It will never be the same again; that's the feeling people had after this battle.
Last night, the House of Jonrad Firemane was burned to the ground, his children kidnapped and taken to the War Dragons Cult.
Jon, Jonrad, Alina, Wulfur, and Bjorna went after them as a search party, but that turned out to be a trap set by the Dragons in order to attack Winterhold with the full might of their cult.
Jon Dare has reached a level of power unprecedented in the Fourth Era, and he split the Skyborn Mountains as he devastated all the cultists who were trying to trap him. After that, he returned to Winterhold to fight off the cult's army.
Jon was faced with Kungosvern, and the two were locked together in a heated battle. Meanwhile, Saarthal's gate was blasted, and many dragon cultists drove in with their summoned Dremora and undead. In a way, it felt as if the Oblivion Crisis from 200 years ago was happening all over again.
Jon did all he could to best Kungosvern, and the dragon did the same, but neither was able to come out on top. While the Heroes of Winterhold were able to defeat the other Dragons, Alduin, the King of Dragons and the World Eater, finally showed himself as he descended from the sky with a meteor shower that he summoned, aiming to devastate Saarthal in one go.
Jon barely managed to use his cunning to injure Kungosvern, but as he closed the distance to Saarthal as fast as he could, he still fell short, and the city was in danger. Still, an unexpected saviour took the spotlight, and she was someone that even Alduin did not want to mess with.
She was an Ada, a Divine Being.
This Divine Being alone spoke to Alduin and, somehow, made him turn tail and leave.
And finally, as Jon scaled Mount Anthor to face her, she faced him with a warm smile and hidden intentions, offering the weirdest thing he had ever heard: to be his third mother.
Jon scowled at the woman, and something about her revolted him—not the fact that she was an Ada, but that something was fundamentally wrong about her. He could not yet put his finger on it, but he had no time to do so.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"Is that how you treat the person who just saved your city?" she replied proactively.
"Thank you. What do you want?" Jon's reply was almost instant, as if getting something out of the way and heading straight to the main thing.
"Interesting. She told me that you can't get enough of women," the White Woman said.
Of course, anyone would ask about that "she," but Jon knew that the woman was trying to talk in circles, so he simply shrugged.
"I stopped fooling around," he said, and looked her up and down. "And my wives are the prettiest; I don't need anyone else."
"Tsk, tsk, tsk," the White Woman shook her head sarcastically, as if making fun of him. "If my daughter were to hear you saying that, she'd think you have taken advantage of her."
"I am not that kind of guy," he replied.
"Really? We'll see," she said, and turned her head, looking at something far from where they were.
"Your dragon friend seems to have recovered, and he's angrily getting over here," she said as if dismissing him.
"You don't seem like the type to worry about such things. After all, you just dismissed a World-Eater."
"That's right, dear. I don't. But I don't do favours for free, and by turning Alduin away, I just made him choose between staying here or forever losing the Gateway to Sovngarde."
As she finished her words, a strong wind blew by and raised the snow, covering her as she disappeared from sight.
Jon could no longer find a way to understand what that woman wanted or how she had even disappeared. He may be one foot into CHIM territory, but he knows that he still understands very little of the Laws of the Mundus and the Dawn Magic that is used by the Ada. What is scarier is that the more he knows, the less he seems to understand, and right now, he was not in the mood to try and get himself distracted.
What he needed most of all was to wrap up the fight with the golden dragon, Kungosvern, then return home to sort out his affairs. Kungosvern is not an easy foe, but he got insight on how to deal with him, and right now, that dragon is flying straight towards him.
The next phase of this battle will not be fighting; it will be butchering.
"The damage is too much! We can't save him, High Priestess!"
"I need water here and a new set of bandages."
"Help! Please, help my father!"
After each battle, this scene occurs one way or the other. Each fight is a massacre, each battle is a slaughter, and sieges are the worst of all, for they gnaw on the soul like locusts in an orchard.
In the midst of it all was Alina, who was the chief healer in this mess. Once it was all over, she was called to her temple to oversee the treatment of the wounded. In a rough estimate, half of the Dare Troopers have sustained damage, with no fewer than 200 killed in action.
As for civilians, the numbers were higher than ever before. Saarthal may have withstood most of the attack, but half of Winterhold was overtaken, and almost all of the Whispering Village and Hsaarik Head were wiped out in the attack if not for those who managed to escape to the mines and ships.
Even with the death toll, Winterhold was lucky enough to be able to hold. The enemy this time was too cunning to handle for the regular defences, and that last attack, as Alduin appeared, would have skyrocketed the casualties if not for the White Woman's interference.
But then again, there was a strange feeling that crawled under her skin like a thousand ants. She was a mystic, so her feelings were all over the place with this much suffering, but nothing would prepare her for the surprise that would come later that day.
News arrived that Jon was seen fighting with the golden dragon, Kungosvern, all around Skyrim. According to the Dare Agents who were posted around the nine holds, the Dragonborn was seen chasing a Dragon across the Pale, then in Hjaalmarch; after that, they appeared in Whiterun and Sungard fortress, and not long after, the Dragon crashed somewhere in the Reach.
Jullanar, who was still possessing the body of a Dragon, as well as Nurina, travelled to the Reach. Once there, they followed the trail of destruction until they reached a mountaintop where the summit was burned as if it were a volcanic crater.
Smoke was still rising from the crater, and nothing could be seen of what went on inside by the naked eye. Jullanar, who has adapted greatly to the body of a dragon, circled around the crater a few times and finally figured out how to land and flap the Dragon's wings at the right angle to blow the smoke away. Meanwhile, Nurina was sitting on top of her head and waiting for her to land.
As the large blood dragon found its way to the edge of the crater, the smoke was blown in the opposite direction, and Nurina jumped off Jullanar's back.
"Is he here?" Nurina asked.
"I can feel it... I don't know how to describe it, but he is here."
Nurina walked into the remainder of the smoke carefully and examined the place around her. A great deal of spells were cast in this place to the point where it became impossible to distinguish anything with Magic Sensory.
But one thing is for certain: if Jon was the caster of this awful number of spells, he has surely surpassed her by leaps and bounds.
The scorched landscape was evidence of using lightning rather than fire, which happens to be Jon's favourite destruction element. On top of that, there were many sword marks, and as she walked further, Nurina found a sword stuck in the ground, its blade was red, and its style was definitely Nordic.
"Bloodskal!"
It was easy to recognise Jon's favourite non-Daedric weapon. But as she kept going, she found Jon's halberd, his armour, and even a couple of Daedric artifacts such as Mehrunes' Razor and the Ebony Blade.
But the last thing she discovered made her flinch and almost scream, as this time she found no mere trace, but a skeleton... a human skeleton.
As she took a closer look, it was a male skeleton of a large man, larger than many, and definitely as large as Jon. His rib cage was broken from the front and shattered against his spine on the ground by the force of a very powerful and focused attack. Still, that did not stop whoever that skeleton once was from keeping one arm hanging up to the sky as if trying to grasp on to something. However, as Nurina started to notice her surroundings more and more, she soon discovered the truth behind the scene she had just witnessed.
The skeleton she discovered was part of something far greater, as in fact, it was lying inside a larger skeleton, a dragon's skeleton. If one were to look from a farther point of view, they would see that the Dragon's skeleton had its spine shattered from the middle by the skeleton of the man.
Nurina was not a mystic, but she could still put two and two together. This scene was the centre of the crater; it was probably done by combining a powerful spell with a powerful physical attack. Whoever did this must have come from the sky like a meteor, aiming forward a mighty weapon and reinforcing himself with a strong lightning spell.
Once the clash happened, the human part of the Dragon took the attack first to its chest, and the two landed in the Dragon form. The attacker's power (in that case, Jon) was so overwhelming that it killed the two parts of the Dragon at the same time, preventing regeneration from either side.
But Nurina was also sure that a foe like Kungosvern, with whom Jon struggled for most of the battle, would not be killed so easily by a single attack from Jon. After all, the dragon had resisted even the Spear of Bitter Mercy, which could be said to be able to pierce anything.
On top of that, the unstoppable dragon seemed like it was escaping, as reports have told. While it may be another ploy set by those very strategic dragons, what Nurina could tell was that this chase was almost akin to a hunt rather than a fight between a Dragon and a Dragonborn.
So, how did Jon acquire that much power that enabled him to do the deed of slaying Kungosvern?
While that was a question worth pondering, Nurina was, at the end of the day, Jon's mother before being his master. She would ensure his safety first before delving into the nitty-gritty details of arcane curiosities.
And what do you know, as the smoke and dust started to settle with Jullanar constantly flapping her wings to blow it all away, a large silhouette was on the other end of the crater as the sun cast a great shadow across the crater.
Jullanar and Nurina immediately approached him and called for him, but he kept standing over there silently and menacingly.
But the moment they got to him was the moment that shocked the two of them for what they saw; despite the identical silhouette, it was nothing like Jon.
Just where to begin...
Just from the first glance, there were no clothes, which is typical for those who know Jon, who walked most of the day butt naked in his house, but there was no butt to be naked either.
Hell, there was no skin.
There were only scales.
Dragon scales.
Kungosvern's scales.
And that's when it hit Nurina, the one who was most familiar with Jon's theories and shenanigans.
He always theorised many things about the World Eater, emphasis on "Eater"; he always said that if absorbing Dragon souls was eating, how did the Tsaesci eat the Men and Dragons of Akavir, and how did their skin turn scaly and gold and their forms bipedal and human-like.
Looking at what Jon had in hand, it became almost evident that this was what he really did—those tools that he always had whenever he had something really mischievous in mind: Sunder, Keening, and Wraithguard; the Tools of Kagrenac.
Jon did really eat a Dragon.
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