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baker's dozen
emma's character / oc writing sideblog. not a very impressive place, but feel free to browse
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I don't post my work work often but I really enjoyed animating this tiger for LNY this year!! Everything is made with paper, done in stop motion. 🐯🎉
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mmmm during the alienage purge ina’s mother told her she was under No Circumstance to use her magic or try to help her parents and - and ina didn’t help them. but she put her sister to sleep so she wouldn’t cry with magic, and she made the wardrobe they were hiding in seem insignificant and not worth anyone’s time with magic, and she masked the sound of her breathing with magic and then. watched her parents attempt to fight for their home; watched them die with her sister clasped so tight to her chest she left bruises.
and her mother never used any magic - not to fight, anyway. after she watched her husband die and a guard decided she was worth more alive than dead, she warded the wardrobe where she knew her children were hiding and self-immolated, taking a not-insignificant amount of guards with her and starting a massive fire
ina knew they couldn’t stay until the fire was put out - she caught what was left of her mother’s spell before it drifted off with her death ,shaped it, wrapped it around herself like a quilt, and carefully stepped through the blaze to pick the only thing of value her parents had off their bodies: their wedding rings. there was nothing else left to take, so. and then she used most of her magic keeping the ward up (it was clumsy and inefficient; she had never used a spell like that before) until they were clear of the fires, used the rest of it to make them unnoticeable as they exited the city through a lesser-used gate and took brief shelter at the farm where ina had worked for many years
and she had to explain to hallan everything that happened, afterwards, but at least her little sister didn’t have to watch them die. at least she spared her that. and then ina pocketed the rings, unsure of what to do with them (and at that point, not even aware they were magical)
#it would take her like a good few years to fully process the alienage purge because obviously! traumatic!#and through all that time all her grief just gets turned to anger#and more anger#and more - etc.
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I kneel into a dream where I
am good & loved. I am
good. I am loved. My hands have made
some good mistakes. They can always
make better ones.
Natalie Wee, “Least of All,” Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines (Amazon / Goodreads)
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wyn @ larkin: i generally take whatever you say and do or intuit something similar to the polar opposite of it
#which isnt meant to be a rude sentiment#just wyn covering her own ass#dnfjndndbf i still love thinking about couriers just existing as non pcs together
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trainer cards for some bts folx
roz has an eclectic team bc she’s kind of a misfit and keeps ending up w misfit pokemon
don’t @ stiffcollar about the milotic
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[She was] proud and impatient and flammable.
Jill Lepore, from Book of Ages (via victoriajoan)
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> bandit.delete
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a weird janky timeline for sakine’s early days in the gameworld. weird n long, goes up ‘til her losing her eye
nearly executed
clutching her pearls neck the entire way out of helgen bc a giant axe came down like 2 inches away from it. tamriel nearly lost one of its best voices and no one would have ever known
“warns riverwood” with ralof (ie, follows him down the mountain because she sure as fuck didn’t want to be walking around at night alone with only an iron sword)
begrudgingly agrees that someone needs to take the news to the jarl. convinces them into sending a guard (bc this isn’t Really her problem) and lopes up to the barrow to Adventure, because it’s been a hot minute since she’s been in a ruin and... well, she’s helping get the claw back or whatever, but moreover she’s testing some limits. she hasn’t Really adventured since... well. since varun died. she’s used the associated skills in the interim, but she wants to see if it’s still as good as she remembers
the barrow is exhilarating, blood-pumping, and reminds her that ruin-diving was once the only thing she ever wanted to do in life (and still kind of is) - and she slurps up that weird rune at the end, and is instantly enthralled by what it could be - it’s burned into her brain like an after-image on her retina, and she won’t ever be able to forget it, but. but she doesn’t know what it means. either way, she pops out the other side and, seeing that riverwood seems to still be standing, delivers the claw, sells the other stuff she got, better outfits herself, and sets off to whiterun to look for a ride to windhelm
she comes across the guard Very Dead on the way to whiterun, sighs, takes the letter of request for aid he was carrying, and decides to deliver it to the jarl against her better judgement. this isn’t her goddamn problem, but he’s dead and she’s already on the way there, and - and. someone has to.
delivers it to the jarl, gives the dragonstone and a rough drawing of the rune she has burned into her brain to farengar in expectation that he’ll give her a rubbing and a translation in a few days, catches delphine’s eyes on the way out but keeps going (again, dragon stuff? none of her business)
irileth runs by her on her way down to the wind district and basically Orders her to help fight the dragon - sakine is suitably ruffled by this (whomst ORDERS her), but... alright. she’s curious. how many more dragons is she going to see up close? (helgen didn’t count, was 2 scary) (also irileth kind of gave her a backhanded compliment about being competent enough to get the stone from the barrow and sakine is. hrm. a little gay and instinctively knows irileth doesn’t mess around, so that also helps settle her into going with the guards)
dragon fiiiiight. absorb soul. this is all very textbook skyrim, except sakine wants Nothing to do with all the ‘oh you’re dragonborn!!!!!!’ exclamations. this isn’t her problem. stop saying these things.
local greybeards scream her name at mach 10209120192019 and scare the shit out of her
she promptly decides Fuck This Shit, I’m Not Doing This Garbage while balgruuf and co. discuss how she has to because it’s such an honor and she has to fight the dragons and - etc. etc. she came back to skyrim for one thing only, and she’s gonna go do that and then... figure out what to do next. she guesses. but it’s time to go to windhelm. some other Big Hero can make the climb to hrothgar, she’s not special and she’s not going.
MEANWHILE, INDMIRA: heard that bigass shout from the throat of the world direction, was distracted from her usual passes through the windhelm territory to help lost travelers. she begins migrating towards whiterun bc she’s been having like a Solid Week of prophecy dreams and that’s a) highly unusual b) she fucking hates it - maybe it’s connected to the Screaming Mountain Men. so she goes.
indmira sees sakine coming down the road from a ways off and clambers up into a tree, then nearly falls out of the tree when she squints closer @ this traveler bc she doesn’t look like a bandit and she doesn’t look lost, so - and sakine’s showed up several times in her prophecy dreams, but she looked. different? she was missing an eye and dressed differently, but it’s the same woman. indmira manages to NOT fall out of the tree, but does decide to follow sakine at a distance
sakine goes into windhelm and indmira promptly Nopes Out, because indmira hasn’t been in a major city since childhood and hates the concept. she’ll wait outside for a few days and carry on her merry way if the Mystery Woman From Prophecy Dreams doesn’t come back out again.
in windhelm: sakine’s trying to find the sister of varun and her children to deliver varun’s will. gets sent on a big runaround because none of the gray quarter elves trust her (for good reason, she’s a nord come sniffing around after a particular member of their community, etc), ends up having a bit of an anger snap and beats the shit out of rolff stonefist at like 3 am, which turns into a huge scuffle that draws out nearly every dunmer in the quarter and also several guards. a stallfront gets wrecked, a small fire gets started in the street, and both sakine and rolff get to spend a night in jail, during which rolff whines and sakine is stonily silent. she’s having a bit of a crisis, internally, because she grew up outside of windhelm (near kynesgrove) and she had... no idea that things were like this. were they always like this? was she just too young to know? were her PARENTS like this? she had even been thinking about joining the stormcloaks up until that point due to ralof’s help and her very intense hatred for the thalmor, but... how many stormcloaks think like rolff? she’s disgusted at him / his rhetoric but she’s also disgusted at herself in some abstract fashion.
galmar stonefist comes to get his brother early the next morning and is impressed w sakine’s handiwork (in beating the shit out of him), invites her up to the palace. sakine sullenly goes, because maybe she’ll get a chance to be an Asshole to rolff some more, who knows. ulfric invites her to join the stormcloaks, they could use someone as tenacious as her, etc. sakine politely declines as she’s only in skyrim for a short while, may talos bless your endeavours, etc, bye.
goes back to the gray quarter to pick up anything she might have dropped last night and immediately gets treated to a free meal at the cornerclub because finally FINALLY someone did what they’d all been dying to do but couldn’t - beat the shit out of rolff. it’s not like ‘everyone loves her now’, but it was enough of a spectacle for someone to finally tell her what happened to varun’s sister. they went on a journey to solitude some years ago, and no one’s seen them since. their house/apartment has been empty ever since, though some people think it’s haunted (oooo)
sakine is like. okay. that’s kind of weird, i thought they lived in this city. i guess i’ll just have to head up to solitude to find out for sure. she thanks ambarys and wishes for the best with rolff (though she doesn’t think he’ll be raising hell again any time soon), and then decides to go again before she overstays her welcome. restocks in the market and sets off back towards whiterun to hopefully catch a caravan over to solitude.
indmira follows her from there, still nervous about prophecy dreams (though they stopped last night after she first saw sakine, so she’s going to assume that’s a good thing). this continues for a few nights, and sakine doesn’t really See indmira but she Knows that she’s there. sakine just pretends like she doesn’t notice anything and keeps going, meandering and investigating a few dungeons or above-ground sites, carving herself a new lute to make up for the one that the imperials took from her before her execution.
valtheim towers - sakine is accosted for the ‘toll money’, invites the bandit to go ahead and try and take it from her, and is immediately in over her head. indmira hates the idea of making herself known but also sakine disappears inside the first tower for a few minutes longer than indmira is comfortable with. then, just as indmira is like readying herself to do something stupid and help this dumbass nord with a confidence problem, sakine accidentally shouts (she’s only done it once before and it literally tears her throat apart - mortal bodies were not meant for immortal voices) and blasts all three bandits fighting her off the bridge over the big river
indmira watches their bodies sail through the air in mute fascination, then watches sakine take an arrow in the shoulder from the bandit all the way across the river and also fall in. indmira takes that freakishly long shot without hesitation (piercing the bandit through the throat) and then jumps in the river after sakine, hauling her ashore and doing her best to administer the wound (she can’t take the arrow out until there’s a healer on hand, and whiterun... isn’t that far away. but to get her help, indmira is going to need to . Go . Inside the city. she decides to worry about that later and gets sakine awake (she passed out when hitting the water, as ydo) and walking, blood still dripping from her mouth (from the shout). she’s exhausted and only really comments “ah, my ghost decided to show up” in a whisper in reference to the fact that indmira’s been tailing her for like three days, and then goes dead silent to account for how much Fucking pain her entire throat+mouth region is in
they get to whiterun a few hours later and indmira just kind of. dumps sakine on the ground, who had previously been relying on the shorter dunmer for support. but indmira Cannot go inside the city, no way no how, and so she just kind of drops sakine and hightails it out of there. a guard comes and gets sakine, and danica takes care of the wound, just telling her to take it easy on that side for a week or so. sakine doesn’t ask for healing for her throat, as that would. be. hrm. she just Doesn’t Ask, because it feels like admitting that she has this Weird Power that no one else does, and she doesn’t want to admit that.
balgruuf comes to see her while she’s chillin in the temple and basically is like do i need to send you to ivarstead with an armed escort. you need to see the greybeards Right Now. and sakine is like (still whispering) - listen, i know that you’re a nord and i’m a nord and you expect me to do this because of our shared cultural history, but i’ve been away from this country for over half my life, and i just don’t care. this isn’t my problem. some other dumb hero can go up there and be the chosen one and i’ll write ballads about them to sing at the bannered mare, but this is NOT my problem.
[hard cut to sakine walking down the road with a bunch of whiterun guards, looking absolutely miserable]
they take her to ivarstead and she’s like. fine. i’ll fucking. go. look, my traveling companion just showed up, and she grabs indmira out of the bushes where she was hiding. they make the climb together, which allows them to properly introduce themselves to one another and begin to bridge the gap of ‘why were you following me for like four days and why did you dump my injured ass on the ground’, etc.
ok i’m finishing editing this on my phone so let’s keep the rest short/sweet:
get to high hrothgar after a fun trek up the mountain; sakine stops that one frost troll from crunching indmira in half and makes a comment about the valtheim debt repaid (which... indmira doesn’t consider it debt at all, but feels a twinge of wary friendship at the idea of having someone besides herself watching out for her)
greybeards immediately send sakine on an errand to get the dang horn, which she agrees to but Is Bothered About
go through the ruin, get delphine’s note, meet up with her, sakine recognizes her from before, delphine refuses to hand over the horn until they help with the dragon at kynesgrove, Sakine Angery Dot Jpeg
they fight the dragon at kynesgrove, sakine realizes she doesn’t know dovahzul and it’s a Problem, get the horn and hoof it back to ivarstead
dragon attacking ivarstead, sakine Stupidly stupidly decides to lure it away from the town and fight it basically by herself while indmira stays in town and makes sure people stay safe (which is a task that requires she Talk to people, but with all the adrenaline, she nearly forgets to be self-conscious) (also she tries to warn sakine about her eye, because this ‘dragon at ivarstead’ was in one of her prophecy dreams and - but sakine is already gone, not listening)
sakine fights the dragon. sakine pulls away from a lunge just a little too late - enough to avoid dying, not enough to avoid getting her face slashed Real Good. she Shouts in response (it’s a gut thing at this point, her finer control doesn’t exist yet) and kills the dragon, but then indmira has to run up and get her and start hauling her up to hrothgar because she’s bleeding from face and mouth and - and indmira has dealt with heavy injury, but not like this. they get up to the top a few hours later and sakine has mostly recovered from her shock-state, enough to be Fucking Pissed at the greybeards
she yells at them (and accidentally shouts, again, which shatters almost every pot in the entire monastery) and is basically like, i’m not going on any more stupid errands until you actually teach me something. i want to know dovahzul and i’m not leaving until i know it. i’ve had a Shitty day and everyone is trying to shove shit way above my head on me and i just got maimed so you’d better FUCKING tell her something worth her time.
then she’s really just very exhausted so she crumples on the first vaguely bedlike surface and finally indmira (and the greybeards, but more removed) attend to her face. hello, stitches and nasty herb poultice and heavy gauze. sakine is like, indmira what the Hell are you still doing here. you really don’t have to do this, it’s probably better for you to go and get outta dodge. indmira is like... I Cannot Tell You Why, but it’s important that we stick together. for now. plus you have no idea where you’re going half the time and could use a guide. she’ll stick around until sakine’s eye is healed, at the very least. sakine agrees to that and passes tf out.
so that’s where they are: sakine, half-blinded and grasping for wisdom in return; indmira, who is bewildered and afraid of being Known but knows she gets treated to Obnoxious prophecy dreams every night she doesn’t spend near sakine. both of them don’t Really want to be doing this, but sakine is rapidly realizing that this is Very Real and it’s very probable that no one else will be able to take care of it (and she saw the broken bodies at helgen, at the watchtower, at kynesgrove, at ivarstead. she doesn’t like having responsibility shoved on her but... but. but those people are Gone and so many more can just be Deleted or Maimed like she was nearly deleted, like she was maimed), and indmira only knows that this nord really loves doing stupid shit and she’s now had to fish her out of two sticky situations. she doesn’t relish the idea of .. whatever this dragonborn shit is, but her job has always been to assist wayward travelers, and they’ve already helped a lot of people.
[jazzhands] they’ve got so much shit yet to get into and another party member to pick up but. Soon. i have to stop myself from just rushing ahead to dawnguard stuff lmao
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Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.
St. Augustine of Hippo
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these are probably horribly dark on anyone else’s screen but mine, but. indmira in various stages of ‘i’m allowing people to See Me’
top is her pre-meeting-sakine usual get-up - she was a wilderness guide decked out in a million furs and she hardly let anyone see any of her body except her eyes. after beginning to travel with sakine, she drops the hood/absolutely massive fur cloak and simply keeps her face scarf up, which remains a constant because Skyrim Is Cold. and then just regular ol’ indoor indmira, looking cute
god. sorry i do this like once a year but it’s time to take ten million screenshots of indmira, as sakine would do if she had a camera
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I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.
Richard Wright, from Haiku: The Other World, eds. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener (Arcade Publishing, 1998)
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tasmin does extreme bosmeri yoga meant to warm up warriors and hunters (but perfect for thieves, as well) and nameless does... normal people yoga. it has a different name, after the collapse, but she does poorly with meditating while not moving, so controlled movement through poses does quite nicely.
wyn does yoga once in awhile during stretches, but usually doesn’t have the patience - stretching is more important to her than special poses, and i doubt much of the ‘idea’ of yoga has remained. if she wanted to look like contorted dead person in rigor mortis she’d just get a room at the atomic wrangler and not lock the door
#wyn's a runner tasmin is euuuhhh an acrobat i guess#nameless is a space wizard who is less bound by earthly limitations and does it more just to do it#i GOTTA sleep is the thing
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this ones saucier so ill put it under a cut lmfao sorry (still arcana but huuuhhh lazier writing & no names & saucy, as previously advertised)
“in all this time you’ve been away, have you thought of how the hangman’s noose would feel?”
she was sitting on him - straddling him, really - legs bent at the knee so her ankles could hook back over his thighs. her voice was low, teasing, but with an edge of... knowing. far too knowing, she was; too quick to find his sore spots and dig in.
not that he was complaining.
“yes,” he breathed back to her, hot breath skimming along the empty space between neck and collarbone. her shirt’s collar had been pushed open, past her shoulders, hanging halfway down her torso. the fabric was soft, worn, inviting; a cool barrier between him and her warm, warm skin. he kissed down in that hollow for what felt like the thousandth time, her skin accepting the bruising without immediately disappearing like his did. what a pretty picture they made, the roses he painted for her.
“perhaps you’d like to try it out,” she replied sharply, her hand suddenly closing around his throat. his appreciative, affirmative noise was cut short but the pressure she exerted for just a moment before easing off again.
“i can demonstrate it for you, free of charge.”
it was all he could do to wrap his arms tighter around her back, bare hands pressing under thin linen to her radiant warmth.
“on the house,” her voice had been gradually descending in tone, getting softer and softer as she leaned into him. he buried her face into that hollow he’d been kissing earlier, feeling her fingers close back around his windpipe in response. her digits weren’t long like his, or elegant like asra’s, but they were firm, strong. authoritative.
“yes, god, yes.” but the words were lost, muffled against her skin, expressing their meaning only through their fervor and how his hands gripped harder at her waist.
he’d let those fingers do whatever they wanted, and he’d thank her for it at every turn.
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sry, more aimless dialogue disconnected from any semblance of a plot. i ? fell in the arcana hole yesterday and i can’t get up
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“Ugh,” Julian started, peeling off the wet leather from his hand - the hand unblemished by the murderer’s brand - and looking at his fingertips. “I look like a raisin.”
Their flight had taken them into the river, ducking under the rickety docks and treading admittedly disgusting water while guards tromped by overhead. Rowan muffling her sudden laughter in her sopping arm, adrenaline making her giddy; Julian grinning in response but familiar enough with the highs and lows of being hunted to forestall his own reaction.
“Why is it that whenever I’m with you, I end up in the water?” she’d asked in passing whisper, her head bumping against his shoulder in the current. A cheeky comment about getting wet came to him, but was suddenly silenced by another passing guard patrol before he could lean over to whisper it to her.
Eventually, they’d dragged themselves out a few hundred feet downshore, cool summer air making their sodden forms shiver.
Now they sat outside Mazelinka’s again, fully aware that the old woman wouldn’t let them inside until they had shed a few dozen pounds in water weight.
Rowan leaned to look, taking his fingers in her own under the pretense of inspection. “It so happens that I’m very fond of raisins,” she replied, taking the moment to study his palm lines as well.
“I doubt I’d taste as good in a bread.”
“Hrm,” she said in turn, a strange noise between disappointment and pondering. “I suppose I’d need a taste test, first.”
And then, seemingly oblivious to the easy flush that had worked its way across Julian’s face, she continued, “Your heart line is freakishly long, Devorak.”
“Is... is that good?”
Finally, Rowan looked up to meet his eyes. Her hair was still soaked, disorganized waves free of their bonds and hanging in her face
“Depends,” she said after a few beats. “You’ll love deeply, but it will hurt beyond anything physical if you lose that love. If you do not damn yourself to failure, you will find joy and a particular kind of freedom, but the path is often occluded.”
Her eyes were trained somewhere behind his shoulder, words drifting dreamily, as if she weren’t fully aware of what she was saying. That hazy, unfocused quality echoed from the tarot reading she’d given him just a few days ago, and signaled that she spoke from some intuition beyond the world her body sat in.
He grinned in his usual manner, brows arching as he did. “Pffthahaha, please, Ro, anyone could have told me that. You just dressed it all up with the word ‘occluded’.”
She blinked in response, coming back to herself, and shook her head. “You don’t have to believe me, of course. Fate happens either way, but people tend to roll over too easily for it.”
And then she leaned forward a little, bringing his hand back to her face - but even closer, where she laid a soft kiss on the pad of muscle near his third and pinky fingers, licking at the corner of her lips as she straightened. “You taste like the river, Julian. I think I’ll take the raisins.”
He laughed as she released his hand, a full-chested bark, warm with ever-evolving surprise at her frankness, and moved to divest himself of his sodden jacket even as she stood and began to wring out her shirt.
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on my list of ideas for that ana & wyn fic is them exclusively speaking in coded messages aligning w wyn's favorite childhood story, something wyn is positive that no legion member has ever read and knows her mother will always understand
the legion is efrafa, slaves are does, wyn (a little facetiously) refers to her own movements in the third person as el-ahrairah. the messages are coded like fables, written on scrap fabric and rough slave-made paper; any soldier who intercepts them and can read just sees childish nonsense. they're usually not intercepted, but occasionally... but either way, it'a a good communication system when it works
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i often have pieces of dialogue and nothing to do with them (as i rarely ever get to writing the thing they belong to), but a years-old line from the classique 'wyn and ana fight the Whole Damn Legion' (with tricks, not one on one):
Wyn shrugged, as she'd made up her mind and nothing could be done for it now. "When in Arizona, do as the Romans do," and she nodded down at the Legion camp below.
Ana shook her head. "It's funny how you can say something so dumb and yet sound so much like your father in one go."
"I thought those were already synonymous."
And it was a joke, from both of them, to bridge the shadow of fear that had grown long against the thought of Wyn willingly giving herself over to a Legion patrol. They had a plan, but plans go bad, and there was no telling... well. It does take a certain type of woman to walk down there on purpose, and it takes another type of woman entirely to let her daughter do it - or the same type of woman, and the instinctual trust shared between them.
Ana had been planning on doing this herself, but she was older and had a great risk of being recognized. Wyn was conspicuous, yes, but young, fit, and had a skilled markswoman waiting to back her up if things got too sticky.
Wyn still swallowed through her thick fear at the idea of the slave collar, and turned away.
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