#maryoneal

[thana-topsy]

Talvas and Brelyna!!

—

You can read about them and their *ahem* ill-advised relationship in my fic “Liminal Bridges”.

[wouldntyoulichentoknow]

my secret Santa piece for @eleayres! happy holidays from the College - don't forget to keep up with your studies 😎

thanks to @scorchedcandy for hosting this event!!

[vidvana]

Brelyna art dump for Brelyna appreciators

[yeah, i'm putting the sketch there bc it imo came out much bettern than the artwork]

[I want a cartoon with Brelyna but i'm way too scatterbrainish to finish even the first drawing lol]

[barvin0k]

UM.... hai 😜 here i come with tons of college content 😺 magic trio and talvas x savos 🪄

[hadvarandralof]

i just felt compelled to do this idk i apologise for my actions

[thedragonandthesnake-comic]

Brelyna Maryon!

[jiubilant]

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.”

[amywinehousequeen]

Amy Winehouse photographed by Alexis Maryon, London 2003

[nerevar-quote-and-star]

Tolfdir, to Ancano: I trust my students. If they said they didn’t do it, then they didn’t do it.

later

Tolfdir, to the apprentices: All right. Which one of you did it?

[critter-in-skyrim]

college friends

[undersaarthal]

the Thalmor don't seem to have a thing for subtlety.

[yorkshirereaper]

Another sketchdump,

1. Talvas spills the tea (on himself)

2. Cicero and Gianna in an experimental style

3. Talvas is a girl! (Teases at my next fic which comes after apprentice restoration)

4. Feowyn “Aspen” , my latest oc. Beekeeper from valenwood who escaped to markarth and who may be being hunted by thalmor but ondolemar thinks she’s an altmer and is tryna smash. She’s a bosmer who can pass for a short altmer when she cuts off her antlers

5. Ice witch

[tythonx]

"This is better than sitting around talking about magic, don't you think?" - Brelyna Maryon

[vidvana]

agree or not but this is how I imagine Brelyna

[barvin0k]

BRELYNA 💕🌠💗💨🌺🐦🌷🫐 ft. pretty clouds 💖☁️

[hadvarandralof]

they’re just the best friends ever, idk what to tell you