#official neighbor reveal also 🎉 gay old guys REAL. despite their differences of opinion on Vivec's tax policies

[everybodyknows-everybodydies]

the hound - Hallie

the hound: loyalty, chains, promises

“—thus brought low, the warrior stumbled from one house to the next, crying out for anything that was familiar, but he recognized nothing, and nothing, in turn, recognized him. The sudden storm had left puddles all down the streets. He looked in each one, and in each one he saw a different face, but none of them were his.

“It was not until he fell to his knees outside the temple that someone saw through the curse, and the Lady Almalexia came forth from her shrine to see the warrior who had once been so brave, now weeping into his own strange reflection.

“‘You have forgotten your name,’ said Lady Almalexia, ‘but by name do I know you; by name do I love you.’” Llaalam’s eyes are all ember-glow with story, his whole body leaned forward and half off his cushions. “She touched the warrior’s head as he knelt there before her, and his mind was cleared of darkness, and he knew himself once more.”

Haldryn finds herself nearly scooted off the cushion saved for her too. She wriggles back onto it, remembering too late her handmade tail when the end of it bonks the wall behind her. “So—so what was his name?”

“He doesn’t know.” Amil leans over his husband’s shoulder with a wry twitch of his thin mouth. He drapes a blanket over Llaalam’s lap for him.

Llaalam reaches up to pat Amil’s bald head fondly. “That’s between the warrior and the Sacred Lady, I think.”

“But she knows it,” Haldryn presses, because it’s important. “Because—because he prayed, before Sheogorath got him?”

“She knows it,” says Llaalam, lifting a finger, “as Lord Sotha Sil does, and as Lord Vivec does. If you forgot yourself—”

“I wouldn’t!”

“—your ma would still know you, wouldn’t she?”

She opens her mouth, then closes it again, bewildered. She hikes her belt up to make her tail sit higher, the squished end of it dragging on the floor. There is no world she can think of where Ma wouldn’t know her. “She’s my ma,” she says. It’s the only answer there is.

“And you’re her Haldryn.” Llaalam makes a grand sweeping motion that she suspects is mostly to make his sleeves swish. “The Three are ours; we are theirs. If a Daedra knows your name, it means they’ve deigned to take special interest in you. The Three are gods because they love you. They are for us and we for them.”

“Or,” says Amil from where he’s gone back to the other room, sounding faintly amused, “you don’t worry about all that, Haldryn; just do your best. That’s all we can really do, any of us, even them.”

She recognizes the tone that means they’re about to start talking the boring bits that they disagree about, policies and stuff, so she scrambles to her feet and tugs at her belt again, tail swinging behind her. “Thank you mu—sera?” she corrects herself when Llaalam starts to huff a laugh. “I have to be home to help with dinner, but I’ll come back tomorrow, and on Fredas!”

“Tell your ma we said thank you for that soup.” Amil reemerges with a familiar jar held with both hands. “Washed it, don’t worry.”

The gold man joins her again right outside, with the jar tucked under her arm and a nice straight stick she’d left by the door dragging patterns in the dirt beside her. “You don’t have to like storytime,” she says, and kicks a stray little stone ahead of herself out of the way of her stick. “But it’s rude when you don’t even say goodbye or anything. You should pay attention to manners next time Ma explains them.”

He doesn’t say anything, staying alongside her with his head bowed to watch her stick squiggle through the dirt.

Haldryn stops to squint up at him. “Do you know anything about gods?”

His face does something awful, then, like he’s got a bad stomachache maybe. No, he says. Or at least: I know that I don’t know anything.

“Oh.” She uses the flat of her heel to smooth out some of the dirt, draws very carefully. “Well, this is supposed to stand for—”

Ayem.

The jar almost slides out from under her arm. The crook of her elbow is getting sweaty. “So you know your letters but not anything about gods?”

He’s crouched in front of where she’s drawn the letter. The tail shouldn’t be so long.

“I did it right,” she insists, insulted. “Anyway—” She scratches out another letter next to it. “That one means the Sacred Lady, and sometimes people call her after it too. She’s got a sword that’s on fire, and she’s tall as a mountain and stronger than ten bears—”

Is that what they tell you, at your storytime?

“I mean—not all of it, no, but she chopped up Mehrunes Dagon, so. But she’s really nice too, she helps people. And her hair’s red, and it curls like mine, except lots longer.” She points to the second letter. “This one’s for me, it’s a hekem. Nobody calls me that though, because it’s not my name, it’s just a letter. But it looks neat, right?”

His face isn’t doing anything now. She doesn’t know what that means. But he nods, slowly, and says, You’ll be late for dinner.

“Won’t either!” But she drops the stick and hugs the jar to her chest to start back for her own front door again, trotting a little faster. “Llaalam says they know everybody without even having to be introduced. But it’s sort of rude not to introduce yourself,” Haldryn says, pointedly. The gold man does a very good job not reacting to that. Maybe he didn’t get it. She continues, “I don’t want to be rude. Ma says the Hist recognizes its own, too, but if I met one I would—when I meet one I’ll still say hi, and tell it my name. And so I think when I pray I should say it’s me, too, so they know, and then when I meet them and they know me maybe they’ll remember easier what I’ve told them. Do you think if—”

But when she pushes open the front door and looks up, he’s gone off somewhere again. She huffs out a breath—maybe his ma just didn’t know manners as good as Ma does.

---

The eyes of the goddess are golden, as vivid-bright as the lava under Red Mountain, burning right through her and on out to the other side. The perfect serenity of the Lady Almalexia’s face ripples, a pebble of recognition tossed into an endless fathomless lake.

Do you really know me, Haldryn wants to ask, but her throat is closing up and she’s blinking very fast and the goddess is only looking at her as at an open window. Do you know me, can you see me, did you hear every time I prayed—

Neht is very still, behind her. She can’t look, can’t turn away, but she doesn’t need to, to know. He says nothing, nothing at all. The cold patterned floor judders all her bones when her knees hit.

The sound of the Mercymother’s voice is the top of a waterfall, great heights on the edge of thunderous force, lingering at the precipice, and the name she speaks is:

“My Nerevar.”