Dragon Kin, Chapter 1: Lakeview Manor

     She was the last of her kind, a dragon born in the body of a mortal; the first to be called to High Hrothgar since Tiber Septim himself. The Greybeards had dubbed her Ysmir, the "Dragon of the North," a name and identity she had adopted wholeheartedly. Alduin the World Eater had called her the Last Dragonborn, as had the First Dragonborn, Miraak. She had completed the destiny foretold for the last of her kind.

     So how the hell had her five-year-old just thu'umed her older brother into cleaning her room?

     "Darva," she said cautiously, looking down at the tiny form perched on a barrel in the girls' room, kicking her feet. "What did you just say?"

     "Gol Hah," she said happily, sucking contentedly on a stick that had, not very long ago, held a honey-nut treat. Her violet eyes were the mirror of her mother's—apparently there was Dunmer in the mix somewhere—as were her cupid-bow's lips and short, straight little nose. Her hair came from her father. "If I say 'Gol Hah', Blaise starts doing whatever I want. He never does what I want when I say 'please,' so 'Gol Hah' is better."

     Ysmir groaned, rubbing her eyes with her hand and turning the gesture into sweeping her short red hair off her face. It wasn't hard to resist the weak, untrained thu'um, even repeated several times, but this certainly wasn't something she was expecting to do today. "Darva, that is a dirty word. It is on your list of no-no words from this moment on."

     The little girl's face fell, making her look heartrendingly pitiful inside a frame of perfect golden curls. "But it's fun."

     "Go practice on the dummy with Runa," Ysmir commanded, using her "no-nonsense" voice. Darva pouted and hopped down, scampering off toward the latched door to the basement. "And don't run with a stick in your mouth!" Ysmir shouted after her. She sighed, watching her youngest (and only biological) child disappear into the main room with barely a hand raised in acknowledgement. After a moment, she shook her head and walked over to Blaise, bending down to peer into his face and gauge how bad it was. "Blaise," she said, "Blaise!" adding more force the second time and reaching out to shake his shoulder. "Ah, hag's tits. Gol Hah," she muttered, and the boy blinked owlishly up at her. Well, if he was going to be mind-controlled for a while, it might as well be to do something he was actually supposed to be doing. "Go do your own chores," she instructed, because she knew very well that he hadn't gotten around to them yet.

     Blaise dropped the doll he had been holding and walked woodenly out the door. With a sigh, Ysmir sank onto Lucia's bed, scooping up the doll and smoothing the woolen hair back. One of Sofie's, it had a half-constructed dress on, pins still holding parts not yet sewn. Some of her own clothing looked a bit like that, thanks to the crafty girl and her penchant for leaving things half-constructed. She took a moment to examine it as her mind raced with all the implications of the last few minutes.

     "Ysmir?"

     She jumped, and then smiled, rising to go out to the main room where Farkas was gazing about, tracking mud on her floor. She frowned down at his boots and he grinned sheepishly. "Sorry. I just saw Blaise go upstairs but he didn't talk to me or seem to see me. I think he might be getting sick or something."

     "It's the latter," she sighed, and when he still looked confused, added. "The 'or something.'"

     "House has gotten bigger," he remarked, coming over and giving her a hug redolent of man sweat and dog. Precious—the grouchy old ice wolf that had inexplicably followed Lucia home one day—sniffed his backside and sneezed.

     "Yeah, I think I might be single-handedly keeping the Riverwood carpenter in business. Who says you can't have four towers on a house anyway?" she said facetiously, wrinkling her nose as the ice wolf gave the man a disgusted look and trotted off. "I don't know if Vilkas told you, but we finished adding that bathing room off the basement. I think you should try it out soon."

     Farkas stepped back and lifted his arm, sniffing an armpit. "Ah," he said, heading upstairs to the main bedroom to grab some clothes. Ysmir shook her head, smiling slightly, and turned to the door, giving the other twin a wave.

     Vilkas wasn't looking at her. His head was tilted back, eyes narrowed as he sniffed the air. "Sulfur," he noted.

     "Could be either from when Runa was teaching Lydia how to cook, or from when Blaise and Alesan found my lock picks and got into the Alchemy lab. Hence, new tower. The old Alchemy lab is now unfit for anything but staying empty with the windows wide, wide open." She sauntered over, grinning as he finally took notice. Farkas was easy to lure into bed; Vilkas needed to be reminded that he had a libido sometimes, depending on what was on his mind. "You two were gone awhile."

     "Bandit job," he said shortly, looking down at her with cool gray eyes. "There were more than twice as many as expected, and we had to form a plan."

     One eyebrow raised, Ysmir echoed "'We'? Since when has Farkas helped with the planning?"

     "He mostly hunted," said a smooth female voice. Ysmir glanced around Vilkas's unfairly broad shoulders and grinned at Aela, eeling around Vil to embrace the Huntress.

     "I almost forgot what you look like, it's been so long since you visited," she teased, releasing the armor-clad woman. Aela chuckled, hitching her pack up further onto her back. The pair were about as different as two women could be on the surface—mage and warrior, dragon and wolf—but where it counted they were alike as sisters. What had started as a rocky acceptance had solidified into a deep friendship over mutual loss and battles fought together: Each knew she would lay down her life for the other, and that spoke more than any differences in temperament, occupation, or race. "Will you be staying?"

     Aela thought for a moment. "For a night or two, if you have the room to spare."

     "The Honorhall children aren't visiting any time soon," Ysmir assured her, leading them both further into the house. "Inigo is off teaching Ma'Rakha some wilderness survival skills; the bard (what was this last one's name?) quit; Sofie, Lucia, and Lydia went off to Riverwood to get some groceries; Runa and Honey-Bee are in the basement; Alesan and Aventus are fishing in the lake; and Blaise…is doing his chores."

     Aela and Vil ground to a halt, staring at her like she had just told them Alduin was in the apiary. "He's what?" Vilkas—ever the disciplinarian and thus knowing full well what a pain it was to get Blaise to do anything he was disinclined to do—demanded, sounding slightly stunned.

     "I'll explain later, after the ears in the walls have gone to sleep," she promised, wagging her fingers at the upstairs balcony with an amused grin. Aventus grinned right back from where he had been unashamedly listening, holding up the bucket he had returned to fetch when she raised an eyebrow. The boy slipped back down the stairs and out the door with a wave of both greeting and farewell, making scarcely more noise than a mouse.

     The adults watched this for a moment before Aela glanced back at Ysmir. "You know, you really should put a bell on him."

.

.

     Much later, after dinner had been served and the children chivvied off to bed, Ysmir poured herself a glass of Cyrodilic Brandy while the Companions wolfed down their beef stew and ale, reflecting that they probably hadn't had much but trail rations and whatever they caught as werewolves for the last week. She sipped, reflecting on how much her life had changed since she had stumbled across the border into Skyrim. The girl that had left Cyrodiil, the mistrustful little teenager with an unnatural affinity for fire, had as good as died that day in Helgen. Something had responded under that black dragon's gaze, beyond terror and wonder. She had known that Alduin was her kin, somehow, and that this was why she had always felt a slight disconnection with people, why she loved fire, and why she dreamed in a language not spoken by anyone she had ever met.

     The Dragonborn was the ultimate dragon slayer, Delphine had told her. Delphine, as far as Ysmir was concerned, could go take a long walk in a blizzard. Killing rampaging dragons was one thing, but demanding she kill Paarthurnax had been the last step over the line for her to cut her ties with the Blades. The Greybeards may not be perfect, but they had given her a sense of belonging she'd never had before, and a name to call herself. In many ways, she privately thought of Paarthurnax as a grandfather figure. He was certainly far kinder to her than her supposed blood grandfather, the Thalmor bastard who had bred and raised mixed-blooded children as his personal thieves and saboteurs. She'd grown up among them, nameless, raceless, a commodity to be used and discarded when they found an assignment that best fit her skills. When she was not-quite fourteen, she quickly turned into an asset to be traded to a hideous old Imperial duke as his wife in exchange for some treachery. Ysmir had been a widow before the night was out, presumed dead in the conflagration she left in her wake.

     Ysmir closed her eyes, not letting the memories upset her. That was why she had decided to stay in Skyrim, after all, in the land of the man supposedly her father, and the mercenary that had tried to save her mother, getting them both killed for his efforts. She could have a fresh start here, she had thought, but she had never imagined the scope of what her life would become. Looking around at her friends, she reflected that she would have it no other way.

     Her friendship with the Companions was an odd one. She probably would have met them sooner if she had decided to explore Whiterun rather than run off to the College of Winterhold right away, but the emergence of her strong talent with fire magic had alarmed her new friend Hadvar so much he'd insisted she needed help learning to control it. It was there she'd discovered she had a large dose of Dunmer in her human-seeming self, but it wasn't until she'd learned she was Dragonborn that the fire affinity really made sense. The College had proven incurious of her past but very curious about other things, and she'd spent as much or more time running errands for them than attending lecture. It was while out on a task for the College that she had found Skjor in werewolf form, injured and too faint from blood loss to move.

     Ysmir had always had a bad habit of taking in strays.

     Through Skjor, who was gone now, she had met Aela, and then the twins, whose friendship had eventually expanded to the bedroom (Farkas first; Vilkas only joined them after some bottomless pit named Sam had challenged him to a drinking contest. Vil never spoke of what else had happened that night, only once letting slip something about a goat.). Not eager to marry anyone ever again, Ysmir happily shared her bed with both of them, a comfortable enough arrangement for them, though it struck many as unusual and had started a brief round of rumors about Dibellan worship. Having them as both friends and lovers suited her well enough, and tended to keep away anyone who would expect deeper feelings from her than she was ready or willing to give. Aela visited off and on, though Ysmir privately thought she had never fully recovered from Skjor's death. At any rate, this arrangement had gone on long enough that the twins had become dual father figures to her clan of half the orphans in Skyrim, with Vilkas being the patient but foreboding disciplinarian, and Farkas basically another giant child to romp with.

     Aela had been somewhat taken aback by being folded into the family, having neither a lot of experience with children, nor an overabundance of maternal instinct at the time. It seemed to awaken the more time she spent around the children, although she typically only spent a few days at a time with them until they got old enough not to mob her. A few late-night conversations with Ysmir made her suspect that the Huntress would like to carry on the line of Shield Sisters in the next few years. In the meantime, she was cultivating Runa to one day join the Companions, and Runa was exceptionally fond of her Auntie Aela.

     "So, Blaise," she said, pouring herself a second cup of brandy. The werewolves stopped shoveling food into their faces and looked up at her questioningly. Gravy leaked down Farkas's chin and she absently patted it off with a napkin as he swallowed, his mouth so full of food his cheeks looked like a chipmunk's. "He was mind-controlled this afternoon."

     Vilkas scowled, "Who? One of the mages looking for that alter we removed?"

     "A vampire?" Aela guessed.

     "A cultist?" Farkas put in, barely coherent around a mouthful of potato.

     "Worse," she told them, and saw them steel themselves. "Darva."

     Puzzlement passed over Farkas's face, "Honey-Bee? How did she mind-control anyone?"

     Ysmir's shoulders slumped. "Do you remember two months ago when those bandits attacked and one of them held her hostage? I couldn't do anything with him using her as a shield so…" They looked at her blankly, and she swirled the brandy in her glass before continuing, "When I was on Solstheim, the First Dragonborn used a Shout that could control the people's minds. I learned it to use it on dragons, but this once…"

     "You can mind control people?" Vilkas surmised, his brow lowering in a fierce frown.

     Ysmir scowled at him. "Just because I can doesn't mean I do."

     "The more pressing issue," Aela said, putting a hand on Vil's arm, "Is that now a five-year-old can bend minds, and that in order to do so, she might be—"

     "Dragonborn," they all finished together, the others with wonder, Ysmir glumly.

     "But you were the Last Dragonborn," Vil protested, getting right to the heart of the matter.

     "Apparently not," she replied, watching what little was left in her glass glisten in the firelight. Her hand shook slightly, sending tiny wave reflections to dance over the skin of her hand; she hoped they didn't notice.

     "That's amazing!" Farkas enthused.

     Aela huffed, giving him a stern look. "Think, Ice Brain. If Darva is Dragonborn, then Ysmir isn't really the Last Dragonborn, now is she?"

     He looked mildly confused, "So?"

     "So the Last Dragonborn is supposed to defeat Alduin," Aela elucidated, following Ysmir's train of thought as easily as she would a wounded deer.

     Vilkas shrugged, tearing the end off a loaf of bread and using it to mop up the last of the juices in his bowl. "I think you're worrying too much about this, Ysmir," he revealed, watching her pensively. "Alduin has already been defeated. By you. I don't think we have anything to worry about, beyond the fact that a five-year-old can perform an unknown number of Shouts."

     "I never got his soul," she reminded him soberly. "His death was nothing like the other dragons, and according to Esbern, he has a destiny of his own to fulfill. I didn't stop that destiny, I just delayed it." Vilkas shrugged again, still unruffled, and she sighed, a bit put out at their nonchalant attitude. "Listen, whatever you may think, I have to get to get to the bottom of this, even if I have to go talk to the Blades. Paarthurnax is not exactly easy to find nowadays, but I'll call him if I have to." Ysmir hesitated a long moment, "Aela, I left many of my more dangerous books in my home in Raven Rock, so that the children wouldn't get into them. I need one of them. I know you wanted to meet the werewolf pack there, and I could use the backup, if you wouldn't mind accompanying me."

     "Of course," the Huntress reassured her, concern in every line of her statuesque form. At least one of them was taking this seriously.

     "What about us?" Farkas asked after exchanging a telling glance with his brother. Ysmir sometimes wondered if they had some sort of mind-linking twin bond or something when they did that.

     "I need you here, at least until Lydia comes back," she told them, not allowing herself to think on why she wanted neither of them on the ash-strewn island where she had fought the First Dragonborn. For one thing, she was pretty sure they could smell deception. For another, she didn't want to think too closely about what she was going to do.