Skyl hurried to the Dragonborn's crash site. This blond man really didn't know what he'd been raised on—his bones were harder than stone. After a hit like that, he still hadn't been smashed to pieces. When Skyl found him, he was baring his teeth as he tried to yank both legs out of a crack in the rocks.
"Slow down. Those are legs, not carrots. If you keep pulling like that, something's going to go very wrong." Skyl cast a Transfiguration charm on the rock layer and widened the fissure. That made it easy for the Dragonborn to slip free.
Skyl saw the Dragonborn's right leg bent at an unnatural angle—even the steel greave had twisted out of shape. His face was drenched in cold sweat, and he was still grinning like an idiot.
Even for a pureblood Nord barbarian, this was a bit too barbarian.
The Dragonborn sat on a ledge, back against the steep mountainside, and briskly removed the greave. One hand clamped his ankle, the other braced behind his knee. With a savage wrench, he forced the snapped shinbone back into alignment. A brittle, unnatural crack made Skyl's scalp crawl. The Dragonborn's face went instantly bloodless, and sweat burst from his pores like it had been pressurized—beads streamed down his forehead and gathered at his brow like a tiny waterfall.
"You…" Skyl's eye twitched. Now he truly believed some people might not have bodies of steel, but their willpower surpassed steel. The Dragonborn's "treatment" was decisive and fast—and far too reckless. If a fracture that serious wasn't handled properly, it could easily leave lasting complications.
The Nord man squeezed out a hideous smile and started preparing a healing spell.
Skyl stopped him immediately. He hauled this barbarian among barbarians to a flat stretch of ground and performed emergency surgery.
First, an anesthetic potion. Then a paralysis spell to cut off blood flow. He cut into the muscle, cleared out bone fragments, and used the charm [Episkey]. A wound that would've put an ordinary person in bed for months was dealt with just like that. Of course, it wasn't only one break—there were fractures all over, and patching him up from head to toe still took quite a bit of work.
"Miracle hands, doc!" The Dragonborn sprang up, good as new.
The mages arrived, too. They'd already seen the dragon's corpse at the foot of the mountain. Creatures this ancient carried divinity—dragon souls did not perish. Even if their flesh turned to ash, they weren't truly dead. The Dragonborn was born with the ability to absorb, devour dragon souls, which meant only a Dragonborn could truly kill dragons in the world of The Elder Scrolls.
Skyl wanted the Dragonborn to leave this fresh corpse to him. After all, dragons were treasure from head to tail. Once the Dragonborn absorbed the soul, all that would remain was a rotten skeleton.
Dragon scales and dragonhide had defensive properties that surpassed most metals. With Alteration/Transfiguration-style analysis of the hide's structure, it might be possible to imitate similar defensive effects—an enormous help for stacking protections on a mage.
A dragon soul was a uniquely divine kind of soul, invaluable for studying souls, divinity, and the roots of magic itself. And the rest—the organs and tissues, a dragon's heart, a dragon's stomach, and so on—would obviously have tremendous research value.
When Skyl said he wanted it, the Dragonborn casually declared that it was Skyl's spoils of war and he could do whatever he pleased with it.
The mages of Winterhold were all smiles. They understood exactly what a dragon corpse meant—like stumbling onto a once-in-a-lifetime thesis topic. You could pad out hundreds, even thousands of papers with it.
Skyl called Dumbledore and invited him to come see the body. After all, Dumbledore was a dragon specialist too—back in the Harry Potter world, he'd discovered twelve uses for dragon blood.
On the other end of the line, Dumbledore murmured, sounding like he was asking for help. "Skyl, I've run into a strange person. She wants me to speak with a 'lord' called Azura. She's so enthusiastic I can't very well refuse."
"Professor, you're not some clueless old man who gets lured into a weird cult over a carton of eggs. If you don't want to convert to Daedric worship, just Apparate over here. We've got a fresh dragon corpse to process."
"But that lord Azura truly spoke to me."
Skyl: "…"
He fell silent. After thinking it over, all he could say was, "If she asks you to run errands for her, you can agree. That Daedric Prince is pretty friendly."
Dumbledore hung up, gently smoothing his beard. He turned to the Dark Elf priestess. "Very well. Please tell me more about Lady Azura."
Meanwhile, Skyl prepared to haul the dragon corpse back to Winterhold—let the citizens see it first to calm nerves, then transport it into The Tower of Tomes and arrange cooperative research with the College mages.
But just as the mages began tying down the dragon's remains, the colossal body suddenly ignited. Its pale flesh burned like thin paper, pricked through with flecks of golden firelight. In the next instant, fierce flames swallowed the dragon whole, and the lofty dragon soul bound within that flesh became a raging gale—shooting east in a blink, racing across the sky.
When the fire died, only a heap of decayed bones remained.
The mages erupted into shocked cries, all of them staring in disbelief.
Skyl frowned and looked toward the direction the dragon soul had fled.
Solstheim.
The place where Miraak—the first Dragonborn—was sealed.
There was no doubt about it. Miraak's summons had crossed a thousand miles and stolen the dragon soul away.
As for Miraak… back when Skyl had first arrived in Skyrim last year, Miraak's cultists had already come looking for him. They'd been bewitched and controlled by Mora—used for suicidal sacrifice to call down a manifestation of the Daedric Prince. Miraak's ties to Mora were, without question, extremely close.
To put it simply, Miraak was Mora's disloyal servant.
From the age of the ancient dragons until now, for thousands of years, Miraak had been trapped in Mora's realm of Oblivion—Apocrypha—locked in a constant battle of wits with that tentacled monstrosity. Now the dragons had returned, Mora had been severely injured, and Miraak naturally believed the moment had come to re-enter the mortal world. Stealing dragon souls was simply how he stored up power.
A long-imprisoned old convict desperate for freedom—if he acted extreme, it was understandable.
But snatching food right under the High Tower King's nose—aren't you being a little shameless?
(Skyl: Miraak, you little bastard. You can provoke dragons, you can provoke tigers, but you really shouldn't provoke me. I won't tolerate you running your mouth!)
Having someone scoop food out of his own pot put Skyl in a foul mood. He hadn't planned on trekking all the way to Solstheim to go looking for trouble, but now he had no choice—he had to make the trip.
After returning to Winterhold with nothing but an empty dragon skeleton, the mages gathered at the College, and Skyl immediately began calling people together.
"Mage Maryon, Mage Onmund, Mage J'zargo, Mage Savos Aren, Professor Dumbledore, and our Dragonborn friend—anyone interested in taking a trip far from home with me?"
Brelyna's eyes lit up, and she nodded at once.
Onmund brightened. "Another adventure? Yes! Where are we going this time?"
"Solstheim—more precisely, Hermaeus Mora's realm of Oblivion. We're going to beat someone up. And while we're at it, we'll pay a visit to my dear big brother Mora."
Skyl explained why the dragon soul had vanished, and everyone grew deeply interested in this so-called first Dragonborn, Miraak.
No history books had ever mentioned such a man—because Miraak had defected to Mora. The Daedric Prince of knowledge had hidden Miraak away as his secret, and everything about him was erased from the record.
When Skyl said that Solstheim had been torn from the mainland by the aftershocks of a battle between Miraak and another ancient Dragon Priest, the entire room erupted.
They couldn't even imagine what kind of fight could do that. To make an enemy of someone like that was enough to make the heart go cold. Yet with Skyl here, no one felt fear—if anything, most of them looked eager.
Professor Dumbledore watched the group excitedly as they discussed how to deal with Miraak. Beside him stood a Dark Elf priestess, and the two of them exchanged quiet words from time to time.
"That young mage… is he the Outsider Lady Azura spoke of?"
"Yes. I can introduce you," Dumbledore said with a smile. The old man's tone was full of admiration. "He's a good child. For his friends, he'll do almost anything. As long as you stay polite, you'll get along splendidly."
//Check out my P@tre0n for 20 extra chapters on all my fanfics //[email protected]/Razeil0810