A New Sun Rises - Maxical's Adventures, The Truth Behind The Oblivion Crisis Options

[mALX]

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A New Sun Rises

This story covers the daily events in the two years leading up to the Oblivion Crisis. It begins following the life of a semi-typical Khajiit girl who inadvertently finds herself the pawn of a powerful necromancer just as factions and forces begin moving into position.

When motivations are revealed it drives out the secrets of forgotten pasts, and another Khajiit girl whose life was an intertwined mirror of her own till both were altered irrevocably by the same necromancer in whose power they both found themselves.

The diverse paths their lives took merge once again in an explosive revelation that leaves one wondering how much of her skills and personality were ever her own; the other in a desperate struggle to keep control of her life, keep from being used against the Emperor as the crisis that will change Cyrodiil and the rule of Tamriel forever begins.

Maxical

Prologue

Sun's Dusk ( 3rd Era, year 432 )
Ma�Thjizzrini Qa
15 years after her parent's deaths

Fate is an invincible enemy in a battle you�ll never leave unscathed. It stalks you as prey and strikes regardless of shields or armor. The gods and other realms can find entertainment in manipulating your path on a whim; or ancient vampires dabble with your life, alter your mind without you even knowing it. Sometimes you don�t find out till it is too late.

I�d like to blame the gods for where I found myself, but the truth is that somewhere between the void and the Dreamsleeve lies fate; a place where time and space meet; where even the blackness of the void doesn�t reach, and the gods make wagers on the outcome of lives caught in the �tween.

Wedged into that fold are damned souls, souls that have been marked for paths they can�t change, to destinies they can�t escape. Ancient vampire's eyes see them as beacons, follow them as scents, control their minds without their ever knowing.

They are targets for revenge of an enemy they don't even know exists, pawns in a game they didn't even know was being played; whose contestants their worst nightmares couldn�t envision.


That�s where I found myself fifteen years after the game started. That was the day I found out that everything I�d ever known about myself had always been�her. Amiela.

Amiela was a 137 years old demon of a vampire that thrived on destruction and usurped whatever she could from others. She died a century before I was born, but the wars being fought over her didn�t end with her death. Her soul was marked�and inside me.

For me, fate was my parents bringing me through the heavy forested area of the Gold Road just outside Skingrad at the same time the second worst necromancer of our time was in a battle for the soul of Amiela. And there I was, a convenient hiding spot.

That was the day my parents died. All I ever knew of them was where they died and what killed them. I was twenty years old before I even learned my mother's name. I was twenty years old before I remembered Nisaba. Nissy.

*******



Nisaba

Nissy�s beginning didn�t just match mine, it was mine; though neither of us knew it before we�d both turned twenty years old. That was the year our paths crossed again and we learned the only scraps of our histories anyone was ever able to recover. That's when we learned our destinies were intertwined long before our lives began.

Nissy and I were born within a month of each other in the year 412, both born in the 'no-man's' land of wild mountain passes between Vvardenfell and Cyrodiil. Our parents were traveling together and we were born en route, but our histories began long before that.

From early childhood our parents were owned by Hlormaren, a Dunmer Stronghold on the Bitter Coast of Vvardenfell. Before that they were housed in the same children's slave pen on the mainland. Maybe our histories began long before that, but that was the furthest back any information went that we were able to find.

Nissy�s mother died giving birth to her. Her father dropped her off at the Imperial Legion Orphanage for the un-adoptable when she was two. Three years later a Legionnaire dropped me off there when my parents were killed in a minotaur attack.

Fate once again found Nissy and me four years later in the middle of the night, right there in our room at that orphanage. We were both nine years old when our destinies were wrenched into the hands of the worst necromancer Tamriel has known since the King of Worms. Both of us have been in his power in one way or another since. Dagoth-Malan.

That was eleven years ago, eleven years that Nissy waited for me to keep a promise to save her...eleven years that all my memories of her were stolen by Dagoth-Malan so I couldn�t keep that vow. Until fate brought us together again when we both turned twenty.

Nissy and me, we were both in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fate.

** The Beginning **



Where Memories Begin And End

Legion Office, Imperial City
3rd Era, year 417 (memories of events that occurred when Maxical was five years old)

The earliest memory of my lifetime begins and ends in the Legion headquarters in the Imperial City. I�ve never been able to remember a single moment of my life before finding myself in that office.

It was a coming awake. A dark void of nothingness, and then in a blink my eyes were open and there I stood in that office with no idea where I was or how I got there.

An odd putrid odor I couldn't name seemed to be clinging inside my nostrils and roiling my stomach, even the pungent stench of sweat emanating from the large man behind the desk was a welcome relief in comparison.

There was an odd feeling of having forgotten something important that niggled irritatingly, a barb that probed against my mind to remember, but there was nothing to answer its incessant prodding. Nothing. It was like a journey through a maze with only dead ends at every turn. I didn't know where I had come from, where I belonged, or who I belonged to.

At first I barely understood what they were saying; strange sounding words spoken so harshly and rapidly that it was impossible to grasp even one to decipher. They couldn�t understand me at all when I spoke.

Somewhere deep inside me in a place as unconnected to me as the lost memories of my life before that office there was the oddest sensation; a stirring, as if that part of me was just now waking. Suddenly their words were striking a chord of recognition It almost felt as if I could speak their tongue, but when my mouth opened the words still came out in the only language I knew.

*******

The large sweaty man behind the desk pointed at me. "What is that?"

"Don't know, only that it's the get of some beasts killed by a minotaur up on the big curve of the Gold Road in County Skingrad. Couldn't tell what they were either. The mother was a bloody mess; but the male...fur black as coal soot, and the same flattened face as that one's." He indicated my face, then added, "Too big for a cat, never seen anything like him. Both bore slave tattoos so they can't be from Cyrodiil. No travel papers or identification on either body."

The large sweating man's chair groaned loudly as he leaned over and gave me an intrusive and extended eyeing. "That ain't no Khajiit, not with that white coloring. That face gives me the creeps, you said the male looked the same? This one must be an albino then. No telling what you'll find in those other Provinces, all barbarians." He spat a large wad of brown cud into the urn beside him.

"The male had been looted; they even took his clothes, naked as a jaybird he was. Found this in the brush near the female's body." He held out a blood spattered travel pack. "When I moved her body this silver dagger was underneath her, and this gold locket fell off her neck. Chain was broken, likely in the attack."

The rotund man tossed him a cloth to wrap the items in, then pointed at me. "How old do you think it is?"

"Too small to be very old. Can't be much more than a couple years. It walks well enough, though. And mark it as female, it squatted to relieve itself on the way here."

"Two year old female." The large man wrote something down.

"And a bad tempered one at that. She scratched me up good trying to get her on the horse." That was met with raucous laughter from the men gathered.

"It's that red hair!" Someone called.

The mocking laughter and insulting treatment I understood without the help of that strange place within me that seemed to know this language. I didn't know anything about myself or how I got here, I was confused and up till that moment terrified. But at that moment I learned that I had a temper. I could feel it building inside me like a fire about to go out of control.

In my rage I nearly missed that their odd contortions and rudimentary gestures to communicate were attempts to get my name. My name. That would be important to find out who I was.

�Ma'Thjizzrini Qa.� A girls voice squealed from behind me. I turned to see a Khajiit girl in the doorway staring at me wide eyed.

"Ma'Thjizzrini Qa!" She started running toward me, but one of the armored men grabbed her and pushed her back out the door.

As soon as she said it I knew that was my name, it struck a familiar chord immediately. I repeated it, imitating their miming gestures by pointing to my chest. �Ma'Thjizzrini Qa.�

"Name, Maxical." The rotund man wrote something down, then stamped his seal on the document.

*******

They said I was found beside my parents, was there when they were killed. I didn't remember any of it. It felt like they talked abstractly about strangers. The greatest shock for me that day and so many days since was that I didn't even know my mother's name; wasn't able to bring an image of her to my mind, or even a glimpse of a moment with her or the sound of her voice. It was like she disappeared into the void, taking every remembrance of her.

That day in the Legion office though, that I will never forget. The smell of pipe smoke and tobacco, male sweat and steel; those odors bring back the memory of that day as if it was still alive within me, still happening to me.

It has stayed fresh in my mind all these years; but not because I wanted to remember it. It was that haunting memory that was just out of grasp beyond it, the sheer number of times I�d come to that stopping point in my memory and tried to force beyond it to find something, anything of who I was; of my life before that Legion office. Of my mother.

That day, those men staring at me as if I were an insect as they tried to determine what I was, what I was saying...what to do with me. All through it my mind burned with trying to figure out who I was and how I got there. I'll never forget that day.

*******

This post has been edited by mALX: May 4 2019, 07:13 PM

[mALX]

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The Orphanage

Memories of the orphanage; 3rd Era, years 417 - 421

Chapter 2: The Compound



Being housed in the same compound with the Legion headquarters meant there was very little we were allowed to do. The boredom would have been excruciating if the prisoners hadn't been more than willing to teach us how to get around restrictions.

If there was nothing else an orphan learned at the Compound, they learned to pick locks and sneak past the hundreds of guards stationed there. Eavesdropping was a big part of our lives, especially in the dorm areas where the guards lived. What we overheard in there was usually forbidden knowledge, which made it much more interesting even if I didn't understand what it meant.

New orphans were tested by dares to pull pranks on the Legion. Tell-tales and chickens were shunned and ostracized. For me to be accepted, I had to take those dares that no one else would. I invariably got caught, usually through clumsiness or because I'm accident prone and left a trail of damage. I stayed in trouble, but it was the way I finally became accepted into their tight-knit family and began making friends there.

At that time the Elder Council was meeting in the east wing of the Compound. Very few dared pull pranks in the Elder Council chambers. I had to, being at the bottom rung of the hierarchy. I actually learned a lot eavesdropping there. The lawyers coached the prisoner in how to act and what to say to help argue their defense.

The first prank in the Elder Chambers was simply tying the lawyer's shoe laces together so they tripped when they rose from their bench. I crept in on my belly, sliding under the benches to the front.

It was easily done. I would never have been caught had I not stayed to see what would happen. I had my legs switched with a sapling branch for it, but when I limped back to our floor crying the others cheered and wanted to hear every detail of the mission. Someone had swiped a sack of sweetrolls from the kitchen and let me have the first pick. After that I never backed down from a dare.

The lawyers found frogs in their satchels and mice in their pockets. A shipment of alcohol for Commander Phillida came up short by several bottles. One of the boys handed me the missing bottles and dared me to fill it in the Council Chambers water pitchers, but didn't say which ones. I ran out of alcohol before getting to the Elder's table. All the defendants were falling down drunk by the time they were called up for their cases to be heard.

I'd started running from the whippings, making them catch me first. With all the guards around the Compound it never took long, but the others began cheering me on. My legs stayed raw from the whippings, but I took them without ever naming accomplices. I even took whippings for three pranks I hadn't pulled, although I was along to watch on all three. That earned my acceptance into the close-knit family structure of the orphans at the Compound.

The boys tarred the guard's dorm floor, and flooded the solitary confinement cell so when they opened it to put a prisoner in the Jailer would get drenched. The boys also strung a bucket of water over the door to the Elder Chambers so the Elders got doused entering.

I took the punishment for them because the older boys were whipped much worse than a girl my size and age would be. Some of the boys had stripe scars on their backs from whippings they'd gotten.






***


The prisoners began thinking up pranks for us. One of their ideas was to put the spike sticks they used to control unruly prisoners in the Elder Council chairs. The spike sticks are hollow needles with a tiny bit of potion in them. They combine calming and paralysis. The Chambers sessions had to be cancelled that day.

A Dunmer on the row marked for death suggested that raw goats stomachs made a loud poop sound when you sat on them. The boys swiped some from the kitchen and helped me to put them in the Elder Council and Judge's seats. We slit the cloth of the seat and pulled the wadding out, then slid the stomachs in below the cloth cover.

I wasn't the only one that hid in the Council Chambers to see the pompous Elders in their stiff robes loudly farting as they sat down. They were in a rage.

That was the last session of the Elder Council to meet at the Compound. The entire Council moved to the Palace immediately after that incident. Prisoners that had hearings scheduled were moved to the Palace prison. The dares for pranks went back to targeting the Legion.

Commander Phillida became involved in my punishments when he and Hieronymus Lex woke up to find beards made of smeared bootblacking on their faces and a good sized hunk of hair missing from the top of their heads. By then I was already immediately the first suspect called in whenever any prank was pulled. His punishments were much more severe. Worse, his face would redden with rage, it was frightening. I only accepted two more dares against him.

The first was the live slaughterfish that Commander Phillida found swimming in his bath when he stepped into it. The second, on Saturalia Commander Phillida's expensive private wine collection disappeared. Each prisoner got a bottle of it as a Saturalia present.

What ended being one of my last pranks at the Compound was a mass bedwetting; dipping the Legion's hands in warm water while they slept. We all participated. The night shift dorms should have been empty at that hour, I was just slipping through to access the unguarded door below it. I was well into the room before I realized Hieronymus Lex was sleeping in there. His arms were wrapped around someone I recognized as a young guard of the South Watch.

I carefully positioned the warm water below his dangling hand and raised the bowl, submerging the hand. The sound of his bladder releasing was immediately followed by a yelp from his companion.

"WHAT THE HELL? You just pissed on me!"

Smothered giggles burst from the corridor, followed by running feet as the orphans that had heard scurried away before getting caught. I ran, but not before I caught the look of hatred on Lex's face. He'd seen me.

*******

Those first years at the orphanage it felt like a battlegrounds was taking place within me; like fragments of magic bounced off each other and acted as catalysts on everything they touched. It left me feeling jittery and nervous, and was the cause of a lot of my accidents, or at least I thought it was.

Whenever I was at my weakest, I could feel it gaining in strength inside me. Sometimes it felt so strong that I was afraid I might combust spontaneously. Those times it overwhelmed, I could feel a severing of something inside me, a disconnect of...myself. It was as if I watched myself from the void while my body moved and talked without my control.

Realizing my parents had really died, and later learning Nissy had lied to me about them; those weakened everything in me. In those moments somewhere deep inside me it felt like something foreign was winning a battle against me. Even when that place lay dormant I could still feel it there, knew it was still there inside me.

Maybe everyone had this inside them, I didn't know if this was normal or not...but I never heard anyone else discussing anything even remotely similar, so was afraid to talk about it to the others.

There were already plenty enough things others could point to about me that were considered odd, or freakishly different. I wasn't going to chance losing the friendships and closeness of the others by mentioning it. I tentatively brought it up to the house mother.

"Parasites." She pronounced, and doused me with a potion that made me very ill at my stomach. I clammed up about it after that.

Through the next four years, I guess I became accustomed to it. Then something happened that changed everything.

*******

Year 421

The orphans weren't allowed out when the Legion practiced with their swords on the lawns of the quad that housed the orphanage, but I'd found myself drawn to watch them with an intensity.

Deep inside me that unconnected place that usually warred for control suddenly came alive; but instead of a battle it felt like it melded in until it was fully a part of me. From that moment on it felt like we had become one.

I'd picked up a stick laying under the tree I was hiding behind to watch the practice; was pretending it was a sword, waving it in a rudimentary imitation of the training moves.

Suddenly it felt like my body belonged to someone else. I began moving with grace and agility, kicking my shoes off to feel the cool grass and clay against my feet and battling the tree with the stick as if it were an enemy attacking.

The stick snapped off after I'd tried to thrust. Behind me I heard a handclapping. I spun to see Leland and another of the older guards applauding. I held up the broken stick, the 'hilt' of it still in my hand.

"My sword broke."

"Can't fight with broken equipment." Leland winked and elbowed his friend. "Think we should let her try a real sword?"

"Can I? Please?"

"Go ahead and teach the beast, Leland. Lay you five Septims she cuts you."






***


Leland drew his training shortsword out, and I felt a shiver go down my spine at the sound of the metal leaving the sheath. I could barely hear Leland's instructions on how to hold it for the rush of excitement within me as I reached for it.

He placed it in my hand and instantly it felt like an extension of me that had been missing. The metal hilt warmed to the touch of my hand as if welcoming me back. The sword in my hand felt as familiar as breathing, or the sound of my own voice. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back, my heart was pounding. I'd never felt so whole as I did in that moment, not since that day in the Legion office.

Leland was instructing, but I couldn't hear his words. Instead I was hearing the blade itself; the singing sounds it made, the changes in vibration and tone with each different movement.

Something deep within me reverberated hearing it, as if I'd known it for centuries and knew in advance every sound it was going to make. The other guard gave Leland his sword to use for the sparring, and with my eyes still closed I found myself visualizing the position of his blade, knew when it was sweeping or thrusting by the sound it made. It was more than familiar to me, it felt as if I'd been sparring with blades for lifetimes upon lifetimes. I knew this.

Sometimes it felt like I watched us from another realm, like seeing a beautiful dance; dodging and blocking, or stepping forward to meet Leland for a parry of blades, the embracing of our swords before the dance separated us again. I felt like a completely different person with a sword in my hand.

"Geelaw, Leland! That beast is a natural!" The other guard's voice sounded awed.

Leland offered to train me after the guard's practice ended every day. I'd always arrive early and watch them, letting the aromas linger in my nostrils; old leather and glycerin soap, steel, the sweetness of male sweat so intense and distinct. I'd kick my shoes off, just feeling the cool grass and clay beneath my feet. It felt like an ages old ritual, honing my senses before a big battle. I absorbed everything he taught, but inside me it seemed like an echo of what was already there.

Maybe it was just another thing they could point out that was freakish about me (and they did), but I didn't care if I was different about this.





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This post has been edited by mALX: Jul 22 2013, 12:14 PM