The chamber stank of scorched flesh, mildew, and blood.
And silence—sweet, horrible silence—finally fell.
I leaned against a half-shattered coffin, my body trembling, my robe soaked through with sweat, blood, and possibly the tears of every undead I'd just electrocuted.My breathing came ragged. Every breath felt like dragging molten air through a cracked ribcage.
The fight was over.
Around us, the stone floor was littered with corpses.
Dozens. Maybe hundreds? Definitely hundreds.
Fleshless, rotting Draugr corpses in rusted armor lay strewn in grotesque positions. Heads bashed in. Limbs severed. Bones splintered. One still twitched; Kaela idly stomped on its skull with a lazy crunch.
She sat atop a decapitated Draugr Scourge like it was a barstool, hair clumped with sweat and bits of skull, grinning weakly.
"I'll be honest," she panted, "even I didn't enjoy that."
That's how you know it was bad.
Ragar let out a final war cry, unknown whether it's from adrenaline or from sheer habit, and finally collapsed, both of his warhammers clattering beside him. For efficiency reasons, he had opted to dual-wield two-handed warhammers. A freak of nature that guy is.
Thorgar stumbled after him and faceplanted directly onto Ragar's chest with a heavy grunt.
They didn't move again. I don't think Ragar was even breathing anymore.
Kaela opened her mouth to speak, finger half-raised like she was about to drop a one-liner, then slumped sideways and promptly passed out.
I sighed.
Then my knees buckled and I slid to the ground with about as much grace as a falling bookshelf.
Lissette exhaled slowly beside me, slumping against the same coffin, her arms limp over her lap. Her sword lay at her side, forgotten.
Her face was pale. Her breathing shallow. Her robes were soaked through, and even her hair looked exhausted. There was even a severed hand of a Draugr holding onto her ankles.
We sat like that for a while.
The silence didn't feel victorious. Just... hollow.
After a while, Lissette chuckled quietly, voice dry as dust.
"You gonna pass out too?"
I turned my head toward her with some effort, blinking past the blood still trickling into my left eye.
"Are you?"
She gave a wry little shrug. "Probably. Just wanted someone conscious nearby in case something tried to eat me."
"Romantic."
She gave a tired snort. "Shut up."
More silence.
Then her voice again, this time softer.
"What was that spell, by the way?"
I blinked, halfway through closing my eyes.
"Hm?"
"That one near the end. When you made half the room explode."
Oh.
Right.
The memory hit me like a blunt object.
I'd been surrounded. Three Draugr Wights on my right, a Scourge flanking my left. My magicka reserves were shot. My arms felt like lead. Lightning Bolt was doing next to nothing. It was, at best, annoying them. I would overcharge my spell, but I would run out of magicka within 2 minutes in that case.
I've been backed into a corner.
Adrenaline sharpened my thoughts like a 4.0 L M840T twin-turbocharged V8 on a Civic.
Too slow. Too weak. Too predictable. It needs more pressure. More heat. More violence.
So I did something stupid.
I took the framework I understood from Sparks—raw magicka discharge, directed forward—and converted it.
Not into static, but into flames.
I felt the fire coalesce; shaky, unstable, raw. Not a proper spell. Just a flame, like a burning coal in my palm. As I funneled magicka into the flickering plasma, it grew. From barely the size of a marble into the size of a basketball.
My already pitiful amount of remaining magicka got halved within seconds. My head began to buzz, and the corner of my vision beginning to turn dark. Normally, I would've stopped here, but the adrenaline had completely blocked off any sense of reason. The fire grew bigger in my palm.
I held it.
Then I compressed it.
I pressed down with every ounce of control I had.
It screamed. Not aloud, but inside my head. The spell began to vibrate, a hum of instability. Magicka wasn't supposed to be that tight. That small. That angry.
Contain it. Shape it. Force it smaller. Tighter. Denser.
The heat intensified. Even if it's my own spell, I could feel the sizzling heat kiss my cheeks.
I could feel it breaking the spell structure—no, refusing to take a structure. It became a self-contained storm, a tantrum of energy.
A singularity made of fury.
I launched it.
The orb flew—small, hot, white-gold—and then the world detonated.
Three Draugr vaporized. The Scourge was thrown against the wall like a ragdoll. The shockwave tore through the stone floor and blew apart two nearby urns.
And then my head rang like a church bell for ten straight seconds.
I blinked, coming back to the present.
Lissette was staring at me.
I shrugged, wincing at the pull on my shoulder.
"Made it up," I said simply.
Her eyebrows slowly climbed. "You... made it up."
"I had a theory. Based on how Sparks functions."
"You had a theory," she echoed flatly.
"Yeah. So I... melted the fire into a sphere. Then compressed the pressure into a smaller volume. When the fire couldn't contain itself anymore, it... well."
I gestured vaguely at the battlefield.
There's a number of corpses that still has fire blazing on them.
Lissette was quiet for a moment.
Then she said, very slowly, "That's a custom spell."
I gave her a side glance. "Is it?"
"Yes," she said dryly. "It is."
She let her head fall back against the coffin, then gave a small, tired laugh, almost bitter.
"You're an idiot," she said.
I gave her a blank stare.
"That was incredibly dangerous," she continued. "You could've fried your soul. You're lucky your brain didn't ooze out your ears."
That got my attention.
I turned to look at her. "What?"
She groaned. Then sighed.
"Custom spells aren't illegal," she said, "but they're basically suicide. You're playing with magicka in ways your soul isn't meant to handle. Spell tomes exist because dozens of mages got their essence snapped in half trying to reinvent the wheel."
I stared at her, suddenly less amused.
"You remember that pressure? That pulsing in your skull? The part where it felt like your brain was going to boil out through your nose?"
I hesitated. Then nodded.
I vividly remember the sensation when I was creating the fireball. I thought it was just the backlash from my dropping magicka.
"That's your soul trying to reject the feedback," she said quietly. "You survived it. This time. Next time? You would be lucky if your head didn't explode. Literally."
I was silent for a long moment.
"...I am an idiot." I muttered.
Lissette let out a tired, dry laugh.
"Smartest idiot I've ever met," she said. "You've got the mind of a scholar and the experience of a toddler."
I groaned and let my head hit the floor with a dull thud.
"You could've just said 'good job.'"
She smirked.
"Where's the fun in that?"
We laid there, corpses at our feet, covered in blood. There was silence, but fortunately not the suffocating kind this time.
"Don't do it again," she said.
"No promises," I replied.
She shook her head slowly.
"You're an idiot," she repeated.
"I'm a creative idiot."
"Still an idiot."
We both stared up at the ceiling again.
Neither of us said anything else for a while.
***
We found ourselves in a chamber that felt strangely… peaceful.
Which, in this place, was deeply suspicious.
A large, circular room with a single sealed gate at the far end, carved with stone rings and a central keyhole. On either side, decayed urns, piles of broken weapons, and dust-thick banners fluttered limply from ancient stone hooks. Sunlight didn't reach here. The air was still, and tasted like iron and memory.
Everyone collapsed into their own corners of the room.
Ragar sat down heavily and pulled out a piece of smoked meat from his bag, tearing into it like a starving man. Thorgar slumped against the wall, uncorked his waterskin, and drained half of it in one go.
Kaela wandered over to the urns and began humming again—because of course she did—digging through them like a kid in a sweetshop.
I let myself breathe. Not relax—never relax here—but breathe.
Lissette, wordless, walked to the far wall. Her eyes were fixed on something.
Carvings. Dozens of them.
I stood and followed her.
The mural was massive, wrapping across the curvature of the chamber like a tapestry made of stone. Images of dragons. Priests in black robes. Cities burning under black wings. Symbols I couldn't read, but something inside me recognized.
Lissette's fingers ghosted over the etched surface. She wasn't smiling. Her eyes were narrowed, lips parted slightly.
"You can read this?" I asked.
She nodded slowly. "Not all of it. The script's old. But I learned its roots as a girl. My family had dealings with researchers from Cyrodiil."
I waited, letting her gather her thoughts.
She traced a line from a jagged carving of a crowned figure with spread wings.
"It speaks of a god-king. A being above time. The Twilight God. The First Dragon. The Bane of Kings."
Her voice was low, reverent.
"The 'World Eater.'"
She continued, slower now, choosing each word carefully.
"There was a cult. Dragon worshippers. Devoted to this black-winged king. They built an empire beneath his shadow. Then war broke out, between the brothers, it says. And when the brothers wage war… 'the black wings will unfurl.'"
I watched the mural unfold.
The god-king crowned in fire. His brothers buried beneath mountains. Cities leveled. Time unraveling. And dragons rising from tombs.
"The return of a golden age," she murmured, "when the tombs of his kin become whispers in the river of time."
Lissette shook her head. "Historians would kill to see this. I've read about bits of this myth in fragments. But this… this is something else."
I said nothing.
Because I knew what this was.
Alduin. The World Eater. The end of all things.
This wasn't just art. It was a warning. Or worse, a prophecy.
"Thank you," I said.
She blinked at me. "For what?"
"For reading the future."
I turned away before she could press further.
I walked toward the stone gate.
It was circular, massive, with concentric rings and a keyhole in the center. The carvings on the rings were animal symbols, each weathered, but still distinct.
I studied the lock for a moment, then turned back.
"Ragar," I called. "The claw?"
He looked up mid-chew, confused. "The what?"
"The Golden Claw," I said again, gesturing. "It's a key. This is the lock."
Ragar blinked at me like I'd just spoken in Dwemeris, but reached into his pack and handed me the artifact. "...Right."
I turned it in my hand, inspecting the base.
Bear. Moth. Owl.
I rotated the rings to match the pattern, the stone grinding softly with each movement. My fingers hovered over the keyhole.
"Be ready," I said, louder this time. "I don't trust this room."
Kaela stowed her coins and rolled her neck with a crack.
Ragar stood, wiping his hands.
Lissette and Thorgar stepped closer, tense.
I slotted the claw into the keyhole and twisted.
The sound was like a mountain yawning.
The rings shuddered. Stone scraped. Dust fell from the ceiling in trickling lines. And then, with a final deep click, the gate split and slowly opened.
What lay beyond was... different.
The chamber was enormous.
Unlike the rest of the Barrow, this place wasn't built for the dead. It was built to glorify them.
A massive circular altar stood beneath a wide opening in the ceiling, sunlight streamed in from above, casting a single beam of light upon the central coffin like a divine spotlight.
And flanking that coffin?
Ten sarcophagi. Five on each side, carved into the walls like a throne's honor guard. Black stone. Etchings I couldn't read. Each lid sealed with rusted iron.
We entered slowly.
My fingers twitched.
Something felt... wrong.
We reached the center, and for a moment—just a moment—I let myself believe that maybe this was just a ceremonial chamber. That maybe, just this once, we wouldn't have to—
The first sarcophagus opened.
With a shriek of grinding metal, its iron lid slammed onto the floor, sending up a cloud of dust and centuries of silence.
The second followed. Then a third. Then all of them.
CLANG.
CLANG.
CLANG.
The Draugr rose.
Ten of them. Not Restless. Not Wights. Not even Scourges.
They stood taller. Armored heavier. Weapons ancient but honed.
Their eyes burned bright blue, like frozen stars.
Lissette's voice shook.
"Draugr... Deathlords."
Ragar's jaw tensed. He muttered a prayer in a language I didn't recognize.
Thorgar unsheathed his blades in perfect silence.
Kaela didn't smile. For the first time since Helgen, she looked uncertain.
Then came the final sound.
A deep groan of metal bending.
The center coffin opened.
Its faceplate dropped to the floor with a thunderous clang, and from within rose something taller than any of them.
Blackened skin pulled over bone. Ancient armor covered in frost. Its hands clutched an Ebony Greatsword, wicked and cruel.A twisted crown of iron sat atop its head.
Its eyes glowed with a light that didn't come from this world.
I felt my stomach twist.
"...That's new," I muttered.
Lissette's voice was faint. "That's not a Deathlord."
"What is it?"
She swallowed. "A Death Overlord."
Even Kaela took a step back.
Lissette's voice was barely audible. "This might be our funeral."
Ragar closed his eyes.
Kaela's hands clenched the hilt of her weapon. Her breath was uneven.
I exhaled slowly.
"This world," I muttered, "is so much worse than the game."
The Death Overlord stepped forward.
Its crown gleamed dully beneath the shaft of light from the ceiling, and its mouth split open with a guttural exhale.
Then it spoke.
"FUS RO DAH!"
The shout wasn't a word, it was a weapon. A tidal wave of force ripped through the air like a thunderclap from the throat of a god.
I was launched backward—no, all of us were. The entire group scattered like broken pieces on a game board.
My back hit the stone with a sound I didn't register.
Everything turned to chaos.
Kaela was already back on her feet, gritting her teeth as she danced between two Deathlords with a manic light in her eyes. She wasn't dodging, she was challenging them.Her greatsword sang as it cleaved through rusted armor, sparks flying.
Ragar let out a beast-like roar, swinging both of his warhammers with such reckless violence that stone cracked with each miss. Two Deathlords bore down on him, but he held firm, screaming, bleeding, relentless.
Thorgar vanished and reappeared like a phantom, slipping between his two opponents like wind through reeds. His cloak was already in tatters, but he hadn't been caught yet, not once.
Lissette—
Gods, even Lissette was holding her own.
She dueled with two Deathlords in tandem, switching between bursts of flame and swift sword strokes. Her face was pale, but her footwork remained precise. She was muttering incantations faster than I could process, redirecting their swings like water around stone.
I, however, was not fine.
Because I had three.
Two Deathlords closed in from either side, one with a blade glowing blue, the other dragging a massive axe across the stone.
But the worst was in the center.
The Death Overlord stepped toward me with the slowness of a man certain of his kill. Its glowing eyes never left mine.
I threw Lightning Bolts. One after the other. My arms burned from the motion, but I had no choice.
Crack.One to the left.Crack.One to the right.Crack.Straight ahead.
Nothing. They barely flinched.
They were already advancing again.
My magicka reserve hit bottom from the barrage of ineffective Lightning Bolts.
A chill ran up my spine.
No—no, no, not now.
I reached deeper.
I forced magicka from my soul. Inhaled from a well that had long gone dry.
And the backlash hit immediately.
My vision spun. A high-pitched ringing tore through my skull. My knees nearly gave out. The breath of my soul thinned, like I was trying to suck wind from a closed jar.
But I couldn't stop.
They were still coming.
I charged the same unstable fire orb as before—compressing it, smaller, smaller—
A whisper of air.
Then pain.
Something pierced through my ribs. I gasped.
And looked down.
A blade was jutting through my chest.
I turned my head and saw the Deathlord behind me, its face an unmoving mask of death.
It got behind me. I didn't hear it. I didn't—
I raised my right hand, trying to finish the spell and fire it at the Overlord.
But then—
CRACK.
A sword came down from above.
My entire world turned white as something was cut.
My right arm hit the floor with a dull, wet sound.
The pain hadn't even registered yet.
The Deathlord behind me yanked its blade out, and then slashed across my back. I dropped to my knees, blood gushing from both sides of my body.
The Overlord finally moved.
It reached out with one hand, gripping my head like a skull about to be mounted on a wall. I tried to speak, but my voice was already lost.
The Ebony Greatsword pierced through my chest.
Through the heart.
And then it pulled the blade free.
For a brief second, I remained upright, held in place by the Overlord's grip.
Then it released me.
My body crumpled to the stone like a broken puppet.
I heard shouting. Metal clashing. A scream I thought might be Kaela's.
Then nothing.
Only darkness.
And silence.
***
There was no pain.
No weight.
No body.
Then—A breath.
I opened my eyes.
I was lying in a field of pale white flowers, blanketed across the earth like fresh snow. Each petal shimmered faintly, bleeding silver into the wind. The sky above me was an upside-down ocean, endless and black. Beneath its waves, polychromatic fractals shimmered, falling like leaves from a tree that didn't exist.
One floated past my face.
Glass. Like a shard of a cathedral window.
I sat up, dazed.
The pain was gone, but something else had taken its place.
Silence. Too complete to be real.
A figure stood in front of me.
Smiling.
He wore a novice mage robe, the blue trim catching light from nowhere. His hair was black, messy, and his eyes were a deep stormy blue.
Same expression I saw in the mirror every morning, when I wasn't busy bleeding or killing.
Familiar. Too familiar.
He smiled.
"Hello."
I stared. My voice caught in my throat. He looked like me.
No—he looked like the Lucen Ardyn I'd seen in the mirror for weeks.
He turned, walking away through the field.
I followed. What else was I supposed to do?
Another fractal floated down, catching the light. I glanced into it—
My reflection stared back.
Not his.
Mine.
Joshua.
My real face, my real skin, my real damnation.
I wasn't wearing the robe anymore. A bloodstained college uniform clung to my frame, torn at the sleeves. The sleeves of a world that no longer existed.
I stopped.
He was watching me.
I said nothing.
"Strange, isn't it?" he asked, still smiling. "To meet yourself at the end of the road."
I found my voice. "Who are you?"
The man smiled. "Lucen Ardyn."
"I'm—" I started, but he interrupted.
"You're not Lucen Ardyn," he said, softly. "You're Joshua. From another world."
My heart skipped.
The name hit like a cold slap.
He stepped closer. "I'm Lucen Ardyn. The real one. The body you're squatting in? Mine."
I was silent.
"Not dead yet," he added cheerfully, "but almost. Just a sliver of soul left to hold you together. That stab through the heart was quite a show."
He gestured at the sky. "This place? It's not the afterlife. Just... a shared mental plane. A crossroads for souls. Magic doesn't work here, by the way. No spellcasting. No escape. Just you and me. Flesh and thought."
He paused.
"We're the same person, in a way. Two souls tangled together in one puppet."
I looked down at my hands. Real. Not real. Conceptual.
"You're real?"
"As real as death," he said, smile widening. "Have you never wondered why the name Lucen Ardyn slipped out of your mouth so naturally? Why you claimed to be a Breton from the Summerset Isles?"
I felt a weight on my chest.
"Those thoughts weren't yours," Lucen continued, eyes narrowing. "They were mine. Echoes. Memories. I never truly left. You just shoved me aside and sat in my seat."
He stepped forward, voice cold now.
"My name. My body. My magic. My life. You stole them."
Silence.
"Or maybe I gave myself willingly," he added with a smirk. "For the sake of a theory."
"What theory?" I asked, but I already knew.
"The Restoration Loop," he whispered.
He walked to a nearby flower, plucking a single petal. He held it up to the sky. "The soul breathes Magicka, like lungs breathe air. Restoration restores breath. So what happens if you teach the soul to inhale itself?"
He crushed the petal between his fingers.
"Perpetual Magicka. Immortality. Divinity."
Lucen turned back to me.
"I needed a second soul. Mine could hold the loop, but not process it. I needed a vessel. A container. A dumb, desperate, power-hungry lunatic who would brute-force the theory for me."
His grin twisted into something crooked.
"You."
He stepped closer. "You see, I needed two souls. That's the secret. You can't loop Magicka with only one. The metaphysical barrier between the soul and the world, it's impermeable. You need one soul to act as the healer. And the other…"
He leaned in.
"To be healed."
I blinked. "You wanted to use me."
"I am using you," he said, eyes alight. "That custom spell of yours? That Restoration obsession? Those weren't accidents. They were breadcrumbs."
I felt sick.
"I was going to use you as the vessel. Your soul, filled with the right Restoration structure, would endlessly heal mine. You would be the pump. The battery. I'd be immortal. Infinite. Resonant."
He spread his arms wide. "And now that you're dying, I can finally wipe your soul clean and make it mine."
He stepped toward me.
"I just need to drain your soul's vitality. A clean husk. One that I can reprogram. You'll vanish into nothingness. And I—" his smile sharpened, "I will become God."
Then his smile dropped, as if it was never there.
"Any last words?"
I stared.
And smiled.
He froze.
"Yeah," I said. "Thanks."
"…What?"
"Thank you," I repeated. "For the lecture."
He tried to speak.
I lunged.
We fell into the flowers, and I slammed his head into the ground with a crack.
He screamed. I drove my thumbs into his eyes.
"Thank you," I hissed, "for telling me everything."
He flailed, but I was faster. Hungrier.
"You think I'm mad?" I whispered, leaning down, voice trembling with joy. "You haven't seen madness. You're a footnote. A hallucination with delusions of grandeur."
He tried to claw at me.
I grabbed a shard of falling fractal glass, jammed it into his throat.
Blood sprayed, except it wasn't blood, not really. It was light, or soulstuff, or—
I bit into his hand clawing on my face. He screamed, unknown whether it's from desperation or agony. Or both.
He yanked his hand, leaving a generous chunk of his hand and an index finger on my mouth. I spat it out, and wondered why I kept biting off fingers.
Lucen screamed. His other hand spasmed against my collar.
I slammed his head into the flowers again. And again. And again.
"See, you almost got me," I said, tightening my grip. "But you talked too much. You explained everything. And now I know how it works."
"You—c-can't—" he croaked.
"Oh, I can," I grinned. "Because I'm greedy. I'm selfish. And I don't share."
He turned his body around, and desperately tried to crawl away.
I sat on his back, and grabbed his shoulder and jaw with a tight grip.
"No—no, no, no! N—"
CRACK—
And he stopped moving.
I leaned back, panting, soaked in something that smelled like ash and honey and burnt memories.
Lucen Ardyn's corpse stared up at me, neck in an unnatural position, one eye hanging out of its socket.
"Good night, Lucen," I said softly.
"Thank you for your life. I'll cherish it."
Then I laughed.
Alone in the flowers.
Alone in my mind.
Alive.