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The blade of Dawnbreaker catches on a rock as she plunges it into the snow, leaning her weight on it like a staff. The star in the hilt does little to illuminate the murky grey of the storm around her.
Merid-Nunda feels warm blood cool as it dribbles down her lip. The pain rises and refuses to subside, crawling further up her gums.
In the wars of the Daedra, unceasing and endless, no solider escapes. There are no cushy desk jobs or even back lines in the bickerings of Meridia and Molag Bal.
It is an enlistment written eternal, a vow unbroken by time. Fighting the wars of the gods is just as unceasing as the wars themselves.
Nu was born for this, she thinks we she stumbles in her march. No birth is ever painless. No life is either.
She gasps. Said pain wells up with the blood that drips from her mouth. Her eyes twitch against the wind, against the pounding in her heart.
Nu can feel her canines expanding within her skull. The root of the tooth branching upward and out, strengthening the base to begin the transformation.
They got her. The damn things, those vampiric scum, they actually fucking got her.
The only landmark within the whirlwind of snow is the shadow of the mountains. A bitter gale rushes in off the sea of ghosts like a thousand ice wraiths plunging their teeth into her at once.
The mountain is high, but beyond it is Solitude.
If Nu can get to the city, the team of priests can heal her. Beyond that mountain is food, a bed, and fire. If she can just make it up the mountain. If she can just hold on a little longer.
She’d throw herself onto the feet of Meridia’s statue, but the comparative nearness of the temple doesn’t outweigh its emptiness.
Meridia can cure the sickly vampirism blooming in her blood, but she cannot sow Nu’s ribs shut.
Nu plunges Dawnbreaker into the snow again, digging her grip onto the sword in search of a lifeline.
That life flickers, as fragile as candlelight.
Nu screams as she hoists herself further.
She will make it to Solitude. She will make it back home to her children’s arms, to the companionship of her friends. Isran is going to give her a stern scolding about going in alone when she makes it back to the fort. She’s going to survive this.
A prayer, silent and pleading, stretches wordlessly from Nu’s lips and effortlessly past the barriers of Nirn and into the Colored Rooms below.
Dawnbreaker wobbles where the blade slinks too easily into the soft snow. Nu stumbles, a spatter of blood shadowing onto the ground.
She tilts her head upward to examine her progress, to glimpse at the mountain in her path.
Instead she sees the stars, cutting through the dark like the needles they are. Each a wound left in the sky by a sibling of her goddess. All glinting like diamonds high above her, crisp and plentiful over a cruel Skyrim night. Dark and bright and beautiful.
The coils of her air whip around her face. Nu shudders with the burden of her pain, moaning as the toothache sharpens. Her prayer made it through, she thinks.
She’s going to make it home. She’s going to make it home. To Serana. To Agmond. To Inigo.
Her expanding canines make a sudden lurch upward. The resulting throb cracks through her skull, launching her backward in agony. The sky glints apathetically.
Merid-Nunda howls into the freezing gale. Screaming to the stars, begging the Star Orphan to answer. Only the wind howls back.