Chapter Text
Fourth Era, Year 201. North of the Jerall Mountains
Ragged breaths exacerbated by the chilly wind, feet aching with every step up the recent increase in slopes that the landscape has turned into, skin shivering when the cold has begun to settle in, wrapping itself and biting into her. She simply can’t escape it, this fatigue that is coming over her, and though it’s been weeks – or is it months now? – since she got out and should’ve been able to rebound to a certain degree, her body does at times yet feel half broken, scarred due to its prolonged endurance of suffering. Then again, she has to remind herself that she hasn’t been granted any real time to rehabilitate and some of these former injuries and detriments to her physique have only newly been properly patched up. In some ways, it comes across like there’s still a long ways away until she can sit at a 100% efficiency again.
She can’t imagine what type of mess she must look to be in right now. She wasn’t exactly starved in that place, and thus most of her well-honed and muscular form has remained, even if the medium brown skin of hers is blemished by multiple old gashes and incisions. If she herself peeks downwards, she knows by now that she’ll find scars across her arms and belly, as well as some down by her legs, but many of these are battle marks, not specifically from…what she had to sustain back there. The grey rags she managed to haggle for, including this fur-lined, black cloak she’s presently wearing, it might stave off some of the cold, but it won’t be suitable in a battle scenario.
Furthermore, she’s wondering what sort of questions she’ll induce in those who see her. By just looking at her build and height, some might guess she’s a nord, likely with redguard heritage, but what of the pointed ears? Not to forget her yellow-grey eyes. Well, just one eye these days, while the ragged eye-patch she eventually netted a week or two ago obscures the other, so that she wouldn’t have to use her poorly washed shoulder-length black hair to conceal the gap. Plus, if she is to defend herself, she needs something better than this damn half-assed, crappy longsword she stole from the outskirts of a village in northern Cyrodiil.
And she has been fleeing northward, for what her head intuits like months, but it can’t have been beyond a year. The voyage upwards the continent has been lined with a profusion of activities and diverse transportation methods, in order to reach her goal. Sometimes she’s been on her own two feet, other times offered herself for simpler manual labor jobs for a day or two, in order to scrape together a couple of coins to prop her up in taking flight once more, and on some very rare occasions, she’s crossed kind souls who are not averse to contributing a free ride, possibly in exchange for the company of conversation.
She won’t stop either. She can’t drop this trek, for the alternative would be fraught with doom and a concrete crucible unlike she’s ever known. She has to get away from her…that damned woman, the one who comes to her in the darkest of times, who materializes in the corners where she believes she can’t see, when the days exhibit a safety where perhaps there shouldn’t be. She still has nightmares of that voice…
The purpose of heading to northern lands is simple – she wishes to seek asylum from any of the local lords, ones who may not be as open to the orders down south, or possibly just keep her hidden from any view, which would likely be for the best as she’s certain spies or assassins will come for her otherwise. A road to sanctuary elsewhere right now would nearly be impossible. She won’t get it in Aldmeri Dominion lands, that goes without saying, since they are the enemy. Black Marsh couldn’t care less about what humans and elves squabble over in their arrogant sense of ownership of Tamriel, Morrowind is too harrowed by having taken such a beating and enraged that the Empire ignored their hardships, and Hammerfell could say similarly when the imperials attempted to sell them out. Cyrodiil can no longer be trusted in her eyes, not in light of the Thalmor’s treaty with the imperials, and High Rock is yet too attached to heartland politics. Then again, she may have to ask herself if she’s just too capricious of a target to shelter – for after all, who would accept Yarun Svalen, refugee from the special operations Seventh Legion, who lost a fight in the shadows and was caught by counter-spec ops?
One of the major snags in this picture is that Yarun has only visited the northern lands a handful of times that she can recall, and none of them thoroughly comprehensive, besides a couple of months during the Seventh’s rigorous training. Plus, after her captivity, she’s entirely ignorant of what’s been going down there after the previous years of fermentation. Going off the higher-ups’ abstracts, many nords had protested and refused the ban of worship on Talos, sometimes violently, but she had never read too much into the specifics. Either way, if they won’t forfeit her to imperial or Thalmor custody, it matters little.
What she’s most mindful of, the particularly that keeps spurring her on to never decelerate in her getaway, is that her hunters are relentless. She’s bumped into their scouts within some of the villages she’s visited, having been attacked and likely quit a whole mess that erupted after her, but she couldn’t remain, no matter how costly to others. To avoid this scenario, she has if nothing else been taking herself from place to place, never staying more than a few days at most, praying that they’ll forget her. She should be so lucky, for the Thalmor never forgets.
Once she at last scales a hill, with the evening sun in her face and the wind slipping into her hair, the faint sprinkling of glistening snow below making her one eye squint, she reckons she can spot a substance of import further ahead. Looks like the banners of a town somewhere in the southern regions of the land. This must be it, right? This must be Skyrim.