1st Hearthfire

Phane nursed his drink, throwing the occasional glance at a pretty redguard girl at the bar. Lalaine was not coming to the tavern this evening, she was visiting her mother or something, and Drelis had left him alone at the table to catch a student he knew and ask him about some book or another.

Drelis had left a few volumes, including Lydia's diary, on the table. Phane almost put his tankard on it before recognising and picking it up. 'I'll bet Lydia was a comely lass,' he idled to himself. 'I could do with a housecarl like that. Someone to follow me around and beat the snot out of any thugs who dared to cross me. Someone to watch the house for me.' He looked around his empty table. 'Just someone to talk to would do right now.'

He opened the diary and flipped through it to find where the story had left off. 'Well, old Drelis certainly wasn't telling the story verbatim was he?' It took him a while to get used to the way the entries were sorted, then found that Lydia's personal thoughts were separate from her documentation of Khargo gro-Mashnar's feats and movements. It wasn't the original diary, that much was certain, so why it had been laid out in such a hard-to-read manner perplexed Phane to distraction.

'1st Hearthfire,' he began, piecing the puzzle together himself. 'A courier delivered a letter to Khargol on the road. It was sealed, but signed "a friend." Very mysterious. The letter suggested finding a place called Lost Tongue Overlook.' He looked over at the redguard girl again, but she had left while he was distracted with the book. No one was watching so he carried on. 'Presumably it was one of the lost word wall murals that would teach him a thu'um.

'A mining community is hard pressed to make a profit thanks to the constant interference of the forsworn. The hills are full of eyes, and the forsworn are a constant threat. The journey back to Whiterun is off with a bang as a glimpse of a dragon is caught amongst the rocky crags. It circles and swoops, roaring, but not attacking. Khargol scales a steep rise of rock to swing at it, but the dragon keeps its distance, bellowing rather than getting involved in a confrontation. Eventually, it flies off. Strange...'

Drelis was still chatting away in another corner of the tavern. 'When the echos of the dragon's calls have finally died, Khargol returned to the road. He found a mine that smelled of death, the owner claiming that dead things had driven his workers out. Khargol entered to investigate nonetheless.' Phane shook his head. 'Madness. Why would you do that?' He read on. 'Khargol encountered draugr in the depths, slaying them until the only way forward was to jump down a sinkhole. In the crypt revealed inside, the draugr wight lord used his own thu'um to disarm Khargol, blasting his warhammer from his hands. Both test the power of their voice against one-another until Khargol, hoarse and exhausted, is the victor.

'The miners help haul him from the pit, but they have no reward to offer him. Khargol encounters forsworn in the hills, swamped by them and praying that his newly-forged dwemer armour will stop their arrows before they pierce something important. The forsworn have a camp on the exterior of an old barrow. With the forsworn dead, and the bodies moved to one side of the encampment, Khargol spends the night at the top, hoping that the broken bones he places around his bedroll will wake him should any scouts return and seek to cut his throat while he sleeps.'

Phane put the diary back on the table and finished his drink. 'Well, when you read it like that it is certainly a lot less exciting.' Drelis was still talking with the student in the corner, so Phane picked the books up off the table and walked over. 'Here you are Drelis,' he said. 'I'm off home, maybe we can continue from the second day of Hearthfire when we get back into the story tomorrow.'