Hi, I not sure if you have answered that before, but I really love your fanfic "Binds of Civility" and wanted to know if you will continue with the story?
P.S.: sorry for any mistakes, English isn't my first language, I'm just curious because I really love that fic. Have a great day!
Thanks for the ask. Yes, I do plan to continue. I have to admit I have been very distracted from actually writing this year. But I never stop thinking about the fic or that extended world.
Mark Twain once ended a very silly story with a declaration of
The truth is, I have got my hero (or heroine) into such a particularly close place, that I do not see how I am ever going to get him (or her) out of it again–and therefore I will wash my hands of the whole business, and leave that person to get out the best way that offers–or else stay there. I thought it was going to be easy enough to straighten out that little difficulty, but it looks different now.
And while I don't have the exact same issues regarding my fic, I feel it. While the fates of some ofthe most central characters: Cecilia and Junius Varo, Elenwen, and Ulfric Stormcloak are fixed, I do keep going back and forth on what will eventually happen to a bunch of the supporting cast. Since they are all at each other's throats in a civil war with *counts* seven fic-relevant factions, some people have to die. I am steeling myself to be ruthless.
And to be honest I didn't expect to end up liking Ondolemar, Thongvor, Madanach, and Delphine so much. Someone(s) has to lose in that tangle even though they would also make a great Reach sitcom cast. ;)
Anyway, I do have an outline, the story is in the home stretch and I hope to post a new chapter in November. In the meantime, Id love to answer any questions you and others have about the story and characters.
The Peasant Princess Rewritten (by an Actual Peasant)
Developed from asks originally on @norieleanduril into a post for r/teslore. I rewrite one of my least favourite ESO stories.
Preface by Alys Thierry, Scholar of Breton folklore.
Some years ago, before the War, I enjoyed the rare privilege of making a journey into Valenwood as an interpreter of Aldmeri languages for the Imperial envoy, Falco Attius. As a student of folklore, I was excited to speak with the locals about their regional tales and customs. Sadly, very few Dominion citizens felt comfortable enough to speak to an Imperial stranger. I should have expected that. There were few times that we were not accompanied by a pleasant but uninformative justiciar.
I had some rare successes with a handful of mer who were either daring enough to brave our justiciar's glares or so unobservant they did not notice them. Most memorable among the latter group was an Altmer footsoldier stationed in Falinesti who not only answered my inquiries but a few days later slipped me a letter to further elaborate on his answers.
This curious document was written in the common dialect of the Isles, consistent with the author's peasant-class background, but is peppered with more formal words and expressions. It would seem the author is imitating more erudite authors, with questionable success. I do hope the author was not punished for his association with me. He was very helpful in expanding my understanding of Altmer culture outside the hallowed halls of academia or court.
_____________________________________
Most Honoured Nebarra Lady,
You asked me if the mer of Summerset actually enjoy stories like The Peasant Princess and I was sorry to say I had never heard of it. But after we spoke, I went looking in an old library and found it. It's a very old play and indubitably one of the worst stories I've ever perused. It begins with a beautiful young servant girl whose mistress dresses her up as a princess to go to a ball. There, she meets a Kinlord who falls for her, and then when she tells him she's not actually a princess, he rants at her for tricking him. Then she realizes she should just be a servant, because her family are servants. The End. No wonder I never heard of this story before.
Sure, this is how it might happen in real life. But that doesn't make it a good story! I suppose this play was commissioned by some smug official to try to show the public a good moral exemplar. Town-reeves always put on the worst public entertainment.
The tales the common people actually enjoy back home are stories about clever farmers or labourers who run circles around their landlords and priests.
So, I have decided it would be meritorious to rewrite this play’s ending so that it may educate the reader in full about our traditional Altmer culture.
I'm keeping this part:
Narrator: So great was Virenire's beauty, she caught the eye of the young prince. Forgetting all decorum, he went over to her and asked for a dance. And so the prince and the servant girl danced for a good portion of the night.
Prince: I've never seen such a beautiful mer. Tell me, who are your parents?
Virenire: Oh, dear prince, I feel I must be honest. My parents are poor peasants, and I but a serving girl to a wealthy mistress.
Narrator: Gazing upon the beautiful eyes of such an entrancing mer, the good Prince came to a startling realization.
Prince: Why, I've been tricked! Here I thought you were a noble mer of good standing, who I might court and one day wed. But you are a mere servant girl.
Now, this prince isn't going to marry a servant girl, of course, that would never happen. And he isn't a nice person, anyway, claiming she tricked him when she told him the truth the moment he asked. We need a better ending here. Virenire needs to use her brains and get what she deserves. It's time for her to turn in her Mistress.
See, the reason Virenire is at the Ball dressed up as a princess is that her Mistress wanted to show her how abject and low-class she was, even if she wore a beautiful dress. She was set up to fail by a woman who didn't care about her or the Prince’s feelings. But the main character of a fairy tale should be quick-witted, so here's my new edition of her response.
Virenire: Oh dear prince, I would never have dared trick you. I am only here at my Mistress' command. If she designed a slight against you, forgive me my ignorance. I am just a simple serving girl who knows her place and does as her lady tells her.
The prince then takes out his anger on that viper Lady Teryldil, who is called away to the capital to face the displeasure of the Prince’s Kinship. Virenire keeps all the jewels and the dress, which she later uses as a dowry to marry a decent young man she'd already had her eye on.
The story is now greatly improved, and think I will petition the village puppeteer to do a performance next time I'm home in Auridon.
You also wanted to know if there was a Valenwood version of this story. I asked my Spinner friend Galethor, since he is a master of all Valenwood lore. He says he has never heard such a story but if it was set in Valenwood, the serving girl would reveal to the prince that she is a long-lost offshoot of the Camoran family, the prince would marry her to secure his claim, and together they’d start a new Civil War for the throne at Elden Root.
He may have been joking, but doesn't that sound a lot like the chapters on Valenwood history in the official Dominion textbooks?
Your Honoured Informant,
[Name Redacted to protect the author's identity.]
_____________
Notes:
The Peasant Princess, A Play in One Act is subtitled A demoralizing tale surrounding the Altmer's adherence to tradition. And boy is it demoralizing! It's a lesson taught to the people to keep in their place.
But I wondered if this is really the sort of story that the peasants themselves would tell. Enter Norieleanduril, Noriel for short, who previously has been my voice for the common Summerset folk. With Noriel I try to avoid the usual character tropes (mine too) of Altmer scholars, aristocrats and justiciars, and instead present a more down-to-earth perspective of life for the regular person in Summerset, who has some of the prejudices and beliefs taught by the priests and upper classes, but with their own perspective. (Though he's probably 100 percent sillier than most regular Altmer.)
On the Arrrant Lies of The Septims' Most Deplorable Toady, My Former Employer, Bertrand Rielle, Duke of Camlorn
Apocrypha/Microfic written for r/teslore. Read it here or on AO3.
This angry pamphlet was published in the early years of the Septim Empire, during the reign of Emperor Pelagius I. Our one copy of this text comes from the Archives of the Adamantium Tower, and bears the simple notation "This is most diverting" in the hand of a Direnni scribe. The fate of the author is unknown.
I, Bazile Guimard, am a historian of the First Era, a role which means I am constantly thwarted in my researches by the imaginative genealogical efforts of the Breton aristocracy. Nowhere in Tamriel will you find such a mendacious crew as the nobles of this land. Pedigree means everything to them.
Don’t mistake my meaning here, certainly all nobles boast of their pedigrees. If you’re ever invited to a Summerset country estate for the weekend, I advise you to decline the invitation lest you succumb to the boredom of hearing an enthusiastic Altmer host monologue about his ancestors back to the Dawn. Breton stories of ancestral glory are much more palatable; largely because everyone is aware that most of them are hogswash. There is a tacit agreement among us Bretons not to look too closely into the actual facts of other people’s ancestors. Our friends and neighbours repay us the favour by not looking into our own.
Yes, pedigree means everything to Breton nobles. This does not entail respect for their ancestors. Instead, it means that they make up their pedigrees out of whole-cloth to suit their situation. The frustrated historian is left to sift through the nonsense of centuries to get at the truth.
And still, I’ve never met such an arrant liar as Bertrand Rielle, Duke of Camlorn.
The man doesn’t lack a grand ancestry. There’s been a remarkable consistency in the Rielle rule of Camlorn over generations. Even if they’re thrown out on their ears, eventually they turn up again. I can trace Duke Bertrand’s lineage back to the hero of Glenumbra Moors, Prince Aiden Direnni himself. That, however, does not please Bertrand. Of late years, he has cozied up to the Septim family and with that, reinvented his ancestry to be more palatable to the current fashion. The last time I visited the Duke, he was boasting about his heroic Nord ancestress, Inge Blood-Swan. Bertrand knows damn well that Inge was the husband of the first Duke of Camlorn, Robert Rielle, and that he is descended from that Duke’s younger sister, Yselle. At least Bertrand knew it as late as last year before he met a so-called antiquarian who informed him that Inge could be a woman’s name as well and introduced to Bertrand the lure of a new more Nordic descent. The Septims will surely be impressed by this one!
In this new version of Rielle family history, Inge Blood-Swan, descendant of Ysgramor, (and as Bertrand tells it, most of the other five hundred Companions), inspired her Breton husband Robert Rielle to throw off the hated scourge of elven oppression. How utterly ridiculous, and what an insult to the memory of the First Duke of Camlorn, the wily opportunistic manmer who carved out his own chunk of the Direnni Hegemony.
Bertrand has revoked my access to his archives and disrupted my work of two decades chronicling the rise of the manmer polity of Camlorn. But In an instance of what I can only see as Divine Justice, he has also lost the boot-licking hobbyist who started him down this path. Scarcely a week into his new job, this idiot reportedly borrowed a late-Hegemony Levies Scroll for a bit of light bedtime reading. The servants report they had to scrape his viscera off the ceiling.
Duke Bertrand is in search of a new lorekeeper. Since no reputable Breton scholar will now associate with him, perhaps he can install a travelling Nord street magician next, as is the Septim-approved fashion.
Notes:
Inspired by finding out Inge: a woman's name in Skyrim is more often male in Sweden/Norway. And by sorting through all sorts of dreadful amateur genealogy done by folks with big dreams of glorious ancestry and no skepticism or discernment.
The Pocket Guide to the Empire, First Edition, and the complaints of texts such as Frontier, Conquest, paint a picture of a period of Nord Fatherland nonsense in the early Septim Empire. If the Septims have loudly-declared roots in Atmora, would the Breton aristocracy pass up on acquiring some for themselves? The Breton aristocracy has a high turn-over and a strong self-aggrandizing streak. From the PGE1
Today, the social structure of the Bretons has divided itself into a poor middle class and destitute peasantry, a magical elite separate from their squalor, and an often incoherent jumble of nobility and ruling families above them all. It is beyond the small ambition of this pamphlet to address the latter in any better terms, for even the natives have difficulty distinguishing their leaders from one another. Indeed, it is an old joke among the Bretons: "find a new hill, become a king," and many have taken it to heart. Youths of all professions and trades in High Rock spend their free time in knightly pursuits, real and imagined, performing good deeds and the like for all and sundry, in oft-vain efforts to achieve, one day, a noble status.
Once you've found that new hill, you need a pedigree, I figure.
There are two more references to the PGE1 here: Altmer commenter YR's allegation that Tiber Septim hired a fake street magician to run his Thu'um college, and the dangers of trying to read Direnni Hegemony official documents without the proper ciphers.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Going to link some of my fic on my tumblr..
Summary: To Her Royal Majesty Queen Ayrenn the First, Primarch of the Aldmeri Dominion, High Queen of the Summerset Isles, et cetera, et alia: Greetings, O Queen, from your humble servant Razum-Dar of the Eyes of the Queen, somewhat more humble than usual, although Your Majesty may be doubtful of that.
Razum-Dar investigates rumours of murder among the Summerset nobility. Oh so delicately he investigates!
Short Gen story starring The Dominion’s most intrepid detective.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
"Today is the 16th of Sun's Dawn, a holiday celebrated all over Tamriel as Heart's Day. It seems that in every house, the Legend of the Lovers is being sung for the younger generation. In honor of these Lovers, Polydor and Eloisa, the inns of all Tamriel offer a free room for visitors. If such kindness had been given the Lovers, it is said, it would always be springtime in the world." - The Daggerfall Chronicles
A scholar of folklore presents the tale as she heard it from an old Breton storyteller. (I write a short fairy-tale based off a few lore mentions.)
