Introduction
This Skyrim playthrough blog will follow the adventures of Raldana Star-Gazer, a not-so-young Nord who has found herself caught up in a world she both knows and doesn’t know at all. It will be a journey of discovery, for her, and for me, too. As a player with over 1000 hours in-game accrued in less than six months, the many moral issues, questions, and ambiguities built into Skyrim’s quests are large factors in keeping this game worth such an investment to me. As a writer, I am hoping to explore some fresh angles in these familiar game stories, as well as hone my storytelling and narrative skills. I welcome feedback and responses from willing readers.
My game has a few mods; I will link reference points to these in the narrative, so they can be identified if anyone is curious.
We start at the beginning:
I. Enemies
I sit here now in the home of strangers--or rather, people whose kindness makes them new friends--safe for the moment, trying to understand what has happened to me over the last 24 hours. So much:
I don’t know how long I was unconscious, but I awoke with my head aching and my vision spinning, as if my skull had taken a dozen hard blows. The whole world bumped and jostled around me. As my wits returned, I realized that I was a passenger in a dilapidated cross-country buckboard, and that I had company: three men, strangers to me, and all of us with hands bound tightly. Oddly, one man had a dirty rag tied around his face to cover his mouth. This gagged man didn't look like he should be anyone’s prisoner. His clothing was plainly of fine quality, even royal, and his bearing remained confident and powerful despite our humiliating state. The man closest to me was clad in a military style set of light armor, but I did not recognize its affiliation. The third man wore only the lowest rough spun garments, as, I now saw, did I. These were not my clothes. How did I end up wearing them? We were obviously prisoners, but who were our captors, and where were they taking us? I would soon find out, and it was meant to be a dead end.
The fellow sitting next to me seemed wryly entertained by my confusion. We had all been picked up crossing the border he said, and for our crimes--fighting against the "Empire's" oppression-- we were being taken to Helgen to answer to the authorities there. The captive wearing the homespun tunic—a thief, the soldier said—yelped in dismay, alternately whining and shouting his innocence. He may have been a thief, but he was no Stormcloak, he kept repeating between his appeals for mercy to every divine whose name he could remember. I, too, was certain that whatever had been my reason for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, it was not as a member of some insurgency. I wish I could recall why I had been crossing that border. Was I on my way into this country, or was I trying to escape it? I can’t quite remember. I hope my head clears soon.
With its driver periodically ordering us to stop our racket, the wagon jerked and rumbled us along the ancient cobblestone road until my back hurt nearly as much as my head. Up ahead, I could see another wagon carrying a similar group of dispirited, uniformed prisoners. Eventually, the miserable caravan arrived at a small garrisoned town—Helgen, the soldier said. The wagons slowed and stopped in the town square, and the thief grew increasingly agitated. The others had adopted a kind of resigned calm at whatever our fate held. Local citizens peered from their porches and windows, while a group of smartly attired officers awaited us beside a headsman's block. Their uniforms were distinctly different from the unpolished gear of my companions in bondage--more tailored and obviously of superior materials. The Empire, I presumed.
We prisoners were ordered from the wagon to stand before the man in charge; someone called him Tullius, I think. He had the manner of a career soldier who had seen and done it all many times--a battle-tempered pragmatism through which he recounted the gagged man's offenses with authoritative world-weariness. It was a strange litany. The man, Ulfric Stormcloak (the namesake of the rebel forces, I realized) stood accused of regicide, by shouting the king to death or something like that. I really did not understand what had occurred, but at least the reason for the gag had become clear: the Empire was afraid of this man's voice, and so he had been silenced in this crude fashion--a state that was about to be made permanent by the executioner's axe. I may not recall much before this ill-fated wagon ride, but I do remember that silencing those who speak out against oppression is a standard response by insecure authority. The voice of free speech can change the world. What must this man's words have been?
Somehow, I had the feeling that I had much more in common with these men and women about to die than I could tell at the moment. They seemed so familiar, almost my people, the families and homes and the way of life all as if I knew it well, and yet I could not say that I did. Their political alliances and oppositions were like so many before and so many yet to come, but of the particular names and places and conflicts they spoke, I knew nothing.
The charges read, Tullius's lieutenant ordered the prisoners to the rough-hewn stump and the axe. We were to have no trial or chance to plead for our lives. This was the summary judgment of war. Names were called, and the executions began. The Stormcloak rebels held their heads high and claimed proud sacrifice for Skyrim their homeland. With "Sovngarde awaits," his last words, the first man went to the block, a lieutenant's boot planted between his shoulders forcing his head into alignment with the swing of the killing blade. The separating of bone from bone and a man's head falling like an overripe apple into the waiting box was a sickening sound and sight I will never forget. The smell….even worse. The thief abruptly bolted from the waiting group, screaming his innocence until an arrow in his back dropped him to the dirt. "Anybody else want to run?" the lieutenant said. Nobody did. The man with the official list looked next at me. This one's not on here, he informed the lieutenant. Well then put her on, he was told. I gave him my name, Raldana Star-Gazer. At least I remembered that right, I think.
At the lieutenant’s command, I stepped forward, walking like a fading shadow in the harsh light of midday. I was about to die! Was any of this real? Or was it just a very, very bad dream? I saw my body drop to the ground as if watching it from above, and felt the same boot shoving my neck onto the execution stump, now slick with blood, hair, and shreds of blue fabric. From the corner of my eye, I saw the sky for what I thought would be the final time. So focused was my mind on its last moments of consciousness that, at first, I barely heard the raucous, guttural scream pierce the air around this grisly, official scene. Then something happened that no one could ignore. Another great roar, and a wave of sound with the force of physical blows buffeted the town square and everyone in it. I can barely even describe the creature from which these earsplitting attacks came. It was immense, dark as the grave...and airborne.
Great leathery wings bore the beast's spiky reptilian body above our heads as it wheeled and bellowed over Helgen. The soldiers of the Empire raised their bows to pepper it with arrows, and everyone else ran for cover. I was not to lose my head that afternoon by the executioner's hand, but would any of us survive this? The creature seemed impervious to the weapons at hand. It screamed its blows at us, landed at its leisure on the town square and breathed fiery vapors on the men closest to it, snapping at them and throwing this one and that into the air as a dog does with its toys.
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