eggiesins

[eggiesins]

Hey, we're mostly through June! How's that writing challenge you started going?

:o thank you for checking in! It started off pretty good, didn't get to the 7,500 weekly goal I was aiming for, but progress is progress. Aaaaaaand then I got sick, yeehaw.

In short, it's been slow going, but I'm really happy I'm doing it because it really has forced me out of my comfort zone, and I'm getting to work with so many new themes and characters of my own! I love doing fanfiction though, so I'm excited to get back to Athenas later on.

Anyway, I really do appreciate you reaching out, so please enjoy a snippet from the first chapter of my work! I don't have a name for the story, or even the world yet, but it's a decently dark fantasy story following four fugitives and adventurers on a mission to eradicate an ancient evil currently poisoning the world.

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Bjorn assumed his usual seat toward the edge, cradling the tiny wooden bowl of watery gruel to his chest. He tried to ignore the tremble in his hands as he scooped out a small portion and laid it gently on the ground, whispering a small prayer for Forgiveness before attacking the rest.

There was only a pittance left in his bowl when the girl began to cry. She had arrived only a day earlier, and to Bjorn seemed no older than twelve or thirteen. Her long hair hung behind her in a knotted braid, a clumsy attempt to replicate the intricate style unique to the Ruby Isles. Only a child, but he could spy the Whalesong's mark already tattooed on her wrist. She held her face in her cracked, bleeding hands, and though her shoulders rocked with sobs, not a sound came out.

Cautiously, Bjorn approached her, taking care to seat himself a few feet away. His shrunken stomach growled and his fingers shook as he passed the remainder of his meager rations just to the right of her own bowl. For a moment, her silent sobs paused as she glanced between Bjorn and his offering. But it was in her eyes the second she saw him - recognition - and he quickly shrank back into his corner at the fury he found. In an instant, she was on her feet and kicking both bowls across the flimsy shelter. Gruel fell to the ground and chilled into gelatinous slop. A chipped wooden edge caught him at the temple and warm blood trickled into Bjorn's eye, but he did not fight back. She shouted words in a language he knew but did not understand, and still her meaning was clear. He knew what she shouted for, knew who she shouted for. Her anger was righteous, and he knew this must be his due.

Even though Bjorn's offenses far outclassed whatever "crime" this girl had committed, it was she who the guards grabbed roughly around the arms. It was her whom they drug off and chained to a stone pillar in full view of the entire camp. She stood against the rough basalt, all knobbled knees and gapped teeth as she watched them in silence. Even when her lips turned blue and her hands went numb from the cold, her murderous glare remained fixed on Bjorn. The minute she was free and he finally laid his head to rest, she would come for him and Bjorn would rest forever. This, he knew.

But a man's knowledge is finite, and before the prisoners could be recalled to their work, the dull thud of hooves and the creak of wooden wheels drew everything to a halt. Guards looked at one another in confusion and prisoners murmured amongst themselves as the carriage drew closer. It was stained a deep violet and gilded in gold, with handles carved from Mammothian Pearls native to the shores of Tumbover and inlaid with only the most distinctive of Hopefell's living emeralds. Banners bearing the imperial sigil dangled from the sides, and even the taciturn coachman seemed to have been plucked straight out of a painting. Bjorn's breath caught in his throat; he knew the carriage's master, but not its meaning. For an envoy to travel so far and through such difficult terrain, their mission must have been ordered by Carilla direct, and Bjorn was loathe to find out why.

The carriage came to a stop just in front of the squalid, low hut the guards used for shelter. Bjorn's bony and gnarled hands clenched into fists by his sides as he watched the envoy climb down the gilded steps. The man was tall, but slight, and moved with an air of practiced grace. His long hair was tied low with a modest ribbon, and his bespectacled gaze took quick stock of his surroundings, only narrowing slightly when it finally landed on the warden, whose chest heaved from the brief dash over. Heron, Bjorn recalled easily. Carilla's left hand.

The two men exchanged a few hushed words before the warden pointed cautiously to Bjorn. Heron's gaze followed the warden's finger, and he could not help the dramatic tilt to his brow as he finally spotted the emaciated prisoner. Where once might have stood a proud warrior with gleaming armor and red hair that blazed like fire in the sun, now there was only a hunched sack of skin and bones, barely covered by the tattered rags that seemed to serve as clothes for the prisoner. Bjorn's eyes were dull and sunken, his cheeks hollow. A shadow of a person when compared to any man, but to the hero he once was? Even a toenail from the Bjorn of days past would amount to more than the raggedy desolate figure currently answering to that name.

Heron chuckled to himself with a shake of his head as the guards dragged Bjorn forward. "Have you lost weight, old friend?" he asked with a sneer. "It suits you."

When Bjorn said nothing, Heron jerked his head toward the carriage. "Get in. And for the love of the Empress, do try to keep that stench on your side of things."

"I am abandoned, Heron," Bjorn croaked as he finally looked up to meet Heron's piercing eyes. "You see me well enough. What more could Carilla want from me?"

"Her Majesty the Empress requests your presence for a game she wishes to play," Heron explained with a stiff smile. "Let that be sufficient. It is more than you - and less than I - deserve."

Bjorn scoffed. "I've no interest in playing more of her games. I'll stay."

"And what makes you think your preferences matter?"

"Because you cannot harm me," Bjorn said, taking a small amount of satisfaction in the brief, irritated twitch to Heron's jaw. "If she wanted me dead, I would be. If she wanted me harmed, she wouldn't need to send you. So what task is so important to the Empress that she would dispatch her favorite aide to fetch me?"

"I'll put it this way for you," Heron gestured vaguely toward the surrounding wilderness. "You can die here, frozen and decrepit thing that you are." He paused. "Or, you can fall in honorable combat like the good dog you once were. Her Majesty might even deign to have you interred in the imperial tombs once you've served your purpose."

Bjorn's jaw worked as he considered the offer. To play by his cousin's rules would be folly; he had already learned this lesson before. But even as his heart shrank at the prospect, his empty stomach twisted itself into knots and his emaciated hands clung to his tattered rags for any reprieve from the freezing winds. Scorning his own weakness, he remembered the girl and her silent cries. Heron's foot tapped against the pebble-strewn ground impatiently. Finally, the prisoner broke his silence. "I'll go, and I'll even forgo strangling you in the carriage, on one condition."

Heron sighed and pinched at the bridge of his nose. "And that would be?"

"The girl over there, against the pillar," Bjorn pointed to her, still standing on trembling knees, her eyes shut against the biting winds. "She's a child. Whatever her crimes, you have the power to pardon her. Do it, and I'll go as Carilla bids."

Heron's composure shattered as he broke out into a fit of barking laughter. "Free her? Have you gone blind as well to not know what she is?"

"Aye. A child."

Heron did not miss the resolute set to Bjorn's jaw, the determination in his lowered brow. He coughed a few more times before returning to his usual sneer. "Fine." He nodded once to the warden, who wasted no time in directing his men to unlock her chains.

As soon as the restraints were off, the girl crumbled to the ground in a heap. Heron barely spared her a second glance before ushering Bjorn into the carriage. He stopped a moment to murmur something else to the warden, but the prisoner couldn't make it out. An uneasy knot settled in Bjorn's stomach as Heron climbed inside and took his seat across from him, looking just a bit too pleased with himself.

"What did you do?" Bjorn demanded, ignoring the way his torn nails cut into his palms.

"Nothing for you to worry about. The girl is freed, as we agreed." Heron knocked twice on the ceiling, and slowly, the carriage began to move. "Now, let's discuss preparations for the tourney, yes?"

Bjorn offered a silent prayer for the girl as he looked down at his bleeding hands.

--

[eggiesins]

decentralize and clean up your life!!!

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

last updated: march 18th 2025

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He drinks a whisky drink (action) he drinks a vodka drink (bonus action) he drinks a lager drink (hasted action) he drinks a cider drink (action surge)

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Buying drugs in Tamriel gotta be so weird, imagine your bro's like "don't worry man I gotta a plug"

And then this is the plug:

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the blacksmith as he does the final flourishes on the most massive and ornate erect codpiece anyone in the surrounding kingdoms has ever seen: so, big plans for the weekend?

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we dont really talk about it but HP Lovecraft just kinda looks like the guy who'd write all that shit like have you seen his portrait photo that man looks like he'd get a blue ribbon at the county fair for "soggiest, shakiest rabbit"

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Day 2 of Rough Draft Month, and so far I've come up with a new region in my fantasy world called Tumbover. It's a cliffside settlement and it's called that because if you're not careful on the cliffs, it's very easy to tumble over the edge.

Is this what true power feels like? Like, is this how God felt when creating the humble platypus?

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This! There’s even a scene you have with Paarthurnax where he outright asks you if saving the world from Alduin would even be the best option on a universal scale, and if you as the dragonborn say “Of course it’s worth saving!” he does agree in a way, but also directly reminds the dragonborn (and the player too) that this world is actively ending all on it’s own. He doesn’t say it as a way to doom and gloom, but to explain that kalpas (life cycles of the universe basically) all end eventually, that they must end in order for a new one to be born. Skyrim is about looking straight into the heat-death of the current universe and going “Yeah, I’m gonna do whatever it takes to stop that” even if it means ultimately sacrificing yourself to Hermaeus Mora’s service for eternity.

The Hero of Kvatch takes on the mantle of madness because the game is about a good world gone mad. The Last Dragonborn commits their life to one of servitude to knowledge because they’re the ones cursed with knowing the world was supposed to end, and they stopped it anyway.

Thinking a lot recently about the constant comparison of Oblivion to Skyrim, particularly claims that Oblivion is superior in every way strictly by virtue of quest length and the greater grandiosity of the organizations in Oblivion, and I think there's been a fundamental misunderstanding of what's actually going on with Tamriel during the time period of Skyrim. Even though it's like...one of the core concepts of the main storyline.

Putting most of this under a cut for length, but I just...I think people misunderstand what's going on here. This is not a "One Game Good Other Game Bad" post, it's an analysis of a major, key difference in story basis between the two that I think gets lost in the (frankly asinine) argument about which is superior.

See, everything in Skyrim sucks. Every organization you can align yourself with is falling apart. Literally every single one.

That's the point.

To summarize:

The Companions (equivalent to the Fighters' Guild) are about a dozen strong, literally cursed, and their most beloved leader gets murdered very early in the storyline.

The College of Winterhold (equivalent to the Mages' Guild, not to the Arcane University) has seemingly only been saved from collapsing into the sea because a master of Restoration fused himself with the structure itself when the Sea of Ghosts tried to tear it down a little under a century ago and his presence is constantly physically "healing" the foundation.

The Thieves' Guild has lost the favor of every possible patron deity, having been outright cursed by Nocturnal after one of her Nightingales murdered another and stole the gift she offers her champion, while the boon that the organization's founder claimed from her in ages past (the cowl) is missing.

The Dark Brotherhood has been all but completely dismantled, the Night Mother's tomb in Bravil having been raided and struggling to persist without a Listener for over a decade; the bodies of the Night Mother's children have been lost and she's essentially being smuggled from region to region in an attempt to find a safe place to continue operations.

The Empire itself has been kneecapped, forced into a traumatic treaty by a fascist regime determined to strike the beliefs and culture of anyone not Altmer off the face of the planet; the Thalmor have gone so far as to torture and radicalize the figurehead leader of the Nords in order to use their own nationalism and superiority against the Empire, sparking a civil war that will further weaken the Empire and allow the Aldmerri Dominion to destroy it wholecloth.

This extends out into the rest of the world, too! We have confirmed existence of Hist-deaf Argonians. The Dunmer are floundering to recover after the quadruple-whammy that is the fall of the Triumverate, the destruction of Vivec City when Baar Dau finally made impact, the Red Year, and the Argonian uprising. The Bosmer are literally endangered due to habitat loss following a super-isolationist cultural shift due to wars with the Khajiit and Altmer. The Void Nights were devastating to Khajiit culture and population in ways that have yet to be fully explained.

The world is falling apart. Everything is dying.

And then Alduin shows up.

We all kind of talk about Alduin carrying on as World-Eater through the course of the Skyrim storyline like it's him being a piece of shit, since he'd started it ages ago and was just displaced in time to land on the Last Dragonborn's head in the Fourth Era, but I don't think that's the case.

Based on the state of things, I think Alduin arrived right on time. I think it's the end of the world. The only reason he "should" be stopped is because the Last Dragonborn has the capacity to stop the world from ending in a more down-to-earth sense than just defeating Alduin: they can't save everyone, but they can "fix" every single organization that's holding "the world" together.

They can align with the Imperials and keep the civil war from further crippling them, keeping the Empire from being too weak to push back against the Aldmerri Dominion.

They can save the College of Winterhold, the only group in the right place at the right time to stop the Eye of Magnus from opening, and in doing so make sure that the Psijics are able to put it somewhere nobody else can find it.

They can lead the Companions, cure the curse for those members who don't want to run with Hircine after death, which bolsters their spirits enough to keep doing what they can even when everyone else is trying to kill each other. A single neutral martial force in the middle of a civil war.

They can regain Nocturnal's trust for the Thieves' Guild, restore the Nightingales, and in doing so they can return the luck that was stolen from them as punishment for Mercer Frey's transgression. They can even reclaim the Crown of Barenziah and award the guild with a paragon to increase their newly-regained luck.

They can hear the Night Mother, becoming Listener for the Dark Brotherhood to restore the balancing force of Sithis in the world, purify the most broken Sanctuary the Brotherhood has ever had, and finish a story set into motion way back in the Third Era—Emperor Titus Mede II is murdered under the order of a Motierre, a descendant of a mark the Brotherhood specifically kept from dying during the Oblivion Crisis.

The Last Dragonborn can't do anything outside Skyrim—there's nothing they can do for the Argonians or the Bosmer or the Khajiit, and they can only do very little for the Dunmer via work in Solstheim—but they can work with every single guild or guild-adjacent group, strengthening the Empire to stand against the biggest threat to Tamrielic culture since the First Era, and in doing so they can make it so the world isn't ready for Alduin to eat it.

The Hero of Kvatch exists when Tamriel, and presumably Nirn as a whole is in the prime of its life, that's what makes the Oblivion Crisis such a big deal. This is a world that isn't ready to give up, it still has the strength to fight, it just needs someone standing at the head to direct it. The Last Dragonborn comes into the story when everything is falling apart and nothing really feels worthwhile, when it's hard to see why the world is worth saving. They have the chance to prove that there's still some life left here, that the world isn't too far gone to save—Alduin arrived right on time, it's the Last Dragonborn's job to change that.

I can see how coming from Oblivion to Skyrim would feel disappointing and hollow, but I'm pretty sure that's literally the point of the story.

Oblivion tells you the world is worth saving because it's got so much left to live for, even with the odds stacked so high against it. Skyrim asks you whether a world that's dying is still a world worth saving, and it's up to you to prove that it is.

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wait ok now i'm curious how old were you when you joined tumblr and how old are you now

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Update!

It’s been a hot minute, and I have hit the wall. I have no intentions of giving up on Where The Sand Meets The Sky, but I will be taking a break from my usual Sandrock content to focus instead on a new project for Rough Draft Month in June!

I’m adapting an old D&D campaign I had written into a new original work for the challenge :D but I do understand that a lot of y’all followed me for Sandrock content so I apologize for the break in that. Hopefully working on this new project will help me create mental space for Athenas’ new adventures in July

I’ll try to keep up with posting updates for this new work, or if any of my fellow writers didn’t know about it, I definitely recommend signing up for RDMO as well

All my love to the lovelies who have been with me this far. June is gonna feature some new content on this blog, and I hope y’all enjoy what I’m cooking up with this upcoming project

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My Time at Sandrock FA

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hello beloveds ☺️

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@rainimisty I'm sorry

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sound off everyone what’s the worst texture. just in anything. for me it’s ground beef not even a question