#oc: theryssa

[gilgamish]

WIP Wednesday

Thank you @tallmatcha and @kookaburra1701 for tagging me 💖

(From the same fic as last week’s WIP) Summary: After a near-death experience in the Great War, Theryssa, scarred and battered, decides to finally live as herself, but when the Emperor asks that she serve as the Imperial Battlemage, head of the Elder Council, an old friend from her adventuring party drops by with a very strange request. 

Word Count: 746

On a drizzly Second Seed noon, somewhere in a chateau on the cusp of the Dragontail mountains, Theryssa of Alcaire received her promotion to High Chancellor of the Elder Council, and responded by going straight back to bed. 

The rain fell harder now with a murmur of summer’s thunder. She marveled again at the shape of her hands, at how soft they were becoming, how small. Just the other day out of curiosity, she tried putting on one of her old gauntlets again, and it slipped right off, clattering to the floor as if a child was fleeing from a stranger. On days like these, she still thrived off that delight. She had to. 

Wincing her eyes shut, she broke out into a cold sweat. Her abdomen felt alive like a parasite was there twisting, pinching, and pulling all the muscle and skin and scar tissue it could find. Her guts writhed, as though remembering that time they had come out once. They were like little eels, gleefully trying to flee outside of her abdominal cavity, but there hadn’t been any pain then, not even as she pushed them back inside. That came later. A year and a half later, her body still remembered the spear that lanced through it, and on days like these, it thrashed and screamed.

Silver lights filtered through the pale drapes; rain pelted against the window panes. The Emperor’s note on the vanity would rot with the other letters on her desk, and she would stay here in the safe, miserable dark. 

That was, until someone knocked on the door. 

Theryssa turned her back to the door, nestling deeper into the sheets, but not getting any warmer in damp bed clothes. Cold silk kissed her skin. One of the scullery maids had the wrong room. Must be. Her steward, Yorric, wouldn’t permit even the Emperor to see her now. But then, there was another knock on the door, and the knob turned, unlocking without a key. She startled upright. 

“Thaussarel,” rasped a familiar voice. Dynvalas Fels, formerly of House Telvanni, swept into the room. His glamor taken off, vampiric eyes gave him away, as did his robes— a delicate, tasteful combination of dark finery and ebony metal. He looked the part of a courtier and wizard in one. 

“It’s Theryssa now.” 

“Theryssa.” The door slid shut, blocking out the light from the hall. Dynvalas’s eyes glowed like coals in the dark. “My dear, you’re better at being a vampire than I am, hiding here in the dark, all by your lonesome.” He lit the storm candles by her window. Theryssa leaned back against the small mountain of pillows on her bed. Dynval stopped by her desk that was buried underneath its stack of unopened letters. “Ah, so that’s where my letters have been going.” He held up one of the many unopened envelopes, then dropped it back into the pile. 

“You’re here now.” 

“I heard frightful things about your injury. I had no idea if you were still alive, but news of your death never reached me. You never wrote me back. I got worried.” 

“Cyrodiil’s been under duress of late. I imagine the couriers couldn’t reach you anyway. ” Which didn’t even begin to touch the absolute calamity that was the province: cities scorched and plundered, villages wiped off the map, and countless other settlements crushed underneath the heel of the Aldmeri Dominion. Still, Theryssa hadn’t a mind past the fog of pain that clogged her every other thought. Of all the cruelties that Titus could have handed her, marching an emissary up here, throwing this appointment into her lap, demanding she mend a broken, bleeding empire was the worst. Though, her pride wouldn’t let her admit it. 

“Indeed it has,” he said amiably, standing by the nearest window. Theryssa longed to join him. She winced, her side springing up with another jolt of pain, and it tingled from her hips to her feet. She sank back into the one other, most tolerable position she could sit in. 

“Please sit.”  Theyrssa gestured at the space on her bed. With that, he stiffly sat on the side of her bed. She said, “Do you see now?” The front of her robe was open, revealing a swathe of her chest, her stomach. Even that small sliver of skin was marked by the deep, sunken scars, and the rest of those scars were raised, angry, twisted flesh. Only tiny patches of smooth, golden skin remained.