*me, having an ok night, feeling better* :)
random shitty intrusive thoughts in my head: THEYRE ABANDONING YOU THEY WANT YOU DEAD THEY LOATHE YOU YOURE BEING MANIPULATED
:(
What do Emperor’s New Groove and Lucifer have in common? 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻
Yazama - Father Kingly
Kronk - Chloe Decker
Kuzco - Lucifer
Emperor - the Devil
Sogno un universo parallelo dove è possibile starti accanto senza farmi scottare
I am sick today. So I had to call off work.
Why do I feel guilty for being ill?
Why is is ingrained in us to give everything to our jobs?
my toxic trait is going to sleep early and putting off work, do that i can wake up early and do it but not waking up early and sleeping for 13 hours straight
Adrianna’s orientation is something like... murder-sexual If it has the potential to kill her and she somehow makes it not proceed with it, she’s turned on
How is it possible to feel so much love for a rock band that doesn't even exist anymore?
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Dawn / Birthsign Written for @tes-summer-fest 2021 Wordcount: 1462 Content Warnings: Brief Death Mentions Ao3 Mirror: here
To nobody’s great surprise, Skyrim was batshit bloody fucking cold at night. Especially in the wee hours of the morning. Just before dawn, the cold settled so thick and glacial over everything that for anyone but a Nord, it almost hurt to draw breath. No matter how many thick blankets or warm furs one had wrapped around themself, there was always a wish for more.
Time had softened Andalmo’s memory of how godsblinded amazingly pisspoor freezing it was just before dawn. And yet, here he was, sitting on one of the great stone ledges of Ustengrav in the wee hours of the morning and wondering whether cursing Kyne out would help or hurt his chances of becoming an icicle. At this rate, he’d give his left pinkie toe to see the sky lightening in the west. He probably wouldn't even feel if it snapped off now.
He took a shallow breath, cuddling up further into his thick cloak, keeping the barrow’s entrance in his peripheral vision. Two more moments and he gave in to the temptation. The tiniest of flames flickered at his gray fingertips - just enough to send hot flares of magicka pounding through his system, forcing his blood flow back to a normal level of warmth.
Amazing that he was looking forward to the dawn now, wasn't it? Dawn had always been his least favorite part of stakeouts as a Blade. It just seemed to signify a night wasted most of the time - a final confirmation that yes, far too much time had passed, and they needed to do something about that.
He remembered remarking decades ago to his partner Sotha that he could happily do without ever seeing another dawn. “Not in a death way,” he quickly had to clarify, “but it really wouldn’t be terrible to wake when the sun is already up for the rest of my life.”
She'd given him an incredulous look, golden eyes glinting in the dim streetlights of the Arboretum District. “I thought you came from a farming town. Don’t farmers get up at dawn?”
Andalmo had snorted. Morthal was not a farming town. There was nothing to farm here, really, except perhaps mushrooms and swamp water, and in any case, Andalmo had never planned on returning.
Those plans had gone to shit now, though. The Blades gone, his team of five unceremoniously murdered trying to hold Cloud Ruler Temple against the Thalmor long enough for seventeen other Blades to escape across the mountains into Skyrim. Sotha had, he hoped, escaped - he’d watched her jump from the ramparts and disappear into the woods himself. The daughter of Morrowind’s Hortator was too important to be captured as a political prisoner by the Thalmor.
He’d escaped only by playing dead, not that it was really an act with the state that twelve hour battle had left him in. And now….
Now he was freezing his fingers off, waiting for dawn, or, better yet, waiting for the door to this stupid fucking barrow to open so he could know he’d been right in this ambush.
At least, he hoped it would be an ambush.
Andalmo tried to draw his cloak tighter around himself, though there was no more fabric left to gather, and glanced to the west again. As stubbornly dark as ever.
It wasn't even that he minded the nighttime. He remembered Miralnu, another Blade of his little team of five, grumbling about it once - “What do Blades and thieves have in common? Sneaking around at night.”
“Vampires too,” Andalmo had said dryly. Sotha had smiled instead of laughing, because they were all three on a roof, being very quiet, not to give away their position. Rather as Andalmo was perched now on the barrow.
“Let us not forget to count ourselves among that august body,” she'd said, mimicking a posh Imperial voice, and Andalmo snorted at the memory. Then he regretted it. That meant inhaling again, and by the infertile cocks, balls, uteruses, and assorted other genitalia of the Divines, the cold stabbed all the way in.
No, he didn’t mind darkness one bit. Ever since Mirmulnir fell to his hand and merged with his soul two weeks ago, he’d almost preferred traveling at night. Or with his hood up. Or with an illusion covering his face and masking his voice. A bit paranoid, perhaps, but decades of being on the spymaster’s side of Blades operations had left him very ill-suited to the fame brought on by the songs of every half-penny bard with a rhyming vocabulary, and the leaflets with sketches of his face and lurid tales of accompaniment. One thing they all got right - the Dunmeri tear track tattoos of loss running curves from the corners of his eyes to his jawline. He’d got them done in the Gray Quarter, blinded by tears of grief, not yet reconciled to the loss of his life and career and friendships in the Blades. He…. hadn’t really thought through the implications of having large, identifying facial tattoos.
But then, his favored spells had always come from Illusion.
The western half of the sky was almost beginning to lighten, he thought. He checked it against the eastern horizon, turned his head back and forth several times, before deciding that it was.
And then he couldn't decide whether this was good or bad. The bad news: he may have wasted the night. The good news: he might soon be able to delve into this barrow himself and retrieve what he was after. The bad news, reprises: if his instincts were right and someone else was after it, he might not find them to confront them in the winding halls of a Nordic barrow.
Mirmulnir had barely been dead ten seconds, his soul still scorching Andalmo’s mind with rage, when the ground had shaken with the Greybeards’ call. Dov-ah-kiin. Andalmo hadn't been insensible to what that meant.
He hadn't wanted to face it, either, not really. And it seemed…. impolite to traipse up the seven thousand steps to the Tower without bringing a gift. And he was a Blade - he knew of the rites for greeting a Dragonborn in every age and area, and knew that most likely, the trial would be to fetch the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller.
Returning home to Morthal had, therefore, seemed the best out of a platter of terrible options.
It had suddenly seemed even better when he'd come into the inn and the whole town seemed to be murmuring about some stranger with an interest in the barrow. An adventurer, they said, and much was made of the strange sword they carried - a long, almost curved blade with no ridge in the middle.
And what, Andalmo wondered, was someone doing near the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller, openly carrying an Akaviri katana normally issued to Blades?
It was curiosity that made him leave immediately and set up his ambush. He regretted it a little bit, now. Not the curiosity or the ambush, no. That was going to be necessary - he wanted that horn as a gift to the Greybeards, as a way to avoid the journey for another week or three. But the leaving immediately and camping out all night on top of this barrow?
That, in hindsight, he really could have done without.
Dawn was full breaking now, the marsh starting to lighten so Andalmo could see more than silhouettes. He simultaneously blessed and cursed it. He was no longer having to pump magicka through his system every half hour to stay warm, that was good. But on the other hand…. he now had to decide what to do.
He was still debating that when the distinct scrape of the barrow door opening reached him.
Andalmo released the edges of his cloak. Footsteps crunched across the frozen sedge grass below, and Andalmo slowly reached for his sword, laid out at the ready all night. The leather wrappings of the hilt warmed quickly to his touch once he sent a little magicka down his fingers to help.
He tracked the stranger’s progress by the crunch of their boots.
Three.
Two.
One.
Andalmo swung down from his perch and landed halfway up the stairs, sword coming up to threaten someone on a lower step, just as the adventurer startled back from him. Her own hood fell away from her face, cold-reddened cheeks and chapped lips and blue eyes widened in alarm.
“Now, let's be civilized Blades and discuss this,” was what he’d planned to say. He didn't even get past marshaling his unconcerned drawl before the dawn light allowed him to recognize her face.
She'd been at Cloud Ruler Temple. She'd led the others to escape. She was standing at the stairs of Ustengrav clutching the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller to her chest.
“Delphine?”
So A.C.E are on bubble now.
Good for them to rack in some money.
Sad for the choice who can’t afford it.
