#skyrim karliah

[villasukkahaha]

Karliah simp ’till the day I die

[littledragondork]

So, I was reading various UESP wiki pages (because that's just what I do now I guess) and I noticed that one of Brynjolf's major skills is archery

So I raise you... what if Karliah taught him to shoot a bow

[spooky-donut-ghost-house]

Now look I have nothing against you Brynjolf and Cicero simps

I'm just saying the Skyrim fandom is sleeping on Vex and Karliah and Astrid

[chaotic-tes-posting]

Uhhhh this makes me want to learn how to make a mod (more than I already want to) just to help you make this real. I almost cried thinking about getting to Help Karliah Heal.

I’m getting a fierce urge to replay Skyrim, and it’s got me thinking about the Thieves Guild questline. It’s one of the best in the game imo, mostly because its major NPCs actually have some depth and backstory - but I’m still sad about the huge amount of potential it has that didn’t really get tapped.

Maybe once I’ve replayed it I’ll think about how I’d properly rewrite the quests themselves, but for now, have a bunch of largely cosmetic changes I’d make to really exploit some of the narrative potential:

When you arrive in Riften, you learn from ambient chatter (and perhaps the conversation with Maul) that the Thieves Guild used to be more like its Oblivion incarnation - humble the rich, support the poor, etc. That ended abruptly 25 years ago, and the guild threw its lot in with the Black-Briars shortly after in an attempt to halt its decline. (The poorer residents, especially the beggars and Black-Briar employees, will lament this change.)

After joining the Guild, you learn from Brynjolf that this change began with Gallus’s death. He’s wistful for those days and for Gallus’s Robin Hood-esque management, and says the Guild’s decline is partly because they once had a small army of invisible spies in the poor, the beggars and the servants who knew the lives of the rich and were always happy to sabotage them. He hopes you can help the Guild become what it once was.

Mercer gets a complete personality change, so that he’s not an immediately unlikeable figure whose betrayal you see coming a mile away. He’s much more charismatic, acting like his change in the Guild’s focus, and his alliance with the Black-Briars, were necessary evils to keep the Guild afloat. He tells you that all he cares about is protecting his own in the Guild, and will do whatever it takes. Players might therefore actually be surprised when he betrays them.

It’s also discussed in ambient chatter that Mercer canonically (according to Gallus’s journal) came from ‘wealthy stock’, and you’ll hear Guild members wondering whether he was actually glad that Gallus’s death gave him a chance to hold onto the Guild’s takings, because he’s used to feeling entitled to money and influence.

Keep reading

[leocatbread]

im so in love with this challenge, I think I might even make a couple more (probably oblivion next)

[damn why is the quality so bad..]

[skyrim-said-that]

POV; Mercer Freys funeral

[arnaerr]

We may be Nightingales, but in our hearts we're still thieves and we're damn good at what we do.

✦ prints ✦ The character for this portrait (Karliah) was chosen by my Patrons ✧ your support helps me to keep creating and pay for my hand injury treatment ✧

[justrandomwholockstuff]

Visited Nightingale Hall the other day a while after finishing the questline and Karliah told me she'd been hearing great things abt me from Brynjolf and now I'm just picturing him showing up at 3am and infodumping to Karliah like "have I mentioned how amazing my Boyfriend is??? He's THE BEST"

[synapple]

soooo fucked up that everyone’s too busy objectifying cicero and miraak to give a shit about the best character in skyrim (karliah thievesguild)

[nerevar-quote-and-star]

Brynjolf: Someone stabbed me and ruined my favorite jacket.

Karliah: Someone stabbed you?!

Brynjolf: Yes, but let's focus on the bigger issue. My jacket!

[peony-plum]

Dragonborn: just chilling with my bae and bestie. I have no clue what we’re doing

[mujinzzzzz]

y'all do also realize that mercers sword was covered in draugr.... juice when he tries to kill you in snow veil sanctum right

[littledragondork]

I have returned. But for once, it's actually about gameplay and not lore.

So you know how you need to take the Nightingale oath during the Thieves Guild quest line? Well, I have been plagued with a bug that causes Karliah to walk away and leave instead of opening the gate. Do you happen to know how to stop that from happening? Or if there's a mod available on PS4 to fix it?

I attempted the solutions I found when I looked it up, but most of them were ones I couldn't utilize or just didn't work. One of them (the "keep running into her until she turns around and then wait an hour" one) actually just ended up getting Karliah stuck behind the gate, making the situation worse.

Oh no I had that glitch a few times!!! It sucks!!!! Sadly I don't have a fix for it other than restart, revert to last save, or just not complete that quest and have it (and Karliah) haunt you forever.

I am a PC player so I don't know any mod solutions for it. But one way to prevent it I found is to talk to Brynjolf stopping him from getting ahead of Karliah when she goes to open the gate, that seems to stop her AI from thinking "ah yes I must wander the world for all time".

[most-datable-undatable]

[ehlnofay]

Summerfest Day 2 - SECRET

All the air in the room shivers and gusts like an expulsion of breath; the sluggish, oil-slick water below resumes its flowing; Arabella, liquid metal curled lacelike over her skin, starts laughing.

It’s dark, in this dank cavern. Karliah left the lamp she carried outside and did not suggest lighting another. Perhaps it would be sacrilege. For several minutes, all had been shadow; but now if Arabella squints, she can vaguely make out the motion of the water, the distant shine of filigreed armour, the bird-mark on the floor. She can make out Karliah on the middle plinth and Brynjolf on the distant one; she can make out the cracked stone below her; she sinks down, low, into a crouch, hood pulled down over her forehead, and cackles. It echoes in her mouth, against the fabric-smoothness of her mask.

“Well,” says Brynjolf’s voice, blankly, from across the room, and again, “well.”

“The first meeting can be… overwhelming,” Karliah says, tactful. Like Arabella’s cracked under the pressure of watching someone talk to a big not-light in a hole so soggy-stale it feels as familiar as the cistern. She is still laughing – she can’t help it (it’s either funny or it’s very serious, and she’d rather not take it seriously) – as she rolls her shoulders back the way she practiced in the armoury, lets the metallic carapace unravel itself, shrinking and sinking again into her skin, to the cold metal mark she pressed like tattoo ink into the back of her neck. (She’s been branded – she’s been gulled – perhaps she should be taking it seriously, but it’s so ridiculous that she doesn’t want to.) The armour goes away. She can, just about, see her skin again.

She is still laughing, birdlike high and delighted.

Brynjolf shakes his head – she catches it only because of the way his eyes glint in the mask – and says, “Didn’t wake up this morning thinking I’d be meeting a Daedric Prince.” He sounds very deliberately careless; taking everything, very intentionally, in stride. “Suppose I’m honoured.”

“Oh, yes,” Arabella crows, “most honoured bargaining chip –” and she goes off in peals of laughter again. Her language is bleeding into Bos, a little – she’s getting her grammar mixed up in her head, blending her words in ways that should give them layers but instead just turns them to gibberish. Most-honoured, ill-weighted, played like lamb-tendon lute-strings, all an unintelligible mess of sounds. It’s all so patently ridiculous.

Brynjolf pauses, asks, “Does this happen, often?” with a nigh-audible furrow of the brow.

“Arabella,” Karliah says. “Arabella. What, the hysterics? No, or, I’ve never – Arabella, pull it together.”

“Lest your Lady think –” and the rest of it is lost to scrambled syntax, but then Arabella wipes her mouth – probably smudging her paint, she realises after the fact, damn it – and stands up straight and says, gleeful, “You liar. Well done.”

“Are you listening, now?” Karliah asks; when she moves, she gleams, ever-faint.

Arabella echoes, “Will you tell us, now? You’ve been so dreadfully surreptitious.”

Karliah gleams again. “I’ve been sworn to secrecy. I’m sorry I’ve had to mete out information so slowly. But now that you’ve transacted the oath –”

“Such a vague oath,” Arabella remarks, shark-toothed.

“I would like to hear more about the oath,” Brynjolf puts in, “and whatever else, but do we have to have this out in the dark?”

“I would like to hear about how it’s supposed to make us more powerful,” Arabella says, “and why I can’t feel any bloody difference.”

Karliah moves – coils her fingers, maybe, so her armour can slink off to puddle in her hand, pulled night-dark in toward the mark at her wrists – and Arabella can see her a little better, then, a ghostlike shape standing ill-defined on the platform. “That,” she says, soft-voiced, “relates to what I was going to say; Mercer’s –”

“Do you feel a difference, Brynjolf?” Arabella calls.

Sharply, Karliah says, “Stop interrupting.”

The water burbles quiet below them. Arabella’s smile is pinned so broadly to her face that her cheeks sting.

“We’re going back into the hall,” Brynjolf decides. His armour sloughs off as he starts picking his way back down the shadow-cracked stone. Halfway down, he looks over, his face a smudge in the dark. “No. But it’s new.”

“New indeed,” Arabella agrees, the soles of her shoes ringing against the marks in the stone; she holds her arms steady for balance as she steps onto the spit of rock. “Whatever power we expect, Karliah – it won’t come up until we’ve made amends with your goddess, will it?”

She is so very spectral, in the dark. Blue-grey, distant-pale. “Nocturnal’s favour alone is a powerful thing,” she says, clipped. “It will give us an edge.”

“Will it,” Arabella says. It is not a question. She is putting considerable effort into not giggling again.

Even in the dark, even without the masks, she can just about catch the shine of Karliah’s eyes as she looks at her. There is a lengthy pause. “It might.”

Brynjolf, a shadow almost at the end of his stone-spit tightrope, pauses. “Ah,” he says, and then, faintly disgruntled, “Really?”

“She played us well,” Arabella tells him with airy unconcern; her teeth scratch against the meat of her lip. “Very cleverly. I bought it just about enough.”

“It might help,” Karliah insists, dogged; “I – I hope it will. And I couldn’t tell you the whole truth if you remained outsiders – we would have been ineffective, barely a chance –”

Arabella slides the last half-metre of damp stone on the flat soles of her shoes, skirt flaring, hair in her mouth. She says into the dank cavern, “You sold us to curry favour.”

“Yes,” Karliah snaps; she strides down back to the ground, quick and practiced, a blur against the stone. “Yes, all right – we need her favour if we’re going to be able to return what Mercer stole, which you still won’t let me tell you about, we need – it’s been a decade.” (Arabella remembers the thick patterns of dust in these strange halls.) “It’s been a decade, Arabella, this is my life, and if bringing it back isn’t – maybe it won’t help! But I told you, it’s business.” She tosses her head; she’s still hooded, and it’s still dark, so this conveys very little. “Yes. I negotiated acquittal. And if you want to be angry about it, that’s fine, but do it less obtrusively so we can actually start –”

“I’m not angry,” Arabella says, and she licks her teeth. Karliah looks at her; in the dark, her eyes don’t flash. Her face is an ink-smudge. Arabella grins. “I just wanted you to admit it. That’s truly astoundingly selfish.”

“In fairness,” Brynjolf says, before Karliah has a chance to rail at that, and he gestures, quick and loose and just fast enough for her eyes to register it, to the lax little circle they stand in, like the points of a lopsided triangle. “Would you expect anything less?”

It’s still so dark – so little light comes in even through the entryway – but the water sounds cold and quick as it runs, and Arabella is good at taking up all manner of sensory space. “Touché,” she says through beaming teeth; shrugs, exaggerated, the motion rippling the metalline mark pressed into the back of her neck. “Really, Karliah, I don’t mind. Nocturnal can have my soul. What worth is it to me?”

[moodiestmags]

Heyyyy Karliah 🥰🥰🥰