A/N: Splasher is the familiar term for a mudguard on a horse-drawn carriage.
There are two words I always have trouble typing, and they're familiar and furniture. WHY?!
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To be honest, when the dragon parked its ass in fronta our carriage, I thought we were all gonna fuckin die.
Lodve and Oystein – better known as Crying and Ain’t Crying – crawled outta the carriage so fast I thought that there scaly beast were their cousin makin a kissy face. Then they dragged up the swords they’d borrowed from brothers in Riverwood (the carriage itself being a generous donation from the miller, Hod), and Lodve had a shield while Oystein was more inclined to magery. The dragon – big greeny-black bastard he was, and nasty, like all the sabre cats y’ever seen taped together. Bugger drew his scaly head back and blew flames all round. I did reckon there a moment the carriage would go up as easy as the dead thistles on the roadside, then I recalled this was Skyrim and the weather was shit, and not even the dead thistles were gunna catch.
“Sonova horker!” Lodve shouts, with his shield in the air. He shoves his sword toward the dragon. “You’re lucky I’m damp!”
Oystein knocks a couple spells in the critter’s direction. It’s about as worried about the spells as I am about the ill treatment of Argonian dock workers. Oystein hangs back shoutin while Lodve runs in shoutin and wavin his dinky iron sword. Honestly you’d think if you were gun blackmail some brother for his sword, y’d at least make it a good one.
“My gods,” Ulfric croaks, coming up beside me on the splasher. We haven’t set one foot outta the woods onto Whiterun Plain yet and here the bastard lizard has tracked us down. Lodve’s shield catches alight and a second later up goes the chemical-saturated leather armour all Cloakers get around in. Lodve starts to scream, the same high-pitched bloody roar you’ll get from any man on fire, only Lodve is in armour, and the helmet muffles the bloodiness of his scream and lets us hear instead this squeal as if it’s a loose-skinned sausage boilin in there instead of a Nord.
He runs and squeals and he’s gotten no more’n twelve paces with Oystein n His Nibs n I all watchin struck lame when Old Ugly snaps his neck out and chomps Lodve’s head n shoulders clean off his body.
His legs and the bit above them drops to the forest floor with a wet splat I coulda done without. Smoke curls from Old Ugly’s red nostrils and I’m aware his eyes are on us, on Ulfric n me in our useless poxy horse cart. With a shout of dismay Oystein flings his spells aside and legs it into the trees.
Meanwhile, you’re likely here thinkin as not the carriage is just sittin pretty here in the middle of the road. Ain’t so. When the dragon landed the driver prioritised survival to manners, and over the rocky downhill path the carriage bounced no amount’a false advertising would make comfortable. Oblivion-bent on death or freedom we went. Just outta spite Old Ugly fetched up his tail and nailed poor fleeing Oystein into a spruce tree, hard enough Oystein’s guts burst through his sides and his face was hammered into a red wed mask on the conifer bark.
Happy with this, but not happy enough, with a smile out of some deep nightmare on what amassed as its face, Old Ugly starts comin towards us. Wing over wing, the claws on its bat’s wrist churning up the soft rotten leaf mould on the road’s either side. Its horrible tail kicks and swishes as it moves, and Ulfric’s voice is a soulless trickle as he watches it,
“He’s going to kill us.”
Which I thought went without sayin, but I wasn’t about to argue with His Nibs.
“He might.”
“He will.” Ulfric peels his eyes off Old Ugly and plastered em to me instead. His works his jaw, his eyes are showin sclera right the way around, he’s cranin forward and recoilin behind the splasher at once. “Br-brother Nord.” His throat works, bobbin his Adam’s apple like a float hittin a wave, “If I die, the resistance will crumble.”
And if I died, I’d be dead. No more drinkin, gamblin or horse-thievin for me. Shi-it.
“What I need you to do,” says Ulfric, watching the dragon and me alternatively, “Is get out there and stop that beast.”
The carriage rumbles on, only a bit faster than Old Ugly ploughing towards us wing over wing. Anyone’d think Old Ugly there had all the time in the world to catch us. I wonder if I’d misheard Ulfric. I hazard a guess that I’d heard right.
“Sir,” I says, and on cue the dragon takes a leap almost to the wing. My guts end up in my throat and my heart bouncing on the road. “Yer Highness, believe me when I tell you you’re the last bloke I’d want to offend. But are you mad? You send me out there and all I’m gonna do is buy you two and a half seconds while Old Ugly there chews my face off instead’a yours!”
The worst part is, Ulfric is listening. I can see him thinking of a million different ways he could use that two and a half seconds I spend dying horribly, and it’s only because he dun find a favourable enough results that he says to me,
“You may be right. What if you were armed with a sword? How much longer would you last?”
Then he picks up the sword under his belt and puts in in my hands. Behind us Old Ugly leaps up again, this time finding the wing, with a huge BAM BAM BAM of breaking air rises above the trees.
“Oh, no,” I moan, as Ulfric gets a hand on my shoulder.
“Fourteen seconds should be enough to see us clear,” Ulfric tells me. Then he shoves me over the splasher.
I hit the ground cursing his name in what I believe is an understandable protest. Old Ugly lays eyes on me as I roll outta the dust, sword in my hand rather than in my belly which I’da thought more likely. Old Ugly drops out of the sky, his shadow swamping me, and as he falls he spits a wad of crimson fire at me.
I promptly forget all about Ulfric and his blonde rebellion. I might be a Nord but no one will ever accuse me of being a decent one. Old Ugly lands and there are flames everywhere around me, the heat so intense that even this soggy miserable Skyrim soil dries and ignites. I can barely see the side of the road. He’ll probably get me like he did Lodve and Oystein, but there ain’t a thing I can do bar try.
Funniest thing is, while we’re on the subject, is I’m not on fire. Oh I’m plenty hot, n scared shitless (ask my pants), but not grilled crispy charcoal chicken. Not yet. You can bet I’d like to keep it that way.
I all but fly into the trees, the flames hot on my heels. Down the slope onto Whiterun Plain. That’s the worst way t’go. Old Ugly has trouble moving through the spruce trees. He’ll have a clear run on the plain. Clear run and I’ll be boned. Mara help me.
Thinking that I cut left and keep on running. Throw the sword away, it’s only slowin me down. Speed, speed, I wish my feet would fly me over the leaf mould, which is up to me knees in some places and a thick rotten soup where it’s fermented over the bare limestone. Sporadic flames at my back. Crackling the air. Mud between my toes. Climbing up, dipping down, over stone ruins, around then, climbing up. I’m outta breath, my lungs are packed with dynamite. The run never ends, this bloody dragon never quits.
I jump a log and snag my foot on a branch on the far side. Face first into the mouldering leaves I go. Earns me a mouthful of soil. The fall bashes the air from me. Flames spew overhead.
There, Ulfric! You’ve got your fourteen seconds! Let’s see you use every one of em, you selfish rich schemeing sonova hagraven!
Slowly, sorely I gain my feet, wonderin why everyone in Skyrim picked today to try n kill me. Old Ugly touches down on the flattish stone ruins ahead of me. He orientates himself with crab-steps n groping wings while I find my feet. We’re on a slant, or perhaps that’s just my head. I’m filthy n breathless n dressed in rags without even a sword. The dragon is thirty foot long, ten tall, coated in scales like layers of fishmail. I’m shaking, thinking maybe I busted my jaw in the fall. It doesn’t really seem to matter.
“Mortal,” comes this growl, this seething growl like from the belly of Tamriel itself. Old Ugly’s hot, sour breath swamps me. Not that I don’t stink already. “Which toy’s trick is this that you resist my thu’um?”
Hey hey hey. I ain’t resistin nothing. I’ve spent the entire thirty (give or take a ten) years of m’life very specifically avoiding resisting everything from joining the Cloakers to arrest for indecent exposure.
“I never did,” I says, “N you got no right accusin me of stuff what I ain’t done on atop’a you tryin t’kill me. I won’t stand for it.”
Old Ugly blinks, somethin he ain’t in the habit of often doin. “Huhn,” he produces after a time. “Don’t suppose you’d tell me what you intend doing about it.”
Allova sudden I’m reminded of the time years n years ago Margeth n me were down in the paddock over yonder hill near home, and into our paddock had wandered this cow. Margeth reckoned it was wild; I wasn’t as sure. He had an old woodcutter’s axe he used to cart around in those days sayin it was an Orcish battle axe. At least he acted like a right Orc when he had it. Proddin this cow n callin it names; stupid beast was stuck in the mud of our dam, let off a bit from the creek. Bit of a dry spell and the dam was mostly mud, but there was water underneath it, and a foot down the mud was thick and viscous. Poor cow was in up to her flanks. It din have any more chance of pullin itself free than Margeth did of bein an elf.
He kept proddin it, and sometimes I joined in and other times I told him to stop. The cow, distressed, mooed something terrible at us, its eyes big n black n wet n beggin us to help it. That old cow looked right at me as it was wearin out, and frank as anything it said to me, Help.
“Margeth,” I’d said, “Either we help it out or it’s dead.”
Margeth got this look then like he did sometimes. Nasty n dumb, rather than the sweet n dumb he usually had on. Somewhere in his body there was one mean bone, as I guess is in all of us, n it surfaced right then in Margeth.
“It’s dead,” he said, and he swung that axe right round into the cow’s face.
It took him two more hits to kill it. I didn’t watch after the second. We went home after, couple cow horns as trophies, and as we wound our way back up the hill Margeth said to me,
“I had’ta. What else I’d done, huh? We couldn’t pull it outta that bog.”
By time we got home the mean look in Margeth’s eyes was gone.
It wasn’t gone from Old Ugly.
Already on the dragon’s pebbly lips was the excuse to its brothers, “What else I’d done? I couldn’t let him run down onto that dangerous plain by hisself.”
Dread knocked its lead fist against my chest, cause I knew I was right. Dragon wanted to kill me, and that was the only excuse it needed to do it.
“Ain’t nothin Imma do’ll stop you.” My throat is dry; I swallow and leave it dry as it was before. The whole forest seems to be creakin, leanin in and listenin. Creakin, and - - a tiny splash of cold water hitting smooth rocks. Not the river rushin down the mountain flutes, I’ve heard that forever. A different sound. Small water, amplified, the splashing shadowing the splashing, right on the edge of hearing, cuttin in n out over the creaking, the dragon’s breath, the shuffle of my raggy clothes as I shake.
To the right, no more’n forty yards. Twenty running paces.
My eyes go wide, and I stagger backwards a pace, Old Ugly following me with his mean gold eyes. But I ain’t starin at him. There, there, behind him!
Alarmed, I choke, “Wha- what’s that?”
Old Ugly turns. So do I. Then, as Old Ugly searches for a glimpse of nothing at all, I duck low and leg it over the log and towards the sound of splashing water. Two steep verges before me; the first steep one onto the road, the next to the river curving round the mountain bend. And there, draining beneath the road into White River, is an underground creek emerging from the undercut river bank.
I’m over the first verge before Old Ugly has figured out he’s duped. I hear him give a snorting roar as I scurry across the road, kickin up sparks how fast I’m going. Ahead I hear the splashing water as loud as the bells of Sovngarde, crashing down a bank I can’t tell the height’a. Old Ugly is comin for me now, but it takes him a while t’get going and he has trouble moving through the trees. Giant BAM BAM BAM as he climbs to the wing. As soon as I hear it I jump over the edge of the bank, bracing with m’knees bent for the shallow water beyond. Hit it, fall back. Into the river and back, back against the falling muddy water of the emerging creek and into the wet rock, and back again into the grotto amplifying the glorious splashing of the creek.
The dragon’s shadow distorts behind the curtain of water. I push further n further into the soft wet black earth, never darin t’take my eyes off the dragon, or where I think he might be. Upwards slant of the grotto floor takes my feet from the water but my head towards the road bottom, and I know I can’t go far.
After circling once, twice, over the river and road, Old Ugly drops into the shallow water on the river’s edge and begins to swing its gnarly long head to n fro, snout raised, scenting the air.
I stink, like I told you, but here n now I was hopin it was the stink of the earth and not of a panicking man. My right shoulder hits a rock wall; the left empty air, and I slide into a lightless wedge where the earth has washed away from a fault line in the limestone. Spider webs tear off in my hair and against my bare legs. Old Ugly leans closer. Stirs the river bottom. Turgid water surges to his wrists, then his knees. An odd sideways swinging walk while his head goes back n forth, snuffling nostrils, wings shedding water as he shuffles closer.
Then that big gold eye swivels towards me, and I know I am found.
Backwards I go, into the earth. The floor of the grotto takes another dip upwards. Any higher and my head will be in the underground creek. Dread, this feeling as cold as the sea of Winterhold, trickles down my throat, pooling in my chest and guts. Old Ugly watches me a moment through the water, then surges forward. Water breaks over the ridges of his grey-green skull. Its snout tips up, its breath rank and hot, a long low growl shiverin at the back’a its awful throat. Deeper, deeper, and there I am slippin on the wet earth doin my very utmost to keep outta reach of his probing snout. Like a bug under a skirting board, I am. Further, further into the earth. Til I’m sliding sideways, n bent up from the low roof and the high floor, the queerest sound of water rushing above my head, blocked by no more than a sliver of mossy slate.
M’shoulder butts something hard, sharp. I throw it a hasty glance and near tear me face off on the rock wall. No use. Can’t see what I’ve hit, not with nostrils blocking the light there wasn’t anyway. I grope at the blockage, hoping to gain another yard, another foot, another inch into the grotto. Steel. Cold. Wide at the top, tapered lower – it’s a bloody sword!
Old Ugly is playin with me, knows he has lunch sorted. Without a kind thought in my head I wrap a hand around the sword’s handle and drag it out awkwardly across my body and clumsily slap it into the underside of Old Ugly’s snout. He starts, n blows a gasp’a flame, but not enough to burn me when I’m damp as a slaughterfish’s crotch. It’d cost me some force to pull the sword free, as it was content to be wedged between the rocks forever, and I’d banged my elbow something fierce. They say when you’re scairt you don’t feel pain, but here was me trapped in a little wedge of earth bein pursued by an animal what didn’t rightly exist but was plenty fierce to compensate, and my elbow was testament to the bullshit people will tell you.
To shut it up I slapped the sword up awkwardly again, this time succeeding in drivin His Nibs Wretched Breath a short way back. Not outta the grotto, not by a long way. Just enough that I could get the sword up over its head. In a flasher madness I struck into the open end’a the cave, sword level n straight out, and bypassing the great snuffling snout ran all my weight behind the sword into the dragon’s small gold eye.
Deep, deep. The sword hits bone and I push harder, slamming my weight into the sword. Dragon is flailin, his wings beatin outside, tail thrashin from what I could discern from the crashing of water and the madness inside the grotto. But its horns had wedged its head fast under the slate roof and between two limestone boulders. I push past bone. The sword sinks to the hilt in whatever dragons have fer brains.
One mighty twitch, one breathless second, and the dragon is dead. Its body sags, slumping into the river shallows, its neck straining as its head stays stuck fast. I realise I’s the problem, n haul the sword from the crushed eye socket. Head hits the ground and snaps out of the grotto. One Oblivion of a splash as the thing recoils into the shallows.
My heart’s throbbing hard as my elbow. Can tell you I have no small amount of hesitation climbin to the grotto mouth t’check the beast is really dead. With the sword in hand and breath caught in my throat I lean out through the short dirty waterfall.
There in the shallows, the dragon lies, its head n neck on the foot of wonner my limestone boulders, tail pulled straight in the deeper waters, the rest of it the better part submerged, one wing crippled up beneath it, the other floating on the water. Beautiful, now that it was dead.
I look at the sword in my hand. A gold handle and blade. Dwarven? I’d have to have it appraised. Surely a solid gold sword would shout me beers and bed for at least a couple nights.
Then again, the amount I planned on drinking soon as I got to Whiterun...
Probably not.
