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Re: A Long Way From Home - A Skyrim AAR [updated 5th October 2015]
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Spider
In the end, I did buy a couple of Farengar's spell-books. I chose oakflesh, because it's supposed to mean that if someone attacks you, they'll do less damage. Sort of like having better armour. I thought that would be handy if I met any more wolves, which Farengar says are common in Skyrim. I also picked one Farengar called "clairvoyance", even though it isn't supposed to do anything I'd call clairvoyance. Back at home – in the universe I come from, or the real world, whichever it is – "clairvoyance" is being able to see the future. Here, apparently, it's something to tell you which way to go to reach your destination. I call that "a sat-nav". My mum calls it "a map", not that she's any good at reading maps.
After that, I went shopping to get that set of clothes I'd been promising myself, and supplies for my trip to Winterhold. Not for the first time, I found myself thinking how fortunate I'd been to find my rucksack after it had been taken from me by the Imperial soldiers. Nobody here seems to sell decent rucksacks. Presumably everyone but me has a horse, and uses saddlebags – or a cart if they need to move a lot of stuff. Even better than just finding the rucksack was the fact that it still had almost all of my belongings in it. The soldiers must have thought nothing I had was worth taking. I disagree. Although I have to admit that matches do seem less useful now I can start fires just by thinking about it.
Which is something I really need to think about. Is magic real? Or did I just hallucinate burning my hand – only feeling the pain because I believed I was hurt, rather than because I truly was? Farengar reacted as if my fire spell worked, too, so at least other people here can see, and presumably feel, flames I create. Of course, I might be hallucinating the people as well as the fire. In which case, my spells will do nothing to protect me against the cold, or cook my food. But if everything I experience is hallucination, then if I believe I've started a fire using a match, that might be an illusion too, no matter how warm I feel. In the end, I can do nothing other than trusting my senses. After all, I have no other way of knowing what's going on around me. Ma'Jhan was right. So I'm going to have to believe in magic after all. At least while all my senses agree it's happening.
Not that I believe it's really magic, of course. There has to be some reason for things happening, other than that someone just happened to want them to. If that worked, I'd have been back at home the moment I saw Ma'Jhan and thought he was a lion...
By the time I'd finished shopping, it was almost dusk, and too late to set off for Winterhold, so after another night in the Bannered Mare – and if I have to spend another night there with that bard of theirs squawking away into the later-than-just-early hours of the morning, I might just act on the Jarl's suggestion that I buy a house of my own – I gathered up my belongings and strode briskly along the road towards Winterhold.
At the crossroads, where Ralof took the road to the east a few days ago, I turned with an enormous sense of relief to the north, following the sign for Winterhold. All I had to do now was walk to Winterhold, which Farengar said was a journey of a couple of days. If I kept practising my magic all the way, the wizards would surely speak to me, and then I was as good as home.
To my surprise, I was actually excited to be off to see the wizards at last. I wandered along cheerily, casting small tongues of flame and crackles of lightning at random rocks, as the number of farms scattered along the road gradually diminished. Even out beyond what seemed to be a disused, rather dilapidated watch-tower, there were still people on the road, though, including a guard wearing a white cloth instead of Whiterun's yellow. Presumably that meant I was no longer in the territory belonging to Whiterun. I wonder how many different territories there are in Skyrim?
Further along the road, I saw one of the most astonishing sights of my life. Somehow, although I feel as if dragons and the walking dead ought to be such incredible sights that nothing afterwards can ever really be surprising, it turns out it doesn't work like that. Dragons and wights are so implausible they almost don't seem real, even when they're trying to kill you, but mammoths – even mammoths with four tusks – are so solid, so believable, so inescapably real that it was a huge shock to me to see them, figures from the ancient history of my world, standing calmly in a clearing by the roadside. I felt as if I'd been dropped into a slightly more benign version of Jurassic Park. Real, living mammoths. It was wonderful.
Well, it was wonderful until I turned round and saw the horror that had been approaching while I'd been distracted by the mammoths. Suddenly, with my brain frozen in terror, I understood what had built all those enormous spider-webs in Bleak Falls Barrow. It had been enormous spiders. Enormous spiders who seemed to think of human beings as small snacks. I wasn't sure I would have time to get to my axe before it reached me, so I did my best to make Farengar proud by aiming a burst of flame into its face. The spider recoiled, clicking angrily. Unfortunately, as I'd discovered when Farengar was teaching me, I ran out of flame very quickly, and although the spider was hurt, it was nowhere near being disabled. I grabbed my axe and shield as quickly as I could, but the spider still had time to slash my arm with one of its forelegs. I did my best to fight back, but the thing was too quick, and its blows were too powerful. I was beginning to lose hope of surviving the fight when the spider spat in my face. The spit must have had some kind of poison in it – perhaps the same substance that gave it its foul stink – because I fell to my knees with my vision blurred and my head swimming. I thought at the time that it had affected my hearing, too, because as I went down, I thought I heard the sound of someone running. Someone human. Or maybe an elf, I suppose.
I expected that to be the end of the fight – well, the end of me – but I was still alive when my vision cleared, thanks to the guard I'd seen on the road earlier. He had obviously been the cause of the running footsteps I'd heard; he had been running to help me. He seemed to have injured the spider quite badly, but it was still fighting back, so I made the most of the fact that I was behind it, and swung my axe hard. Those spiders are tough. Or maybe I need a better axe. I don't think I did any damage at all. But at least the guard knew he wasn't on his own any more. It only took us a few more minutes to kill the spider after that.
“You all right?” asked the guard. I didn't seem to have any serious injuries, and I knew I could heal small injuries, so I said I was fine and asked how he was.
“Oh, I'm well enough. These damn things turn up every month or so, so we get a fair amount of practice at killing them. You might not want to travel alone round here, though. If you come across two of these beasts at once, things can get a bit sticky.”
I didn't really want to admit things had been very sticky for me with just one oversized spider, so I promised I'd look out for a travelling companion and that I'd be careful in the meantime, and we nodded at each other and set off in our different directions...
Last edited by Caillagh de Bodemloze; April 22, 2018 at 11:58 AM.