The rushing wind rebounded off the cliffs, mimicking the sea breaking itself against the merciless rock of a shore. The acrid reek of steel, leather, blood. Everywhere, blood. Fury given form, gushing red rivers ground into paste so the soil looked like baked clay.

Then, silence. A silence so vast it could fill an ocean, yet so sharp it pierced the soul. It lasted for a heartbeat, maybe two, but felt like a lifetime. Maybe two. The kind of quiet reserved for sacred places. Or graveyards.

The sound of voices pitched to a conversational tone broke the seal, and Trendil shivered as life resumed. Her leg began to complain from laying in one spot for so long. Birds chattered in the trees as a light breeze ruffled the branches. Someone nearby laughed. It all seemed too real, oversized, like a parody of life. The voices continued, along with the sounds of work. Grunting men, clinking metal, heavy things being dragged through the dirt. The chink of shovels in the dirt. Then, at last, hooves, creaking leather, a sharp voiced command, and the sound of a host of soldiers on the march.

Trendil felt a cramp begin to creep up her calf, make its way to her hip, but she forced herself to stay still for another hundred heartbeats before shoving at the broken shards of the carriage, digging out from under the splintered wood as if from a grave. She thought she was prepared for what she was going to see, but the reality of it hit her like a slap on the face.

The grass was matted down and trampled into the mud; mud made from the rivers of blood that had flowed from the Stormcloaks when they had stumbled upon an Imperial force in the narrow confines of Haemar’s Pass. The bodies of her late escort had been stripped and dumped off the side of the road. Trendil stumbled to them with an irrational hope fluttering in her chest. She knew better than to give it heed, but still collapsed when she came upon him.

Marcus’ eyes seemed a reflection of the sky above, twin pools of blue yearning for freedom from the lifeless vessel in which they were trapped. Trendil covered them with a hand, closed them like a lid on a coffin. She bowed her head and shed tears for the life she had barely begun – married one sweet day to your childhood best friend, alone in the world the very next. She cried her way through the onslaught of pain as she mourned the loss of her life, her love.

When the tears had dried, at least for the moment, she took stock of the rest of the clearing. There were no signs of the other women, which meant the Imperials had taken them. Spoils of war, she supposed. She had not known them well – they had joined the convoy at the last minute, for the safety traveling in groups was supposed to contain. Had she not just lost everything, she might have spared more sorrow for them, the poor things.

A bird chirruped, and the rest of nature seemed to take that as its cue to resume, and the sound of normal wilderness broke Trendil from her musing. She took in the rest of her surroundings, truly seeing it for the first time. There wasn’t a lot to see. The clash had happened on a narrow portion of the road. Trees swayed on a steep slope behind her, and a jagged cliff climbed to the sky in front. The road cut between, tending downward to her right, upward to her left. She looked both ways along the road as she racked her brain, trying to remember maps to which she had only given the briefest glance. They had crested the pass and were on the downward slope. The road, she was mostly certain, met with the road from Cyrodil just a few miles outside of Helgen. Or what remained of Helgen. It had been destroyed almost four months ago, or so the rumors said, when the first of the dragons had reappeared in the land.

Well, that was neither here nor there. She had not seen any dragons, save one long in the distance some weeks back. Dragons had not killed the love of her life. Humans had. Specifically, Imperial humans had. Trendil ground her fingers into her palms until they bled and her sorrow – well, some of it, at least – was replaced by an anger that built with each heartbeat until a fire raged in her chest. Marcus and she had been careful to avoid the appearance of picking a side in the civil war – losing half your customers meant losing half of your profits, after all – but the time for neutrality was past.

She bent, kissed her love’s cold forehead, picked up a discarded sword, climbed to her feet, and turned toward the east. Toward Windhelm. If the Imperials wanted a war, she would bring it to them.