The scaled beast was taken down quite swiftly, thanks to the Listener and I. For most of the time in which we fought it, we stayed behind the shelter of that boulder, shooting arrows into its rough hide from a distance. Once the creature had been severely wounded, the Listener rushed out from the safety of the mass of rock, charging it and slamming her intricately designed mace into its skull.
She had once told me that she received that mace from the Daedric Lord of Domination, Molag Bal, himself. At the time, I had pretended not to believe the story, but everyone knows that she had quite interesting relationships with the Daedra, Sheogorath most of all. I had heard many people jest about the Daedra fighting each other over who gets to keep the Listener's soul in the afterlife. As much as it irks me to hear others make fun out of her current situation, I know for a fact that her soul belongs to none other than our unholy matron herself, the Night Mother.
When the dragon had finally drawn its last breath, the Listener turned her silvery gaze upon me and began speaking to me, though I heard not a word she had said. I was too entranced by the dragons corpse that lay behind her, as its numerous scales began to slowly light up in flames, flying off into the air in soft flakes before disappearing completely. Amongst the ashes, a bright light, completely unnatural and yet familiar to me, began to swirl up into the air, moving straight toward the Listener as she spoke.
The light curled around her body, gently wrapping itself around her armor and, where there was not that, her porcelain-like skin. It hugged her form closely, taking her over completely as it made her eyes shine an even brighter color than before. In this lighting, she truly looked like an angel, though she was far from.
It was beautiful. She was beautiful. The lights danced around her in slow, graceful motions, before they finally settled onto her skin, satisfied with its performance, and absorbed into her body as though that were its rightful place.
Her form glowed briefly, before all signs of that wonderful, dancing light disappeared entirely. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I may not have known it had occurred at all. She acted as though it hadn't, speaking in a nonchalant tone to me, as she had been the entire time. This was quite normal for her, as I often forgot.
On occasion, I forgot that the woman standing before me was not only the Listener, but many other things as well. She was the leader of the Dark Brotherhood, head of the Thieves Guild, member of the College of Winterhold, Stormcloak, thane of Whiterun and, most importantly, she was Dragonborn.
Holding the ancient power of the Thu'um, this woman before me had the blood of the ancient dragons running through her veins, and her mind was able to awaken their power. To use their voice.
Quite some time ago, I had not a clue that she was in any way related to the dragons or the Greybeards and their mysterious ways. She never used her Thu'um, and made it her goal to avoid the corpses of fallen dragons, so as to avoid absorbing their powers. This behavior, which I had thought to be normal at the time, continued for some time, before the call happened.
I had heard it twice before, and that had been before and during my first time meeting the beauty before me. The call of the Greybeards.
Unlike the Dragonborn, the Greybeards spend their entire lives devoted to learning the way of the Thu'um. Unable to absorb dragon's souls, they resorted to more ancient methods, isolating themselves at High Hrothgar, the highest mountain in all of Nirn, to learn from their mentor, Paathurnax.
The call was just as powerful as it had been in previous times, and even I could tell that it was far more forceful. It shook the earth beneath myself and the horse I had been riding, and I hurriedly turned my gaze upon Irrissa, who sat atop her dark steed, Shadowmere, beside me. Her bright gaze was clouded with dissatisfaction, her pale lips tilted down in a frown.
"Listener..?" I inquired, my tone cautious and hesitant. It was rare that I angered her, but when I did.. Let's just say she easily put me back into my place as Keeper.
She still refused to look at me for a few moments, before giving a light shake of her head, causing the ebony strands of her ponytail to sway through the air as she did so.
A Nord such as herself usually had dark colored eyes, or azure for the blondes. But her irises had an unusual coloration for any race to have, a pale silver that held the appearance of moonlit orbs upon her face. I could see even now that they were tinted a slight crimson from hunger, though not the ordinary type of hunger.. I realized it had been some time since she had last fed, and was about to offer up some of my own blood when she cut off my thoughts with a few sad words. "The Greybeards are calling the Dragonborn once more.."
Her words were nothing more than a simple fact that anyone could have pointed out, but the somewhat lonely murmur in which she said this fact caught my attention straight away.
"It appears so.." I stated, my tone still cautious. Despite her obvious sadness upon their call, I still wasn't sure of the situation, and knew that to rush into this would have a very nasty result on my end.
Holding a few strands of my chestnut horse's thick mane, I gave her a sideways glance as I attempted to assess the situation. It wasn't the safest choice, but I decided that to really understand why she was so upset over this, I would have to investigate further. Pursing my lips for a moment, I tried to think up a way to lessen the probability of my demise if I were to delve into her personal life. "Would Listener like to tell Cicero why she is so upse-"
"No." The reply came faster than I had anticipated, though it didn't come as a complete surprise that she refused to speak of it. She had never been exactly.. Open about her thoughts. But since her stubborn word came so quickly, I, as the fool I am, made an even faster reply to her.
"Why not?" I knew that I would most likely come to regret this, and mentally reprimanded myself for being so selfishly curious. Though this was incorrect. While there had been some form of curiosity mixed inside of my thoughts, I was being so pushy more for her wellbeing rather than my own.
Though I didn't expect an honest response, I saw her press her lips into a thin line, as though considering telling me what I wanted to know. Figuring that that was the furthest I was going to get, I began to come up with silly (and incorrect) theories of my own as to why she could be distraught over this. My thoughts were quickly interrupted by her velvety voice, the faint hint of an Imperial accent hidden inside. "Alright then.. I suppose there isn't really much hiding it anymore as it is."
She continued to tell me the story of how she had delved into Bleak Falls Barrow soon after her arrival here in Skyrim, and how when she had stepped toward a massive stone wall decorated with strange symbols, even stranger white lights had danced about her form and voices bellowed inside her mind in some foreign language so loud that she'd had a headache until the next morning. She told me of how the drauger in the cave had shouted at her, shoving her back against the wall with a force of surely unnatural energy, and how after killing a dragon later that day, she had been able to cause the same great force to leave her mouth. She told me of how she heard the first call of the Greybeards as she had traveled back toward Whiterun, and how the Jarl had told her a strange tale of a person named Dragonborn.
It did not take long for me to understand what she was saying, that she was the Dragonborn, but it did take a few moments for me to comprehend what this all meant. Once she had finished, I asked in a meek voice, "Why didn't the Listener approach the Greybeards when they first summoned her?"
