Chapter 1 - An Expedient Tactial Retreat

Caprifexia, last true daughter of Deathwing, Queen of the Black Flight, rightful Aspect of Earth, and whelp of twenty two months was having a bad day.

It had started well enough, with her crawling from her tiny cave hideout strategically clandestine headquarters and catching a rat to eat in the nearby grassy mountain meadow. After sating herself with the fruit of her successful hunt she had returned to her base of operations and read one of the books on magic she had managed to salvage while escaping relocating to thwart the 'adventurers' who had sacked her home and slaughtered her brothers and sisters.

She had been half-way through a chapter on fire magic when suddenly she had found herself under attack, and had been forced to flee again expedite another tactical retreat from a dracocidal maniac sent, presumably, by her traitor of a brother in his quest to be the last black dragon left alive.

If Caprifexia had been human, she might have thought it was some kind of elaborate life-insurance scheme. But she didn't, since as we have already established, she was a dragon.

This had led, after some desperate scrambling breathtaking acrobatics to her being propelled by an explosion through some kind of rift in reality in her haste to escape urgently attend to more important matters elsewhere.The rift had opened into an abyss filled with terrifying shadows, floating platforms and bridges, and blazing stars strung together with gleaming strands of light, through which she had fallen.

Then, despite the best efforts of her small wings she had hit one of the stars, and found herself sinking into foul smelling swamp water that was higher than her head, all of which had been more than enough for the drowning whelp to declare it a 'bad day,' even if it wasn't yet noon.

Caprifexia thrashed about ineffectually in the dank water, primal terror gripping her.

She, the last true member of her flight, the Aspect of Earth, was going to drown in foot deep water because her infuriatingly slowly growing body didn't reflect her true majesty, and because she had no idea how to swim.

Then, as black spots began to creep in on her vision, she remembered that she had managed the spell for her mortal guise two and a half months ago, and with a surge of magic transformed herself into a young woman that, while not particularly tall, could safely stand in the water without it going over her head.

She hadn't ever quite gotten the spell right, and without access to the books and wisdom of her flight, might never manage it; her eyes still glowed an eerie orange, and she had large horns jutting from her temples and sweeping back behind her skull.

Muttering several curses that a young woman – dragon or human – definitely should not have known she scrambled up onto some drier land, glad that no one had been around to see her rather embarrassing flailings.

She sat down on a rock with a huff, glad to have a chance to breath. Finally, hopefully, safe and dry she looked around and inspected her new domain.

As the smell had told her, she was indeed in a swamp; and judging by the insect chirps, one infested with disgusting creepy crawlies.

Caprifexia wasn't scared of bugs. She was, after all, a dragon, that would be absurd.

She simply hated them with a burning passion and wanted them to be exterminated to the last ant, or, in the mean time, at least keep them as far away from her as possible at all times.

There were a few other bits of land here and there, but on the whole the swamp was mostly below a few inches of dirty water. Tall trees raised on labyrinthine roots extended in every direction creating a seemingly impenetrable wall of wood that extended off into the distance. The only light came through foliage so thick that although the sun was directly above her head it felt like it was already dusk.

Something niggled at the back of her mind, telling her she was missing something, although what it was eluded her entirely. It was like an itch on her lower wing in the place she could never quite reach to scratch with her too-short neck, or a small shard of bone that sometimes would get wedged between her teeth and she'd have to spend ages worrying at with her tongue to dislodge.

She was fairly certain that the thing she was missing was important. Despite the buzzing and chirping of the swamp it was almost as if she was suddenly at the centre of a still pond that had previously always been a raging tempest.

Thus Caprifexia was so caught up in her internal reflection that she didn't notice the giant centipede crawling towards her until she felt the weight on her shoe.

Caprifexia certainly didn't hurl herself backward and land in a heap, screaming and swearing. That wouldn't have been in keeping with her great dignity as Earth-Warden and Queen of the Black Flight.

That definitely didn't happen.

"Fucking swamps!" screamed Caprifexia, shifting back into her whelp form and flapping up into the canopy, away from the creature that definitely didn't terrify her.

It took a lot of biting, clawing, and a few small gouts of fire, but she did eventually emerge from the thick canopy and out into the brilliant sunshine. From atop her perch on one of the higher trees she could see some mountains to her right, capped in snow, and she sighed in relief.

Snowy mountains, unlike swamps, tended to have very few bugs.

"You there," said Caprifexia in what she hoped was her most endearing voice. "Tell me what town this is."

She had flown west for a while, figuring that if she had landed in the Swamp of Sorrows she should would hit the Deadwind pass and Duskwood sooner or later – which might be a good place to lie low for a while.

She had, however, not hit the haunted forest, instead finding mountains that seemed to go on and on, and a towns where there shouldn't have been any towns. At first she thought she might be in Alterac, an area she was less familiar with, but there was no Lake Lordamere to the west, nor any ogres or undead apes.

So, after several confusing days she had decided to simply land and ask one of the local mortals.

"This is Helgen," said the man, frowning at her horns. "You have some kind of magical accident?"

"Excuse me?"

"Your horns."

"Oh – yes, that's right," she said, inwardly cursing her inability to cast the spell correctly. "That is definitely what happened."

The man grunted in a way that indicated that he was extremely unimpressed. "You with the Thalmor?"

"I am not with anyone," she said snootily, not entirely sure what a Thalmor was. It probably wasn't important.

"On your way to Winterhold then?"

"What makes you say that?"

"You're a wizard, obviously – only they're stupid enough to give themselves horns by accident."

"Watch your tongue m- man," she said, almost calling him a mortal. Mortals didn't call each other mortals, they actually thought they were important like that. Bless them.

The man spat at her feet and Caprifexia saw red, and he was part-way through opening his mouth to say something else impudent when her fist rammed into his nose and he crumpled to the ground.

Caprifexia might have looked like a small woman, but she even in her guise she was a dragon, and her body was in large part magical. She didn't need massive muscles to break the man like a twig.

"Fucking elves!" spat the man, as there was a rushing sound and the scraping of steel. "Why don't you go back where you came from?"

"That's enough Telvir," said one of a rapidly growing number of men and women in uniforms who were brandishing bits of metal at her. "Elf, you're under arrest for assault; you'll have to come with us."

"That man insulted me, and is a racist," she immediately countered. "I was provoked. He threatened to kill my entire family; burn down my home; sell my brothers into slavery. He wanted to harvest my organs, and carve-"

"Disliking Elves is not a crime in Skyrim, and no he didn't, I was standing right there," said the guard. "But please, resist, I got rather good at killing your kind in the war, and I would hate to let my skills atrophy."

Caprifexia glowered at him, but didn't resist as two of his fellows secured her arms behind her back and she was frog-marched towards the fort.

If she was older she would have simply fried them all with magic or transformed ripped them apart with her teeth, but while she was still a whelp her hide wasn't tough enough to turn aside mortal weapons – she couldn't defeat a dozen or more guards quite yet.

But she remembered their faces. Oh yes. Give her a few years to grow into a full drake and then she'd come back and show them the price of assaulting a dragon. She'd show them all.

Two weeks later Caprifexia was still kicking her heels in gaol. Or rather, kicking the metal bars of her small dirty and dingy cell deep beneath the town's squat keep. She was starting to feel antsy, too long in a mortal form made dragons get like that. Like being stuffed into a too small box.

"Hey!" she shouted, for the seventeenth time that hour, banging her foot against the metal bars. "When am I going to get – what do you apes call it – a trial?"

"For the love of Akatosh, please stop," said the only other inmate in a resigned voice from the cell opposite hers, a swarthy human with tanned skin and dark brown hair. "Didn't you get your answer when they socked you in the face?"

Caprifexia did have several bruises from when the wardens had gotten sick of her imperious demands, but she was a dragon, the definition of stubborn, and she had simply etched their face into her mind and added it to her rapidly growing 'kill later list' and kept on going.

"Hey!" she shouted, ignoring him.

Then there was a rumble and the keep shook and something exploded outside. Some dust fell from the ceiling, and there was the sound of running far down the corridor.

"Finally," breathed the man opposite her.

"What's going on?" demanded Caprifexia.

"An opportunity, the guards will be distracted by whatever that is," he said, rattling his lock. "Damn, wish I had a pick."

"You know a way out?" she asked, as another explosion rocked the keep.

"Sure," he said, ineffectually trying to break the lock. "Not the first time I've been in here."

"How about we make a bargain then: you agree to show me the way out of here, and I break that lock for you."

"How are you going to do that?" he said sceptically.

Caprifexia took her own lock in her hand for focused, weaving her magic into the necessary form.

"Ignis," she intoned, using the nonsense mnemonic that she had associated with generating heat. Incantations were personal, and not entirely necessary. Good spellcasters did without, but she was still a novice, and needed the crutch.

There was a crackle as her magic made its way from her fingers into the metal, and she felt the lock heat up beneath her fingers as it began to slowly turn orange and melt within her hands.

"Why by the Eight didn't you do that weeks ago," he said. "I wouldn't have had to listen to your whinging."

"You didn't say you knew a way out," she said. "So, do we have a deal?"

The blonde man nodded and extended his hand. "You have my word, elf."

"Caprifexia," she said, ignoring whatever silly mortal ritual he was attempting.

"What?"

"My name, I am not called 'Elf.' You will address me properly or I will atomise you."

"Oh, err, of course – I'm Einar," he said, as she repeated her spell on the lock. "How does that not burn your hands?"

Because I'm a dragon. "Because magic, shut up," she said, opening the gate as the building shook once more. "Now what?"

"We-"

Before he said could finish whatever nonsense his limited mortal mind thought was important enough to annoy her with the doors to the prison broke open, cutting him off as a slightly burned looking woman with tanned skin and a short man with a shaved head entered, both wearing the armour of the 'Empire,' as Caprifexia had learned it was called.

"There is a way out-" began the woman, before she saw Caprifexia and Einar's in-progress breakout. Rather than being reasonable, the female guard yelled and drew her sword, not even bothering to ask what they were doing out of their cells before charging with bloody murder in her eyes.

Caprifexia, being a practical young dragon who knew that the more bodies were between herself and a sharp blade the better, immediately pushed Einar towards the guard and turned, running off down the corridor in the opposite direction.

"You bitch!" said Einar, recovering and following after her a moment later. "Throw a fireball at her or something!"

Oh, right. She was magic, wasn't she?

"Augis," she said, tossing the fire that jumped to her fingertips behind her without looking.

"Fucking hell," swore Einar. "At them, at them!"

There was a masculine scream as the fireball hit something with a whoosh, and Caprifexia looked backwards to see one of their pursuers fall to the ground, thrashing about as he tried to put the fire out.

"Again, again!" said Einar.

"Augis," she repeated, throwing another fireball blindly.

There was a female scream, and Caprifexia slowed as she glanced over her shoulder again to see the woman in the metal armour thrashing on the ground, attempting to put the fire out. Einar was slapping at some fire on his arm from where she must have clipped him, and Caprifexia almost felt bad for a moment – which confused her, since when did she care about mortals?

Oh it must have been because she still needed him to escape, that made more sense. She also needed lackeys. Dragons always needed lackeys. And he seemed to have an acceptably small number of scruples.

Behind him several of the more flammable parts of the prison were on fire, and Einar coughed as the air filled with smoke. It didn't bother Caprifexia though, her kind lived in volcanoes by choice, and could process many normally toxic gases as part of standard respiration.

It was one of the virtually endless ways her kind were infinitely superior to ugly hairless apes.

Einar eventually managed to put out the fire, before picking up the woman's sword from where it has fallen.

"Sorry, but you were trying to kill us," he said, before quickly and efficiently ending the life of the still burning woman. "That's a bad way to go. Can you put this out? She might have some coin."

"Glacis," she said, launching a ball of frigid mist towards the woman that made the flames splutter and die.

Einar quickly rifled through her pockets, withdrawing a very singed bag filled with coin, which he pocketed, and a dagger, which he handed to Caprifexia, before moving on and searching through the already still and more or less extinguished male guard.

"What am I suppose to do with this?" said Caprifexia, looking askance at the dagger.

"Stab things."

"That's what you're for, meat-shield."

"You are unbelievably arrogant," he said, heading in the direction they had been running. "Fine, come on."

The tunnel sloped downward for another minute, empty cells lining both sides. Then they reached a dead end and Einar pushed open the cell to their left.

"Are you drunk, mortal?" she said. "That's just another cell."

"Mortal?" he frowned. "Wow, I didn't know you elves were that arrogant; you think yourself a Goddess or something? No – there's a passage."

He pushed a semi-loose brick in the upper right section of the cell, before one lower down. There was a huge grinding sound that definitely would have attracted attention had the apocalypse apparently not been happening outside, and to Caprifexia's surprise part of the wall slid away to reveal a dark passage.

"What sort of imbecile designed a secret escape route inside a cell?"

"This castle is ancient, maybe it wasn't always a prison," shrugged Einar. "Can you make us some light?"

"Of course," said Caprifexia, raising her hand. "Lucernia."

A pale white warelight burst into existence over her palm, before wobbling slightly. Caprifexia realised she had probably overtaxed her reserves a bit with the two fireballs. She was a dragon, and thus good at magic naturally, but she was also very young, and hadn't built up much in the way of reserves.

She had been very, very lucky that her two wild fireballs had hit.

"Let's go then," said Einar, ducking his head as he entered the tunnel. Caprifexia followed a moment later, and after ten or so seconds of walking the passage entrance shut itself just as the keep shook once more from whatever fortuitous destruction was going on up above to help cover their escape.

Caprifexia's arm shook as she lowered herself carefully to a rock outside the small crack in the rock-face that the tunnel had emerged from.

"Hey, Capri? You OK?" said Einar. "Something bothering you?"

Caprifexia gulped and stared down at her web-covered arms, flash backs of the the dark cave illuminated by desperate flashes of orange, the tangled webs, the bodies wrapped in silk, and the giant creeping legs making her shiver.

"Giant. Fucking. Spiders," she said. "I hate insects."

"Well technically they're arachnids."

"Shut up mortal."

"Still with that?" laughed Einar. "Look – I get it, you live longer than me, but you're still going to age and die."

"Age," said Caprifexia imperiously, forcing herself not to think about the spiders and instead focus on recruiting the beginnings of a new network of mortal servants she had been meaning to replace ever since the last ones had all met rather messy ends. She shifted, her voice becoming ever so slightly deeper. "But not die."

Einar turned blinking as a small whelp replaced the small woman, web still clinging to her forelimbs.

"You can turn into a lizard?" he said sceptically. "I mean, nice magic, but how does that stop you dying?"

"Turn into- you foolish mortal," she said, flexing her wings. "I am not a lizard – look, I have wings; I am a dragon."

Einar rolled his eyes. "Smallest dragon I've ever seen."

"I- look, I am young, yes, but I am still an immortal being," she huffed.

"As opposed to an elf who knows shape-shifting, and has a mild- who am I kidding, an accute case of megalomania?"

"I am a dragon."

"Sure you are," he said, patting her on the head and nearly getting bitten. "Hey!"

"Listen mortal, I am giving you the opportunity to be the first of my minions. I can give you power, money, fortune-"

"How? You were just in prison, and while you're clearly a decent enough wizard, if you had that kind of clout I wouldn't have had to listen to you whinge for weeks."

"I am a dragon."

"Even if you were, that explains nothing," he said. "Look, you make me laugh Capri, and after you stopped trying to push me into swords we worked well together. I know some people in Riften, we could go into business together – cons, thieving, that sort of stuff; there aren't that many spell-casters in the business, we could go far."

Ah, 'business together' was a mortal phrase for forming a working relationship. So he had some pride, but had clearly accepted her offer. Excellent.

"Good idea, minion," said Caprifexia. "I do need contacts in the criminal underworld… very well, we shall go to this 'Riften.'"

Einar rolled his eyes. "Whatever 'dragon,' come on.