#tesble

[berensreverie]

Skyrim Themed Valentine's Day Card!

[caliblorn]

Your art is absolutely amazing and your blog in full of interesting stuff, I like it a lot

THANK YOU ANON ❤️❤️❤️ this blog wouldn't hold up without the amazing stuff people post in tesbl，stupid s力量stuff included。 Sorry没 没没有keyboard started writing你Chinese out of nowhere how do I stop IT

[kettlequills]

Tesbl writing prompt no 23 if you're down for it

write a story about a lie. u didn't specify laat so i went with soskro (my beloved). ok. a little esoteric a prompt. but! this is soskro (from waking dreams, he's a miraak cultist) grandmother, and how soskro ends up being raised as part of the miraak cult. or, if you like, one cultist's journey from morrowind to solstheim, and what drew them there. tw: implied filiacide, lies.

The baby is only a week old when Amaryllis' dreams go from bad to worse.

According to her daughter, anyway, and the foreman who monitors the work they do for the Clock God. Because divinity still requires system maintenance. The dreams distract her, make her weary head nod at her desk, components and plans scattering like the legs of scurrying cuttle. Her daughter is worried for her – she has never approved of the dreams. The price of her mother’s foolishness, she thinks, and nothing more.

The dreams are stronger than Amaryllis’ indulgence of her daughter. He whispers to her, the masked man, and offers her snake-tongued prophecies, scraps of text. She has seen him ever since that one, ill-advised pact with the Tide Keeper, centuries ago - stopped, then, by the graceful hand of the Clock God's disciple, before the corruption could squirm further. Before the ink-scar Hermaeus Mora left on Amaryllis’ heart could show as more than a ruddy tear-stain that would never wipe away, not even if she scrubbed her cheek raw. For her foolishness, her daring, Amaryllis uncovered secrets of mating metal to flesh, with which she rebuilt her missing arm - and the masked man's song in her dreams.

For years, she has hid them, those strange, growling words, the vicious posturing, the melting light among the flapping pages. He speaks no civil language that she understands, wrestles with monstrous beasts that leaves her heart pounding in breathless terror when she wakes, and the rhythm of his breathing is hollow-heavy, hungry-holy, sucks all the strength of her soul from her chattering teeth until she wavers, a slip of a torn paper amongst the weight of a legend. The masked man; half-daedra, half-dragon, half-mortal, all cruel, all divine.

Only Amaryllis’ pillow rammed over her screaming mouth knows these dreams’ true content. Her daughter, dearly devoted to Lord Seht, her fresh life among the Tribunal, has no time for suspiciously Dagoth mutterings about dead dreams and sleeping gods.

Her line has always thrown true Dagothi Dreamers, and the Clock God had taken the refuse of Dagoth after the dissolution of their House only reluctantly, when the Mother and the Warrior spurned them. Melted now, into the rich cosmopolitan pot of modern Morrowind, but there was a difference in the names, in the records that stopped, abruptly, like a secret to hide. It’s been years, but Dagoth blood remembers the Sixth House. At least they weren't Ashlander. Amaryllis has been an acolyte of the Three all her life, raised in the faith, embraced in it. But Dagothi dreams were dangerous dreams, delusions of depthless and dark drumming to the tune of their deathly desires, a dirge of the drunken mind.

So Amaryllis hides them. Learns to lie, Ayem-sweet, about the quickened pulse of her heart in sync with the wingbeats of the three damned dragons who serve, as she has been called to serve. Serve him, the masked man, the Guide, he who sifts between his time-kissed fingers the reflections of starsigns upon the oil- and water-tide of Fate. The tempter, the light, the lantern in her dreams, with his gold-mask, and his holy disobedience.

Madness, her daughter would whisper, but the Guide's glory is labyrinthine and many-fold, and in his whisper there is the heavy weight of rewritten destiny.

There are strange tidings in the air, and the power of the temple is waning - people whisper that the Clock God has gone, and so has Mother, and the Warrior Poet. That the Ghostfence is falling, and Baar Dau above Vivec City wobbles in the sky. That the Dreamer’s House is rising on Vvardenfell, and spreads its warlusting wings on the lips of blight-dust. But the temple that Amaryllis has served for all her long life is far from Vvardenfell, and the secret humming of ticking machines is still strong. Not here, there are rumours and fears of corprus disease. No, here, there is the temple to Seht the Wise, with shrines for his sibling gods, and the alms to consider.

Amaryllis bows her head, serves her debt to the Clock God who wrested her from Hermaeus Mora’s grasp, listens to her daughter, and watches her belly round ripe with the softness of her grandchild.

And the masked man grows tired of being ignored.

He begins to speak to her in Dunmeri, accented and fragile, like the syllables would snap sensitive and soft in his mouth. Dunmeri gleaned from her mind and those of others like her, dream-plundered by a wight in gold light among those black books, seduced once to drink of Mora’s chalice, and since hooked to his soft song. Drumming, unbearable, the deep rolling thunder through her sternum that never quite learns how to pronounce the guttural gentleness of a Dunmeri R without the roaring of dragonsong behind it. He speaks in riddles, for he speaks of concepts for which he has no reference, says nonsensical words and sentences that do not agree, and fumbles into social blunders like a dragon among glassware.

Amaryllis mocks his accent the first time she forgets not to speak back, and like a nightmare acknowledged grows richer he folds smooth and close, like churned butter in her hand. His accent gets better, the more he talks to her – his mind is as fertile as the newborn child of her daughter, soaking in language as if he has been cut from the cloth of Mephala-Many-Tongued, who knows all whispers secret and lovely. The pail upset, the milk spilt across the straw and the guar kicking - and Amaryllis, falling into dreamer-dazes while awake, halfway through a hymn, dreaming of a flickering mask and the honey scent of books.

And an island, that he shows her again and again, with his voice of an outlander. Flying through the sky like a bird - or a dragon - cresting the dark clouds and seeing a ruin there, tumbled and still. A single Seeker, a long-dead acolyte clinging to life from faith alone, there among the dead-men in their barrow tomb, key clutched in palm to unlock the shrine of the masked lord, awaiting her, like he waits for her.

She closes her eyes on the dream, the implicit price demanded – serve him, come to the temple across the sea, abandon Seht the Wise, and live her days and raise her voice to him; the masked man, persistent as a glacier, impatient as fire. He will teach, if offered a subject, endless knowledge spilling from his hands like blood, and Amaryllis has saved lives with his knowledge, has won accolade for it. Suspicion that has bloomed rich in the other acolytes when they notice anew that small mark of Mora on her, a tearstain of ink, fades under the strength of his usefulness.

Her daughter asks if she truly sees the secrets of Seht in her dreams. And Amaryllis lies.

Soon, he warns, presses dire portents in his rough voice of stone and flight, shows her again and again the island. He is worried, impatient, important. Amaryllis has delayed through the long pregnancy of her daughter, and delayed days after the infant’s birth – but soon, before the end of the year, she will have to go. This is the price for his company, for the infection of his dreams, for the foreknowledge he strains the heavy weight of her mind under. The sky black with ash and the foyadas red with blood and fire. Kagouti belching blight, kwama abandoning their mines, Dunmer bodies unburied splintering across the ashlands like weeds. Her grandchild’s first steps among the ruins of dead men walking, learning how to cough broken dragon-roars before ever learning how to read. A life’s service he was promised, and Amaryllis, ageing, owes debt.

Her daughter refuses.

Their place is at the temple, she says, serving the will of the dead gods. She will not risk life and limb with a small child in tow, on a madwoman’s whim.

Though Amaryllis has long known that her daughter does not consider her word worth more than the grains of bantam-shit shovelled off the temple steps, it hurts. It hurts, for Amaryllis knows that her daughter and certainly her baby with its infant lungs will die if they stay here, choked to death on the venom of Vivec’s burning.

She dallies, unable to bear it. The masked man grows insistent within her dreams. Attend me, he orders, and his song grows louder every day. Her body begins to break and bleed, and Amaryllis knows she will not see the day of Morrowind’s end if she disobeys his commands longer. And yet – she has a longing in her, to visit that isolated isle of snow and ruin she has seen in dreams since she was a young fool bold enough to poke a daedra prince’s lair, to repay the gift of a lifetime of his haunting. The foreman relieves her of work, and her daughter nurses her with tightlipped impatience, as if she knows her mother will soon die, and turns from her grief with the harsh sarcasm of a shield.

Amaryllis wonders where she failed, with her, whether the masked man’s price has been too much – always straddled with a foot in the dreaming, Amaryllis has been a poor mother, absent and dispossessed. The fractures placed in their hearts of glass will not survive the hammer, and Amaryllis knows – tonight, she must do the dreadful sin, that which no one will ever do. It breaks her to consider, so she falls into slumber, and pretends it is not her flesh hand that is red and ripe with blood.

The masked man guides her when she stumbles away from the temple, the baby’s bloody bassinet in arm. She has not taken supplies, has stolen nothing save that which cannot be ever given back, and as she goes lights blare in the darkness and cries of foul murder go up. But Amaryllis’ grandchild will not die, now, on the dying struggles of a people and a god, and the god that will tend them now has a fortress he awaits for them to hold. A place, where might they chisel safety and silence, solace for the stirred soul, where Dagothi dreams will lead them to him – the masked man, flickering in his scholarly cell.

The Red Year has claimed its first soul, but ahead of the tide of broken souls that will wash up and crush against the shores of the cold northlands, an elderly Dunmer woman with haunted eyes and a basket with a wailing, newborn baby is not yet familiar enough to find no charity in aching hearts. She gains passage for pittance, and supplies for free, and a milchbeast is found for the baby. Amaryllis slings the baby’s bassinet over its humped back and leads it on a dirty rope, following the eye of her dreams. By night, she soars, within and at once with the masked man, miles disappearing into shadows under her wings.

It is freedom, of a sort, from her hunger and her grief, the nightmares of her unforgiveable sin. She calls the baby by the name of its mother, and sings the song of the masked man to lull the baby to sleep. In that icy temple across the sea, she will raise the baby as if her water had broke there on Solstheim to serve the man Amaryllis knows will call one day; Sos-Kro, her grandchild with the grand destiny to further her work, redeem the life Amaryllis spent in idle worship of a false god. Amaryllis bears the kiss of the tidal Lore-Keeper to learn mating metal to flesh, but her child will know Oblivion to stone, will shatter the promise of dragonblooded kings to anchor this ruined, lonely island to the Beyond until the breeze itself sighs with the whisper of pages, and the God walks through the cell bars beating heart unstilled. Sos-Kro, mage of blood, mage of dreams, Dagothi daughter-son: Amaryllis’ true child, she tells the baby, and Amaryllis the only mother the baby will ever need. A chance to rewrite it all, live as the Guide whispers.

For now, though, Amaryllis stumbles alone, lugging the bassinet and the skinny milchbeast, and practices the lies in which she will rear this new motherhood.

"You were born for him," she tells the child, her child, "My child, my only child, it will be your destiny to free what has been trapped; the true Dragonborn."

Together, they will go, and find the masked man with his cold island and ruined temple upon it, and his whispers in their waking dreams.