Chapter Text
The morning Rumi left home, the sky over Eastmarch looked like hammered iron.
Wind worried at the eaves. Frost silvered the windows. Somewhere beyond the trees a dog barked once, then decided the cold was not worth the effort and shut up again. Inside the house, the hearth was still alive, its low orange glow painting the little room in warm light that made leaving harder than it should have been.
Rumi sat on a stool near the fire with her father’s sword laid across her knees.
The blade was old Nordic steel, well-kept and ugly in the honest way of useful things. No jewels. No gold filigree. No noble nonsense. Just a broad, weathered weapon with a grip darkened by years of use and a pommel worn smooth where hands had rested over and over again. Her father had carried it into battle. Now it belonged to her.
She drew the whetstone down the edge one last time and watched a faint line of light move along the steel.
“Any sharper and you’ll shave with it,” Mi-yeong said from the table.
Rumi looked up. “I could.”
“No, you couldn’t.”
“I definitely could.”
Mi-yeong snorted and tied off the mouth of a travel sack with the air of a woman who had spent years losing arguments to her daughter and had never once accepted defeat. She was not tall, but she had that certain kind of presence some women earned by raising children, surviving Skyrim, and refusing to be impressed by anyone’s nonsense. Her dark hair was pinned back with practical indifference, and there was flour on one sleeve from the bread she had bullied into existence before dawn.
Across the room, Celine stood at the kitchen shelf sorting little stoppered vials into a leather roll.
Unlike Mi-yeong, Celine looked as if the cold should have offended her on principle. She was all long lines and graceful hands, fair Altmer skin touched gold by the firelight, pale hair braided neatly over one shoulder. She carried herself with that quiet sort of poise that made even simple movements look deliberate. But the expression in her eyes as she counted out healing draughts was not distant or lofty. It was familiar. Warm. Maybe a little resigned.
“Before you swagger out into the wilderness and get yourself disemboweled by old men in tombs,” Celine said, “you will take these.”
Rumi grinned. “You have such faith in me.”
“I have known you since you were small enough to get your head stuck in a chair,” Celine said. “Faith has very little to do with it.”
Mi-yeong laughed under her breath and set the travel sack on the table with more force than necessary. “Eat first.”
“I ate.”
“You inhaled half a heel of bread while you were looking for your boots. Sit.”
Rumi sighed in theatrical suffering. “I am a grown woman.”
“And I am still your mother. Sit.”
Rumi sat.
Mi-yeong put a bowl in front of her. Hot oat porridge, thick and steaming, with a little honey if the gods were being generous. This morning, apparently, they were.
Rumi took a spoonful and groaned softly. “You’re trying to make me stay.”
“If I wanted you to stay, I’d break your leg.” Mi-yeong took the chair opposite her and folded her arms. “I’m trying to make sure when you go chasing glory into some cursed hole in the ground, you do it on a full stomach.”
“Romantic,” Rumi said.
“It is. Your father would have said the same.”
The room went gentler at that.
Not sad. Not yet. Just touched by a familiar ache worn smooth by years.
Rumi looked down at the sword again.
Kang-dae. Her father. Warrior. Hunter. The kind of man village drunks still compared themselves to when they wanted to sound bigger than they were. He had died when she was young enough that memory had blurred around the edges, but the stories had never blurred. He had died fighting. Died bravely. Died well. His name lived in song, and his spirit feasted in Sovngarde among heroes. Rumi had grown up on that truth the way other children grew up on milk.
One day, she told herself, the bards would sing of her too.
Celine crossed the room and set the leather roll beside Rumi’s bowl. “Two healing draughts. One for pain. One for frostbite, though if you need that, I’ll be disappointed. This little blue vial is for stamina. This one is not.”
Rumi looked at the red vial. “What does it do?”
“It makes you shit yourself.”
Mi-yeong choked on a laugh.
Rumi stared at Celine. “You put a vial of emergency shitting in my pack?”
“In case you grab the wrong one without looking,” Celine said calmly. “It encourages good habits.”
“That’s evil.”
“That,” Mi-yeong said, “is parenting.”
Rumi laughed and reached over to squeeze Celine’s wrist. “I’ll read the labels.”
“You never read the labels.”
“I will this time.”
Celine’s mouth softened at one corner. “That is exactly the sort of lie you inherited from your father.”
Rumi finished eating, shouldered her pack, and fastened her sword at her hip. The familiar weight steadied her. She rolled her shoulders once and felt the restlessness in her bones flare bright and eager.
Hollowsong Barrow.
Recently exposed after a rockslide up in the hills. Old Nordic ruin. Untouched, if local rumor could be trusted, which it usually could not. There had already been talk of hidden chambers, carved songs on the walls, treasure still buried with the dead. Half the village thought it was cursed. The other half thought it was haunted. Rumi thought it sounded perfect.
Mi-yeong stood when Rumi did. “You know where you’re going?”
“Yes.”
“You know the way back?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll come home before sunset if the dead don’t decide to keep you?”
Rumi leaned over and kissed her mother on the forehead. “If the dead try to keep me, I’ll be very rude about it.”
Mi-yeong huffed and grabbed the back of Rumi’s neck for a brief rough squeeze. “Come back with all your limbs attached.”
“That feels like a very low standard.”
“It is the standard I have.”
Rumi moved to Celine next. For a second the Altmer woman just looked at her, eyes searching her face in that quietly unsettling way she had, as if she could see every foolish impulse already sprinting ahead of her. Then Celine touched two fingers to the leather strap crossing Rumi’s chest and straightened it.
“Ancient Nord tombs do not care how brave you are,” she said.
“Neither do I.”
“Yes, that’s what worries me.”
Rumi smiled. “I’ll be careful.”
Celine’s brows lifted almost imperceptibly.
Rumi amended, “Careful enough.”
“Somehow,” Celine said, “that is worse.”
Rumi laughed, ducked before either woman could find another thing to say, and stepped out into the cold.
The air hit hard and clean. Snow creaked under her boots. Eastmarch stretched around her in white and dark pine and old stone, harsh as a scar and beautiful enough to hurt. Home.
She drew a breath that burned her lungs and grinned into the morning.
“Right,” she murmured to nobody. “Let’s go become a legend.”
---
Mira hated Skyrim on sight.
Not because it was ugly. Worse. It was beautiful in the sort of theatrical, miserable way that demanded appreciation while actively trying to freeze the blood in your veins. Mountains like broken teeth. Pines black against the snow. Wind that found every opening in every cloak and slid inside like an insult.
“This province,” she announced to no one human, “was clearly built by people who confused suffering with architecture.”
Derpy blinked at her.
The summoned sabre cat padded along beside the narrow road with the dreamy expression of a creature whose mind had never once been burdened by thought. His fur shimmered an impossible blue under the gray light, too vivid to be natural, though everything about Derpy was technically unnatural and therefore, in Mira’s opinion, above criticism.
Sussie, the six-eyed raven, sat on Derpy’s broad back like a little black omen and watched the world with a level of judgment Mira found frankly rude.
“You could at least pretend to agree with me,” Mira told them.
Derpy walked into a low-hanging pine branch and kept going.
“Hopeless.”
The road north had become a ribbon of packed snow and old wagon ruts. Mira’s boots were expensive enough to make her feel guilty every time they sank into slush. She had left Cyrodiil with coin, talent, and a very healthy certainty that she would thrive without her family. All three were still true. None of them had prepared her for a land where the wind bit like a dog and the locals looked at every stray mage as though waiting to see whether she’d explode.
Ahead, a roadside inn huddled against the cold with smoke spilling from its chimney and two horses tied outside. Mira stepped in before the storm rolling over the hills could decide to get ambitious.
Warmth hit her first. Then the smell of mead, old wool, grease, wet leather, and woodsmoke. A proper northern welcome.
A handful of travelers occupied the common room: a merchant with red ears and bad posture, two hunters sharing stew, and a broad man in furs speaking much too loudly about burial mounds.
Mira slowed immediately.
“—telling you,” the man was saying, “there was singing. Out there in the dark. No wind, no birds, just singing.”
One hunter snorted. “You were drunk.”
“I was inspired.”
“That is what drunk people call it.”
Mira slid into the nearest open seat and held a gloved hand over the table. Magicka prickled at her fingertips. A tiny tongue of conjured flame rose in her palm, just enough to warm numb skin. The innkeeper gave her an unimpressed look that suggested minor arcane theatrics were not an especially compelling form of payment in Skyrim.
“Stew,” Mira said. “And whatever passes for decent tea in this province.”
The innkeeper grunted and moved on.
Mira angled her head toward the loud man. “What was singing?”
The man turned, clearly delighted anyone had asked. “Hollowsong Barrow.”
Well. That was a name with ambition.
Mira folded her hands and gave him her most innocent expression, the one she usually used before doing something expensive or inadvisable. “And what exactly is Hollowsong Barrow?”
“Old ruin in the hills east of here,” he said. “Been buried for years. Rockslide opened it up last week. Since then, folk hear things.”
“Things,” Mira repeated.
“Singing. Whispers. One lad swears he saw blue fire in the entrance.”
One of the hunters muttered, “One lad also swears his goat can count.”
The loud man ignored him. “And there was a student asking after it two days ago. Said she was from the College. Wanted to know if anyone had disturbed any wards.”
That was enough to make Mira sit up straighter.
The College of Winterhold attracted talent, fools, and people who could not reliably distinguish between the two. If one of its students had been sniffing around this ruin, there might be actual magical significance to it. Unusual wards. Ritual burial magic. Something older.
Interesting.
The innkeeper thumped a bowl of stew in front of her. Mira fished a coin from her purse and kept listening.
“No one gone in?” she asked.
The loud man shrugged. “Maybe some grave-thieves. Couple folk wandered up to look, but the locals are keeping clear.”
“Because of the singing.”
“Because Nords know enough to leave dead kings sleeping.”
Mira glanced out the frosted window at the cold hills. “That seems wildly at odds with most of your architectural choices.”
The hunter closest to her barked a laugh.
The other one eyed Derpy, who had somehow gotten his head into a sack of onions by the door. “What in Oblivion is wrong with your cat?”
Mira followed his stare.
Derpy looked back at her with an onion half hanging from his mouth and an expression like he had personally misunderstood the concept of food.
“A great many things,” Mira said. “But he means well.”
Sussie lifted all six eyes toward the ceiling and made a sound like an old woman choking on gossip.
Mira ate three spoonfuls of stew, enough to prove to herself that it was indeed stew and not punishment, then stood.
“You’re leaving already?” the loud man asked.
“I’m curious now.”
He laughed. “About the singing?”
“About why everyone here keeps hearing warnings and deciding they’re invitations.”
The hunter raised his mug. “You’ll fit in fine.”
Mira pulled her cloak tighter, scratched Derpy between the ears, and headed back into the cold with new purpose burning under her ribs.
Winterhold could wait a day.
Ancient barrow magic could not.
---
Zoey’s first honest impression of Skyrim was that it was trying much too hard.
Snow on the roofs. Snow in the roads. Snow on trees. Snow in her boots. Snow drifting down in soft pretty flurries that looked lovely from inside and immediately became treachery the moment they touched skin.
“It’s very committed to the bit,” she told the driver of the little cart that had carried her the last few miles from the last settlement. “I’ll give it that.”
The driver grunted.
Zoey had learned, traveling, that many men responded to delight as if it were an infectious disease. She did not take it personally.
They rolled into a village that seemed to have been built from timber, stubbornness, and generations of people refusing to die of weather. Smoke rose from chimneys. Somewhere a hammer rang against metal. A pair of children pelted each other with snow until an older woman leaned out a doorway and threatened to skin them if they hit the chickens.
Zoey climbed down from the cart, thanked the driver, and adjusted the bow across her back. The instrument case slung beside it made for an awkward but familiar weight. One held strings and polished wood. The other held arrows. She had learned long ago that songs and survival both deserved proper tools.
The inn near the village well was warm, loud, and packed enough to please her at once.
A place with people was a place with stories.
She got mulled wine, charmed a corner of table from a pair of laborers by promising not to sing unless asked, and spent the next quarter hour quietly gathering the shape of the room. A family on the road north. Two trappers arguing over pelts. A woman complaining about wolves. Three older men at the hearth debating, with increasing slowness, whether draugr could smell fear.
Then one of them said the word barrow, and Zoey’s attention sharpened.
“Hollowsong,” the oldest was saying. “My gran used to tell verses about it when I was little.”
The second old man rolled his eyes. “Your gran also said horkers can smell lies.”
“They can.”
“They cannot.”
Zoey turned on her bench. “I’m sorry, did you say Hollowsong?”
All three men looked at her. She smiled her brightest, least-threatening smile, the one that usually convinced strangers she was either harmless or too entertaining to dismiss.
The oldest man squinted. “You’re not from here.”
“I’m from High Rock.”
“That explains the face.”
Zoey laughed. “Good. I was worried it was the boots.”
The second old man snorted into his mug. “What do you want with Hollowsong?”
“Only everything,” Zoey said. “It sounds dramatic.”
The third old man, who had so far been busy losing a private battle with his own scarf, pointed one thick finger at her. “It’s cursed.”
“Excellent.”
“No, that was not praise.”
Zoey slid from her seat and came nearer, resting one hand on the table. “You said your gran knew verses?”
The oldest man leaned back. “Bit of one. Used to sing it when the wind got ugly.”
“Well now I have to hear it.”
He peered at her, perhaps weighing whether she was mocking him. Whatever he found in her face must have passed inspection, because after a moment he cleared his throat.
His voice was old and rough, but the rhythm of the words had shape.
“Beneath the hill the old kings lie,
and stone remembers every name.
Where hollow throats still hold their cry,
the dead keep song and death the same.”
The room had quieted around the verse without anyone quite meaning to.
Zoey felt it down her spine.
That was not just local nonsense. There was age in that little scrap. Real age. The kind of old burial poetry that got copied badly into books and performed even worse by bored students who had never once felt wind off a barrow mound.
“Gods,” she breathed. “That’s gorgeous.”
The third man tugged his scarf straight. “It’s unlucky.”
“That too.”
The second man muttered, “Someone else went asking after the place earlier. Mage sort. Fancy voice.”
Zoey brightened. “A mage?”
“Or a lunatic. Hard to tell with robes.”
That settled it.
A barrow with an old song. Rumors of magic. Some local fear. Maybe a buried skald or warrior. Maybe a relic. Maybe enough truth to turn into something worth writing.
Zoey downed the rest of her wine, set the mug aside, and stood.
“You cannot possibly be going there,” the oldest man said.
“I can,” Zoey said. “Very easily, actually.”
“You’ll die.”
“I’d rather not.”
He stared.
She smiled. “But if I do, at least I’ll have been interesting first.”
Outside, the village air bit pink into her cheeks. She tilted her face up to the pale sky and laughed once to herself, too full of nerves and excitement to stand still.
Skyrim. Songs. Barrows. Cold she still thoroughly resented.
Perfect.
---
Hollowsong Barrow sat above the tree line like a cracked tooth pushed up through the earth.
The hill it crowned was half rock, half snow, all bad intentions. Old standing stones leaned around it in a rough ring, carved with weather-eaten knotwork and burial lines gnawed thin by time. The entrance itself had only recently been freed from stonefall. Broken slabs and churned dirt marked where the hillside had opened, revealing a dark mouth cut into the mountain long ago by hands that cared as much about death as they did about craft.
Wind moved through the stonework and made a low sound that might once, in a kinder mood, have been called singing.
Rumi stood near the entrance and grinned.
“Well,” she said to the barrow. “You do know how to make an entrance.”
Tracks marked the slope. A few sets, recent enough to be sharp-edged. Some villager curiosity, maybe. Or a looter with more courage than sense. She crouched, ran gloved fingers over a boot print, and frowned very slightly. Too fresh. Bigger than she would have liked.
Then she heard footsteps crunching through snow behind her.
Rumi rose and turned.
The woman coming up the slope did not look like a local. Too elegant. Too deliberate. Dark cloak lined in fur good enough to cost a fortune, boots too fine for farm mud, a face made for the sort of confidence that got people slapped in taverns. Pink hair, impossibly bright even under the gray sky, was pulled back high and clean. Beside her padded the strangest sabre cat Rumi had ever seen—blue, for one thing—and on its back perched a six-eyed raven like the world had given up trying to be normal.
Rumi stared.
The woman stared back.
For three long seconds, the wind sang through the old stones.
Then Rumi said, “No.”
The stranger’s brows went up. “No what?”
“No to… whatever this is.”
The stranger looked behind herself as if checking whether a procession of lunatics had followed her up the hill. “This is a woman walking to a barrow. It’s not especially complicated.”
“You’ve brought a blue cat.”
“He came willingly.”
The cat, as if to undermine the claim, walked face-first into one of the standing stones and paused there in thoughtful silence.
Rumi pointed. “Did he?”
The stranger glanced over, sighed without any real heat, and snapped her fingers. The cat backed away from the stone with infinite dignity.
Then a third voice called from farther down the slope, bright and breathless with the effort of climbing.
“Oh, good. Other people already made the terrible decision for me.”
Rumi closed her eyes for half a second. When she opened them again, a shorter woman was making her way up the hill, cheeks pink from the cold, boots nearly failing to keep pace with enthusiasm. She had dark hair gathered into twin braided buns, a bow over one shoulder, a lute case strapped across her back, and freckles scattered across her face like the gods had gotten fond of detail.
She reached the top of the rise, bent double once to catch her breath, then looked between them and smiled.
“Well,” she said. “This is promising.”
“No,” Rumi repeated.
The newcomer straightened. “You said that already.”
“I’m saying it again.”
“To me?”
“To the situation.”
The pink-haired mage folded her arms. “For once, I agree with the Nord.”
Zoey blinked. “You two know each other?”
“No,” both women said at once.
“Lovely. So we’re all strangers meeting beside a haunted grave. That’s either the beginning of a magnificent friendship or the sort of story parents tell to make children behave.”
Rumi dragged a hand down her face. “What are you doing here?”
Zoey looked faintly offended by the question. “Following a song.”
The mage snorted. “Of course you are.”
Zoey pointed at her. “And you’re here for magic, I assume?”
“Yes.”
Both of them looked at Rumi.
She lifted her chin. “Treasure. Glory. Maybe a sword I can sell.”
Zoey’s grin widened. “Oh, I like you.”
“You should reconsider.”
The mage gave Rumi a long look. “You’re going in alone?”
“That was the plan.”
“Idiotic plan.”
Rumi’s mouth curved. “Bold criticism from the woman who brought a menagerie to a tomb.”
“It’s not a menagerie, it’s a support system.”
The raven made a noise like rotten laughter.
Zoey looked from one to the other, clearly enjoying herself. “I’m Zoey.”
Neither of the others answered.
Zoey waited.
The mage sighed first. “Mira.”
Rumi held out maybe one more heartbeat, then relented. “Rumi.”
“Wonderful,” Zoey said. “Now that we’ve done the hard part, what exactly are we arguing about?”
“We’re not arguing,” Rumi said. “You two are leaving.”
Mira laughed outright. “No.”
Zoey nodded. “Also no.”
Rumi glanced at the entrance. Then back at them. “Fine. Then stay out here and freeze while I go inside.”
She turned and took three steps toward the dark opening before the stone under her boot gave with a dry crunch she did not like at all.
Instinct made her jump back.
The snow-covered ground just beside the entrance collapsed inward, revealing a narrow shaft lined with old cut stone. A spray of gravel rattled down into darkness.
Zoey stared. “Well that feels personal.”
Mira crouched immediately, one gloved hand hovering over the hole. Magicka shimmered faint blue between her fingers. Her face sharpened with concentration. “Trap. Old one. Pressure release tied to the entrance path. Still active.”
Rumi eyed the shaft. “That was close.”
“Yes,” Mira said. “You’re welcome.”
Rumi grunted. “I didn’t ask for help.”
“No, and yet here I am, improving your life against your will.”
Zoey peered down into the hole and winced. “That would’ve broken every bone I currently value.”
A gust of cold wind rolled down from the standing stones and threaded through the barrow mouth. With it came that low hollow note again—longer this time. More voice than wind.
None of them spoke for a second.
Then Zoey said, more softly, “Did that sound like words to either of you?”
Rumi didn’t answer. Her hand had gone to the sword hilt without conscious thought.
Mira rose slowly. “There’s active warding in there. Or what’s left of it. But something’s wrong.”
Rumi looked at the fresh boot prints again.
“Someone already went in,” she said.
Zoey followed her gaze. “And didn’t come out?”
No one had to answer that either.
Rumi exhaled through her nose. “Fine.”
Mira’s mouth twitched. “Fine?”
“We go in together. For now.”
Zoey brightened as if she’d just been invited to a festival instead of a grave. “Excellent.”
“This is not excellent,” Rumi said. “This is practical.”
“Of course,” Zoey said. “A very practical terrible idea.”
Mira adjusted the strap of her satchel. “Try not to step on any more ancient mechanisms.”
Rumi drew her sword with a ring of steel. “Try not to summon anything stupid.”
Zoey unslung her bow. “And I’ll try not to write a song called *The Day Two Arrogant Women Froze to Death Because They Wouldn’t Listen to Me*.”
Rumi glanced at her. “You haven’t even said anything useful yet.”
Zoey smiled sweetly. “Give me time.”
Together, against all better judgment, they entered Hollowsong Barrow.
Inside, the air changed at once.
Cold remained, but it was a barrow’s cold now—old, still, damp at the edges. Their footfalls echoed softly over stone worn smooth by centuries. The passage angled down through a tunnel of carved walls and broad archways supported by squat pillars. Faded Nordic knotwork twisted along the stone. Here and there torches sat in iron brackets, long dead and furred with dust.
Mira snapped her fingers and a pale blue magelight bloomed above them.
The chamber ahead opened wider, revealing tall carved slabs set into the walls like standing pages from a stone book. Runes ran in vertical lines across them. At the far end, a row of burial alcoves waited in darkness, each sealed with a heavy slab.
Zoey let out a low breath. “Gods.”
Rumi looked over. Her face had gone soft with something close to reverence.
“It’s beautiful,” Zoey whispered.
“It’s dead,” Rumi said.
“Those things are not mutually exclusive.”
Mira moved to the nearest slab and traced the air above the runes without touching. “This is not simple funerary carving.”
Rumi prowled farther in, blade ready. “Can you read it?”
“Not all of it. Old Nordic dialect. Bits and pieces.”
Zoey stepped up beside her, eyes moving eagerly over the lines. “It’s verse.”
Mira glanced sideways. “You read Old Nordic?”
“Enough to embarrass myself in three regions.”
Mira gave her a more interested look. “Useful.”
Zoey smiled. “I’ve been waiting for one of you to say that.”
She leaned in toward the slab, sounding out the older words under her breath, then translated more confidently.
“Voice to stone, and name to bone. Breath to dark and oath to throne…” She frowned. “Not throne. Not exactly. Seat? Place? Hm.”
Rumi turned from the alcoves. “What does it mean?”
“It means whoever they buried here wanted to be remembered very, very badly.”
Mira’s fingers hovered over the runes again. “And whoever built this barrow threaded sound into the stonework. That wind outside is not just wind. The chambers are shaped to carry voice.”
Zoey looked delighted. “A singer’s tomb.”
“A skald’s, maybe,” Mira said. “Or a warrior with too much ego.”
Rumi snorted. “That narrows it down to every old Nord in history.”
Zoey laughed.
The sound traveled weirdly. It slid down the corridor ahead and came back thinner, stranger, as if the barrow itself were trying on the shape of it.
Then something clattered in the darkness beyond the alcoves.
All three women went still.
Rumi raised one hand for silence and moved forward on careful feet. She could hear Mira behind her, quiet for once, and the soft shift of Zoey drawing an arrow from her quiver. The magelight drifted after them, pale and cold.
At the end of the chamber, the floor dipped toward another hallway half-choked with rubble. Rumi crouched beside the stones there and touched two fingers to the dust.
Fresh disturbance.
“Boot prints,” she murmured.
Zoey came up on her right. “Same as outside?”
Rumi nodded. “At least two sets. Maybe three.”
Mira’s voice came from just behind her shoulder. “There’s blood too.”
Rumi leaned closer.
There, black against the gray stone. A few dried flecks, dragged into a smear by a boot heel.
“Wonderful,” Zoey said very quietly.
Rumi rose. “Stay sharp.”
“I hate when people say that,” Mira muttered.
“Why?”
“Because it always means something awful is about to happen.”
As if to prove her right, one of the burial slabs behind them shifted with a long scraping groan.
Zoey spun, bow already up. “Oh, fuck me.”
The slab slid aside.
A draugr stepped out into the blue light, moving with the stiff, hateful purpose of the long-dead. Desiccated skin clung tight to old bone. Frost-rimed beard still hung from its jaw. Ancient armor creaked over a body that should have stayed buried. In one hand it held a rust-spotted axe.
For one heartbeat the draugr stared at them with ember-blue eyes sunk deep in its skull.
Then it roared.
Two more slabs ground open at once.
Rumi moved before the sound finished leaving its mouth.
She met the first draugr head-on, sword flashing up to catch the axe stroke with a crack that rang through the chamber. The impact jarred down her arm. She twisted, slammed her shoulder into its chest, and drove her blade under the edge of its cuirass. Old ribs cracked. The draugr snarled wetly and staggered but did not fall.
An arrow hissed past her cheek and buried itself in the eye socket of the second draugr as it clawed free of its tomb.
Zoey did not wait to admire the shot. She was already moving sideways, boots skidding over ancient dust as she loosed a second arrow into the first draugr’s throat.
Mira stepped out from behind Rumi and flicked her hand.
Purple light spilled around her forearm. A bound blade formed in her grip with a shriek of magicka: curved, single-edged, gleaming with violent violet edges. At the same time a burst of flame erupted near the far wall and twisted itself into the shape of a female figure wreathed in fire—a flame atronach, beautiful and furious.
“Oh, that’s useful,” Zoey said.
“I know,” Mira snapped.
The third draugr lurched from its alcove only to take a spear of fire through the chest. Ancient wrappings went up at once, filling the chamber with the stink of dry rot and scorched meat.
Rumi ripped her sword free from the first draugr and chopped low, severing through knee and old tendon. The corpse dropped with a shriek and clawed for her boot. She stamped on its wrist hard enough to break it, then buried steel through its neck and into the stone.
The second draugr tore the arrow from its face and charged Zoey with surprising speed.
“Rumi!”
Zoey dropped under the swing rather than back away. The axe whistled over her head, close enough to tug loose strands of hair free around her face. She rolled, came up on one knee, and jammed a knife into the back of the draugr’s leg. It turned on her with a sound like a tomb exhaling.
Then Mira’s bound gokdo slashed across its spine.
The draugr jerked, twisting with dead fury, and Mira hissed as its axe clipped her shoulder hard enough to spin her half around.
Rumi was there a second later, sword shearing through the thing’s collar and halfway into its chest. Zoey’s next arrow punched through its mouth. The combined force drove it back into its open tomb, where it collapsed in a tangle of limbs and old rage.
Silence crashed down.
Flame crackled from the burning corpse near the wall. Mira’s atronach hissed like a bonfire in human shape. Dust drifted lazily through blue magelight.
Zoey put both hands on her knees and breathed hard. “That,” she said, “was deeply fucking rude.”
Rumi barked a laugh she didn’t mean to.
Mira pressed a hand to her shoulder and glared at the blood on her glove. “I hate it when I’m right.”
Zoey straightened. “Are you hurt badly?”
“No.”
“You said that very fast.”
“Because it’s true.”
Rumi stepped in and pulled Mira’s hand away before the mage could protest. The cut was shallow, but it had bled enough to stain cloak and tunic.
“You’re hurt,” Rumi said.
Mira drew herself up. “By the lowest possible standard.”
Rumi snorted and reached for her satchel. “Stand still.”
The look Mira gave her suggested she considered obedience a personal moral failure. But she held still while Rumi uncorked one of Celine’s little bottles and poured a measure over the cut. Mira inhaled sharply through her teeth as the potion bit and then closed the wound with quick bright magic.
Zoey watched, gaze flicking between them with interest Rumi chose not to examine.
“That was almost gentle,” Zoey said.
“It was medicine,” Rumi said.
“Still counts.”
Mira flexed her shoulder experimentally. “Useful.”
Rumi corked the bottle and shoved it back in the satchel. “I’ve been waiting for one of you to say that.”
Zoey laughed outright.
For a moment the chamber felt almost light again.
Then the smell reached them.
Not draugr. Not old burial dust.
Something fresher.
Rumi turned toward the blood-smeared corridor.
“That wasn’t all,” she said.
No one argued.
They moved deeper.
The next hall narrowed and bent left around a fallen pillar. Here the old songs carved into the walls had been cut through by newer damage—hammer marks, pry lines, one chunk of stone broken away entirely. On the floor lay a dropped torch, long burned out. Another smear of blood darkened the edge of the rubble.
Zoey crouched beside a shallow groove in the dust. “Something was dragged.”
Mira touched the wall and frowned. “These ward marks were broken from the outside. Deliberately.”
“Can you tell what kind?”
“Clumsy,” Mira said. “Impatient. Possibly stupid.”
Rumi stepped over the rubble first and entered the chamber beyond.
It was larger than the first, circular and higher-ceilinged, with a domed roof blackened by age. More carved slabs lined the walls here, but these were different. Instead of battle scenes or knotwork, they held columns of words framed by spiraling patterns like breath made visible. Stone benches ringed the room. In the center stood a raised bier, and above it rose a carved stone pillar split into three branching faces, each face covered in verse.
A body lay crumpled against the far wall.
Not ancient.
Recent enough that the blood was still dark red rather than black.
Zoey swore softly and went still.
The dead man wore boiled leather, a fur-lined cloak, and boots fitted for climbing. One hand was missing two fingers. His throat had been opened by something sharp and fast. Beside him lay a dropped iron prybar and a pack torn open, its contents scattered over the floor.
Rumi scanned the shadows first, then approached.
“No draugr did this,” she said.
Mira knelt on the other side of the corpse, face gone all sharp angles and thought. “No.”
Zoey hovered near the bier, eyes flicking over the carvings. “He wasn’t alone.”
Rumi looked up. “How do you know?”
“Three packs’ worth of drag marks back there. Different boots too. And…” Zoey pointed. “Those are mud drips from someone pacing while someone else worked.”
Mira gave her a brief, impressed glance. “You notice everything, don’t you?”
Zoey smiled tightly. “Only when it’s inconvenient.”
Rumi crouched by the dead man’s torn satchel and began sorting through the contents with the tip of her sword. Rope. Flask. Bone-handled knife. A little purse of septims. A charcoal rubbing taken from one of the wall carvings. And tucked half beneath the corpse’s hip, a folded scrap of parchment stiff with blood.
She picked it up and opened it carefully.
There was a sketch on it. Not good, but detailed enough: a carved stone fragment the size of a man’s forearm, covered in runes and framed by a wolf-head motif. Below it, in cramped script, were two words.
Verse Stone.
Mira leaned over her shoulder. “That sounds unpleasant.”
Zoey moved closer. “No. Wait.”
She took the parchment, squinting. “This is not just a label. It’s… gods. It’s a catalog note.”
“A what?”
“Whoever came here knew what they were looking for,” Zoey said. “Verse Stone. That’s not a random relic name. This—” she gestured to the walls, the pillar, the chamber itself “—this whole place is built around voice and memory. If the burial song was broken into carved pieces…”
Mira finished the thought first. “Then someone’s collecting them.”
Rumi looked toward the central bier.
The stone lid covering it had been shoved half aside.
Something in the room had once sat upon the bier as the heart of all this work. Something was missing now.
Zoey stepped toward the pillar, eyes racing over the runes. Her voice, when she spoke, had gone hushed with awe.
“This is a skald’s tomb,” she said. “Not just any skald. A warrior-poet. Somebody tied to a war band or a lord—look, here, titles. Names cut out of line. Old honors. And these verses—these aren’t all for the dead. Some are instructions.”
Mira rose and joined her. “Instructions for what?”
“For remembering,” Zoey said. “For recitation. For ritual. I think the burial song was divided on purpose.”
Rumi straightened slowly. “Why?”
Neither woman answered immediately.
Then Mira said, “Because someone didn’t want the whole thing in one place.”
At that exact moment, a whisper slipped through the chamber.
Not wind.
A voice.
Too soft to catch words, but undeniably there.
All three of them froze.
The whisper came again, this time seeming to rise from the opened bier itself.
Zoey’s eyes widened. “Tell me you heard that.”
“I heard it,” Rumi said.
Mira’s hand tightened on her bound blade. “Something here is still active.”
Rumi approached the bier in two slow steps and looked inside.
Within lay ancient burial cloth, fragments of lacquered wood, one cracked iron brooch, and an impression in the dust where the missing object had rested for centuries.
At the head of the stone bed was a smaller tablet not yet removed. It had split down one side, but most of the carving remained. The runes on it were deeper than the wall texts, and unlike the others, these seemed almost to gleam faintly under the magelight.
Mira saw it at the same time. “Do not touch that.”
Rumi had already reached for it.
“Too late.”
She lifted the stone.
The whisper turned into a voice speaking straight into her ear.
Not words she understood. Not exactly. But sound enough to make the hair on the back of her neck rise.
For one awful blink the chamber around her seemed to shudder. She saw—no, felt—snow under boots that weren’t hers, heard drums or heartbeats or both, smelled old smoke and blood and pine resin. A hall lit in amber. Men shouting. A name being sung.
Then it was gone.
Rumi staggered half a step.
Zoey caught her elbow immediately. “Rumi?”
“I’m fine.”
Mira took the tablet from Rumi’s hand before she could protest and hissed as the carved runes flared once beneath her fingers. “This is not just funerary magic. It’s anchored. Echo-binding, maybe. Memory tied to sound.”
Rumi rubbed at the back of her neck. “It showed me something.”
Zoey went very still. “Showed?”
“Not clearly.”
“What did you see?”
Rumi frowned, trying to hold on to it. The vision had already begun slipping away like a dream after waking. “A hall. People. Noise. Nothing useful.”
Mira turned the tablet slightly in the blue light. “There’s a break here. This is part of a larger piece.”
Zoey’s face had gone bright with the dangerous kind of excitement scholars got right before they ruined their own lives. “A remaining fragment. A piece of the song. If that missing Verse Stone was one part of the burial text, this could be another.”
Rumi looked at the dead looter by the wall. “Then why leave this one behind?”
“Because they were interrupted,” Mira said.
That answer landed with a hard weight.
The dead man on the floor. The torn satchel. The blood. The hurried pry marks. Whoever had come here had not finished cleanly.
Zoey looked toward the chamber entrance. “Where are the others?”
As if summoned by the question, a deep grinding sound rolled through the stone beneath their feet.
The walls trembled.
Dust rained down from the dome.
Mira swore. “That felt deliberate.”
A roar answered her from somewhere below them.
Not human. Not fresh. The old dead again, but larger now. Deeper. Awake.
Rumi’s mouth pulled into a feral grin that startled even her. “There it is.”
Zoey stared at her. “You are enjoying this.”
“I’m enjoying not being bored.”
“Your standards are terrifying.”
The second roar came closer. Burial slabs scraped in distant halls. Stone shifted. The barrow had decided they were no longer guests.
“Move,” Rumi said.
They ran.
The passage back seemed narrower now, the blue magelight jumping wildly with their motion. Behind them came the drag and slam of ancient bodies forcing themselves from tombs. Ahead, the first chamber flashed into view—and with it three more draugr and something bigger stepping down from the burial alcoves beyond.
This one still wore fragments of fur mantle over old mail. Its helm had horns broken short with age. In one skeletal hand it held a long sword blackened by centuries. The blue glow in its eyes burned colder than the others.
Zoey skidded to a stop. “That one looks important.”
Mira lifted both hands at once, magicka pouring around her fingers. “I hate important dead men.”
Her flame atronach surged forward in a blossom of heat, colliding with the nearest draugr hard enough to send it smashing into the wall. Zoey loosed two arrows in quick succession, one punching through a lesser draugr’s throat, the second glancing off the bigger one’s helm with a sound like a hammer on an anvil.
“Fuck,” Zoey said.
“Strong language,” Rumi said, and charged.
The larger draugr met her swing with its own.
Steel slammed against steel. The force of it jarred up into Rumi’s shoulders and nearly wrenched the sword from her hand. Fast. Too fast.
The undead warrior drove forward with brutal old skill, not the mindless chopping of lesser draugr. Rumi backstepped, barely avoiding the point, then hacked low at its ribs. The thing turned just enough that her blade bit mail instead of spine.
“Little help!” she barked.
“Already helping!” Zoey shouted.
An arrow buried itself in the bigger draugr’s exposed neck. It barely seemed to notice.
Mira’s bound gokdo flashed in violet arcs as she carved through one of the lesser dead. Then she thrust out her free hand and a wave of force hammered the larger draugr from the side. It staggered.
Rumi took the opening.
She stepped in hard and slammed the pommel of her sword into the thing’s faceplate, cracking ancient metal. Then she drove her father’s blade through the gap Zoey’s arrow had found in its neck.
The draugr made a sound like a winter door being forced open.
Its sword came around blindly.
Rumi saw it too late.
Zoey’s shout cut through the chamber. “Down!”
Rumi dropped. The blade passed over her in a silver-black blur as Zoey’s next arrow struck the draugr in one glowing eye. At the same instant Mira’s bound blade severed through the undead warrior’s wrist.
Its sword hand hit the floor still clutching the hilt.
Rumi surged up from her crouch and split the draugr open from hip to chest.
Old armor gave. Dry flesh tore. Blackened dust and clotted darkness spilled out across the stones.
The undead warrior fell apart around her.
For a heartbeat no one moved.
Then two more draugr came through the side alcoves and the moment shattered again.
The fight turned ugly.
A lesser draugr seized Zoey by the back of her cloak and nearly yanked her off her feet. She twisted, dropped the bow, and drove her knife backward into the thing’s forearm. It did not care. Its other hand clawed for her throat.
Rumi saw the motion and crossed the chamber in three strides.
She caught the draugr by the side of its skull and smashed its head into the stone wall once, twice, until old bone cracked. Then she drove her blade through its spine and kicked the corpse off Zoey as it collapsed.
Zoey sucked in air, eyes wide. “I had that.”
“You absolutely did not.”
“I had most of it.”
“You had the part right before dying.”
Mira shouted from the far side of the room. “Argue later!”
She had overextended. One lesser draugr lay burning at her feet, but a second had closed inside her guard while she dealt with a third. She parried one axe blow with the bound blade and took the follow-up shield bash square in the chest. The impact threw her backward into one of the carved slabs hard enough to crack her head against stone.
Rumi started toward her, but Zoey was faster.
She snatched her dropped bow, vaulted a fallen burial slab, and planted an arrow point-blank through the draugr’s mouth. The corpse jerked. Mira, half on one knee and furious now, thrust both hands forward and conjured a burst of violet force that blew the draugr backward into the open tomb behind it.
The chamber rang with the impact.
Then, at last, nothing else moved.
Flames guttered low. Magelight flickered. Dust settled over broken corpses and split old stone.
Rumi stood in the middle of it, breathing hard, blood and grave-filth sprayed up one sleeve.
Zoey leaned on her bow and laughed once in pure disbelief. “That was horrible.”
Mira, still sitting against the carved wall, pressed fingers to the back of her head and looked at the blood there with deep offense. “Yes.”
Rumi walked over and held out a hand to Mira.
The mage eyed it as though suspicious of charitable gestures. Then she took it and let Rumi pull her up.
“You bleed elegantly,” Zoey observed.
Mira glared at her. “I’m concussed. Be respectful.”
“You’ve been rude since I met you.”
“And yet you persist in speaking to me.”
Zoey flashed her a grin. “It’s because you’re pretty.”
Mira stared.
Rumi let out a short helpless sound that was almost a laugh.
Zoey looked between them. “What?”
“Nothing,” Rumi said.
Mira brushed dust and old ash from her sleeves with exaggerated dignity. “We need to leave. Now.”
Nobody argued with that.
They retraced their way toward the entrance, slower now, every muscle waiting for another attack that thankfully never came. The trap shaft by the doorway yawned black and hungry, but they avoided it this time with ease born of experience and bad feelings.
Outside, the air hit like a slap and a blessing all at once.
Snow had begun falling in earnest while they were below. The standing stones wore fresh white along their tops. Wind rushed over the hill and through the barrow mouth, making that old hollow song again.
Rumi stepped away from the entrance and bent to brace her hands on her thighs, drawing huge breaths of clean freezing air. Beside her, Zoey did the same, then laughed for no reason except being alive.
Mira stood straight and closed her eyes for one brief second as the snow touched her face.
No one spoke until their hearts had slowed.
Then Zoey said, “I think I’m in love with all of this.”
Rumi looked over at her, then at the blood on Zoey’s sleeve. “You have very bad instincts.”
Zoey smiled. “Probably.”
Mira took the cracked tablet from her satchel and held it up between them. Snow gathered in her pink hair and did nothing to soften the hard glitter in her eyes.
“This,” she said, “is not a trinket.”
“No,” Zoey said. “It isn’t.”
Rumi straightened. “The dead man called the missing piece a Verse Stone.”
Zoey nodded. “And if I’m right, Hollowsong Barrow was one place in a larger tradition. A divided burial song. Maybe split across multiple sites.”
Mira glanced back toward the dark entrance. “Meaning someone is already hunting those sites.”
“And killing for them,” Rumi said.
Zoey looked from one woman to the other, excitement and unease pulling together behind her freckles. “If those songs were broken and hidden, then they mattered. Maybe politically, maybe magically, maybe both. There could be more barrows, more fragments, more—”
“More dead things,” Mira said.
“Almost certainly.”
Rumi rested one hand on the pommel of her father’s sword. Beneath the blood drying on the blade, the steel still caught what little light the sky offered.
This morning she had left home hoping for treasure, maybe a fight, maybe the beginning of a story worth telling.
Instead she had found a blood-soaked corpse, stolen burial relics, magic carved into old songs, and two strangers who had somehow become the difference between living and joining the dead under the hill.
It felt, she had to admit, exactly like the sort of trouble worth following.
Mira was watching her. So was Zoey.
Neither of them said it first.
Rumi huffed out a breath that fogged white in the freezing air. “You both have your own roads.”
“Yes,” Mira said.
“Obviously,” Zoey added.
Rumi nodded once toward the tablet. “Then take them.”
Neither woman moved.
Zoey tipped her head. “Do you actually want us to?”
Rumi opened her mouth, closed it, and scowled. “That is not the point.”
Mira’s lips curled. “I think it very much is.”
Snow gathered on Derpy’s whiskers. Sussie pecked lightly at one of them as if testing whether it counted as food.
Zoey tucked a loose strand of hair behind one ear. “I came to Skyrim looking for stories worth singing. This is the first one that’s actually bitten me back. I’m not leaving it.”
Mira shifted the satchel higher on her shoulder. “And I diverted from my journey because I heard there might be unusual magic here. There is. Which means I’m also not leaving.”
Rumi looked at the barrow, then at the hills beyond, white and endless and full of gods knew what.
Then she looked back at them.
“Fine,” she said at last.
Zoey brightened. “Fine?”
“Fine,” Rumi repeated. “We follow the trail. We find out who took the Verse Stone and why.”
Mira raised a brow. “We?”
Rumi’s scowl deepened. “Don’t make me take it back.”
Zoey grinned so hard it should have been illegal. “Oh, this is going to be a disaster.”
“Without question,” Mira said.
Rumi started down the hill. “Then stop talking and keep up.”
Zoey fell into step on one side of her almost at once. Mira came on the other after the briefest hesitation, Derpy ambling behind them with holy stupidity, Sussie watching the world like it had already disappointed her.
The wind moved through the standing stones again and carried the hollow note of the dead out over the snow.
Rumi glanced once at the blood drying dark on her father’s sword, then at the two women the barrow had handed her, and had the sudden furious certainty that the old dead had just ruined all three of their lives.
For the first time that day, she thought that might not be a bad thing at all.