#zannammu

[therunawayscamp]

Grief

The Scamps have lost more than a few of their own over the centuries, but that doesn’t make it any easier. They each have their own ways of reacting to and dealing with the ensuing grief.

R’khan gets much stricter and quicker to anger. The only time he has ever hit Luca was after a crew member was killed, in response to an unrelated incident. She didn’t retaliate, surprisingly, but ran away and hid in the hold for a while, where the Argonians kept her company. R’khan didn’t apologise but then again, he also didn’t punish her for shirking her duties.

Speaking of Luca, on the rare occasions when somebody she actually likes dies, she gets stuck in the denial phase of grief. The person in question cannot be dead, and if they are, there must be a way to get them back. That’s what shady deals with the daedra are for.

Vilayn shuts himself away refusing to talk to anyone and drinks heavily; the length of time and amount of booze vary according to how much he liked the recently deceased. He was drunk for three days straight after he found out that his mother had died. Casether is worried about what will happen if (when) Hazil succumbs to his illness.

Tosti becomes cold, almost surgical. He tends to disappear for a length of time as well. If the person who died was someone close to him, and if they died before their time, the people at fault for their death tend to meet an unpleasant fate of their own shortly afterwards.

Azareth takes the news in his usual stoic way. It’s even more difficult than usual to coax conversation out of him afterwards, although he might be found in deep, quiet debate with Ethysil. Eventually he will pour out one for the deceased, smoke one of his fancier pipes in their honour, and move on.

Bereavement might be the only thing which silences Eddis’s laughter. True, he will start sucking and chewing on his teeth instead, but at least it’s a break from his usual giggling. He also becomes more erratic in his behaviour. The last time they lost a crew member and this happened, R’khan, in a moment of genuine concern for his bosun, called Eddis into his quarters for a private talk; Eddis was back to usual when he left.

Drasonval, Braskan, Oran and Sham commiserate with each other. Their omnipresent sense of camaraderie intensifies, and they will gather around, usually with a drink, and if they all knew the deceased they will share stories together until they’re able to laugh again. If only one of them was personally affected, the others will do their best to cheer him or her up or, failing that, just be there.

Bob will take her feelings out on any objects nearby, smashing them until she feels better. Surprisingly, it works. She doesn’t understand why everybody else has to bury their emotions, or sit around doing nothing about them.

Eldnar feels loss keenly, and struggles to hide his sentimentality. It embarrasses him and -- what a shock -- the crew tease him for it, so he tends to disappear in this sort of situation until he’s over the tears.

According to his beliefs, Ethysil is not supposed to consider death an end, merely a return to a greater whole. That’s all very well as an abstract idea. In practice he becomes very sombre, spends a lot more time alone with his thoughts, and either avoids talking to people if he is the only person affected, or listens quietly if other people knew the deceased.

Jo’Raya doesn’t show much in how she deal with other people, but she loses her appetite and spends a lot more time sleeping, or at least curled up in her bunk, than she usually does.

Assuming her surgical efforts did not contribute towards the death in question, Rosie deals with grief reasonably well. Like anyone, she goes through periods of sadness and anger, but they fade in a reasonable amount of time. If her surgical efforts did contribute, once she overcomes the guilt she will be determined to learn from the experience and do better next time, and will throw herself almost frantically into her work and study to ensure this is the case.

Turithys shuts down all personal communication. She will only talk to people to discuss work, and it can take a long time before she is ready to relax and open up again.

Like Jo’Raya, Xisthia’s interactions with others don’t change much, but that’s assuming they can find her. She will spend most of her time swimming and hiding underwater, distracting herself with exploring the seabed and sometimes sitting on rocks down there, watching the ripples overhead.

Zannammu appears to have much more faith in her concept of an afterlife than Ethysil. She is convinced that those who pass on receive their just rewards and uses this to cope with the loss of them in her own life.

[therunawayscamp]

“Are you here by yourself?”

‘I’m trying to be.’

Zannammu watched the people moving through the square warily, which, for her, was akin to being bright and cheerful. When no others came jostling into her corner she even managed a smile in Bergitte’s direction, albeit a thin-lipped and weary one.

‘Looks like I’m safe for now,’ she said. ‘What about you?’

[therunawayscamp]

“Tell me that wasn’t fun!”

‘That wasn’t fun.’

‘You’re the one who’s no fun, Zan.’ Sham thumped her shipmate on the back, ignoring the glare directed at her in favour of matching Dram’s grin. ‘What next? Can you get us into that palace place, where their Jarl or whatever it is lives? I’ve got something we could try.’

[therunawayscamp]

The Recovery.

Our first sight of the Kintyra in the feeble dawn, when the winds had calmed and the rain was thin and drizzly, almost convinced us not to go in search of survivors. She looked pathetic. A ragged pile of wood, half-submerged in a frothing, angry tide that continued to burst higher and higher over her remains. That was all that was left. A few shards of timber against a watery sky and the hulk of Vvardenfell smoking behind her. There was no movement – only the slow drift downwards towards the seabed.

We brought the Scamp in as close as we dared and were rewarded with one small mercy: Jo'Raya, damp and cold and shivering, had clung to the bowsprit after the vessel went down. She leapt across to the line we threw her and arrived sopping wet on our main deck. We asked her if there were any other survivors. She told us that most of the crew had abandoned ship, but Braskan had held on to the last, and after that she wasn’t able to say any more. In the end, we opted to drop anchor and send out the boat to comb the beach.

If we were sombre and silent on the Scamp, it was worse on the shore. Vvardenfell's Bitter Coast was, as I remember it (and I remember it pretty damn well because even before I signed up to the Navy we used to ship our definitely not smuggled goods from Solstheim to Hla Oad), a solemn sort of place even in its heyday. Vivec City was busy enough, but as soon as you pulled out of the harbour and made your way north it was all quiet, misty marshes, lit by the dim light of coda flowers, serenaded by the groaning of the netch. Peaceful, but mournful.

Since the island was deserted, it had become much worse. No netch or guar for company. No ramshackle villages straggling out into the water. Only swamp, and the backs of rocks rising out of them. Some were smooth and rounded boulders, coated in moss, rocks which had sat there for years. Others were like black glass striking out of the earth. Those were the ones vomited out of Red Mountain and the ones which had ripped apart the Kintyra's hull. It was as silent as the ancestral tombs carved into the hillsides and, also like the ancestral tombs, scattered with bodies. Not many of them were alive.

Zannammu became aware of the water before anything else. It was oily, covered in a film of muck which left a grimy trail across her cheek, and the salt in it stung the wounds too numerous to count across her body. She tried to lift her head and got it as far as something green, slimy and stinking of rot, at which point she decided that maybe drowning in two inches of swamp water wasn't that bad after all. She had never known a pain like it. It burned and froze her, wrenched at her muscles, slammed into her head. She could hardly breathe. Every single bone in her body felt as if it were fracturing apart. Like the wood. The deck. The Kintyra.

When she finally hauled herself up on her elbows and crawled away from the swamp, dawn was breaking on the stretch of coast. The Scamp, battered and limping but not yet broken, was anchored further out in the bay, while her boat pulled towards the shore. Zannammu's last great effort was to send a burst of magefire up into the sky as a guiding light. I remember seeing it from the boat, navigating towards it, the boat grinding across the mud as we inspected the damage in silence. Without that light, we might never have known there was anyone left alive.

We saved who we could. That wasn't many. Braskan we found headfirst in a dead scathecraw plant and managed to bring him back to life with a few kicks to the chest, which dislodged the seawater in his lungs. He and Zannammu sat side by side on a grassy hill and watched the rescue efforts through empty, glassy eyes. The first words Zannammu spoke were rough, scraped out of a throat raw with salt and deadened screams.

'A judgement from Azura.'

Even that didn't spark off some reaction in Braskan. Nor did being presented with a bottle of rum to himself, or the news that Sham and Oran had made it out alive, or being bundled into the boat and rowed back to the Scamp. There was nothing. Zannammu, crammed in beside him once again, had to watch wordlessly as she left Vvardenfell, the Ashlands, her homeland, for the final time.

[therunawayscamp]

The Loss of the Kintyra.

'Azrik, take the helm!'

Azrik Mathri, good old One-Ear, skidded across the deck to the helm, where he and four mates struggled to control it.

'Sham, get them sails stowed!'

Sham was already in the process of doing so. She and the sailors were fighting the wind and another blow from her cosh did nothing to speed them up, not when they were already pouring all of their energy into it.

'Zannammu, how far?'

'Two cables!'

The string of shouts continued below. Zannammu allowed herself a moment to glance away from the rocks and out to larboard, at the Scamp lurching in and out of the fog bank. It was hard to pick the brig out. She was listing hard, her lanternlight hidden, and the sheets of rain seemed to erase her from existence. By the time she looked back, a wave had sliced across the deck and taken Azrik with it. There was no time to help him. He lies somewhere at the bottom of the Inner Sea to this day.

I should like it to be noted that it was not a case of the Scamp abandoning her sister. We did our best. Even R'khan's harshest critics would have to concede that he considers loss of life to be a waste of resources, and so I know it was with a heavy heart that he ordered us to stand off, preferring, thanks to Zannammu's signal, to preserve our flagship rather than risk more lives in a hopeless rescue attempt. We did our best, and our best was not good enough. For that, there are no words good enough to express our regret and our sorrow.

The Scamp was invisible in the night when the Kintyra hit the rocks. Zannammu felt the whole vessel buck and shudder under her palms, which slipped and sputtered for a grip before digging in so tightly the splinters gashed across her skin. There were creaks and groans so deep they might have come from the bottom of the ocean and risen up over the eras, until they burst through the surface with a tortured and painful howl. At that moment, every one aboard knew in their hearts,even if they couldn’t admit it to themselves, that the Kintyra was lost.

Braskan stood with his legs apart, arms wrapped around the rail, snarling orders nobody could hear or obey. Sham says he was determined to save the Kintyra even as she broke apart beneath him. Whether it was denial, ignorance, or a last desperate stand, I don't know, but whatever it was it kept him going through the night. When the waves were like cliffs and they were hanging from the top, when he had to hold the rail to stop himself dropping over the edge into the ocean, when they dropped over the brink and ended underwater, it kept him going.

‘Eight points to windward, captain!’

‘Heave-to on larboard tack!’

‘Can’t! The– b’vehk!’

I don't presume to write about the wrecking itself. I wasn't there. I don't know what hells they went through. Besides, this story started off being about Zannammu, and every single member of the Kintyra's crew deserve equal recognition for their efforts that night. They earned themselves all the honour and glory ALMSIVI – or the New Temple, or the Eight or Nine or the Moons or Hist or even bloody Malacath – can bestow.

The last Zannammu remembers is the mast falling. Wind and rain and the weight of the sails dragged the mast too far, split it in the middle. The world, she says, swung around beneath her, until the sky dangled beneath her feet and the ocean stretched out overhead, tipped, spilled over, smashed into her ears and her eyes and her lungs, dragged her up or down, she didn't know which, and swallowed her up in darkness.

[therunawayscamp]

Signals are Exchanged between the Runaway Scamp and the Kintyra.

The natural habitat of an Ashlander is in the Ashlands. I realise that this may sound self-evident but you would be surprised at the number of people who don't understand what it means. The Ashlands are not an area of Morrowind which happens to be a bit hotter than the rest of it, they are (or rather were) scorched wastelands riddled with foyadas, barren of any life which didn't try to kill all other life it encountered, and near impossible to live on thanks to an absence of any water. The Ashlanders managed it somehow, mostly with bloody-mindedness the like of which has not been seen before or since.

With this in mind, and for absolute clarity, it can safely be said that the natural habitat of an Ashlander is not fifty feet up in the air in squalling winds and rain, squinting across an ocean. It is a compliment to Zannammu's versatility and determination

that this is where she found herself on lookout duty, and that she committed herself entirely to her task.

Fog and smoke, which is never far away in Morrowind, obscured most of her view. There was a dark, heavy mass squatting on the horizon, which might have been a raincloud, but was probably the ruins of Vvardenfell, and that was about it for unique features. In every direction, the sea was grey and choppy, and the Runaway Scamp slipped in and out sight as she passed through the mist thrown up by the waves and the wind. The only colours in this grey, featureless landscape were her signal flags. Zannammu pushed her bandanna out of her eyes with the hand not clinging to the mast and bellowed the message down to the main deck.

'Deck there! Signal from the Scamp! Storm ahead!'

Braskan was marching back and forth between the sailors. I might have my reservations about him as a captain, but I will say this for him: when he gets nervous, he doesn't show it. Primarily because all the sujamma has rotted away his common sense, but that doesn't change the facts of the situation. When he heard the message, he grunted and spat over the side without so much as a flicker of concern.

'Ya don' fuckin' say!' He stumped towards the mast and shrugged off his coat while he addressed Shamilia, who was his first mate at the time. 'Keep her on course, Sham. I's goin' up top ta see if I can't find summat useful ta signal back.'

While Zannammu waited for him, feeling the mast rock and the deck swing around beneath her, she followed the Scamp's progress as best she could when the weather was so thick and foul. There were no points to mark distance by, or if they were the waves reared up and covered them before she could get a good fix, but as she watched she realised that something was wrong. The water was dark all around, coated with a shiny film of ash, but between the cavernous troughs of the waves she was sure she could see lighter patches and then, at their centre, jagged flashes of blackness. Surf whipped across them. Waves breaking.

The arrival of Braskan beside her didn't interrupt her line of thought, which is astonishing because Braskan's presence anywhere in the vicinity is enough to put everything else out of my head as I try to work out what he's done wrong this time. Having him and his smell

squashed against her in such close quarters could not have been a pleasant experience for Zannammu, yet she kept staring, and let his words tumble around her.

'They thinks I can't tell a storm when I sees it? Damned thing came outta nowhere. Yellow one minute, black the next. Looks a righ' big one, too, goin' ta hit us wi' all Seht's wrath. Bes' get down afore this wind gets any stronger. 'S already like Oran's bunk after he's bin eatin' kresh, so 'tis.'

Neither of them moved, or at least not further than the gales pushing them on the swaying mast. Braskan was staring at Vvardenfell, what he could see of it. Zannammu was staring at something much closer.

‘Captain, look there. Do they look like rocks to you?'

Braskan squinted in the direction Zannammu had waved her hand. They were on the peak of a wave, gazing down into the trough, and the blackness was stark against the white froth only a few cables away. He gritted his teeth and gripped the mast more tightly.

'Ya seen Mr Drasonval's charts afore ya came aboard, didn' ya? There wasn't no bloody rocks on them.'

'They were drawn up before the Red Year.' Zannammu said this in a tone us officers know well, the tone of a sailor who would really like to be using much stronger, more direct words but doesn't want to risk a beating. 'Nobody's fully charted the Bay since then. What if the Imposter's--'

'--Lord Vehk may he be praised an' all--'

'–little accident left debris in the water?'

The next wave swelled up over the blackness and then surged forwards. The prow of the Kintyra lifted as water sluiced across the deck, drenching the hands at work. They glanced between each tug on a line at the oncoming storm and the older hands, the ones like Azrik “One-Ear” Mathri who knew the cost of carelessness first hand, sidled as close to the taffrail and the mast as their task would let them, prepared to grab hold if the storm came any closer. Braskan, when he managed to tear his eyes away from the clouds and the patch of water, looked directly at Zannammu, saw her chin jutting forwards and how tightly her fists were clenched, so far away from her home – and yet so close, with Vvardenfell somewhere out there. He leaned sideways, so that he was dangling over the deck, and roared to Sham,

'Signal the Scamp! Danger ahead! Alter course to larboard!'

Sham's voice was torn away on the wind, but the mess of figures below suddenly coalesced as they ran to their stations and obeyed their orders. Braskan hunched his head down as far as he could, not having the collar of his coat to hide in, and began to lower himself from the top, none of which was enough to stop Zannammu from kicking his shoulder as he went down.

'What do we do, captain? If we want to avoid the rocks, we have to sail into the storm.'

'I knows tha'.'

'We'll be taken aback!'

'I knows tha', too.'

'There's nothing we can do, no time to prepare.' She felt rain lashing across her knuckles and down her wrists. 'You know what this is? This was sent by Azura as a judgement. You said yourself it came out of nowhere, and--'

'Mistress Zannammu, shut yer Thrice-cursed ashen mouth, or I's gonna shut it for ya!'

Hardly up to R'khan's standard of threat, I'm sure you'll agree, but it did cut Zannammu off. She was almost beyond speech anyway. As Braskan continued his descent, her arms were locked tight around the masthead and her lips moved in silent prayer. All she could think about, all she could see, even when she closed her eyes, was the water rearing towards the hull, and the rocks baring their teeth in the depths.

[therunawayscamp]

In which a Plot is Hatched, with the Help of the Kintyra.

I am a fair mer and not, as I have stressed many times, prone to attacks of Politics or Philosophy or anything else which is supposed to be important and therefore bores the britches off a sane audience. Yes, I worship the Three, but I can't claim any reason for doing so other than habit, and I won't deny that there are other Gods out there. Which means, in the interest of maintaining this neutrality, that having talked about Ethysil I ought to talk about Mistress Zannammu. I hope you are all grateful for this because I do so at great risk to my life and various personal parts of my body. Zannammu does not like to be Insulted, and she can find insults in pretty much anything. Fortunately she also does not like reading Tamrielic so I may get away with it.

Besides, I don't want to mock her (not on this occasion anyway). She was the lookout up top when the Kintyra was approaching Vvardenfell and I don't care what Braskan says, if she hadn't been up there the end result would have been much worse. We probably would have lost the Runaway Scamp. Such a thing cannot even be joked about. Zannammu is a grumpy old s'wit, and she has a way of looking at you which makes you feel like a scrib about to be gutted for jelly, and she smells of ash yams, and that weird singing she does makes my skin crawl – but she saved our lives and our ship and for that, I will always be grateful. I forget whether I've mentioned the Kintyra before in this manuscript. One day I will write of how we captured her, the balletic maneuouerevres

of our vessels circling one another around the bay, the moment when we boarded her after a long, wearying engagement and tasted victory in the air,

the glorious battle with armed Imperial forces on their deck. Such a cunning and triumphant tale deserves its own treatment if my audience is to understand exactly how cunning and triumphant we were, however, so for now all you need to know is that the Kintyra was an Imperial sloop we captured off the coast of Skyrim I think it was, and that many songs have been written and tales told about the occasion. For reasons I've never been sure of myself, the crew voted for Braskan to be her captain, and even more mystifyingly R'khan agreed to this, so for a few years we had our own fleet

with which to adventure across the shores of Tamriel. The Imperials called it "marauding", but they don't know anything about seafaring and should be roundly ignored if not beaten.

Yes, our luck was in back then. For a while there we were the heroes of Morrowind, the toast of Blacklight, and nothing could stop us. And so we thought, who better than us to lead the return of the Dunmer to Vvardenfell? There was talk at the time of settlers heading out there to rebuild, but if we got there first, it would make an ideal haven for when House Sadras decided to persecute us for our so-called “harassment” and “piracy” and “gross crimes against Morrowind”. If anybody could do it, it was us. The gods were on our side, we had our fleet, and we set a course across the Inner Sea to the Scathing Bay, there to reclaim our history.

[therunawayscamp]

❝ Why be ashamed? Power should be respected, not swept under the carpet. ❞ (Jocelyn)

‘Because they were false gods!’

The temptation for Zannammu was to stamp her foot on the ground, but in the interests of a healthy, reasonable debate -- and that R’khan had sworn everyone not to offend this ship captain -- she limited herself to glaring.

‘It doesn’t matter if they were powerful. They stole their power, tried to murder the memory of our rightful gods, and Ethysil should be ashamed to say he draws his strength from them.’