My first car was a 2003 Honda Accord. It was about as basic a car as you could find - the most advanced technology it had was power windows. Its one nod to luxury was a sunroof that I almost never opened because it was too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. It did make the car feel more spacious inside than it really was, though.

 

I bring this up because nothing makes one appreciate modern technology more than the absence of it. The distance from Shor’s Stone to Windhelm is roughly 200 miles by road (although not much more as the dragon flies – once you get out of the mountains and into the alkaline flats, the road runs smooth and straight for most of the way). It would be a short car ride, maybe a bit over four hours, depending on traffic. It’s an exhausting four day trek for an American on foot who hasn’t done anything in the way of aerobic exercise since high school. And that’s walking for sixteen hours a day and doesn’t even bring into consideration the stops along the way.

 

The first of these was a stone tower about an hour down the road from Shor’s Stone. It didn’t look like anything of interest until I got near enough to see the door – and the two bodies slumped against the wall next to it. I froze in my tracks, hand reaching for (and not finding until I hurriedly glanced down) the hilt of the sword Lysha had given me. Nothing moved around the tower or the trees around it, so I approached as cautiously as a twenty-first-century Ohio city girl could manage. I jumped a little as a bird in a nearby tree fluttered away but reached the bodies with no other incident.

 

I didn’t need a degree in forensic science to determine the cause of death for the soldiers (for soldiers they clearly were, with matching purple-draped armor and shields with the same crossed-swords design). The arrows and gaping blood-soaked slashes in their leather armor told the tale well enough. It was a bit of a shock to my system, I must admit. I had seen dead bodies, at funerals and in the hospital where I interned, but never quite like this. It felt wrong to just leave them laying out so I dragged them, one by one, into the tower and laid them on the floor. I tried closing their eyes and crossing their arms over their chests but rigor mortis kept either from sticking. At last, I gave up on the idea and looked around.

 

There were a few weapons hanging on the wall which I didn’t know how to use and didn’t want to lug around, so I ignored them. The cheese, wine, and bread, on the other hand, I scooped into a small sack (after eating a few bites – I had forgotten about food with all the other craziness, but seeing it made my stomach grumble awake). There was also a note on a table. I picked it up and was surprised to find that I could read it. Apparently they either spoke and wrote English here (it was only at that moment that I considered how odd it was that I could communicate with people. Another point in the “this must be a dream” tally) or Parman wasn’t quite as stupid as I had grown to consider him and had managed to incorporate some sort of Babel fish component into…whatever he did that dragged me here. The asshole.

 

Anyway. The note was a warning that “Imperial forces have been seen headed your way.” The warning clearly hadn’t done the tower guards much good.

 

There were two more bodies at the top of the tower. I didn’t want to drag them down the winding staircase so I just left them there. I did take a bow and a quiver of arrows. I hadn’t shot a bow since summer camp when I was ten, but if this was real and I was going to live here, it seemed prudent to be able to use one. There was also a locked trunk. A quick (although kinda uncomfortable) search through a waist pouch on one of the guards revealed a key. I took it then turned back and took the belt and the pouch as well. He wouldn’t be needing it, but the armor Lysha had provided has no pockets (naturally I couldn’t get sent to a place that had pockets). I cinched the belt with the pouch around my waist and unlocked the trunk. It held another small pouch that jingled when I picked it up. I opened it and found coins. Presumably this world’s money. I should have asked Lysha about that. Oh well. I tucked the pouch into my other pouch and looked back into the trunk.

 

The only other thing it held were two palm-sized glass vials of some red liquid. No way I was going to play Alice with unknown drink! I dropped them back in, then had second thoughts. I wasn’t about to drink them, but maybe they were worth something. If I was going to be stuck here, I would need to start finding a way to live. I added them to the sack with the food and headed back down the stairs.

 

It hadn’t occurred to me until I was at the doorway that anyone who happened by might see me looting a tower full of dead guards and jump to clear and difficult to refute conclusions, but fortunately there was no one around when I peeked out. I hurried to the road and continued my trek, although my heart didn’t slow down until the tower got hidden by a bend in the road a quarter mile on.

 

I kept walking through the winding mountain road until it got too dark to see clearly, then stepped off the road into a copse of trees and sat down, took off the boots Lysha had given me, and rubbed my sore feet, wincing a bit as my fingers ran across growing blisters. Why hadn’t I worn tennis shoes to the fucking party? Well, because my Cole Haans looked fabulous, but still…

 

I worried as I sat about more of those man (and presumably woman) eating wolves or whoever had killed the guards or….or any number of other dangers for a twenty-first century earth woman trying to sleep in the middle of the outdoors without even a fire, but my exhaustion overwrote my fears and I fell into a deep sleep on the spot, waking to sunlight and incredible soreness and a parched throat and the most amazing scenery I had ever seen. I groaned and got up and stepped to the other side of the trees to pee (and, after a moment, wiped with some leaves, the only thing available), then yanked the boots back on, grabbed my bag, and started walking while I ate cheese and wine. Breakfast of champions.

 

The second delay in the trip became noticeable a few hours further down the winding road in the form of the sound of metal crashing against metal. Another quarter mile added blood-curdling screams into the mix. A few steps further brought me around a bend in the road and gave me my first glance at the source of the cacophony – a pitched battle on the road ahead where two roads intersected. I didn’t know what was happening at the time but I could see no way around the fight without getting uncomfortably close, so I stayed well back and watched. It was the first time I saw, in person, the brutality of war, with all its visceral impact. No movie or tv show can prepare you for the real thing, even from a hundred yards away.

 

Most shocking to me was not the death, though, but what followed. The victors went through the wounded, pulling their comrades off to the side and applying bandages while the enemy soldiers were stripped and, if they were men and still alive, dispatched via dagger. But if they were women, of which there were a few (a little surprising to discover, at least to me), they were…well, raped. Right there in the middle of the road, often by several men in a row, before finally being put out of their misery. It was chilling in its matter-of-fact feel, as if everyone, including the women, just saw it as the normal course of things. The penalty of losing. Some of them put up weak attempts to fight but, of course, they were already close to dead at that point anyway, and it did not seem to take them long to just slump to the ground and accept their fates. I stopped watching early on in this process.

 

Fortunately, I had arrived toward the end of the battle, so it was only an hour or two delay before the victors headed along the intersecting road and I was able to resume my journey, carefully avoiding looking at the dead bodies they had left scattered like so much flotsam. Apparently they had no interest in burying their enemies.

 

I camped again in some trees off the road at what looked to be (at last) the base of the mountains. The road ran straight and flat ahead and the air was noticeably warmer. A faint scent of sulfur clung to the air. It took a little longer to fall asleep this time, mostly because my feet were *really* hurting. The promised blisters had come and then long since popped. I feared the possibility of an infection. Once I managed to fall asleep, it was more fitful than the previous night.

 

The third day of my journey brought me my first kill. Not a human, though!

 

The afternoon was on its last legs as the sun began to tuck itself behind the mountains when I heard them. I was limping along beside the jagged alkaline valley that sits between three towering mountain ranges with Windhelm at the head like some kind of weary crown. The howling of the wolves off sprang up to my left but I didn’t see them until they were nearly upon me. Fortunately I had been passing the time practicing drawing and re-sheathing my sword. More fortunately, they came upon me at a moment when it was unsheathed. And, as a third bit of fortune, the first one impaled itself, jumping for my throat while I just stood, petrified with fear, sword held in both hands in front of me. The wolf’s body knocked me over and I had a brief terrorized moment when I didn’t realize it wasn’t alive and was sure its teeth were about to bury themselves in my neck. Once it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, adrenaline kicked in and I began to fight the weight of the wolf’s body, desperate to get to my feet before the rest of the pack tore me apart like they the man who had chased me outside of Parman’s cave.

 

“It is all right.” A calm voice broke through my panic and a moment later the wolf’s body was lifted from me.

 

I could not stop the “Fuck!” that crashed from my mouth at what I saw. It was a cat. Person. A Khajiit, I was soon to learn, but at that time it was a surprise, to put it lightly.

 

His ears twitched and he looked behind him. “She seems to be in shock.”

 

“Well, is that a surprise?” A woman’s voice, and a moment later, a refreshingly human face appeared, looking over the cat man’s shoulder. “Hello. I’m Holo, this is Kra’aft. Are you all right?”

 

It took a few moments, but words eventually burbled up from the depths of my receding panic. “Y...yes. Yes, I…” I looked down at myself. There was an awful lot of blood, but I was pretty sure it was the wolf’s, not mine. “I’m fine.”

 

She smiled and some small, hidden ball of fear that had wrapped itself around my heart like a block of ice thawed, just a little. They reached out their hands – or her hand and his paw (which was as soft as I imagined. I was sorely tempted to try to reach up and rub his ears) – and helped me up. It was the first kindness I had received in this new land. Even Lysha hadn’t extended warmth – just a sort of collected interest.

 

I stayed that night with them at their camp, which was made up of their destroyed caravan. “It is a long sad tale,” Kra’aft began when I asked, but it really wasn’t – they were travelling merchants, their wagons had been attacked, they were left with nearly nothing. I extended my sympathies but Holo just shook her head.

 

“It is not the first time we have had to start over,” she began, but Kra’aft interrupted with an emphatic shake of his head.

 

“No. This one has had enough. No more starting over.”

 

Holo laughed. “You say that now. We’ll be back on the road soon enough.”

 

“No.” It was hard to read his cat expression, but something about Holo’s reaction told me it surprised her. “This one has started from scratch too many times. This one wants to stop travelling. This one is…tired.”

 

Holo frowned as she stroked Kra’aft’s furry arm. “What are you saying? We should just curl up and die?”

 

His turn to laugh as he leaned a little into her touch. “Of course not! This one will build a store from the pieces of the cart. Fate has led us here. Here is where we shall make our home.”

 

Holo looked around with justified doubt – the only things around were alkaline lakes that reeked of sulfur, broken rocks, and…wait, was that a mamm…

 

“Here?” Holo’s incredulous voice took my eyes away from what it appeared they were seeing. A trick of the dying light, surely. “You want to make our home in this desolate place? Who are you planning to sell to? Bandits? That giant over there?”

 

Giant?! I looked back over my shoulder but all I could see was a fire in the distance and a shadow that was only noticeable because it was darker than the general darkness that surrounded it. Surely…

 

“And what, exactly, do you intend to sell?” Holo kicked at the ground. “Sand?”

 

“Do not underestimate the value of sand!” Kra’aft’s voice sounded light but his eyes (from what I could tell, anyway) seemed serious. “But, no. This one still has a few things the bandits did not find. Once this one gets hold of Ri’saad…”

 

Holo groaned. “Another loan?” She sighed and waved away whatever Kra’aft began to say. “I suppose we would have had to do that anyway. Fine.” Her eyes hardened and she gave him a glare. “Be warned, though: if it comes down to starvation or survival, I won’t feel a bit guilty about eating you. And your pelt will be my new blanket.”

 

Kra’aft laughed long and hard. “Understood! This one agrees to your terms.”

 

They sat with arms around each other then, cooking meat and talking of their plans. It was during this time that Holo asked of my own plans, so I told them my story. They concentrated on my words without a hint of disbelief and, when I was done, Kra’aft shook his head.

 

“This one has seen many strange things, but nothing like what has happened to you.”

 

“So you are going to Windhelm to see this…Pare?” Holo glanced up the road, though there was only darkness all around. “Are you sure he can help?”

 

“No, but what choice do I have?”

 

A pause, then, as they looked at each other.

 

“Well…you could stay with us.”

 

“It is true,” Kra’aft agreed. “Holo can teach you how to use that sword – more protection is always helpful. And as the store becomes bigger, this one will need even more help.”

 

“It will be hard,” Holo added, “but…well…you will be safe. This is not a safe place, especially for a woman by herself.”

 

Ah, if only I had listened. If only I had known. If only…but my heart was set on Windhelm and Pare and getting out of this crazed land, and so I declined. I suppose it would have turned out to be necessary to follow the road destiny (ha! Destiny! I crack myself up) laid before me, eventually – the things that were about to happen would have done so had I stayed or not. But perhaps the path forward would have proved less treacherous had I taken a different turn. Two roads diverged in the alkaline flats, and I…I took the painful one. And that truly has made all the difference.

 

Don’t feed the bastards. They’ll just want more.

 

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