When the first two draugr appeared, Atmah started to shout, “Watch out, they…” but before the words even left her throat, the draugr were dead. Trendil moved with a speed that belied belief, slicing one of the monsters into pieces with her swords while Sloan seemed to disappear from Aithne’s side and re-appear behind the already-slumping form of the second draugr. As the creature’s chest exploded and it crumbled, Atma finished, “…’re deceptively quick.” Atmah blinked at them. “Um…”

 

Sloan grinned. “Not quick enough.”

 

“So I see.” Atmah shook her head as she resumed walking.

 

Aithne had even less to say – it was all she could do to keep her mouth from gaping open. Visions of Saarthal interposed themselves, of their struggles and near-deaths. Eventually they had found ways to destroy the dead things but it had taken a collective effort and sustained fire. She shook her head as they began walking. She had thought she had grown strong but her duplicates – who didn’t even use magic! – had given her a glimpse at how strong she truly was not.

 

The story was similar through the next few rooms. Aithne managed a single firebolt in that time, and that merely skipped off a draugr’s shield. Trendil and Sloan were simply too fast. Atmah, clearly in as much awe as Aithne, just shook her head and continued forward until they came to a large closed gate. She stopped in front of it, fists clenched, and just stared for several seconds until Trendil stepped toward her. The movement seemed to shake her from her reverie.

 

“Sorry. This…this is the room that…where Girduin died. The rest of us barely made it out. I recommend just running as quickly as you can as soon as the gate opens. Try to get to the other side before…”

 

A pause.

 

Trendil raised her eyebrows. “Before what?”

 

Atmah looked at them with wide tear-stained eyes. “Before it gets you.”

 

“Well now I’m curious.” Sloan stepped past the shaken mage and pulled a metal lever embedded in the wall.

 

The gate rattled open, revealing a massive circular room. They stepped through and the gate clanged shut behind them in a disconcertingly familiar way as the ground began to shake. Aithne felt a moment of panic as more shades of Saarthal rushed through her mind, but those were pushed aside when a massive skeletal dragon rose from the center of the room and reared back. At the same time, dozens…no, hundreds of skeleton warriors sprang from alcoves around the edge of the room and charged them. Aithne scrambled to put up a ward big enough to cover all of them but Trendil just laughed.

 

“Oh, is that all? I’ll take care of the dragon. Just keep the skeletons away.”

 

Sloan nodded, already sprinting toward the closest batch but Aithne began to protest when the dragon’s roar morphed into a glowing blue-white ball that, itself, morphed into a blast of icy death. Aithne cursed as she once again started the spell, knowing it was now too late for the major ward she would need for such a blast. But Trendil stood in the path of the blast and, just as it reached her…split the blast with her sword. Somehow. The ice dissipated to nothing almost immediately, leaving just patches of frost on the ground by Trendil’s feel. The ward spell died on Aithne’s awestruck lips as the soldier ran toward the dragon.

 

Movement in her peripheral vision shook Aithne from her stupor and she turned to lay down a firestorm on the opposite side from where Sloan had run. Her nerves made concentration difficult and the first one erupted farther back than she intended. The skeletons in the vicinity disintegrated in an instant but the majority still…well, “lived” wasn’t the right word. Still shambled forward.

 

Aithne cursed and slapped down another firestorm. Her aim was better this time and the back half of the swarm collapsed in a gratifying instant but she hesitated to cast a third, both because of the amount of energy a firestorm used and because it would be perilously close to where Trendil dodged and weaved around the dragon, her swords mere blurs as they carved out continuous chunks of bone.

 

Aithne switched tactics, resorting to more precise firebolts. The skeletons were not nearly as strong as draugr – one bolt was enough to destroy a single skeleton - but there were still dozens of them and it was slow going.

 

For her, anyway. Sloan appeared to have less trouble. She appeared as if out of nowhere from behind the dragon, apparently having already cleared her entire side. Just as Trendil’s swords moved too fast to see, so Sloan’s entire body seemed to be little more than a blur. She seemed to spin like a dervish through the dead things and a continuous wave of bones flew through the air in her wake. Aithne managed maybe a dozen firebolts total before the last of the skeletons were gone. She shook her head as Sloan wiped her daggers off on her pants and strode to join Aithne and Atmah.

 

“That was…” Atmah began, and Aithne finished for her, “…amazing. How did you do that?”

 

A laugh. “’That,’ as you call it, was ingrained in me over the course of several painful months. Shall we help our…I don’t know, sister? Cousin?”

 

“Doppelganger? I suppose we…oh, too late.”

 

Even as Aithne spoke, the dragon’s head careened away toward the far wall as its body collapsed into a jumble of broken bones. Trendil sheathed her swords as she turned away from it.

 

“That was much easier to kill than a living dragon. Fortunately.”
 

Aithne blinked. “How many living dragons have you killed?”

 

“Hundreds. Don’t be impressed,” as Aithne’s mouth gaped, “I didn’t kill them by myself. I had my Company with me.”

 

“Yes, but still…”

 

Atmah cleared her throat, her eyes wide with an expression that told Aithne she felt the same way. “There were six of us and we couldn’t touch that thing. We were overwhelmed by the skeletons. Elvali tried a wall of fire but couldn’t hold it for more than a few seconds. That thing decimated Girduin in five seconds flat.” She stopped, took a deep breath. “Who are you people?”

 

Sloan and Trendil shrugged while Aithne’s mind, brimming with unexpected feelings of inadequacy, threw itself with abandon into a sudden yawning pit. The last time she had felt so useless had been…

 

 Flashes of Borkul, of pain and terror and complete surrender shot through her. The room seemed to grow dark and her lips began to form words she never thought they would say again: “I belong to Borkul!” but she was interrupted by Sloan’s laugh.

 

“That’s a good question.” Sloan sheathed her daggers and rubbed her head. “I was an orphan so I’ve never really known the answer to that.”

 

Trendil echoed the laugh. “I thought I knew but then I met these two.”

 

Aithne just shook her head as her mouth snapped shut and her mind clawed its painful way back out of the abyss she had tried to forget was there. She clutched a fist over her pounding chest and focused only on breathing until the gibbering fear passed, the pit faded away, and the room lightened.

 

She came back to her senses in time to hear Atmah say, “…just to survive. None of us was prepared. We knew we had made a catastrophic mistake in coming here, but we also knew we would never survive if we tried going back. At least, not through that room.” She waved a hand and the spectral figures appeared once again.

 

Act 2 – A Narrow Escape

INT. LABYRINTHIAN HALLWAY

 

All cast except GIRDUIN huddle together. They are out of breath and appear to be recovering from a difficult ordeal. The atmosphere is now palpably fearful.

 

ELVALI: "We... we have to go back. We can't leave Girduin..."

HAFNAR: "We barely made it out alive, and you want to go back in?"

ATMAH: "It's too late. There isn't enough of him left to go back in after."

TAKES-IN-LIGHT: "Gods, what have we done?"

SAVOS: "We can't go back. Might as well go forward. We can still do this."

ATMAH: "Savos is right. We can make it if we just stay alert."

 

Fade to darkness as each turns toward the passage ahead with heavy dread.

 

After a pause, Atmah tossed a bitter smile. “We stayed alert. But we didn’t make it.” A frown. “Well, most of us didn’t make it.” She shook her head, then turned and started down the corridor.

 

They spent the next hour moving deeper into the ruin but Aithne paid little attention to the continued draugr attacks – Trendil and Sloan made short work of any that appeared – or Atmah’s memories (“Elvali died here. We didn’t even see it happen – she was with us and then she wasn’t.” “Takes-in-Light just sat down and gave up. Refused to go any further.”) Her mind wrestled with the unexpected turn it had taken.

 

She was twenty-two years old, nearly twenty-three. She had spent only a year and a few months in Borkul’s dubious care. It had been three and a half years since she had been forcefully parted from him and she was increasingly certain her vision of his death had been true. Less than one percent of her life had included him.

 

So how did he still have such a hold on her mind? She had thought she was past that, past him. She had obeyed him for pure survival, at first. But that didn’t explain how she had allowed herself to become so fully immersed. So fully lost. So fully his.

 

The pit yawned open again, but this time she was aware and stepped with care to its edges. This was important, she was certain – she had spent the last three-something years trying to bury the pit but she saw now that that wasn’t enough. She couldn’t hide from the pain, couldn’t ignore the wound, or it would fester, would gnaw away at her until she was no longer…

 

“Here we are.”

 

Next chapter

 

Previous chapter

 

Start from the beginning