Leisurely afternoon at Old Mournhold
experimenting with colors and thinking about what the 1st era would look like again, i needed to push myself to draw more characters in a scene, i dont really like the clothing in this, but the composition should work
depicts Ayem resting and getting treatment from her personal healer after a duel, reading recently arrived letters in the presence of her reliable advisor Vehk, rather grumpy that they cannot just play the lyre instead
"A tall figure with a golden mask led you among the dead as through a wedding celebration."
[PRINT] - [COMMISSIONS]
He is a groom he is a widow, he is a bride he is dead
Process and yapping vvv
I know there's no horse in morrowind..... But some fidelity had to be sacrificed for my grand vision of bride/groom or widow/death vision :)) Also it's technically the dream of a foreigner, they can dream of horses
Anyway I'm so so so happy with how the line turned out !!!! The colors tho not so sure nvfjbv
The more I draw Dagoth Ur the more high femme he gets..... Can't resist giving him more gender-
And as a bonus an alt horizontal version I was way way to lazy to do vfhjvf
thinking about it, as vivec was the last remaining tribunal god for six years before he vanished, so he had plenty of time to lower baar dau and he didn't. it makes me wonder what he thought during that long half a decade without his fellow god-kings, and why he decided to leave baar dau to remain and doom morrowind. was it spite? resignation fate?? something prophetic??? did he just forget about the giant floating threat of rock???
okay so i was looking through "the book of the daedra" in-universe book that's been in morrowind through to eso, because i wanted to look at any differences (and i wanted to remember what it said about your fav and mine Namira), and something that always stuck out to me when i was first learning my daedric princes wayyyyyyyyyyy back in 2006 playing oblivion on a crappy laptop, is Mephala's description. That her "sphere is obscured to mortals". This lil bit has helped me wrap my brain around her theming for years now, and has always been something it feels like the writers toss aside in favour of reverting her into lolth (because elderscrolls was just originally dnd, but i digress).
Her sphere is obscured to mortals. 'sphere' can mean realm, domain, essence, what she rules over, what she does (like everything elderscrolls, nothing is goddamn concrete), and it always made sense that the otherworldly being who's plots and requests seem nonsensical and randomly petty to regular people, would herself embody 'unknowability'. so, mephala has always been the unknown, the mystery, the big picture, possibility, who delights in the cascade of consequences that to anyone else might seem unforseeable.
Now. if you scroll your eyes down from mephala's snippet, meridia's section is right there. what does the book have to say about the light deity of light and undeath-hating that elderscrolls online loves using as their mystical christian goodness waifu?
It says meridia's sphere is obscured to mortals. just like it does mephala.
okay, prepare for adhd-brain-train speedmode:
meridia is 'associated' with the 'energies' of living things. the book says. she's usually called the 'lady of infinite energies' as a title, and obviously because of this energy-connection and undeath-hatred, there's a theme of light glopped onto her, right? but it's not light itself she has domain over. she does not cover the sun. we already have azura who is connected to the dawn (y'know for the transitional component there), and meridia is said to be about energies. Life energies.
what is life energy? souls. souls are an energy source in this heckin universe, and they're used by everything. soul energy is a heckin monopoly when it comes to magical batteries. and souls are immortal, right? the lady of infinite energies, and those infinite energies are souls.
this is why she hates molag bal & undeath. molag bal takes souls, her domain. vampires have souls, but they're claimed by molag bal, hence meridia's hatred for vampires. undead would either 1: have no souls, or 2: take a soul to make, putting the soul under the power of whatever made the undead, keeping souls away from meridia again.
she's just like molag bal. her 'purified' are horrific eternal servitors, their bodies made immortal like the souls inside them.
whO ORCHESTRATES THE ENTIRE SOUL-ORIENTED GAME OF KEEPAWAY THAT IS THE ESO MAIN BASE GAME PLOT. IT'S MERIDIA. she holds on to your soul (supposedly) and is like 'here ya gooooo, good as newww ^u^'. what does fuckin any daedric prince have to do with souls, other than molag bal? ffffffffffff IT'S HER DOMAIN. IT'S HER SPHERE. IT'S HER WHEELHOUSE.
she's a fuckin soul-collector AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
ahem but yeah. that's the summarized version of it all. souls.
i do wonder if the bosmer's yffre has any connection at all to hircine. the stipulation of the green pact all but requires the bosmer to become apex predators, the nature of the bosmer themselves is fairly beastial with horns and so on. the wild hunt also feels to me like a 'super' bloodmoon so to speak - becoming a horrific amalgam of ever evolving, ever changing animal parts turned killing machine does sound up hircine's avenue, or any daedra for that matter
after a whole year of avoiding this task, i have finally drawn jyggalag, the only daedric prince my redesign project was missing! the gang's all here!! i also updated vaermina's and sheogorath's colors a little.
its funny how in the dark brotherhood questline telaendril is the only one actively leaving the sanctuary. it makes for a great line of suspicion when taken later with the sanctuary purge and the rumours of a traitor
by chance i happened to do the leyawiin assassination job on the same day telaendril is scheduled to be there. it was the first time ive seen her outside the sanctuary - and it genuinely made me pause and think that she may have been following me the entire time and i never realised before. taken with the rumours of a traitor - and her consistent absence in the sanctuary at large - it would have been interesting to have an option to 'confront' her about her absences