NOVEL NEXT Chapter 17: The Journey
From the fork in the road, we soon cross the bridge and pass by Anga’s Mill. After that, there isn’t much to stop us from just continuing on, straight up the road to the runback that will then take us on to Winterhold. As such, the next place we actually come upon is Fort Kastav, and by the time we reach it, night has already fallen and its clear that Lydia is starting to grow… weary.
Which considering how she’s been acting all day long, isn’t something I mind all that much. I expected something like this to happen, but that didn’t make it any less annoying. The entire day, Lydia had been seeking… correction. The Nord woman had accepted her place under my thumb and had found solace in the punishment and discipline I was enacting upon her.
The only problem was, she was starting to enjoy it too much. By the time we reached Fort Kastav, I was ready to teach her a new lesson… but first, we had to clear out all of the Conjurers and Necromancers that infested the damn Fort. Ugh, I knew it was this way in the game, but what was with the Imperials and Stormcloaks getting chased out of every major garrison they had? Why did the Dragonborn have to clear everything out FOR them? Really, it was fucking ridiculous.
While tempted to order Lydia to clear out the Fort on her lonesome, I knew that would result in her death. Instead, we handled it just like the previous Forts on our travels, and within an hour, the place was registering as Cleared on my map, and there wasn’t a single soul alive left in the entire residence.
It was around this time that I discovered one reason to regret not stopping at Windhelm. I should have had us go in there, even for just a second, in order to sell my stuff.
Even approaching level Five Hundred as I was, with more than half my level ups going towards Stamina to increase my inventory space… I was running out of room. Luckily, I did make one discovery that helped me out greatly there. It was a mod I’d completely forgotten that I’d enabled in my latest playthrough, and only noticed now when I was finally starting to have Inventory Space troubles.
Called Alchemist’s Respite, it was a simple, unobtrusive mod that made potions and ingredients weigh quit a lot less for the purposes of one’s Inventory. All ingredients weighed at least fifty percent less, and all potions were reduced to a fifth of their original weight. It was the kind of thing that made farming alchemy and making gold off of every merchant you came across all the easier, really.
But even with that mod enabled and reducing the total weight of my potions and ingredients by a metric fuck ton, I was still starting to reach the point where even my insane stamina couldn’t keep up with how much loot I’d started to pick up. And unlike the video game, I couldn’t just foist it all onto Lydia. She might be sworn to carry my burdens, but she wasn’t capable of carrying several hundred pounds of gear in a pocket dimension like her game self would be able to do.
In the end, I was going to start having to do what I always ended up doing in most of these Skyrim playthroughs where I found myself inventory-capped in a dungeon or whatever. I was going to have to start picking and choosing what to keep and what to get rid of. It was easy enough, getting rid of some of the shittier weapons. And to be fair, the enchanted robes that all of these rogue spellcasters in these forts were wearing had an excellent weight-to-value ratio going for them. Still, it annoyed me all the same to have to leave a small pile of almost-junk sitting in a back corner of Fort Kastav.
It annoyed me just enough that I was REALLY looking forward to Lydia’s next lesson. As we all move to bed down for the night, meaning mostly Lydia, the dark-haired Nord looks over at me and once again tries to push me to punish her.
“My Thane, are you absolutely certain the Fort is cleared?”
A fairly innocuous question, but one she was sure would get her smacked anyways. She was counting on it. And obviously, I couldn’t allow her to think I was that damn predictable.
“Lydia… come here.”
She approaches with an air of anticipation and excitement to her, but rather than slap her, I reach out and take a firm hold of her jaw, looking into her eyes as she goes still, like a captured prey animal.
“I’m not going to hurt you just because you want me to.”
My Housecarl’s eyes widen, and she tries to shake her head, tries to deny it, but I just hold her steady.
“Be silent. You spent an entire day without testing me, so I know you know how to keep that mouth of yours shut. But then you spent today testing me even further… because you like it, don’t you? You like it when I hit you. You enjoy when I spank you. You WANT me to hurt you.”
Lydia quivers, my words doing more true damage to her than any physical assault I could levy against her at this point. Its one thing for her to be getting off to my abuse of her. Its another entirely for me to point it out and FORCE her to admit it. A single tear ends up trickling down her cheek, before she finally nods her head.
“Y-Yes… my Thane…”
Smirking, I let go of her jaw.
“I approve of your honesty. And it’s clear to me now that you’ll just keep acting up if I continue to discipline you as I have been. And so, punishment will have to take a different form with you, won’t it? Hm, for tonight… you are forbidden from touching yourself sexually.”
“… My Thane?”
Snorting, knowing exactly what she’s asking, I just grin and nod.
“Oh yes, Svanna and I could both hear you last night. Did you think we wouldn’t? Did you think we didn’t know what a foolish slut you were being?”
Lydia blushes, taken aback by my language. Ah, I’ve made her a slut for physical pain, but not given her anything approaching a degradation fetish, haven’t I? My words actually ARE doing more damage to her than anything else. Well, that’s fine. She doesn’t need to be a complete masochistic pig, just a obedient little pain slut. Better that I have SOME way of disciplining her still, I suppose.
“Get to sleep. No touching. If you do, I’ll know, and it WILL get worse for you.”
Lydia shivers… and finally nods.
“Yes, my Thane.”
I watch her bed down for the night… and then raise an eyebrow and look down to see Svanna kneeling between my legs at the chair where I’m sitting. She’s not even trying to hide as she gives me a coy grin and extracts my golden cock from its confines. Licking her lips, she spits on my length and jerks her hands up and down my shaft, moaning out as she leans forward and swirls her tongue around the tip.
A moment later, Svanna is descending down my shaft, giving me the noisiest, sloppiest blowjob, I’ve ever received. Our hands connect after a second, our fingers intertwining as we hold hands while she slobbers all over my cock.
“Hulghk! Hulghk! Hulghk!”
Lydia starts out turned away from us, but I can see how tense her shoulders are. Eventually, she slowly turns over and watches Svanna go down on me. I pretend not to notice her single visible eye looking at us from where she’s nestled in her furs, but I am very much paying attention to her. If Lydia so much as touches herself, I will know it. I’m watching for the most minute shifts beneath her blankets, but… no, she never does. She keeps her hands away from her body and simply watches.
Eventually, I blow my first load down Svanna’s throat, the lithe Dragonborn swallowing every last drop. But if Lydia had thought or hoped the younger Nord woman was done with me, she has another thing coming. Svanna wastes no time in hopping to her feet and throwing her clothes off. She’s in my lap a moment later, facing away from me as she leans back against me, arching her back in a very feline manner and impaling herself on my cock.
With her legs spread wide and her lithe form on display, she’s making sure Lydia can see EVERYTHING as we fuck, the poor Housecarl unable to do anything but watch in silence as Svanna bounces up and down my cock again and again. Unfortunately for Lydia, if she thought we were going to ever stop… she had another thing coming. Amused, I can tell what Svanna wants to do… and I’m all for it.
We fuck throughout the night, the two of us, all the way into morning. With no need for sleep, we fuck and fuck and fuck. At some point, Lydia does pass out, unable to keep her eyes open any longer, but to her credit, she doesn’t try to touch herself. She doesn’t masturbate even once, though I know she must want it.
The next day, with what little sleep she got, Lydia definitely has bags under her eyes. She tries, half-heartedly, to garner my ire a few times as we travel, but quickly grows quiet when she realizes that I’m not going to punish her physically any longer. As we make our way down the road, we eventually come to Stillborn Cave. I almost don’t have us loot it, because I’m already having to throw out shit as it is… but hey, why not right?
And so, we go into the Cave, and I get to have my first encounter with the Falmer. It’s a tad ironic, because there’d been one playthrough where I’d made a female Dragonborn character, done enough of the main story to pick up Lydia as Housecarl and traveling companion, and then gone on a tour of Skyrim to find and experience defeat at the hands of every possible monster there was, Falmer included.
It had been fun, sending my Dragonborn character into peril again and again, watching her and Lydia get defeated and then raped by whatever enemies had been the ones to bring them down. Certainly, it’d made for great jack off material for weeks, back in the day.
Of course, this time around, Svanna and Lydia weren’t two damsels in distress on a computer monitor, destined to lose and be fucked into a stupor by every single bad guy they came across. They were two real, living, breathing women… and more than that, they were MINE. I wasn’t about to let anyone have a go at them save for myself.
So yes, the Falmer and their Chaurus pets are quickly routed, and we slaughter our way through Stillborn Cave swiftly enough. Luckily, most of the Falmer loot is absolute rubbish, so it’s not like I need to throw too much out. I take what’s worth taking and we continue on our way after clearing the Cave.
After Stillborn Cave, we eventually come upon Whistling Mine, where we’re stopped by a Winterhold Guard, of all things.
“Ho there. What’s your business?”
“Heading to Winterhold, good sir. Have business at the College.”
Immediately, the Winterhold Guard bristles.
“Hm, another mage, are you?”
He turns his back on us then, very clearly not interested in us. I’m a little surprised, until I remember just how absolutely fucked the relationship between the Jarl of Winterhold and the College of Winterhold actually is. The Jarl, a Nord named Korir, was a bitter man, to be sure. He and his wife Thaena both, in fact. They blamed the College for the destruction of Winterhold and hated the mages for what they perceived to be complete indifference to the plight of the former city.
Worse still, because Winterhold was barely a shadow of its former self, Jarl Korir’s influence and political power were non-existent. The other Jarls didn’t give a shit about him from what I remembered from the games. And he knew it too. The College, as ironic as it was, was the only thing of value left in all of Winterhold. Those who weren’t affiliated with it but were still living in the small rundown town that the city had become, were quite bitter indeed.
I suppose, in the end, it made sense that this Winterhold Guard would share his Jarl’s prejudices. Still, the sun IS waning in the sky, and I was actually initially intending to stop here for the night before reaching Winterhold in the morning. Now… now I wondered if that would be the best idea. Maybe it would be better to push on. Maybe-
Before I can make a decision, a powerful roar splits the air, and my eyes widen as I realize what’s happening. The Winterhold Guard whips around, his eyes going high in the sky just as ours and the miners around the Mine do. There, swooping in from over the nearby Mountains to the West… was a Dragon.
… You know, its funny, I’d completely forgotten random Dragon Attacks were even a thing. I just… well, on my latest playthrough, I had completely skipped out on the main story. I’d gone straight from the cave at the end of the Helgen Prologue, through Riverrun without stopping or talking to anyone, all the way to the XP Spells Barrel in Whiterun. From there, I hadn’t interacted with anyone in the city except for the shopkeepers.
So long as you didn’t go and collect the Dragonstone from Bleak Falls Barrow, the Random Dragon Attacks never started. But… well, here we were. We’d gone and gotten the Dragonstone, and Svanna had been revealed as the Dragonborn. The Dragons were being resurrected by Alduin and being sent after my companion now.
That just wouldn’t do.
“Everyone, find cover!”
The miners all run into Whistling Mine, of course, while the Whiterun Guard does what all Guards do in the face of a Dragon Attack. He tries to get ready to take the thing on head to head, like a complete idiot… or maybe just a very brave fool, like most Nords were. Regardless, I’ve learned my lesson from last time, and collected more than enough bows and arrows at this point to have my own ranged options.
As the Dragon comes in for a landing, my first arrow takes it in its side right alongside Svanna. I immediately have Archery at one hundred, and a quick pause of the world around me allows me to fill out every single Archery Perk. There are quite a few good ones. Thread the Needle, for instance, allows my shots to avoid fifty percent of the Dragon’s armor, whenever its on the ground and not moving. Quick Shot increases my bow draw by a whopping thirty percent. Hailstorm lets me attack eight percent faster with my bow for ten seconds after shooting, with a stacking effect.
But more than that, I don’t want to risk Lydia here. Svanna and I aren’t going to die to a dragon, not after my insane leveling and the rudimentary overpowered enchanted gear I made for her before we left Whiterun. But Lydia? She’s very killable still, and since I’m the only one who seems to operate on game physics, I highly doubt she’s essential.
And so, I quickly activate the Hawkeye Power. Once a day, I can slow down time and ‘focus’ on my foe for ten seconds of my time. In this, the Perk allows me to look for opportunities for a killing shot. As the Dragon turns in this slowed down bullet time, its eyes alighting upon Svanna and its maw slowly starting to open, I can see the ice coalescing in its throat, marking it as a proper Frost Dragon.
More than that though, thanks to Hawkeye I see and take the shot. The arrow flies true, punching straight through their eye and into their brain. The Dragon is staggered and lets out a shocked, wounded roar of surprise. After all, it was likely expecting a fight, or maybe a massacre that IT would get to perpetuate. Instead, little insect that I am to it, I’ve dealt it a mortal wound in one go.
Truly mortal at that, because with Svanna in close proximity, the Dragonborn’s consumption effect begins. As the Frost Dragon roars in frustration, its skin flakes away, its life force taken into Svanna as she absorbs its soul and adds it to her growing collection. A collection of two, to be fair, but a collection all the same.
I smirk as I lower my bow and glance over to see the Winterhold Guard looking gobsmacked.
“Ah, did I forget to mention that I’m traveling with the Dragonborn? My apologies… now you know.”
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