#*artorian

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dunks these here while I’m at it

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doodles from the week

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what is dead may never die

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do you know how much of a slut i am for rule 63

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I dont have a modding problem YOU have a modding problem

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“Welcome home, granddaughter.”

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One day I will endure three nights of terrors and broken sleep. I will crave tastes and smells I have no words for. I will sweat and grow weary. I will suffer. I will die in my sleep and wake the next day with a word to sate that hunger. My father will give this gift to me, as his father to him, and one day I will give it to my son. We are Septi.

[blood, character death]

-

The only knowledge I have of others are stories and gossip shared with a scowl and curse over drinks at feasts. Other vampires are not like the Family, they tell me. Uncivilised, spreading the gift like it's a virus; like something caught from a dog or rutting with a dunmer slave. He finds me at the arena in the bright heat of day. Crows are cheering for the victor but the dark-skinned elf  is all I can see. He smiles at me and for a moment I forget my name. 

He is the first I have met, and the first that has lasted more than a week in our lands. I try not to spend time with him. I've a son to raise, and a duty to the Septi. If he wasn't a dumner. If he wasn't an outsider. Perhaps we could have been friends. I take him as a lover instead. I am careful. The Family will smell him on me if I am not.

-

I told my father. He has less grey hair than I have now, and I know I've put it off for far too long. My son is twenty. He wants the change and I know I let him down. Father is furious. He told me I had shamed the family and broken the bloodline. He demands proof. I show him the delicate puntures on my arm. No other soul will see the dozen others beneath my clothes, on my chest, at the base of my neck, on the inside of my thigh.

There's sweat on my brow and no colour in my cheeks- it's not too late to cure the gift and take it away, but they won't. They'll want me to live a few centuries at least with the knowledge that I let an elf break a chain three eras in the making. I tell them it is worth it. It would have been, if he had not left me by the next morning. I have not slept in an empty bed in ten years. The name is all I have now. I stay a Septus to spite them all.

-

He is not there to help me as I die. I dream of him drawing the blade across my throat and drinking deep; I dream of being alone in the dark and he offers me a hand and a candle to light my way. When I reach where I am going, he is waiting. He smiles at me. He sets the hounds on me. I wake in the night and fall asleep only to dream it all again.

-

Father is gone. Slain by beasts from the gates of Oblivion that half of the Family fell fighting. Had it been our Prince to lay seige to the mortal world, perhaps we might have joined him, but it was not Coldharbour on the other side of those infernal mirrors. We helped keep the world safe.

But now I find a letter at my door with the Septus seal. It's carried by an Imperial, who took it from an argonian, who held it for my son. Oblivion opened and closed but my world is only now collapsing. The tremour in the earth we all felt was the price elves paid for forsaking their gods. A cataclysm crashing from the sky and wiping out a country, but I do not care. My son was buried in the eye of that storm and all he thought to write in his letter was, "I found him."

-

I don’t have to look. He finds me. I return to our fortress home in the highlands to the smell of silver and blood. The castle lies empty. Servants, good and honest mortal folk, are slaughtered like lambs on an altar. The halls are quiet. Five generations of the Family should be laughing and living but I only find one.

He stands over their corpses with a knife in his hands. "I'm here to free you," he tells me. Three hundred years too late. My nephews. Nieces. Their children and children's children. Eternity ahead of them slashed away and condensed down to the drip, drip, drip of blood from a silver blade. There is but one child left, living and warm and crying in her bed. I shield her from him. He laughs at me for defending her, a tiny, mewling thing.

Artoria. She was named for me; I cannot let her die.

-

I keep him in the darkest reaches of the castle until he is starving. I chain him in the courtyard. I drink and I make myself stand to listen to him beg until the sun crests over the fortress walls.

I throw his ashes into the river. He always hated the water.

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The Septus Family Almanac - Artorian Septus, 4E

I seem to have formed a habit. Almost two centuries now since my own son was lost in the Red Year, I find myself with more children than I entirely know what to do with. I cannot decide if it is they who are drawn to me, or I to them. I only know that if this carries on any longer, I shall be ever less the assassin and ever more the wet nurse.

Artoria does not mind. She'll be twelve years old soon, and I am unsure if this castle is the place to raise a young woman, even if she hadn't discovered her taste for the School of Destruction. Petulant at first, she welcomed the half-Imperial boy with a trap of flaming dung in his bed. I have spoiled her, I think, orphan or no.

Orix at least seemed to take it in good humour. He has been here barely a year and he teases her awfully. It is good for her, and healthy for him to learn to run faster. He can hunt, too. He is quiet when he wants to be. I wish that he wanted to be quiet more often.

So much the opposite of my newest charge. I pride myself on three centuries of experience in judging a character, man or child, but this boy defies my attempts at every turn. He is the only one of them that I sought out. But when a letter arrives with news that he has been Seen, what can I do but deliver him a handprint of black? He could be the finest of us for a generation. Sithis knows he has already begun to practice.