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He waits for the blow. It might be from a weapon, it might be a shout, it might be a kick to the head. The world holds its breath – or is he? His sight reels from the exertion. He doesn’t even try to coil away. He knew it would be a hard fight, a long one, a desperate one. No one else could have taken his place here. No other mortal has his power. And perhaps this is how it should have been, he fleetingly thinks. He waits for the blow. What form it takes is of little consequence. The snare tightens around him. He’s not sure where exactly, but it’s there just enough that he can feel it. It pulls. It’s slow at first, and hardly more than a numbing little tug. Even broken, he’s far stronger than it. It settles snugly against and amidst the pain, the exhaustion, the smashed will and smashed bones and split sinew. He knew it was coming. Something sharp rattles and sizzles through his skull. He wakes. Was it a stupor? Was he sleeping? It doesn’t matter. He wakes enough to remember what it means. He wakes enough to try one last time. He thrashes once. He cries out. His throat makes the ground shudder anew, but not with shouts. This time, he begs in the dragon tongue to the dragon father. “Forgive me. I was a foolish child, but I am still your child. You are still my father. Help me. Break whatever is left of me, but help me. Save me.” Something jostles his mask partway off, enough for something to scrape against his face. Grime and blood mingle in a patch of raw flesh near an eye, but he doesn’t feel it. He weeps for another reason. He weeps, though his body is too far away from him to lament anything. The snare is too strong, though he did not feel its first touch. A thread of blood intertwines with tears and slinks down his neck. He cries out again. “Please. Help me.” But the loudest noise is his body dragging across the site, the place that distant generations in the future will either call cursed or blessed ground. No presence appears. No voice answers. “Father.” The whimper is smaller than the residual trembling in the earth. His voice is spent. His lungs are spent. His breath is spent. The stenches of battle waft thick on a breeze. They cloud his head a little more, accustomed though he is to them. Even broken, he’s far stronger than it. But it only takes one good fall to break a mortal, and he knows. He knows in the way that all dying things know. The world is watching and not watching. He feels the weight of its eyes and the weight of its indecision, its inability to stop what will happen. “Father.” The world is speeding and slowing and jolting all at the same time – like him, like whatever is left of his body, his free will, his moments left on Nirn. He tries to catch himself mid-twist in the air more than once. Maybe he’s not moving, maybe he can’t move, but he’s falling all the same. He scrambles, but internally. His limbs can barely twitch. He isn’t a carcass. He isn’t an ordinary mortal. He can rise above it. Even broken, he – The snare smothers his sight.