✵ synopsis: To Arpina Sun-Stealer, nothing comes without a cost.
✧ word count: 577
✵ warnings: none
✧ tags: tes summer fest 22, introspective, no dialogue, canon!prophecy
✵ ship: mild arpina sun-stealer/miraak
✧ characters: arpina sun-stealer, mentions of miraak
✵ tag list: @reachfolk, @lookathooves, @faolan-red-eagle, @cwahsont, @vilkas, @fennorians, ask to be added i say as i add willy nilly
Arpina often wonders when it will catch up to her. It is inevitable, she knows it, the consequence of saving someone who was going to kill her—and rescuing him instead. There is nothing quite like the fire of desperation to spur on impulsive decision making about things you were initially on the fence about, but she didn’t have the chance to bargain with Mora for Miraak’s life and now she is not entirely sure of what to do knowing that there are two Dragonborn on Nirn now.
It’s not like it was in the prophecy, but what could she have done? Left him to die? No.
(No, because if she was in his place, she would want to be saved in every scenario. She would want to be saved, over and over again, because she cannot imagine never seeing Nirn again before dying.)
It is an inconceivable thought to leave the mirror of her soul to die. To die the most painful, devastating, and lonely death. He didn’t die in battle, but at the hand of a cheater, and she’d have eaten his soul, devouring it the way Alduin would take hers, and then she would be just as much a villain as him.
Arpina swallows thickly at the sight of Miraak, asleep on her bed and still looking too far close to death, even with all the care she has given him and the healers she had sent for. He is the stronger Dragonborn, she knows that, and maybe he wanted it. He has always seemed to act that way, like he is the Dragonborn and that the world ought to bend at the knee and know it—
She huffs in some sort of bitter amusement, and then turns away.
Nothing she has ever done has come without cost. Everything has a price to it, and no matter how well she plays thief, consequence will always make her pay for it. Even her life comes at a cost, one she is still in debt for. The world, after all, demands change. She always did think that she had already done her part, doing the little things she had wanted, but then the prophecy, this blasted prophecy had changed that.
(Is this it? The chance to run? To take what she has and leave behind this responsibility thrusted onto her?)
When the Snow Tower lies sundered, kingless, bleeding—
She never wanted to be the Last Dragonborn. All she wanted was to live, to survive, to exist in this world like any other passing soul, leaving only the trace of a mark behind. Arpina doesn’t want to be remembered, and yet she is the one the world will sing songs to when Alduin falls to the blade of a mortal.
And Miraak, who she knows has always wanted to be remembered, to be the hero of legend and glory, to be the one who has an epic tale to be told from the very dawn of the world to its last moments, to have been here and there and everywhere even only in myth and legend—to think he is the one who has been forgotten, discarded, and kept secret from the world.
It is the irony, Arpina notes, that makes this hurt all the more.
(She cannot help but wonder what it means to be the Last. The Last made? Or is it the Last one standing?)
The World-Eater wakes, and the Wheel turns upon the Last Dragonborn.
tfw your dad gives you an edible and keeps checking up on you because he thinks mothers day is a traumatizing day for me when in reality i’m dissociating too hard to care jgiodfsgjio
