try to get closer under cover. Get to the tree line curving off to the left, there. If it’s focused on me, maybe you can get a good shot. And then…you run.”

     

    “What?” Vilkas sheathed his sword and reached for his bow. “No. I’m not-“

     

    “It’ll be all right. I survived once, didn’t I?”

     

    Farkas met Vilkas’s thunderous stare with what he hoped was a reassuring expression. He wasn’t sure – how was he supposed to reassure anyone when his own odds of ending yet another day as a burnt corpse were so fucking high? At the very least, maybe Vilkas could escape, get back to Whiterun to warn everyone else. “This is our best shot, you know it. If we have to fight, brute strength isn’t going to get it done.”

     

    Farkas silently clapped Vilkas on the shoulder and shoved him off through the forest. Once he was safely hidden among the trees, Farkas crept to the edge of the clearing and gazed out at the dragon. It inclined its head in Farkas’s direction and shook its wings out, the curved claws at their crests glinting in the sun.

     

    A tiny gout of smoke and flame puffed from its snout and it spoke, the words nearly drowned by the pounding of Farkas’s heart and pebbles grinding under his boots as he stumbled back.

     

    “Yes, you understand,” the dragon rumbled. And Farkas did understand – but how? It wasn’t the Common tongue snarling and growling from the dragon’s jaws. His face burned hot – Vilkas hadn’t understood the flying draugr back in the barrow, but he had. And the wall…

     

    Farkas stared at the dragon and took another step back. The beast let out a low chuckle. “Then again, perhaps you do not. Your blood,” it said, tapping its chest with a claw, “your ancient blood. It has…awakened, mortal.”

     

    Farkas didn’t trust himself to speak. If he could understand this gobbledygook, this language he’d never learned, could he speak it as well? He didn’t want to find out.

     

    “It called to me, your blood.” The dragon babbled on, folding its wings back against its body. “Alight with its first Word of Power, flowing through your veins like quicksilver. Crying out for a spark.”

     

    The dragon paused, and stepped from foot to foot. Fire chuffed from its snout, blackening the grasses waving under its neck. “You will not speak?”

     

    Farkas shook his head and shifted his sword in his hand, and the dragon laughed. “Brave. Foolish. Your power is new. You cannot best one of my kind.”

     

    Had Vilkas made it to the edge of the forest yet? Farkas closed his eyes and tried to keep his head clear and calm. What if Vilkas snapped a twig on his way to the clearing, or disturbed a nest of terns? Panic bubbled up in his throat. Their plan was doomed from the start. How could they think they stood a chance against a dragon?

     

    A faint click sounded from the tree line, and a piercing shriek shattered the uneasy silence in the clearing. Farkas looked up and his mouth fell open. A black arrow barely protruded from the beast’s right eye, its gray fletching splashed with blood. Farkas couldn’t believe their luck, and Vilkas’s skill - unless the dragon had some sort of shield covering its brain, it couldn’t last much longer.

     

    The dragon threw his head back and roared, and another arrow pierced the exposed spaces between the scales on the underside of his throat.

     

    The dragon let out a strangled, keening wail and turned in the direction of the volley. Farkas pushed aside his fears and questions and sprinted from the trees, his sword held tight against his side. A gout of fire flew toward the forest, and Farkas spared a quick glance – blackened tree trunks and red-orange embers falling like rain from drooping branches. No Vilkas.

     

    Farkas ran for the dragon’s underside and its leathery wings. If the monster somehow survived its wounds and took to the sky, they’d be lost amid its fiery breath, no matter how handy Vilkas was with a bow.

     

    If his brother was still alive.

     

    He felt an arrow whiz past, and hot relief spurred his steps. Farkas swung his sword over his head and slashed through the left wing. His sword hit bone and he pulled it back, and kept running, slashing wherever he could reach.

     

    Arrows flew around him, and judging from the dragon’s shrieks, very few missed their mark. Farkas took advantage of the dragon’s distress and slashed at its back legs. A gout of fire flew his way, and he raised his shield. Heat seared through ebony, and Farkas smelled burning flesh and hair, its sweetly-acrid scent too familiar after the walk from the Pale. Flames licked at his legs before he ran out of range.

     

    It seemed to go on for hours, their pattern of attack: volley, slash, dodge. But just when Farkas started to believe the dragon really did have a shield covering its brain, its roars turned to groans, and it listed left and right. Farkas rolled from under its hindquarters into a crouch, watching in disbelief as it finally tumbled to the ground, the bones of its shredded wing crunching under its bulk.

     

    When the ground stopped shaking, he circled in a wide arc, watching the dragon’s head twist on the ground, its throat pin-cushioned with arrows. Blood-flecked jaws hung wide, and Farkas sprinted back and to the side, but no fire issued from its snout – just a ragged breath, like air pushed through busted bellows. Farkas kept his sword drawn, and slowly, slowly…stepped closer.

     

     

     

    Vilkas sprinted from the smoldering woods and watched his brother approach the fallen behemoth. Farkas’s lips moved, and he spoke. Vilkas slowed his pace and squinted. Was he seeing things? Farkas opened his mouth again and shook his head, his eyes glued to the dragon’s.

     

    No, he definitely spoke, his jaw oddly squared, as if he had an underbite. Vilkas had seen him speak like that once – they’d met an Orsimer legionnaire at the Bannered Mare and treated him to some mead. After a few drinks, he’d taught them a word or two in the orcs’ ancient language and laughed uproariously at their horrific pronunciation and jutting jaws.

     

    But why would Farkas speak orc to a dragon? Why would he speak at all?

     

    Vilkas couldn’t hear his brother’s words, but he saw Farkas’s back stiffen, and trotted closer. The dragon snarled – a gagging, rasping growl – and Farkas seemed to deflate, his sword hanging limply from his hand.

     

    The dragon snarled again, and Farkas yelled something incomprehensible, clenching his fist around his sword and plunging it into the beast’s neck. Blood pooled around his boots, but Farkas stood still, his chest heaving as he gulped for air.

     

    “Brother?”

     

    Farkas’s vacant gaze traveled from the blood at his feet to the blood on his sword, and finally his eyes met Vilkas’s.

     

    Hollow, empty eyes.

     

    Vilkas cleared his throat and took a tentative step toward his brother. They’d just fought a dragon, and won. A victorious battle with a beast they hadn’t known existed before last week, and something they’d assumed impossible to take down. So, why did Farkas seem so…bleak? “You hurt?”

     

    Farkas shook his head and cleared his throat. “B-burns on my arm and legs,” he began, peering at Vilkas through narrowed eyes. After a second’s pause, he swallowed and went on. “The fire cooked my armor and shield. Its tail grazed my head once, but it’s fine. You?”

     

    Vilkas shook his head and glanced back at the blackened corner of the woods where he’d hidden with his bow. Lucky for everyone in the Hold, they’d had a soaking winter – the fire had snuffed itself out. “That first spray of fire blew a branch back into my face,” he said, and ran a finger down a wide, red welt running from his temple to his mouth. “But otherwise, I’d say we got off easy.”

     

    Vilkas cleared his throat again. “Did I see,” he began, and frowned. Such a ridiculous question, he felt stupid even thinking of it. “I could swear I saw you talking to that dragon.”

     

    Farkas huffed and stared off into the distance, and Vilkas stepped behind the dragon’s head, forcing himself into his brother’s line of sight. “Farkas, it looked like you were having a conversation with that thing. What-“

     

    Farkas grunted and knelt to wipe his sword in the grass. He turned away from Vilkas and trotted around the dragon, his fingertips grazing the arrows piercing its throat and wings.

     

    “What are you doing? You didn’t answer-“

     

    “Next fight’s not going to be like this one. Need to know how many strikes it took to kill this bastard,” Farkas said, counting off on his fingers. “I’m counting fifteen arrows. I slashed at its wings more than I can count, and the sinews at the backs of his…knees, whatever dragons have back-“

     

    “Farkas,” Vilkas said, anger beginning to boil in his chest. He’d been patient, he really had. But he wasn’t stupid, and he had eyes – Farkas had left something out of his story back at Jorrvaskr, something about that black dragon. And then, his weird reaction to the wall. No one wanted to admit to hearing voices from inanimate objects, so he didn’t blame Farkas for his reticence. But this had gone too far. There were dragons – plural – flying around Skyrim. The time for secrets had come and gone.

     

    “Hey,” Vilkas snapped, sidling in between his brother and the dragon, “were you talking? Was it talking to you? All I heard were growls and snarls and gagging sounds, but you…”

     

    Vilkas scrubbed his hair back from his face. “That wall, you said it spoke to you. And the flying draugr. It said something – again, all I heard were snarls – but you looked at it like it insulted your manhood or something, and flew at it. Beat the shit out of it. And now this,” he said, sweeping an arm around the clearing. “What’s going on?”

     

    The brothers faced each other in a silent standoff. Finally, Farkas shook his head. “I-“

     

    He broke off. The ground beneath the dragon started to shake, and the dragon trembled with it.

     

    “I thought it was dead,” Vilkas said, backing up and pulling his bow. “Wasn’t it dead? Why’s it moving? Is there another one?”

     

    Farkas glanced up at the sky, but nothing flew overhead. He crouched a little, steadying himself and readying his sword again. But the dragon didn’t rise, and its eyes remained closed. Vilkas heard a pop and the telltale whoosh of a spark hitting an oil-soaked funeral pyre, and pulled Farkas back just in time to avoid the flames and ash whipping around the dragon’s body.

     

    The brothers watched in stunned silence while the conflagration flared, consuming skin and flesh and blood, until only bones and a few scales remained on bare, blackened ground.

     

    Glowing ashes and embers flickered from the skeleton and spiraled above their heads, coalescing in a shimmering mist. It hovered, iridescent and sparkling in the sun, and drifted.

     

    Toward Farkas.

     

    For a moment or two, the mist swirled around Farkas’s body and hung there like a living cloak. He held a hand before his face, twisting it this way and that, the mist clinging to his fingers. His eyes widened and darkened.

     

    Farkas drew a ragged breath. The mist pulsed. And again.

     

    The strange mist wasn’t hurting Farkas, at least not that he could see, but Vilkas tore his eyes away from his brother and scanned the clearing and the forest’s edge. Dead bodies didn’t catch fire and dissolve into sparkles. Was this the work of some mage? An illusionist, or even a conjurer? The breeze had stilled, and the grasses. Time itself seemed to slow. He heard a sharp gasp.

     

    The mist flickered and flared, and seemed to thin out a little. But Farkas gasped again, and Vilkas looked closer. It wasn’t dissipating at all, but disappearing into his brother’s chest, a stream of power that sank into his skin under his armor. Farkas’s eyes glowed a sparkling silver, and a choking sound escaped his lips.

     

    Vilkas tried to wave the mist away, but his hand passed through it like it was nothing but air. He dropped his bow in the burned grass and tried again with both hands, beating on Farkas’s armor. Nothing.

     

    His brother’s body finally stopped glowing and Vilkas waited, his heart pounding. He swallowed, and opened his mouth to speak, but Farkas’s scream had him stepping back and closing it again. Vilkas grasped the hilt of his sword.

     

    Farkas screamed again, a choking, gagging scream, and fell to his knees. He screamed again, and again, and just when Vilkas thought he could scream no longer, his brother’s eyes closed and – for the second time in as many weeks – he crumpled to the ground.

     

     

     

    Far to the north, hundreds of feet above the Sea of Ghosts, a woman paused, her hand clenching the spine of a leather-bound volume. She slammed her other palm against the library wall and steadied herself, her feet shuffling a little on the ladder’s bottom rung. Power throbbed deep in her chest. An odd little breeze drifted through the room, its warm eddy swirling around her body, setting her green tunic a-flutter and ruffling chestnut curls.

     

    Her heart raced. She shelved the book among its brethren and stepped to the stone floor, trying to keep her hands steady and watching warily for the librarian.

     

    Had he noticed an errant gust of wind blow through a room with no open windows or doors?

     

    More to the point: did he notice her near spill from a ladder with one of his precious books in her hand?

     

    Maybe. The librarian rose from his desk and strolled down the aisle. A ball of magelight followed, casting an enormous shadow that loomed over the books she’d haphazardly piled on a nearby table. His tusks twitched. He glared down at the books, green fingers twitching as well, but took a deep breath and rested his arms across his chest.

     

    “Fey,” he drawled, his sing-song voice gruff and warm at the same time, like caramel warming over hot jagged rocks. “You alright?”

     

    “Yes, Urag,” she said, and forced a small chuckle. “Just lost my balance.”

     

    Urag chuffed and finally gave into temptation, straightening Fey’s to-be-shelved pile into an orderly stack. “I didn’t know Bosmer could do that.”

     

    He’d not noticed her clothes and hair, then. Fey relaxed a little. Urag would stop at nothing to suss out a potential threat to his library, and an impossible wind? Unauthorized magic? That sort of investigation would bring far too much attention to her quiet little corner of the College. “Well, there’s Nord, too, in there somewhere. And you know how Nords are around books.”

     

    “I do at that.” His gaze rested on her rounded cheeks and eyes, their irises a pale shade of icy green unusual amid the deep forest wilderness of Valenwood. Fey had mentioned distant Nord blood, in passing, but her height (even with a topknot, her head barely cleared his chest) made such details difficult for Urag to remember.

     

    “Young Onmund recently earned a two-week suspension for ham-handing A Minor Maze. He means well, he does. But those pages still got ripped. But you,” he said, pulling a chair over to her table and giving her shoulder a hesitant pat, “you still look shaky, go ahead and have a seat. Take a minute. Catch your breath.”

     

    “Thanks, Urag,” Fey said, grabbing the top book from her pile and heading back to the ladder, “I didn’t know you cared.”

     

    Urag blocked her way, and nodded toward the chair. “I care. A lot. About my books. Sit.”

     

    She rolled her eyes and grinned up at Urag, but sat. Maybe he was onto something, she thought, taking a few deep breaths and trying to calm her still-racing heart.

     

    No use.

     

    Not when she knew what that rush of power signified. Ever since Ulfric Stormcloak killed Skyrim’s king and raised the stakes of his rebellion to impossible heights, she’d been waiting for it. Dreading it.

     

    When the Snow Tower lies sundered, kingless, bleeding…

     

    Fey jammed the knuckle of her right thumb into her mouth to stifle a full-blown panic, and bit down. Hard.

     

    The World-Eater wakes and the Wheel turns…

     

    Fey glanced around the library, trying to ground herself amid its beeswax-polished wood, and comforting parchment and leather scents. Urag’s thumping steps, and snow lashing at stained-glass windows. She touched a book and a silver candlestick, her fingertips tracing cool, ornate scrollwork.

     

    Her place – here, she felt safe. Confident.

     

    Hidden.

     

    But not for long. In her mind’s eye, flames engulfed the library, shattering its windows and tumbling its arches and domes, stone by crumbling stone, into the sea below.

     

    the Wheel turns upon the Last Dragonborn.

     

    “Shit,” she whispered, and hid her face in her hands.

     

     

                                                            

     

     

     

Comments

6 Comments   |   Loopdiss and 4 others like this.
  • Paws
    Paws   ·  October 15, 2018
    This chapter is utterly captivating from start to finish, your words flow like river water. Gentle with gathering turmoil at its depths before gaining momentum to cascade into roaring falls at the end. Your take on the characters gives them more dimension...  more
    • ilanisilver
      ilanisilver
      Paws
      Paws
      Paws
      This chapter is utterly captivating from start to finish, your words flow like river water. Gentle with gathering turmoil at its depths before gaining momentum to cascade into roaring falls at the end. Your take on the characters gives them more dimension...  more
        ·  October 15, 2018
      Thanks! It was a fun chapter to write, and it means a hell of a lot that you enjoyed it. 
  • The Long-Chapper
    The Long-Chapper   ·  April 10, 2018
    Great dragon battle. I know you're not a fan of battle writing, but I do enjoy them. Oooooo at mystery lady in the end. She definitely felt what the Farkanator did. :D
    • ilanisilver
      ilanisilver
      The Long-Chapper
      The Long-Chapper
      The Long-Chapper
      Great dragon battle. I know you're not a fan of battle writing, but I do enjoy them. Oooooo at mystery lady in the end. She definitely felt what the Farkanator did. :D
        ·  April 12, 2018
      Thanks! And yes, she did. What I can’t believe is that no one - neither here or on AO3 or FFN - has said anything about the poem Farkas recites backwards. I’m a hopeless romantic, true, but that’s one of my favorite parts of the game. <3
  • Karver the Lorc
    Karver the Lorc   ·  April 4, 2018
    Ok, wasn't sure at first if I've read this chapter before, but then I remembered it was the awesome dragon fight. Going ti await the new stuff from now on. :)
    • ilanisilver
      ilanisilver
      Karver the Lorc
      Karver the Lorc
      Karver the Lorc
      Ok, wasn't sure at first if I've read this chapter before, but then I remembered it was the awesome dragon fight. Going ti await the new stuff from now on. :)
        ·  April 4, 2018
      yeah, finally got it all reloaded. i will say, though, i revised this chapter quite a bit. and the first chapter a lot. and the first part (the dragon part) of the 5th. i didn't change the story, but i added some things i didn't think i wanted to add unti...  more