#he becomes more beastlike every drawing

[stage-39]

indistinguishability

[dunmerofskyrim]

42

When I ran from the people-eaters in the glassgarden, I had no sense where I was running. Away, to quiet, to solitude. Guts eeling inside me, but I felt eyes from everywhere though I saw no faces, no living souls. Only the shade of a racer or two, hanging above on open motionless wings, too high to see if they saw me. Still it felt like accusal.

I found my way across rooftops of rough-faced clay and into a deep gutter between one building and the next. Overhead the noonday sun in a white and grainy sky, but to either side of me only the shoulder-high guttersides. I was hidden. I threw up in gagged silence. Made myself retch long after my belly was empty of all but bile.

The feeling had me entire, then, body and brain and all. That I needed to be rid of what I’d eaten — what I told myself they’d made me eat. And I told myself I couldn’t have known better. Still I felt I should’ve had some sense: a wrongness, even before it all came clear. But all I’d thought of was my hunger, and the savour of stew and spices. And perhaps the hope that this was other than as cursed a place as it seemed. That maybe there was kindness here, and community. Something like civilisation, or at least settlement, in seed if not in shoot and stem.

I looked at the red mess I’d left in all my retching, though. And some beast and bird part of me still spoke up and said: Waste. It had passed teeth and tongue and throat and known the inside of me. What difference did it really make if I threw it back out after? It had touched me. Was I changed? I was still hungry. Worse even than before. That dark part of me wanted to take it back. It wanted not to have run.

The gutter sloped down a little. All this while I had grit my boots against its sides for purchase. Saltlick stains from rains gone by marked its coarse-tiled channel. Detritus too. Drowned half-rotted racer plumes and scraps of draggled cloth. Twigs unthatched from nests, I supposed, and the small bones of things that had lived and died in these rooftops. But I looked down the way it flowed and saw it fed down into an alley. One of the narrow ratways that made up the understory of Dyer’s End. Black iron staples laddered down the side of the fall.

I followed the gutter’s flow down, and down into the alley, the underbelly, where I searched in the shadows and overhang of Dyer’s End, hungry and hollow as a ghost.

In the days that followed I found glints of luck at the roots and in the branches of that forest of stone, claybrick, crumbling plaster.

Scorching open the rot-warped wood of a cellar hatch, I got inside and set fox-mad among the dusty jars and shelves collapsed long ago from damp. Up in the shop above, a weaver’s, where the cloth had gone to mould and tatters. But below I found a jar of black gram, and another of dried fruitpeel, rich dark halves of dried apricot, a pair of laminate bracers in resin the blue-black glistering colour of wet ink. I gorged myself on the food; strapped on the armour. I had no aketon now, no sword, and any protection was better than none.

Just as well, I found. That day I ducked into a scragged thorny patch of overgrowth to hide as I heard voices. It covered half a square I’d found in the Dyer’s End underbelly, where I knew the old well with its green copper bucket still gave good water. I lay on my belly, knife in one hand, wand in the other. And through the brush I dared a few small glimpses of the mer who came to draw from the well, same as I had.

They were each of them lean and bandy built, but bundled and draped in fabrics. Long shawls, belted at their waists with sashes of faded silk in the blue and green of the ocean, the rabbit’s blood red of black tea. Spurs jutted out from the toes of their low and manytime-mended boots, I reckoned to help them climb. Clever. One wore their hair long and off-black down their back in a tail bunched with ties of fabric every handslength down. The other was Bosmer, with earthenware skin and bugshell-black eyes, and wore a fringed turban wound about his head, a small ragpack on his back. He carried a sickle – the Morrowind rice-farmer’s sort; a shaft and slight-curved blade like a carrionbird’s beak where a hatchet would have its head – while the other had a soot-blacked shortsword, and dishlike buckler hooked to their belt.

They spoke a dialect thinner than the eaters in the glassgarden. Sometimes a turn would come that I couldn’t follow, or else that seemed strange, too far from literal for me to work out. But I caught the greater part of their talking.

Would they have enough, they wondered? Enough for the Lord of the Stilts. Six strides of roughcloth and two of fine. A gull nest; the soupmaking sort. A knife. Fine if you clean off the rust. And the books? Depends what’s in them — might be worth a cup or two, but then again maybe not. It would be enough – so ran their verdict – but not enough for much.

I was left wondering: Much of what?

They turned away and down an alley. The pack on the Bosmer’s back began to squall. It was a baby. What did that omen? That there was hope to be had here? Or only that there was a place more pitiable to be born and be a child than the Grey Quarter of Windhelm?

Next day, I hungered again. I tried to keep from working magic, for fear it would render what meat there was still left on my bones faster than going half-starved. Something will always be eaten. Those were my mother’s words, and perhaps they held with more than just calling fire. So I went unwashed. I suffered the dark after close of day. But when I needed fire – to boil gram, or to light the spitting stinking pine-pitch torch I used to see by while searching buried places – the sparks to kindle the flame I needed came always from inside me. I didn’t know how to make fire with flint and steel or rubbing wood. I had never needed to before. To this day I still haven’t learnt.

Read and understand, I was no great worker of spells in those days. I could call a dim bleak light to see by. Could ask fire from things that would burn; call smoke and heat from air and stone; and shape and strengthen what other flames I found extant. I knew cantrips I’d bought on scraps of paper for coppers from witches in tents in sellsword camps — to clean myself and ask water if it were clean to drink. And, over two weeks, I had muttered and chanted, dry-mouthed, a mantra that perhaps hastened the heal of my wounded side, or at least had dulled the pain from it.

I’ve since learnt healing charms, purgations, and bindings from the libraries of the Indoril. I’ve worked in a siege-choir with a dozen other battlemages to call fire from the sky to sunder walls and topple towers. I’ve learnt wards to weave the air and turn arrows of iron and steel from their flight. I’ve studied the rites of the Temple to name and weigh and rest the dead. And more than that, I’ve turned my ken to harsher arts than would be lawful to admit to or explain here.

But even then, going without magic day after day felt like a dimness at the heart of me. Like I lacked more and more of what before had been bright and keen and clever in me, and was living beastlike and so becoming a beast. And as I killed a rat with a thrown roofslate and was thankful to the point of glee for the spitted meat, it was easy to believe that what I felt and feared was true.

I’d not eaten rat since the Winter of my fourteenth year. A sickness had come over the Quarter. Rockjoint. My father had it and it kept him from work, and kept food from our bowls and fuel from our hearth. My mother, my sister, my father and I — we almost froze and almost starved. And when Soraya was quick enough to catch rat, or cat, from the Rigs or the Gulleybottom of the Quarter, we were grateful and hateful for what had become of us. But we had one another. Who did I have now? The growing savage self I hid from, and the voices and footsteps and strangers’ shapes. I hid from them as well.

[shadowhooftribe]

Primal

In battle, some warriors fight as though possessed...while others truly are. Primals (aka primalists) are those warriors who revel in their bestial rage and give into it completely. As they slowly take on an increasingly beast-like appearance, they also gain powerful and violent abilities. Primals believe that every creature is inhabited by a dark, primeval essence. They hold to the notion that each and every living soul is haunted by a beastly force, and that those who accept this fact can eventually ascend to another level of existence - one that is more primitive, but also more connected to nature and the animal kingdom. Though very few can fathom the existence of this whimsical force, primeval characters strive to unlock its secrets. They call this pristine essence "the beast within". Primals believe that once someone has accepted the beast within himself, he must learn not to suppress it — as most civilized folks were brought up to do. Indeed, the character must welcome it into his heart and soul in order to call upon it in times of need. Thus, primals can tap this essence and channel the instincts, strength, and fury only the beast within can provide. Long ago, even before they forged their great empires, trolls lived in a primitive world. They shunned civilization and failed to comprehend its ways. Among the many tribes of jungle trolls, fierce barbarians emerged. As disorganized as they were, these raging warriors formed the bulk of each tribe's military force - and indeed the proud jewels of the trolls' ancient life. Though all barbarians of olden times learned to embrace and control their rage, a few among them connected more fully with their bestial anger as well as with their animalistic insights, exploring and surrendering to the dark, primeval essences that inhabited them. In battle, barbarians of the time — like their modern brethren — fought as if possessed, but among the jungle troll barbarians some truly were possessed. They not only reveled in their bestial rage, they completely surrendered to the beast within. Their connection to the dark essence into which they tapped was so strong that their bodies took on beastlike appearances. Eventually these warriors came to be known as primals. Today, people view primals as lethal and unpredictable warriors driven by savage natures and primitive instincts. As his connection to the beast grows, a primal takes on an increasingly beast-like appearance, gaining powerful and deadly new abilities as he unlocks the mysteries of the beast within and learns to control it. Primals indeed revel in the bestial fury they can trigger on a whim, but there is more to them than meets the eye. As the primal begins to connect with the animal spirit within her, she comes to understand the animals around her. A primal may speak with animals for a number of minutes equal to how skilled she is. The primal grows sharp claws and fangs that can be used in combat. A primal can use body language, vocalizations and demeanor to improve the attitude of any creature of the animal, magical beast or vermin types. Through time subtle changes in the primal’s physical appearance emerge. His physique takes on the most common features of a wild beast. His hair becomes coarser, his face takes on more angular features, and his skin thickens, changes color or grows hairier. As he grows more in touch with the beast within, the primal’s body continues to change. The muscles of his body become thick and sinewy, granting the primal greater Strength. The primal’s eyes mutate into those of a wild animal. The primal’s irises turn into an eerie yellow, green or white shade while his pupils become darker and shaped like those of a feline or other type of animal or magical beast. As the primal gains experience, his body continues to change, becoming more beast-like. Upon attaining more experience, the primal’s nails turn yellow and harden. His teeth become pointier, as though they were gradually turning into fangs. Through extensive experience the primal reaches the apex of this mutation, his body now looks like an unnatural mixture of his original race and a strange type of creature. From this time forth, he appears more beast than humanoid. Unlike barbarians and berserkers, who harness their rage to become more powerful, a primal channels his fury from the beast within. Unlike most characters, the primal accepts and indeed embraces the wild and often macabre aspects of the beast that inhabits all creatures. More importantly, he learns how to draw from this primeval essence and turn his rage into devastating fits of anger not unlike those of the wildest beasts. Like the beast within him, the primal is constantly on guard, and his instincts become so well honed that he can trigger a rage in response to someone else’s action. While raging, the primal grows fangs, horns or claws. The primal’s fangs, horns or claws remain until his rage ends. A primal considers this new appendage a natural weapon with which he is proficient. Civilized society fails to understand primals. Most people — even among the Horde — believe that primals are too bestial, too bloodthirsty and too unpredictable to be trusted. Indeed, the majority of those who have crossed swords with a primal did not live to regret it; those who survived now make it a point not to anger them, and indeed do their best to avoid contact with primals. Primals are not welcomed in cities under Alliance control. Since few people dare confront them, primals are often left alone for several days before soldiers or town folk organize to drive them away. Among the Horde, primals are at the same time mistrusted for their incomprehensible connection to the beast within and admired for their sharp instincts and feral bestiality. Thus, their peers often view them as undesirable necessities. Though they are an invaluable addition to the Horde military, in most Horde member's minds, primals serve only one purpose: to wage war. In times of peace (which are certainly rare), even the Horde considers them a sometimes dangerous but always menacing nuisance. Primals consider themselves illuminated and blessed with powers far beyond what others can comprehend. Thus, they frequently view those who would cast them out as frightened and ignorant fools. Preferring the simple ways of primitive people, primals feel more at home among barbarians and shaman - and these characters indeed are more welcoming and understanding toward primals.