So this was like Skyrim siding history for me, seeing how the Imperials were affected by the hatred of the Stormcloaks: as well as hunters and frost trolls, as well...poor troll. I picked the dead troll's head up in my hands, scrunching its white fur up beneath my fingers... kissed its jaw, and stepped back. I always wanted to kiss something as frightening as that. It was kinda cute, too, besides all the grizzly teeth.

The dead, their tears and pain cried out to my soul because my imagination could only understand what they went through down here. Men locked in cages - literally, a hunter guy I saw was locked in a cage further downstairs, and on the upper floor above me, so were two skeletons. Years they'd been down there, but these bodies on this floor looked fresh, if not only dead for a day. And the bandits - I pulled a barf back from rising when I thought about how they stayed in here with this. But that food I saw on the way into the depths of this fort was kind of good-looking, so even though the dead dwelled here, and fresher dead bandits, you could tell what I was going to do, later -

I raised my hands to collect the souls of the dead in their prison cells and send them to their rightful place, for them to live one more time. Images in my mind swirling back to relatively recent events of this fort -

The bandits were at the gates, guarding when we came in, and us shooting (and me hiding through the majority of the shoot-fest. Then I even joined, and started smashing some heads.).

I wanted to read books stacked by the fireplace once in the fort, but secured the urge through more fighting.

The blood of prisoners slicked the floor to the prison, which I rather had decided to stall going into simply for that reason.

And before our feet ever touched the prison, I stole another frost staff from an annoying chick that was wielding frost - 'lieve me, you'll always find those chicks somewhere.

"Haha, I can actually sell one of these, now," I said to myself, flipping it around in my hand, then settling it in a sling on my back.

"Because you have more than one, that's it, isn't it?"

"Yeah, I always gotta keep the original," I said, tapping the bark of the first frost staff I had.

At that moment, Lydia ran into one of the rooms, and I followed her, watching her stick the hammer into a knee cap, then a head itself, for efficient k.o.ing of an opponent. Someone had come at me with a sword, and I blocked it, without enough time to scoff because that blade nearly took my head off, and then pushed him, sending him into the table. The sword of his was nicely against his throat, and squeezing into it from the pressure I applied to the hilt of my axe that was up against his body while he was pinned between it and the table. He'd had his sword-hand up to block me and it proved fatal as the red ran down his neck, now. I could've probably thrusted my hilt harder at him, causing him to cut himself through, but...

"Man, remember this as the last time you come across a lady in armor - those guards were right," I said, bending my head down to lap some of the blood trickling from his throat. "Ugh, you taste like something raw," I said, kneeing him in the stuff, and allowing his reaction of crumpling to be the end of him through me hitting him in his side, making him fly into another bandit that was running from the room ahead in alarm. I let Lyda stare at me for the approval of ending the second bandit's life. I yawned, the smoke of a kitchen, which this was what we were in, I noticed, burning my eyes. "I want food," I whined.

"Heyah!" Lydia exhaled after chopping a guy almost in half who she found in the quite spacious cupboard-room. I went in there, afterwards, and my stomach's appetite turned sour from the smell of his blood. "Lydia...I can't take the hunger"; you wuss, she replied to me, bumping past.

I stared at the guy, slapped him a few times, then slapped him with his hand and asked why he was hitting himself. I lifted his arm up and smelled his armpit. "Ew, you stink," I said, gaining a gold piece from that since the change had fallen near his side from his pocket - then I scrunched my nose up some more. Defecation. "Ew, I"m getting away from you, dude," I said, and smelling myself, hoping his scent didn't attach to me.

"Good, Lydia. You made the guy squirt himself," I said, yelling then from a guy that sprung out from a cabinet near that food room that I didn't check for spoil yet. "Aaah," I said, choking him with my axe by jerking it upwards into his throat. That was clumsy. He jumped on me, thinking I'd not block with this jumbo axe blade. If I was slower, yes I wouldn't. But, outta luck, guy, I thought, walking with a limp. I think he just sprained my posture jumping onto me like that.

"Lydia, nevermind, you missed the cabinet freak." Lydia stopped, and I wondered why, so followed her upstairs. There was two skeletons in the cage. There was a room before that I just went through with four toilets and some tissue, and potions. I took the potions and now that I saw these skeletons, I was gulping down a health elixir. I sighed satisfactorily and placed the bottle in my side-holster for a who-knows-what-weapon that wasn't there. "What does it say?" I asked her.

"What does what say?" she retorted.

"The gravestone." She squinted. "It was a joke. They're skeletons...that are dead."

"Yeah. Any skeleton would be dead," she said, unlocking the gate with a nod in that direction from me.

"Ah, unless you're talking about the draugr," I said back, and she only turned to me unhumored because she knew that she missed that one fact.

"Huh, I can't even," she began, clutching her nose. I stepped in the cage, smelling it.

"Beats me what they did in here before they died," I said, encroaching myself within its metal bar walls. "Wonder if they jerked each other off to their death."

Lydia's laugh surprised me. "What?" I said, turning behind to see her lean against the door with one arm, her other on the frame of the bars. "That's what I would do."

She covered her mouth and her nose, both, conveniently. "Let's get moving just in case there's others." She stepped back, and probably scoured me disgustingly with her eyes as I sifted and picked through the bones to find some gold, looking at each gold piece in the light every time I found one. "Gosh, the smell," she said as I worked. "Good, I got everything," I then said, and closed the gate back.

I could've freed the guys if they were still alive. Is anyone in here alive, I said, any other prisoners? If there are more prisoners, where were they? Or were these bones just an ornament? Haha, this wasn't Fallout.

Inside the next room, there were alive people, however. Late - I spotted them a mile away and they only noticed we were here when we set ourselves fully inside the room - I let this one guy lunge at me and I jerked him off - haha - my axe. I paid no attention to him as he would recover, but I stuck the blade's end into another bandit's stomach. "Curse you, traitor," he announced hoarsely, and since he didn't want to get off my blade I awkwardly tugged him off, saying, "C'mon, why don't'ya move? I'm trying to do business here -" and then I cut off that statement when someone's foot from behind me pushed into the guy, knocking him on the floor. I turned, not knowing who it was but the momentum of turning giving me a good swing nonetheless, which from my blade Lydia blocked. "Sorry," I blushed, "but no sorry. Because maybe I intended to do that," she brushed her hand past my wrist and grabbed the axe from me as I said that because I didn't like 'friendly' fire. I looked at her. She tapped the instrument against the floor.

"Off me again while I'm trying to help you out," she tossed it back to me, one-handed, while her warhammer was resting in her other hand. I laughed, and turned from this post-skeletons room that besides for the bandits we just killed looked as helplessly empty as my stomach, and ran back to the stairs, saying "I beat you," only when having gotten to the bottom of them. I frowned at the pool of blood I'd noticed at another door I caught a glimpse at while wandering again on the first floor. "Lydia,"

"Sure," Lydia said, checking it out. She was starting to do stuff herself, now, without asking me. I liked that.

But not the reply she gave me. "It's a prison."

"Ohh." I'd seen the roof door above that prison hell when we were outside. Now I knew how the door to the cells looked on the inside of this place. "Let's skip it for later." I rumbled around the large indoor entryway to the fort building, looking in retrospect at the ice on the floor that I could've slipped on with all my running around here from the alive gnarly bandits."Lydia, I'm tired of these ice-wielders."

"Well...you do really seem into necromancy, so why not be?"

"Raping the dead?"

"Huh?"

"That's just what you said I did, right?" I said, turning to her with furrowed brows, away from the inspection of the floors.

"N-no. That's not what necromancy is," she slung her orschich warhammer over her shoulder as a response and to tax her shoulder some of the weapon's weight.

"Then, what is it?" I said, my eyes darting distractedly to a door. I pulled it, and saw and smelled the fresh, non-rotting-flesh (I just noticed it smelled like thanks to this fresher) air.

"Oh, thank goodness," she pushed me out of the way and hung herself halfway out of the door, panting. Coughed once. Then gasped largely.

"Sounds like you're having an orgasmic experience."

"Stop talking about sex for a while," she responded, slinging herself back in from the white-tipped, exitway-trampled grass.

"I can't help it," I pouted, watching her close the door.

"Wouldn't want anymore bandits coming in," she then said.

"I am so hungry. Lydia." I looked at her with bigger, glossier eyes than they were before.

"Okay," she gave into my deceit. I smiled slightly, really not wanting to show her how I felt, and then ran to another flight of stairs that led to a lower level instead, just inticing me by their darkness, yet scaring me a bit simultaneously for me not being able to see down them. "Let's explore!"

But she, instead, looked intently upon that flight of stairs before proceeding. "Do you hear that?" she said.

I stopped proceeding down them myself and held my ear. "No - oh, yes. A man. A nice, tough, wiry man -"

"Shh," she said.

I smirked, had nothing to loose. I usually had Uthgerd do all the work anyway, so I might as well save my housecarl this time some of arm strength. Travelling down the stairs, I looked at a man who in fact was a wiry dude - unattractive, though. I whistled at him as he came at me, and felt that sword of his with my hand, let it slide pass and even cut me slightly. I knew I was touching the sharp side and had quite did that purposely to give me a disability - and when he fell sideways, into the wall, I pinned him up against it, face-first squished against the wall.

"You know you don't want to mess with a Stormcloak girl," I said, at that moment, then noticing the Stormcloak armor lining the wall ahead and sported an open-wide mouth. "Oh." I used his sword in his hand to slit his throat, and felt his body go limp against me. "Bye," I said, dropping him to the ground. "They have Stormcloak armor? Get out!" I said, tracing my fingers along it on one of the walls, drawing tears from myself and a nerve that's jumping in my neck from the remembrance of my mother's arms around it, and really that tingling sensation happened everywhere in my body while I could see images of my parents fighting and tumbling on the Skyrim grasslands near my home, also. It was a great memory -

Until Lydia put a hand on the cloth, scooting my hand off it, and then pointed to the door in front of us. After eyeing the maces and swords on the opposite wall of the garments, I then pushed myself through half-way the door in front of them with Lydia's help. After scavenging that place after it, I retreated finally to the cells, out of her coaxing me to enjoy myself. Because for some reason, exploring cells, something I'd only in my life seen once, was according to her logic something I did to enjoy myself.

Through her reason is how I got here to the prison's cells, now.

I rubbed my ankle where a snare on the way in here got me - a bear trap. Maybe it was for the troll - or even the humans - if it had ever tried to leave this prison. I let the spell come to my hands after this remembering how we got into here, and also after Lydia had helped me unlock all these prison cells. Now, I could see the bodies all lift in purple wisps.

I sauntered to the cages to see the bodies of inmates rise, for however long they'd been in their cells, finally be set free at my power. Thank you, thank you all, I said to myself, and then looked at a guy that had been hiding in the corner whom I didn't notice that tried to attack me now at this instant - an alive guy. Lydia was too slow to attend to him however a high-elven maiden socked him in the jaw with her fists, instead, and he fell out, groaning.

They were Imperials, the rest of them other types of people jailed, I think. Imperials and otherworldy people that Skyrim didn't accept. My friends. Because they were like me. Undeciding to help Ulfric Stormcloak take over Skyrim and deride its peace and its new rules of acceptance of all races besides the worship of Talos, for death. They were people that did nothing to get here, and only wanted to welcome the King that had happened to gain control over Skyrim as well as warrant protection of its peace from other nations.

I had agreed inside myself when Lydia had asked me; Age of Aggression was definitely my favorite song: it spoke of our retaliation, that of the Imperials, against Ulfric, a Stormcloak.

Then, considering all this thought within me, I was an Imperial. I think.

And the seemingly likehearted people came to me, almost as if they were cheering, and I could imagine clapping here and there, and shouting along with their moans I reckon a sighing for the once unattainable freedom they can remember from a past they could not control, rather than the fact that I was controlling their bodies.

Now I was controlling their souls. Leading them into a peace they couldn't have concurred when they were alive. I needed to do this to Skyrim, bring alive all its dead in this inevitable war, and bring it to an end-all, standstill place of peace. I needed to wake the warriors that would fight in their years awake and not dead.

Goddessgirl2000 and Beeper1973! I must say of you both: the stuff is always the stuff. And you guys are the stuff.

And thank you all readers from the Phillipines! Mwah! And I finished Dustman's Cairn, so mwah to you all!

And good morning, though by the time you read this, it'll be afternoon, if you of course don't live somewhere that I don't.

Till next chapter...in history, where there's a tale of souls and swords...just kidding. Wrong fanfiction. Vote if you know the reference, or liked this chapter...or if you got out of school this/last weekend. Lucky you.