Niamh's Adventures in Nirn..., This is a thread featuring a digest of stories about... Options

[PhonAntiPhon]

NIAMH.
But first, who is she?
Well she's a character who I have been acquainted with for a very long time, and with whom I have travelled across many worlds.

She's a Wood-Elf, in Nirn terms - of about 30. She's very much her own boss, and not a terribly pleasant individual. She is, to employ a cliche, "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". She's a hard drinking, promiscuous, authority-hating rebel with baggage enough and troubles enough to fill a volume of psychoanalysts' shelves.

She's maybe 5 feet 8 inches in height, very slender, with pale skin and long black hair and dark, chestnut eyes in deep sockets. She had a predilection for body-piercing and a bad-attitude to personal hygiene. She's a thief and an assassin and pretty much anything else that will garner her gold and a thrill.
In the Nirn universe - (Cyrodiil) - she lives principally in Bravil, but has a shack on the waterfront outside of the walls of the Imperial City, although she spends much of her time in a rather dysfunctional relationship with Jo, one of the local "courtesans", who you will not be reading about on here(!).
In Morrowind she was a loner who pretty much stumbled upon a destiny of sorts more by simply being in a certain place at a certain time than by design; whilst she arrived in Skyrim confused and somehow "altered", more feral and wild, as part of a story arc that started in Cyrodiil and ended back there amidst death and heartache.
Since then she has had a second chance, but is squandering it, reverting once again to type...

Throughout her adventures in Nirn - Morrowind, Cyrodiil, and Skyrim, her character has evolved and changed. She's taken on aspects of each of these variants to become something "other" than what she started as; more rounded, but far more complicated. The ultimate expression of that is in the world that she now inhabits - Varrius, a world created for her specifically, with it's own story arc and characters.
Anyway, that's by-the-by, for the nonce, this thread will have various stories and vignettes that I have written involving her, and the characters that she has interacted with, during the time that she has inhabited the Elder Scrolls universe.
(Only some of the stories are on here, as this is a 13-rated forum, and not everything I write is... suitable. For stories not on here, do feel free to visit Niamh's blog, in the signature.)

I hope you enjoy her stories, it's gives me a lot of pleasure to write them.

This post has been edited by PhonAntiPhon: Jan 19 2013, 04:22 PM

[PhonAntiPhon]

So, on with the show.
This little vignette actually is linked to the latest screens in Niamh's screenshot thread, and it concerns...
...well it's probably just easier to read it I guess:

It is 5 years earlier, Helgen is a smoking ruin destroyed by a dragon whose appearance has the surrounding countryside in an uproar.
Niamh Esher, 25, a Bosmer of little account and less worth has been recently captured during a sweep of a ruined fort some 2 or 3 leagues from the settlement by Imperial soldiers on the hunt for a group of rebels who had been harassing patrols in the area.

It was very much a case of "wrong place, wrong time" for the Wood Elf, who had only been in the fort in the first place because she was looting it.
Whilst she certainly had no love for the Empire she had equally no sympathies for the Stormcloaks either, preferring to pursue her own solitary path of petty theft, shady deals, assault and - if the coin was good - the odd unsanctioned "assassination".
No, her life was complicated enough as it was, what with managing pilfering, dealing with a string of largely failed relationships and, recently, increasingly disturbed sleep where she would awaken from dreams of a woman like but not like her, a woman who it seemed lived in the province to the south some 2 centuries previously.
She had on and off had these "visions" from her childhood, but over the last few weeks they had grown in both frequency and intensity such that it was taking an increasingly high dose of skooma-laced ale to even catch a few meagre hours of oblivion each night.

Nevertheless, it befell her to be captured - (not without some difficulty) - and stripped of her armour, weapons, sundry trinkets and rather pitiful belongings; given a scratchy rough sacking dress to cover what little modesty she possessed she was unceremoniously bundled into the back of a cart along with a motley crew of other miscellaneous captives and ne'er-do-wells and driven judderingly off to Helgen to face Imperial "justice".

----

Fate, it seems, is ever vigilant however and soon after her arrival, perfunctory "trial" and inevitable judgement, she chose to intervene in a most spectacular way.
During the chaos of the dragon's attack Niamh, who had only seconds before been so close to death that she could feel the tingle of the edge of the headsman's axe against the back of her neck, managed to escape, falling in with a Stormcloak rebel, Ralof, largely because in the first place he was not an Imperial and in the second place because he appeared to know the way out, via a secret path.

Ralof led her out of Helgen via an underground tunnel, following for some small distance a sewage outflow leading into an underground stream.
Poking around in the dungeons on the way, much to the Stormcloak's frustration, the Bosmer located some armour of sorts and unheeding of her - not unappreciative - audience, exchanged her roughspun dress for it. She further acquired dome weaponry, albeit of dubious quality as a result of some few skirmishes with Imperial guards, and also from a wounded Stormcloak soldier who she "released" from the pain of her injuries along the way.

Once outside the settlement Ralof, who had evidently concluded that Niamh's presence implied her cooperation, attempted to persuade her to visit some relative of his, or somesuch, and tell them of the dragon's attack. Niamh, in fact, was more concerned with putting as much distance between Helgen and herself as was physically possible and set off at a run westwards as fast as she could, the erstwhile Stormcloak's words a fading echo in her large ears.
Hungry, thirsty, and penniless she made her way over the course of the day, stealthily and via indirect and little-travelled paths, across the country between Helgen and Falkreath until she arrived at the only place in Skyrim she'd ever really thought of as home; the Bosmer treetop colony of Elvenwood.
(In truth she would have been happier with the Khajiits, but at least Elvenwood had the distinction of being where she left it, they spoke her language and didn't seem to mind her occupying the empty rooms way up in the colony. The beer was good too, even if the singer in the inn only knew Imperial songs.)

On this occasion it proved very much to be a lifesaver and she spent more than a few gold - (gained after some not inconsiderable violence from a foray into the nearby bandit camp, upon discovering she had none secreted amongst her things in the colony) - in the inn on provisions, which, after retiring to her rooms she devoured hungrily, pausing only occasionally to take deep swigs from a bottle of ale, laced as was usual with her in the evenings when she could, with a hefty dose of skooma.
Once satisfied, and feeling the foggy effects of the drug creeping through her aching and trail-worn body, she lay down on the bed and mused upon her situation.

Clearly they were all as bad as each other, these factions. Petty squabbles, what did they know of life? They should walk a mile in her shoes and then see what hardship was, she was badly off she was, not them.
And the Imperials? She hated them them the most, not just because they had caught her, not just because nobody put her to death and got away with it, but because they had forced her hand, and in doing so she had formed, she felt, some sort of tacit alliance with the Ralofs of the world, which irritated her to an almost unbearable degree.

Chewing her lower lip, and in doing so unconsciously playing with a ring piercing the flesh of another Niamh, seen only in her dreams, she turned her head and gazed through the wall of her room northwards somewhat across the long leagues to Whiterun...

Might as well start somewhere.