A Conclave of Princes Options

[Colonel Mustard]

A Conclave of Princes

Part 1-The Call

Azura

Tick

Of all of the many secret places of Moonshadow, the meeting chamber that Azura stood in was the best hidden and least-known, so obscure and unknown it was not even myth.

Tock

Hidden from all prying eyes by spell and ward and ancient ritual, the room was built like an amphitheatre, a great tiered circle of white stone surrounding a single raised dais. Behind the dais was the clock, a ring of brass, silver and pearl, gleaming in the silvery light that illuminated the room. An engraved pendulum swung left and right with the passing of every second, delicate hands clicking as they moved, the cunning of its long-dead artificer and the spells he had laid upon it ensuring that it would keep time with perfect precision until Akatosh himself finally passed.

Tick

The chamber was empty but for one person, a woman clad in shining silver-white hooded robes, the garment woven from moonlight by blind seamstresses. Her face was three faces in one; that of a youthful maiden, of a kindly, smiling mother and of a wrinkled, wizened crone, all three of those at once and yet at the same time none. Her name was Azura, the Lady of Dawn and Dusk, and right now she was waiting and listening to the clock.

Tock

The timepiece itself had been a gift to her, made for her long ago by a Dwemer admirer, a clockmaker and timekeeper with skill beyond repair. She had honoured the generous donation by hanging it within this hall and, when he died, by taking his soul to her realm of Moonshadow that he might continue his craft forever more.

Ti-

The pendulum froze mid-swing, caught in the precise halfway point between one second and another. Azura took a moment to glance at it, and nodded. Her sacred time had come, the precise moment when day turned to a night of a crescent moon, a span of time so short that it could stretch to eternity. With a nod, the doors lined around the hall groaned open, and now that they had been invited to Moonshadow and into Azura’s secret eternity, the cats entered.

Untold numbers of them came, an uncountable army of the animals prowling through the doors. Fat, pampered lazy housecats trotted alongside scarred and battered strays who had lived every day of their lives on the vicious gauntlet of the streets, old cats wheezed their way in whilst kittens rolled and played around their paws. Short-haired breeds from Hammerfell came alongside the thick-haired cats of Skyrim and shared space with the elegant stock bred by the Altmer of the Summerset Isles, while the large desert wildcats of Elsweyr loomed over the animals around them. All of them had come by the secret routes known only to cats and the mistress they served, arriving in the time that was there only for them

Somehow, despite the millions of animals that entered the room, there was no struggle for space. The amphitheatre seemed to grow with its audience, expanding with its crowd as the cats went to their seats and waited. One or two greeted each other by tentative sniffing, and a few old friends that could meet only on this day; on one of the rings, a Hammerfell tom met the Valenwood tabby that he had bumped into in the last meeting, and was introduced to the litter of kitten he had fathered for the first time. There was no yowling, hissing or snarling between them, and even little in the way of normal, conversational mewling, the gathered assembly silent out of respect for their lady and mistress.

One by one, the cats began to form a line, and Azura took a knee as the first one approached. He was an Summerset breed, tall, lithe and proud, his white fur groomed with meticulous care, the tufts of hair on his ears twitching as he sauntered forward, as if speaking to a goddess were something he did every day. Azura bowed her head as he stopped next to her, and as she bowed it, the feline told of her of all the secret things he had seen. Once she had listened to his account, she nodded, and the cat trotted away, back home, and the next one took his place. She had the nervous enthusiasm of a newcomer, and her report was stammered out. As with the first, the Mother of the Rose listened to all she had to say, and when she was done, she dismissed it, briefly stroking her spy behind her ears before she went.

So it went on. Each cat gave their report, and each one was given equal time by Azura, and the lowliest of street cats was listened to with the same care and attention given to the sacred cats of the island nation of Laalket, bedecked as they were in their finery and jewels. Everything the Daedric Prince heard, she remembered and digested, and was added to her great libraries of knowledge, the books and shelves filling up as she listened.

Yet one cat, a feline who said she lived in a temple of the Nine as a mouser, told her something that gave her pause. After a moment, Azura instructed her to stay until her council with the other cats was finished, but all of the other information she heard was received with an uneasy frown. Even though the place she inhabited was timeless, the Lady of Dusk began to feel it drag, and she was glad when the final stragglers gave their news.

As the final cat made her way out, herding her kittens with her, Azura returned her attention to the feline that had given the news to her earlier. She asked the mouser to expand on what it was she had said, to give as much detail as she could remember. Azura quizzed her on where she had heard it, how the overheard conversation had gone, asked her to repeat it word for word to the best of her memory.

Finally, once she was satisfied that she had heard everything from it that she possibly could. She permitted it to leave. She watched it scurry out of one of the doors, back to the warmth of its basket by the hearth. For a few moments, Azura lingered in the chamber, debating her options. There only really one to take, she knew, but though it was necessary it did not make it one she wished to do so.

A gesture of a hand and a doorway appeared before her, gnarled oak in a white frame. She turned the knob, stepped through it, and disappeared. There was work to do on this night.

-ck

Behind her, the pendulum of the clock swung into motion once more.




So what's this? A 3-part story, each part divided into 18 chapters, each chapter following a Daedric Prince and one other mystery entity. Each part is a short one, between 900 and 1500 words (so I can hopefully update at a reasonable pace) and if you think of it as something like a shorter version of the Canterbury tales set in the planes of Oblivion you've got something akin to the right idea.

Do enjoy, do leave any comments or critique that you think are useful and do have a lovely day, my dear readers.

This post has been edited by Colonel Mustard: Mar 10 2013, 10:28 PM

[Colonel Mustard]

Eva and Elizabeth: Thank you both very much!

Subrosa: In this case, Azura being a threefold goddess was inspired by the Norns of Norse/Viking mythology, and considering that in TES lore she's often associated with prophecies and fate I found the comparison worked quite neatly; I was originally planning to have her weaving on a loom to make the allusion more obvious, but I like the cat idea more so went with that.

I can see where you're coming from with the whole telling instead of showing point with that chapter, but I couldn't think of any way to work around it either; in the end I decided that I might as well make the telling part as interesting as I could with similes and general oddness and somesuch. I'll keep it in mind for future updates, and considering that from segment 2 onwards there's a lot more character interaction, it shouldn't be so much of a problem. Thanks!


Also, I'm writing for this story at an insane pace right now (segment 3 has already been completed and I'm halfway through segment 4) and with that in mind, would you people prefer me to post the parts up as they're completed or space them out to an update every few days?

Nocturnal

The tides of Oblivion screamed as Azura stepped from the plane of Moonshadow and into the pure, unknowable infinity of its interreality limbo. The robes she wore whipped and billowed in the airless gales that howled at her in silence, the pull of the currents tugging at her very being. She frowned at the itching pain of the sensation as it skittered across her skin, and raised a hand, summoning from the wellspring of her being and power. Her clothing ceased to flap and ripple, the itch subsided, and had there been an outside observer, they may have seen the tiny thread of arcane power that formed between the Prince and the gates of her realm.

With her free hand, she drew a circle in the air, a gleaming silver disc hovering in the air. She laid her palm upon it, closed her eyes, and cast a segment of her being into a search.

The dart of her essence sailed forwards, formless and inscrutable, feeling for the realms of the other princes. It felt the jibbering voices and deranged babbling of the Shivering Isles, heard the intense heat of the Deadlands, tasted the impenetrable brightness of Meridia’s Citadel of Fusion, and paid them all no heed. She continued to search, stopping only when she came to an emptiness.

She drew herself to it, appearing into a void so filled with nothing that it was not even black. She nodded to herself in satisfaction.

“You can find my realm in all the places it is not there,” she said. “And in none of the places that it is.”

And around her was the Evergloam. To say that it appeared would be a lie, for it had always existed at that point, filling the empty spaces of Oblivion with its not-absence, and now that Azura had invoked it with the passphrase, it had been present for eternity. She stepped forwards through the thick shrouds of gloom, the shadows so thick that they were tangible, not bothering to call up light within this place of visible darkness.

“Sister,” a voice from behind Azura said. “This is an unexpected surprise.”

Azura turned around, but as she expected there was nothing from where the voice had come from but darkness.

“Show yourself, Nocturnal,” Azura said. “I can’t be bothered to chase you out of wherever you’re hiding. Besides, you know it’s poor manners.”

As bidden, Nocturnal emerged. Azura’s twin and opposite, she wore a long dress of midnight and the shadow of raven feathers, and her skin was the glistening black of charcoal. The only suggestion of eyes she had was a line of silver-grey around her pupil, and if her teeth had not flashed a brilliant white in a smile of welcome one could be forgiven for thinking she had no mouth.

“I bid you welcome, dear sister,” she said, bowing low. A wave of her hand and a table and two chairs boiled up from the shadows behind her. “Please, take a seat.”

The two sisters sat, and Nocturnal called a bottle of wine and two glasses into being.

“Wine?” she asked. “It’s Shadowbanish vintage; I know you like that one.”

“If I may,” Azura replied.

“Of course,” Nocturnal said, beginning to pour. “I take it you’re here for something important, then? This wouldn’t be a simple visit for the pleasure of my company, of course; you may have forever but there’s never the time, is there?”

“Something has come up,” Azura said as she accepted the goblet. “One of my agents uncovered something important, something that could affect us all, so I’m calling together a meeting. Of all of us.”

“What something is this?” her sister asked.

“I can’t say, not yet.”

Nocturnal laughed, a flutter of black wings at the edge of the noise.

“You can’t say?” she asked. “Whyever not, sister?”

“I can’t trust anybody with this information until it is known by all,” Azura said. “Trust me and my judgement, sister, it’s for the best.”

Nocturnal frowned at her twin.

“‘Trust me and my judgement, sister’,” she mocked. “‘It’s for the best. After all, my judgement is truly, utterly flawless! I’ve never made a mistake before!’”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Sotha Sil,” was Nocturnal’s only replied. “That went wonderfully well, after all, with one race of mer completely disappeared off the face of Nirn and the other was cursed forever more. And who warned you that he couldn’t be trusted?”

“That was millenia ago,” Azura said.

“And what of that?” Nocturnal asked. “We’re Daedra, sister. We may be change embodied but we ourselves cannot change. Just tell me, give me a chance to talk you out of doing anything stupid!”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know, pay a visit to every single one of the Princes in their realms and then call us all together in one place?” Nocturnal suggested. “Anything could happen to you whilst you’re out there; do you really think Dagon or Bal or Jyggalag are going to welcome you with open arms? Too much can go wrong! At least tell me what this problem is.”

“I can’t,” Azura said. “If I tell you here, now, the other Princes will also insist on knowing what it is and that can throw affairs dangerously out of balance.”

“And how will they know I know anything?” Nocturnal asked. “My word, you’re worse than Hermaeus Mora sometimes.”

“Three of them have been following me since I stepped out of Moonshadow,” Azura said. “Hermaeus Mora, Boethiah and Mephala track every move the other Princes make as soon as they step out of their realms, you know that.”

“Oh yes, I often forget that,” Nocturnal said. “They alway seem to have trouble following me; can’t imagine why. But still, they wouldn’t be able to see into my realm or eavesdrop on us.”

“One of them might not be able to,” Azura said. “But if the three of them combined their power they would. And if any of those three managed to get wind of this before the others, that could spell disaster. Even if I told you but somehow blocked it from their scrying, they could just force their way in here and interrogate you, and I don’t want you to get hurt, Nocturnal.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Nocturnal conceded. “It’s good to know you care, at least.”

“Of course I do, sister,” Azura said. She drained her wine. “I should leave; there’s still much to do.”

The sisters stood and embraced.

“Stay safe, Azura,” Nocturnal said, before kissing her twin on the cheek.

“I’ll do my best,” Azura said. “Wait for my call, and then make for Moonshadow. I’ll see you soon.”

“Wait, before you go,” Nocturnal began, breaking their embrace and taking a black diamond from somewhere about her person. “Take this. You’re going to get into trouble, I just know it, so when you do, call me.”

“Thank you, sister,” Azura said, tucking it into a pocket of her robes. “I shouldn’t have any need for it, but thank you.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Nocturnal said. “Now, if this mission of yours is so important, get going, sister. I’ll wait for when you need me.”

With a final nod of farewell, Azura was gone.