What happens next is pretty well known by now. Hell, you've probably heard it so much that you feel like you have done the exact same thing yourself several times. So I won't bore you with the details – I’ll just highlight a few things since rumor has already begun to fester into fact. Also, I’d like to remind you that all of this happened in a mere fourteen days. My entire life changed in just two weeks. A fucking fortnight, if you prefer.

 

Helgen

 

I got to Helgen about five minutes before the monstrosity I would eventually come to know as Alduin made his presence known. At first I wondered what Edith wanted me to do (other than “face my destiny.” So helpful). I loitered around the north gate for a bit before noticing a general rush of people toward one section of the town. There seemed to be a sense of excitement in their steps, so I figured something interesting was happening and tagged along.

 

We got to a wide common area that, judging from the colorful kiosks and tents that had been shoved against the walls of the surrounding buildings, was usually an open air marketplace. Now, though, several soldiers stood in a clump watching some wagons rattle in from the east gate. The wagons carried prisoners and it came to me in a flash that the battle I had witnessed on the road from Shor’s Stone was part of the civil war that Lysha had talked about. At a guess, then, I’d say the disciplined group of soldiers in matching armor that were waiting for the carts were the Imperials, which probably meant the wagons were full of…I couldn’t remember what they were called. The word that came to mind was “Stormtroopers,” but that seemed like a probable conflation. Rebels, anyway. Which was kind of ironic if they really were called Stormtroopers.

 

Sorry, tangented pretty hard there.

 

The prisoners were pulled from the carts and lined up in a ramshackle row and the air of tense excitement increased until I was craning my neck, wondering what the excitement was about. Until they led the first guy (well, he kind of walked himself) to a large stone in the middle of the square, made him kneel, then chopped off his head. The crowd cheered while my stomach turned. I made a hasty retreat back toward the gate, clenching my gullet as hard as I could to avoid spewing all over the place. Not that there was anyone to witness it – everyone was at the town square watching the executions.

 

I had just reached the gate when Alduin struck. I heard a roar and a giant THUD and turned around to see that giant black lizard on top of a building overlooking the courtyard I had just vacated. Then fire spewed from his mouth and I was very thankful I had vacated when I did. In fact, I finished the vacating at that very moment, sprinting as fast as my legs would allow back down the road toward Riverwood, frantically praying that he wasn’t the fucking destiny Edith had meant. Although she had called me Dragonborn, so that didn’t bode well…

 

Ralof and Alfhild

 

I got lost on the way to Riverwood, which is how I happened to stumble upon Ralof, who turned out to be one of the doomed Storm…rebels who now had a second lease on life thanks to Alduin. He was collapsed on the ground, bleeding and bruised, outside a cave that, apparently, ran under Helgen. He asked for a healing potion. I told him I had no idea what that was but I’d try to find one if he told me what it was, so he described it and that’s how I learned that the vials of red fluid I had taken from the watchtower outside Shor’s Stone were healing potions.

 

Huh.

 

So I gave him one and watched in amazement as his wounds stitched themselves up and the blood stopped flowing. After only a handful of seconds, he was on his feet again. Remarkable stuff.

 

He helped me get un-lost – turns out he’s from Riverwood himself, so he knew the way – and introduced me to sister Gerdur who implored me to get to Whiterun with all haste to tell the Jarl about the dragon. Ralof and his family were very nice and I always felt bad about joining the opposite side of the war, when it came time to choose.

 

I bring that up last because there has been much speculation about my motives for eventually siding with the Imperials. Here is the truth: I was on the road leading to Whiterun on the errand Gerdur had given me. I had just passed the meadery when I noticed several figures running up the road toward me. The Whiterun guards in the area paid no notice of them, so I thought nothing of it. I just moved to the side of the road to give them room and kept walking.

 

But as they neared, they drew their weapons. I looked around but saw nothing that might be considered a threat. The guards continued patrolling the area as if nothing was wrong. It was only when the first one came close and swung a mace at me that I realized that I was the target. It was my first personal experience with Skyrim's bands of slavers, who had total legal rights to capture and sell anyone not "of name" - i.e. a known noble.

 

The guards stood by and watched as I tried to flee, just to run into more slavers that had circled behind. I grabbed my sword and fought back, but there were far too many of them. They soon had me down and disarmed, and I was sure I was dead (or worse).

 

Then something distracted them. That something was a woman, wearing just clothes, no armor, carrying only a knife. She was screaming at them to stop and brazenly attacked the nearest. The slavers responded by fighting back, but that was a mistake. The woman, it turns out, was Alfhild Battle-Born, a member of one of the local power-broker families. As soon as she was attacked, the guards sprang into action. The slavers were chopped down in moments. Too late, alas, for Alfhild. She gave her life for me; thus I gave my sword to the Battle-Borns and their cause. Had it been one of the Gray-Manes that jumped to my rescue, Skyrim would look very different right now.

 

I made it the rest of the way to Whiterun without trouble and was granted an audience with the Jarl, Balgruff. He thanked me for the warning, sent a detachment of soldiers to Riverwood, then gave me another job – Bleak Falls Barrow, which is a giant tomb that used to be a shrine back when the dragons ruled the world, apparently held something called a Dragonstone and the court wizard wanted someone to go get it.

 

I debated. I wasn’t much of a warrior, so it didn’t seem like I was the right person for such a job, but I figured, what the hell – all I had to do was go into some creepy ancient crypt and find a stone. Surely the worst I might find in there would be some rats or something, and they would surely run away from a human carrying a torch. What could possibly go wrong?

 

I should have known better – this is a land where dragons and man-eating wolves live, after all.

 

 

Whiterun and fucking Bleak Falls Barrow

 

I suppose I have to acknowledge the trip to Bleak Falls Barrow, but the less I think about that place, the better my peace of mind. I still have nightmares and flashbacks. Here are the things I learned there:

 

- I really started practicing with a bow. I was pretty good by the time I got out of there, though the bruises on my arm from where the string slapped me on release the first few dozen times I tried to shoot it didn’t go away completely for two weeks, and I had plenty of fun blisters to boot. However, it was necessary – I was no good at close combat, so archery was the only way to get things done.

 

My standard battle went like this: hide in the darkest place I could fine, shoot at something, run away, hide behind another rock or pillar, start all over. I’m sure many people would have considered this a cowardly way to fight, but I survived, and that was what mattered.

 

- I had my first encounter with the giant fucking spiders this godforsaken world has. I didn’t use to have arachnophobia.

 

- I had my first encounters with the zombies this world calls draugr. draugr. They still make me queasy – old blackened skin (but surprisingly tough) stretched over skeletons. They are disgusting and they are very difficult to kill. If you can call it killing, given they are technically already dead. It’s a good thing the surprisingly large number of corridors and rooms had plenty of space to run and maneuver.

 

- I also (and this is why I still have nightmares) learned the hard way (har!) that their...equipment still works, somehow. All the scouring baths in the history of all worlds could not make me feel completely clean. I would take the gang rape (never did learn the names of my saviors) a thousand time before going through that again.

 

The reason the draugr was able to rape me was because there was a wall in that place that has ancient writing on it in what turns out to be the language of dragons. These things are peppered all over Skyrim. I was in the middle of a battle with a particularly large draugr – and by “battle,” I mean I ran away from it (thank god it was slow), turned and shot at it until it got too close, then ran again.

 

Except the last time, I ran up onto a dais where the wall was. I didn’t notice it glowing – I was keeping my eye on the draugr – but I did hear what sounded like a group of people chanting something and felt a sudden warm wind that caressed me and then it felt like something was hugging me and touching me and entering me (through my armor) and…well, let’s just say I had never had an orgasm nearly so powerful before. I lost all sense of time and place, all sense of anything.

 

I had no idea what had happened, of course, and likely you don’t either, so I’ll take a quick aside to let you know what I only learned later – these Word Walls have magic phrases carved into them. When someone who happens to be a Dragonborn gets close to them, those words glow and then…infuse them, is the only way I can describe it.

 

The word on this particular wall was “Fuz,” which means “force.” Since the word had infused me (as described above), I could now Shout it, which is exactly what it sounds like: I just had to yell “Fuz!” at someone or something and it would push (or force) that someone/thing away.

 

I hope that all makes sense. I was very confused about what was going on for quite a while.

 

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, the fucking (literally) draugr.

 

It seems safe to assume I dropped my weapon and probably fell over. All I know is that I was wrapped in a cocoon of sensuality so extreme that I couldn’t feel, see, hear…well, sense in any way anything else around me.

 

Which sucks because by the time I got out of it, the draugr already had me stripped and pinned and spread and I got to watch in horror as his extraordinarily ancient, nasty dick slammed into me.

 

It was weird because I was ridiculously wet from the wall orgasm, so I felt no pain. In fact, with the dregs of the orgasm still lingering, it would have felt pretty good had it not been a literal fucking corpse inside me. As it was, I vomited all over it and me (which didn’t slow it down even a little) and struggled to no avail. That thing was strong. When it was finished – and I’m not sure what constituted “finished” for it since I didn’t feel it come in me – it picked me up, shoved my still-struggling body into a nearby empty sarcophagus, and closed the lid on me. I panicked for a moment until pushing at the lid showed that it was not sealed. Just heavy. It took some doing, but I got it moved enough to climb out. The draugr was back in its own sarcophagus but the lid was off, so it noticed me right away. Panic, anger, and deep loathing took over, and I grabbed the thing’s own giant sword before it could stand and hacked the shit out of it until there were only little pieces remaining. Then hacked some more. Then threw up again.

 

I’m ready to throw up right now just thinking about it.

 

One other sort-of-related thing that bears mentioning was a chance meeting with a priestess of Dibella. She was tending a small shrine near the back entrance to Bleak Falls (too bad I hadn’t know about that entrance before – it would have saved so much time!) and gave me food and drink and let me rest there. I told her my story and she suggested I go to a city called Markarth to become a Defender for her goddess.

 

“She will bless you with gifts to help you in your struggle,” she said, and I told her I would think about it, though the last thing I wanted was to have even more of a connection to the fucking Daedra than I apparently already had.

 

 

The dragon at the watchtower

 

After I returned to Whiterun (the big draugr at the end had had the Dragonstone, by the way – sorry, I forgot to mention that), the Jarl praised me and gave me money and then, just I was getting ready to leave, a soldier came running up and told everyone within a six-room radius that a dragon was attacking a nearby watchtower.

 

This did two things: first, it put the song All Along the Watchtower in my head, where it remained for the next three days, and, second, it put everyone on high alert. Balgruff immediately turned to me and asked me to join the defense of the tower because “you have seen a dragon, so you know more about them than anyone here,” which, okay, technically that is true, but Jesus Christ, seeing one fly overhead hardly made me a Subject Matter Expert on them.

 

I did help kill the dragon at the Western Watchtower. Kind of. I got blasted by fire early in the fight and ran out of arrows about halfway through. My contribution to the battle was a few hits on the dragon's back end with a sword I had reclaimed from a draugr, and a lot of running around and hiding behind rocks. I was actually on my knees struggling to get up at the point the dragon died. Irileth (the Jarl’s Housecarl, another person I don’t know if I could beat even now) and her men did all the heavy lifting in the battle.

 

To counter all the rumors about me that have sprung up: I did NOT shout the dragon from the air, kill it with my bare hands, turn into a three-hundred-foot giant, nor (God help me) rape the dragon (or any other dragon, for that matter).

 

This was an important moment because it was also the first time I sucked the soul out of a dragon. Not, like, with my mouth, so keep your perverted thoughts to yourself. It was actually a sensation exactly like the one when I got close to the wall in Bleak Falls – the same wind, the same overwhelming sensation, the same orgasm. Except this time, instead of coming to my senses while getting raped by a dead thing, I had two dozen soldiers just staring at me. I’m not sure which was worse.

 

Okay, yes I do – the rape was worse by a gigantic margin. I wish I hadn’t brought it back up. Excuse me while I go throw up again.

 

Jarl Balgruff named me a Thane after I reported dragon attack. Which seemed a little premature, considering he had just met me a couple of days previous. He has a very healthy respect for the position of Dragonborn, which he (and Edith just a few days before) proclaimed me to be.

 

Since we’re on the subject, a few words about what, exactly, that means: a Dragonborn is one who can Shout, as we discussed, BUT, perhaps more important, a Dragonborn is the only one who can permanently kill a dragon. They do this by sucking out their souls, as we also discussed. Without a Dragonborn present, the dragon will inconveniently come back to life in five to seven days.

 

Nobody knew that at the time, of course – dragons had been thought to be extinct before Alduin showed up at Helgen, so no one really knew much about them at all, save what had been passed down in ancient tales. It was a huge surprise to everyone when they showed up, seemingly out of nowhere.

 

Just like I had, come to think of it. Lucky me.

 

Don't feed the bastards - they'll just want more

 

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