4E 202, Soul Cairn
Gerron Ironbreaker
Gerron could still feel that insidious tug, like a hook sunk deep into the core of his being.
Alduin's pull gnawed at his soul with every step he took, a pressure that didn't belong in any sane reality. It wasn't pain, not exactly. More like gravity had decided his spirit weighed more than it should.
He forced it aside.
There was work to be done.
He pushed forward through the ashen terrain, Automaton Guardians flanking him in perfect formation. Their heavy steps crushed the blackened sand beneath them, utterly indifferent to the metaphysical catastrophe unfolding above. Gerron envied them that, just a little.
The Soul Cairn itself was getting worse, like a scene straight from the apocalypse.
The purple lightning kept falling from the skies with greater intensity, striking the grounds with enough force to vaporize. The meteors that rained down in erratic arcs stopped being strategic and became more of a hazard as time went by. Every impact sent tremors through the Cairn, as though the realm itself was screaming in protest.
'Alduin and the Ideal Masters are done playing tug-of-war', Gerron thought grimly. 'Things are escalating.'
High above, Odahviing and Durnehviir still circled one another, locked in combat. Gerron could tell even without his Insight that neither dragon was fighting to win. Their movements were restrained, deliberate so.
'They're stalling. Both of them.'
Odahviing wasn't calling the storms Gerron knew he could. No titanic whirlwinds, no city-flattening gales. Just enough violence to look convincing. Durnehviir, for reasons unknown to Gerron, mirrored that restraint.
All of it was theater, meant to buy Alduin time while the other Dragons wreak havoc upon the Cairn.
That was when the shadow crossed over him.
Gerron looked up just in time to see a bronze-scaled dragon a few shades lighter than Vermithor banking sharply, its wings beating toward him with murderous intent. Its roar rolled across the ground, heavy with malice and hunger.
He didn't break stride.
With a practiced twist of his wrist, the Mercury Hammer responded instantly. Gears whirred and clicked as the hammerhead unfolded, plates sliding apart like the petals of a blooming flower. Runes flared along its length as the weapon shifted into its heavy crossbow configuration.
Gerron braced, lifted, aimed.
He pulled the trigger.
A compressed bolt of raw magicka screamed through the air, striking the dragon square in its wing joint. The impact detonated with a thunderous crack, tearing through scale and sinew alike.
The dragon howled as it spiraled out of control and smashed into a black stone structure nearby. Before it could even recover, the Automaton Guardians were on it.
All twenty bore down upon the dragon with their enchanted blades, hacking away at its scales as bone shattered.
The bronze dragon was dead within seconds.
Gerron grinned, it was good to see the weapons worked against the damned beasts
The Reaper's Lair came into view shortly after. A squat, foreboding structure half-sunk into the Cairn's surface, as though the realm itself had tried to bury it and failed.
Its walls were carved from the same black stone as Valerica's castle, but where the castle felt defensive, this place felt… expectant.
Like it was waiting.
Gerron slammed through the locked doors without slowing, wood and metal exploding inward under the force of his shoulder.
Inside, the air felt thick and heavy. The walls lined with carvings, depictions of a towering, masked figure cloaked in shadows, a massive axe cradled in its grasp. Every image showed the same thing: judgment. Finality.
'Cheery place,' Gerron thought dryly.
At the center of the chamber stood the contraption, a stone receptacle etched with runes so old they barely registered as language anymore. Three empty indentations waited patiently.
A translucent prompt shimmered into existence before his eyes.
[Reaper Shard Receptacle]
The Reaper, once a certain Prince-serving Dremora Lord swhose soul had been claimed by the Ideal Masters. After eras of torment and enslavement, his essence warped into a being of pure death.
To summon the creature, three gems containing powerful souls must be placed within the receptacle.
Gerron exhaled slowly.
"Right," he muttered. "Let's do this the easy way.".
He unclipped Bronze from his belt, the automaton shifting as its form reconfigured. Metal plates folded and rotated, reshaping into the familiar owl frame.
"Sorry, buddy," Gerron said quietly. "I'll put you back together in a minute."
Bronze let out a soft, mechanical hoot.
Gerron carefully extracted the gemstone housed within the construct's core. The light inside it pulsed faintly, still stable. He repeated the process with the Spell Shield and the Crown of the Rift—nonessential, for now, but potent enough to serve their purpose.
Three high-grade soul gems.
'That should get your attention.'
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the air tore.
Mistmen phased into existence around the chamber, shrieking as they lunged forward. Gerron didn't even flinch as the Guardians moved instantly, tearing through their misty forms.
The creatures dissipated into nothingness within moments, their ambush utterly ineffective.
That's when the ground began to tremble.
Something vast and wrong started pulling itself free from beneath the floor.
A colossal figure rose, ghostly and half-formed at first before solidifying into a towering presence. A mask concealed its face, crude and executioner-like, with only two dim red orbs burning where eyes should be. A massive battle axe loomed behind it, as long as it was tall.
The lair grew colder. Darker.
Even Gerron felt it then, a pressure against his mind, whispering inevitability, futility, surrender.
He narrowed his eyes and pushed back, the pressure dissipating as if it was never there.
"The Reaper, I assume?" Gerron said, tightening his grip on the Mercury Hammer.
The thing did not answer.
Instead, it stared.
Gerron took a careful step backward. Then another, leading it outside. The Guardians mirrored his movement, maintaining formation as they exited the lair.
The Reaper followed.
Its gaze shifted skyward, fixing on the dragons tearing through the clouds. For a moment, its attention lingered there, calculating, assessing.
Then its eyes snapped back to Gerron.
Not to his face.
To the hammer.
Gerron froze.
'…Ah.'
Slowly, deliberately, he dismissed the Mercury Hammer, returning it to his inventory. The moment it vanished, the Reaper's attention drifted away, once more drawn to the carnage above.
The Reaper raised its head and let out a sharp, piercing whistle. The sound was odd, and definitely inhuman.
From beside the creature, flame and bone coalesced, forming a skeletal horse wreathed in ghostly fire. The Reaper mounted it in a single, fluid motion.
Gerron stopped at the edge of the rise, watching as the Reaper urged the horse forward, then upward, rising from the ground as if gravity itself had decided not to argue. Where the horse stepped, flaming violet footfalls appeared like a trail in the air.
Horse and rider surged into the sky, ascending toward Alduin and the storm of souls beyond.
A large roar had erupted from a blue-scaled dragon dove to intercept. But the Reaper was undaunted, he raised the axe and swung, a dark crescent forming from the slash that hit the dragon right at the thinnest membrane of the wing.
A pained cry came from the dragon as its wing was cleaved apart, tumbling down before crashing a good distance away.
Gerron stood still, eyes tracking the flying figure of the Reaper until it became a dark silhouette against the violent heavens.
"…Good hunting," he murmured.
…
4E 202, Soul Cairn
Serana Volkihar
The Soul Fissures were wounds of this realm.
Serana had no better way to describe them. Luminescent cracks split the ashen ground, stretching like veins through the Cairn, each one pulsing with a sickly violet glow.
From their depths, spectral tendrils rose. Streams of screaming souls torn free from their endless torment and dragged screaming toward the sky.
Towards him.
Serana followed one such tendril with her eyes, tracing it upward until it vanished into the colossal black void hanging in the heavens. At its center loomed Alduin.
There was no sun here in the Soul Cairn, only a pale, corpse-mon and that endless dark circle, within which Alduin's titanic form coiled. His scales drank in the light, his wings blotting out entire swathes of the horizon as he fed.
He was even larger than she remembered.
Serana's jaw tightened as the memories of High Hrothgar resurfaced. The fateful battle they had had atop the Throat of the World. The icy winds, the echo of his shouts. The jagged scar across his chest was still there, glowing faintly as he absorbed soul after soul.
They had beat him once, but this was something else entirely.
Purple lightning rained down upon him in relentless fury, cast either by the Ideal Masters in desperation or the Soul Cairn itself rebelling against its own consumption. It didn't matter. The bolts shattered harmlessly against Alduin's form, dispersing like mist against a mountain.
'If he was already this powerful—'
Serana forced the thought away.
"I know that this was my plan and all," Valerica said beside her, voice tight as she watched the same terrible spectacle, "but do you have any idea how we could seal these?"
"Of course." She said non-hesistantly.
She closed her eyes and reached inward—not for cold, not for blood, but for light.
The power of Meridia answered instantly.
White radiance spilled from her like a star being born, wrapping her form in a brilliant aura. Her eyes snapped open, glowing a pure silvery-white, and the world changed. Every undead presence burned against her senses like rot under sunlight. She had hurt herself the last time she tried this, now she just ignored the pain.
She raised a hand toward the fissure.
Frost erupted, not creeping ice, but absolute cold. A blinding wave of crystalline white engulfed the crack in the ground, flash-freezing it in an instant. The glow vanished. The soul-tendril snapped like a severed rope, dissipating into nothing before it could reach Alduin.
The temperature plummeted. Frost spread across the stone for a mile in every direction as Serana exhaled a breath of visible mist.
Alduin roared in the distance—more in irritation than pain—but the tendril did not reform.
Valerica stared at her, eyes wide.
"You truly are a surprise, my dear," her mother said softly. "You've experienced many things since you woke up, haven't you?"
Serana allowed herself a small, tired smile. "I did."
Valerica returned it, pride and concern warring in her expression. "Then we should be quick. We can seal as many as possible before Gerron releases the Reaper. We do not want to be here when that happens."
Serana nodded, already moving.
They sealed two more fissures in rapid succession. Each time, Serana felt the strain deepen—the Soul Cairn fought her every step, its hatred for Meridia's light clawing at her mind. By the third fissure, her hands trembled slightly.
Then the sky changed.
A sound like a grave being torn open echoed across the Cairn.
Serana and Valerica ducked instinctively as a massive ghostly figure burst into view.
Towering, masked, riding upon a skeletal horse wreathed in violet flame. Death itself surged upward, cutting through the chaos as though it belonged there more than any dragon.
"The Reaper…" Valerica whispered.
"That's the creature?" Serana swallowed. Her instincts told her that the Reaper was powerful. "Gerron did it then."
A chirp sounded as they saw Bronze circling in the air above them. They followed the mechanical owl and eventually regrouped with Gerron amid some ruins as the battle above escalated into something mythic. The Reaper carved through the sky, dragons falling in single, catastrophic blows. Odahviing and Durnehviir joined the fray, their roars shaking the very air.
Around them, the undead armies of the Cairn surged forward. Bonemen, Wrathmen, Mistmen. Every manner of undead that call this place home rallied behind the Reaper as if answering a call from the Ideal Masters themselves.
"We need to leave now," Gerron said, voice firm and unyielding.
Serana and Valerica didn't argue.
As the portal flared to life, Serana cast one last look over her shoulder.
She saw the Reaper rise higher, a herald of annihilation. She saw Alduin turn his burning gaze toward it, the clash of inevitabilities moments away. She saw a battle that would reshape the Soul Cairn forever.
Then the portal swallowed them whole.
The Soul Cairn vanished in a wash of light, and with it, the fate of that war, left behind in the realm of the dead.
…
AN: Fun fact, The Reaper is an actual boss-level npc that can be found in the Soul Cairn.
Funny enough, I only found out about this guy by going through the wiki. Not once have I ever found him by myself in any one of my playthroughs.
The aftermath of all of this will be touched on in the next few chapters as the Soul Cairn arc officially ends. We finally move on into the final bits of the fic.
More chapters are available on my Pat_reon. Chapter 107 should be available by the time this chapter is posted. Just look up my name, TeemVizzle, and you'll find me.
Cheers!