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((Please, go right ahead and read my boy Moraelyn to filth))

im not kidding send me your ocs and i will do tarot readings on them. i have nothing better to do rn

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my ancestors are frowning at me, actually, imperials. but for reasons mostly unrelated to you imminently executing me. mostly the transgender stuff and also the incredible amount of moon sugar i consume.

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What did you have for breakfast today, kena?

Such charming manners! It has been quite some time since last I had the opportunity to call myself any kind of teacher, but the flattery remains as sweet as ever. Breakfast isn’t something I always have the luxury of enjoying slowly, so this morning’s meal was rather a pleasant treat I made for myself.

Let's see now... A little cured wild boar fat to start, diced into an iron skillet to hiss and render until the sizzling remainders are crisp and light; those I set aside for later. Next, some wonderful Riften salmon, fishery-fattened and buttery, smoked over birch and maple. After a splash of white wine from the night before, there was a medley of assorted mushrooms, some fresh green garlic sprouts, and a peeled and chopped bulrush root, all tossed together in the skillet over a middling fire until the scent is too delicious to wait any further.

I piled it all atop a thick slab of good bread, the salmon arranged above and crowned with the wild boar cracklings, and a healthy grinding of tephra peppercorn. I took my meal out onto the balcony, the weather being uncommonly mild and the mist draping over the glassy waters of the lake like the silver leaf on the back of a looking-glass. Quite a simple but nourishing dish, one to enjoy with a cup of honeyed tea and a pleasantly-inconsequential book.

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Salvation From the Dawn (from the Netflix Series "Devil In Ohio")

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((Who is that stunningly handsome mer over there~? All thanks to the fantastic hyperionwitch!))

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Mory, the notebooks you write in, do you bind them yourself? Or do you know of a good bookbinder who does? And which materials are your favorite? uwu

I do indeed bind my own journals, yes, when I've the time and materials available. It's a wonderfully meditative craft, one that was taught to me young; the Temple in Balmora never had any shortage of books needing rebinding or pilgrim's handbooks needing assembly. To this day the motions are all deep muscle-memory to me. I can't imagine how many thousands of pages my hands have laid and stitched and cut over the years...

On Vvardenfell, the tradition was to 'bind like with like'; a tome on Telvanni architecture might have its covers bound in preserved mycelium, for example. This tradition extended to the binding of holy scripture, though in a more metaphorical manner, spawning endless ecumenical debate...

Some argued that Truth was most often symbolized by water, and thus the skins and resins of dreugh ought to be used to honor the sacred truth within such writings. Others, more pedantic than I, pointed out that the sea's waters were under the purview of Sotha Sil, and that therefore fish glues like isinglass should only be used to bind books of Lord Seht's influence and studies, suggesting that the skins of cliffracers be used for the writings of Vivec so as to honor the Lord of the Middle Air. And then would come the bickering over whether utilizing such winged vermin would be a profaning insult, and perhaps some sniping over just what Mardyn suggested we glue these Homilies Of Blessed Almalexia together with if he was so smart, and some barbs about milking starlight into gluepots would get slung at Mardyn until he shut up and finished those binding boards...

The intellectual rigors of academic theology.

In Cyrodiil, when gold was plentiful, I would send for fine Nordic isinglass for my bookbinding, made from great sturgeons native to Skyrim's White River. Now, finding myself in Skyrim by the very banks of the White, I may buy the same isinglass for a pittance, but I dare not. You see, Nordic isinglass is the finest glue for bookbinding... Unless it freezes, whereupon it cracks and becomes hopelessly brittle. Look here, my journal is like a willow in Sun's Dusk: one hard frost, and the leaves start falling. I'll have to make another soon...

Hmm. Bookbinders, bookbinders... Now that's a difficult thing to answer. Here, I've only a few persons I would trust, none of them bookbinders. These are times of war, and it is child's play for any paid-off stationery clerk with an enchanter's kit to lace those cheap journals with hidden dictation enchantments for the purposes of spycraft. If you would keep your writings private, dear, it pays to remember this. All sides pay well for information.

(It's been years since I've seen any amulets or rings bearing useful enchantment-detecting properties, and even then they were perilously expensive. Don't despair, however, for a book may only be enchanted once, which can be turned to your advantage. For but a little gold (or a few rats, if you fill your own soul gems), you may have some small enchantment placed upon your new journal by any local artificer. Something cheap and inconsequential. Muffle, perhaps. It doesn't matter. If the enchantment takes, then no further enchantments may be placed upon it, and you can rest easy knowing that no spies have tainted it. If it doesn't, then you will know to burn that book immediately, or fill it with vulgar invective and waste some shadowy investigator's time.)

As for my favourite materials, oh... Fawn skin, I think, for the cover, tanned in alder-leaf and Pelletine sumach liquor in an iron pot for a year, and dressed with oil rendered from a young female badger (be wary not to get cheaper badger oil rendered from the old boars, the stench is terrible). The leather's color becomes like that of gathering storm clouds, quite beautiful. Brass for the cornerplates, engraved if I can get it. Linen laceweaver's line for the thread, of course, at least three-stranded but still quite fine, or else the spine will bulk out too far.

As for the paper, I've never had anything quite as pleasurable to write and sketch upon as this kind I found in a Khajiiti trader's stall; made from well-worn cotton rags, torn up by their children's little claws and beaten into fine little wisps, mixed in with flaxen scraps. You wouldn't imagine such fine and smooth paper could be moulded from old rags and thread-ends, but for my money there is no finer. I'd happily pass up nobleman's vellum for this, it cradles the ink so generously and never bleeds at all.

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His eartips flicked upwards ever so slightly, his brow releasing a little of its unconscious tension at her begrudging acquiescence.

“It is not that they do not care for you, Haleth,” Moraelyn assured, reaching into a tied pouch at his waist for a stub of candle, an old but well-shined brass bowl, a little twist of dried hackle-lo bought dearly from a Riften spice trader. “To hear the calls of the living can be very difficult. It is like…” He brushed aside the dust that had gathered upon the Waiting Door’s offering table, setting forth the bowl carefully at the very centre as he reached for a fitting analogy for Haleth. “...Like being inside by the fire, while a lost child calls out through a howling snowstorm. Though he cries for help, his voice alone simply is not enough to make out above the wind. But we can make it easier for them to hear us.”

Moraelyn folded his fingers lightly around Haleth’s hand, drawing her with him before the Waiting Door with the patient imploring of a Temple tutor. “You have been kind to me.” He smiled  for her with gently-hidden teeth, truer than most of his smiles. “Let me do you so much favor in return. I could hardly live with myself if I did not help you with this.”

And that was not a lie, true. He did not lie to children-- though Haleth would no doubt bridle at the categorization-- and every child deserved the comfort and protection of their family’s shades. 

His own living blood bought only so much proof of lineage, however; even when spilled in desperation upon the offering plate to amplify his intent, without anything else to anchor his beseeching to specific ancestors, his summoning rituals were unstable. He made of himself an open door to… Anything. 

A door snaps open. A light shines. Skin prickles. Time slides sideways…

Kneeling upon the rug before the altar, jaw tensing against the barbs time had sewn into his joints, he gestured to the offerings laid out before them. “Smoke, fukahn, to please the spirits. Candlelight, hla-sil, to draw their eye. Their relics, deif kulint, to call them by name. Our blood, molkhun, which calls to itself.”

The fragrant hackle-lo rustled and crackled between his fingers, crumbling some into the bowl at the centre. His sister used to help him fill the beshe'm, crushing up the leaves and spices in pudgy toddler's fists. He allowed himself a moment to breathe in the scent.

“Do you wish to start?”

He cradled the portrait in his hands as tenderly as he might a newborn bird, his eyes wreathed in cloudy memory. He’d been young, then, so young, wearing the cream and blue of the Covenantal Vimeri priesthood, his long and unshorn hair strung with river-pearls and oiled glossy with bug musk. Chitin lanterns had hung overhead, and lush river blooms had piled the tables in fragrant abundance, counterpoints to the incense and liquor. And the poetry, the singing, the music of lyre and wheel-harp, and the laughing face of the Armiger at his side offering his hand to dance. A mer of his mother’s House. A Redoran…

Moraelyn started from his reverie with a quick inhale of breath, his eyes flicking back up as though just woken from deep dreaming. “Eldras Serandas,” he said, half under his breath, “of House Redoran… Sixth, four removed…”

…Was that true?

Was it the sugar softening his memory, letting these new images suggest themselves into the gaps in his threadbare recollections? Perhaps. After all, how direly unlikely would it be to run into not one familiar name after two centuries, but two in two days? Suspicion was more familiar a taste than the sting of hope laid low, more safe…

Faithless cur, to speak of coincidence and happenstance! Take the gift as it is given and shy no more from its hand.

He flinched from his own thoughts, raised his head to look again upon the face of the girl who watched him somewhat worriedly. The sorrow that struck him was sudden and deep, a heartstopping plunge into icy waters. Severance, to be without the Dunmeri birthright of the Ancestors, had been among the worst punishments the Temple could perform. But Haleth was barely more than a child… How could she possibly have done anything to warrant such a thing? No, this was something else, something… Worse.  

 “Oh, Haleth,” he said quietly, softly, not in pity but in something more like horror, “no one taught you…”

There simply wasn’t any Temple mer left to teach her, was there? None but him, and he so far from a true and well-skilled master of that discipline. But, for better or worse, he was not willing to leave this child to suffer– whether she recognised her suffering or not.

And of course… There was one way to test whether his memory was lying to him. Dangerous, certainly. Foolish, most definitely. But it would be certain… And perhaps, even useful…

“I could show you, you know,” he murmured. “How to wake the spirits.” He offered one long hand to the young mer. “Would you like to learn?”

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The Cure - Burn (lyrics)

((Something fitting for Halloween, I think, as well.))

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Falkreath

TES V: Skyrim

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Sulphur.

I only smell sulphur in the alchemist’s apothecaries now, or in a few of the blacksmith’s forges. That is safer, I suppose, but it does little to stop me from thinking of Ald’Ruhn. In the midwinter winds especially, the ash storms would kick up until the sky turned red-grey, and it would howl against the shells of the buildings as if furious to be denied entry. I remember one afternoon, resting beneath the eaves and shadecloth of the cornerclub, the Rat in the Pot, watching the ash collect in the ridges and cracks in the chitin-plate walls. A holy scourge, flagellating and scouring. The harder flecks would cut you if you had not wrapped yourself well, and the Blight was ever-present and dire in those days. For all this, my heart still leapt to see the sky bathed in blood, to smell hell on the wind.

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTgK40Pu_yA)

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What’s wrong with Morey; murder is not a solution!

But it solves so many problems!

Sure, it spawns a whole pile of NEW problems...

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Anonymously tell my muse what the fuck is wrong with them.

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The Decemberists- "Severed"

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(TES V: Skyrim, PC screenshot)

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Ohh, so I was looking at my storage and found these! I originally shared them on twitter before yeeting the platform. Anyway, feel free to use! Art memes for your oc :D

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Balmora