A Hero's Tale

Morrowind had nothing to offer for Kaile. As the third child of a small town blacksmith, what was there for her to do? Her elder brothers were expected to carry on the craft while Kaile was supposed to look pretty and fetch a good dowry. Kaile was never very good at looking pretty. If there was one thing she was good at, it was accidentally burning things down. At eight years old she nearly burned down the entire smithy, and was thus never allowed to practice magic in front of her parents ever again. Fortunately her brothers indulged her, as they looked kindly upon their only sister. They allowed her to practice swordplay with them, allowed her to smith small items with them, and allowed her to burn a few things down that really no one would miss. Being merely allowed to do what it was she wanted to do in secret was not what she desired, however.

When she was twenty years old her father finally found a young man of decent standing for her to marry, and so Kaile went from being the daughter of a blacksmith to the wife of a merchant. She didn’t move far – two blocks over, to be exact – and her accommodations were hardly different. She had a slightly larger bed to sleep in, although she had to share it, and she could still sneak out to practice with her brothers, but less often. Not only was she kept busy now as a wife, but also her brothers seem to think that while it was acceptable for a maiden to practice manly arts in secret, it was less so acceptable for a married woman.

All this may have been tolerable had Kaile been fond of her husband, and truly, she tried to be, but while she was perfectly able to conjure sparks out of thin air, she was never able to kindle a spark for him. It was not as if he was a particularly vile man, no, he was perfectly ordinary. He was courteous to Kaile, kept his temper, and frequently offered gifts to her. But Kaile could not love the man. She liked him, yes, but she could not love him and she could not understand why.

A few years after their marriage, her husband hired a pretty young woman to help with the shop. Kaile felt strangely about her. At first, she thought it was jealousy, but then she realized that it was actually attraction. Against her better instincts she started to talk to her more and more, until finally one late night while no one was looking, the two kissed. For the next four years Kaile maintained this relationship in secret.

Then her husband found out. Six years together with no child and sparse bedroom action had already ground down his patience, but finding his wife in bed with a woman was the last straw. He flew off into a rage, and panicked, Kaile did what she did best: burn things. In seconds the whole room was aflame, both her husband and her lover were caught in the flames, and while she tried to save them, she was always better at starting fires then putting them out. Both died in the fire, and fearing retribution from the law, Kaile grabbed a few things from her parent’s house, stole a horse from the stables, and fled for the border.

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At twenty-six years old and half starved, Kaile stumbled across the border into Skyrim. Almost immediately a border patrol caught her, along with what appeared to be some high-ranking criminals in the province, and put her on a cart for a one-way trip to Helgen. At this point, wallowing in guilt and ravishing hunger, Kaile did not fear her impending death.

What she did not expect was the giant black dragon that showed up and demolished the city. She was able to escape – barely – with an imperial soldier who escorted her to Riverwood and also fortunately released her. Kaile had effectively escaped to Skyrim, but in a manner far from what she had expected.

Kaile had originally expected to travel to Windhelm to join her dunmer brethren in an attempt to find solace in numbers against the elf-hating nords, but seeing the dragon had awoken something in her, something she was not fully capable of understanding, and certainly not capable of settling down with that sensation festering in her veins. The people of Riverwood were crying for someone to visit the town of Whiterun to seek assistance from the jarl against the dragon many of them had seen from afar, so Kaile volunteered. They were at first hesitant to trust their protection to a small dunmer woman who was also an escaped convict, but no one else was offering to take the trip, so they afforded her some small provisions and sent her off.

When she finally reached Whiterun, she found her welcoming to be similarly chilly. Although she was able to win audience with the jarl with her tales of dragons, he didn’t seem to take her very seriously and sent her to talk to his dragon-obsessed court wizard, who mistook her for some sort of errand girl or mercenary. He wanted her to fetch some stone from a burial site because it would allegedly “help him with the dragons”. Kaile thought he was crazy, but she also realized she needed to make friends in high places if she was going to keep from being arrested, and knocking the court wizard over the head with his own staff was not the way to go about that. Thinking it would be a simple trip with nothing worse than a few spiders and improperly stored bones between her and the stone, Kaile agreed to make the trip.

The bandits weren’t that much of a challenge, Kaile cut them down easily. What Farengar neglected to mention, however, was that spiders in Skyrim were not the appropriate size for squashing under the boot, and that the dead of Skyrim…well, they weren’t really dead. Kaile found herself dodging traps, venomous spiders larger than she, and battling against zombies she later found to be called draugr. Much shaken but still alive, she finally found herself standing before a large stone wall covered in etchings from a language she did not know. One particular word, if you could call it that, stuck out to her. It seemed, almost, to glow. She moved closer to get a better look at it, and suddenly it came to her. She could hear – no, feel – an echo of it inside her. She didn’t understand what it meant, so grabbed the dragonstone and returned to Whiterun.

Before she could collect her reward, another dunmer started yelling that she had seen yet another dragon. The jarl instructed Kaile to go with, and while Kaile did not particularly wish to face off with yet another dragon, she once more felt she had little choice. After all, many of the nords she had encountered thus far were less than courteous to a dark elf woman, and she didn’t want to give them any reason to suddenly decide to throw her in the dungeons or attack her or something. Although she had a feeling she could better take on five hold guards than a dragon, at least going down facing a dragon would be slightly more exciting. So, with the other dunmer and a handful of guards, she sent out to find this dragon. If nothing else, in the confusion she could slip away.

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When they arrived at the watchtower the evidence of dragon attack was overwhelming. Rubble, particularly burning rubble, was strewn all about. A few frighten guards warned them off, and before Kaile could make a break for it, the dragon showed up. This one was not the same as the first, for one, it was green and not quite so large, but still more than a single man or woman could handle. Desperately Kaile dodged both its flame breath and the onslaught of arrows from the guards to get a few stabs in at it when it landed, and then astonishingly enough, she found an opening. She managed to clamber up onto the dragons back and stab into its neck, slaying the beast. The adrenaline started to wear off as she climbed down from the winged monster, and she felt exhausted.

That was not where the excitement ended, however. Suddenly the dragon caught flame, though not by her doing, and was quickly reduced to bone. And as the smoke and fire rose up from the giant body, something else flew up, and flew at her. A great power enveloped and entered her, filled her with ancient knowledge and strength. The guards stared at her with awe as this transpired, and as the effects wore off, one approached her.

You…you are dragonborn.

What? she replied.

You took the soul of the dragon! You’re dragonborn! he insisted.

Kaile had never heard of such a thing. Skyrim seemed to have a lot more lore pertaining to dragons than Morrowind did. It also had dragons, which was not a problem the rest of Tamriel seemed to suffer from. What does that mean?

The guard paused for a moment before speaking. Well, you have the blood and soul of a dragon so you can take the power of dragons and shout. Try shouting now.

Kaile didn’t have any idea what in Oblivion he was talking about, but then she remembered that word she had "learned" back in that crypt. It had made no sense to her when she had learned it, but now what was a glimmer of a meaning was suddenly filled with understanding. As if by magic, though by magic with which she was unfamiliar, the word flew from her lips and knocked the guard off his feet.

That’s shouting! See you really are dragonborn.

She still wasn’t sure what to make of that information, or really anything that had happened in the last several days, and she certainly didn’t feel like becoming a Nordic hero of sorts and saving the entire world from an ancient world-eating dragon, but the, she didn’t really have much choice in the matter either. It was either drudge around musky, druagr infested dungeons and climb frigid peaks to fight monstrous, fire-breathing dragons or sit around and wait for the end of the world.