#karliahs

[amandasmurfee]

hello!! sorry if you've answered this before but are you okay with people using your art for icons on discord/ao3? with credit of course. no worries at all if not!

Hi there! Yes, that’s totally fine ^^ thank you for asking!

[gothwizardmagic]

for the wip ask game if you're still playing: blood and picture?

KIM KITSURAGI - While you’ve been finding new sexualities to obsess about, Kim has been finding his first aid kit, which he’s now returned with to find you deep in thought.  It doesn’t phase him, he’s well and truly used to finding you staring off into nothing deep in your own mind by now.  He simply sits down next to you, looking over the muddy, bloody, peeling dressing with distaste.

The Modern Leper

This was the Fade - it could be nothing else.  He had visited before - had unforgettably fallen to the whim of a Pride demon at the slightest of provocation, much to his humiliation and frustration - and the feeling around him was familiar, a more intense version of the otherworldliness he touched every time he ghosted through an object.  The appearance, though… this was wrong.  The Fade he remembered from Feynriel’s dreams had been a familiar, tangible place, albeit altered uncomfortably.  But this… Black rocks floating above him, lakes of what could have been dark water or blood, glowing crystals… it barely resembled the real world at all, and Fenris’ heart stuttered with fear as the gravity sunk in.

untitled thing ill never finish

both of these had several instances of the word so i just grabbed the most notable ones haha

[leocatbread]

im so in love with this challenge, I think I might even make a couple more (probably oblivion next)

[damn why is the quality so bad..]

[skyrim-said-that]

POV; Mercer Freys funeral

[villasukkahaha]

Karliah simp ’till the day I die

[arnaerr]

We may be Nightingales, but in our hearts we're still thieves and we're damn good at what we do.

✦ prints ✦ The character for this portrait (Karliah) was chosen by my Patrons ✧ your support helps me to keep creating and pay for my hand injury treatment ✧

[synapple]

soooo fucked up that everyone’s too busy objectifying cicero and miraak to give a shit about the best character in skyrim (karliah thievesguild)

[nerevar-quote-and-star]

Brynjolf: Someone stabbed me and ruined my favorite jacket.

Karliah: Someone stabbed you?!

Brynjolf: Yes, but let's focus on the bigger issue. My jacket!

[peony-plum]

Dragonborn: just chilling with my bae and bestie. I have no clue what we’re doing

[littledragondork]

I realized that for the time span of the Thieves guild questline it's possible that the last time Karliah saw Brynjolf face to face he looked a fucking dweeb in his late teens to 20's

[most-datable-undatable]

[mujinzzzzz]

y'all do also realize that mercers sword was covered in draugr.... juice when he tries to kill you in snow veil sanctum right

[gothwizardmagic]

hmm 16, 36, 86?

16 - Grrls by Lizzo

36 - Losing My Mind by Montaigne

86 - Favoured Son by The Mechanisms

[ehlnofay]

Summerfest Day 2 - SECRET

All the air in the room shivers and gusts like an expulsion of breath; the sluggish, oil-slick water below resumes its flowing; Arabella, liquid metal curled lacelike over her skin, starts laughing.

It’s dark, in this dank cavern. Karliah left the lamp she carried outside and did not suggest lighting another. Perhaps it would be sacrilege. For several minutes, all had been shadow; but now if Arabella squints, she can vaguely make out the motion of the water, the distant shine of filigreed armour, the bird-mark on the floor. She can make out Karliah on the middle plinth and Brynjolf on the distant one; she can make out the cracked stone below her; she sinks down, low, into a crouch, hood pulled down over her forehead, and cackles. It echoes in her mouth, against the fabric-smoothness of her mask.

“Well,” says Brynjolf’s voice, blankly, from across the room, and again, “well.”

“The first meeting can be… overwhelming,” Karliah says, tactful. Like Arabella’s cracked under the pressure of watching someone talk to a big not-light in a hole so soggy-stale it feels as familiar as the cistern. She is still laughing – she can’t help it (it’s either funny or it’s very serious, and she’d rather not take it seriously) – as she rolls her shoulders back the way she practiced in the armoury, lets the metallic carapace unravel itself, shrinking and sinking again into her skin, to the cold metal mark she pressed like tattoo ink into the back of her neck. (She’s been branded – she’s been gulled – perhaps she should be taking it seriously, but it’s so ridiculous that she doesn’t want to.) The armour goes away. She can, just about, see her skin again.

She is still laughing, birdlike high and delighted.

Brynjolf shakes his head – she catches it only because of the way his eyes glint in the mask – and says, “Didn’t wake up this morning thinking I’d be meeting a Daedric Prince.” He sounds very deliberately careless; taking everything, very intentionally, in stride. “Suppose I’m honoured.”

“Oh, yes,” Arabella crows, “most honoured bargaining chip –” and she goes off in peals of laughter again. Her language is bleeding into Bos, a little – she’s getting her grammar mixed up in her head, blending her words in ways that should give them layers but instead just turns them to gibberish. Most-honoured, ill-weighted, played like lamb-tendon lute-strings, all an unintelligible mess of sounds. It’s all so patently ridiculous.

Brynjolf pauses, asks, “Does this happen, often?” with a nigh-audible furrow of the brow.

“Arabella,” Karliah says. “Arabella. What, the hysterics? No, or, I’ve never – Arabella, pull it together.”

“Lest your Lady think –” and the rest of it is lost to scrambled syntax, but then Arabella wipes her mouth – probably smudging her paint, she realises after the fact, damn it – and stands up straight and says, gleeful, “You liar. Well done.”

“Are you listening, now?” Karliah asks; when she moves, she gleams, ever-faint.

Arabella echoes, “Will you tell us, now? You’ve been so dreadfully surreptitious.”

Karliah gleams again. “I’ve been sworn to secrecy. I’m sorry I’ve had to mete out information so slowly. But now that you’ve transacted the oath –”

“Such a vague oath,” Arabella remarks, shark-toothed.

“I would like to hear more about the oath,” Brynjolf puts in, “and whatever else, but do we have to have this out in the dark?”

“I would like to hear about how it’s supposed to make us more powerful,” Arabella says, “and why I can’t feel any bloody difference.”

Karliah moves – coils her fingers, maybe, so her armour can slink off to puddle in her hand, pulled night-dark in toward the mark at her wrists – and Arabella can see her a little better, then, a ghostlike shape standing ill-defined on the platform. “That,” she says, soft-voiced, “relates to what I was going to say; Mercer’s –”

“Do you feel a difference, Brynjolf?” Arabella calls.

Sharply, Karliah says, “Stop interrupting.”

The water burbles quiet below them. Arabella’s smile is pinned so broadly to her face that her cheeks sting.

“We’re going back into the hall,” Brynjolf decides. His armour sloughs off as he starts picking his way back down the shadow-cracked stone. Halfway down, he looks over, his face a smudge in the dark. “No. But it’s new.”

“New indeed,” Arabella agrees, the soles of her shoes ringing against the marks in the stone; she holds her arms steady for balance as she steps onto the spit of rock. “Whatever power we expect, Karliah – it won’t come up until we’ve made amends with your goddess, will it?”

She is so very spectral, in the dark. Blue-grey, distant-pale. “Nocturnal’s favour alone is a powerful thing,” she says, clipped. “It will give us an edge.”

“Will it,” Arabella says. It is not a question. She is putting considerable effort into not giggling again.

Even in the dark, even without the masks, she can just about catch the shine of Karliah’s eyes as she looks at her. There is a lengthy pause. “It might.”

Brynjolf, a shadow almost at the end of his stone-spit tightrope, pauses. “Ah,” he says, and then, faintly disgruntled, “Really?”

“She played us well,” Arabella tells him with airy unconcern; her teeth scratch against the meat of her lip. “Very cleverly. I bought it just about enough.”

“It might help,” Karliah insists, dogged; “I – I hope it will. And I couldn’t tell you the whole truth if you remained outsiders – we would have been ineffective, barely a chance –”

Arabella slides the last half-metre of damp stone on the flat soles of her shoes, skirt flaring, hair in her mouth. She says into the dank cavern, “You sold us to curry favour.”

“Yes,” Karliah snaps; she strides down back to the ground, quick and practiced, a blur against the stone. “Yes, all right – we need her favour if we’re going to be able to return what Mercer stole, which you still won’t let me tell you about, we need – it’s been a decade.” (Arabella remembers the thick patterns of dust in these strange halls.) “It’s been a decade, Arabella, this is my life, and if bringing it back isn’t – maybe it won’t help! But I told you, it’s business.” She tosses her head; she’s still hooded, and it’s still dark, so this conveys very little. “Yes. I negotiated acquittal. And if you want to be angry about it, that’s fine, but do it less obtrusively so we can actually start –”

“I’m not angry,” Arabella says, and she licks her teeth. Karliah looks at her; in the dark, her eyes don’t flash. Her face is an ink-smudge. Arabella grins. “I just wanted you to admit it. That’s truly astoundingly selfish.”

“In fairness,” Brynjolf says, before Karliah has a chance to rail at that, and he gestures, quick and loose and just fast enough for her eyes to register it, to the lax little circle they stand in, like the points of a lopsided triangle. “Would you expect anything less?”

It’s still so dark – so little light comes in even through the entryway – but the water sounds cold and quick as it runs, and Arabella is good at taking up all manner of sensory space. “Touché,” she says through beaming teeth; shrugs, exaggerated, the motion rippling the metalline mark pressed into the back of her neck. “Really, Karliah, I don’t mind. Nocturnal can have my soul. What worth is it to me?”

[justrandomwholockstuff]

Visited Nightingale Hall the other day a while after finishing the questline and Karliah told me she'd been hearing great things abt me from Brynjolf and now I'm just picturing him showing up at 3am and infodumping to Karliah like "have I mentioned how amazing my Boyfriend is??? He's THE BEST"

[moodiestmags]

Heyyyy Karliah 🥰🥰🥰