4E 202, Skuldafn
Esbern
Lightning spewed from Nahkriin's staff as Esbern created a ward in the same instant.
The translucent barrier snapped into place at the same moment that the bolt hit it and split apart, licking the sides in crackling arcs. He felt the concussive force through his palms but the ward held. He exhaled through his nose.
"Again," said Marcurio, stepping up on his left.
The Captain of the Shor's Guard extended his own ward without fanfare, layering it over Esbern's with the precise overlap that maximized surface coverage and minimized strain on either caster. The young man had clearly been trained well. His ward-stacking technique was clean and efficient in a way that spoke of someone who had drilled it until it was muscle memory rather than conscious thought.
Esbern remembered hearing about him once or twice when Esbern was still a gutter rat hiding in the Ratway, a mercenary who frequented the Bee and the Barb whenever he looked for employment. And now he was here, a captain of the Shor's Guard. The times of war truly allowed one to climb high.
Above them, on the high platform of Skuldafn's upper tier, Nahkriin floated in the air. What manner of magic he used to do such a thing, Esbern never knew.
His ebony mask glinted in the pale mountain light. His staff pulsed with the deep glow of destruction magic so potent, that it wasn't simple lightning, but the kind of channelled atmospheric discharge that could level a Stormcloak formation in a single arc.
They had been at this for a long time.
The battle for Skuldafn had begun with a well-executed plan and—as with all plans that never survived first contact–quickly turned into a chaotic grind where the battle became a manner of pushing and killing till one side tilts into defeat.
The Legionnaires still held the center; Esbern could see Legate Taurinus and Hadvar on the main platform below, Hadvar's blade cutting wide arcs through a cluster of scourge draugr that had pushed the left flank back a step. The Unbroken Sword, they called him, and the name was not flattery, judging by what Esbern had seen.
"On your left, Captain."
Esbern didn't need to point. Marcurio was already turning, his off hand snapping sideways with a bolt of chain lightning that caught the scourge draugr emerging from the side passage before it reached their flank. The lightning threaded through four of them in succession, each one staggering as the current jumped.
"Thank you," Marcurio said.
"Don't thank me yet."
Nahkriin floated lower.
That was the sign that he had decided the ranged exchange was no longer sufficient. Esbern knew the pattern by now — the dragon priest had tested their warding twice, had attempted to circle wide once, and both times Marcurio's company had repositioned fast enough to maintain the coverage. Now Nahkriin was going to make them work for it up close.
Esbern steeled himself and looked sideways at Marcurio.
"I need three seconds of his attention elsewhere."
Marcurio glanced at him once. Then he looked over his shoulder and raised two fingers at the nearest Shor's Guard mage — a young woman, Tolvane, who had been Esbern's best ward-stacker all day. She was already watching and read the signal immediately.
From the wall at the north, Aerin's archers let loose a volley on Marcurio's signal as the longbows sang in near-unison, shafts rattling off Nahkriin's outer ward from the right. The crossbows of the Dawnguard followed a half-second later from the left, the storm of bolts forcing Nahkriin to actively track two separate incoming angles simultaneously.
In that same moment, Marcurio dropped his ward entirely, took two steps forward into the open, and threw a fully charged lightning bolt directly at the Dragon Priest's face.
It was not subtle, and the attack was terribly choreographed that any capable mage could see coming.
But it was also the kind of aggressive provocation that a creature with ten centuries of pride and a staff capable of ending formations could not simply ignore. Nahkriin's attention snapped to Marcurio.
And while Nahkriin's eyes were on Marcurio, Tolvane summoned a storm atronach directly behind the Dragon Priest .
With the archers, the Captain, and the summon; that was three things that demanded attention at once.
That was all the opening Esbern needed. His hands were already moving in the pattern for the spell he'd been preparing since the last exchange.
He was not a young man and he was not a combat mage in the traditional sense. But he had spent sixty years studying dragonlore, which included extensive scholarship on what Dragon Priests were, how they worked, and what the specific frequency of soulbound magic that animated them responded to.
The disruption bolt he cast was not large, and it certainly looked considerably less impressive than Marcurio's lightning. But it was tuned to the exact resonance of a soulbound servant of Alduin, and when it hit Nahkriin's mask at the moment the distraction had his ward low…
The Dragon Priest seized. It won't last long, probably a few seconds at most. But it was enough.
"Now!" Esbern barked.
Marcurio and the two Shor's Guard mages flanking him hit the opening simultaneously — chain lightning, a fireball, and a frost spike that buried itself in the gap between Nahkriin's chest-piece and gorget. The combined hit shattered the outer layer of the Dragon Priest's personal ward entirely.
Nahkriin fell onto a controlled descent onto the platform.
The staff was still in his hand, but his posture had changed. The arrogance had stripped away and Nahkriin was now cornered, and a cornered rat bit even harder.
He raised his staff at the same moment Esbern raised a ward to counter.
But from behind the Dragon Priest, another chittering of voices came.
Draugr-Fultheim appeared from the side passage, another six draugr surrounding him as they were clearly drawn by the noise and converging on Esbern's group as an additional threat.
The icy blue lines across his reanimated skin moved with an animation that no dead thing should have had, and the Blades katana in his hand was raised in the guard position Esbern recognized from years of watching Fultheim spar.
Just as Esbern prepared to shout for Aerin to loose a volley, Njada Stone-Arm appeared from the opposite side of the platform.
The werewolf tore through the passage opening with her head down, moving at a lope that became a full sprint inside three strides, covering the platform in seconds. Fultheim heard her coming and turned to present his sword.
Fultheim was dangerous. Esbern had known the man in life and had never doubted it. Despite his recent skill level having been stripped due to age and grief, he remained a capable swordsman who moved with the eerie completeness of a fighter trained in the ways of the Blades, and his first counterattack very nearly opened Njada's throat.
Very nearly, but she proved faster.
The werewolf form was not a brawler's gift alone. Njada parried the counterattack not with a block but with a roll that took her under the sword's arc entirely, and when she came up her jaws closed on the wrist of Fultheim's sword arm.
The crack was audible and the katana fell, as the werewolf's claws swiped towards Fultheim's neck.
Esbern looked away from what came after.
'Rest well,' he thought, for Fultheim at least. 'Rest well, old friend.'
Another sound made him turn as the constant, sharp ringing of two swords was both flashy and obvious.
Mjoll and draugr-Delphine had found each other on the main platform, and the sound they were making was unlike anything else happening on this battlefield.
It was not the brutal, practical clash of soldiers grinding against each other. It was something else entirely. Something that had no business existing in the middle of a siege.
It was a duel in the oldest sense of the word, two exceptional swordswomen who had spent their entire lives becoming exactly what they were, now facing each other with no pretense or tactics, only the full expression of their respective arts.
Esbern had watched Mjoll spar before. He had seen her dismantle opponents that looked twice her match without visible effort, the Blades' katana moving in the clean, efficient lines that the order had refined across generations. But sparring was one thing. This was another.
Draugr-Delphine moved the way she had moved in life. A precise swordsmanship, held with the deep patience of a woman who had survived the Thalmor's purge by being better than everyone sent to kill her.
The purple flame burned in her eye sockets and she did not tire, did not hurt, did not flinch when Mjoll's edge caught the bracer above her wrist and drew a long gouge through the metal. She simply reset, shifted her weight, and came again.
Her footwork was Delphine's footwork. Her blade angles were Delphine's blade angles. Every habit, every preference, every trick Esbern had watched the former Grandmaster use across years of close quarters — all of it was there, but slower, yet the body of a draugr gave its own advantages.
Mjoll was pushed back and gave ground twice in the first thirty seconds.
It wasn't a retreat, Esbern noted. But rather an attempt to read their opponent, the way a true swordswoman absorbed information rather than simply reacting. She was doing it now.
Draugr-Delphine pressed with a combination Esbern had seen the real Delphine use against Fultheim in practice — a high feint that pulled the guard up, followed by a drop to the inside low line that was meant to catch under the ribs.
Mjoll did not raise her guard.
She sidestepped instead, the tip of her boot pivoting on the stone in a half-turn that took her entirely off the anticipated defensive angle, and Delphine's blade passed through empty air. In the same motion, Mjoll's katana came around in a horizontal arc at neck height.
Draugr-Delphine tilted her head, the edge of Mjoll's blade catching Delphine's cheek-guard and scraping upward.
The draugr's head was forced back from the impact. And that right there was just what Mjoll had been waiting for.
She drove forward, closing the distance before Delphine's frame had fully settled, getting inside the optimal reach of a blade that was designed for distance and control, putting herself in the one position where the former Grandmaster's technique could not function cleanly.
The pommel of Mjoll's katana drove up into Delphine's jaw.
The follow-through was the blade.
Esbern did not look away this time. He owed that much.
Mjoll drove the Blades' katana into Delphine's neck, and the purple flame that had been burning in those eye sockets for centuries finally, quietly, went out.
The body slid down.
Mjoll stood over it for a moment, the katana still in her hand, her breathing the only sound she made. Her expression was not triumphant. It was the expression of a woman who had just done something that needed doing and was carrying the full weight of what that meant.
Esbern had wanted to tell her that it would have been a good fight when both of them were alive and in their prime. He had wanted to say that the Delphine he had known would have wanted to see it, would have respected it.
Yet all that came out was a mere bow.
'Rest well.'
He turned back to Nahkriin.
The Dragon Priest had recovered from the combined hit and was building something large — the staff's amber glow was intensifying in a specific pattern Esbern had seen once before, back when Nahkriin first descended onto the field and destroyed the Stormcloak center line. The wall of lightning. An area effect that would not discriminate between friend and enemy, the kind of attack that was purely destructive.
Marcurio saw it too.
"Everyone back!" he shouted to the company. "Give him open ground!"
The Shor's Guard mages scattered from the immediate area, pulling the Vigilants with them, creating a wide empty radius around Nahkriin that meant the wall of lightning would have nothing to arc to except the platform itself.
Esbern did not retreat.
He was too old to run quickly and he had thought this through already.
He planted his staff against the stone, poured every reserve of magicka he had left into a ward that he shaped not as a barrier in front of him but as a cage around Nahkriin.
It would not block the Dragon Priest's spell from going out, but rather create a reflective shell that would redirect its arc inward.
It required precise channeling, something he was more than capable of doing. The only problem was that it required being approximately eight feet from a Dragon Priest about to release an area-effect lightning wall.
Esbern was aware that this was not sensible behavior for a sixty-year-old archivist, yet he did it anyway. The time to be reckless was now.
After another moment, Nahkriin released his spell.
The lightning erupted outward in every direction; a blinding, crackling wall of lightning that should have covered the entire platform.
It hit Esbern's cage-ward instead. For two terrible seconds, the redirected arcs crashed back into Nahkriin from every direction simultaneously, the Dragon Priest caught in the center of his own attack.
Nahkriin spasmed, and the purple flame behind the eye-holes flickered.
Esbern felt the ward collapse. He had nothing left, the reserves were gone, and his knees attempted to introduce themselves to the platform stone. He caught himself on his staff and forced himself upright by sheer stubbornness.
Marcurio was already there.
The Captain of the Shor's Guard closed the distance with three quick strides, conjured a blade of crackling electricity in his free hand, and drove it straight into the center of Nahkriin's chest.
The purple flame went out.
Nahkriin's body stopped maintaining its own coherence and slid downward, the staff and mask clattering on stone, the ancient form collapsing with the release of a bound soul, a long, unwilling departure that the mask had been preventing for centuries.
Esbern leaned on his staff.
Around him, the wider battle was winding down. The draugr garrison was losing cohesion without the Dragon Priest's will to anchor the most dangerous of them.
The scourges that had been most capable were being dealt with by the Companions and the Vigilants in small, controlled engagements across the platforms. Legate Taurinus' Legionnaires were advancing methodically up the center stair, the last cluster of deathlords being ground down between them and Hadvar's force.
Yet despite the victory, the next sound they heard caused each person to freeze in their boots.
A roar.
Alduin appeared over the mountain ridge from the south at speed, the black shape of him unmistakable against the grey and white of the Velothi peaks.
"It's the World-Eater!" someone below screamed.
"Has Shor's Stone fallen?!"
That single sentence had fear coursing through the heart of every soldier in the area.
Esbern felt it around him, saw men's eyes go wide, saw weapons waver. They had been fighting for hours. They were exhausted and hurt and the sight of Alduin descending toward them was exactly the kind of thing that could break a line that had held all day.
"No, you fools!" Esbern stepped forward, staff raised. "Look!"
He thrust the staff toward the sky to the south.
Behind Alduin, flying through the skies, was the unmistakable color of bronze.
Vermithor's wings beat hard and fast, and on his back three figures were visible even from this distance.
"It's the Bronze Fury!" Taurinus' voice tore through the silence. "And the Dragonborn! She's on his back!"
The effect was immediate.
"Come on, lads!" Hadvar's voice rose from the platform below, the voice that had held the center line twice today. The Unbroken Sword raised his blade toward the sky. "Let's not show the Champions a pathetic showing! Beat these undead to the ground! For Skyrim! For Nirn!"
"HOOOOHHH!"
The cry went up from every section of Skuldafn simultaneously. Legionnaires and Stormcloaks, Companions and Vigilants, Dawnguard knights and Shor's Guard mages; each one was exhausted and bloodied, and yet not one of them didn't shout.
Esbern found himself doing it too.
Another strange sound appeared then, as if reacting to the World-Eater's presence. It came from the upper platform, the highest tier of Skuldafn where something had laid dormant all day.
Esbern looked up.
Iridescent light began appearing above the uppermost tier, shifting colors that had no natural name — the shimmering, unstable radiance of a portal between this world and the next, of a gate between Mundus and Sovngarde being forced open by something vast and desperate.
The portal was opening.
"Gods," Marcurio said beside him.
Alduin passed over them without slowing, climbing toward the upper platform and the portal still blossoming there in impossible iridescent light. The winds from his wings battered the platforms as he ascended, men grabbing for handholds, loose equipment scattering. The sound of the gate opening grew louder — or more present, rather, filling the air with the kind of pressure that lived behind the ears.
Esbern tracked him upward.
And then Vermithor crested the ridge.
The Bronze Fury was close enough now that Esbern could see the scorch damage on the right wing, could see the three figures on the saddle clearly — Kiera at the front with Dawnbreaker visible in her hand, along with a dark blade in her left. The Dragonborn looked like she had been in a war, which she had, and like she was not finished with it, which she wasn't.
Behind her, Gerron and Serana. Both battered, but still upright.
Vermithor banked hard as Alduin passed through the portal gate above them, following the World-Eater up at the same angle, the same speed, wings carrying all three of them without hesitation toward the iridescent light that was swallowing everything above the uppermost platform.
Esbern watched.
The portal blazed and pulsed as Alduin disappeared into it.
Vermithor followed a half-second later, Kiera and Gerron and Serana with him, all of them swallowed in an instant by the light.
The portal remained open for exactly three seconds after.
Then it closed, and the light died.
The sound that had been filling the air went out as completely as a snuffed candle.
Above the uppermost platform of Skuldafn, there was nothing. Just the cold sky and mountain peaks and the pale winter light coming through the clouds.
Esbern stood with his staff planted against the stone of the platform and stared at the empty sky for a long moment.
Somewhere below him, the last of the Skuldafn draugr were being finished off in the absence of their master's will.
Marcurio stepped up beside him.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"You think they can win?" Marcurio asked.
Esbern thought of the three people that were on Vermithor's back, and nodded to himself.
"Yes," Esbern said simply.
He turned back to the platform, where Marcurio's company was beginning to check on the fallen and Hadvar was already organizing the Legionnaires into a perimeter.
There was still work to be done here.
…
AN: Here we go! The second half of the previous chapter and the last one before Sovngarde. This chapter was a grind, let me tell you. Battles are so hard to write, but I did manage to get almost 4k words here, which is a new standard for me, I guess.
The Skuldafn fight ends right as Alduin and Vermithor arrive, the portal to Sovngarde opening due to the presence of the World Eater.
The true true final fight will be coming soon. See you guys then.
Chapter 131 should be available by the time this chapter is posted. Just look up my name, TeemVizzle, and you'll find me.
For free users, you can get 2 chapters ahead instead if you're interested, just sign up and you can get other first chapters for free for a few of those fics (Game of Thrones, Young Justice, and One Piece).
Cheers lads.