Audhr's Despair: A short (ish) story about Nords and CHIM

Audhr was older than a Nord should ever be. Although she felt no rush, that Kyne would grant her all the time needed to find a successor; her insubordinate followers were quite anxious about their fate should Audhr finally meet some kind of end.

She grieved the loss of life, because there was no surviving the final, almost impossible test that no candidate had ever passed. Talos and Kyne had told her directly that the test was not impossible, although the methods untested.

The thread of hope inside her compelled her to cooperate with the deadly experiment. Teaching the unteachable, trusting her followers to find suitable candidates; Audhr was suspicious of how many initiates were full-blooded Nords, surely there was diversity in Heaven. There were two promising candidates sitting across from her; it was the first time she had ever apprenticed two initiates at the same time. They were twins; a tall brawny woman named Hedly and a sickly looking man named Heim. They had been raised by the mages at the College of Winterhold, after their parents had been killed in some anti-magic violence in the years following the bloody civil war. Despite their virtue and considerable talent in magic, Audhr had heard the children suffered greatly at the hands of some of the teachers. There was a particularly dark story behind the young man’s chronically poor health, but absolutely prodigious reserves of magicka. There was also an utterly intriguing story about the girl using Thu’um to tear the heart right out the perpetrator’s chest while she simultaneously cut off his legs with her sword, which was made more unbelievable by the fact that she remained invisible the entire time.

The twins were inseparable, and when told they were summoned for the testing, they refused unless they could go together; when the cultists tried to force them, they threatened to kill themselves. Audhr had grown to love the strange pair over the years she had taught them. Those days were now past, and despite their insistence on doing this together, the final moment of truth had to be faced alone.

Audhr straightened herself in the comfortable wooden chair, shedding the facade of the geriatric crone who had taught them over many years, appearing as she remembered herself when she was first changed. A tall, skinny youth who barely fit the plate-and-leather armour her mother had shown her how to assemble, her hair was an impossible shade of yellow, her eyes were dark grey, and light brown freckles chased each other across the skinny bridge of her upturned nose. Her cheeks and jaw were broad, jutting out at awkward angles like her elbows and knees.

“It feels appropriate to look old, but I can look any way I want to; without resorting to illusion spells, and this is as close to my true form as can be expressed on this plane,” her voice echoed starkly through the room, high and girlish, the voice Kyne heard and Shor echoed. The twins hid their surprise well, they had prepared well; they were the best hope for success in generations.

“I have always doubted the utility in this kind of apprenticeship, because I did not achieve what I did through tutelage. For the longest time I believed it was by accident; a dark coincidence. I was finishing my training as a shield-maiden, and taking to the field during the Oblivion crisis, my parents’ squire, and searching for a war-husband.”

As Audhr spoke, a spell was being woven around the two subjects, absorbing their senses, enticing them to be forced to see through the eyes of the fourteen-year-old girl-child, in her last conversation with her mother before taking to the field in search of Daedra. “Audhr, remember your training out there. Repeat to me the Verse of the Shield-Wife,” the deep, melodious voice of her mother ordered her as she tightened the armour around her daughter’s narrow ribcage and bony hips.

>“Should the man fail and die,
>Shield-wife fights, does not cry
>Picks up sword, hammer or mace
>Fights for Kyne and the Nordic Race.
>She stands firm and does not flee,
>Never alone for she has we.”

“Nords are never alone, my little spriggan. We are used to crushing the skulls of elves and other mortals, these...these Gates are a different kind of battle. You have to remember that no matter how terrifying the battle is, no one on the field is invincible and no Nord stands alone. We have each other, even in death, we are buried together, and rise from the dead together when called by Shor.”

“Thank you mother,” Audhr’s young voice was jarring as she ran a skilled hand over the plate helmet she would be wearing, secretly glad her mother addressed her fear, she being too proud to admit it herself.

Audhr stood behind her father and mother as the Gate loomed dark and bright in the clearing. Her group had been designated to deal with the Daedra around the Gate while other groups ran in to close it. The strange lightning in the sky and the twisted plants made her stomach churn, and her hands closed around the short swords she held in each.

Her mother threw a shield in front of her father to keep the mace of what she understood to be a churl, but this left her vulnerable to three imps who closed in, slashing with their razor-sharp claws and filthy teeth. Audhr lay into one with her short swords, but it was too late, her mother had fallen, her father desperately parrying the blows of the Daedric abomination.

Griefstricken, but extremely well trained, Audhr picked up the shield and thrust it between her staggering father and the dead-black bludgeon that was careening towards his face.

They never saw the Xivilai behind them, and its sword ran through her father so quickly Audhr did not register what happened until he began to slump to the ground bleeding. She looked up and met the dead eyes of the Daedroth before her, and this is when time seemed to stop.

The world was silent as she registered that her parents were dead and she was powerless to prevent this. Short swords fell from her numb fingers, but her shock was too great to even notice. Never again would she hear her mother’s indelicate alto reciting war poetry as she plaited her daughters hair, or taught her how to assemble men’s and women’s armour for maximum comfort and coverage. Never again would her kindly father’s voice request mead and cheese as he regaled his daughter with stories of the Companions and Tiber Septim. Never again would she ask their approval for anything, and never again would they give it.

She felt she was falling, and the only thing she became aware of was the lusty hatred in the eyes of the Xivilai, the desire to feel her warm flesh tearing under his grip, and her utter inability to stop it. She needed an anchor, to control the fear, to give her a reason to live.

>“Never alone for she has we.”

Her mother’s voice touched her frozen ear, and she could feel her father’s callused hand on her shoulder. She in turn thought she could hear the voices of all the Companions whispering the verse into her soul, the Daedroth seemed to fade from her vision as she saw through it into the heart of the world, a great wheel spinning through space, held up by the Gods, in a space created by Kyne. Two beings stood with her, a strange elf and Talos himself.

“Welcome, Audhr, princess of the House of We. You have carved a crown out for yourself, will you wear it, or will you be consumed by it?”

“My mother, my father...”

“They are dead,” said the elf. “Like their birth, you cannot undo that without undoing yourself. They had to die to bring you to this point today.”

“They are dead,” said Talos himself, “Like your birth, their death is a step in your life. They had to die to bring you to this point today.”

“You can change the world, having stood at this point. But change is only good if it is done out of Love,” said the elf.

“You can change the world, having stood at this point. But change is only good if you truly understand Love,” said Talos himself.

Audhr looked down across the world, a wheel woven of threads, each thread a story that could be spun into words or song, she looked down at herself and saw herself as nothing more than a thread, her tune lost in the cacophony of the music that surrounded her.

“Your song is different from ours,” Talos himself said. “Vehk and I were unequivocally ambitious. You are a child. We never thought a child could survive to this point.”

“What is that?” she asked, pointing at what seemed to be a fire burning hotly at the horizon.

“Landfall,” said Vivec.

“Can I stop it?”

“Probably not.”

“Humans aren’t going to survive,” she said, her voice sad, her eyes fixated on the strange light.

“We know,” said Talos himself, softly and sadly.

“Can anyone be saved?”

“We don’t know,” said Vivec, softly and sadly.

“Maybe,” said Kyne, who had somehow appeared, placing an ethereal hand on Audhr’s shoulder. “Even standing here, we cannot predict everything. We can see probabilities, but unlikely things happen all the time,” she said, with a pointed look at Talos himself and Vivec, who shrugged.

“If there is even a chance, I want to try. I will spend the rest of my life trying to save everyone. No one has to be alone because we all have each other, no, we all own and are part of each other!” her bony fists clenched, and Kyne, Talos and Vivec smiled, and it seemed as if tears ran down their cheeks.

Audhr blinked and suddenly she was staring once again into the death-dark eyes of the Daedroth, but it appeared that no time had passed, indeed, her father had not fully crumpled to the ground. She took a deep breath and found words she did not know she knew and blasted the Xivilai to pieces. She picked up her father’s sword, and with words and swords cut all the daedra down, reaching through the gate with more than hands to crush the Sigil Stone to dust, and extracting all the surviving Nords, before the gate snapped shut.

Heim blinked and suddenly he was back in the room with Audhr, and he turned to find Hedly. Her chair was empty, she was gone.

“No...” he moaned, “NO! It cannot be! I cannot accept this...” and then he was also gone.

Audhr sat across from the empty chairs and wept.