MosstheBoar

Writing, fantasy, The Elder Scrolls, Dark Souls, colourful art (usually reblogged), and whimsy

[kuuwo]

Captain of House Redoran

[vehkthesnake]

Dunmeri Tattoo master.

[andrevalias-tes]

'Not all healers use restoration magic. Many make do with alchemical and medical treatment. In fact, restoration magic is usually used in place of first aid when available and appropriate. Where restoration is not viable, alchemy and medicine might do instead. The same could be said for the opposite. Our most versatile healers also happen to be the ones who are well-regarded in our fellowship.'

-- Treila, explaining the range of skill that healers possess in the fellowship of the College of Healers.

[andrevalias-tes]

'We sometimes receive letters from a certain Bastiella. We do not have her name in our graduate records, but she offers insights now and then on the study of restoration. At first, the faculty wanted to ignore her suggestions. But on a whim, one of the members of the Council of Healers made an inquiry into her claims and found due cause to review more than a few texts that we previously used for instruction on curing poison. Even better, the existing spell could be modified to cure paralysis. Now when we occasionally receive Bastiella's notes, we turn them over to the Council to investigate.'

-- Lucetta Corin, professor of the College of Healers, discussing an unexpected and mysterious source of restoration insights for the Council of Healers

[lorsted]

An Astartes from the Krakenborn (a Legion created by Kitbashcat over on bluesky).

[sweet-milky-tea705]

Did more ayem sketches awhile ago

[theminttu]

A collection of scenery paintings from Morrowind I’ve done over the years. Vvardenfell will always be my home :’)

[theminttu]

Drawn while listening to this.

[transgenderer]

every spelunker should go in with a cyanide tooth capsule so if they get stuck they can take the gentle way out instead of being tortured by the earth for 72 hours and then dying anyway

[transgenderer]

@kropotkindersurprise said:

it should be an explosive device, so they widen that part of the cave at the same time and no other spelunkers will get stuck there

beautiful vision. i love the idea of a minecraft-style world where if you explode underground it just clears a radius

[saltymaplesyrup]

"That night a storm came and visited Hjalti's camp. It spoke with him in his tent."

A depiction of the blighted ash wraith of Ysmir Wulfharth visiting the tent of Hjalti Early-Beard, anon General Talos, ca. 2E 852.

[saltymaplesyrup]

Gonna use this one in place of my WIP Wednesday even though I do have some writing in the cooker (not super happy with that quite yet), as I don't usually post art WIPs on here. Tags and sketches under cut!

I was not super happy with the initial sketch I had going on 'cause I popped that one out at 12am purely to get the idea out of my head, but then decided to redraw it with better perspective in the morning - which is how I landed on the one I got now.

From the get-go, the plan was to portray Wulfharth in the same vein as Skyrim's ash spawn, given that he is supposed to be a blighted ash monster at this point in history. However, that also meant that I would have to give him some kind of internal glow for contrast, and I knew I wouldn't be able to pull that off while keeping the image as dark as I wanted, so I decided to disembowel him and give him some glowing snake-intestines instead :)

The texturing was probably the hardest part to figure out, since the texturing would mean I'd have to add a lot of fine details and hatching that could be VERY easy to mess up, so I pre-sketched much of it with a pencil using images of burnt wood and charcoal as reference.

And with all the inking applied, and some blending with a tissue to smooth over the sharper lines, this was what I ended up with before throwing it into an image editor for refining :)

Thank you to @kookaburra1701, @mareenavee, @chiqita, and @sulphuricgrin for tagging me last week <3 Forwarding to @spicyraeman, @skyrim-forever, @ego-osbourne, @gilgamish, @theropoda, @arimabari, @truth-01001001-liar, @cookbookbutch and whoever else hasn't seen this yet!

[andrevalias-tes]

'The Combat Medic's Companion is a similar publication that is collaboratively curated by the Imperial Legion and the physicians of the Imperial Arenas. You won't find a more in-depth medical journal cataloguing and detailing a wide range of battle injuries and wounds, as well as best to worst treatments. Occasionally we contribute research that the Legion has interest in, but otherwise the Companion is always being revised and added to with any new documentation from field healers and arena physicians. There's even four different ways for relocating bones.'

-- Treila, discussing another medical journal that is published by the College of Healers but maintained by the Imperial Legion and Imperial Arenas.

[roguesfolio]

Sentinel, crown of the desert, seat of the king, green emerald eye at the northern limit of the Alik’r. Ever-shifting Alik’r, where nature hikes her skirt and shows off her privates, sweet rocky shoals of Illiac! Home of bravest Ra’gada, the warrior wave, who broke upon the Alik’r such as to grind it to sand. There is a Yoku god of Sand-That-Gets-Everywhere and it must hold court over the sand that shifts on Sentinel’s limits, across her stoops, down her chimneys. That selfsame and everywhere sand masks my footfalls behind me as I pace the evening’s star-kissed stairs and porticos. Pomegranates and jasmine blossoms waft sweetly in the dusk air and the emerald is wine-darkened as one thousand varied gods of the sun, anon magnus elsewhere, end the days retreat. Sentinel, How I’d like to pry that emerald eye free of your crown’s gold setting. The sickly sentimental night with its warm summer breath, envelopes me. A bygone favorite night of youth; no longer! Yours is a tyranny of blood. My own blood! Tyranny all the same. The Yokudan dagger chinks at my hip. How long before it may do its duty by some Camlorn streetlamp? Temperance is even more necessary outside the law than within. Gazing up I trace the Shadow’s hazarded form across the darkening sky, as much a strong portent as a fistful of left-facing jackal bones or a welwa’s bellows on the ides of Second Seed. I turn out the alley, amongst twilit domes and towers, moving ever abreast the outer limits of the greasily lit promenade whispering,

“The first turn of the pick pays all debts.”

[roguesfolio]

I rode east on the heels of a great dust devil, the trailing dust and sand off my horse and distant pursuit all swept away into a higher and more monstrous form in that storm. On this windwhip demon maelstrom I did ride into Bangkorai, like some mythic jockey of nemesis, and my horses tracks did vanish as I laid them. I rode on, face sandshorn and raw, no rations spared the grit of it. The storm swept me along to the far edges of the river’s charges of grass and shrub, past trees and bramble further in, and eventually to the city wall: gray breton buildings shaggy with green vine, protrusive like the teeth of a supine giant. That brings me to where I stand now, gazing up at the clearing clouds with sand a memory, at the gates of Evermore — free of Sentinel’s pursuance. Evermore, throat of the Bangkorai Pass, murmurs its secrets in a language of black flapping wings and stirred dust motes. Breton merchants fill the markets, whispering money. The Bjoulsae laps wet syllables on the city pier as small skiffs and light schooners cut up and down its glass back, strangers from further ports. Soldiers clatter down the streets in formation, the many legged hulks of regimens, creaking like a Dwemer derelict as they pass, steel fluttering with shocks of covenant blue in sashes and standards. The chapel bell chimes for any matter of small notice. Laborers percuss with mallet, peg, and saw, undoing the wreckage of past decade’s cruel sackings. The town is a cacophony of life and that din envelopes me- I am become silence, untouched. The creak of a back door is lost, the turn of a key, the footfalls on granite cobblestones, the flutter of a startled crow, the jingle of a cut purse- all is washed away in the steady hum of Evermore’s song.

[roguesfolio]

Mournhold, god-city of Almalexia, Mother Morrowind, Dunmer god of Mercy-as-long-as-its-convenient-to-whim-and-wish, lies in the fertile fungal veldts of Morrowind’s Deeshan Plains. Like the cities of the god of Makes-Us-Women and the god of Nobody-Really-Cares-Untill-It’s-Too-Late, the Mourning Hold is a mirror of its god-ruler’s fancies and nature. It is a glorious city, beautiful and lush, thick verdant carpets of grass extend between stepped terraces and virile mushroom trees loom over clan houses, markets and many clear fountains. Time spent in Mournhold’s stacked patios and verandas banish the megrims of a life spent running. Decadent house-mer travel in layers upon layers of brightly colored robes, kin tassels glinting in the sun. Guar graze languidly about the gates, only bellowing when prodded by their Hlaalu masters. It is starkly different from the ash wastes of the north but no less dangerous. The city reflects its god, beautiful yet deadly. How quickly the moonstruck mother’s fancies turn! Not like mother Morwha’s chiding, inconsistent with morals, which even I have. How quickly, too, will her city destroy you. There is danger under every surface, Morag Tong assassins and depraved nobles, slave masters and unhinged Telvanni mad-mancers go about their debased businesses, some with impunity in the daylight. The only true crime here, heresy. There is an unsettling feeling of being watched. How does one steal under the nose of a walking god and sleep at night? How may an outlander evade the pervasive evil-eye of her brass-faced orphan elite? They cut an intimidating silhouette, arraigned as they are in brass armor with the balls to match. One croaked an ill omen as I passed him yesterday, “We’re watching you, scum.”

[roguesfolio]

I stand now before the Graht-Oak, stately namesake of its supplicant wood. Those servile trees in court around it, huge as they are, resemble arrows strewn about a tower, that city-as-tree and tree-as-king-of-trees of the Bosmeri homeland. It stands with regal bearing, a mile high from its verdant crown of foliage and hanging vine to truncated torso half-mile wide, wound with the coaxed pathways and pocked hollows, not carved, nor cut, nor built at all, of wood elf architect make. This tree once walked with the labored steps of a giant, making its migration south in summer and north again come Hearth Fire, but the walking city was planted by Anumaril, who walked with a secret femur, he that fangled and failed. The citizens of Elden Root still lash their trunks and tables to smaller branches with thick leather straps (just to be safe) and hedge bets on when the Graht will groan to life again (if ever) while smoking their tree grub and caterpillar from bone pipes in Elden Root’s tree-branch inns and taverns. “The Green Pact” protects this king of trees, the Bosmer never taking from the tree even the smallest strip of bark or leaf to their own ends. The pact protects those supplicant tree-whelps who are never harmed, protects even the low shrubs, the vegetable smoke, the valuable alchemical reagents of the forest floor. Its tandem principal, “The Meat Mandate” has resulted in truly gut-wrenching and creative liquors, ingenious bone tools, and more than a few hungry looks my way. All live, and work, and steal, and love together in its mighty trunk and branches, waiting patiently for the walking wood to stir anew.

[roguesfolio]

The stars wheel in loose forms. They are suppositions of an order, a lattice of tattered void hung on the bone frames of recognitions, that arc the vaulted roof of our Sep swaddled maybe. Hazarded they are, under a tyranny of ancient imagination, into such rude shapes as a warrior or a shade. Such history of reckoning counts the lives of empires, dynasties… No, eras as the stone must count a mortal life, innumerably brief. They author themselves, those thirteen stations of the sky, wholly independent of man or mer or god. Their mundial names and reckonings are our simple means of understanding under their immensity. Ruptga’s many children, a living map to the Walkabout ways. They seem endless, timeless, doomed to vault the firmament in rigorously exact cycles in each turn of the year and with each skin of the serpent. The stars that now shine on me in Belkarth’s night-grappled streets are in some eternal way the same stars that looked down upon Akos Kasaz, on Samara, Khibi, Kamlesh, and Kanesh and saw them cast asunder by mans own pitiful pride, those same stars that guided those Ysgranauts south and ignited passion in the now-dust Dwemer. Within the firmament’s wine-dark stage is set a play that foretells strict fates for man and mer and beast, laid out in a vast cosmic elder scroll for any to read who have the eyes of it. But what, oh children of the mundus, if such fates of man do fall upon our mortal soils? What if portents walk? Rumors under the bazaar silks of Belkarth’s caravan ways and winding arcades hint that we may know sooner than we care to.

For W.G.

[roguesfolio]

Abah’s Landing is the perpetual muckstain on Khefrem’s kicking boot, where, with the lockstep of a mighty Raga, it plunges south into the Abecean. It is a scuff that no polish can ever wipe clean. Not to say that many have not tried. The land was first settled by blood of my distant blood, a crown of Yokuda, known for the spectacle of his shortcomings, Prince Hew. It is no small wonder that this land in Hammerfell’s most southerly terminus should be called, colloquially, his bane. The land is hot, barren, riddled with winged adders and fire-breathing frogs, and far too close to elven lands for my tastes. If Sentinel is the emerald of the Alik’r, then Abah’s Landing is the ruby of Khefrem, bloodred and winedark. Ruled by petulant and greedy merchant lords, broken on the rack of the Iron Wheel and its ever corruptible inspectors, invigorred with trade that knows no exclusivity and hates no race of man or mer or beast, and most of all harried, at every turn, by my kind. Thieves rule Abah’s Landing. Make no mistake, for that is what the merchant lords are. But thieves will also set her free. Indeed, there are no thieves in all Tamriel who compare, in wit or elusiveness or grandiose design, to the thieves of Abah’s Landing. And though they lie now crushed in the rut of the crushing rim of an Iron Wheel, make no mistake that they will rise again. As I walk the sandy streets of my peoples greatest port, flanked by streams of Altmer and Maomer pirates and profiteers in their dubious trades, I feel I fit right in. One more scuff on the kicking boot of the Redguard, one pebble to crack the wheel’s rim.