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By the time the last of the stone steps fall away into packed snow and sky, Lilliandra’s lungs are burning.
She refuses to show it.
The wind at the Throat of the World is a living thing, teeth and claws of ice dragging at her robes, plucking heat from her skin. She keeps her shoulders straight, her pace even, her breath measured through her nose. A thin shimmer of magic clings to her like a second, invisible cloak — just enough to blunt the worst of the cold, not enough to betray strain.
Miraak has stopped pretending he doesn’t notice. “You’re pale,” he says, for the third time, boots crunching close behind her. “Paler. This was a terrible idea.”
“I'm half Nord,” she answers, not looking back. “You come in only three shades: pale, paler, and ‘hasn’t seen the sun in a century.’”
“Your humour deteriorates when you are about to fall over.”
She snorts, which costs more breath than it’s worth. The air is razor-thin this high; every inhale leaves a hollow ache in her chest. She can feel the wrongness in her soul-thread too — the place where the shout had been turned inside out, where Miraak’s soul had caught and held after death.
It will settle, eventually. Everything does.
“If I was capable of resurrecting you,” she says, “I am capable of walking up a mountain.”
Behind her, the cadence of his stride stutters, then resumes, sharper. “The former was reckless. This is idiotic. You could have waited at least another month before climbing a mountain.”
She doesn’t answer. The old path curves, snow smoothing the scars their battle left in the stone. She remembers standing here with Alduin’s shadow blotting out the sun; remembers the way the world had seemed too big and too small at once. She remembers shouting the World-Eater out of the sky.
Now the sky is high and open, the clouds thin as gauze. The only weight in it is the sound — distant, resonant — of a dragon’s voice humming on the edge of hearing.
He knows they’re here.
They crest the last rise together.
The peak is a white bowl cradling old stones: the time-wound’s spot, the familiar grey edges of the word wall, the scattered scars of battle half-hidden under snow. The silence here is different from Apocrypha’s; thinner, but somehow heavier, as if every breath is monitored by the mountain itself.
The air shudders. Paarthurnax spirals down from the blank sky in a slow, controlled fall, wings wide, snow whipping into little storms beneath him. He lands on the ground with the grace of something too large to be that careful, talons digging furrows in the ice.
“Drem Yol Lol, Dovahkiin,” he rumbles, the word vibrating in her sternum. “You return.”
The pressure of his gaze settles over her like another mantle. She swallows, squares her shoulders. “Paarthurnax,” she says, inclining her head. “You are well?”
His head tilts, steam curling from his nostrils in the cold. “As well as one can be, when the World-Eater is no more. The wind is quieter now. The sky… less crowded.” Then his eyes narrow, molten gold focusing more keenly. The air tastes charged to her, like the moment before a storm. “You return,” he says again, slower, “carrying echoes that are not entirely your own.”
She feels first, rather than sees, Miraak move. One moment he’s a steady warmth at her back; the next he’s stepped forward half a pace, angled just enough that his shoulder is between her and the dragon. Not overt, but mere instinct. Lilli stares at him.
Paarthurnax’s gaze slides over Miraak without catching, like wind over stone. “Your companion is unsettled,” the dragon observes.
She makes a short sound that is almost a laugh. “That’s his natural state.”
Miraak’s jaw tightens. “I am here,” he says, clipped, looking offended.
Paarthurnax’s attention fully settles on Miraak. “You have chosen your company from interesting ruins, dovahkiin,” he says. “I thought the wind smelled of old rebellion.”
Miraak’s shoulders go very still. The dragon tongue scratches at something old in him; Lilli sees the flicker of it behind his eyes — a memory not entirely his, the echo of another self that walked among dragons when the world was young.
“And I see,” Miraak replies, voice cool as the snow underfoot, “that Alduin’s lieutenant still lingers on his perch. A very patient vulture.”
Paarthurnax huffs. The puff of hot air ruffles Lilli’s hair, but she holds her ground. “You remember me only as lieutenant,” the dragon muses. “As if the story begins and ends there.” Paarthurnax’s nostrils flare. His gaze slides to the stone beneath their feet, to the scorched scars on it. “You were once the sharpest of my brother’s tools, Miraak. You stood against us. There are not many dov who can make that claim. You burned bright, then fell into ink and silence. All thought you dead. To find you here, at the dovahkiin’s side…” He huffs again. “The skein twists in strange ways.”
This time when the old memories rise, Miraak doesn’t turn away from them. He looks at the dragon, at the curve of his horns silhouetted against the sky, and some half-buried image overlays itself — fire raining from above, the roar of a shout that made mountains tremble. He had been younger then. Stupid. Brilliant. Angry.
“Few rebels burned as brightly,” Paarthurnax says, almost gently, “before they fell into shadow.”
Lilli glances between them, eyes narrowed. “You remember him that clearly?”
“Dragons are not so many that we forget the ones who bite,” Paarthurnax says. “Nor the ones who turn their teeth on their own.” His attention shifts back to her properly. “You climbed for a reason,” he says. “Not merely to parade old grudges in thinner air.”
Lilli exhales. The breath ghosts white. “I did.” She isn’t entirely sure she can name it, but it’s there: the need to see him, to stand where she fought Alduin and listen to something older than the World-Eater’s hunger. To wonder if he will say something different than Durnehviir.
Paarthurnax’s gaze sharpens again, as if the thought itself is a shout. “The song of your soul feels… unsteady. What have you done?” he asks gently.
She hesitates, then answers with an exhale. “I used Alduin’s shout to bring Miraak back to me from the dead.”
“You pull a soul back from dissolution.” He tastes the word, thoughtful. “You inverted dominion into devotion.”
The phrase lands like a hand on the back of her neck. Lilli’s stomach gives a small, unpleasant twist. Behind her, Miraak bristles. “Do not speak as though she erred,” he snaps.
Paarthurnax does not flinch. “All choices carry cost,” he says. “Even noble ones.” A pause. “Especially noble ones.”
“It wasn’t noble,” Lilli says, before Miraak can argue. Her voice comes out flatter than she intends. "It was greed. I will not argue with that."
The dragon’s head tilts but does not correct her.
She looks away, out over the sea of clouds. The world drops away beyond the edge of the peak, endless blue and white and nothing. It feels uncomfortably like standing on the edge of the shout itself again, the one that reached past death and seized what it wanted. “It was necessary,” she says. “That’s all.”
Miraak’s hand flexes at his side, gloved fingers curling, then releasing. She knows how the tether felt from his end — they haven’t talked about it in detail, but sometimes he wakes too abruptly, breath coming too fast, and she can guess.
Paarthurnax studies him. “You resent being returned?” he asks.
Miraak’s mouth thins. For a moment, he looks as though he’ll avoid answering. He doesn’t. “I resent the price she pays,” he admits. Lilli’s throat tightens. She hates that this is happening with an audience.
The wind gusts suddenly, a sharp, slicing draft that cuts through her. Lilliandra’s body reacts before her mind does; her vision swims for a moment as the cold steals the air from her lungs. The thin air, the climb, the constant drag at the wounded place in her soul — it all piles up at once. Her knees wobble.
Miraak is there before she pitches forward, his hand closing around her forearm, the other bracing at her back. The grip is firm, not quite panicked. “Easy,” he says, low. “Breathe.”
“I’m trying to breathe,” she mutters, annoyed with the way her voice frays around the edges. “That’s the problem.”
Paarthurnax’s head dips farther still, until he can sniff at the air around her like some enormous, terrifying hound. Warm breath washes over her, smelling faintly of stone and ash. “Your body protests,” he says. “Your soul is still mending from the inversion. You climbed while unsteady, too soon. Foolish.”
“I’m fine,” she says on reflex.
“You are decidedly not,” Miraak says through his teeth. She feels his glare even without looking at him.
Paarthurnax’s gaze softens. “Dominion and devotion are both chains,” he says. “One you resisted, dovahkiin. One you embraced. Such balances require rest, or they will drag you in directions you did not choose.”
“That’s very poetic,” Lilli says. Her tongue feels thick. “You’ve been sitting up here rehearsing that one?”
“Sometimes I speak to the wind,” Paarthurnax says. “It is less argumentative.”
Miraak snorts despite himself.
The dragon’s gaze shifts between them now, for the first time properly seeing them as a pair rather than individually — taking in the way she leans, just slightly, into Miraak’s steadying grip; the way he has placed himself so their line to the path is clear, as if he expects something to attack.
“You walk a dangerous path together,” Paarthurnax says. “Threads of fate tangled by choice. Old rebellions meeting new ones. Be cautious.”
“Of what?” Miraak asks, wary.
“Of thinking the mountain will always hold,” Paarthurnax replies. “Even stone breaks, under enough strain.” There’s a silence that isn’t quite comfortable but isn’t hostile either. Snow drifts. The sky arches, empty and vast.
Lilli shifts, carefully, trying to find a posture that doesn’t make her head spin. Miraak’s hand moves with her, unconsciously adjusting to support. She pretends not to notice; he pretends it’s entirely practical.
“We should go,” he says after a moment. “Before you collapse in the snow and I am forced to haul you back down like a sack of alchemy ingredients.”
She huffs. “You couldn’t carry me the whole way.”
“I have carried heavier burdens,” he says dryly.
Paarthurnax’s chest vibrates with a quiet laugh. “Return,” he says, “when your soul no longer trembles.”
Miraak bristles. “It does not tremble.”
“He meant me, you idiot,” Lilli says.
Paarthurnax’s eyes gleam. “Both of you,” he corrects, gentle and implacable.
Miraak goes very still. For a heartbeat, the wind seems to hold its breath with them. Then Lilli sighs, the sound a white cloud in the cold. “Very well,” she says. “We’ll… consider resting. Temporarily.”
They turn toward the path down, boots crunching, cloaks snapping in the wind. The mountain falls away beneath them in switchbacks and ledges, the world below an indistinct smear of white and dull green. Behind them, Paarthurnax curls back into his vigil atop the peak, a lone shape against the sky.
As they descend, their argument resumes in low, familiar tones — about rest, about recklessness, about the nature of foolishness and the weight of choices. It threads between them like breath in the cold air: sharp, steady, alive.