#my hands are on fire i'm telling you. between writing my Master's thesis and chapter 19 of TPATD i somehow managed to make even more Words™

[bougainvillea-and-saltwater]

TES Summer Fest Day 3: Starlit

You'll Be In My Heart

Summary:

I will tell you the story of the traitorous Dragon Priest who ever truly served one single dragon and no other—the woman he fell in love with; his own Dragoness, the sun-eyed bride of flame, the one who redeemed him from a death everlasting. But in every tale, little one, this one has also a twist: it was he who was first destined to rescue her from a demise, even if they both found out many years later.

✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ Guided by the moonglow and a starlit sky, the First Dragonborn comes to realize that not even the confines of Oblivion can prevent his spirit from finding its evermore destiny.

Rating&Warnings: Teen And Up Audiences. Some (mild) descriptions of the near-death of a newborn child, and some fleeting references concerning changes in Miraak's physical appearance/emotional state in Apocrypha.

Wordcount: 2,006 words

@tes-summer-fest, thank you for this lovely event! 🥰

This one-shot is below the cut and you can find it posted in Ao3, too!

There are no stars in Apocrypha.

Miraak, the First Dragonborn of an Aedra and the First Servant of a Daedra in equal measures, knows this all too well. Much to his despair, he has conceded to it for eternities unending now—or is it perhaps hours, minutes, or mere heartbeats of a second ever since a reel of obsidian-black ink engulfed and swiped him forever from a place asunder in two and smeared in blooded snow? This, he could never really say; time is a thing most whimsical in Oblivion, anyhow. When he is courageous enough to raise his eyes from the intricate filigree full of scattered pages below, to this caricature of a sky aloft, all he damns himself with is a canopy green and swirling, like a poisoned typhoon, like a polluted abyss, and in the place of the moon and stars he once marveled, named, and dreamed under somewhere in Frostwood's ice-sprinkled tundra, now there are only the boneless limbs, and the demon-like, sleepless, ever-watching eyes of the Woodland Man, as his fellow Atmorans called him; the Gardener of Memories, of Knowledge, of Fate—the Gardener of Men, is his most precise name.

His body does not function in Apocrypha; his heart does not beat, and so the blood in his veins does not flow—instead, it lies stagnant with no other option but to adjust with the ink puddles beneath his feet, altering him into a Seeker clad in the tainted flesh of a death-pale man, little by little. His body does not hurt in Apocrypha; if he ever felt any sensation, it was nothing more than the phantom pain one feels upon a limb they have already lost. His body has no need for sleep in Apocrypha; his eternal damnation is to always remain awake, watch how everything changes around him, and how it remains the same.

But, why now, does Miraak feel something changing? 

For the first time, a pain keen and penetrating and endless rends through him. It reaches the very depths of his dragon soul that wails its reverberating suffering across Oblivion, it carves him like a razor with a scalding and rusty tip, and it knocks his breath out. As he falls to his knees that crack under the weight of his body, his heart thunders like the drums of a tribal war dance beneath his chest, down his ribs, in his ears, in his face, in every fiber of his being, everywhere, everywhere, setting his blood alight and moiling. 

On his knees as he is, his neck and head jerk up against his will as though in a forced slumber, in a trance, his hood and mask slipping and clattering to the stale floor, freeing his waist-long all-tangled hair, and before his bottomless eyes roll in the back of his head, he manages to catch a thing most curious: the evermore swirl of Apocrypha's sky has now ceased, the immense double-pupils of Herma-Mora nowhere to be seen, and everything is frozen and standstill and put out.

_____________________________________________

The extinguished light slowly returns to him, and Miraak is on his feet, feeling no pain this time—on the quite contrary, all he feels is an unexplained calmness, that sort of peace one makes with themselves when they have a clear purpose to fulfill, an inescapable destiny written in the skies before they are even born. Though, there is a more crucial difference now: that light growing its sheen above his head, is not of Apocrypha, its sick green shade is no more, neither on him nor anywhere about. 

That light is a delicate, silken caress, limning and bathing him in a milky luster; it reflects flawlessly on his marble skin, burns up the ebony pools of his eyes with a silver flare like a celestial fire, and mirrors his ashen-white hair like an iridescent halo, until it becomes one and whole with his very being, and he looks like—like a lokzii, the eternal entourage of the Divines in Aetherius.

That light, is the light of a starlit needlework, embellished with smaller and larger seams, each representing a distant luminary and various constellations connecting the galactic dots between them. The starglow mingles with the radiant rays of a moon so full that, for an instant, Miraak thinks it is not a mere moon but the heart of an Aedra, expanded and centered inside the night sky's velvet embrace.

And there are stars anew. 

Real ones, he then realizes in awe.

Is he—is he back to Nirn? So soon? He has just set in motion his pursuit of enchanting the Skaal Stones with his Bend Will, so his hypnotic influence on the people of Solstheim in toiling them all day and all night long, fueling his return with the sacred ancient power of the All-Maker could have been... not nearly enough to help him escape the confines of Oblivion yet!

"I am lost and adrift," he looks up at the moon and speaks to it as if it were a living person, a fleshed guide. "It has been millennia since I last marveled at the sky, you see, and I cannot recall how it is to follow the path of the stars. Care to show me the way?"

And as if heeding his plea, a moonbeam flashes above him and starts to forge the route—or maybe it is his feet that begin to move first, and he becomes an astral walker with a destination untold but predestined and familiar-to-soul all the same, damning on the boundaries of his hellish prison and spanning through Nirn. As the case may be, the stellar canopy overhead will burnish brighter, as though all the stars together suddenly went supernova, momentary converting the night into day, the moon into the sun, when Miraak finds himself by the heavy, wooden gates of a building—a mead-hall that has the shape of a lavish... longship, a shield-adorned one at that, exactly like the ones once swayed upon the sun-shimmered seawater of Jylkurfyk's harbor; like the ones heroes-of-old sailed across the Sea of Ghosts to meet their coveted plunder at the other side.

He cannot help but recognize the midnight firmament's apparent signal to him, and so Miraak passes through these gates, stepping inside the mead-hall. Like an intangible specter he wanders within, and even though his view continues to be softly wreathed by the white-blue moonglow that escorted him to this place, he is completely indiscernible by every person dwelling there. His hands may graze against theirs as he glides his way amongst them, though he is naught but a whispering zephyr to them, a wisp of shadow, and they are but scarcely limned figures, fleeting forms in his eyes. 

Everyone and everything, ephemeral thready presences all around. Except—

Except for a newborn girl, her mirage so clear to his vision as though he faces his reflection in a grand soul gem; a girl with few red tufts upon her delicate crown, set in an oak-timbered cradle chiseled into wolven motifs, next to a bed that smells of blood, wolfsbane, and primrose. A girl that does not get to be held and protected by her mother's loving arms, nursed from her breast, and put to sleep by her soothing lullaby; all because—because Arkay claims her first.

Death has stretched its bloody talons towards the child who just met the world outside the womb, though earlier than she was meant to—always so hasty, always so impatient, the little fool, Mother Mara have mercy on her—and thus she bears a tiny and too-frail body, a listless surrender on her limbs, an ill pallor on her cheeks. A lily, she is; an ivory bud on the edge of withering.

This infant will be dead before the night is done. 

Be not afeared, soothes Miraak as he bends over the crib—it is his very dragon soul that it is speaking at this moment, while his human voice does not make a sound, his lips, not even a stir—death's darkness shrinking aside, life-light prevailing. I will tell you the story of the traitorous Dragon Priest who ever truly served one single dragon and no other—the woman he fell in love with; his own Dragoness, the sun-eyed bride of flame, the one who redeemed him from a death everlasting. The knuckles of his hand brush the child's soft cold cheek in the most feathery caress. But in every tale, little one, this one has also a twist: it was he who was first destined to rescue her from a demise, even if they both found out many years later.

And then, silent like a prayer and thunderous like a battlecry, he says: Whatever Light I have left in me, let it pass to her; let her be saved and live.

If the stellar-burst he saw by the time he found the gates of the mead-hall was like a supernova of all stars exploding as one, the forceful blast he sees after these very words leave his dovahsil is equivalent of— 

Realms crashing together, galaxies spinning in interstellar dust, nebulae forming new stars over and over again—

Newborn constellations—a shimmering crescent with a fraction of its disk slowly illuminated by direct sunlight, until all Miraak beholds is the moon and the sun united, bound together, rising up up up the starlit sky, finding its place amidst the constellations of the Ritual and the Lord— 

Uncreated Light that blinds and redeems him all at once— 

And in the end?

In the end, two eyes previously sealed shut, now open wide.

Two eyes, of pure molten sun. 

_____________________________________________

A violent inhale plunges down Miraak's lungs, chest heaving and falling by vigorous turns, and he blinks his strained eyes. For some unfathomable reason that he cannot recall no matter how much cognitive effort he puts forth, he is not standing on his feet; instead, he is sprawled upon Apocrypha's moist pages, his body numb and drained, his muscles aching and shaking as though he'd just traversed miles and miles away. His hair is free, his face is uncovered, hood and mask gone, even if he always made sure to conceal his countenance—no, his shame—ever since he set foot in this nightmare.

He bares his teeth and glares at the familiar abyss floating above his head, to his left, his right, behind, in front of him, and everywhere all at once. "Why am I like this?" He croaks, trying to get himself up, but the effort goes in vain, his legs giving up and falling to his back again. "What have you done to me, you foul bastard?"

And while Miraak would have expected some ambiguous but no less sharp rejoinder, Herma-Mora merely narrows his prominent gigantic eyeball in a way that makes him appear infuriated, as if... as if he likewise does not know what to respond to Miraak's demand. As if he is just as baffled as his Servant. 

"I am the Demon of Knowledge, Guardian of the Unseen, Knower of the Unknown. No knowledge can evade me forever," he rumbles in the end, almost like he's struggling to assure himself, of his own influence on his very sphere; one would even say he sounds fretful. "Have no fear, dear Champion, and this one shall reveal itself, sooner or later." 

Twenty-six years later, a woman will read a Black Book and fall into Apocrypha. She will be stunned by the Dragon Priest's spells in what they both thought to be their first encounter, and down at his feet as she is, she will raise her face and look at him straight in the eye—and for the second time after five millennia, his heart will beat once more. Twenty-six years later, she will kiss his lips and confess her soulful love with a bard's ballad. 

Titles, triumphs, praise, power, and pain. All in the shape of hers.

A woman so different and yet so same as him.

Death-grazed, fire-blessed, a clawed-and-teethed spirit.

A Dragoness—

Sun-eyed.