Survivor (A Skyrim Fan-Fiction)

Chapter Twenty Nine

"Two hundred and twenty Orcs, two hundred and ninety seven Nords, and three hundred and sixteen Khajiit."

The amount of fighters we lost. We barely got through.

"Without the bravery and sacrifice of those warriors, we could all easily be dead," Ulfric muttered looking upon the endless line of corpses across the river. "How many injured?"

Jorleif flipped through the parchment in his hand, concerning himself with all the technicalities of war that no one ever thought of. "One hundred and two, and Healer Warrick reports seventy cases of early vampirism; twenty-nine of which are too severe to be cured."

Ulfric pinched his chin in thought, then stroked back his hair repeatedly despite it being in perfectly neat form. "End it quickly. Let their families know first and let them say their goodbyes if it's safe enough."

  "Yes, of course." And Jorleif was off again. Sometimes I wondered if that poor man ever gave himself a break.

The fire that had been lit the previous night was still burning the piled up vampires. Some thought that if they weren't burned before nightfall, they'd rise yet again and our narrow escape would have been wasted. 

We haven't burnt our dead as some needed to be identified or sent back to families. A sad thought.

Ulfric slumped himself down upon the edge of the dock, staring out again at the amount of bodies laying hauntingly still on the opposite shore. "Why did they do that?" he wondered aloud. "Why did they come to our aid?"

I sat cross-legged next to him and dipped my hand in the river absently. "Maybe they had a change of heart," I suggested, but even I knew that was a false hope. "No...I don't know. But why encourage conflict when they had just saved our lives?"

"They saved us so they can have the satisfaction of destroying Skyrim themselves."

There were a lot of indications that Thalmor intended to conquer not only Skyrim, but the whole of Tamriel - but in such an odd way? That wasn't like them at all. They had expressed no interest in helping us defeat the vampires before...In fact, we were certain they had allied with Maven and Serana.

I had thought myself into just as much confusion as Ulfric.

"We can't condemn them when we don't truly know what their motive was. I think you're wrong, and I cannot agree with you on this."

His eyes were still fixed on the corpses, not daring to look into my eyes. His voice was cold, distant, yet laced with a deep sadness. "I'm not asking you to."

I wanted to know what he was thinking, what he thought would come, what he planned to do. But I couldn't bring myself to ask.

I fell onto my back and rested on the wooden planks, gazing up to the smoky sky. After a while, the distant murmurs dulled and the trickle of running water faded. I was exhausted.

"You didn't come across Maven, did you?" Ulfric mumbled.

"No, I didn't."

I did have some hope that Maven had for some reason decided to be so foolish to be present in the battle, despite the fact that she probably couldn't even handle a weapon. There's no way that she wasn't guilty of war crimes, and treason, and murder, and every crime under the sun.

Ulfric hoisted himself up and patted the dirt off, looking determined. "We've got to find her or the Thalmor will. Justice will not be robbed from us." He pointed to bodies, "It will not be robbed from them."

"So, where'd you think she'd be?"

"Where people who think they're queens belong...In a castle."