Einar shivered, pulling his cloak higher as a frigid gust of wind blew across the tundra of the southern Pale. His horse descended the last few steps from the Whiterun pass, the ground levelling out and stretching off towards the distant peaks of the Windhelm Range.

  The Jarldom of Dawnstar was one of the most desolate areas of Skyrim, and not the sort place he would visit by choice, especially not in late autumn. The days were already short and the nights beyond frigid.

  He had bought the bay mare with a fraction of 'his share' of the loot of the several stress inducing months of shenanigans and trying to keep that blasted flying lizard out of trouble. It was a period that even now, less than a week after leaving the meglomaniacal flying reptile behind, he was still in two minds about.

  On one hand, he was now richer than he ever had been before. It was a novel and welcome feeling after having scraped by on petty theft and the odd, usually shady, job for the past decade since he'd left the Imperial Legion.

  On the other, his world was quite possibly doomed because the juvenile monster lacked any kind of grasp of even the most basic points of honour and decency and had slain the Saviour of Nirn because she thought for some reason it was 'heroic' to stomp a defenceless woman off a cliff into the void between universes.

  His horse stumbled in a pot hole, and Einar winced at where the burnt skin on his arm pulled as he jerked up to keep his saddle.

  Capri hadn't been happy to see him leave.

  No, that was understating it. She'd been apoplectic.

  Although he was reasonably sure she hadn't been trying to kill him, she had still thrown around enough fire during her temper tantrum when he had told her he was leaving that he was glad that the tundra in autumn wasn't particularly flammable.

  Some part of him did feel a bit bad for leaving her back in Whiterun. She was, after all, just a baby; completely erratic, often irrational, and with a severely underdeveloped sense of right and wrong.

  That was fine for human kids, but Capri wasn't a human kid, she was almost a meter of super-magical fire-breathing lizard capable of walking through the void, hurling boulder shattering magic around on a whim, and was totally and utterly convinced that she was not only the smartest being the multiverse, but also the wisest. It made for a rather deadly and chaotic combination.

  He'd told himself she'd been getting better under his guidance. She'd stopped calling him 'Minion,' more or less, and he thought she might have been showing the beginnings of actual empathy towards people she regarded as 'inferior beings:' i.e. everyone else.

  But then she had burnt down the Companion's hall and killed the Dovahkiin while doing a mission that, in reality, only he actually cared about.

  It had been a wake up call. It had made him realise that he'd been kidding himself to think he had been curbing her destructive impulses, channelling her into becoming a decent sapient being, or at the very least, not a omnicidal maniac. He hadn't been doing that at all, all he'd been doing was setting up opportunities for her to wreak havoc; opportunities that had been, if he was honest with himself, mainly aimed at enriching himself.

  From the city of Astapor an infinity away where she'd hurled half a dozen guards into the void, to Riften where she had set the honey farm on fire and gotten the manager arrested for 'insurance fraud,' to the debacle at Jorrvaskr – they were all situations created by him. The worst she had managed before meeting him was breaking some Nord's nose in Helgen.

  She didn't care about money, he didn't think she even really understand the concept. In fact, she didn't care about anything other than herself. Certainly not him, she'd made it pretty abundantly clear that she regarded him as a tool, not a friend. A minion, not an equal.

  She was probably already on some other world, curled up in a ball and napping in the sunshine; she could well have already forgotten his name.

  Maybe in a hundred years or however long it took for her to properly mature she could be a real hero, but until then it was in everyone's best interests that she just stayed out away from civilised lands.

  He would just have to try and clean up her mess himself. That was why he was headed northward, to Winterhold and the largest library in Skyrim. If there was any information to be had that might help defeating the Dragons in the absence of a Dovahkiin, it would be there. He hoped.

  The sun was just setting as he came into what had once been a small town, but had swollen several times over with a large influx of imperial troops. They had brought with them the usual amenities of Cyrodillian civilisation: well maintained roads, impressive square palisade forts, neat lines of standard issue tents, and that perhaps most ubiquitous symbol of the Empire, a set of full gallows.

  Stormcloaks, or their sympathisers.

  Or perhaps not. Perhaps just those unlucky enough to have looked the wrong way at some young commissioned Cryodillian noble.

  "Papers," said a soldier from Hammerfall as he approached the checkpoint outside the town.

  Einar grunted in response, fishing out the forged documents he'd had made in Riften back before he'd undertaken the world-dooming quest to steal the axe of Ysmir, what felt like years ago.

  "Business in the Pale?" asked the soldier.

  "Heading for the College," answered Einar honestly.

  "For?"

  "Trying to find some way to fight the damn dragons."

  "Should be more worried about your Empire," said the man, thrusting Einar's papers back towards him. "About fighting those Stormcloak traitors."

  "I did my time," replied Einar, flicking the reins. "I'll worry about them when they can Shout a village to ash."

  He slept fitfully that night, memories and disturbing images from the darker recesses of his imagination blending together into a whirlwind of falling Dunmer women, his father returning home in bloodied armour and a string of elf ears around his neck, and endless fields of bones and sand and ash, above which soared a winged creature that cast a seemingly endless shadow again a blood red sun.

  The days rolled on, turning colder and colder as Einar left behind the Pale and reached the shores of Lake Yorgrim. The road became busier the closer he got to Windhelm until he was coming across several Stormcloak patrols a day. He was a Nord, so they paid him little mind, something he was glad of since he probably still had an arrest warrant or two out for him in the region.

  It had been quite some time since he'd been so far north, and although the landscape was just as bleak and frigid as ever, change was obvious.

  The most clear signs of suffering were the burnout townships. Some, he suspected, were the result of the civil-war, which although calming down now that the autumn snows were starting, had raged viciously over the summer between the Imperial aligned Pale and the heart of Ulfric's power in Windhelm.

  Others, however, bore the tell-tale scars of dragons. Men didn't gouge foot deep rents into rock, nor make fire so hot that even the most sturdy stone temples came to resemble the cooled flows of lava he had seen when he'd visited the province of Morrowind to the south east several years earlier.

  Some of the attacks were old, but others clearly recent. And while it was unlikely that even had the Dovahkiin still been alive she would have stopped those attacks in particular, he couldn't help but feel at responsible for the stands of ash where houses had once stood.

  Dragons and civil wars, however, weren't the only causes of suffering. The combined forces of nature and good old xenophobia also conspired to create misery.

  Camps of dark elven refugees from Morrowind that sprawled out around once-sleepy lakeside hamlets dominated large sections of the road. Thin canvas tents ripped, torn, and covered in ash seemed to be the only shelter they had, and looked to do next to nothing to ward off the autumn chill. He shuddered to think what it would be like for them once the true winter came.

  The destitute Dunmer looked at him with tired red eyes, gaunt faces, and open hands, and by the time the road forked and he continued his trek northward his coin-purse was lighter, and his heart heavier.

  Things became quieter as the road wove it's way north into the icy wastes of the Winterhold, the nights turning frigid as soon as he crossed over the pass and descended towards the frozen coastline of the Sea of Ghosts and began to follow the icy sea-side road.

  People said that all of Skyrim was remote and rugged, but Winterhold was unlike anything he, a boy from the relatively warm south western Reach, had ever seen. Great cliffs rose up to never-ending snow-capped peaks in the west, and plunged down into the furious waters in the east. Here and there a few copses of hardy trees clung to life in the most rugged of all the holds of Skyrim, and in places the ill-kept and ill-frequented road disappeared entirely.

  More than once he had to carefully cross frozen rivers which ran only at the height of summer where the bridges had long since collapsed. He might be able to understand how mages, who could reshape the world around them with their mind, might choose to live in such a place, but why anyone else made their lives in this place, he had no idea.

  The road was completely and totally empty, with no set of tracks in either direction. At night the only sounds were the occasional howl of a wolf, the bray of a fat Horker on the rocky coastline below, and the howl of the ceaseless wind. Einar found himself missing not only Capri's company – prickly and capricious as it might have been – but her skill with pyromancy. Say what you liked about dragons, Nirnian or otherwise, they were good with fire.

  It wasn't until he was a few days out from the frigid college that he saw another soul.

  He had found a small copse of trees and set up camp for the night, and was trying to coax a fire into existence with a handful of semi-frozen pine needles and twigs he had managed to scrounge when he heard the crunch of snow.

  He whirred around, dagger half drawn from its sheath, expecting to find a hungry wolf. Instead his eyes fell on a comely Imperial woman in a very tight, and somewhat revealing scarlet dress over which she had nothing but a light mantle.

  She had long, shimmering black hair, sparkling yellow eyes that seemed to glow in the firelight, and blood red lips.

  Despite the cold and the flimsy state of her clothes she didn't shiver, and instead gave him a wide smile that made him weak at the knees.

  Part of his mind found it odd that she didn't seem cold, but the larger part of his mind pushed that thought aside as he sheathed his dagger and returned her smile.

  "Um, hello! P-please, join me," he stammered, not quite believing what was happening to him. It was like everything was a dream. The world seemed to shift and wobble, although he was sure he hadn't drunk any alcohol. Perhaps it was simply his nerves. It had been a long time since he had found a woman so overwhelmingly attractive.

  "How kind of you," said the woman huskily, licking her cherry red lips delicately. "I am Maria."

  "E-Einar," he said, stumbling over his words. "Would you like some of my… bread?"

  "Ah – no thank-you," she said, flicking her eyes briefly to the stale slices he had cut for his dinner. "I wouldn't want to… spoil my appetite."

  That made Einar frown for a moment, before he relaxed.

  It didn't matter.

  Everything was fine.

  All that mattered was that he was going to get to spend more time in this amazing woman's company.

  "You look cold my lady," he said, standing and rushing to his saddlebag. "Let me get you a blanket."

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "Why, how gallant of you," laughed the woman as he moved away, returning a moment later with his sleeping roll, her eyes flicking down to his neck as he drew close.

  He stilled, frowning ever so slightly as that nagging part of his mind reasserted itself once more as she reached up towards his face.

  Something was wrong, he thought as Maria pulled his head to one side and moved to… kiss his neck?

  Well, no, that was fine, he certainly wasn't opposed to such a lovely woman doing that, he thought as his heart pounded in his chest and she bared her unusually sharp teeth.

  "Augis!" came a squeaky shout from above them, and Maria's gaze snapped upward, inches from his neck, as a ball of fire rocketed down from the frozen canopy.

  Her eye-brows shot up as the ball of mage-fire careened towards her, and she began to move – impossibly quickly.

  Even her breathtaking speed, however, was not quite enough, and the fireball caught her in the arm and sent her spinning into the snow as a black blur rocketed down from the branches, spewing more fire as Maria roared in pain and anger.

  Einar saw red, drawing his dagger and slashing at the blur as it passed, eliciting a yelp of surprise from the creature that dared attack his lady as the blade caught it in the leg and sent it crashing into the white powder, the frozen water immediately beginning to melt and steam wherever the monster's deep red blood dripped onto it.

  "You stupid mortal!" came a familiar voice as the lizard's horned head emerged from the snow, spitting crystals. "I'm trying to save you!"

  Einar paused. He knew that voice…

  "Einar kill it! Kill it!" yelled Maria clutching her burnt arm and baring her fangs at the interloping flying lizard.

  The voice of his lady shook him from his stupor and he raised his dagger, setting his jaw as he advanced on the lizard.

  "Ugh, you pea-brained mortal," said the strangely familiar reptile as it flapped up into the air again, darting out of his reach. "Nubilas."

  Choking smoke billowed out from the flying lizard, and Einar doubled over, coughing and pressing himself against the ground as the acrid gas stung at his eyes and burned his throat.

  "That won't work on me," hissed his lady from somewhere behind him. "I can still hear you little lizard – Frosset!"

  A spear of ice rocketed through the smoke over Einar's head, and there was a squawk of outrage, although, unfortunately, no sound of impact.

  "Listen to this then, you bloated corpse!" retorted the lizard. "Rudiat!"

  There was a deafening boom, followed by an immense, ongoing cacophony of discordant sound.

  If Einar had had to describe it he would have said it sounded vaguely like a thousand cats being drowned combined with an orchestra of deaf musicians all playing different pieces at the end of the world; only much, much worse.

  He dropped his dagger, jamming his fingers in his ears as the noise pressed down on him, so loud he could almost taste it.

  He felt blasts of heat and cold pass back and forth over his head a few times, before something heavy fell behind him, thrashing about for a few moments before growing still.

  The smoke faded, revealing a pile of ash spilling out of a slightly charred red dress, and Einar felt his mind begin to clear, the memory of the previous few minutes beginning to snap together into something approaching coherence.

  "Vampire," he gasped as he realised what he was looking at, or at least, he thought that was what he said. It wasn't really possible to hear over the racket; whatever horrific magic Capri had cast was still going on and making it difficult to hear himself think, let alone speak.

  He turned around, his heart catching in his throat as he saw the small dragon on the other side of the clearing, glaring at him as deep crimson blood oozed from a wound on her leg. A wound he had made.

  "Shit," he said rushing over to her as the noise-spell mercifully began to fade.

  Before he crossed half the distance a wave of force blasted out from her, and he tripped over as the air was knocked from his lungs. Another spell washed over him, and he felt himself being firmly pressed down into the snow. His dagger rocketed out from his sheath a moment later and flew off into the gloom beyond the clearing.

  "… weak-willed … pathetic … mortal … fool," said Capri, the ringing in his ears making it difficult to understand the full extent of her abuse as she crawled over, putting her small head up to his face and snapping her needle-sharp teeth millimetres from his nose.

  "I said I was sorry!" he said. "Do- do you know any healing magic?"

  "… not … ignorant … mortal," said the Whelp, smoke pouring out of her nostrils. "… didn't … my supposed ally … stab me!"

  "I said I was sorry, she had me under a spell-"

  "I know," spat the angry whelp, releasing the magic and flapping off, settling on the other side of the clearing and licking at her wound. "You mortals are pathetic. Honestly, it's almost like you want to get killed. It's a wonder you don't all perish as infants! Maybe I should have let her eat you, I'd probably have been doing the multiverse a favour!"

  "What are you even doing here?" he said, his concern fading away under the torrent of abuse and some of the weeks old anger he felt towards the small dragon returning. "Have you been following me?"

  "Following you? How preposterous. Dragons do not follow mortals, least of all mean and nasty ones like you!"

  "So you just happened to be in the tree above my camp for entirely unrelated reasons?" said Einar.

  "That's right," declared Capri, nodding her draconic head as if this was an entirely believably explanation for her presence. "Totally unrelated reasons. If anything, I'm suspect of you; what were you doing camping below my tree? Couldn't bear to be out of my awesome presence, I'll bet."

  "Right…" said Einar.

  Capri snorted, flicking her talons towards his pathetic fire and making it roar into life as she began to pointedly ignore him.

  "Why didn't its glamour work on you?" he asked after a few minutes of Capri's patented 'no speaks.'

  "I am a dragon."

  "Oh of course. I would have also accepted 'because I'm a wizard' or 'because I said so,'" he said, rolling his eyes as he moved over to the vampire's dress and started sifting through the pockets for a few moments before fishing out a dusty coin-purse. "Again, why were you following me?"

  "I told you, you sieve-brained ape, you just happened to camp under my tree-"

  "We both know that isn't true," he said sharply, cutting her off. "And, just so we're clear, this doesn't change anything. You might have saved me, but that doesn't mean what I told you back in Whiterun is any less true: you're toxic Capri, you've quite possible destroyed this world with your chaotic madness."

  Capri huffed and went back to staring into the fire for several long minutes, probably trying to come up with some kind of lame excuse. One that she no doubt would believe wholeheartedly was the definition of guile.

  "I didn't have anywhere better to go," she said finally in a small voice, apparently finding the task too hard.

  "Yeah, not buying that either," he laughed. "You can go anywhere, an infinite number of worlds, why here-"

  "You're here!" she said in a strangled voice.

  Einar look up to see the tears in her reptilian eyes.

  A feeling of shame welled in his breast as her hot tears fell to the snow, bursting into clouds steam. He'd seen her cry before, when she'd thought she didn't have any kind of purpose, before she'd becoming nominally a 'hero.' But that had been about her, not him, maybe she-

  No, he had given her enough chances.

  He had been kidding himself again to think she had changed; just because she reminded him a bit of Freya, at least in her 'mortal guise.'

  Well, minus the horns and the creepy glowing red eyes.

  "Wherever you go Capri, chaos follows," he said hardening his heart as he forced himself to remember the burnt out hamlets and melted temples that she'd unintentionally had a hand in. "And there are consequences for what you do-"

  "I know that you silly mortal!"

  "Do you? Have you seen the burnt out villages? The lines and lines of graves? Do you really understand what not having a Dovahkiin means for Nirn?"

  "So there will be a few more angry proto-drakes flapping about-"

  "No! No, you damned lizard! The legends say that Alduin, the greatest of the Nirn-Dragons, is destined to eat the world," said Einar. "If that's true, then you could very well have doomed every living being on this planet by killing the one person who could stop him."

  "That's just silly mortal superstition," scoffed Capri. "Those Proto-drakes, I will admit, are presently… problematic for me to slay in open combat in the short term. But none of them could hold a candle to my father, and even he didn't manage to destroy my home-world."

  "See, here you go again – you don't know anything about this world or it's history; yet you act like you do. If you were a normal kid that would be fine, but you're not, you're a powerful wizard, a dragon; you can't afford to make mistakes – people die when you do."

  "So I can't stay with you because of my species?" she said, sniffing and wiping her eyes with her tail. "That's discrimination: dragonism. You're a- a dragonist!"

  "That isn't a thing," he said. "And it isn't just that you don't know things; it's that you refuse to learn, and refuse to listen. Maybe I won't live as long as you, maybe I can't shrug off a vampire's mind-magic like it's a light breeze, and maybe you have an incredible intuitive understanding of magic – but that doesn't mean you're somehow a better than everyone else, and it doesn't mean you know everything."

  "I know I don't know everything," she snapped. "I know that I don't know how to be a hero – OK? You were supposed to be teaching me, but the moment I made a mistake you started yelling at me and then just abandoned me!"

  "You… you 'made a mistake?'" he said, his jaw dropping as he tried to process what she'd just said.

  "Of course I did!" she yelled, hot tears spilling from her orange eyes as she smacked her front talons down into the snow and made the fire leap up another meter into the air. "What's so surprising about that!? I'm a whelpling! Of course I make mistakes! You can't judge! When you were my age you were probably still crawling about and soiling yourself! If I was a human child you'd never be so mean, you hate me because I'm a dragon! Dragonist! Dragonist!"

  "I don't hate you Capri, and certainly not because you've got scales," he said shakily. "I've just … never heard you admit fault before."

  Capri sniffed and looked away. "Dragons aren't supposed to admit fault to mortals. It's weak."

  "Says who?"

  "Says everyone."

  "Capri, by your own admission your people were corrupted and twisted into something dark and nasty – don't you think that maybe their dismissive attitudes towards non-dragons was a part of that?"

  "… maybe," she conceded uncertainly, before shaking herself. "Although we are better than mortals at everything."

  Einar rolled his eyes. Was he being too harsh, leaving her behind? He had known she'd be fine physically, but he clearly hadn't really understood her emotional dependence on him since it was normally behind an impenetrable layer of arrogance.

  And she had grown.

  Oblivion, she'd gotten into a mage-duel with a vampire to save him. That was leagues away from the dragon that had pushed him towards the Imperial soldiers during their escape from the Helgen gaol. She'd never have gone out on a limb for anyone back then; if he'd attacked her, enthralled or otherwise, he would have instantly been on the receiving end of a lethal fireball.

  And it wasn't like she didn't have quite an array of skills, skills that might be able to help him dig the world out of the mess she'd made… well, they'd made.

  "OK, OK… I'm sorry if I upset you," he said.

  "A mortal like you, upset me?" she said weakly. "R-ridiculous, I am a -"

  "-dragon. Yeah, I know," he said. "But I'm still sorry. I thought you… it doesn't matter. I was angry, but- but I wasn't fair to you. I shouldn't have said what I did."

  Capri sniffed.

  "This is the bit where you say: 'That's OK Einar, we both said things we regret, and I'm sorry I killed the Dragonborn, but I know that together we can try and put this situation back together.'"

  "I didn't know it was the wrong thing to do!" she snapped back. "It's so hard to know what I'm supposed to do to be a hero, everything is so complicated with you mortals. I thought heroes were supposed to kill villains!"

  Einar sighed.

  "I accept your apology," she said snootily. "Even if you are an unapologetic, unreconstructed dragonist. It isn't a good look you know, bigotry; especially coming from a silly little mortal like you."

  "That isn't a- ugh, fine, I suppose that's better than nothing," he said, going back to looting the vampire's remains.

  "What are you even doing here?" asked the reptile, apparently just as eager as him to change the subject. "You've seemed very cold the last few nights, I can't imagine it is for pleasure. Then again, you mortals are crazy."

  "I'm heading to Winterhold College," he said. "There is a library there, if there is knowledge about how to defeat the dragons-"

  "-Proto-drakes-"

  "-whatever you want to call them. If there is information on how to do that without the Dovahkiin it will be there," he said, checking another of the vampire's pockets and drawing out a letter. "Huh, what's this?"

  The envelope was made from thick, high quality paper. It had been opened, but the design of a snarling, bat-like creature was still visible in the blood-red wax that had been used to seal it. Inside was a slip of paper, filled with neat loopy writing that he couldn't really read, but might have been a very old version of Imperial.

  "Hey Capri, read this for me?" he said, moving over and passing it to her. She accepted it with her talons, carefully unfolding the letter and holding it up to the light of the campfire.

  "'Fledgling Maria,'" began Capri instantly, not even needing a moment to translate from a form of writing she'd probably never seen before – apparently 'because she was a dragon.' "'Your King has need of your service. You are to travel to Winterhold College and search for any leads as to the likely present location of an Elder Scroll. Take care not to arouse suspicion within the college. Feed only on townsfolk as absolutely necessary. The Archmage is immensely powerful, and will certainly be able to discern your true nature upon close examination. Avoid him.

  "'Once you have completed your research you are to travel south again to Windhelm, in the eastern quarter of the city you will find a house marked above the door with an image of a Winged Woman, enter it and leave your notes with one of the people inside, they will be expecting you. Once you have done so your task is complete, and you may return to your usual hunts until I have further use for you.

  "'Do not attack mortals within the house in Windhelm. They serve an ally who is integral to my plans for the Black Sun, and who will be most displeased if her tools are damaged.

  "'Do not disappoint me,

  "'Lord Harkon.'"

  "Huh," said Einar. "What is the 'Black Sun?'"

  "I do not know, it does not elaborate," said Caprifexia, handing the note back to him.

  "Well it doesn't sound good, whatever it is," said Einar frowning as he ran over the words again in his mind. "Well we should probably look into it when we get to Winterhold; anything that an organised group of Vampires are after can't be good."

  "So I can come with you?" said Capri, her eyes lighting up.

  "Yes – I'm sorry I left you behind."

  Capri grinned like the child she was, and for a moment he thought she was going to hug him. But then the moment passed and her imperious guise reasserted itself.

  "As you should be. You will, of course, need my help to clean up this mess you've made."

  "Yeah, 'my' mess," he said, scoffing at Capri's ability to assert completely counterfactual nonsense and act like she believed it. "Just try not to kill anyone else unless you absolutely have to, all right?"

  She gave him a withering look.

  Still, for a moment he had seen beneath her draconic arrogance to the lost little child beneath. The child desperately looking for a friend, and who was actually sorry she had upset him. And more than that, he had seen a glimmer of the person she might become if given a chance to grow.

  Maybe she did have a lot of blood on her hands for killing the Dovahkiin, maybe she was still an immature megalomaniac, maybe in the end she'd never been the 'Saviour of the Multiverse' she thought she was.

  But he wasn't perfect either. He was a thief. He was a liar. And he was a cheat.

  He'd mislead Caprifexia into smuggling goods between worlds in 'aid' of making her a 'better hero' when she was supposed to be his friend.

  He'd even killed people before. Never happily, but he'd still done it.

  Maybe all that mattered, maybe all that he could ask of both her and himself was that now they were trying to do the right thing, even if they both didn't always quite know how.

  The Divines, after all, weren't the ones who needed redemption.

  A.N. If you like my writing, you might be interested in my fantasy adventure novel – – which is entirely pre-written and with chapters released every Friday!

  Mishka the Great and Powerful that isn't up on Royal Road yet!). However, I don't monetise or time-gate my fanfiction though (plz no sue!).