sideblog for short self-indulgent fanfiction by @ayem (aeayem on ao3). everything here is okay to reblog unless specified otherwise (just please don't repost anywhere without asking first) ||Â Â i love requests and i love critique. || the only fantasy my fanfiction fulfils is the one where i write something people actually want to read
A Rolecall of Lives Lost at the Battle of Red Mountain, 1E700
Chapter: 5/7
Fandom: The Elder Scrolls
Characters: Indoril Almalexia, Vivec
Summary: An account of the many, many things lost at the Battle of Red Mountain, as reckoned by the two mer left to count them.
A Rolecall of Lives Lost at the Battle of Red Mountain, 1E700
Chapter: 5/7
Fandom: The Elder Scrolls
Characters: Indoril Almalexia, Vivec
Summary: An account of the many, many things lost at the Battle of Red Mountain, as reckoned by the two mer left to count them.
Yesterday, Kogoruhn received a visitor, which was both very normal and very strange. Very normal, because this visitor was a Nord, and foolhardy Nords seeking a chance to fight for Wulfharth arrived at Kogoruhn rather frequently. Strange, however, because this guest was a girl, and very young, and she knew how to Shout.
Strange, again, that Shouting. It was not the thu'um as Voryn had ever heard it, though Wulfharth explained after her arrival that it was not unknown for some Nords to use the thu'um in its raw form in such a way, especially in times of primal emotion: rage, grief. He seemed wholly unsurprised to hear it from the war-torn scrap of a thing that stumbled her way into Wulfharth's chambers; then, Wulfharth was not a man who ever seemed surprised. Voryn had been more shaken by it, though he felt silly for the feeling, tried to hide it. He'd lived through the Invasion, he'd seen enough survivors that her wounds and her grief hadn't shaken him. Just odd, he reasoned, for her to find her way here, although the frontlines of the succession war lay far away, and although she was so young and so injured and as bewildered as any injured teenager would be. With that, at least, Wulfharth agreed.
So 'strange' here was a mystery: who was this girl? Voryn liked mysteries-- or at least, he liked them better than his agenda for the week, which was more dismal than he'd had in a long time. Reprimand Gilvoth (again) for misconduct with an Ashlander caravan? Investigate a report from his spymaster that Tureynul's been raising support for some sort of leadership challenge? Then there was a petition calling for the extirpation of the Nordic settlement on Dagon Fel, with an alarming quantity of support, to which Voryn was expected to graciously explain to his subjects that, no, he probably could not convince Wulfharth to side with them in a rebellion against the Nordic empire, not least over a few fishermen living on a frigid uninhabitable island. Even the calligraphy project he'd been working on had stalled over a critical wording choice he'd second-guessed two-thirds of the way through.
Maybe what Voryn really liked at that moment was less 'mystery' and more 'procrastination'. Well, so be it: for the day, the mysterious arrival of Barfok deserved his personal attention.
Unfortunately, the mystery of Barfok proved shallow. A visit to the permanent Nordic encampment outside of Kogoruhn was more fruitful than Voryn had secretly wanted it to be. The very first person he asked only needed to hear the words 'family killed' and 'Barfok' before his face changed. "Fokbarshofkah," he spat, "You ent hear about Fokbarshofkah? A village over in Whiterun, the damned Alessians burned it to the ground cause they kept the old gods. Killed them to a man. There's a survivor, eh, and she's here?" His face brightened. "Now Ysmir's got to fight them, if she can't make him no-one can."
So the mystery of Barfok was solved, then, except for the casually-mentioned fact that the massacre of Fokbarshofkah had happened over two months ago.
Still, determined to waste at least some of his day on this errand, Voryn decided that it would be most prudent for him to interview the survivor personally. Rather than sending her to the medical wards or the Nordic encampment, he'd had her stashed for now in a disused guest chamber very near to Wulfharth's, reasoning that a thu'um-user, no matter how inexperienced, ought to remain under the close surveillance of another Tongue. He'd appointed a healer to keep a close eye on her, but, considering the sedative tea she'd been plied with, he had deemed a guard unnecessary. Good enough to leave her to sleep and trust she'd be unable to find her way around Kogoruhn, no?
Voryn arrived at her chamber and found it empty.
He didn't have too long to feel foolish over the blunder. After a brief (and embarrassed) search, conducted alone, he found her standing awkwardly by a doorway in one of Kogoruhn's many long and uniform corridors, fixated by a dark corner with an expression of horror. She held a limeware platter before her, complete with a full mug, an empty bowl, and the remnants of a meal. She did not notice Voryn approach until he announced himself with a soft cough, at which point she flinched and turned to face him.
"Barfok," Voryn said, doing his best to sound non-threatening, "Are you lost?"
Barfok looked down at her platter. "Maybe," she admitted. "I thought to return this to the kitchen."
She had a thick accent, one that Voryn was used to hearing in soldiers and mercenaries but which sounded incongruous in a teenage girl. And she did look young, now that the healer had washed the worst of the grime off, with a face still round with baby-fat and the awkward posture of someone who hadn't yet adjusted to the size of herself. They'd given her a simple black robe in lieu of her ruined clothing, which she wore incorrectly and which looked ridiculous on her.
"You should have left it in your room," Voryn informed her. "I'll have a servant collect it. Shall I escort you back there?"
This concept seemed to bewilder her. "I don't need a servant," she protested. "I can do my own washing."
Nords. "I'm sure, but you should be resting. You've clearly been through an ordeal."
"I will, I'll just take this back--"
"Actually, I'd prefer if you just come with me now."
She finally realised it wasn't a request. She hung her head and shuffled towards Voryn, holding the limeware platter sheepishly in front of her.
Voryn started back towards her chamber and she followed behind him, though she was quiet and sullen, and Voryn realised that if he meant to interrogate the poor girl, he'd already ruined his chances. Scolding her for wanting to do her own chores, really? It was quaint, of course, ridiculously so, but if he'd wanted to get her talking, he'd chosen the wrong way to go about it.
So, in an effort to patch things up, he asked conversationally: "Did you always do your own chores at home?"
"Aye, we all do," she answered. "We ent got servants, everyone takes care of his own…" She paused. "I mean, everyone took care…"
Then she trailed off, and was silent for several moments. When Voryn finally glanced over his shoulder, he saw that she'd started crying, silently, and was attempting to wipe her face on her shoulder, while both hands remained occupied by the platter.
With a quiet oath he stopped and turned to face her. "Shall I take that from you?"
"I'm sorry," she croaked. "It ent-- I'm sorry."
"Here, I'll carry that."
"I've got it." She raised her arm further, trying to wipe her face on her elbow, this time.
This was a catastrophic miscalculation: it raised the edge of the limeware so far that the entirety of its contents began to slide, and then, with a loud crash, everything tumbled to the floor-- complete with the limeware platter, dropped in surprise, which shattered on impact.
The two of them stood there for a minute, looking bewildered at the wreckage.
When Barfok started to kneel, Voryn held up his hand to stop her. "Leave it."
"But--"
"I'll send a servant," Voryn pinched the bridge of his nose. "You should get back to bed before you break anything else."
She blushed. She was still crying, her cheeks shiny with a film of tears and snot, her big grey eyes fixed accusingly on Voryn and her lips trembling with the effort of keeping herself quiet. Thoroughly embarrassed, Voryn turned and started walking away from the broken platter, and he gave a word of thanks to his ancestors when he heard Barfok following.
The awkward silence persisted until they reached the chamber allocated to her. Voryn stood beside the door and she shuffled in like a prisoner, her head hanging low and one hand raised to her face. She clearly expected Voryn to leave her there, appropriately coralled; when he lingered she peeked over a snot-covered sleeve at him.
Leaving him, unfortunately, to try and restart the conversation."How's your back?"
"It's fine."
"I noticed you didn't drink your tea. It will help with the pain."
"My back's fine. It doesn't hurt."
"The healer said that most of your skin was gone." A dangerous impulse decision-- "May I look?"
She stared at him dumbly.
"I'm trained as a healer."
Still, no movement.
"Ysmir will want to know how you're faring."
She turned away from him and shrugged off her robe, letting it fall to the floor, and then she pulled her stringy hair over her shoulder to leave her neck and back free. Her torso was bound in wet bandages, stinking of ointment, watery red with seepage.
Realising too late what he'd signed himself up for, Voryn approached her and gingerly pinched the edge of the uppermost bandage, at the base of her neck, pulling it away from the burns beneath.
Two months swam unbidden to his mind. Two months and change ago, most of the skin had been burned off of Barfok's back, and-- apparently-- she'd then walked across half of Tamriel without ever having it treated. There was infection, as one would expect, even the small section he'd exposed at the top of her back was laced through with pus. Pink new skin had formed at the edges but failed to take root in the wreckage. It was captivating, in the sense that only a healer would find disgusting things captivating.
Barfok stood still through all of this, her face in her hands, still stifling tears. Feeling absurdly guilty, Voryn smoothed the bandages back over the wound.
"You're very lucky," he said.
This-- this-- of all things, earned a reaction. "Lucky?" she uttered, tearing herself away from his touch. "Lucky!"
"This should have killed you--"
"I ent lucky, I'm cursed! How can you say I'm lucky?"
"I only mean that you shouldn't have been able to survive for two months in this state!"
This stopped her dead. She stared at him, tears pouring down her face.
"Two months?" she squeaked.
"That's how long it's been since…" At least Voryn had the grace to hesitate over the words, "The incident at… your family's home. Did you not know it's been that long?"
She shook her head. "I--" her voice faltered, and it took her a few attempts to form words before she managed to admit: "I didn't know there was still such thing as time."
All Voryn could do was let that rest between them; permit the unfamiliar, awkward grief of this interloper to sit on the floor of the guest chambers, oozing throughout the room.
"I'm sorry for your loss," he finally offered, not knowing what else to say.
"Me too," Barfok hung her head.
"You know, I come from a large family, too. I have seven brothers. They all still live here, in fact, at Kogoruhn, and we're very close."
"That's a lot of brothers. I've only got the three, and three sisters--" She stopped herself, "I mean, I had. Six."
Voryn nodded at that.
"But I would've had seven, like you. Ma wanted one more. Only… you know."
"I know."
"I'm sorry I broke your plate."
"Don't concern yourself with that. You're Ysmir's guest, for now." He gestured ambiguously to her form. "Prioritise yourself with resting. I'll have more tea brought to you, it will help."
Barfok turned away from him again, shuffling towards the unmade bed in the far corner. So Voryn's attempt at building rapport had also failed spectacularly; he was beginning to think that this entire fact-finding mission might be best chalked up to a failure, and that dealing with one of his troublesome brothers may actually be the preferable course of action here. Somehow the notion seemed less unappealing than before.
Still, unwilling to call a complete defeat, he lingered in the doorway until Barfok had crawled into her bed, and when she'd settled in, sitting upright, he asked with all the tact he could muster: "May I ask, how did you survive those wounds? Do you know?"
Deshaan. The monsoon. Everything is wet, wet, wet. The sky oozes, the ground is marsh. Buildings drip and plants wilt with rain. Rocks gleam and roads effuse mud.
In Mournhold, the vast storm-sewers beneath the city churn. The streets rumble as rain pours through subterranean rivers. The constant apocalyptic crash of water being channeled away from houses and out into lush fields drowns out the soggy dripping of the low-hanging clouds. When rain does not bucket down, it drizzles; when it does not drizzle, it mists. It is never dry, in this season, in Deshaan. It cannot be escaped.
Barfok stays on in Mournhold. She stays past the feast she was invited to, she stays past the departure of the Tongue whose presence she was invited to ward off. She stays, though Almalexia does not want her to stay and actually seems desperate for her to leave, obviating her fiance's return with so many aimless hand gestures and ambiguous political entreaties. It's not that Barfok's unwelcome here, but… Nothing against her personally, however… Delicate political situation, change on the wind, Almalexia's options limited considering her current situation. Bad look, for the recently betrothed of up-and-coming Nerevar to be cavorting with a Jarl. No longer Jarl Almalexia that Barfok's worrying over, not even kaansejer, just Nerevar's fiance making vague motions with her left hand and sounding more bitter about the dismissal than Barfok is.
Barfok listens to all of this very sympathetically and then she proceeds to completely ignore it. Well, let Almalexia remember how powerless she is in this world of Tongues, maybe it'll sweeten her feelings towards her would-be rebel husband.
Almalexia is not defenceless, and to her credit, it takes Barfok a while to slip the two Shouts that Almalexia's cordially assigned to watch her every move. Longer still to shake takes the spymaster, who manages to follow Barfok for three days before Barfok loses him by un-making a cornerclub wall. Barfok, who's big and clumsy and loud as any Nord, is not very good at going about in stealth, but she's never been afraid to learn new things either. There are Nords enough in Mournhold, Nerevar's brewing rebellion or no, that when she dresses down she can go mostly unremarked-upon. Wrap herself up in the raincloak the Hlaalu gifted her, go barfoot like the locals in the ever-damp streets.
Mournhold is used to the monsoon. The true locals content themselves to being drenched through, going about near-naked in light linen garments that can take the deluge, while the more delicate and more foreign have their spoils of parasols and netch-leather cloaks. So the streets are busy as ever, if not even more busy, with subterranean life forced above-ground by the seasonal flood. The second city, the Mournhold Underground, has been temporarily relocated onto every available alleyway and street-corner, so that the sprawling cosmopolitan roads have changed into a maze of awnings and temporary shelters and new market stalls. A glut of dripping, cloud-covered civilisation, capable of swallowing even a Tongue.
So that's where Barfok enjoys her newfound anonymity. Purchasing street-food in bad Chimeris, perusing market stalls, letting herself be conned by tricksters with card-games. She lets pickpockets slip the coin-purse from her belt, then hums a note to have it returned to her and follows them around to enjoy their confusion. She spends a while at a seller of counterfit Daedric Artefacts and impresses its unscrupulous shopkeep by explaining why his Black Book of Herma-Mora is a clear fake; this earns her a free soul-gem to buy her silence and an invitation to a secret meeting that evening. The entry key is the very soul-gem that she was gifted, which supposedly contains the soul of a particular Daedroth.
This invitation, to the secret meeting, Barfok mulls over later, while wandering a market street and eating a scrib-roll. Oh, she's no longer a child, wrought with shame, she no longer cringes at the eyes profligating in every shadow. But still, what does a Tongue have to do with Daedric Cultists?
Then, maybe it's not a bad idea. A new identity for herself. They're saying the so-called Nerevar's raising a rebellion; they're saying he's got Mournhold on his side now, managed to snatch Almalexia's hand; they're saying he's going to throw all of the Nords out of Morrowind. All of them? The Jarls-- Barfok and her ilk-- fair enough. But the man peddling mammoth-cheese on the corner, or the Mournhold palace's head groundskeeper, or the young woman who spoke only Chimeris and cheated Barfok at a cups-game? What have they got to do with it? And if Barfok threw aside her Jarl's mantle, left Narsis to the fretting Hlaalu and signed herself up as a real spooky Daedric Cultist, would she get kicked out, too? What about Jurgen, with his Telvanni wife and his magically-inclined children? What about half-Nord Almalexia herself? What gives them the right?
Distracted by such self-pitying thoughts, Barfok hardly notices that the matter is made for her when a thief slips the soul-gem from her pocket. But she notices still.
She turns her head slightly, watching as the thief pushes through the crowd ahead of her; an orphan, slight, small, wrapped in a raincloak, head hunched. She follows the thief through the crowd, watching as they turn a corner into an alley. Then and only then does she sing out-- not even a word, only the prefix of the word, but she's sung Mournhold's bones into gibbering messes already and they get her meaning.
The soul-gem is back in her pocket, but Barfok still follows the thief around the corner, into the alley. The alley leads immediately to a small garden, a few trees around a plot of land full of fragrant herbs, hemmed in on either side by tall buildings. The thief is just ahead, stopped beneath one of the trees, his hand at his hip.
He gropes at his empty pocket and looks up to see Barfok. His eyes are wide, his expression bewildered. With his cloak thrown away from his face, Barfok finds it startlingly hard to tell anything about him, up to the fact that of whether it's really a him; he's slight, white-haired, underfed like an orphan, though he seems as ageless as he is sexless. He beckons to her and Barfok, hands in her own trousers, one wrapped around her soul-gem, saunters close.
"How did you do that?" demands the thief.
"Dunno what you mean," Barfok replies.
"I stole something from you," the thief insists, in a voice as androgynous as his face, "And now I don't have it. It was in my hand and now it's not. What did you do?"
Barfok blinks at him, keeping her face slack. "Eh?" Feigning bewilderment, she pulls the soul-gem from her pocket and shows it to him. "You mean this?"
"Yes! How did you get it back?"
"Think you're confused," Barfok tells him slowly, "You ent never stole a thing from me."
"But I did," insists the thief. "I stole it and now I haven't stolen it. It was done and now it's not done. How did you do that?"
"You're confused, little elf. You ent…"
Then Barfok pauses. Blinks once.
"Wait, I know you. I saw you at court. Didn't I?"
The thief shrugs his own narrow shoulders, crosses his arms. "Please, I want to know how you did that. How you un-did that. Tell me!"
"What was your name-- Nerevar's little friend! Vivec, right?"
Now Barfok only feels bewildered; Vivec, on the other hand, seems impatient. The strange little courtier had been introduced by Almalexia as Nerevar's advisor, though what advice the emaciated orphan could offer a would-be rebel leader was lost on Barfok. To be fair, Vivec had seemed much younger in the court, among nobles, shrunken into hir too-fine clothing and doing hir best to vanish into the crowd. This Vivec, the pickpocket, seems to be perfectly in his element; standing tall and energetic like a dagger balanced on its tip, staring at Barfok with keen golden-brown eyes.
"That was the thu'um," Vivec says, "Right, Barfok?"
Barfok takes a half-step back. She feels distinctly foolish, like she was just caught in the middle of a prank. "Eh," she scratches the back of her head. "Would you look at the weather? Reckon it's about to rain-- rain more-- I ought to head in."
"Wait." Vivec darts forwards and grabs her arm. "You can stand under here, with me."
And Barfok does. For some reason, she lets Vivec drag her beneath the low canopy of the tree.
The leaves are rustling with the constant rain, a steady, melodic dripping from a thousand layers, melding with the chatter of the market and the underfoot roar of the sewers. Everything seems quieter under here, more muted. Barfok finds herself standing close to Vivec, though there's plenty of room; he is shorter than her and won't look at her, his face half-hidden by his ragged white hair.
"It'll lighten up soon," Vivec promises, gazing out at the rain. "Then you can go."
"And you'll go report me to Almalexia, no doubt," Barfok huffs. "Get me kicked out of the whole city for not having my papers or what-such."
"Ha. Ayem's driving herself mad, trying to hunt you down. I think she's worried you'll sabotage her sewers or something."
"What do I have to do with her sewers! I've been shopping. It's a great time for it."
"War mindset." Vivec glances up at her. "She's waiting to be attacked, I think. She's frustrated it hasn't happened yet."
"War mindset." Barfok looks at where Vivec had been looking, at the alley entrance, the over-crowded streets, the market awnings. "So is that what this is, little elf? Reconnaissance? Scouting the enemy's abilities? Aye, it'll frighten your Nerevar a deal, I'll bet, that he can't help himself to my trinkets. He'll have to buy his own damned little rocks."
To her surprise, this makes Vivec laugh. "You're right, Nerevar doesn't want what he can't steal. Only he thinks of it as taking back what's rightfully his."
"Almalexia said you're his advisor?"
"More like his translator… his language tutor, I guess. I taught him Dwemeris."
Now it's Barfok's turn to look to Vivec in surprise. "You speak Dwemeris?"
"Enough of it. But he gets by on his own now."
"I've met some of them. The dwarves."
"Really?"
"Just a few times. They've got the same musical notes as us."
"As… the Nords?"
"Nay, as the Tongues. Same scale, same meanings. I watched Ysmir have a meeting with them, a few times… they spoke entirely by humming and playing an instrument, the meaning was just in the sounds."
"And you speak like that too, right? The meaning's in the sounds."
They're looking at each other, now, both standing close to the trunk of the tree. Vivec has startling eyes, brighter than the gloom surrounding them, and Barfok finds it hard to meet that gaze.
"Something like that," Barfok looks away again, making an ambiguous gesture with her hand. "It's all just sound, ent it? What the dwarves and we do."
Vivec leans back against the tree. "Why do you call them dwarves?"
"It goes back to the first Atmorans. You know, they were bigger than us, the Atmorans, we had to shrink down over time to fit on Tamriel. In Atmora, everything was bigger, the trees were wide as houses and a single glacier was more vast than the very Sea of Ghosts--" Barfok breaks herself off with a laugh. "But you didn't ask for a story."
Vivec is watching her still. "Tell me."
So she, too, leans back against the tree. "Well, Atmora froze and the Atmorans saw they wouldn't be able to stay for much longer. So they chopped down their giant trees and whittled giant boats out of them. So vast were the trees on Atmora that a single boat could fit five mammoths on it, plus the Atmoran tending them-- but only the one Atmoran, mind, two would've sunken it before it left the bay. So these Atmorans whittled their big trees into boats and loaded aboard all their mammoths and then they all set out, sailing south towards Tamriel.
"Well, like I said, they all had to travel one Atmoran to a boat, and the Sea of Ghosts is a mean mistress. So as they crossed over there was a great storm, and all the Atmorans lost sight of each other. Still, they knew they ought to go south, so they kept on sailing alone. Many weeks were they lost at sea, living only on the milk of their mammoths and all the flowers they'd packed for those mammoths. (Mammoths only eat flowers, mind, flowers and tussocky grass.)
"And finally, the Atmorans reached the coast of Skyrim. But they'd all been separated, so each to a man was alone with just his mammoths. Now Atmorans are solitary as the best of them, and no man is alone who has five mammoths to his name. So the brave and simple Atmorans figured they'd just get on with things. Start wandering around looking for flowers to feed their mammoths, not knowing if they were the only Atmoran to make it over to this whole new land.
"One Atmoran-- his name's lost to time, but let's call him Gfuu, which means goat-- found himself wandering somewhere east of the Whiterun plains, all alone like the rest of them. He found a nice place for his mammoths, and he found flowers, and he found a warm land that weren't so frozen as Atmora was. But he found no other people, none like him, none unlike him. He were just on his own with his mammoths.
"Now, loneliness is hard to abide by. It's an awful thing, to be completely alone. The Atmorans were raised to hear the Qethsegolle, so they could hear the chatter of the world all around them, but in those days we hadn't been taught the thu'um yet and they couldn't speak back.
"Loneliness is a quiet thing, too, little elf. You lose your voice when you're lonely. You forget how to speak, and if you can't speak, you can't really think. If you can't think, you can't even be. That's the frightening thing about being alone, even for a man with five mammoths. With nobody around him to talk to, Gfuu couldn't think, and as the months rolled on he could feel himself fading away, like he'd forget to even be.
"Now, Gfuu didn't want to fade away into just another of the earth-bone, even for lack of someone to talk to. So one day, to make sure he was still real, he started to sing.
"At first he sang with words. He sang all the ballads of his childhood. He sang about the giant forests and the giant ice-sheets and the mountains that reached to the sky. He sang about mammoths and hares and foxes. He sang with words, for a while, and then he ran out of words and he just started singing with tones. He kulned across the plains and he hummed while he cooked his dinner, and he let the tones speak for him about his loneliness and his mammoths and his home.
"And then a funny thing happened. One evening, while Gfuu made his mammoth cheese and sang and whistled and hummed, the earth opened up around him, and out came a bunch of people!
"They were funny little people, with skin of bronze and pointed ears. Some were made of metal, and some were only clothed in metal. All to a man were half Gfuu's size. The funny little people surrounded Gfuu, but they didn't interrupt his singing. They stood and listened to Gfuu's humming, nodding their heads in time with the beat.
"And when Gfuu stopped humming, the little folk started to hum back. They hummed the same songs: of loneliness, of homeland, of the deep dark snug earth they called home. They hummed the tones of mystery and discovery, of dark and light. And then, to Gfuu's delight, they hummed of other Atmorans wandering those very plains.
"So it was that the Dwemer became the friends of the first Atmorans. They helped the Atmorans find each other, and were gifted many mammoths in thanks. The Atmorans have learned since that all men of Tamriel are small, even their own Skyrim-born descendants, but the Dwemer were the very first friends of our ancestors back when we didn't know that yet, and we've called them dwarves ever since."
The rain has lightened. Vivec is a rapt audience, standing close to Barfok and gazing out at the alley, a small smile on his lips. When the tale concludes he allows a silence to settle gently over them, filled by the wet, dripping leaves and the chatter of the market, the rush of water below them, the chatter of the earth-bones that only Barfok can hear.
Finally, Vivec speaks. "Did you just make that up?"
"Damn!" Barfok feels her face heat. "It's that obvious? I'm getting rusty, ent I?"
"No, no-- it was incredible." Vivec leaps off of the tree and grabs her hand, nearly frantic, as if he'd been worried that Barfok were about to flee. His fingers are thin and his palm cool. "I mean it. It was amazing."
"Aye, well--"
"And I get it." Vivec squeezes her hand. "Loneliness is not an absence of people, it's an absence of shared language. When Gfuu sang, he had a shared language with the Dwemer, and he was no longer alone."
Barfok shakes her head. "Eh… sure, but that ent the most important bit."
"Without language, we cease to be."
"You'll hear that in any Tongue's tales. That's the thu'um, little elf, a tale about what is."
Vivec realises, belatedly, that he's still holding onto Barfok's hand; he releases it, but he doesn't pull away. "Is that your thu'um, too?"
"All thu'um's a tale."
"But your-- your undoing. You can change the story of what is."
Barfok waves her hand; she feels oddly embarrassed. "Nay, not that. I ent Aldiun! Nobody can change what's been."
"Then what do you change?"
"Only… what's been made out of what is. How do you know what's happened, anyway? Just by what it's caused. I can't change what it's been. I change the outcome."
There is an expression on Vivec's face that's impossible to comprehend. Fear, perhaps-- no-- hope? The day is overcast but his face looks as though it has the sun on it. He's standing too close.
"I want to change the outcome," Vivec says abruptly.
"The outcome of what?"
But Vivec doesn't answer that; he turns away, putting his back to Barfok, his shoulders hunched up and his arms crossed. Barfok gets the impression that what he feels goes far beyond anything she's said or done. Uncomfortable in the face of what's starting to seem like grief, she reaches out and touches his shoulder with two fingertips, very gently.
"Are you lonely, Vivec?" she finds herself asking. "Hey, now."
"Gfuu had his mammoths, in your tale," Vivec replies. "And he had the earth-bones. But the mammoths could not speak to him, and the earth-bones could not listen. And that was his loneliness, that nobody spoke to him, and nobody could listen. I taught Nerevar to speak, but nobody has ever taught him to listen." He leans into her touch. "Who listens to you, Barfok?"
The question catches her by surprise; she flattens her hand against Vivec's shoulder. "I'm a Tongue," she replies, "It's not a lack of listening, for me, it's the lack of those who'll speak."
A perfectly ironic silence settles between them. Barfok's hand lingers against Vivec's shoulder, her pale, chewed-over knuckles big and ungainly agains the thin dark leather of his cloak, his head turned away from her. She's unsure whether to remove it. She's unsure whether she wants to.
"Nerevar returns tomorrow," Vivec finally says, sounding very quiet. "You should leave when he does." Barfok opens her mouth to reply, but Vivec cuts her off-- "Can I stay with you until you leave?"
"So Almalexia gets her spy on me after all." Barfok pulls her hand away.
"It's not that!" Vivec turns back to her-- are his cheeks flushed? "You're good at stories, Barfok. The way you…" he swallows, "I want to tell you a story, and I want you to fix it for me."
"A story?"
"It's the story of my life. I want you to change it. The narrative, the moral, the meaning. I-- I need it to mean something. I need you to change the outcome."
Barfok is lost for words; she lets out a soft laugh and shakes her head. "My thu'um doesn't work that way, little elf. I can't just--"
"I don't need your thu'um, I need you as a storyteller. Teach me how to speak like that. Help me rewrite it." Vivec does not reach for her again but his gaze will not leave her. "Please."
How young is Vivec? Not a child, no, and elves age different to men, but how young is Vivec? As young as Barfok herself was, when she crawled to Ysmir the Silent bleeding and begged with all her heart to be taught the thu'um? If she says no, she wonders, will Vivec start to scream and scream and scream?
She realises that she does not want to hear Vivec scream. It's too much for her guilty heart to bear.
"Buy me a drink and we can go over it," she relents, and Vivec's face outshines the gloomy day around them.
this is original fiction it's a little drabble set in one of my worldbuilding projects the premise of which is basically "academia but everyone's a steppe nomad"
Moving season belongs to the family; traveling, though often done with company, is always done alone.
So Nanu is setting off alone again. It will be her third winter on the road: there's a gathering in the southern deserts where she will share her work with scholars from across the country, and from there it's on to the temperate highlands, to one of her people's greatest settlements, where they have built the complex mechanical devices she needs for the next stage of her work. The desert will be new to her; the settlement she has visited before, but it is always unfamiliar.
She should not be as nervous as she is, to be setting out again. Her project team has been settled in its current location for only a few years, and the time she has lived with them is even shorter. She was brought in by her supervisor only two years ago and is still, so to speak, finding her feet. She's young, only a student, with no accolades to distinguish her among the group. Her closest relationships are with the ancient beings they've been studying.
And yet.
Nanu is packing, moving about her yurt in a slow circle. She is traveling only, so her tent and many of her possessions will stay here, though like most of her people she has kept her possessions few. Her jewelry will stay, and her samples, and her summer clothes, and her things for spinning yarn. A shelf stacked with souvenirs of previous homes will stay too. Her lyre comes with her. A cherished doll, also, if it fits in her luggage. She touches her things lightly as she moves between them, bidding them with her fingertips to stay and to wait for her until she returns.
There's something melancholy about the disarray, about packing and packing alone. Her fellow students will be in their own yurts, going through their own private packing rituals, whatever those may be. Do they also bid goodbye to their things? Would they think her silly for doing so? Is the journeying as hard for them? They have all come from far away, all grown up in the saddle and upon the road, all known no home but their ever-shifting projects. Is she uniquely weak, that she now wanders aimlessly around her ephemeral dwelling, petting statuettes?
Suddenly she feels sheepish before her things. She averts her face, blushing, and exits her yurt.
The air outside is dry and so cool that it stings her hot cheeks. Her yurt is one of twenty or so, arranged in a loose circle. Most face inwards towards the centre of the circle, where their field laboratory and working-space has been erected beneath wide sails of canvas. She turns away from this, looking instead beyond their campsite, towards the excavation trenches. Their site is at the bottom of an ancient lakebed that stretches out on every side of them, so vast that the mountains it's set within look small as a child's teeth on the horizon.
She breathes deeply, washing her nostalgia away with smoke and the sharp scent of oncoming winter. She makes her way around the back of her yurt, to where she's left her paintings to dry.
Her paintings depict the history of the lake, as they've researched it, and they are what she'll present to the gathering scholars in the desert. There are three of them, showing the history of the lake that their research has uncovered. There was a great civilisation here, once: they've found its bones deep, deep in the mud, walls of a city nourished by the fertile drained bed of an even older lake. Then the lake filled, and this civilisation was drowned. Why was it filled? Some think the ice came, great tongues of it choking the single outlet at the far end of the valley. Others think there was a landslide, that the outlet was choked with rocks instead. Others still say that an enemy of the great city drowned them deliberately.
What Nanu's paintings say has nothing to do with all that. Her research has found that pine trees were the first to grow again upon the lakebed, when it drained and uncovered its vast plains once more. It's taken her a year to discover this, on her knees, sifting through mud for flecks of decaying wood and squinting through lenses in search of pollen. Such is the nature of their lives.
She wants to make some adjustments, but when she rounds the back of her yurt, she finds her paintings already under scrutiny. Her supervisor stands imperiously before them, his neck craned down, his hand resting thoughtfully upon his chin. He does not look up when she freezes before him.
"You could've chosen brighter colours," says her supervisor.
"I wanted to make it look cold," Nanu defends herself, though her heart isn't in it. "The ice dam theory."
"Mm. You're sure that's what you want to present?"
"It's what's true, isn't it?"
"Is it?"
Nanu approaches his side, mimics his pose, looking down at her paintings. The panels are indeed cool, dark, glacial. She'd thought it was a clever choice at the time.
"No pine trees," says her supervisor, and he waves towards the first panel: the Ancient City and all they've discovered about it, its great walls and buoyant gardens. "Is that deliberate?"
"Yes. We've found no evidence."
"So they came only after the lake drained? What does that tell us?"
"It was colder," Nanu crosses her arms, "When the lake drained, I mean. These types of pine trees don't like the warmth."
"How do you know that?"
Now Nanu knows that he's just teasing her, and she blows air into her cheeks, crossing her arms more tightly. "The trees told me themselves. I asked."
He glances at her, snorts a laugh, then looks back at her paintings. The city; the lake, ice-ringed, no sign of the drowned paradise visible upon its silver surface; a dense forest with tops sharp as the mountains beyond them.
"Well, be ready to argue." Her supervisor finally looks up, not at Nanu but at the wide plain that surrounds them, where an ancient metropolis once lay. "The ice dam theory isn't so popular these days."
"Mm." She follows his gaze out, towards their excavation sites, the trenches, the empty plain beyond. The ground rises irregularly in places, mounds that only look conspicuous to a trained eye. And this, those mounds, all that remains of a city larger than anything their civilisation has achieved.
She tries to imagine it-- a city!-- thousands upon thousands of people, many of whom probably spent their whole lives surrounded by these same jagged mountains. They've found very little evidence of foreign trade in their expeditions, and is it any wonder? The floodplains are fertile, the mountains rich in ore-- they would have had everything they needed, no need for journeys outwards or even for visitors. No need for anything at all.
And yet.
Her supervisor is turning away. "Sir," Nanu says quickly, "Do you think they left?"
"Hm?" He looks back at her. "Who?"
"The people in the city. Did they know--" she glances out at the plain, "I mean, anyone can see this is a lake. Was a lake. Should be a lake. So-- did they know their city would flood? Did they try to evacuate? Or did they just…" wave her hands, "Stay here, forever, and let themselves be drowned? All the skeletons we've found…"
She doesn't even know what she's trying to propose; she trails off, but her supervisor is already nodding.
"That's an interesting theory," he replies. "Whether they attempted evacuations. You could be right, and they didn't. Let's have a look at some of the burials when you get back."
He touches her shoulder, briefly, and then he walks away. Nanu takes a deep breath and looks down at her paintings again.
She hasn't drawn the city well enough, she decides. It's not bright enough, not opulent, not perfect, not bounteous… then again, who could possibly imagine such a place? What city could be so perfect that its people would just live there forever, and never want for anything more?
Not that she has the time to touch it up, she decides; she needs to pack. She has a long journey ahead.
Have you considered writing for Tamriel Rebuilt? Lore books, World building, Quest design You'd be great at it!
i've never really considered it because it seems like it'd be a lot of work and i'm not really sure what i could actually... offer? i have no experience game-writing outside of like, writing rp campaigns for my friends. even though i've toyed with the idea of making mods or some sort of interactive story in the past, getting involved with a big project seems way too daunting ^^;
i also don't think my writing would make particularly good lorebooks, outside of a few exceptions maybe. (i'd absolutely die if this story about clavicus vile made it into a mod or something as a lorebook, omg.) so unfortunately there just doesn't seem to be an easy way for me to get involved in something like that and i'm very busy these days
that said, if someone approached me wanting to use some of my hcs in their project, i'd be thrilled!! i'd probably even be happy to supply original writing for it, like things that would actually make good lorebooks or quest objects or whatever. i think that'd be fun, i'm just too shy and lazy to make it happen myself, lol
The first Tongue to die in the invasion goes in silence. Shadows take him from this world, and in the morning, his body is found in his freshly-conquered chambers, his throat torn to shreds.
This sends rumours flying. Rumours in the stones of the walls, who witnessed it; rumours picked up by the wind that whistles against the window-frame, carried out into the streets. By noon all of Ebonheart is aflurry. The Nords are angry, but not frightened; the qethsegolle are frightened, but only of the Nords. And all say: assassin. They say: secret-murder, shadow-knife, black blade. The word they use is Mephala.
Even the Atmorans hear of it. Elja hears it first, while picking through the ruins of the city. She sings it to Ingridal on the city wall, and Ingridal passes it to Vashina in the field, and from Vashina, word flies to Mem-yet Chemua. The invasion is swelling like a wave in the shallows, by then; Mem-yet came too late for the conquest of Ebonheart but there are still the scraps of armies to defeat, dwarves to freeze from their burrows, refugees to slaughter. Minor things. They are waiting for Ysmir to lead his forces up north before they all descend on Mournhold and they are restless. Boredom does not suit the Atmorans. When they hear of tthe murder of Alabar Kings-Clever, they are interested.
A hunt, they jest to each other-- it is a jest, because they all remember Atmora, and understand how ridiculous is the idea that there is anything in this verdant wasteland worth hunting. Still, they like their jests. Only a few of them have participated in Vrage's grand crusade, so there is only a few of them to gather in the shadow of one of Ebonheart's ruined towers, the day after the Tongue was assassinated. Elja, Ingridal, Vashina, Mem-yet; the four of them erect a small shrine from the rubble, and they capture an elf to slay upon it. They paint each other in blood and they sing of Kyne and her son Hir. They make jokes, darkly, about their throats being ripped out. They place bets on which of them will succeed in hunting the quarry before the others, and decide that the victor will be the first to storm Mournhold.
It is Elja as the oldest who sings out the call to hunt. Her thu'um shakes the broken stones of Ebonheart, and the bones of the earth echo back: Mephala.
Nothing upon Tamriel is worth hunting. Its bones are too talkative, the towers sing too loudly to hide a path. For those who can listen, to find any quarry is trivial-- and Mem-yet is better than any at listening. She goes first to the site of the murder, still uncleaned, and smears her hands in the dead man's blood. When she touches her wet fingers to the walls they remember the event as if it were happening again, and they hum it, and she hums in return. She follows the directions she's given, leaving bloody fingerprints in her wake.
Mephala is the word for spider. It is the word for a secret, creeping thing. Mem-yet has been told by Vrage that the elves are also secret, creeping things, that they love to kill from the shadows. He ran his hand over the back of her bare neck and warned her that she ought to guard herself in Morrowind, lest an elf take her from behind.
It is such an elf that has murdered Alabar. Spiders, Mem-yet understands, do not like to crawl far, especially when they are in danger. They prefer to retreat to their webs and hide.
This spider's web is down by the river-- the river tells her so. Mem-yet finds it in one of the elven longhouses, which is tall rather than long. With great reluctance, loath of enclosed spaces, she allows herself into a stinking hovel of perfume and cusions and cowering elven girls hiding behind inefficient daggers. A word makes short work of the girls, turning their flesh to ice, and then Mem-yet follows the muttering stones through a hallway, a narrow door, and down a stairway into the bowels of this filthy foreign city, where murder is thick in the air. The Nords shed so much blood upon taking the place that it's leaking through the stairway's earthen walls.
At the base of the stairway, Mem-yet finds a shrine, and she finds her murderess.
The shrine is a foreign goddess, many-armed, abstract and corporeal all at once; her face is unfamiliar but the air whispers Mephala. At the foot of this shrine kneels an elven woman drenched in old blood, a bloody black dagger clutched in one hand, her eyes closed in ecstasy and her face tilted towards the dripping roof. Around the woman, candles.
Just as the stones lead her here, they sing of Mem-yet's arrival. The elven woman hears it. She ceases her whispering and turns her face.
She looks exhausted, delirious and triumphant all at once; her mouth is rimmed with blood as if she'd eaten of Alabar's heart. She says something to Mem-yet in a language that Mem-yet does not understand, and then she laughs a bitter laugh.
Mem-yet draws the hand-axe from her belt.
The woman says something else, staring defiantly up at Mem-yet. There is the dagger in her hand, but she does not seem inclined to use it. She says something else, something spiteful, twisting her bloody mouth as she does.
Mem-yet tilts her head to the side. She glances at the shrine, then back at the elf-- her quarry, she understands, but this is no beast worth hunting. The goddess of the shrine is as unimpressed as Mem-yet herself is.
But the elven woman follows Mem-yet's gaze to the shrine, and for a moment, in the dim candle-light, Mem-yet recognises her expression: love. Love, and relief, excitement-- homecoming. This is a homecoming ritual, whatever Mem-yet has interrupted her quarry in, and the jealousy could ruin her.
Whatever is about to happen, this assassin will get to go home.
The thought of it is hateful. Bitterly hateful. Mem-yet is no magician, she cannot trap a mortal's soul, but she is seized with a spiteful need to keep this elf, to force it forever upon this damnable Nirn with her. She raises her axe, she takes a step forwards, she inhales to form the most evil word known to her, she--
She goes unnoticed. The elf, staring adoringly at her goddess, raises that knife and cuts her own throat.
The first elf to kill a Tongue dies in silence. She falls to the ground at Mem-yet's feet, her throat erupting blood around her own blade; Mem-yet watches her die and feels only terribly jealous.
The stones are singing with blood, drowned in it; the statue of Mephala is silent. Only Mem-yet is atonal, her breath ragged to her own ears, her half-formed thu'um dissolving into a tuneless whine that sounds almost like a baby's cry. Sick with bitterness, she closes her own eyes and crouches by her self-slain quarry, dipping her hand into that rushing blood, finding no answers and no comfort in the flow.
Her sisters will not know of her failure, here. By the time Mem-yet has finished carving this corpse into strips, not even the bones of the earth will remember who really killed the last Night Mother. But the conquest of Mourhold will always feel like an unearned prize to her, and the city itself, a pittance compared to what treasures the elves claim.
The Alessian Hogithum, as they call it, takes place in the early summer, the same season as when Barfok's world came to an end. The Whiterun plains are beautiful this time of the year, more beautiful than they have any right to be. On the journey in, the ash-bitten dry Nords of Morrowind journey through ebullient overgrown plains, sprayed with explosions of wildflowers in every colour imaginable, and fields of wheat rippling in the wind like waves over the Inner Sea. She had thought this place would remember them, remember the ruin they wrought last year, when they brought the Blight down upon Kastav not so far away-- but no, the world is peaceful, the early summer's life is joyous, and the wheat does not whisper even when Chemua passes.
It's the early summer of her childhood, here, though the months bid only spring, the year is an unusually hot one. The blazing sun evokes the lazy midyears long lost to her, when she was but a plump young girl sprawled out beneath the trees, groggy and sated on wild strawberries. It is all too sweet, and far, far too bitter. She's worn Mournhold silks for the heat but they cling to her skin. Along the road they stop by a pool beneath a waterfall, and the youngest Tongues of their travelling party take turns flinging themselves from the top of it, plunging through a summer-warm void to a death that would be certain if not for the feim they Shout on the way down. Childish games of budding tyrants in their early twenties.
It should feel comradely, but it doesn't. Barfok feels oddly disconnected from it all, and the others aren't helping. Jurgen is diplomatic but finds them too young and naive to be very interesting; Kjoric is a right old miserable letch; Ysmir is steady as always but also silent as always; Hoaga and Chemua, closest to her age and experience, vacillate rapidly between being thick as thieves and ignoring each other, but in both of these activities they are singularly obsessed with each other, and that leaves no room for her. No matter, because Barfok, meanwhile-- there's Herma-Mora, as always, eyes blossoming around her while she lurks up to her nose in the corner of the pool and watches Hoaga trying to force Chemua beneath the water. There's the ghosts of her laugh-shrieking baby siblings splashing in the goat trough.
But she's not lonely, despite the lovely summer weather. She's not lonely when they get to the gathering at the mountain opposite Monahven, so near to Hillgrundhofkah, though she has to try very hard to ignore the fact that, were she to climb to the top of the great stone temple, she'd be able to see the black smudge of Fokbarshofkah out among the verdant green. Fate, always kind to her, provides her with distraction enough. Not only is there distraction aplenty: Alessians! Reach-Tongues! The Silmoran Queen, guest of dishonour! There's Chemua, too, thoughtlessly discarded by Hoaga once the latter realised that the silk-clad Chimeris-speaking Mournholder is too embarrassing a companion for this noble event. He becomes her companion, close to her and miserable as when they were imprisoned in that dungeon together after they cursed the world. They get terribly, wretchedly drunk together, and Chemua produces some mushrooms he brought from Deshaan-- Sadrith Sheogor-- and Barfok sees dragons winding through the streets of Whiterun, and she wakes up face-down in a ditch.
She is too warm and the Hogithum is too long. The theological discussions fly over her aching head. They have no interest in her, she loses interest in them; when she is not too hungover to move, she follows Chemua around and watches him make a mess of his bonds with everyone who has ever loved him. The arguments with Hoaga, these funny folks from his time on Monahven-- only Custodian Lundga does not quarrel with him, but then again they only talk about horses together. She has a horse farm, it sounds like. Barfok half-eavesdrops on the conversation with her face planted in his back. Warm, claustrophobically warm-- the air reeks of pollen, of the fragrance of flowers and hay, of home.
Home. Home, home, her father's house, the smell of manure and warmth and wildflowers and wind and-- she understands, after a point, why she feels adrift here. The summer has reminded her that she's but a dumb little farmer's daughter, and she feels filthy, sitting about and talking philosophy when she ought to be herding the cows. She understands that this is also why she only feels comfortable with Chemua, who has to his own dismay remembered that he belongs in Mournhold first and foremost. It's nice, in a way-- the two of them flitting awkwardly about together, at the fringes of polite society, like a pair of despairing ghosts. Maybe they are ghosts, she muses, their corporeal bodies left rotting in that Whiterun dungeon.
She suggests it to him, too, and he doesn't disagree with her, or insult her for it. He shrugs and offers a, "Maybe."
"I don't feel alive," Barfok adds cheerfully.
"Mm. That's the hangover."
"Do you?"
"Feel hungover?"
"Just think about it. Maybe we died down there. Maybe they never saved us. Do you feel like you were saved?"
He doesn't. He doesn't even need to answer that; it's a rhetorical question, Barfok knows, she was in that dungeon too. He's taking it worse than she is-- her world was unmade before their capture, while his had to get ripped down again right there and then. It will kill Chemua, Barfok thinks, sure enough as the warm pleasant summer is going to kill her. The heat of the season makes everything feel so unreal. While their comrades bicker about philosophy, they are dying between these stone walls.Â
And then, at the final day of the Hogithum, Chemua borrows a couple of horses.
They set out in the morning. They don't discuss where they're going; Barfok leads the way and Chemua follows. It's hard to say whether this is because he understands her well enough to know what their mission is, or because he simply loves to ride horses and will be content no matter where they pursue this hobby. At any rate, after the stuffiness and the clamour of the Hogithum, the wide open plains must come as a relief to them both. The wind is stiff and crisp-cold where it rises off the thawing permafrost, the sky a limitless, blinding blue, streaked through with strands of cloud like sheep's wool snagged on a fence.
They ride without exchanging words. Chemua asks no questions, even as Barfok guides their long-legged dun-coloured Silmoran mounts onto progressively more Skyrimisk roads. They're heading south, towards the place where the Whiterun plain sneaks its fingers beneath the forested skirts of the distant mountains, and the roads are growing progressively more disused and squishier beneath the hoof. At some point, despite the silence, Chemua starts singing, quietly, and there's the thu'um in it-- Barfok realises that he's echoing off of the soil, goading the plants to reveal where the ground is firmer, and she recalls that he learned to ride on a farm further north upon these very same plains. Neat trick, that. She doesn't copy it; she can hear the qethsegolle as easily as he can, his voice charts a path for her, too.
But she must wonder what else is audible, when one turns their ears to the murmur of the spirits woven into the world's fabric. What ghosts whisper to each other upon the wind that, to her surprise, does not smell of ash. She herself hears all of them: her mother kulning across the fields for her to come home in the evening, and the bray of the cows, and the bleating of goats. Her baby sister singing, voice faint on the soft breeze that rustles the mane of her fine dun steed. And yes, she knows that these voices exist only in her own mind, that neither Chemua nor the myraid bones of the earth can hear them-- but who can say where is the line between memory and hallucination, hallucination and reality itself? She thinks sometimes that the earth-bones themselves are hallucinations, she and her fellow Tongues madmen to the last.
But what does that matter? Their words are reality. It is meaningless, in the end, whether only she or the whole world can hear her mother calling her home: she is being called home all the same.
Home. That smoldering ruins.
They come to it around midday, and almost by surprise, for Barfok doesn't recognise it. She'd somehow still expected it burning. Or-- or for there to be a monument, a blazing pyre, a chasm in the earth rent as wide as her grief. Anything. A catastrophe as vast as the world. No, it's not like that all, she sees-- they approach the mountains that framed her childhood and she sees only a plain, clamouring vegetation, wildflowers in every colour, early-summer softness like a blanket over everything. All that remains of Fokbarshofkah is a grass-coloured mound with shards of black peeking through.
There are signs: here is the ditch that used to lie just beyond the settlement gate. Here is the remains of a goat-pen. They find a strip of hard ground where the grass is paler and stunted, which was once the packed-earth road leading in, and their horses trod it with heads hanging low in reverence. The raised ground before them looks now more like a ruins: through tangles of thistle, burned beams poke through; a cluster of bluebells crown what Barfok thinks might've once been the chicken-coop.
At the place where the gate was she dismounts. She closes her eyes, there, inhales deeply, and tries to remember Fokbarshofkah as it was before her life ended.
Can she hear the bleating of goats and the shrieks of her siblings, the songs of working men? She can't, and this disarms her. Her memories, so clear for all the ther parts of her life, seem to shrink before the daunting reality of these too-peaceful ruins. It cannot be, and yet--Where is the grind of the millstone and the clanging of the smithy, the trundle of an old cart? She has heard these songs constantly in her head, in every moment of silence, in echoes, in her very dreams, and now that she stands at their grave--
The day is quiet, there is nothing but the rustle of wind through grass.
Run, her feet tell her. There's a panic in her at the absence of those ghosts. Her throat is tight, her hands tingling, and she feels her muscles tensing to send her charging forwards, into what remains of the ruins. She wants to believe she could unearth her father's laughter if she only plunged her hands deep enough beneath the earth. She closes her eyes, strains her ears to it-- nothing but wind and the buzzing of bees and a soft earthy thud as Chemua dismounts some ways behind her.
In desperation, she tunes her attention to the qethsegolle that make up the world, the language of making and unmaking the world:
How warm is the sun, croon the bluebells.
How cold the soil in our shade, argues the grass.
How nourishing the wood we've found here! sings a patch of clover.
She listens. She listens and finds that all this greenery has nothing to say about the murder of her family. They feed upon the ruins of this catastrophe and never once mention that it happened.
Throat tight, she turns and faces Chemua. Holding the reins of his horse, he's been watching her confront the ruins, his brow creased against the overbearing summer sun.
"Do you hear it?" Barfok demands, waving her hands at the un-devastation around them. "They don't-- don't even-- they have forgotten what happened here!"
She sees Chemua's eyes cut towards the ruins-- the purple thistles, the soft blue cornflowers, the outreaching red poppies and the gem-yellow daisies. "Yes. That's life."
"They shouldn't." Barfok turns her face back towards the ruins, now swallowed by verdant and overgrown vegetation. So innocently returning to the landscape, as if it were never here at all. "How dare they?" Then, her voice trembling, "... Show them."
She turns her back on her home while Chemua draws a breath.
She doesn't need to see it. She has seen the Blight before, and anyways, even without seeing, she would know the effect of those words of power by the venomous hatred in them alone. The thu'um can reshape the world, but this one is more subtle, and only a reminder: that Shor died to create the world, that everything is already dead and has only forgotten to rot.
Well, it's what that early summer deserves-- what does this world deserve for forgetting tragedy if not the Blight? What is the Blight except poorly expressed grief?
She does not watch. She goes back to her horse, flings an arm around its neck, and buries her face in its sweaty fur. For the second time she hides as her world dies around her.
They stopped to camp a safe distance from the Orange Road. Jauffre had finished his watch, and closed his eyes to leave Olof to his. Olof hadn’t rested well, but kept a sharp eye out for assassins — or more likely, more wolves.
Olof glanced at Martin, who sat against a tree. His eyes were closed, but he was thumbing through a rosary, his lips mouthing prayers to Akatosh.Â
“Can’t sleep?” Olof asked.
Martin paused in his count. “No,” he said, his eyes still closed. “I don’t particularly want to. I haven’t slept well since…you know.”
“I understand,” Olof said. Martin suspected he actually meant it. “Do you want to talk about it, Martin?”
Martin sighed and dropped the beads on his lap. “I’m not sure what there is to talk about, honestly. You were there, you know what happened.”
“Yes,” nodded Olof. “I’m sorry.”
Martin thought about Weynon, and the journey so far. “I almost didn’t feel anything when I saw Prior Maborel. I felt even less about the Mythic Dawn we slew in defense of the Priory, or the bandits we’ve run into along the way.”
“I understand.”
“I’m not sure you do, Olof,” snapped Martin quietly, so as not to wake Jauffre. “I was a farmer’s son, and then…a priest. I hadn’t seen many dead bodies before, much less killed anyone. You’re an adventurer, you’re already used to it.” Olof said nothing. “I feel so numb to it all. Does that make me a monster?”
“No,” said Olof. “Even if I don’t understand what it’s like for you, I know that you’re not a monster. Would you call me a monster?”
“Well…no, of course not. You’re more like a hero.”
Martin saw red under Olof’s sharp grey cheeks, and felt it heat up his own as well. “It’s just…” Martin struggled to find adequate words. “I’ve been through a lot the past few days, is all.”
“You’ll go through more, Your Highness, before all is said and done.”
Olof and Martin looked up at Jauffre, who had spoken. He continued: “You’ll be responsible for all of Tamriel soon as their Emperor. You must develop thicker skin to survive.”
“With all due respect —” Martin began.
“Leave him be, Jauffre!” said Olof, nearly shouting. “He’s just a man. And by no means a child, so don’t scold him like one.”
“Am I to care for what a murderer thinks of my abilities as Grandmaster of the Blades?” Olof fell silent. Martin glanced at him, confused. “Oh yes,” continued Jauffre. “I looked into you while you were gone. Only truly serious crimes are punished in the Imperial Prison. Patricide among them.”
“At least I’ve retrieved the Emperor!” Olof spat. “You lost the Amulet because you kept it in your bloody sock drawer!”
“Olof, Jauffre, please!” cried Martin. “That’s quite enough. Jauffre was only doing the best he could on short notice. And I’m sure Olof…regrets what happened with his father.” Martin didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. He certainly didn’t want to pry right now.
The two men simmered down a bit. Olof crossed his arms and tilted his head back, glancing at the stars through the leaves above, and asked, “Why did they come after the Amulet of Kings, anyway?”
Jauffre became suddenly thoughtful. “I’m not sure. Of course Uriel had enemies, and this was only the first successful assassination attempt on him and his sons. But how could they have known about Martin for the Kvatch attack? Or that we would bring him to Weynon? Perhaps they sought to kill me, instead.”
“Maybe,” said Martin, “there’s more importance to the Amulet than we realize.”
The conversation paused. Martin thought it disconcerting that not even Jauffre knew the answers to this mystery. “When we arrive at Cloud Ruler,” Martin said, breaking the silence, “I will study this. I’ve been a scholar before. Perhaps I can discover something in the library of the Blades.”
Jauffre and Olof both nodded. “Yes,” said Jauffre. “Perhaps.”
“Try to sleep, both of you,” said Olof. “I’ll keep watch, don’t worry.”
The rest of the night was uneventful, save for Martin’s fitful, restless sleep.
the last atmoran teaches her son to hear the earth-bones
-
When the night is still and warm, when the birds slumber and the stars twinkle bright in a big dark sky, the new mother ventures outside with her babe held her breast. Silent and barefoot she pads out of her shelter, and with her broad arms she shields her child from the teeming boughs of lush vegetation that reach out for the both of them. She goes on tip-toes, loathe to interrupt the riot of life that fills this place in the summer, and so the only sound of her passage is the happy cooing of her young son.
Deep in the forest she finds the meander of a broad, slow waterway. The canopy opens above the water, letting in pale moonlight. She alights on a large rock by the shore, then drops to a crouch in a puddle of that moonlight, and then sits, cross-legged, her shoulders hunched forwards, her long hair shrouding them both.
Her son has taken to fussing, so she gives him first the breast and feeds him. He's a strong, hale thing, like a child of her homeland, with strong legs already learning to walk and fat hands that grasp like the world is his to take. He pulls on her hair as he feeds, but she does not mind this. She has been silent-- like all of her kind she seldom speaks in words-- but the moon soaks her skin, and by the by, she begins to hum.
She hums one note, at first: Mara. Mara, Mara, Mara; she percusses it, low in the back of her throat, to the rhythm of the growing plants that surround them. To her own heartbeat and her son's mouth. Then, words: du, devour. Monah, mother. She sings, husky and below her breath, as if she wants to laugh it: Du-monah, kiiri, du-monah…
Then she breaks off the song and swallows, staring hard into the dark forest on the other side of the waterway; she's been telling a joke for sisters who are long lost to her. No Nord can understand it, why it is so funny that they use the dragon-Tongue the way they do.
Her son, by then, has released the breast. He stares up at her in the dim light, perplexed by her sudden melancholy. She rouses herself, blinks hard, and, remembering her purpose, she lifts herself to her knees and stoops forwards.
She holds him out from her but only barely, just enough that his tiny hand dips into the warm water of the creek. He squeaks a protest, but he can feel no true danger in his mother's arms, and his displeasure gives way to the curious sensation of the running water.
Here, the qethsegol of flowing water is bickering with the qethsegol of the coarse sandy bed; she closes her eyes, tuning her ears to the sound of it, before she begins to translate for her son:
"Push, push," she whispers, dragging his little hand in the direction of the current. "Shan't move," then follows, and she flattens his hand out against the current, letting him feel the resistance between the water his soft palm. "Push, push… shan't move…" she traces the argument with his hand-- move, pause, move, pause-- the soft rhythm of a river in motion, until he understands the game-- when she releases him, he moves his hand on his own.
But there is more to this world than the bickering of a river with its bed. By and by the mother stands, hoisting her son into the still and moonlight-sodden night. Holding him high she goes to the nearest and noisiest tree. Its great limbs are heavy with leaves, laden with the buds of new fruits, and the qethsegol of the air that trees sigh in the night is murmuring amorously to the qethsegol of thick summer humidity. She goes to a bough that is near the height of her head and places her son up by her face, with one of his round cheeks near the leaves, and the other very close to her mouth.
Haah, she breathes against his skin, in time with the sleepy exhale of the qethsegol of sleeping tree-breath. Haah… haah… her breath is as moist as the summer air. Her son grows bored quickly and, kicking, seizes a handful of bud-laden branch; the qethsegol of the fragile connection between fruit and tree protests, and with all the pride in the world, her son reacts to the outcry with a turn of his head.
More spirits to introduce him to: the whisper of grass, the gloating of soil, the chatter of the wind. The distant, eerie song of starlight. She moves about her clearing and she moves her son with her, letting herself be the conduit between the universe's voices and his nascent mind. She knows, from tradition and her own experience, that he understands these things more keenly than even she does-- that the beating of the Doom Drum will be still familiar to him as the beating of her own heart when he was in the womb, and that his language-less movements are in more direct communion with the world than her own ears can hear the gibbering earth-bones. When he grabs, kicks, coos, and marvels at the world, something primordial makes itself known through him; it makes itself known, too, when he nuzzles lovingly into her skin.
Finally, when the moonlight has grown weaker and when he's grown fussy once more, they lie in the grass near the water. She lets her feet trail in the current and she lets her son sleep on her chest. The stars are multitudinous above her, the world that surrounds her is rich and lush and noisy and thriving: a cacophony of existence, every thing a spirit with a voice and a heart. The doom drum beats, the towers sing, and Tamriel-- this Dawn's Beauty, this Vus, this creation of Shor-- is as alive and miraculous as the child she's brought forth.
All this, and meanwhile distant Atmora lies dead.
"I hate you," she whispers to the world.
And to her son, too, who will never belong to the home that was stolen from her. But her body feels to him as soft as ever, and the world cradles them both all the same.
"should we tell authors on ao3 when we have discord conversations about their fics" i don't speak for everyone here but if y'all ever find a group chat discussing my fics you can should must and WILL send me screenshots of the whole damn thing. inflate my ego. gimme
this whole thing with people discussing a fic in secret, on closed discord servers, instead of leaving a nice comment, is such a loss for fandom. we're losing fic writers with every fic with hundreds of hits and barely a comment.
writers publish to be read. fanfic is meant to be a conversation.
I say this very gently and with much love, and I say it not only as a writer myself but as someone who has been privy to many 'but how can they not know that work is amazing! I love it! I gushed about it to every friend I have and recced in x, y, z servers and [...]'
The writer or artist doesn't know this.
They have no way of knowing that you found their work beautiful and lifechanging or even just a bright spot on a bad day or that you think about it every day or that you told all your friends about it, and those things are great, but we have no way of knowing them! You may not be doing it intentionally, but you're excluding the writer or artist from the community feeling of fandom that you are carrying on (that is so great! fandom is a community! continue to talk and play!) even with their work.
Please, please just drop a line even that is "oh gosh I absolutely love this work, I screamed to every one of my friends about it when I first read/saw it!" even if you don't have the spoons to share more of the specifics that made you flail at your friends or what you said in private. (Though if you do, we will love you forever for it.)
It is Vivec's first time seeing Sotha Sil drunk. He's been working on Mournhold's court wizard for weeks, slowly winning him to their cause, slowly learning from him the ways of the city and its royalty, but only tonight has he finally succeeded in getting Sotha Sil drunk.
"Before Nerevar…?"
"No, before--"
He looks out of place in the shabby inn-room Nerevar and Vivec have been sharing for the past month, like a stolen artefact propped up in some thieves den. He's at the foot of the bed, leaning back against the wall, his artificial legs splayed before him, his hair loose and falling into the mug of sujamma he's clutching desperately to his chest. His big thoughtful eyes are lost in the distance.
"Oh, Almalexia," Sotha Sil says to himself. "What have you done?"
"Before what, Seht?" Vivec inches closer to him on the bed. It's just the two of them, after all, old friends sharing secrets.
"Before that-- everything. I mean, if you'd met her as a child, and after her coronation…" He barely seems to notice Vivec.
"What was she like?"
"She was bold. Arrogant. A little reckless, if I'm honest, but relentlessly passionate." He finally focuses on Vivec but his gaze is soft. "Your Nerevar reminds me of her. How she truly-- how she used to be."
"Just like Nerevar."
His eyes go back into the distance. "And then she overplayed her hand and got herself into the most foolish situation and handled it so badly and…" there's a bitterness in his voice, "Yes, she threw out the Nords from Mournhold and it was a great achievement, but look at what she had to do to herself. The pain she put herself through, and for what? Nobody asked her to sacrifice herself-- she just sacrificed herself! Her… herself."
Through the thin inn walls they can hear an argument in the next room. Sotha Sil focuses on Vivec again.
"It's as if there's less of her now." He says it as if he's pleading with Vivec for something. "Sometimes I hope it's still there, she's just buried it deep down, but I think it's gone. I wish you could've met her before."
-
"I wish you could've met him before."
It's the first time Almalexia's sat down for something unrelated to duty in over a month. Vivec has to wonder if she's even slept in all that time; the Nords have been recently vanquished but there's a wedding to plan and Ald Sotha is in ruins and it seems as if Sotha Sil will just drop dead from the grief of it, if his injuries don't do him in first.
"I did," Vivec reminds her. "I've known Seht forever."
"No," Almalexia shakes her head, "I mean before."
They're in her favourite hiding place, on the palace roof, staring out at a starry sea of city lights, wrapped in rugs that are too thin for the nighttime chill. Almalexia looks perfectly at home there, the Queen surveilling her empire of sky-lights, but while the light cannot reveal the dark shadows beneath her eyes and the lines that have appeared in her face, the exhaustion in her voice paints its own picture.
"Before what?" Vivec lays a hand upon her knees.
"Before all of it. I wish you'd met him when he was a child."
"What was he like?"
"He was so annoying." Her face is hidden in darkness but affection makes her voice thick. "He could be arrogant, and he didn't always think through how his actions might hurt people. But he was also so, so sensitive, and he hated to hurt people, and if you told him he'd done so, he'd cry. And he was brilliant, even then, he had a way of understanding the world…"
"Just like now."
"He's still brilliant, yes. But--"
Vivec can feel Almalexia looking at him, even if he cant see it. His hand feels cold upon her knee.
"He's just different now," Almalexia sounds resigned to the idea. "He's so cynical, he hates people, he has no faith in anyone. He wasn't always like that. He used to love, so much that it hurt him, he wanted to help everyone and he felt their suffering like it was his own." Her voice is quieter when she adds, "Sometimes I hope that, if he has more time to heal, he'll come back. I want you to meet him as he was before."
Vivec pulls his hand away. Mournhold's darkness betrays so little, spread out before them, but in every window a light gleams.
"Dead things don't come alive with time," Vivec tells her gently, "They just get more dead."
The Egg of Time
Chapter: Chapter V, part III
Words: 109,335
Fic summary: In which Almalexia gains a throne; Sotha Sil loses a House; an egg becomes Vivec.
