crystal; open

[earthbones]

FORM: Sending crystal
SENDER: Brónach
RECIPIENT: Everyone
WHAT: A few questions about dragons and what you're fighting for, nbd
WHEN: current
WHERE: Kirkwall outskirts if you want to track her down
NOTES: TES lore/your brain is now on skooma

This thing, the Inquisition, it stands between the world and its breaking. Or close enough for an outsider putting pieces in place so let the question be asked after everything has settled and we aren't sweating out of our skins with our minds unravelling. A question asked by a very old one to me. Older than anyone here. [What is time to a dragon? A thing they can't comprehend, she's comfortable enough to count everyone here as younger than Paarthurnax.]

Do you like the world? I would think, if you don't want it to end. But if you don't--

What is an end? Do you think time is a wheel? That time is one thing? That the dragon eats his own tail and that's it? Time has never been flat, has it? So, do you like the world? Do you not want it to end? Why are you here to do these things if you don't like the world? Maybe you think it's destiny though...

[Destiny is where her laugh rattles out, all piss and vinegar because what is destiny but ash in your mouth and the weight of claws in your spine pressing your down in the dirt? Answers will be weighted accordingly, mostly in the Nord, Altmer/Thalmor, and Dunmer camps as appropriate. Those are the Loudest opinions she's found that she can put names to.]

Comments

[iceblade]

I like the world, aye! At least the parts of it that aren't overrun with Chantry nonsense. The world beyond that is so much more than what their clergy thinks, and I want to see more of it. The hold will want a lot of tales and I don't aim to disappoint.

Why would I want it to end, when there's so much yet to see and do?

[earthbones]

Nords liked their world I think in the same way you did, it makes sense it was their mountain high above it all. Younger than us, never had a thing ripped out of them. Same here I think.

Why does everyone think of ending as ending? Mortality is fixed in me too but what happened here to keep you so close looking to your own ending. That nothing beyond and beyond and beyond might be thought of?

[iceblade]

I don't pretend to understand the lowlanders' ways of thinking, but remember what I said before about Avvar and permanence being a foreign concept? It's true in all things, from our settlements, to marriages, to alliances to the gods themselves. Nothing ever really lasts, even an 'ending'. Some souls are reborn, clothed in new flesh. Others...well, the Lady of the Skies takes care of that and she isn't sharing details with those still living. The point is, change comes, whether or not we're ready for it. It's the way of the world, as long as we Avvar have known it.

What about you? Do you like anything about this world? What's an end, to you? What's beyond that?

[earthbones]

There's the Dreamsleeve. If you made no pact or bond back you go into it but no guarantees. Nords have Sovngarde. I might if I go or I will return to nature because of what the Ehlnofey taught. I don't know what you'd make of how time is divided up. Not everyone thinks of it but it concerns me and I read many things when it became my business of how it split apart when dragons are time. But some things? They last beyond your ending. There are deals into the afterlife. Into the next.

Ending was when the whole of Nirn which is the world would have been within the world-eater's gullet, all of us forever, and that would have hatched the next kalpa. That is an end to one. The birth of the next. But mine lives on, Alduin is dead so I have murdered the next still slick in the shell. This world is simple, your dragons cannot eat the world and you have no Thalmor. I like that. I like the world alive. Breathing. A heart beating.

[iceblade]

So do I, lass. So do I.

[There's a soft sigh as she shifts her weight, getting comfortable. Faint nug squeaks can be heard.]

We don't have Thalmor, true, but we have Venatori. They want the Tevinter glory days back...you know, when magisters wanted to make themselves gods and brought Thedas a world of trouble. Corypheus will use them to birth a new world, if he gets his way...but more likely than not it's not one a sane soul would want to inhabit. Did you hear, about the agents who visited a future with him nearly victorious? It sounded like a fucking mess, and if the world was ending by that point, no doubt many would think it a mercy kill. But I wonder what would be birthed from that.

...murdering the next world, eh? Does that keep you up at night? Or do you just think it'll come in its own time, anyway?

[earthbones]

[Her stomach doesn't growl but it's a near thing. Starvation before a hunt is a ritual, and it's been several days now since she last left with her bow to go take down whatever there is by Sundermount or the Wounded Coast, or the fringes she feels most comfortable in pushing at.]

There is a thing--

[And dead silence for a time. Her hand weighs the options. Skadi is almost a Nord, might be able to shut her mouth about this and there aren't time wounds because time is so dull, so predictable in Thedas, and dragons die, and the people are useless so she curls her mouth up into a smirk.]

There is a thing called an Elder Scroll, and to write one is to make history, but reading them has blinded some, left others mad. The right person. The right place. The right time. Past, present, future; all of that matters to read an Elder Scroll. Until that thing happens, until the history is made all possibilities exist in the Scroll, each time anyone would ever be mad enough to try reading the same scroll it would unfold, unfurl, stretch out. Time is not a flat circle. If that happened and time was wounded somehow, even if it is changed, no matter what happens it changes. A thing doesn't happen until it happens. Until it's made to happen.

[No Septimus here. No Herma-Mora to beckon with black tendrils, with the whispering of pages of forbidden knowledge, all his helpers blind for they read the margins of the Elder Scrolls.

Skadi's question is unwelcome. Galatea could say how her roommate sleeps: little, disturbed, muttering half the time.]

You break down your ages here, so do we, but you'd shatter beneath what's come to Nirn and Nirn could take what Thedas has weathered. [The Oblivion Crisis. The Tribunal. The return of the dragons. Thedas would already be thrice-renewed if those had come to pass.] Paarthurnax asked why I wished to learn something, and my answer was that I like the world, if anything keeps me from sleep why should it be that to have the world stay? When I'm gone or when the Fifth Era comes something will happen as it did before but that's beyond me.

[iceblade]

[Skadi waits patiently for the reply, either not having much to do or busying herself as they speak. As for the question...well, maybe she shouldn't have asked, but the answer is interesting enough that she doesn't regret it.]

Aye, and there's no point worrying about what's beyond your scope. [No one reasonable should expect that, anyway.] This Paarthurnax liked your answer, then, enough to teach you? It would've worked on me; those who like the world seem a bit more motivated to save it, after all.

How do you know when the right person, place and time are, for those scrolls? And...do you have them with you, here? [A little curious, a little cautious...for once.] Not that I'm asking to read it, I like my eyesight and sanity as they are, but a thing that can breach time...Lady, you could learn so damn much if the pitfalls didn't get you.

[earthbones]

My answer was good but he couldn't teach me, it would have been impossible because of his nature to teach me, he could only tell me where to go to find the tools to learn what others had learnt ages before me. [If she could have him here--

What would he be here, how many times to turn that question over in her head? But it would be cruel when all the shadows of his kin are silent and stupid, flesh and blood beasts, not something so much more.]

I don't know how anyone else knows, only that when a thing has to happen it happens. There are things you don't think on too hard otherwise the world pitches to the side, and when the world was so close to its breaking there wasn't time to think on all those things. I don't have it now or here. It's gone. That-- history happened. I read it. As I was meant to. Learned what I had to and then it was gone. It happens.

[iceblade]

And yet, rifts have spat out items from other worlds before, with no one to claim them. Sometimes they're harmless, but now that makes me wonder, if one of those could come through. [A soft snort at that.] If I ever want to not sleep at night, that would do it.

Time isn't quite set in stone here, not for rifters. Have you heard of gaining new memories of their home, as though they were still there? It's not that common, but I've heard a few talking about it.

[earthbones]

If one turns up, and someone tries to read it then maybe it would be history but they're tied to events, to greater things than this and I'm the only person here from Nirn so why would another scroll come?

Dreams can happen for any reason. I drank a potion and walked through the memories of a priest as if they were my own. With this Fade thing, and now all that happened to us? I wouldn't blame time for it.

[iceblade]

Something's to blame for it, though. They've talked about how these new memories are different from dreams, as though they actually lived them. I didn't think to ask if they had any new scars or such, but now I wonder. [Time to find out later, she supposes.]

...Lady, that sounds like a surreal tale. Want to share it over drinks and a game, lass?

[earthbones]

Can't drink anything any of you drink, goes against the pact and no pigs have piglets for me to go try making deals with farmers. I'm not one for games, no one played them in taverns.

[Bards played and sang, she got in fights sometimes, made deals more often.]

[iceblade]

What do you do to relax, then?

[Not judging, honestly curious.]

[earthbones]

I don't. [Even the idea of it sits uncomfortably.] There's always something to be doing.

[iceblade]

Ah. [Can't relate. Work hard, party hard; that's her way of life.] My hold is productive and practical, but we still have our ways of blowing off steam when it's needed. Sure, sometime it's arena battles and climbing and shite like that, but afterward, those sore muscles need a good hot spring to soak in for a while. The baths here...will do, but they're not the same.

[earthbones]

I'm a Bosmer far from Valenwood, now far from Skyrim, Tamriel, Nirn. Once I get jagga going I can drink but there were invaders then I was alone during a civil war and a dragon crisis, unless I was working for the guilds. I don't like these baths, it's meant to be river water. Good and cold and back in the earth.

[It's a Bosmer thing.]

[iceblade]

Jagga, eh? What's that made from, then? Make some and I'd be willing to give it a shot just to try something new.

[earthbones]

Fermented pig's milk. Need to finish the still then I need to find a willing few farmers with some does, it'll take me longer than I'd like. It's an acquired taste, never met anyone not from or who hasn't spent a long time on Valenwood to acquire it.

[iceblade]

...that will either be epic or vile. Perhaps both. Either way, I'm not afraid of a challenge.