The Speaker 18: Melancholy

• Posted by Clement Bilhorn February 10, 2013 - 746 views

  I arrive at Skuldafn and Odahviing takes off. There's nothing more to it now, just me and the inevitable path to Alduin, to finish what he started, what I delayed, and what fate has finally decided should end.

  

  Or not fate. I am, after all, here of my own volition. Paarthurnax encouraged me, Lisin pushed me, Delphine ordered me, but I still made a choice, just as much as I made a choice a year ago to ignore it all and try to find myself in pursuit of riches. 

  It's not fate that fells every dragon at my hand. It's me, the dragon I've become. The dragon I am.

  

  Paarthurnax is right--the Dov are bound less by time than the other races. We can move forward or backward, sometimes not moving at all, simply making the world bend around us. It doesn't matter the plans of others--we simply glide on, building the future with every word on our tongues, every beat of our wings, every arrow on our string.

  

  So let Alduin throw his armies of Draugr at me. They're nothing, just the faded husks of a warped and broken civilization spent long before its time passed.

  

  And let him send his brothers at me, those weak and cowering bodies that dare take the name of Dovah. No dragon would so readily submit to the beck and call of one of their own kind.

  

  Because being a dragon has nothing to do with the strength of one's body or the power of one's voice or the size of one's ego.

  

  Being a dragon is about understanding one's place in the world, knowing that to be a dragon is to be the pinnacle of creation, the most beautiful and glorious things Akatosh ever made. And with that birthright comes a responsibility, to make dragons something to be revered and admired, not out of fear, but out of amazement.

  

  The dragons should have been a stabilizing force in the world, the cornerstone of creation, the embodiment of such awe that all else would fall into place around them. They should have been a light so brilliant that to stare at it would only throw the rest of the world into clearest relief.

  

  But Alduin wanted more. He raged against the place that was made for him and wanted the entire world to bow to him on bended knee, eyes cast to the ground and away from the light. He sold this lie to his brothers and deceived them all. 

  And now it falls to me to kill them.

  

  I'm sorry for Alduin. I truly am. We are brothers in every sense of the word, but brothers estranged, he the arrogant prodigal, spitting in the face of his father, and I the lost orphan, trying to find myself in a world much bigger than I. 

  

  And that's what I've come to realize. Too often was I tempted down the same path as Alduin, thinking that simply because I had the power to do so, that I should do so. And while it is the nature of dragons to make paths, not follow them, the path I have left is not the one I would have chosen could I do it again.

  

  But it is my path regardless, and though it is I who make it, it is also I who follow.

  Wherever it leads.