#i just think him and shelreni being exes is really funny

[yansurnummu]

The Origins of Arcanist Drals

“Are you happy, Dralvayn?”

What an inane, trifling, irrelevant question. Happy. Why would he be happy? What did it matter if he was happy? His happiness had nothing to do with anything.

Dralvayn grimaced, carelessly tossing the book he had been trying to read to the side of his desk. The sound echoed sharply around the now-empty study of his fungal tower.

It wasn’t as if she cared, anyhow; she was merely making petty remarks at the expense of his misery in order to cope with her own emotional poverty.

He pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. He was fearful, after everything, that his mother may have been correct – romance among Telvanni mages was ill-advised at the best of times. Shelreni was becoming increasingly more difficult to work with, nevermind the more private aspects (or lack thereof) of their relationship.

A frown fell over his face as he picked up his spell tome. Black leather and silver. It was an old thing; a gift from her, long ago, when their love was young and naive. When still there was love to speak of.

They had studied together as young apprentices. They had laughed together. Conspired together. Clawed their way up together. She was ambitious, forceful, insatiable in her hunger for power, and he became swept along in her wake. Holding the spell tome in his hands, it felt so far away now.

He supposed, at first, it was perhaps her ambition that attracted him. Now, however, she was becoming a liability.

Behind him, he felt the hum and flutter of displaced air characteristic of levitation. He could only sigh, still riding the irritation of their last argument.

“Not now, dear, I’m working—”

Flash. 

Burning, scorching, searing pain. 

Black. Falling. Dead?

Petrichor. Parchment. Not falling, but floating. Dead?

Sea. Not water, thicker than water. Need to breathe. Not dead, very much not dead.

Gasping for breath as he dragged his body to what felt like a shore, panic and survival instinct taking over. 

For a moment, he could only lie there blindly and catch his breath, vaguely aware of viscous mud beneath him and the damnable spell tome still in his grasp. Now afforded a moment to process, the pain across half of his body and face finally began to register.

He soon devolved into cursing, hauling himself into sitting, throwing obscenities into the air around him. He was no longer in his tower, he knew, or surely she would have finished the damned job.

What in Oblivion just happened? Where was he? Where was Shelreni?

Frustrated, he wiped sticky black liquid away from his face. Only one eye could be commanded to open, as he looked up and saw a thousand more staring back at him, his field of vision a sea of ink and tentacles and sickly green.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”