After discovering your Dragonborn powers, you gather your belongings to embark on a pilgrimage to the Greybeards at High Hrothgar, the biting mountain wind stinging your cheeks as you adjust your pack straps. The weight of your newfound abilities presses upon you like the heavy armor you've carefully polished and packed away. You hope the ancient masters will help you understand the strange power awakening within you - the ability to shout with the voice of dragons.

As you're about to leave the city gates, the familiar jingle of a courier's bell cuts through the morning bustle. A weathered envelope sealed with crimson wax finds its way into your hands, emblazoned with a sigil you don't recognize - a dragon coiled around a human figure. The letter inside claims dragons no longer seek conflict and wish to live alongside mortals, their leader requesting an audience at High Hrothgar itself. Though every instinct screams caution at this unlikely proposal, the meeting place is your destination anyway, so you slip the letter into your pack alongside your map and provisions.

After weeks of arduous travel through snow-choked passes and narrow mountain trails, your boots crunching on the perpetual frost of Tamriel's tallest peak, you finally reach the ancient monastery. Instead of the expected isolation, you find not just the Greybeards, but a gathering of dragons perched on the surrounding cliffs like oversized, scaled crows. Paarthurnax herself - leader of the Greybeards and now apparently the newly appointed leader of dragons - greets you with a wisdom-filled gaze that seems to see straight through to your soul.

She explains that after nearly being annihilated in their war with mortals, most dragons have abandoned their world-conquering ambitions and now seek equality with the shorter-lived races. Not all have agreed, she admits with a flick of her tail, but the majority have chosen peace over destruction.

You decide killing all dragons would be impossible and ultimately counterproductive, preferring instead to help them integrate into mortal society like Khajiits or Argonians have done before. What you don't know as you accept this mission is that Alduin, the former World Eater and once-feared leader of dragons, will become your unlikely teammate in this endeavor.

She's undoubtedly a formidable presence, her very aura radiating power that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on end, and you're secretly relieved to have her on your side - sort of. She can tear through steel armor as easily as you might tear through old parchment, wield devastating elemental spells that make even the most powerful mages seem insignificant, and summon an Akavir daedric blade that glows with otherworldly energy whenever she enters battle. Had you chosen to fight dragons instead of ally with them, you'd likely be nothing more than a smoldering corpse within seconds of encountering her.

After several weeks of what Alduin laughingly calls 'teamwork' - which mostly involves her single-handedly eliminating entire bandit camps while you struggle to keep up - you've set up camp in the woods near Falkreath. The air smells of pine and woodsmoke as you cook over the crackling campfire, the supplies you purchased with the bandit reward money bubbling in your pot. Alduin had wandered off to 'scout,' though you suspect she simply grew bored watching you struggle with a knife and vegetables.

The ground trembles faintly with her approach long before she comes into view, the subtle shift in air pressure giving away her presence even without the sound of her footsteps. "Mortal! I'm hungry!" she announces upon bursting through the trees, her scales catching the fading sunlight and turning them into a shifting tapestry of crimson and gold. Her golden eyes fix hungrily on your cooking with obvious curiosity, the tip of her tail twitching with impatience. "What are you preparing?"