#oc:corinne

[bretongirlwrites]

bretongirlwrites's list of ocs

MORROWIND

Lunette (Nerevarine) - Accidentally implicated in an assassination attempt on the Emperor, Lunette was sentenced to hard labour on Solstheim, and later sent to Balmora to play the Nerevarine. There she led multiple lives: as the Empire's unwilling toy; as a schemer rising through the ranks of House Hlaalu; and helping Jim Stacey to resurrect the Bal Molagmer. Through this she became intimately involved with the Twin Lamps and... intimately involved with a certain Ilmeni Dren.

OBLIVION

Julianne Traven (Arch-Mage) - A researcher at the Arcane University who became entangled in the Necromancy Crisis, Julianne saved her father's life by facing Mannimarco early and alone - a fight which had lasting effects on her physical condition; but, now renowned, she was elected to the Council of Mages and rose to Arch-Mage. Much more secretly, she spent many years assisting Marianne and the Thieves' Guild. The Oblivion Crisis took her to Cloud Ruler Temple, where her constant presence at Martin's side to help with research led to a brief, predictably ill-fated relationship.

Corinne Traven (Champion of Cyrodiil) - Julianne's younger sister, Corinne worked her way through the ranks of the Fighters' Guild and Imperial Watch before being selected as a Blade. She was at the Emperor's side when he was killed and was entrusted with the Amulet of Kings. She subsequently devoted her unwavering sword-arm to enacting Martin's ascension to the throne, and her mediocre powers of persuasion to trying to stop her sister from doing anything stupid.

Marianne (Grey Fox) - Marianne grew up within the Thieves' Guild, and, a bright and effervescent spirit, became determined to help everyone who deserved it, however she could. She insisted on becoming Julianne's housekeeper in return for developing her magic skills, especially as an illusionist; her talents led to her being chosen for the heist of the age, and receiving the Cowl of Nocturnal. During the Oblivion Crisis, she helped to track down Mythic Dawn agents via her excellent contacts and unconventional methods.

SKYRIM

Julienne (Dragonborn) - A budding mercenary with social anxiety, Julienne travelled to Skyrim with Marcurio to see if Pale Pass was passable, only to discover she was Dragonborn and end up stuck for longer than anticipated. She worked with the Blades, having developed an admiration and fondness for Delphine, and assisted in building them up into a formidable force once more. Once she had defeated Alduin, she set off to new adventures on Solstheim, and received her eternal fame with a shrug and more than a few complaints about always having to talk to people and that sort of thing.

Minor OCs

OBLIVION

Tara-Lei - Julianne's best friend at the Arcane University, a less scatterbrained student who helps her keep her life in order. She moved to Kvatch to become the steward at the Guildhall there, whereupon Marianne swooped in to keep Julianne's life in considerably less order.

Caecilia Iucundus and Jenette - Caecilia is the Chancellor of the University of Gwylim; Jenette is a Nord wanderer, with ancestors among the Skaal. Caecilia did her doctoral thesis on oral histories of rural Skyrim, for which Jenette provided more than a little assistance; Caecilia returned this favour by marrying her.

Derek the Dremora - I don't know what he's doing here. He's a joke character who got out of hand

SKYRIM

Talvynea Morven - A Legate with the Imperial Legion, come over from Solstheim initially to help the Dunmer of Windhelm. Helped Julienne and Marcurio out of Helgen; later returned to Solstheim to help with defeating Miraak.

The Courier and the Postmaster - The unnamed protagonist of The Formation of a Courier is a former Winterhold student who is now in the business of postal delivery. The Postmaster of the Couriers' Guild is a secretive, possibly centuries-old man with eccentric facial hair who liks nothing more than a well-delivered letter.

ESO

Aurélie and J'Ankor - I haven't played very much ESO admittedly, but Aurélie is my Vestige, a naive and trusting scholar; and J'Ankor is an Alfiq who keeps her out of trouble. He's based on Azincourt from the Paris des Merveilles series.

[bretongirlwrites]

It’s probably no surprise, that the Blades never tell us anything. Neither the Elder Council nor the Courier report on their movements; it’s anyone’s guess who most of them are; and my own sister comes to tea alarmingly often with blood on her cuffs telling me she had another uneventful day at work. I can’t say it doesn’t unnerve me. I’ve only killed one person in my life, – bloodlessly, mind you, – and I’m still rattled. How many people Corinne has killed, –

It never puts her off her roasted vegetables, I can tell you that much. So that particular day, when she sat poking at her carrots with the sort of deliberacy one usually sees in the condemned, the melancholic and the students who haven’t revised for their imminent exams, I caught myself looking for the blood spatters she had missed; and finding none, at last had to ask:

‘Bad day at the office?’

Corinne, who would not put her elbows on the table if the Empire depended on it, put her elbows on the table. 

‘You know I’m not allowed to discuss it.’

Now this I mostly respect. We all have our secrets. Corinne, for example, does not know about my involvement in the Elder Scrolls Library theft, which she spent half her professional life trying to solve. But even during that time, she had never looked quite so distressed as now.

I looked at her. She looked at me.

‘What’s the Arcane University’s take on prophetic dreams?’

‘Take?’ said I: ‘you know we have a thousand takes on everything under the sun. Just this morning we were arguing about whether the jam went first, or the cream, or if the jam should actually be on the outside, or whether a potion made of jam and cream and scones is a more efficient way of consuming the damn things without having to hold this debate every time, –’

‘Julianne.’

‘Oh!’ said I: ‘well, usually you can explain prophetic dreams by normal means like the subconscious or whatever wine you drank at dinner last night. But officially we say they do sometimes happen, and that the Emperor has them more often than most, –’

Corinne’s hands froze. 

‘This is about the Emperor,’ said I, ‘I presume.’

‘Nothing I do is not about the Emperor,’ said Corinne, tersely: ‘that’s kind of the point of being a Blade.’

‘That’s not true,’ said I, ‘you have your wife; and me, Mum, Dad, –’

I had never seen her look so professional at the dinner-table. I started to worry I was about to be arrested for curiosity. But unsatisfied curiosity is the nemesis of the Mages’ Guild; and I am the most tactless damn sister in the world. I said at last, wryly:

‘So how many of us are going to die horribly, if the Emperor’s dreams come true?’ 

She did not reply: but nor did she look at me quite as though I was about to perish imminently in some kind of world-ending inferno: which is not a look I have ever actually seen, but I am sure I would know it if I were to see it.

‘Or has the Emperor merely seen his own death,’ said I, considering, ‘and you do not know if your duty is to save him from his fate, or leave him to it?’

It is not possible to drop a fork discreetly. If it does not sound like fully-armoured dremora marching to the conquest of the Imperial army, likewise clanking like a dinner-service, then it was not dropped at all. Corinne did not bend to pick it up. She hardly even blinked.

‘What do I do?’ she cried: ‘what do you do if a man tells you he is going to die, and you are going to be there, and your fate is inextricably bound with his death? That Oblivion will open its gates, but it's fine, because you will be there to close them again? That a man I've spent my own life trying to preserve is just going to go marching towards his death like, – like, –’

She stopped, and I could not fill the abyss. Mine was not an intimate acquaintance with Uriel Septim VII, but from what I knew of him, he had probably told Corinne all this over his elevenses scone, and then complained that the cream was on top. The most alarming thing I have seen over elevenses was Mannimarco's face appearing on a slice of toast. I may be arch-mage, but this was quite out of the realm of plagiarism or someone's potion setting fire to the curtains.

I wanted to say: Has he tried less cheese before bedtime; but I am not so tactless as all that.

‘This is all classified information,’ said Corinne at last, breathless, while I was thinking about being tactful, ‘by the way.’

‘Of course,’ said I: ‘don’t want to panic the populace, and all that. Have his dreams ever come true before?’

‘Without fail. They’re usually more mundane than the end of the world, but, – you know how fate is.’

‘Everything’s written in the stars, or the stones, or the head of the Emperor,’ said I: ‘well, come! even the people with the Elder Scrolls did not predict the theft of one! If everything was decided by the gods before we were all born, –’

I crossed to the counter, pulled out a bottle:

‘Then they would never have predicted such an abomination as a scone-potion. Jam, – cream, – bread, – it’s all in here. Restores fatigue, allegedly. You look like you need it. A glass to saving the Emperor from his own head?’

Despite everything, Corinne managed the corner of a smile.

‘Damn it all,’ she said, ‘we always do it, we always save the Emperor. We’re the damn Blades!’

Whereupon she took the bottle; poured some out; sipped it, – sputtered at the abomination of it, – and so sputtered, that even as she forgot the fate, even as I laughed the whole thing off, unsteady, – so it spattered, scarlet, on her cuff like blood.

[bretongirlwrites]

Neither Corinne nor Caroline, – though deep-seated in silver and gold, though shining pillars of force, – a force which, now blood-spattered, battle-weary, perhaps lost its strength as much as its shimmer, – had emerged unscathed; but the fires had burnt long enough to finish the thing; such that when the High Chancellor had bowed and taken their leave, they felt it all suddenly upon them as if the City had taken a last struggling breath, and come down onto them. Corinne blinked blood; knew somewhere, that there oughtn’t to be blood on her face; though there was blood everywhere else; and knew it only, when Caroline shrieked and summoned a spell and clutched her hand. There were better healers about, – Julianne was only just out of earshot: sitting with Marianne beneath Martin’s marble foliage, startlingly unharmed but shaking as the world had, – but she needed to be alone: and that meant with Caroline, Caroline alone, it always did. 

She let her doting wife make a rugged job of the knitting; let her throw her gloves aside and with bare hands brush away the blood; then, taking these hands, pulled her away, pulled her from what remained of the Temple, to wander. 

As if there were somewhere to go; as if the City half in pieces, had not the dreamlike circular feel of some interminable ruin, – dust and ashen flame; civilians emerging from cellars; survivors lost, battered; spattered remains almost too far gone to know their like, – they clung to each other after the end of the world; found at last some quiet unbroken corner; and collapsed. 

‘Here,’ said Corinne, at last: and though her hands were still trembling, though her arm had not quite survived the day, drew half a crumbling baguette from some devoted place beneath her armour.

It was so straight-faced, and so Corinne, that Caroline sputtered laughing; and laughed, maniacally, until the ringing of it had gone flat into the scorched earth, and frazzled into nothing. They broke the bread; it near dissolved in their hands; they shared what was left, in silence. In silence though the City awoke panicked and restless from its nightmare; in silence, in the ringing past echoes of steel on steel; in silence, in companionable silence, they still had that at least.

‘I don’t know,’ said Corinne, who hardly broke it for she leaned in close, ‘if we have failed.’

‘I don’t think,’ returned Caroline, ‘that it matters.’

Not now. Not today. They’d meant to defeat Dagon: and Dagon defeated, they’d not failed. That they were Blades, that they defended an Emperor, did not matter. The City, – and it would have a hard time believing it, it would slip into nightmare, over and over, it would grieve its wrecks and breathe painfully its own dust, – was saved, and they’d saved it. Nothing else mattered. 

‘It does not matter,’ said Caroline, again.

And raising a hand, – still in dust and blood and breadcrumbs, – she combed Corinne’s hair straight; wondered at it, that bar the scars, that bar the beading tears, she was still the same, still there, – sighed, placed another spell upon the split which rent her lip. 

‘I don’t think,’ said Corinne, whose arm was beginning to pound, but with a weak smile ‘my dear, that that is quite the priority, –’

‘I think so,’ said Caroline, – ‘see, the sun is coming out,’ and felt unharmed, felt unbloodied, felt unchanged, – half closed her eyes that only the sunset beaming on Corinne’s cheeks beamed through, – those lips on hers, timeless. 

---------------

(prompt from @druidx, who wanted some 'post-crisis fluff' for these two... there's more blood than fluff but ah well)

[bretongirlwrites]

The Blades prepare for their assault on the Mythic Dawn shrine.

The courtyard had become so tumultuous, that I could hardly find Corinne; until at last I saw her beside her horse, and so intent upon whomever should give the next order, that she did not see me, until I clapped her on the back and told her that, – in all this mess of footmen and clanking armour and forgotten things steadily sent for, – she needn’t worry yet about movement, since nobody else was ready yet.

‘They are,’ said she, ‘and only delaying it; for though we so want it, this ending, it is something which seems to await the right moment. And there never quite being a right moment, –’

A sort of patting one’s thighs and saying I shall go now and beginning another conversation lest one really must leave, – I thought of putting the kettle on again; but now could not escape from all the gathering agents. 

‘Will this really be the end!’ said I: ‘I wonder… You are right: it never feels like an end, does it. Not like the stories…’

One of the Blades brushed past me, apologised without looking, had got halfway to his horse before returning and repeating at once the toe-stepping and the apology. I was perfectly in the way; but reluctant to turn away and leave my sister to her quest.

'Things just happen,’ said I, ‘and then more things happen, – I do not mean to discourage you, Corinne dearest. Go forth and finish the damn thing, won’t you.’

‘I shall try my utmost,’ Corinne replied, quite as if she were swearing an oath to her emperor; and grasping her most affectionately by the middle, I managed to force her to informality, and a smiling promise that: ‘If I don’t manage to kill the one responsible, then I am sure that you will half kill me, and that is motivation more than anything.’

‘Let it be final,’ I insisted.

We concluded our farewells more wordlessly and with more staunch emotion, such that once we were done with it, there were hardly words left; and when she left with the others, out towards the fire-dark depths of that shrine to chaos and destruction, I knew that only something remarkable would stay her sword; and hoped though I hardly could, that if there must be an ending, let it for once be happy, –

[bretongirlwrites]

Off the back of your tags from the OC poll, does Corinne ever feel bitter/ jaded/ jilted etc that Julianne steals the limelight?

Also, apologies if I've missed it, but what is the age order of the Traven children?

Also also now, poor girl, I feel I need to request more fics featuring her 😅

corinne (born 3E 394) is two years younger than julianne... as a child, she was at once less magically talented and less showily eccentric than her older sister, so it really felt as if julianne was the special one. corinne wasn't resentful as such; but she abandoned the mages' guild for the fighters' guild as soon as she could, to feel useful, to feel talented

now however i don't think julianne gives the impression of stealing corinne's limelight outside of my own biases. corinne is no longer anything close to bitter. julianne may be arch-mage: but corinne, too, is exactly where she wants to be. she'd much sooner follow than lead; and as a blade, her role is more than important

but oh i feel bad for abandoning corinne myself a bit... i guess the main quest doesn't interest me as much as the questlines julianne is involved with. i wrote a little about her a long while ago... conflicting loyalties and troubling devotion and an abiding love for one of her fellow blades. there's a lot to be said about her. maybe with some pressing i will manage to say it...

[bretongirlwrites]

hok 2? :)

2. Do they go straight to Jauffre? Do they feel any responsibility to do so?

i suppose the answer for this is to some extent straightforward since corinne is a blade and not a prisoner at the start... the emperor's words her duty, she wants to set out immediately. but baurus is much more shaky and his sentiment afflicts her: because he's so convinced they've failed, because he feels so guilty

but jauffre's is a far superior experience; and he surely has the willpower to handle something like this. it's his guidance that will help him - and the amulet of kings which she holds. neither can go into the wrong hands. she must leave at once, before she collapses under the disaster

she rides out to the priory almost all in one go; and arriving by night, hopes that this is the province - the septim dynasty - the world, her world saved. does not know that over the horizon, there is a whole city aflame...

[bretongirlwrites]

‘Oh!’ said I: ‘when the Grandmaster said we were to ride into the City in state, –’

Martin suffering from the long ride, sat like some dishevelled burden in his saddle; looked over his new dominion as if he had been given the charge of some wild beast; and glanced over at me hoping my hair might be more windswept than his, – 

‘I suppose he meant,’ I went on wryly, ‘that we were to arrive at the City in a state.’

Hoped with it, to evoke some sort of smile. He did not: rather billowed out his cloak and wondered how he ought to do it, – if he ought to cast money out to the crowd, – ‘That is no use,’ said he at last: ‘I put all of my spare change in the collection at Bruma.’

‘I can lend you a half-septim,’ said I putting my hand in my pocket, ‘and… and… and a sherbet lemon.’

He still did not laugh; only considered the western horizon; and nostalgic, said:

‘There is a stained-glass in Kvatch, which I often dwelt upon. It has a humble lord riding into a city, who finding a shivering beggar in the gutter, cuts off a great piece of his cape for him. I suppose the whole cape might have been better, –’

‘If an Emperor were to cut his cape in half for a beggar,’ said I, ‘then it would be talked about for generations, I’m sure. If you did it with no expectation of a stained-glass, then, –’

‘I do hope,’ said Corinne appearing beside me, ‘that you don’t actually intend to cut His Highness the late Emperor Uriel’s cloak in half.’

‘It will be worth twice as much,’ said I laughing: ‘come, Corinne, what do you think Martin ought to do, on entering the City? – Is there Blades protocol for it?’

‘The Emperor,’ said she: ‘must be at once stately, dignified and humble. He must acknowledge his people without stooping, –’

‘Is throwing a sherbet lemon at a peasant,’ I interrupted, ‘out of the question?’

‘Julianne, you’re a bad influence,’ said Corinne at once, though not in bad humour: and tried to remove me to talk to Martin herself. I let her ride alongside; but not overtake me: and when she again emphasised humility, I must put in:

‘All of this is pointless, at any rate. Humility must be spontaneous, and not planned before we have even reached Weye. Martin already has humility in spades. I’m sure he’ll manage that bit. It’s the acknowledging his people part we’re trying to figure out, –’

‘A doff of the cap,’ said she, ‘or a ruffle of the cape; a nod in all directions; it need not be a grand gesture; they will be satisfied, –’

‘Will they,’ said he, ‘will they? Will they know me?’

The voice still which I remembered from Kvatch, – 

But the Emperor Uriel’s cloak; a hand to his hair; straightening on the horse; a crease upon his brow which I knew, but obliquely, – I had been about to pocket my half-septim: but turning it heads-up, studied it a moment, and said that I had no doubts: that they’d know their Emperor.

‘You’ll arrive in state, and they’ll know that,’ said I, ‘at any rate, –’

‘I must be stately,’ said Martin: but when I offered the coins, took them.

[bretongirlwrites]