#profluvium

[miome-decompression]

Kailec the Student

Kailec is 15, and has lived most of her short life in the area around Riverwood.  She lives with her adoptive mother, the elderly hermit Anise.  She doesn’t remember her birth family, but knows that Anise found her as a young child clinging to a dead altmeri woman.  

[Edit: I forgot to write an intro to this post!  This is the story I’m building up around my current Skyrim protaganist.   I’ve had so much fun reading @skyrim-hates-her ‘s writing about her OCs, I decided what the heck, I should start to share this kind of story in case someone else might enjoy it too.

She gathers alchemy ingredients and delivers potions for Anise, catches fish or rabbit for their meals, and trades the pelts of foxes and wolves to local hunters for venison and salt.  She knows a few novice magics -  how to summon fire to hand, to draw healing magic into herself, and to fill the mind of a lesser creature with fury.  Anise has painted her with a design of protective magic, which marks her to those who know as under a witch’s protection.  

She is playful, active and curious, and often mischievous.  Anise has warned her to wear a hood around townsfolk, and to not steal or do harm to those in Riverwood.  It goes unsaid but understood that other folk are fair game.  

In Riverwood,  she has a bit of a mixed reputation.  She will do small favors for people who ask, but refuses large or dangerous ones.   She is discrete in her deliveries from Anise, often blank-faced.  But otherwise she is expressive, and will stop to talk with townsfolk.  Sometimes she’s ignorant of things they take for granted, and some wonder about Anise’s parenting, if maybe Anise is letting her run too wild.  Others hold her Altmeri heritage against her, and wouldn’t be upset if she disappeared into the wilds and never came back.

She often visits shopkeeper Lucan Valerius to sell general purpose potions, and place orders from Anise for alchemy ingredients not locally available.  She’s run errands for him a time or two, in exchange for small amounts of coin or useful items.  But when he asked if she’d run down the thieves who stole his gold claw-shaped ornament, she balked.  She’d spotted bandits going up and down that path, and one had even gotten mad and chased her. (She’d thrown a brief bit of fire and then ran for it, right to where she knew Anise was working.  It was a good look on his face when that little old lady conjured eldritch spirits to take him apart.  It served him right.)

In secret, Anise trains her in the arts of witchcraft.  In this Skyrim, there is no magic tome to teach a spell instantly (thanks to the mod Spell Research.)  The elements of magic can be discovered via alchemy, or from ancient artifacts or books.  It is up to each person to put those elements together in such a way that it forms a new spell, and then to study that spell so as to learn new elements and refine their skills.  Usually.

There’s a story in how she learned her first magics.  A concoction brewed by Anise, as a rite of passage into young womanhood.  She drank it down with pride and uncertainty.  Next there was only pain and flames, brief flashes of her mother’s panicked face,  hands coated in frost.  When she awoke, Anise was there to comfort her.  “I've never seen it take someone so strongly before”, she said, taking Kailec’s hands in her own.  “Your magic potential must be strong.”  “Will it be like this every time?” Kailec asked, weak and sick with dread.  “There are other ways to learn.  Slower, but safer.   Rest for now, and when you are recovered we will discuss it.”  Over Anise’s shoulder, Kailec could see the wooden tub they use for bathing.  There were deep scorch marks on it.  One looked like a handprint, folded over its rim.

She spent months studying the magic she learned that night, coming to peace with that fire that flowed out from her, learning to direct it out and not in.  But there came a time when she had learned what she could from it, and though Anise did not push her on it, she knew she could go no farther without gaining understanding of other elements.  

No youngling ever caught torchbugs with such a serious face.  She dissolved their glowing thorax in Anise’s borrowed alembic, and carefully separated the results into their separate vials, paying special attention to the one marked <i>Lumen Profluvium</i>.

Finally, with Anise’s careful supervision, she sipped the liquid.  It tasted like moonlight reflected on wet rocks, or like the brief glimpse of a star on a cloudy night.  When there was no pain, she drank more, and finally tipped it until she had drunk it all. In her mind, there bloomed an understanding of the element of <i>light</i>.

She worked tirelessly through the next day to write down what she had learned, and to connect it to techniques of gathering and releasing magic.  When she held out her hands and tried to shape her spell, a glowing orb shimmered into being and rose to hover over her shoulder.   In the blue-white light of the spell Candlelight, the little cabin seemed stark and unreal, and even her own hands seemed foreign.  She put her arms on their rickety table and rested her head between them, and let go of the wire-tight tension she’d held so long.  She could do this.