Redoran rules Indoril drools!
If you mean to insult me, I don’t mean to laugh– All right, I do, but… You speak as if you’re the perfect reincarnation of my uncle Endalyn, if he were a very small child. The image won’t leave my head now. Ayyeh, hah, heh… Have you ever imagined a Dunmer child, about so high, wearing full Redoran armour? Trying to wield steel larger than he is? I am certain that is how Endalyn was as a child. I can’t imagine there was a day of his life that he did not spend in bonemold.
Ah, he truly did hate the idea of his sister with a House Indoril mer. Or anyone outside of Redoran, really. Or within it. No one was ever good enough for her, and I daresay he was likely correct, but he took umbrage with Father quite specifically. Mother always took great pleasure in reminiscing over how she’d blacked his eye and cracked his tooth for it. He came around, in the end. Mother has that effect on people, when it’s clear she’s determined. And at least it wasn’t a Telvanni she wed, though Mother would never have cast her eye anywhere near that House with any intent short of murder.
No, Mother had her eye set firmly on her Ordinator, and set herself to snaring him. Marrying out of her House, of course, wasn’t a simple matter regardless. I do not know how much you recall of Vvardenfell and of the customs of the Third Era, if you are indeed old enough to have known them at all, but leaving your House… It simply wasn’t done. You could never enter into another House, not even by marriage. No other House would even touch you, which means that hardly anyone at all would go near you either, at least no one of any consequence. You could well starve to death as an outcast Hlaalu in Balmora, I remember that distinctly. Even your own family line would likely sever you, expunge you from the family records and shut you out of the Ancestral tombs, nevermore a child of theirs. Expulsion from your House, in effect, was literal and eternal exile.
But Mother has ever been a determined mer, and sharp in every way there is. She’d simply find a way to enter House Indoril with her honour intact. Her status within House Redoran was well-deserved after so many years serving the Guard, and her commanding background made certain she was well aware of the history of alliance and mutual support between House Redoran and Indoril. And Father being quite accomplished in his own right by that point, doing rather well for himself within the Order of the Inquisition, he was not exactly a poor choice, if one may be said to ever choose one’s loves.
I say often that my speechcraft is honed by gods, but I admit also that I hope at least a little comes from my mother. She made a suggestion to the Redoran Councillors, a diplomatically-arranged marriage to cement House ties to Indoril. Once they’d agreed to this clever idea, she was tasked with selecting a likely candidate and sending forth missives to House Indoril’s representatives.It needed to be someone of relatively high standing within their respective Houses, high enough to be worth something, but not so high as to jeopardise the limited number of eligible noblemer.
So, of course, she sent a letter to her paramour to tell him to pack his things, volunteered herself, and had half the marriage already arranged before Redoran could even breath in surprise.
There were arguments within the Thavas family line for years, I heard, most ending in the traditional Redoran debate method: armed combat. Still, by all House laws, Ulenea Thavas was still considered Indoril only by marriage, and was still very much of Redoran blood. This was proved many times, until stubborn mer found sense enough to stop making her bleed them to prove her point. She won her husband, the Thavas line kept their daughter (no matter how confused and frustrated she made them), and even Uncle Endalyn eventually warmed to Father ever so slightly. At least enough. He was always fonder of we children than of our father, noting often how we took after our mother in quite pointed ways.
Although once, on the night of my twenty-seventh birthday, while we were sitting by the riverside and both quite deep into our greef, I remember him slurring muttered praise for my father. Just the once. Stubborn old alit…
…Lords, I miss my uncle. It hurts me, to think of him as he is…