BIRTH & ORIGINS
4E 174
—̳͟͞͞ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ
No One came into the world in 4E 174 (24th Sun's Dawn), a year before the White-Gold Concordat tore the Empire apart. She would never answer to "Arya"—the name her parents had chosen with quiet affection before she’d even drawn her first breath.
Nagá Fernvale, her mother, was a Bosmer adventurer from Valenwood, born with wanderlust and no intention of settling down. Curious about the world, wanting to see all of Tamriel, she traveled widely, excited to see the lands beyond her homeland's canopy. That curiosity was what later got her into trouble.
Nagá was not built for staying still. After drifting through the sands of Elsweyr and the heart of Cyrodiil, she hit the Skyrim border, where the sudden, biting cold demanded her attention. She lingered in Falkreath just long enough to dry her boots before the old itch returned. It led her to a pack of adventurers with eyes on the Rift—specifically the brass and steam of Bthalft. The Dwemer ruin promised enough salvage to make the risk of the deep dark feel like a fair trade, right?
The crew stocked up in Riften, picking up a young man who’d caught wind of the word "treasure" and decided that was all he needed to hear. Nagá figured he was a bit of a stoic oddball, but he had steady hands and didn't complain when the work got heavy. They spent days crawling through Bthalft’s collapsed guts, prying brass from the walls and filling their packs with anything that looked valuable. They climbed back out into the light with heavy pockets and a half-formed plan to go back for the rest once their backs stopped aching.
The time in the dark had given the young man ideas. Once they were back in Riften and flush with coin, he turned up with a stolen Amulet of Mara and a look on his face that suggested he’d already scripted the ending. He presented it to Nagá with the baffling confidence of someone who didn't think "no" was on the table.
Nagá was flattered. Truly. But she was also not interested. She said so, as kindly as she could manage, which was kind enough but still a no. The atmosphere among the group didn't recover and the young man didn't take it lightly. What had been easy camaraderie curdled into something stiff and uncomfortable, and Nagá, who had no patience for that particular kind of tension, decided she had seen enough of Bthalft and enough of the Rift for the time being. Eventually, after a light-hearted good bye, she moved on. There was more of Skyrim to see, and she had never been good at staying where she was no longer wanted.
Somewhere on the road near Markath, Nagá crossed paths with a group of Thalmor agents transporting a political prisoner — a young child, taken hostage as leverage against a family of Talos worshippers. Nagá intervened. She helped the child escape. It was the kind of decision that felt right in the moment and cost everything afterward.
With the Thalmor now on her trail and nowhere safe in Skyrim, Nagá fled west into High Rock, the child in tow. It was meant to be a temporary refuge and would turn out to be one of her worst, desperate decisions.
In High Rock, she crossed into the territory of Lord Alderween — a Breton nobleman of considerable reputation and considerably worse character. To the outside world, he was charming, well-mannered, and generously hospitable; the kind of man other nobles spoke well of and commoners trusted on sight. He was known for taking in travelers in need. He was known for his open doors and warm hearths. All of it was a carefully maintained lie.
Nagá did not know that when she accepted his hospitality. She had no reason to suspect it. She was exhausted, hunted, and grateful for a hand extended to her without obvious malice. By the time she understood what kind of man she had walked into, the door was already closed behind her. Secretly, Alderween was something else entirely. A devoted worshipper of Molag Bal. He took pleasure in dominance, suffering, and the breaking of people he considered his property. He had developed a particular, obsessive fixation on Nagá the moment he laid eyes on her; her unusual appearance, her rosé-coloured hair, her foreignness — she was, to him, a prize. Something rare to be owned.
The details of what followed are not ones that need to be written down. Some horrors are better left in the silence between words, where they belong. What can be said is this: Nagá did not leave that place the same woman who entered it. No one ever did.
Eventually, Nagá escaped Alderween's hold. She did not leave easily, and she did not leave whole. Her first instinct was to find the child — she followed what little trail she had back into Skyrim, all the way to the Rift, where the last lead died with the confirmation she had been dreading: the child was gone. Killed. And there was nothing left to save.
Near Shor's Stone, still in the Rift, she ran out of road. Exhausted, cold, underfed, and in no condition to go much further, she was barely standing when a hunter found her. His name was Toivo Russ, the son of a simple farmer. A Nord who earned his living by selling game. Not a remarkable man by any grand measure — no titles, no wealth, no particular destiny. Just someone who saw a woman sitting at the edge of collapse on his doorstep and offered her a meal and a roof without asking for anything in return.
As time passed, Nagá fell in love with Toivo, and with love came trust — so she told him the truth about her past and what she had been through: Alderween, the Thalmor, the child, what she had survived and what it had cost her. Understandably so, she was paranoid, still dreading that the Thalmor were after her as well, or that Alderween had not forgotten her and would eventually come to collect what he considered his. She told him she was likely still being hunted, that staying near her carried real risk. Toivo stayed anyway. Love, as it turned out, did not require ideal circumstances. It simply required two people who chose each other anyway.
The day Arya was born, the Thalmor found them and Nagá would never know whether it was on orders of Lord Alderween, or if it was revenge for helping their hostage child in the first place.
Toivo fought. There was no negotiation, no hesitation — just a Nord man putting himself between his family and the people who wanted them dead, with everything he had, until he had nothing left. While drawing his last breath, he still swung his axe at the attackers. As his heart stopped, he still grabbed one of them by the throat and took him along into death. Toivo bought his wife and child time to run and it cost him his life. A sacrifice he would've chosen over and over and over again…
Terrified and heartbroken, Nagá fled, dashing through the aspen and birch forest of the Rift. Wounded, bleeding, newborn pressed against her chest, she didn't stop once, pushing herself over her physical limits. Like any loving mother, she kept moving long after her body had given her every reason to stop, driven by the single, wordless certainty that the child had to live even if she did not.
Unfortunately, Nagá did not make it far. The wounds she carried were too deep and the road too long — she bled out slowly, until her body simply had nothing left to give. She was found hours later by a farmer's wife travelling the road near Riften. Nagá was long gone by then, her body cold and still. And yet, tucked against her chest — held there by arms that had apparently refused to let go even as everything else gave out — was the baby. Alive. Impossibly so. And stubbornly crying, though cold to the touch and screaming with the kind of desperate, furious hunger that only the very young can manage. The farmer's wife stood there for a long moment, unable to quite believe what she was seeing. It was nothing short of a miracle.
She had no idea what had happened. A dead woman on the road, no signs of a struggle nearby, no one else in sight — she assumed bandits were responsible. She wrapped the baby in her own cloak, held her close for warmth, and stood there with a heavy heart and no good options. Temporarily, she took the child home. But winter was coming, resources were already stretched thin, and there was simply no room for another mouth to feed — not if her own family was to survive the cold months ahead. It broke her heart, but there was only one place she knew to bring a child who had no one left in the world — The Riften Orphanage.
The True Scale of Riften: Skyrim in UNREAL ENGINE 5! [4K]
Skyrim:Honorhall Orphanage
