#oc: asenath / nerevarine | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

its-sixxers · 3 years

Text

Aftershock

Early in the fourth era, the Nerevarine’s children eke out a living with an ashlander clan on Solstheim. Unfortunately for them, Red Mountain has not yet breathed her last.

First Seed, 4E 26, Solstheim

Red Mountain smoldered in the distance. The pebbled shores were half drowned in ash, rippled from the tide. A ghost of the Ashlands - of a home Azuraansi could see only when she closed her eyes.

Now one of the remnants of its people were clustered on the shore. Her clan - her father’s clan, small even when Vvardenfell was whole. Little was said of her father, and Raansi always wondered if her mother had warned the others off of speaking of him.

She stared at the horizon, and wondered where in the great world her mother now was. The moment Raansi and her brother came of age the Nerevarine had left Solstheim’s shores once more to see what could be saved in Red Mountain’s wake. A burden her children could never understand, but was writ plain enough to witness.

Raansi shook her head and returned to her work. She and several of the clanswomen sat on the larger stones at the shore mending fishing nets and tarring the outside of their boats. The celebration of Azura, her namesake, was fast approaching and the needs of the upcoming feast would require every net available. As the women worked the entirety of the clan’s children ran up and down the shore, skipping flat rocks over the water and playing hide and seek around barnacle ridden boulders - allowing their mothers a much needed reprieve. Their laughter echoed in the spring air. Raansi looked up from the net she was weaving to watch their play, and smiled to remember when she and Tandreth were the same age. They’d done the same at Blacklight’s docks, though the air was choked with smoke. Solstheim’s air was clean and crisp - if cold enough to bite at her lungs.

It was a bittersweet memory, for the time she and her brother had been on such playful terms had long passed. Now Tandreth bartered with the Skaal and House Dunmer and returned angrier each time - now he’d jumped at the chance to hunt, to escape the yurts and find an outlet for his fury. He worried Raansi. Once upon a time she’d thought he could be Ashkhan - his skill with the bow was second to none - but as time wore on and their mother’s absence grew longer his heart grew further from his people.

Raansi’s only grew closer. Apprenticed to the clan’s wise woman, after the Red Year she was one of very few who still possessed the knowledge of the Ashlands. Within her she helped carry the ember of her people, and ensured it stayed lit. However much her brother seemed to want to escape, Raansi was content with the rest of her life continuing on much as it did that day - tending to humble tasks ensuring her people would thrive.

Fate had another plan.

She saw the explosion before she heard it - the steady trail of smoke pouring out of Red Mountain’s ruin was pushed aside by a shockwave, and the ensuing boom was strong enough to be felt in her chest even miles away. The air was filled with the screams of the children, running back to Raansi and the other women in fear. Soon their worried murmurs joined the children’s cries, and Raansi’s blood ran cold.

There was no time to get to higher ground - what little there was. Her mind’s eye flashed to the main camp - to the wise woman and her tent, to her brother, to her precious belongings - and then she saw the water peeling away from the shore.

She had to move quickly.

“Draw a circle in the ash. Big enough to surround us.” she commanded the other women, and several began to etch a line around them in the ash with shaking fingers. Others shepherded the children into the circle’s center while Raansi dug out several bowls along the circle’s edge. A warding spell, rooted in the ash - she’d only recently learned it and had no idea if it could shield them from the might of the sea, but she had to try. Next to them she scrawled the necessary words as quickly as she could.

“Azura save us.” One of the women whispered, and it spurred several into prayer. Some of the children joined them, the ritual chanting calming them.

“We need blood.” Raansi looked up from where she knelt with ash covered hands and gestured at the divots in the ash. Quickly the women who had blades on them let the metal bite into their palms, spilling crimson into the ash.

They were offering bowls, and Raansi’s would be the last.

“Ash of our ancestors, save your children.” she murmured, moving to the center of the circle just as the crest of the incoming water became visible. Women cried out as she made the last of the bowls in the ash - she didn’t even feel the pain of her blade as she spilled her blood in offering. The blood of Nerevar, for whatever it meant. Raansi stood and clasped her amulet in her bloodied hand, crimson against starsteel carved into the shape of the moon. It was the twin of her brother’s, a star, and Raansi had possessed it since she was born. It made a grim sort of sense, she supposed, that she would hold it as she died.

“Azura.” she whispered, a last plea if the wards she placed failed them in the face of such power. “My life is yours. Take it, if it will save my people.”

The roar of incoming water grew louder and louder, drowning out the cries of those surrounding her. As it hit the shore Raansi thought of her mother.

It crashed with deafening force, the ground beneath her feet quaking. Raansi heard gasps around her, and thought it was the last breath of the women whose children she’d delivered, who had mended her clothes and laughed with her, who had taught her how to make a meal out of anything. The water hit the line that had been drawn into the sand. All sound of the world cut out, and she thought it was the end.

Yet the moment the water had touched the ward it was as if the blood came alive - rising to meet the water. It formed a shimmering red dome above them and the sea crashed around it, all the power of the ocean unable to overwhelm their offering. Beyond Raansi could see only murky water. The others were silent with awe or terror as the sea washed over them, and she thought of the now-dead Tribunal, who had saved Morrowind from a similar fate. The Tribunal, who had paid for their power with her ancestor’s life.

Raansi wondered what price she would have to pay.

She lost track of how much time had passed before the water level began to lower, but as it did so too did the shield protecting them - ebbing away as the Sea of Ghosts left Solstheim’s stones. When at last the water had returned to whence it had came it was as if a spell had been broken - now some of the women and children wept, while others gathered up their charges and took off running to the main camp.

Raansi followed. It was as if the world around her had been wiped clean - the nets and boats were long gone, the ash stolen from the shore with only the patch that had protected her remaining. Still she clung to her amulet as she sprinted across the rock, kelp hanging from what few trees had withstood the onslaught.

She wasn’t the first to make it to camp. As she neared she could hear the sound of weeping, and she knew what in her heart she had known the moment Red Mountain had gasped another death rattle.

It was gone. All of it. Even the paths between the tents were erased, years of foot traffic gone in a heartbeat. Raansi felt faint on realizing that with them countless ashlanders had lost their lives. In a daze she stumbled through the site, as bare as it’d been when they first landed on Solstheim’s shores - and when she reached a boulder that had sat outside of the wise woman’s yurt with nothing near it she collapsed to her knees.

The cruelty of it gripped her. Her people had been persecuted in Vvardenfell for so long, driven nearly to extinction - by Azura’s grace they had survived the Red Year to struggle on Solstheim’s shores, only for it all to be destroyed by an echo of what had nearly ended her world.

Now Raansi beheld the death of all she knew, and realized that what little knowledge she kept - what desperately little she had - was all that was.

She buried her face in her hands and wept.

By sunset she and the other survivors had gathered what few things could be salvaged and constructed a shelter. Raansi drained her magicka reserves keeping them warm, for the makeshift yurt they’d managed had canvas walls soaked with seawater. They huddled together, women, children, and what supplies had been buried for safekeeping. Counting heads had given her a grim statistic - out of a clan of more than fifty, twenty remained - fifteen of which were children who were either orphaned or had lost fathers.

They’d cried all the tears they could muster by nightfall, and all but Raansi had collapsed into exhausted slumber. She sat outside the ramshackle yurt and watched the moon rise, trying desperately to take solace that at least the children had survived. Still, her eyes stung as the stars made themselves known in the sky, the loss of her brother settling over her. They were moon and star, pledged to Azura from birth - two halves that together could do anything. Years of schemes and pranks, of discovery and play, of childhood fights and hopes and dreams, knowledge of the other that only siblings could possess…

She squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn’t mourn yet - not when the wind from the Sea of Ghosts was biting cold and she had the survival of the others to ensure. Raansi didn’t know nearly enough to be a wise woman, but she was the closest thing they had - by dawn they would start on their way to the nearest Skaal camp (if it, too, hadn’t been lost to the sea) and consider their next steps. With food and shelter, they could mourn their dead.

What would she tell her mother? That everything she had fought so hard to preserve was gone in a freak accident? That her only son, spitting image of the father lost to them, was dead with it?

He’d been so angry the last time their mother departed. He’d shouted at her to stay, told her that whatever was left of Vvardenfell cared little for her, that she’d done enough - and still the Nerevarine had departed, tears freezing on her lashes.

Was that the last memory her mother was to have?

Raansi’s would be his smile - a promise he’d find her a snow leopard to tame, a joke that a Skaal shaman’s son would be her perfect match. Only he knew how to exacerbate her and make her smile at the same time, only he dared when the others offered her too much respect, and now…

Gravel crunched nearby. Raansi raised her head from where it had dropped between her knees, and saw a shadowy silhouette stumbling dazed through the camp. A humanoid outline - by its gait she thought it was a zombie, shambling toward the yurt and the campfire within. She hastily scrambled to her feet and gathered the dregs of her magicka to summon an orb of light in her hands, sending it through the darkness toward the figure.

The light illuminated Tandreth, so frost laden he looked as if he’d crawled out of the sea. He was shivering violently and clearly hypothermic, but he was alive.

Raansi cried out and ran to him, throwing her arms around his shoulders in the tightest hug she’d ever given.

“Is it a dream?” Tandreth murmured. “The sea took them all, I thought it took you, I thought of what I’d tell mother-”

“We need to get you somewhere warm.” Raansi took his hands into hers and gasped at the touch - they were as ice, his fingers clearly frostbitten. The pinky of his left hand was blackened, and she swallowed to think of how her vain brother would deal with its loss. “We have a fire and some furs in the yurt.”

Tandreth stumbled, and Raansi had to loop his arm over her shoulders and support him the few meters to the yurt. Their entry woke some of the women, whose eyes shone with hesitant hope at the sight of Tandreth. Some had husbands in his hunting party.

Raansi could only shake her head. Her brother was all that survived of the clan’s men.

It was the first time she’d dealt with loss of such magnitude.

It would be the first of three.

A price had to be paid.

#fanfic #elder scrolls #oc: azuraansi #oc: tandreth #oc: asenath / nerevarine #heeeeeeey it's some tandreth and raansi lore #liberties taken w/ ash magic #:V #also how tandreth lost his pinky

7 notes · View notes

its-sixxers · 4 years

Note

Sooooo..... Tandreth is the son of the Nerevarine... does it mean you also have a char for Morrowind? 👀 And if so can you talk a little about her? Preeeeetty pleeeease? jsjsjjsjsjsjs

Oh god I sure do and sure can.

Her name’s Asenath, she’s skilled in alteration, destruction, and illusion and also isn’t half bad with a spear.

Ashlander by heritage, though her family fell victim to dunmeri slaving practices so by the time Asenath comes along she only has scraps of her culture left to her. Her family earned their freedom about a hundred years before she comes along and ended up working as guides and caravan escorts in County Cheydinhal and The Rift, helping merchants, smugglers, and basically anyone with coin find their way into the Morrowind mainland. Asenath was born in Cyrodiil, lost her mother when she was in her teens and didn’t know her father, and her uncle took care of her after that. He was chronically depressed being very close to her mother/his sister, so Asenath has a massive desire to find some sort of belonging - the strange dreams of a life entirely different to her own don’t help.

It’s one of her first escorts for the family business where things go wrong for her - she’s tagging along with what she thinks is an ordinary caravan, but when they’re held up by an Imperial patrol it’s revealed to be a contraband smuggling operation and she ends up tossed on an imperial prison ship and hauled off to Vvardenfell, and OH WOW LOOK HEY SHE QUALIFIES FOR THIS WEIRD PROPHECY THING and the whole Nerevarine thing gets launched off.

Asenath is initially annoyed to be strong armed into working for the Empire but happy that she’s allowed to keep her hands and avoid worse punishment. Through it all she reconnects with her heritage, discovers the tribe of her ancestry is extinct, and slowly gains a very large and intense hatred for the Tribunal. Her personal sense of identity starts getting quite fuzzy once the Nerevarine thing sets in hard.

to tl;dr it, she deals with Dagoth Ur and the Tribunal and ends up feeling a lot of pain and general melancholy from the whole thing - while ‘justice’ is done, Nerevar had a legacy of conquest put onto her, ancient beings that did often genuinely care for their people were killed (beings that were friends/a lover in a past life), the Dunmer are cursed, an entire culture’s founding principles have been destroyed and exposed, her people are only just beginning to recover from centuries of oppression, and that meteor hanging in the sky doesn’t have anyone to keep it up anymore. But Azura’s very happy with her, so that’s nice. For however much that counts, daedra and whatall.

Tandreth and his sister Azuraansi come on the scene as a result of her seeking some sort of comfort - having twins was a surprise but if there’s anyone who can single mom a set of twins while Red Mountain’s exploding it’s probably the Nerevarine. (Tandreth is named for Asenath’s uncle, Azuraansi being the firstborn twin is named in tribute to Azura in an ashlander fashion).

She ends up disappearing sixty or so years after the Red Year, and it’s only when Tandreth calls on an ancestor spirit fighting a dragon with Idunn ~150 years after that he has confirmation she’s dead, given it’s her spirit that shows up.

#ask #there's a few things i still gotta hash out but aaayyy #dis my girl #forever love ashlanders honestly #oc: asenath / nerevarine

5 notes · View notes