zurin - Tumblr blog

[zurin]

i don't usually pay attention to tes legends but the clockwork city expansion claims that alfe fyr is living by herself on mount anthor during the events of skyrim. what. i'm fascinated

[zurin]

i still don't have an argonian character but jiub and i were discussing the possibilities yesterday. i want one with a thagomizer

[zurin]

insp: [x]

In the third hour of Vistha-Kai’s long watch, someone coughs in the Corprusarium.

This, in itself, is not unusual. The wards of Tel Fyr’s caverns, he thinks, often cough—and rattle, and moan, and scream. But they rarely wander so close to the entrance-door. And no longer, now that the wizard is—away—does Vistha-Kai allow seeking, sneaking thieves into the Corprusarium. They upset Uupse.

“Peace!” he calls, the proposition belied by the searching point of his spear. “I am Vistha-Kai. The Corprusarium and its wards—”

“Are under your protection.” Something moves in the damp and the dark. A skitter of stray stones; the flicker of an eye; a dry, wheedling voice like the wind in a tibrol tree. “But who protects a humble healer, armed with nothing but”—a muffled clank, as of several implements shifting in a bag—“a speculum?”

Vistha-Kai stares at the darkness.

Then he sighs through his teeth and, with a lash of his tail, lowers his spear. “Come out, naheesh.”

“You’re sure?” More clanking. “I also carry a tongue-depressor—”

“Come out.”

A pause. Then, with a flick of his own tail, the stranger steps into the light: a lukiul like Vistha-Kai, bent by a healer’s bag.

“Peace,” he agrees, raising his empty hands in demonstration. His lean raptor’s face splits into a long, sour smile. “I am poor sport for a sportsman. I’ve come to compare notes with Uupse Fyr.”

Sarpa, thinks Vistha-Kai, studying the stranger. Not for many years has he met a quilled cousin of his own scale-armored kin. The healer’s plumage had probably been striking, once, thick and tawny as a faeder’s; now he’s bald on top, and the sickly feathers of his tail have faded to the color of dust. He’s tied up his road-stained robes like a peasant’s skirts. The bare legs beneath are like a chicken’s. The sickle-claws curving from his feet, which at first glance look deadlier than knives, are blunted and capped with brass.

Poor sport for a sportsman, Vistha-Kai concludes—but confident enough to brave corprus. Or foolish enough. He leans with some suspicion on his spear.

“You came with the diseased one,” he says. Alfe had told him that much over supper last night, hands calm and still around her cup, while a trembling Beyte spilled the rice. “The outlander. I was told that she and you would not venture here until tomorrow.”

“What nefarious intent”—the healer ducks his head, his eyes clouding over, and stifles another hoarse, hissing cough—“do you suppose of me?”

Not of him. The arms of his companion had been like pillars. “Where is the outlander?”

“Resting,” says the stranger, tilting his head this way and that—twitchy as a bird, thinks Vistha-Kai with mingled fascination and disapproval. He watches the man’s feather-duster tail sweep an impatient line through the dirt of the cavern floor. “She is diseased, as you say. It taxes one.”

“Then you should tend her, healer,” says Vistha-Kai. “Or go and cure your cough. If that is beyond you, Uupse Fyr”—who would possibly, he thinks with a guilty twinge, welcome the distraction—“will have no use for your notes.”

He’s made an enemy, he thinks, watching the healer. The man’s eyes flash in his arrowy face.

“You won’t,” he says, his voice an ingratiating scrape, “escort a humble healer—”

“The door,” says Vistha-Kai, and nods at the passage from which the healer had come. Then he smiles with all his teeth. “May I walk you to it?”

* * *

Outside, in the dewy light of a Zafirbel dawn, the damned dirty cliff racer accosts the healer in the garden. Again.

“Ech,” he spits, throwing up his arms to shield his face. “No! Shoo! Do you”—he swats aside a wing and the thing’s jingling jesses, then fumbles with plaintive desperation through his bag—“do you want a pilchard? Eh?”

“Are you letting him bully you, Surriwit?” The voice resounds through the maze of decorative stones—no hedgerows on the Black Isle, of course—like the clang of a brass gong. “He’s but a puppy—”

“He’s a kite with teeth,” the healer snaps over the clamor of hunting-bells. “Call him off—ha!”

He whisks from his bag the jar of brinefish he’d bought in Sadrith Mora. When he flings one across the garden, it gleams for a moment in the morning haze before the cliff racer streaks after it like a javelin. The gust of its wings buffets the healer’s robes. He watches with feathers abristle, dipping his hand back into the jar, as the beast chirrups with glee and tosses the fish back into the air.

The voice of his traveling companion rolls, amused, from behind a plinth topped with two truncated legs. “He only wants to play.”

“Yes, yes.” Surriwit rounds the plinth, giving the cliff racer a wide berth. “Life’s but a game, says the Nerevarine, so why worry?”

She’s made a liar of him, he thinks, crunching with aggrieved impatience on a pilchard. He’d left her lounging on a sheet in the shade. He’d told her not to exert herself. Now, instead of heeding his advice, she’s moving through the tiresome spear-drills that eat up half the day: a hewn block of a woman, corprus-bald and blistered, hulking from shadow to light like a dancing guar.

Madwoman. He should have left her in Sadrith Mora.

“What did you think,” she says, and skewers some imaginary foe, “of the Corprusarium?”

“You might come to like it,” says Surriwit with his surliest smile. “Perhaps that brute warden will spar with you. If your arms don’t fall off.”

The Nerevarine looses her enormous laugh. “He didn’t let you in!”

He tries not to look too ruffled. “The kena was busy with her wards—”

“He didn’t let you in!” Three more hypothetical adversaries find themselves in need of sewing-up. “Your friendly overtures, my Wit, are worse than your bedside manner.”

“They’ve no liking for Guild mages here.” He comes no closer. He’s studied corprus; to stray too close to a sufferer is a death worse than flux, than lung-rot, than putrefaction of the living flesh. “And you were right, I think. He did kill the wizard.”

“Not him,” says the so-called Nerevarine with satisfaction. Her spear whips through the air like a war-wasp. “The daughters.”

The divine disease, thinks the healer, has not yet touched her reflexes. It will. He gives her a look of bitter skepticism. “But you, of course, they’ll save—”

The fire in his chest flares again. The coughing-fit that seizes him is so severe that he staggers, wheezing, retching with every lungful of fungal spores and dust; something hard nudges his side, and he grips it like a railing to steady himself. Then he realizes, regaining his breath, what it is: the extended haft of the Nerevarine’s spear.

He leans on it. It doesn’t wobble. The dying woman, a safe spearlength away, holds him up.

“Why worry?” she asks, unsmiling.

He’s too winded to answer. He takes a difficult breath. Then another. The little cliff racer, with an anxious chitter, twines around his leg.

“Oh, puppy,” he rasps, and scratches its horrible chin.

[zurin]

source

[zurin]

nomad has a 15% off promo code right now, valid until may 31!

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Thanks!! If you send me an esim referral or discount code I'll publish under my #esim tag! Buy an esim here!

[zurin]

playing as a mage in skyrim is freaking hard at early levels. i turned the difficulty all the way down to novice and when satu rounds the corner to where the evil necromancers are doing their evil classwork in fellglow she and orthorn get vaporized in about 5 seconds

[zurin]

the thought of cafepress receiving uesp's morrowind mousepad order and either having to excavate it from 20 year old deadstock or panickedly custom printing it and then rushing to shut the site down because they didn't realize it was still live and able to process payments. is hilarious

[zurin]

They slip out of the refectory, accompanied by a bobbing light and a few incurious looks from the adepts’ table. Their footsteps echo in the corridor like cracking ice. Mirabelle, in her scratchy new College robes that smell of mothballs and musty spells, resists an unthinkable urge to dance up and down the hall until it resounds with noise. It would be unscholarly, she thinks. She hugs herself hard instead. “If you think this is cold,” says Phinis sagely, misunderstanding her, “wait until end-of-term. Falion says we’ll have to crack the ice in our basins every morning.” The giddiness, despite her best efforts to restrain it, wriggles up from her toes to her face. “What else does Falion say?” Phinis gives her a wounded look. “You’re making fun.”

-Students of Mystery, @jiubilant :')

[zurin]

plotting evil dragon priest wives stuff with my girlfriend. the main issue has been deciding which other canon dragon priests show up to morokei's terrible bromjunaar parties

[zurin]

enthir is going to republish all his contributions to academic journals in a few years as enthir vartanil. just btw

[zurin]

When Enthir walks into his workshop, chewing absently on a shriveled apple from the refectory stores, the thief’s already halfway out the window.

“Whoops,” the thief says, smiling in surprise. “Hello.” Then, nimbly ducking the apple: “Clever of you to cut your construct’s burn rate by installing a second gem. Might have been easier to tweak the polarity, though—”

“One move,” snarls Enthir, snapping his fingers to strike a spark, “and I fry you.”

He’s almost flattered, he thinks, rounding his cluttered workbench. No one’s tried to steal his research since his apprenticeship. That someone had hired a sneak to peek at his notes—not Guild, of course, or the little snoop wouldn’t have gotten caught—is a sure sign that his latest treatise was well-received. A pity, he thinks, that he’ll have to take drastic measures to preserve the next—

“Fair enough,” the boy says. He shifts with care to keep his balance, almost imperceptibly, his young face beaming blue in the electric light. “My name’s Gallus.”

Enthir stares at him. “Gallus.”

“Gallus,” the thief agrees, grinning. He’s still spidered in the window, gripping frame and sill, his hair whipping in the wind. “It’s a Reachling word, I’m told. Means bold.”

"It’s a Cyrod word, too,” says Enthir. “It means chicken.” With a thin, grim smile, he advances on the thief. “A notoriously flightless bird, the chicken.”

“If you push me out this window,” Gallus says quickly, “you’ll never know where you forgot a comma.”

“I don’t forget commas.”

“Until today. Paragraph two, line, uh…”

“Thanks,” drawls Enthir, and lays a hand on the thief’s chest—

And, smirking at the look on his face, hauls him inside.

“Say again,” he says with his most attentive smile, “about the polarity?”

* * *

TRACTATUS ON THE GENERATION OF PNEUMATIC CONVECTION WITH RESPECT TO THE “MZULFTI HYPOCAUST”

ENTHIR ANTHORNVIR, GALLUS DESIDENIUS

We announce with a confidence almost certainly misplaced that, after some trial and error, we believe we have successfully restored to full operative capacity a Dwemeri pneumatic construct. In this tract...

[zurin]

cw: horror elements

He’d been a scrib of three, sticky-fingered and clinging to his sister’s skirts like an anther-burr, when first he saw a war-wasp of the Dres. In less than seven years they’d be extinct: their cliff-hives burnt, their grubs smeared across singed flagstones or speared wriggling on An-Xileel pikes. But it had been a bright morning—the dust had glittered in the air like motes of kanet, like the specks the goldsmiths blow off their tables—and the messenger from Bal Foy had circled his glorious mount three times above the marketplace, like a victorious chap’thil, before landing her in the middle of the street.

“Give her a pat,” he’d said, laughing, to the children clustering round—and the adults, too, a few merchants and house-servants whose stern faces broke with smiles. “She’s polite, my Khes.”

He ran, that scrib of three—not towards the great wasp grooming her feelers in that circle of hands, as oblivious to her admirers’ attentions as Benitah, but to a basket of comberries abandoned at a fruit-seller’s stall. The first fistful he stuffed in his mouth. The second he stretched above his head, high as he could reach.

“Khes!” he’d called, his voice shrill and garbled with fruit. He remembers the moment even now. Juice dribbling down his wrist. Dust in his throat. His little heart surging upward with that cry, as if on jeweled wings. “Khes!”

The wasp turned her alien head, broad and shining as a bonemold shield. Her feelers whiskered over him. Out flicked her wings once, twice: sheer and strong as wevet, fluted like stained glass into a thousand fiery panes.

“Hold your hand out flat, hla!” the messenger called.

He did. The mouthparts that could crush a Nordling breastplate descended to meet it. Delicately, like a lady reaching into a bowl with finger and thumb, the wasp took a single berry from his palm.

* * *

He wakes in his cold dormitory cell feeling stiff, sore, and improbably cheerful. Mzulft and its horrors, the Synod included, are behind him; it’s up to Mirabelle, now, to decide what to do with what they’ve learned. A magic staff in Hjaalmarch—perhaps the first item of import, he thinks with amusement, to ever come out of Hjaalmarch. And the Thalmor know nothing about it. And he’s rising late from a bed, not a bedroll, with the fading idea that he’d dreamed something pleasant.

“She’s stung me to the heart,” he sings in soft Velothis over his washbasin, scraping off the journey’s stubble with his shaving-knife. The ancient song comes to him in snatches, like the dream. “She’s stung me, jewel of the sky, armored queen of the valleys of the Shir”—someone raps on his door, probably one of the prentices with a question about a translation, and he takes some smiling liberties with the next line—“one moment, per favore, s'il vous plaît—”

“Break it down,” says a curt voice.

The door crashes open. He makes a startled, absurd swipe with his shaving-knife at the first of the intruders—black robes, beaky buttons that glint gold in the firelight—before a burst of magic shivers through him like heat-lightning. He hears a thump. Himself, he realizes with belated surprise, hitting the chilly floor.

“Is he immobilized?” the voice asks pleasantly.

A chorus of subordinate voices, at least three: “Yes, Secretary.”

They’ve never gone this far, thinks the man on the floor, struggling to budge limbs that have gone rigid and heavy as kedge-anchors. Something’s emboldened them at last. A heavy-gloved hand dips into the neck of his nightshirt and fishes out his Company chain.

“Justiciar Ancano was right!” the young Dominion agent attached to the hand exclaims. He dangles the pendant in the light. “East Empire Company. A factor’s clerk. A pleasure, Master”—he squints at the inscription on the copper, above the tarnished ship—“Ramo, to properly make your acquaintance.”

That’s right, the clerk thinks. They’d bungled his name on the thing. Probably in the records, too. A laugh escapes his spell-sealed lips as a stifled huff.

“Kick him,” the pleasant voice suggests. “Oh, cousin. To scribble and scrape for the mayfly enterprises of men!”

Someone does kick him. He finds himself facedown on the hearth, seeing nothing, hearing creaks and thumps and curses as the Thalmor toss his room. One rummages through his sea-chest, takes something out, slams it. His ewer shatters. Floorstones scrape in protest as they’re pried up; the thieves’ Altmeri chatter grows excited, then. They must have found his papers. The clerk scrabbles through his mind for what little Altmeris he knows—

“Closer to the fire,” says the pleasant one in Cyrod, perhaps for his benefit. The clerk’s heart petrifies like his limbs. “He fell. A terrible accident. Put his cane—yes, there. As if he’d been trying to reach it.”

Someone drags him closer to the hearth. Flings his arm into it like a peat-brick. The heat bakes his hand. “I can seal his heart-valves to be sure—”

“Don’t be a fool,” snaps the pleasant one. “That shrieking cat who heads up Restoration would notice. Let us defer, out of respect for our cousin, to Velothi custom—”

The click of the closing door.

The silence.

He can breathe, the clerk thinks, breathing fast. He can blink. Involuntary motions, then, are not suppressed by the spell—only those that he wills. Sitting up. Crying out. Smothering the fire nibbling, with increasing interest, at his sleeve.

It was once said of the war-wasps of the Dres, he recalls with faint amusement, that the venom of their stings worked much the same. One was advised, perhaps as a way to bide one’s time before the end, to battle the enervation in increments: try wriggling a finger. A toe.

Something pops in the fire. The cell begins to smell of smoke and singed hair. He wonders whether the jerk of a limb exposed to flame, to that sharp, betraying sting, is involuntary—no, it seems not. The pain scourges his arm, his ear, the side of his head.

A finger, he thinks, concentrating all his awareness of his body into the palm of his lifeless hand. A toe. A terrible accident, they’ll say when they find him. Don’t think it. Hold your hand out flat, hla—

A strained rap on the door. “Magister?”

Relief crashes through him where the magic holds him fast. His thumb twitches free of the spell. It makes less noise than a crumb of peat shifting in the hearth.

“Magister,” calls the voice, dear and strangely small, “the—the Master Wizard, she wants you in the quadrangle—”

“Brelyna,” a familiar brogue interrupts, “J’zargo does not think he’s in.”

Her voice rises nearly to a wail. “Where is he, then—”

They’re going, the clerk thinks, gripped by a panic more searing than the flames climbing his sleeve. His hand jerks. It hits his cane, which the Thalmor had propped so tellingly on the fireplace-jamb.

The cane wobbles. He holds his breath.

Then, with a magnificent scrape, it clatters to the floor.

A silence.

“Is it unlocked?” asks Brelyna.

The creak of the door. A gasp. The panicked squeak of boots. Then someone throws the contents of the washbasin on him: a shocking blue chill, like a plunge in pack ice. He breathes out. His shaving-knife swirls past his head on a runnel of suds.

“Turn him over.” J’zargo’s voice, sharp as claws. “Is he dead?”

“I don’t think so.” Magic crackles in the air above his head. “I, I think he’s—didn’t Master Neloren show us how to dispel this? Let me try—”

Something heavy and sluggish evaporates from the clerk's bones. He stirs with some difficulty, blinking soap from his eyes, and finds himself in a circle of worried hands: J’zargo lifting his head, Onmund buffeting the last of the fire, Brelyna slapping his ridiculous half-shaved face.

“Hlai,” he rasps, laughing, trying to raise his arms to fend them off. They’ll beat him to death. Ai, a terrible accident. “Hlai, I’m not a rug—”

“You look a rug,” snaps Onmund, terse as ever. The clerk recalls that he’s wearing the nightshirt patterned with fleurs. “What happened? Who spelled you?”

The less they know, the better. The clerk flexes his hands, then his face, breathing with great care around the boot-shaped ache in his side. “Shouldn’t you”—the fire’s ghost gnaws his arm when he bends it, and he winces—“be in class?”

“In class?” Onmund sits him up so roughly that they nearly knock heads. The boy’s hands, the clerk realizes with a start, are shaking. “We were in class. Don’t you know what’s happening outside?”

Brelyna sits back in the mess of hearth-ash and washwater, rubbing her crumpling face with both hands. Her voice wavers like a shrill flute. “I thought you were dead, too.”

“Too?” The clerk, blistered and dripping, stares at his pupils. “Who’s dead?”

A muscle jumps in Onmund’s ashen face. J’zargo flattens his ears and looks away. It’s Brelyna, choking on overwhelmed tears, who answers.

“The Archmage,” she sobs. Outside, muffled by the dormitory walls, a scream pitches above the cries of gulls. “The Archmage.”

[zurin]

first gry gra-darna update in one million years: borgakh the steel heart is her bestie. including serana these three teen girls are going to either save or destroy tamriel

[zurin]

after 57838734882 hours of playing with sea of spirits i finally saw it........ SKY WHALE

[zurin]

do you have a character who wears plate armor... are you making sure to take advantage of the opportunities, necessity even, for human intimacy that come with how deeply impractical and difficult it is to equip without help. who's dressing your warriors??🎤🫵

[zurin]

stephen russell does such a different restrained and level voice for mercer compared to enthusiastic concrete-garglers like enthir and viarmo that i thought mercer had a unique VA for like.... ever lol

[zurin]

i don't think i'm going to take any summer classes because i'm tired and need a break. guess i won't have an excuse not to write the 6374848382 fics that have been on the backburner for so long they've caught on fire