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This is the first part of a three-part thing.
I was looking through some of the left-over things that I'd written for laughs and had one of those "oh yeah" moments. This should really go into the Celebrities category, but it will be blended with something I wrote a long time ago which has nothing to do with the setting in this one, so overall, I decided to put it here.
This is set in Skyrim, from the Elder Scrolls series of games. Most of the characters and places are out of that game and so those things are the property of Bethesda Game Studios.
The main character is Dhaerys Mishaxi, an Akaviri soldier, one of a small band sent from a distant land to deal with a dragon threat before it worsens. Her kind are believed to be gone from the place that she ends up.
Khali is a Khajiit girl. The Khajiit are a race of mostly bipedal feline folk who are often shunned and viewed with mistrust here. Most of those ones are of specific type and Khali is of another one, but the humans here are very quick to look down on her kind.
If you're a Skyrim purist, maybe read something else. If you don't know the game, it might be better that way, I dunno.
Hope you like it.
0_o
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As Dhaerys Mishaxi slowly dragged her way to full wakefulness, she thought at first that she was back on the ship. That long and storm-tossed journey which had brought them all here to this cursed place.
But ...
But as had happened all throughout history it seemed, whenever any of their kind had attempted to journey to Tamriel, more often than not, many had not survived storms of the trip. There had been times long ago when her people had invaded, it was true, but invasion in and of itself had not been the thrust of the effort even then.
They'd come chasing the dragons which had managed to escape the continent of Akavir. And though her people had arrived in enough numbers perhaps to make it seem like an invasion to the inhabitants at the time, what was never spoken of openly to them even much later was that those who had come were only a fraction of the force which had left to journey here. The rest had never survived to set foot dry land.
She and nineteen others had been given passage on a small, but fast and fully-crewed ship to come. They'd been sent by the Tsaesci king himself, for there was word out of this absurdly cold land that the dragons were back, and this time, there was an actual purpose behind their reprise - one which threatened everyone in this world. The first one of the dragons mentioned in the reports was the World Eater himself, gone from all knowledge for many centuries but returned now somehow.
News traveled instantly between properly trained mages stationed an ocean apart in the service of the king. That was how it had been pieced together and the threat known long before the Imperials and the Nords in Skyrim had been bothered to notice the beasts.
This journey was no invasion, either. It was nothing more than a little prudent planning on the part of the king. It seemed that he had little faith in the abilities of the Imperials of Cyrodiil and even less in those of the Nords to the north of them to wake up and deal with something which could destroy the world.
Dhaerys and the others had been briefed regarding what was expected of them as well as the lay of the land as much as was possible. To no one's surprise, they learned that what few of their kind had remained from the original group on Tamriel, they'd been assimilated into the Imperial culture of Cyrodiil and were long gone over the course of the centuries from then until now.
The original invaders had successfully surrendered to the one who would become the first of the Cyrodiilian emperors and managed to give themselves jobs as his protectors and bodyguards when they weren't busy touting his "divine" right to rule.
And another but ...
According to the very few Akaviri agents still operating in Tamriel, Dhaerys and her companions were not supposed to exist. The lore told that the Tsaesci - who were said to be vampiric - had killed and eaten all of the Akaviri people. Well that was simplistic allegory for a forced alliance at best and a poor joke at worst.
From what she'd managed to gather for herself after landing on the rocky, boulder-strewn coast a month ago, the people here loved to tell and hear tales, and it didn't seem to particularly matter if they were fanciful or even partly true. Any gaps in the factual telling were filled in with cattle shit by someone eventually and sooner or later the garbage would be accepted and rarely questioned by anyone.
Sadly, that seemed to include what passed for scholars here.
Dhaerys was an Akaviri of exceptionally pure lineage - as were they all to have been selected for this. She and her companions had been hand-picked and the purity of their bloodlines had come in for a great deal of scrutiny.
Some of the others had made much of it during the trip across, but Dhaerys never had. To her, it was more a matter of accident that her bloodline was known to someone who had insisted that it could be traced back to the ones who had been so effective in the slaughter of the dragons of Akavir - back when there had been any.
Dhaerys stemmed from one of the most famed families of dragonslayers there had ever been back home. More than that, her family had long been one of the very few such who were renowned as stealthy and relentless fighters afterward. They had to be. There hadn't been any dragons on the continent of her birth for many centuries and everyone has to make a living, don't they?
She'd never made much of her heritage to the rest. There'd been no point anyway. Many of the others had won their selections because of the subtleties of knowing someone who knew someone and so on. Dhaerys had never had either the time or the patience for it. With no dragons to hunt, her father's family had turned their abilities to what there was for them. They were soldiers - and famed ones in a long line.
Dhaerys was a soldier.
She might have magical ability in spades and the reflexes and speed of a ripsaw with a blade in her hand.
But first, last, and everything else, she'd been a part of the King's Akaviri elite since she was seventeen. She'd seen a lot in those eight years, enough to know that few like her live long lives. That's why she was here. That's why she'd jumped to agree to go in the group, to be a part of this covert quest.
The general state of fitness - or lack of it - had dismayed their instructors, and so they'd imposed requirements for them all to be gotten into shape. Dhaerys hadn't said a thing, making no comment either way. She'd left them all in the dust. Her previous militaristic lifestyle along with some good genetics had given her a level of fitness which most of the rest couldn't hope to begin to match. They groused about it and some went out of their way to trip her up as often as they could. She'd said nothing and just kept herself in shape.
The one time that an instructor had asked why she'd taken the abuse so stoically, Dhaerys had laughed quietly and shrugged. She'd replied that for all of the garbage, there was no one here actively trying to kill her. That was what she was used to during the campaigns that she'd fought. Matched against that, this was a joy, she'd said.
With a little luck, they could kill all of the dragons before the reasons for their rise could come to pass.
With a little insane luck, she might make a new life for herself out of the service of a king who was not of her own people.
Of course, those were her privately - held views before it all fell apart.
To be born into the Mishaxi family, one of the first sights which met your newborn eyes was the traditional tiny, curved wooden sword that your mother had pressed into your little hand, curling your tiny fingers around the haft during the ceremony where you were given your name just as soon as it was noted that your dark little eyes were open and actually seeing things around them.
Unlike most other humanoids on this world, for her kind, it typically happened within the first few minutes of one's life, not long before the instinct to hide that gaze took over and your irises became defined in whatever color you unwittingly chose as the rest of the eyeballs turned white.
For her particular part of the family, tradition held that the sword went into your right hand. What was pressed into the left was a small piece of a fallen star. It was only ceremonial in most cases, a bit of a traditional hope that you would have some magical ability. In almost all cases, that was as close to the truth as it came - a faint and vain hope.
In Dhaerys' case however, it seemed that whatever ability had eluded her forebears had all been saved up for her somehow and no one had an answer for it, other than to maybe explain some of her family's insane luck in battle. Dhaerys however; she was capable of things far beyond whatever the traditional faint hope might encompass. And there wasn't anything vain about it.
In Dhaerys, all of it came to her. The rest of her company were of most classes, each one with some mix of talents and all of them exceptional bladesmen or women. There were even three of what some might know as mages besides her, and though she made no effort at the sort of displays that the others did, she knew that of the twenty, she was the one with one foot in both worlds on either side of the arcane line and she excelled at them both quite naturally.
Like all of her kind, Dhaerys' eyes seldom revealed the darkness within. It took moments of extreme emotion to bring out the dark, featureless blackness. There was nothing sinister about the trait; it was just a vestige from a long ago past which had been used to help see in dim surroundings. What was different was that, beneath the disguise, Akaviris could see in a wider arc. The hiding of it was a protective instinct among most true Akaviris and might never be seen by others of a different racial background.
Indeed it was assumed, probably correctly, that as the Akaviri blood of the ones here so long before had been thinned by interbreeding with the locals, that this latent characteristic had been lost.
It was probably just as well to Dhaerys' mind. With all of the dragons dead as far as anyone knew and with only mostly humans and the other creatures of Tamriel to fight, no one really needed the wide viewpoint that the feature provided.
Besides, in her admittedly limited experience on this continent, it tended to scare the shit out of anyone who saw you like that. So it stayed hidden most times.
She remembered a little more of her arrival after that. She recalled that she and four others had climbed over the side of the ship for the swim to shore at night. That had been the plan; to insert four teams in different places along the coast. Two of those teams had already gone ashore in other places.
