The Elder Scrolls - Iseai

Author's Note:

Hello, my name is Bob. This is my first foray into writing, erotic or otherwise. Please let me know what you think. I have a few original tales that I'm working on as well, the primary ones being

Party Leader

and

Stories From the Couch

. Party leader is a fantasy, and you can probably guess on the other one. Those will get uploaded when they're ready. Although, considering this one took me almost a year and a half to write... Well...

Anyways, thanks so much to Darth_Aussie, Spartan_Preferred and Mobin for inspiring me to write, y'all have been good friends when I needed it most. And thanks to those who helped me edit. You know who you are.

Prologue:

Stephen yawned and rubbed his eyes. Setting his cup of coffee down, he plopped down onto his office chair. Laying out a blanket on his lap he focused his tired eyes on the screen in front. Noticing the time, he wondered how the day had gone by so quickly. He'd taken the day off from work to give himself a long weekend, but with all he'd done today it hadn't exactly been a restful lazy day.

He'd started the morning with a hearty breakfast. Grits and eggs, toast, sausages, and some fruit. Breakfast was something he usually forsook in favor of an extra hour of sleep in the morning, preferring to just down a thermos full of coffee on his commute into the office. He figured he had the time today though, and decided to indulge a little. He'd need the energy, especially with what he had planned for the day.

He'd been waiting over a month for all the parts to arrive and another week before he could take a day off and devote enough time to his little project. But today was the day and with a gleam in his eye he had settled in at his desk to tackle the work ahead.

His project for the day had been setting up his new gaming computer.

Initial OS setup had gone smoothly. He didn't need, or, if he was being honest with himself, know how to set up anything truly cool. All he cared about was getting to the games. Lots of internal storage paired with an 8 TB external hard drive meant he had more than enough space, even for all those games he'd bought and never actually played before.

Like a lot of people Stephen would often buy a whole batch of games on sale, start one, forgot about the rest, and then never got around to playing them. One game that Stephen had bought and ignored for several years was Skyrim.

Sometimes fictional worlds just grab you. Skyrim, officially

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

, and by extension the rest of the Elder Scrolls universe, had reached out and grabbed Stephen by the throat and refused to let go for well over 5 years at this point. And he had loved every minute of it. He'd spent months online reading character bios, lore, walkthroughs, you name it. He'd spent even more months actually playing the game. Both a role player and a completionist by nature, he'd once spent an entire month on the Companion's storyline alone.

He'd taken breaks, of course, at one point buying and playing through the entire Kingdom Hearts series because he'd seen it on sale and gotten nostalgic about playing the first one as a kid. But he always seemed to gravitate back to Skyrim.

But once he had finally slain Alduin, beaten the smugness out of Miraak, and put a stop to Harkon's idiotic plans, Stephen didn't think himself done with the game. Oh no, he had more builds he wanted to try and better ways of completing certain missions. At one point he'd even taken the time to learn much of the language of the Dragons, Dovah, so he could actually read the dragonwall inscriptions. Given the limited official vocabulary and grammar available it wasn't quite like learning a full fantasy language, like Klingon or Tolkien's elvish language Quenya. But he could read in-game inscriptions and he'd learned how to sing and play the opening theme song on his guitar, and that was good enough for him.

Then, he'd found the mods. What started as a couple of simple creature mods quickly ballooned into hundreds of mods designed to fundamentally change his game.

Frostfall

&

Campfire

to add temperature rules and camping.

Hunterborn

, so he could make better use of the wildlife.

Ordinator

to completely overhaul the perk system.

Wintersun

so he could finally worship the divines properly.

INeed

for food and water requirements.

CACO

&

CCOR

to overhaul Crafting, Alchemy, Cooking & Smithing. Not to mention the huge DLC sized mods that added entire storylines, new locations, and characters, like

Legacy of the Dragonborn

,

Beyond Skyrim: Bruma

, &

Beyond Reach

.

Not that Stephen would admit it to anyone who asked, but he had also added as many sex mods as he could get his hands on. He had gotten tired of pretending like he didn't want to respond to Camilla Valerius' obvious flirting, or bend over Lydia and make her "carry his burdens". So, he grabbed some mods that would allow him to do just that.

It was actually these mods that had finally pushed Stephen over the edge on buying a new computer. In the past he'd used a laptop that had struggled to keep up with his ever-growing mod list. He was fine dealing with the occasional lag, crash or freeze when it only affected easy grinding or well-known story, but nothing quite killed the fun like his game crashing just as he was about to bed that tease Serana. And now that he'd finally upgraded, he'd spent all day redownloading his mods, along with a handful of new ones he'd had his eyes on.

When it comes to mods, the exact order in which the game loads them is extremely important, and resetting a load order in the hundreds is no easy task. He had a tool that processed his downloaded mods and gave him the optimal load order, but that was a baseline at best. He still needed to test the build for game breaking bugs and any obvious collision problems. He'd once spent well over 400 hours on a modded save file only to walk into Winterhold for the first time and have his game immediately crash. And then crash again the next time he tried to walk into the city from the other side. And the next time. And the next. At this point, he realized he was probably being overly cautious, but he figured spending a few hours testing for game killing bugs was better than spending a few months getting invested in a game, just to have to restart because of a faulty load order.

But as he blew on his steaming cup of coffee before taking a sip, he knew he was getting close to the finish line. He was pretty sure he'd checked everything, or at least everything he could think of. He just had one last mod to optimize.

Stephen had saved it for last, because he was a bit dubious about it. It was one of his new ones, and it was one he'd really only downloaded on a whim.

Ultimate Access

didn't have a lot of details in its description page, just that it was designed as a framework mod, something to get all his disparate mods working together in a way that would cut down on crashes. It was surprisingly huge for what was essentially a background mod, but it had good reviews that testified to its efficacy so he was willing to take a chance on it.

He realized, of course, that if it actually did what it advertised, he had basically wasted his entire day. But he figured he'd just consider it doing his due diligence to make sure the game worked without it first, just in case it actually broke his game instead of stabilizing it.

"Alright, time to give this mess a try and hope for the best..." Stephen mumbled as he loaded his heavily modded version of Skyrim, ready to test his last mod of the day.

As the loading screen finished and the main menu opened, a text box popped up, a bouncing chibi version of the Daedric prince Sheogorath playing in the margins.

Hmmm... That's weird

, Stephen thought.

None of my mods should be starting this soon.

He had actually downloaded a tool that stopped mods from initializing until after the cart scene to prevent the dreaded "wild cart ride" that was unavoidable if a couple of his mods were started before character creation.

He focused on the text box: *Would you like to engage

Ultimate Access

?*

I mean... yeah, no shit Sherlock. I wouldn't have downloaded it if I didn't want to use it? What a weird message...

Stephen thought to himself, taking another small sip of coffee as he clicked the Yes button in the text box.

*Thank you. Enjoy your playthrough of Skyrim with

Ultimate Access

!*

As soon as Stephen finished reading the pop-up message, he was struck with a piercing headache, his eyes slamming shut in pain, as the screen turned a blinding white in his darkened room. The sudden movement of his head away from the light made the pain worse tenfold as he slumped in his chair unconscious, the cup he'd been holding dropped to the ground, rolling away forgotten.

♦ ♦ ♦

Consciousness came to Stephen slowly. His eyes were closed and his heartbeat thundered in his ears, drowning out all other noise. Feeling the cold first, it took him a moment to realize that he was laying on something hard. Groaning as he tried to open his eyes Stephen took a moment just to breathe, hoping it would ease the headache that had awakened with him.

"I distinctly remember telling you he was going to be knocked out cold! You can't get impatient with him being passed out on the floor when you're the one who put him there! You need to tone down the summoning power next time you stupid lunatic!"

"Tone it down! Tone it down! Ha! A little head trauma never hurt anyone! Well, except for poor Stanley. Lost his ability to talk, he did! I mean, that was the only interesting thing about that damn grapefruit! What's the point of a grapefruit if it can't talk!"

"Oh, shut up already... Hey, do you have any more of that Cyrodilic Brandy? I seem to have run a little dry again."

"Huh? Oh, oh, of course. HASKILL! Get this drunken sod another case of the good stuff!"

Struggling to a sitting position, Stephen slowly opened his eyes. He seemed to be sitting on a stone floor, in a room apparently lit by flickering candles based on the way the light bounced around the floor in front of him.

"Oh ho ho, look here Sam! LIFE! Magical, mystical, infuriating life! Now, let's get you into one of these chairs, hmm?"

Stephen looked up to see a man standing on a short set of stairs that led to what appeared to be a throne. The man snapped his fingers and all of a sudden Stephen felt two sets of hands grab him roughly by the arms, standing him up and shuffling him towards a long banquet table set before the throne. Looking around the room with equal parts fear and wonder Stephen was unceremoniously dumped into one of the chairs at the table by the two women who'd picked him up off the ground.

Finally finding his voice Stephen barked at the women: "Jesus, no need to be so rough! I've got a hangover that could kill the dead and my body feels like it got ran over by a steamroller!" Rubbing his hands on his temples he looked around the table, noting only the man who seemed to be in charge and a large red skinned demon drinking directly from a bottle and holding what appeared to be a roasted leg of some sort.

Wait. Demon?

He thought.

Stephen rubbed his eyes and stared at the demon across from him with mounting horror.

"What the fuck is that?" Stephen mumbled to himself.

"How rude! Haven't you ever seen a Daedra before? Come on boy, know your place before your betters, apologize!"

Whipping his head towards the man who'd spoken he nearly jumped out of his chair when he noticed his glowing golden eyes. Dressed in an exquisitely tailored suit of purple adorned with silver swirls and designs, the man seemed young despite both his head and well-trimmed goatee being a striking silvery grey.

"Holy shit! Look, I don't know what you guys want, but I don't make enough money for this kind of thing and I don't have any family who you can extort a ransom out of, but whatever you want you can have, just let me... Wait... Did you say Daedra?"

Stephen looked back at the man, now standing next to the demon, with wide eyes, then back at the being seated across from him. The demon was wearing what appeared to be armor. Black and brutal, it was designed with sharp lines and spikes, the shoulders looking like it would make going through a doorway difficult. Two sets of tightly curled horns sprung from his head along with a full crop of black hair that fell neatly to his shoulders.

The Daedra tipped his bottle up as he saw Stephen staring at him and grinned wickedly.

"Aye, the madman speaks correctly. I'm a Daedra. But not just any Daedra, mind you. You sit before the Daedric Prince of Revelry, Sanguine. A touch of respect please, mortal."

"Madman! Madman! Your words cut deep, my dear Prince. Of course, they're absolutely true, but never mind that, they still hurt!" The man in the purple suit yelled, drawing Stephen's frightened eyes towards him.

"I suppose introductions are in order." Bowing with a flourish, he tucked what appeared to be a cane under one arm. "I am Sheogorath, Prince of Madness. Among other things. I'm not talking about them... The being seated across from you is Sanguine, the Daedric Prince of Debauchery. Lovely fellow usually, except when he's insulting you in your own home! And you, dear boy... Well, you're going to be our plaything for the next, hmmmmm, millennia at least, I would think? I do hope you don't mind?"

Stephen blinked at him in confusion. "Uhhh..."

"Uhh? Really? Uhhh? You sit before two of the most powerful beings in existence and your first words are 'Uhh'?" Sheogorath harumphed. "You know you're really starting to wear on me. Me! Everyone knows I'm famous for my patience! Maybe we should just kill him and start again, what do you say Sam?"

The Daedra at the table nodded sagely, putting down his food as he rubbed his chin. "He has been rather rude, after all. I suppose I wouldn't mind. Just so long as you tone down the power next time! I don't want the next one to be knocked out cold when they come through. We had to wait 20 minutes just to realize we'd caught an imbecile!"

"Woah! Hey, wait a minute, no need for killing! I'm, uhh, just a little confused. Did I have a stroke? Am I... in a coma? I-Is that what's happening? Some sort of fever dream, while I lie in a hospital bed?" Stephen smiled nervously as he looked at the two strange beings before him.

"A dream? A coma? Do you think we would be so crass and base as to do this all through a dream like that self-important twat Vaermina?! BWAHAHAHAHA, no no no no no no, boy, no!" Sheogorath said, doubling over in laughter. "Ooooh no, you're here for real! It was easy too! We simply plucked you from your chair at home and placed you in that chair right there. Well... The floor first, but you wound up in a chair eventually!"

"But that's impossible!" Stephen grumbled in frustration. "The Elder Scrolls aren't real! It's just a game! This is all just from a game. The Shivering Isles, Tamriel, Sanguine's Realms of Revelry, The Aedra, the Daedra, it's all just fantasy!"

"Right?" Stephen whispered.

Sheogorath looked at him with a frown. This mortal was more confounding than he had expected. "Fake? Alright, I suppose I can see how you'd think that. Not everyone can be blessed with easy acceptance of insanity. But really, you're starting to annoy me. Get up!"

Putting his hand out, Sheogorath made a portal appear beside Stephen, the inky blackness swirling with purple vapors. Moving around the table faster than Stephen thought possible Sheogorath grabbed him by the back of his shirt and lifted him out of his chair.

"Come along now boy, you had better hope this will convince you."

Quickly moving through the portal, the two men were suddenly standing in Stephen's kitchen. Opening the cabinets without a thought Sheogorath grabbed a mug, filling it with the still warm coffee on the counter. "Do you have any sugar? I might as well get some coffee out of this obnoxious little side trip."

Still confused, Stephen pointed at the cabinet next to the one Sheogorath had opened first. Pulling it open the man grabbed a small jar marked "Sugar", pouring it into his cup before snagging a few other bottles in Stephen's spice cabinet.

"You know, I don't know why I haven't brought cinnamon to the Isles yet. Something about the atomic structure just seems to confound me. Never turns out quite right when I make it myself. I like to grab a bottle or two anytime I'm in your world. Now! Take a good look around, doesn't this look real to you? Although... This is your kitchen, right? Wouldn't be the first time I landed in a stranger's kitchen..."

Pointing down the hall he motioned Stephen to continue through the house. "And this, isn't this your living room? Goodness, look at all those books, perhaps I should send a golden saint down here when we're done to borrow some of those... You'll get them back! Eventually! Probably..."

Slowly approaching the office, Stephen stopped, his hand trembling as he turned the door handle. Spread out before him was his office, exactly as he'd left it. Boxes from computer parts piled in the corner, his blanket still draped across the seat of his chair and an empty coffee cup lying on the floor next to a conspicuous wet patch in the carpet.

"There now, see? Exactly as it was when we grabbed you. Look, your game is even still running!"

Sure enough, Stephen looked to see a fresh character standing on the screen, ready for him to customize its name and appearance, apparently having already made it through the famous cart scene.

"I mean... I must be going crazy... This all feels so real, but... You know my dad was a schizo, maybe I finally caught the crazy? I mean, that's gotta be what's happening right? You're the god of insanity, it would be fitting for someone like you to be the hallucination. Not sure how Sanguine fits in though?"

Closing the door to his office behind him before turning to face the man in front of him, Stephen brought his shoulders back and stood straight, desperately trying to put on a brave look in the face of his worst nightmare coming true.

"You're not real, I'm just crazy. But it's ok, I can make an appointment with a doctor and get some meds to make you go away. I'm not going to let my life fall to shit like Dad's did. So... so... fuck you!" Stephen shouted, his hands shaking at his side despite himself.

"Hmm? I mean, nice speech I guess, but I'm afraid you're still wrong. You're not crazy. Not yet anyways, I suspect once 'Ol Sam and I are done with you, you'll be a fitting resident of the Shivering Isles. But for now, anyways, you're boringly sane and this is all quite real. See?"

Closing the distance in an instant Sheogorath flicked Stephen's arm, halfway between his hand and his elbow. With a snap, the arm broke, Stephen crumpling in the hallway, gasping at the pain.

"Feel that pain? Can't feel that if this is all fake? Here, how about another!"

With a light kick the Daedra sent Stephen flying into his office door, ripping it off with the impact. Wheezing and floundering on the ground Stephen couldn't get enough air to even scream.

"Oops, sorry about that, you mortals are all so damn flimsy, I always forget how little it takes to make you crumple like a napkin. Here, here, this should set you right as rain!"

Kneeling down beside him Sheogorath touched Stephen's shoulder, a soft golden light emanating from his hand. In a matter of seconds Stephen's broken body was set right and he was left lying on his floor gasping for air, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes.