WIP Merglergl
Thank you for the recent tags, @mareenavee, @paraparadigm, and anyone I missed 🤗. I don't have a lot of time this week, but what little I have has been spent writing this chapter and reading @archangelsunited's Foul Redemption. There are so many on my reading list, including a few by @thana-topsy as well. I hear there is a FALMER fic???? And @kookaburra1701 has an orc fic I am dying to get started on. My brain needs MORE PROCESSORS, PLEASE.
I have a bit of Valendiil.
The person who came out to greet them was not at all what he expected—not that he even knew what that was in the first place. She glided over the uneven terrain with the pointy grace of an ancient hind, firm-footed and severe, and when she stepped into the sun, she didn’t even blink. She owned that place, or maybe simply herself. It was difficult to say at the time. She was paler than most he’d seen from Alinor, sallowed by age, and her hair was white as snow, pinned in intricate patterns swirled atop her head. Her eyes swept toward him, found his own and locked. Rebars and pearls. Prickles crawled up his spine. This woman had a century and fifty on him, maybe more. She'd seen the war engines of Oblivion, suffered the gates and lived. She’d witnessed the fall of the Crystal Tower and its subsequent repair. She'd suffered the ravages of those she had thanked, spent a century severed from all she knew outside, and rebuilt naught but the trifles favored by war. Val soaked her in and startled all over again. This was the woman he'd seen captured in the exiles' paint, nostalgic for the austere beauty of their Isles, never to return. It hit him, then, the living memory of it, that there was a people lurking behind the monster in his head. He latched onto them, searching for the Eagle or the Thalmor’s sign on her clothes. Nothing. Civilian. Thank the goddess, auroras guide him, this was going to work. Unless he hated her, too. It was difficult to say at the time. He swallowed his bile as the guard backed away with the politest nod. “These are the guests, madam.”
