I’m Intya - editor, historian and TES brainrot patient. When I am not busy explaining to yet another 70yo author why we do need that image in 300 dpi at least if they want us to print it, I can mostly be found somewhere around here, yapping about the blorbos.
Other than that, my favorite pastimes include:
writing and drawing
getting ESO bard songs stuck in my head and singing them all day
making up conspiracy theories about Darien Gautier
A few other notes:
I am European, and so is my time zone.
Please note that I am notoriously bad at talking to people first! Chances are I do want to talk to you, I’m just scared to do so.
I am also an adult, and there will be nsfw content on this blog. Minors, you have been told. I would kindly ask you to not interact with me.
behold my creations
OC directory
eso housing tag
writing tag
ao3 [Please be aware that my fics are only available to registered users to prevent AI scraping as much as possible.]
At the end of winter, hellebore flowers greet Sun's Dawn.
Maenathil as The Lover constellation, people-watching at the gala. [close-up and sketches under the cut]
I started from the outfit in the illustration of the Lover's stone and The Lover and the idea that I wanted to do something with (1) gloves and (2) the colours of the sky at dawn (from the name of the month). Do gradient fabrics exist in TES? For the flowers, I wanted something that would bloom that month. Hellebore was perfect because Mae would love to wear poisonous flowers to a gala actually.
Most of this was actually finished on monday but then I got stuck on the background the rest of the week (it happens)
Bonus: original sketch + outfit from the back.
(Neither of them really know how to dance but they make it work.)
He awoke before the birds, in that pre-dawn black. The dressing was swift, even in the dark, by his memory alone, the weight of it both settling upon him and seeming insignificant against the crushing responsibility of the day. He let his hands brush the carving of Storihbeg on his sill as he passed, before clambering out the window out onto Aldous’s roof. The window itself gave no complaint, he had oiled the latch a fortnight past, and the hinges answered silent.
The air was mild, yet thick with yesterday’s rain. Morach could smell the river-rot on the wind from the Bjoulsae; he took it in before lowering himself from an eave to the stones below. With a final glance-check back at the Cobbler’s, he moved on down the alley.
Evermore slept poorly; drunks ambling around before joining their ordained rest in a doorway, a watch-pair laughing several streets away, cats howling and fighting on every other street. Mor threaded through them now with a well-practised ease. The postern gate on the eastern wall had a single guard, who always slept through half of his shift without fail, his chin on his chest and pike propped beside him like a steadfast hound. Mor had used the entrance a hundred times, and had left him untroubled each one.
Out the walls, the way ran south-east toward the Viridian, narrowing from road to path to trail before it dissolved into nothing but wild grass. Beyond it, he found the game trail he knew, one that wound up through juniper scrub toward the ridge line above the lake. He let his stride lengthen until the ache from yesterday’s work repairing Aldous’s roof bled out. By the time the sky began to grey in the east, his breath came hard and deep.
The trail crossed a stream, ankle-deep and fast, ice-cold even with the heat of summer. He knelt and drank from cupped hands, looking east. Not yet. The sun still hadn’t broken.
Mor pulled Daeghar’s knife and cut a sprig of juniper from the nearby bush, tucking it through his belt. He sat back on his heels and waited. It was far from a complex ritual, which his clan had *plenty* to boast of. It was made from a memory and a year of hunting in wilds more gentle but no less Hircine’s. You waited for dawn. You gave blood and asked nothing but a chance to prove your worth.
Gold broke over the crest of the mountain. He pressed his father’s blade to his left palm, and drew it swift and shallow. It welled and fell into the stream below as he turned his hand, watching as it feathered away in its current. He flexed his hand and rose. The blood dried as he climbed.
Dawn was an hour past when he found the elk-sign. A bull, grown fat and arrogant on the easy feed of the summer. His antlers would be up in velvet, soft and blood-warm. He had bedded down in the shade, after wallowing in a churn of mud by the boulders to keep cool. Morach crouched at the fringe of the clearing and searched. Deep prints from the heavy beast. The trail pointed down, towards the lake-shore. The droppings were hours old, rather than minutes.
It was quiet work, the tracking, slow and attentive. Every part of him narrowed to what lay afore him. A thread of quarry’s hair on a strip of bark. The depressed grass. The faint musk of a summer-bull. His father taught him how to read and breathe the forests and mountains for a hunt; after twelve years, it felt more natural to him than reading Evermore or its people ever could. He moved through the scrub without a noise. His weight kept low, and each footfall taken with the same care he’d give a marked floorboard on a job.
The bull was drinking when he found it. Knee-deep in the shallows, roughly a hundred paces away. His rack was broad in the velvet, no hard tines to mind; only the size and his foul temper to watch. A magnificent beast, all the same. The kind of elk his father would have made him wait for. To be sure the shot was earned, and not given as a fluke.
He hadn’t brought his bow today; it sat back in his room above Aldous’s shop. The night before, when he flitted between waking and sleep, he’d set his mind on only having Daeghar’s knife. The blade felt alive, the handle warm from his grip, the worn leather wrapping that was moulded to his father’s palm, and now his own.
He checked the wind and started down, watching the beast side-long every step. The bull was utterly serene, the chief of his own private lake-shore. Morach checked every step before he committed it, avoiding the leaf-litter for moss or stone. The elk looked up, away from him, and the water dripped from his muzzle like silver. Thirty paces.
Mor flew forward— the bull started, turned. Morach was on the elk, his thighs deep in the cold shallows. The knife went up, through the jaw. The elk let out a cry, violent and ugly, and thrashed. A fore-hoof came up and caught him across the shoulder, and tore through clothing and the skin beneath it. The blade stayed in, Morach twisted it. The blood ran hot from the wound over Mor’s arm, and the elk’s legs slowly began to buckle, before collapsing entirely as he took Morach down with him into the waters.
He held the elk as he went, both arms around his neck, skull pressed against Mor’s chest as his breath rattled out with a few wet bursts. His dark eyes rolled to find him, and he met them. Mor held him until the light went out.
“Og Pater Noch. Co lan, co noch.”
The coarse fur on the bull’s neck steadied him as he watched the water lap at them both. His own blood, from his shoulder, and the elk’s from the jaw. Two red-threads unwinding, before twisting about each other, until he could no longer say which belonged to him or the beast. His blood, the same he’d given alone at the stream at dawn. It was no longer his gift alone, but theirs together. The water thinned the two and drew them off to be lost in the greater lake. Mor stayed a while yet, in that frigid shallow with the elk cradled against him. Underneath it all, the press of a hand between his shoulder blades. The attention settled on him, weighing the work.
The butchering itself took roughly two hours. The amount he could take back was limited, both out of practicality and on purpose. He took the liver, back straps, and a hind-quarter. The rest would stay for the scavengers, back into the wild, Hircine’s share. The knife washed off in the stream easy enough, him less so. He scrubbed the blood off, and checked over his shoulder. The bleeding had stopped at some point, but left a gash that would scar without a doubt.
Morach coated, wrapped, and packed the meat; berries, salt, and juniper leaves, the process slow and almost ritualistic to him after so many years of practise. He took the long way back to Evermore, whilst his mind walked quiet, content to watch the road go by.
Anyone seeing this is free to tag me to their WIPs. ❤️
Started at my new job this week and the lack of sleep is driving me crazy... I have very little else to say. Writing has felt like drinking tar. My miis are starving.
Y'all are still getting a small snippet of Rogue Waves (282 words).
CW: None
His expression sharpened into something colder as duty reasserted itself over impulse. Whatever business she had inside the shrine was ultimately irrelevant unless it directly threatened Dominion interests. If she wished to waste her time skulking through dusty Nord catacombs filled with stale incense and dead gods, that was her concern.
Not his.
The problem was that he no longer trusted himself to leave the matter there.
That realization sat unpleasantly as he ascended the remaining steps.
The shrine of Talos' entrance loomed larger now, weathered stone darkened by shadow and deliberate disregard. The metal door remained slightly ajar, just enough to expose a narrow seam of dimness within.
Ondolemar’s gaze lingered on it.
He also had first left it that way intentionally years ago.
The irony was not lost on him.
Most citizens assumed the shrine had simply been abandoned too hastily to secure properly, but the truth was considerably more practical. A partially open door invited temptation. Temptation drew the desperate, the sentimental, and the stupid in equal measure. Nords with their muttered prayers. Laborers clutching hidden amulets beneath their tunics. Veterans still clinging to old loyalties and older gods.
Vermin, all of them.
And catching rats when they willingly wandered into the trap saved an extraordinary amount of time compared to dragging them from alleys and basements across the city and the hold.
Efficient.
Usually.
He stopped a short distance from the entrance, hands settling behind his back as his eyes narrowed slightly toward the dim crack between door and frame. No sound emerged from within. No movement. Just stillness and the faint scent of old dust drifting into the cool air outside.
Should he go in after her?
Tagged by: @umbracirrus @cresu @intyaliel
No pressure tagging, with a soft kiss on the forehead @tobianidiot @heavy-metal-dick @theoneandonlysemla @labskeever @dirty-bosmer @pocket-vvardvark @sanzas-reverie @captain-of-silvenar @tigerlily340 @red-mountain-flower @kuurankaiho @oblivions-dawn @caz-the-yarncromancer @saltymaplesyrup @dark-brotherhoe @silly-little-diary @hircines-hunter @artaeums @skyrim-forever @friend-of-giants @sulphuricgrin @anilliscarts and YOU!!
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“Baurus? Some help over here?” Arri called but a moment later, though she kept her voice down so the patrons upstairs would not come running. This here would be a nuisance to explain to Luther already, who would then have to alert the city guard once Baurus and Arri were in the clear. Enough of a mess as it was, Baurus supposed, without any additional witnesses. Not that the agent had left them with much of a choice.
Leaving his hiding spot, he walked over to the Imperial, who was doing her best to not get blood on her borrowed clothes, looking around for some fabric to wipe her dagger on and eventually settling on the agent’s trousers. Baurus still didn’t know where she’d hidden that blade, and decided he didn’t want to know anyway; best not to ask her about it.
“How did I hear him, but not you?” he wondered instead, because he was certain he had only heard one person coming down the stairs instead of two, and while he was not interested in finding out where she’d learned certain things, he did have an interest in how they were done. He was sure that this information would be of help to him in the future, and it was a lesson learned – his ears could betray him at any time.
“I move very quietly,” Arri shrugged, and the Blade raised an eyebrow at her, which was only met with a groan. “Fine. I matched my steps to his, copied his movements as far as I was able, drew my dagger at the same time he did his. And it helped that he wasn’t exactly an experienced assassin. One of those would have noticed me right away, would’ve known to look in the shadows.” She nodded at the would-be murderer’s blade now lying uselessly on the floor. “Biggest part is still moving quietly, and reading the other person’s movements, though. Not something you Blades are trained in, huh?”
“Not as such, no,” Baurus admitted. “The latter part, yes, that is something every fighter needs. The former, not as much. Some of us are, when there is a need for us to work undercover. I was … not meant for it. But desperate times call for desperate measures, right?”
“Fair. Just do me a favor and try not to apply what I tell you when you’re back in your clunky armor. Anyway, Breton bookworm here’s not going to tail anyone ever again.”
“He wasn’t much better at espionage than me, after all,” Baurus said, “or I would likely not have noticed him as quickly. But if I see a man sitting in a corner for three nights in a row, pretending to read a book but barely even turning any pages, even I get my suspicions.”
“Must’ve been one of their low-level men,” Arri sighed. “Bit worrying how he was so ready to murder someone when he’s just a nobody. Have you learned anything of note while you’ve been here? You’ve not left the city, I take it?”
Baurus shook his head. “No. The assassins who killed the Emperor were part of a Daedric cult called the Mythic Dawn. Apparently worship Mehrunes Dagon, but something tells me you already knew.”
“Hard not to, given your future Emperor made me run halfway across the Deadlands to close the gate the cult set up in Kvatch before he saw fit to let me drag his royal behind back to Jauffre. There’s only so much lava and brimstone you can walk past before you take a hint.”
Been unable to lock in on a single WIP still, and am jumping between many at present, but today's snippet comes from Seeking the Sun (my Skyrim main quest fic with Elyse!)
Tagging @hircines-hunter @cresu @sulphuricgrin @heavy-metal-dick @friend-of-giants @chiqita @skyrim-forever @theoneandonlysemla and anyone I may have forgotten (brain is mush at the time I am scheduling this 😆), and of course an open tag to anyone who wants to say that I tagged them <3 Obviously no obligations!!!
The air in the cavern felt cooler than the rest of the ruins, no doubt helped by the holes in the ceiling which allowed the moonlight to drift in. Had she really been in there long enough for it to turn to night…?
However, it was not the streams of light which captured her attention in the area, no. It was the intricate tomb placed upon a raised platform on the opposite side to her, and the wall which curved around it, smooth in contrast to the rugged stones across the rest of the room. Taking a deep breath, she began to make her way towards it, casting a candlelight spell in one hand, drawing the magicka to summon Spectre once more in the other, and taking a brief glance towards the dagger tucked into her coat’s belt.
When she made her way up the steps to the platform, the air seemed to still and almost thicken around her. Breathing felt harder than it did a few moments earlier. And the wall… she could not tell if it were an issue with her eyes or not, but the engravings upon it appeared to both blur or shift. One moment, it looked to simply be primitive scratches, easily something done with a hammer and chisel or another such tool used for carving. The next? It was in script which she knew, which she understood. Tamrielic. No doubt some sort of magic, especially given that a specific set of scratches, a specific word, appeared to shift and unlike any other markings, glow.
Eventually, she chose to release the magicka to summon Spectre, the wolf choosing to sit beside her quietly, so that she could pull out her notebook and make note of what was written to see if it was any indication of what was going on. When she eventually reached the end of the words, she came to the realisation that she was for certain in the right place.
“Here lies the guardian, keeper of the dragonstone… and a force of unending rage and darkness.” Then she turned to her companion, just wanting to let out some relief that she hadn’t been sent on a pointless endeavour. “Farengar’s lead was right, Spect-”
The sound of stone shifting from behind her made her freeze, and the wolf quickly jump up and turn around with a loud growl. The tomb. She had forgotten about the tomb.
She quickly slammed her book shut and went to shove it back into her satchel – a difficult task with the awkwardly shaped golden claw also within it – before having to quickly duck down as she caught the sight of an axe being swung in her direction. Fortunately, it just missed her, only catching the very ends of her hair and leaving what looked to be frost across the newly shortened strands, before Spectre lunged into action and latched onto the draugr’s leg.
Taking a deep breath, she stood up straight once more and began to conjure flames into her hands. This draugr was hopefully the last thing standing between her and finally making her way to Winterhold. Nothing more could get in her way – except possibly Korir. But she could deal with that when she reached her destination, and not a moment sooner.
