The Voice Beyond The Throat

“Because you’re still walking.”

That had been before the snow took his face.

Now the pass gave a low groan.

Lyris stopped.

The sound came from above, not the mountain itself but the slope resting upon it. Snow shifted in a long white sheet. Pebbles clicked down the rock. She lowered herself behind a marker stone and drew her hunting knife.

No birds moved. No mountain hare broke the crust. The silence was too clean.

She touched the hilt of her sword and watched the ridge.

A dark shape appeared against the snow.

Then another.

Thalmor.

Their white-and-gold armor made them easy to see and difficult to kill. Four descended from the ridge in a spread, boots biting into the slope. A fifth remained above with a bow already drawn. Their leader wore no helmet. Her narrow face was calm, almost bored, as if this were an appointment rather than an ambush.

Lyris counted weapons. Two swords. Two bows. One staff.

The staff-bearer lifted a hand.

“Lyris Frost-Tongue,” the woman called. “By order of the Aldmeri Dominion, stand aside.”

Lyris glanced at the road behind her.

The snow had erased it.

She drew her sword.

The woman’s expression changed by a finger’s width. “That is unfortunate.”

The first arrow struck the marker stone and shed a spray of sparks. Lyris rolled downslope as the second passed through the place where her head had been. She came up behind a shelf of rock, breath burning in her scarred throat.

Her old reflexes returned before thought. Scout’s work was mostly finding the place where death had not yet looked.

She kicked loose a bank of snow.

It broke free and rushed toward the nearest Justiciar. He stumbled, cursed, and vanished to the waist. Lyris crossed the distance before his companions could reach him. Her blade found the seam beneath his arm.

He fell without ceremony.

A sword rang against stone behind her. She twisted aside. The blow clipped her shoulder and numbed the arm. She drove her pommel into the attacker’s mouth, then cut low. The white armor took the edge, but not all of it. Blood marked the snow.

The staff-bearer spoke a word.

“Fus.”

The force struck her like a slammed door.

Lyris flew backward and hit the mountain. Pain flashed through her ribs. The world narrowed to white glare and the heavy pulse in her ruined throat.

The Voice did not sound to anyone else. It never did. But she heard the Word inside the shout, felt it pass through her bones, and knew the distance between herself and the staff-bearer was only a few strides.

Close enough.

She planted one palm against the snow and rose.

The woman’s eyes sharpened. “There. I was told you could hear it.”

Lyris moved before the next Word came.

An arrow cut her sleeve. She reached the staff-bearer and caught the woman’s wrist. The other tried to wrench free, but Lyris pressed her forehead against the Justiciar’s brow.

She opened the place where her voice had once lived.

Pain tore through her throat.

No sound left her. The stolen Word did.

It shuddered between them, stripped from the woman’s mouth before it could become force. Lyris felt it coil in her chest, hot and furious, then turned her hand toward the slope.

The silent shout broke outward.

Snow exploded from the ridge. The archer disappeared beneath it. The two swordsmen were thrown against the rock, armor cracking. The staff-bearer collapsed at Lyris’s feet, blood running from her nose.

For a moment, nothing moved but the snow.

Then the mountain answered.

Not with an avalanche. Not with thunder.

Something deep below gave a single, dull knock.

Lyris froze.

The sound traveled up through her boots and into her teeth. It was not a Word of Power. It had no shape she could hold. It was older than speech, and it seemed to notice her.

The dead agent’s order pressed against her ribs.

The surviving Justiciar on the slope saw her hesitation. He raised his bow.

Lyris seized the fallen staff-bearer by the collar and dragged her in front of the arrow. The shaft struck the woman’s breastplate and glanced away.

The Justiciar swore.

Lyris did not wait. She drove her knife beneath the woman’s jaw.

The pass returned to silence.

Her knees nearly followed the dead down.

She braced herself against the marker stone and swallowed. The motion scraped her throat raw. A thin line of blood touched her tongue. She wiped it away with the back of her glove and looked at the bodies.

The Thalmor had not come to search the pass.

They had come for the order.

That made it worse.

Lyris climbed until the road bent around a cliff face. There, beneath an overhang, she made a small fire from resinous splinters and torn cloth. The flame was mean and blue at its edges. It did not warm her much, but it dried the inside of her boot.

The oilskin packet lay across her knees.

The seal bore a dragon’s head with its mouth closed.

She thought of the agent’s hand. Of his blood. Of the way he had watched her face when he said High Hrothgar, as if the mountain itself might be listening.

Lyris broke the seal.

Inside was a single sheet, folded twice. The handwriting was cramped and slanting.

The Dragonborn has not returned.

Lyris read the line again.

Below it, the order named the rumors plainly. Pulled into Sovngarde permanently. Driven mad by the final shout. The Greybeards concealed the truth and had refused every request for confirmation.

Her fire snapped.

The next lines made her fingers tighten around the paper.

A contingency remained.

Three ancient Nordic Voice Wells lay beneath Skyrim, older than the Dragon Cult. The dragons were using them - or would use them - to call the World-Eater’s true master. The wells had to be located and destroyed before the calling was complete.

High Hrothgar was to receive the order.

Lyris looked toward the unseen mountain.

The Greybeards had taught the Dragonborn to shout. They had never taught her anything. She was not Dragonborn. She had no right to the Words that lived in her bones, no blessing from the gods, no place in the old stories.

Yet the order had found her.

A horse whinnied below.

Lyris folded the paper and turned toward the pass.

One of the Thalmor was alive.

The staff-bearer lay half-buried near the cliff, armor dented, one hand clawing at the snow. Her eyes found Lyris.

“You don’t know what you’re carrying,” she whispered.

Lyris descended without answering.

The woman tried to reach for her sword. Lyris kicked it away.

“What did they tell you?” the Justiciar asked. “That the Dragonborn failed? That the Greybeards can hide a god beneath a blanket?”

Lyris crouched beside her.

The woman smiled through blood. “They will kill you at the monastery.”

Lyris drew her knife.

“Not if you go first,” the Justiciar said.

Lyris paused.

The woman’s gaze dropped to the oilskin beneath Lyris’s coat. “There are eyes on every road now. You carry that seal, and every one of them will know.”

Lyris cut the woman’s throat.

The act was clean. It was also not enough.

From somewhere beyond the ridge came the faint cry of a horn.

Another answered farther down the mountain.

The surviving Thalmor had marked her. Perhaps the dead woman had managed it before the snow took the archer. Perhaps the order itself carried some sign visible to those trained to seek it.

Lyris rose and stamped out the fire.

High Hrothgar lay beyond the pass, but the road no longer belonged to travelers. She wrapped the order in a strip of wool and pushed it beneath her tunic, against the scarred hollow of her throat.

The mountain knocked again.

This time, something knocked back from far away.

Lyris stared into the white distance.

Then she left the road.

She climbed toward the broken ridge where the snow was deepest and the stone offered no easy trail. Behind her, the horns called through the pass. Ahead, High Hrothgar waited beneath the clouds, and beneath it waited three buried wells that had begun to wake.

Lyris Frost-Tongue moved into the storm with the order against her skin.

The Thalmor followed.

End of chapter one. 19 more chapters and about 41,112 words in the full book.