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ehlnofay · 3 months ago

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Summerfest Day 4 - ENAMOURED

Efri leans over the scaled black fence until her feet are off the ground, spelled light quavering in the air above her hands, and says delightedly, “Oh, can I touch them?”

“Do not,” J’zargo says plaintive behind her, because all her friends are big boring babies, and Kazari huffs hard enough that she feels the fabric ruffle on the backs of her knees.

She wants to touch them. She wants to touch them very badly. She hasn’t had much chance at all to even look at them yet in the time they’ve been here in the underground village, since they spent most of it being watched (in, you know, a manner of speaking) and escorted and very carefully supervised, but she’s had glimpses of the big purple-black bugs in their fenced-off corners, wiggly as snakes and shiny as beetles, and now she’s finally getting to look at them properly and she wants to touch them. They’ve got these cool spikes along the ridges of their backs and huge sharp-looking mandibles that they click and clatter, making noises like the elves do, and she’s never ever ever seen a bug that big and she wants to see what it feels like.

Everything here is something she’s never ever ever seen before. It’s extremely exciting, and was from the beginning, even if it was also a bit scary, at the beginning. It would be hard for it not to be scary – snow ghosts are like dragons, a bit, things that straddle the line between fable and fact. Dragons were legends and yarns and then all of a sudden they were burning towns down; and Onmund says the clatter-coats were strange creepy stories from up in the high north, once, common enough in folklore, but unsubstantiated. Still not very well known. Seeing things you’ve never seen before, that you weren’t even sure are real, is always a bit of a fright (Efri was startled when first she met Kazari), and the snow elves had been threatening them with weapons, at the time, which didn’t help. But that was all a misunderstanding, and it’s cleared up now, and they’re being allowed to look around the cave-village without anyone needing to worry about fighting, so Efri wants to see all of it, right up close, like she couldn’t when they were all still wary of each other. She remembers seeing ponds, before, milk-white, with people all poised statue-still around the edges with spears or nets or traps; she saw the cave bugs, but only from a distance. She saw all the funny little huts but she hasn’t seen the inside of most of them. She knows so little. There is so much still to learn.

(It is hard to clear up misunderstandings when nobody speaks a lick of the same language, but they managed; a woman with sky blue veins and a little bit of hair twisted up in these amazing shapes did mind-magic, which Efri didn’t even know was a thing before today, so they could kind of communicate for a little bit. Brelyna says it’s rare and probably taxing, so they might not be able to do it again. Efri wishes she’d known what they were going to do ahead of time. There are so many questions she would have asked if she’d known to plan them all. She wants to know what their clothes are made of. She wants to know what the ridged tattoos are for and why almost everyone has them. She wants to know if everything is made of the bug-shells, because almost everything she sees looks like bug-shells. She wants to know how they talk and if they can talk to the bugs because they make the same sort of clattering noises and if they ever go into the grand halls of the dwarven ruin and if they ever make their way above surface, and she wants to tell them about the sky and the trees and the mountains and the snow. She’s trying to copy their tapping-talking, but they do need to get back to managing the Eye thing sooner rather than later and there’s not time to learn a language, worst luck. It’s all a shame. But it’s all also incredible, because they might not have long before they have to get back to business but they do have right now, and she is making the most of it.)

So she nearly tips over the edge of the fence in her excitement to lean over it, and Sissel squeaks, and their friend – the one snow elf still escorting them around, making sure that they don’t do things like fall into the bug enclosures – reaches out quick as a wink to grab the back of her mantle and haul her back onto the ground.

“Thank you,” she says, reaching awkwardly around to tap her fingers on his arm in acknowledgement, as seems polite, and he hums. (In her head, she calls him Whistle; she thinks he told them his real name, but part of it was whistling, and when she tried to copy it she just ended up spitting and he made the sort of dry hissing clicking noise that she’s pretty sure is how they laugh. So Whistle it is. Kazari could hum the right pitch but she can’t whistle or do the tongue-teeth click-clucking, and Onmund can whistle long and loud but not quite high enough, and not as clear and clean as it was supposed to be.)

The light bobs and sputters above her hands. It’ll go out soon, but for now it’s still going strong. Efri wriggles, leans forward to press her chest against the bug-shell fence again, says, “Look at them! They’re so big!” The smallest ones are at least as long as she is tall, with mandibles as big as her head; the biggest one is enormous, as big as three horses, probably. She could sit cross-legged on its head with room to spare. It could swallow someone and they wouldn’t even get stuck in its throat.

“Looking,” J’zargo says. “Not liking.”

“Chicken,” says Efri without even looking over her shoulder, and he makes a very offended scoff.

Sissel is hanging back somewhere with Brelyna; she also doesn’t really like the cave bugs, but she’s not such a baby about it. Efri can hear her feet shuffling. “I wonder what all they’re used for… do they build everything with them?”

“I don’t know!” Efri is bouncing on her heels, a bit. (All the buildings are made of layers of careful-wrought purple-black shell; all the tools, too, all the utensils and knives and spearpoints and everything. She doesn’t know how it’s worked, how it’s harvested, if maybe it’s different kinds of exoskeleton for a house than it is for a platter or a chopping knife.) “It looks like it. I wonder if they eat them, too, like livestock. Do you?” (She directs the last question at Whistle; who, of course, does not answer.)

“Not much meat on it,” Sissel points out.

“I want to touch them,” Efri repeats, and she takes Whistle’s arm; he lets her, ears twitching. (He’s cold to the touch, like a dead fish, and he has the scar-patterns all down his wrists, but she ignores all that because that’s not the point.) She manipulates his loosely curled fingers until he’s pointing, pulls at the limb so the pointer finger jabs against her shoulder, strokes his wrist in the awkward motion one might use when patting a bird, and then shifts his arm again so he’s pointing in the vague direction of the bugs in their fenced-off corner. “Can I touch them?” she repeats, and then, for good measure, “Please?”

The light bobbing over her hands spits and flickers. It’s really hard to try to read Whistle’s face, which is actually very interesting – making faces doesn’t have much utility when no-one you know has eyes, so the snow ghosts don’t seem to quite know how, and Efri hasn’t learned whatever their equivalent is yet – but his ears move more than any elf she’s ever seen, so she mostly focuses on that. (That’s saying a lot, because Brelyna’s ears quiver when she’s annoyed. Not more than the Khajiit, though; they move them as much as their mouths when they’re talking, and J’zargo, at least, never shuts up.) After a moment, he half-straightens, the crooked angle of his back shifting before he eases back into it; he clatters his tongue, pats Efri’s arm, and hops the fence in one smooth motion.

(They’re so fast, and they move so fluidly, even though they don’t look like they should be able to, hunched over and made small with their shoulders stooped and centre of gravity held low. Efri considers, briefly, trying to see if she could move like that; but she suspects it wouldn’t work for her, and anyway, bugs.)

Efri follows gleefully – scrambles over the strange chitinous scaling of the fence and lands a little bit on her knees in the dirt. “Efri, be careful,” Onmund implores, and she turns around on purpose to stick her tongue out at him.

Kazari inclines their head in something like sympathy, signs no stopping her when she gets like this, and Efri sticks her tongue out at them, too. Then she turns back around to follow Whistle – who, it looks like, has paused to listen, face turned like a sunflower towards her. In the light bobbing over her hands, his skin practically glows.

“Bugs,” she says, and taps his arm again. She can see them down the other end of the enclosure, skittering, light glinting off their ink-dark carapaces. The big one lies mostly still, except when it moves its head, mandibles clacking.

Whistle presses a few narrow fingers into the dirt and clicks a rapid pattern with his tongue, and they come swarming. And Efri gets to touch a big bug.

They’re slippery-smooth, and ridiculously quick – she jumps out of the way at first, she’s so startled, but Whistle just leans against them, spreading his hand against sheets of keratin like people might rest their hands on the back of a dog, so Efri copies him. Runs a hand over the jagged plates along one of the bugs’ sort-of-neck, looking at its face side-on, its beady little eye flashing like a cat’s when her light bobs out of the way. Its head is spiky. The scale-plates are thick and gnarled and oil-dark, like the dead material she’s seen almost everything made out of but raw, unfinished-feeling. It clatters its mandibles at her, and she brushes her fingers along one of them, out of curiosity; her hand comes away slick.

“Eugh,” she says delightedly. “They’re slimy.”

The slime, she thinks, might not be good, because suddenly Whistle grabs her wrist, making a very shrill keening noise, and pulls her down to rub her hand on the dirt until it’s scraped dry. Maybe it’s poisonous – they look like the sort of animal that would be poisonous. Or maybe it’s just gross, to the clatter-coats, like walking around with chicken poo on your fingers. He directs her hand back firmly to the top of its head. She says, “Thank you,” even though she knows it won’t get across.

(She’s getting to touch the big maybe-poisonous bugs, and she got to sort-of talk to someone here, and maybe, if there’s time, she can go see the ponds again and learn how they fish, if it’s different with chitin-tools and underground; it’s a shame there’s so little time. Maybe, once the Eye is handled, she could come back. She wants to learn all about this place. And she’s already basically friends with Whistle.)

(All the rest of her friends hang back, even when she tells them it’s fine – she calls them fraidy-cats, and J’zargo takes mock offence – except Brelyna, which is a bit of a surprise. She has to jump to get herself over the fence, and she approaches the bugs with very little worry. Efri grins at her, and Brelyna half-shrugs and says, “They’re just insects. The way they all act sometimes, I think they’d wet themselves if they ever saw a nix.” Efri makes a note in her head to learn, when she has a moment, what a nix looks like.)

(Then Efri’s little light goes out, and she waits for someone else to strike one, because she’s been using her gloves an awful lot since she came underground and if she doesn’t let the enchantment rest they’ll probably unravel themselves.)

So that’s one thing on the list of things she’s curious about; there’s more, of course, an endless spiel. She wishes she could ask what the bugs are kept for, and how they’re reared, and what they’re called; she wants to put them in her word-book, but she doesn’t know the name past big bug and those words aren’t really worth the page space. She’d really like to see what she can find out about fishing next, because she’s certainly never tried fishing underground, but by the time she’s done patting the beetle-things – the really big one, she discovers when she works up the courage to approach it, likes to be knuckled in the chinks of its belly-armour, like a dog (or she thinks it likes it, anyway; it clicks and lolls its head when she does) – Onmund and Kazari are saying that they’re hungry, so Efri has to figure out how to try to get that across. She ends up putting Whistle’s hand on her cheek and miming chewing, which is the best way she can think of to communicate eating short of biting his fingers, which feels rude.

Eating is probably about as good as fishing, anyway, because Whistle does the hiss-click-laugh sound and leads them neatly through the gnarls of the village to a half-open hut they haven’t been to before, and there’s people cooking there so Efri gets to learn about snow elf cooking, and there’s a baby there so she gets to learn about snow elf babies. It’s in a cloth sling over someone’s chest, looking very small and squishy, eye-spots all wrinkly and ears floppy and skin as pale-translucent as the belly of a crab. “Aw,” Efri coos, “It’s a baby.” Which is obvious, but still worth noting.

Sissel says, “You don’t like babies,” which, as a general rule, is true. They’re loud and whingy and don’t do much, and it means they’re pretty boring, even though it isn’t their fault.

But, “It’s an interesting baby,” Efri says. She’s never seen a snow ghost baby before. No-one ever mentions babies in the stories. Its mother lets her hold its hand. Its knuckles are purplish; its nails are tough, like chitin.

It’s nice to get to sit by a fire, too; there’s precious little of it down here, it seems. Fire’s good for light and heat and snow elves don’t need much of either. But it makes it easier to watch them all work, weaving in and out of the sparse furniture and each other, as if they all know where everything is at all times. Efri gets to help mash something in a bowl. She’s not sure what it is. It might be some kind of vegetable, though she doesn’t know any that would grow down here. Someone takes the bowl away again, and she sprawls out over the dirt to watch. All her friends have sat down, too.

“We’ll need to keep going, soon,” Onmund says, quiet, firelight casting strange shadows through the wisps of his hair.

Efri tips her head back. “I know,” she grumbles. “It’s just all so interesting.” The staff will be interesting too, she knows; you can find something to be interested in everywhere. But she’ll miss the snow elf place. It’s all so cool, and there’s so much more to learn.

Whistle is listening from where he’s doing something to the coals of the fire; she can tell because his ears, batlike, are twitching her way. She tries, one more time, to make the right whistling noise, and again she spits all over her chin, and again he laughs, strange and alien and rustling like dry leaves.

#I made whistle up for this piece but I'm kind of attached to him now... I want to flesh him out further. what are his thoughts on all this #what's his deal when he's not babysitting the weird strangers #also I had to write efri for this one because she is enamoured of LIFE #most joyful little girl in the world #her love of everything ever is unmatchable. they love her for her merriment and whimsy and eagerness to learn #I know I literally made her up but god I endeavour to mimic her joyous swag #tesfest24 #the elder scrolls #tesblr #skyrim #tes #oc tag #efri #fay writes #my writing #college of winterhold #falmer

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