We cut our teeth on a pack of conjurers when our path led to Fort Amol. The various atronachs they summoned made the fight interesting, but the true standout was how well Brienne had come along in her combat training. She'd been with us less than a week and had transformed from a novice to a journeyman fighter. Her talent was truly incredible, able to learn from watching and understand from simple instruction. Seeing her managing her footwork and level changes after so little time as a warrior made me feel almost envious, and Jack and I had freaky fight IQ's.
That evening Aela rallied the Circle for a raid on the nearby Lost Knife Hideout. The place was full of members of the Silver Hand, fanatical werewolf hunters who knew the truth of the senior Companions. They returned before dawn with a fragment of Wuuthrad, Ysgramor's legendary shattered axe. I raided the cave for all the silver weapons and other valuables after breakfast, not one to allow a pile of valuable loot slip through my now perfect fingers.
Aela shuddered when she caught me tapping my claws on a silver greatsword.
Chill girl, I am imagining the money, not putting you mangy dogs down.
With Fort Amol cleared, we diverted from the path to Ivarstead, and headed southeast to Darkwater Crossing. As each day passed, the signs of dragons increased. Dragons, not a dragon. I knew there were three corpses at the Bonestrewn crest and this region was completely littered with dragon burial mounds.
With Alduin resurrecting his followers, even at a sedate pace, the number of dragons grew and grew.
The presence of the dragons put the modest mining town on edge, compounding with the recent uptick in miner's lung. They were happy to host us while I melted down our loot and cast a number of valuable silver ingots which both paid for our stay, our resupply, and netted me a tidy sum of septims.
On the evening of our third night at the Darkwater Crossing, Jack and I slipped away to activate the nearby Atronach Stone. For people like us, with almost no magical potential, the Atronach stone was all benefit. Upon activating the stone, our Magicka pools expanded six times over, and we gained the ability to absorb half of all incoming magic at the cost of our magicka pools restoring at only half speed.
Losing the benefits of the Warrior Stone didn't matter to us any longer as after three months with some of the greatest warriors in Nirn, we had expanded our skills as low tech warriors to great heights. At this point the extra twenty percent to our learning speed no longer outweighed the benefits the other Standing Stones could bring us.
Upon our return to the Crossing the sound of great wings beating overhead clued us into the inbound attack from a dragon. We got our bows strung in time to witness another green scaled beast breath a gout of fire from its mouth as it passed over the thatched roofs of the settlement. It regretted illuminating itself when a pair of javelins penetrated its side even deeper than my Skyforge Steel bow had managed.
Neither had landed in a way that impacted its wing joint, but the pain caused it to lose control and crash into a house.
"Deus Volt, bitch!" I shouted as I ran to the house at top speed and engaged the big bastard with The Mule.
The sonofabitch bit me!
Rather than allow me to rain down blows on it, the dragon locked its jaws around me and put down a painful squeeze. In honor of Kratos, I put a hand on each jaw and pushed out from my body, extending my arms until I heard a satisfying snap as the dragon's jaw dislocated and its pitiful wails of pain.
Animal lover that I am, I couldn't leave it in such a poor condition.
After a bit of messy knife work I held the dragon's severed head up as the gathered onlookers cheered. The light show that went off once Brienne approached got the appropriate Ooos and Aaas.
The party really started after all the fires were put out and we began carving up the beast to feast on. Dragons are just particularly juicy turkeys that breathe fire or ice or other Thu'um mischief. Their meat, when roasted, made for incredibly satisfying eating unlike my last flying enemies. The collectors truly were the lowest of the low.
I wonder if Javik would have been tastier.
Needless to say, our stay at the crossing extended as I now needed to process the dragon along with the leftovers from our previous kill to outfit the rest of the Companions. The young Dragonborn got a shirt and hoes made of the finer green scales of the beast to be worn under a more traditional set of nordic scaled horned armor made from the beast's wing leather and a few of the local sheep.
With her golden hooded cloak tucked into the ramskin and thick warriors girdle, she looked quite the riot of colors. The other members of the crew who wore light armor were similarly outfitted, while the heavies all got the dragon bone upgrade layered over their preferred gear.
The biggest advantage came from the whole crew using dragon bone bows. Our ranged DPS went through the roof and would hopefully hold up against the upper tier dragons.
With our business at the crossing concluded, we ventured north through the volcanic hot springs to the Bonestrewn Crest. Somehow we managed the approach without spooking the sleeping Frost Dragon, allowing everyone to take aim and lose a volley of death at the lazy beast. Both its wing joints were penetrated, though not as deeply as the green dragon had due to the Frost Dragon's natural increase in toughness. A number of lesser arrows had landed in its neck and chest, but Aela's had struck it in the eye, blinding the beast's left field of view.
In response to the sudden wake up, the beast bellowed out a stream of icy air that caused a localized white out, preventing us from targeting it again as it charged through the cold blast.
I managed to whack it with a hammer strike before it bulled me over. Damn thing stepped on me as it passed, but I hacked the tip of its tail off before it got away.
The fight after that was a blur of teamwork as the crippled dragon went down in white blaze of glory. Athis and Ria came away from the battle with the worst of the injuries as the nords all were able to resist the magical cold and Jack and I absorbed it. We chose to make our way up to Windhelm to stock up on potions to better resist ice and fire attacks at the legendary White Vial alchemist shop.
After the battle against the white scaled Frost Dragon, the brief attack by one of the lesser brown scaled dragons barely got our blood pumping, but at least added another dead dragon to my Loot Sled.
Despite the dead dragons and the presence of the Companions, I was turned away at the gates of the ancient city, as Argonians were not allowed inside the city walls after the sun sets begins to set. In solidarity, the Companions and I made our way down to the docks where the local argonian population lived and worked. The conditions here were better than those further to the north, where the dunmer slums existed.
Unlike in the game where the dunmer refugees had taken up a segregated corner of the city, here they were forced to live outside the stone walls in a hastily constructed ghetto. They had over time made the place far more homie, but the stark contrast between the conditions of the nords and the other races in Windhelm set the Dragonborn off something fierce. She and Athis set out to the Grey Quarter that evening and had it out with various drunks who stumbled through the ghetto throwing bottles and shouting slurs throughout the night.
Jack and I didn't join them as the local argonians sensed the kinship with us and invited us to a big ol' Hist Sap group trip. Mistakes were made.
The wife and I exist in a state of quantum fuckery as we possess the DNA and Power of three distinct individuals while only expressing the advantageous and subconsciously desired traits of any of the constituent beings. It's why Jack and I became more physically imposing after eating Jabba, but did not change beyond our basic krogan and human forms, and why I gained a more hybridized argonian-krogan form while Jack remained largely unchanged.
You see, that quantum fuckery should make us sterile to anyone we encounter… unless we encounter a race of people who are constantly in flux controlled by a hallucinogenic sap that has connected their species evolutionarily to a species of godtrees that shape them into their ideal forms.
When we all woke from the trip I was surrounded by buffed up argonian girls leaking my seed from their every orifice.
Jack and I left the docks that morning having chosen to not speak to anyone about me fathering a new super race.