This was the first story that I posted and a fair number of the pictures are not taken with ENB. I also learned a fair amount about formatting and cropping as I went along.
I’ve taken a number of liberties with Skyrim lore along the way, but one of the considerations that I had to deal with was the subject of mer age. Humans in Skyrim live the lifespan that we’d expect for us– unless they are mages or something else is going on. Mythic kings were reputed to live a long time. And humans have the same phases of life that we’d expect.
Mer are different, and it’s hard to piece together just how different, because the source material conflicts. We know that mer, particularly Altmer or Dunmer mages, can live a very long time. Even absent being mages, the lifespan for Altmer is said to be 100-200 years. That’s.. rather a large variance. And then we here about various Altmer persons who live much longer than that, with no indication that they are mages.
Given all of that, and given that I really don’t see Altmer as the permissive-parenting type, I came up with .. 38. Cyrelian is 38 at the time of his arrival in Skyrim, which means that he is old enough to make his own important life decisions, sign contracts, get married, and so on… at least from a legal perspective. His actually doing so would prompt an immediate family meeting, I am sure.
First off, Cyrelian is the cutest Altmer ever. Consider me smitten.
I think you’ve done an excellent job of establishing his character – brilliantly sassy, wry wit, intelligence that far surpasses any of his “superiors” (and his awareness of it), and his duty-bound nature battling with his lack of time for anyone’s bullshit.
This was probably my favourite passage in the chapter:
“The huntsman is superior to the hound, and I believe he calls a leash a leash; the falconer superior to the hawk, and a jess is a jess. To the horseman a spur is a spur.
So what is this? What effect has ‘this Skyrim’ had on my proud sister?
A truly superior being would have no use for euphemism.”
Superb writing, and sums up so succinctly every facet of Cyr’s personality/disdain for his superiors. The way I understand it, he’s still invested in being a Thalmor agent, he just doesn’t have any time for the petty dressage and bureaucracy that comes with it. I could be way off on that one, but I’m eager to read on and find out.
I also enjoyed the flashes of Cyr enjoying his alone time in the basement interspersed with Ahtar – looking forward to seeing where that’s going (spoiler alert: I already know). Your end line for the chapter was perfect, too – Cyr looks so sulky with his tankard of mead, haha.
And that sulky face was totally a coincidence, probably due to a head-tracking mod that assigns facial expressions based on nearby actors. And the nearby actors in the Embassy are not tagged as friends. I didn’t have poser mods/face expression mods then.
Cyrelian is always invested in being a Thalmor agent. While he himself is certainly going to be altered by his time in Skyrim, his underlying beliefs are not going to change. I am sure he will regale us with that at length.
The whining probably isn’t going to stop either, but there are at least two people willing to stomp on his foot at any given point.