Ray of Light Options

[Lucidarius]

This was planned as a prologue to my adventures in Oblivion but then it turned rather long so instead of a complete story about a major plot line, I’ve only finished the prologue up until the prison in the Imperial City. The goal was to understand my character’s motive and background for better immersion in the game.

This is my first try at writing fiction so any comments or thoughts are more than welcome. Thank you for your time.

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12 Last Seed 3E419
As all children living on the Bitter Coast Nienna had learned to swim almost simultaneously with learning to walk. One day they had been on the shore, Lila killing the big mud crabs and her daughter Nienna swimming and diving for pearls. The kollops around the coastline of Vvardenfell in the Imperial province of Morrowind seldom held any pearls. They had already been taken by the abundance of poor inhabitants.

Suddenly Lila realized she had not seen her daughter’s head above the surface of the water for quite a while. She resolutely jumped in with all her clothes on. When she didn’t see her immediately, she began to panic and even forgot to cast a water breathing spell so she had to surface to get air. Then she saw Nienna a good distance away and gestured to her to come back. Nienna complied immediately, swimming all the way back under water before joining Lila on the bank. Lila did not know what to do first, berate Nienna for swimming out so far or quenching her curiosity about how she could hold her breath for so long. First she hugged Nienna tightly, grateful that she had not come to harm. Before she could say anything, Nienna excitedly burst out:

“Oh, mama, I found out how to cast the water breathing spell, it’s wonderful, wonderful to do magic.” Nienna jumped up and down to expend some of her pent up energy upon discovering her new ability.

“I was out swimming as usual and then I saw an open kollop with a pearl glinting rather far away. Instead of just swimming as normal, I pictured my fingers closing around the pearl, daydreaming about buying you a new wool skirt for winter like the one we saw at the shop yesterday and a real doll for me with a dress and silk slippers. Then it happened. My lungs didn’t feel like they were under water anymore, but more like inhaling a very cold, clingy kind of fog. And I could swim, and swim, and swim. It wasn’t until my fingers actually touched the pearl that I felt the pressure of the water on my chest so I had to go up for air.” Nienna smiled happily, dancing about throwing sand and twigs up in the air, reveling in the discovery.

Lila was shocked to hear that Nienna had discovered the water breathing spell by herself – and at such a young age too. She was not even four years old. Normally, children in High Rock were tested for their magical capabilities at the age of six. Lila had been an unusual five years old herself when admitted to the Guild of Mages, but had intensely disliked the stuffy and old-fashioned teaching methods. She ran away when she was seven, doing the odd job for different employers while trying to learn as much about magic and different spells as possible. She was afraid that Nienna was too young to understand the powers involved in magic thus resulting in fatal consequences.

“Congratulations, Enna. This is a big day and cause for both celebration and contemplation,” Lila said in a quiet, serious tone. “Magic always consists of both sides: lightness and darkness, the power to heal and to destroy.”

“Yes, mama, but I didn’t do anything bad, I just swam underwater,” Nienna said, confused about her mother’s serious tone.

“I know, darling, it’s hard to explain what it is I mean. When you cast that water breathing spell, your only intent was to get the pearl and buy something nice for the money. This spell belongs to the school of alteration. Alteration means “change” and that is exactly the purpose of the spell, to change the way you perceive the water, the world and everything in it so that you can breathe longer and don’t have to surface to catch air. Until the spell runs out,” Lila gently pulled her daughter down beside her on the bank; this was going to take a while.

“When we change the physical world around us, we might get to a point where we forget that we’ve changed it but reality will always win in the end. No person can hold a spell indefinitely because the person would run out of either magicka or stamina. Just think about how fatal it would be if you were deep down in the ocean when suddenly reality came back and you had no more magicka or stamina left to prolong the spell. You’d die.” Lila had looked intently at Nienna’s face during her lecture to see whether her words had any effect.

“No, but I would not forget the real world, mama. I wouldn’t go down so far that I couldn’t easily come back up again.” Very little effect, it seemed.

Lila sighed, recognizing her own stubbornness and misguided pride in her daughter. She had been just as confident about her magical skills, and it was not until she had met Turamo and he had expanded her knowledge about magic that she had realized the prudence of humility. Altmers are known for their arrogance, and with reason; the only exception from it is magic. They view humility as the most important factor in successful application of magic as a whole. This means in alchemy as well as in the research and understanding of the six schools of magic: alteration, conjuration, destruction, restoration, illusion, and mysticism.

[Lucidarius]

To Metal Mallet: Loosing a father is severe indeed, but at least she's got her mother and then two "grandparents".

You're right, your story is really long, but fortunately a thrilling read.

To Minque: Thank you for your positive comments. I am fascinated by the magic in TES, so I decided to make my main character a magic user. This update only talks about alchemy, though. Playing the game as a pure mage was too much trouble, so I tweaked my class skills and added the blade skill, too. This is also reflected in my story later on.

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Lila and Nienna
Lila often talked to Nienna about Turamo. She relived her moments with her husband through these memories, and Nienna loved to hear the story of a love so strong that they had been happy despite his family’s renouncement and their subsequent economic hardships.

“Times were hard because there weren’t any people who needed your father’s abilities as a scholar or as a scribe,” Lila said.

“Instead we decided to use our abilities for magic and trade a little in potions on the side, and that was enough to give us a decent income and buy this hut.” They sat outside in the sunshine in front of the hut, making potions and preparing ingredients for sale.

After the death of Turamo, Lila had been devastated and felt the world had caved in on her. She could barely think about her future nor care for her baby in more than the most basic terms.

Fortunately, the nearby neighbours, Teldrisa and Grohen Alvor, a Dunmer couple in their middle ages, had taken an active interest in her and Nienna. Before they had just greeted each other politely, since the Alvors were reserved like most Dunmer, but after Turamo’s death Teldrisa and Grohen had helped Lila as much as possible.

Lila knew, she needed strength to carry on for the sake of her baby, but at times she felt life did not hold more for her and cried at the thought of her husband. To sustain herself and keep going, she prayed to Akatosh, the god of time, who embodies the qualities of endurance, invincibility and everlasting legitimacy. She especially needed the endurance, Lila thought. She had never gotten used to her religion, the Nine Divines, being called The Imperial Cult here in Morrowind. Regardless of the name, the gods and goddesses were the same eight Aedra with the humanborn Tiber Septim, who united all the provinces of the Empire and was later elevated to godhero, as the ninth divine. But she refused to call them a “cult”; there was nothing cultish about the Divines.

One day in spring, baby Nienna had been trying to keep sitting up, but continuously fell down. She screamed and cried with rage and frustration, but then she wriggled her way over to the table, sat up, and then sank her single tooth hard into the wooden table leg for stability and thereby finally managed to keep sitting. Lila laughed for the first time since her loss.

After that episode, Lila felt life was returning in full colour, and she began to appreciate the little things that hitherto had seemed insignificant, like the first warmth in the air, the smell of newly baked bread and most of all the time together with her little daughter. Experiencing Nienna’s exuberant delight, when she discovered all the mundane things that grown ups take for granted, was a daily joy for Lila, and she often thanked Mara, the goddess of love, for granting her the gift of two great loves of her life, Turamo and Nienna.

Teldrisa and Grohen had suggested that they sell their alchemical wares together, complemented by her spells. This proved a successful merger, since Lila could concentrate on selling her magical abilities, while Teldrisa and Grohen would take care of the bartering of potions, ingredients and salves.

In the following years, Lila was either selling spells or collecting herbs and plants. At home she would prepare and mix some of the ingredients into potions or salves, all the while talking with Nienna and teaching her about alchemy. Nienna went with her everywhere, so even though the work was endless, none of them felt it as a chore, but more as an opportunity to learn, to play and to satisfy their keen curiosity. As all Bretons, they felt a natural affinity to magic, and Lila showed Nienna, how magic could show itself in the most common plants and parts of animals.

She tried to teach her daughter to appreciate all ingredients and schools of magic and not fall for the arrogance or laziness to elect one as the winner. “Instead,” she stressed, “the wise would choose depending on the situation and purpose.”

In order to make a wise choice, Nienna would have to learn as much as possible about the ingredients and the magical schools. Both fallacies, arrogance and laziness, originate in ignorance. But Nienna was too young for the actual teaching of spells. There would be plenty of time for that later, Lila thought. She had allowed her to start with alchemy, though, and only when she was present.

“To escape the trap of ignorance is a lifelong endeavour,” Lila said. She observed, how meticulously Nienna distilled the arcane properties of natural and supernatural substances from their raw ingredients in the alembic, a glass container often used in the alchemical process.

“Sometimes you will think that now you’ve learned absolutely everything there is to know about the magical properties of an ingredient or the strengths and weaknesses of a spell,” Lila took a corkbulb root and began peeling its fibrous roots off.

“But this line of thinking will only set you up for huge disappointment later, not to speak of maybe fatal or disastrous mistakes.”

Nienna listened, while she infused the substances of three ampoule pods and a handful of violet coprinus mushrooms. Her goal was to make a water walking potion, but both ingredients had inherent negative side effects, so she used the alembic to decrease those. She carefully stoked the flames surrounding the foot of the alembic to raise the temperature inside, but knew that it should not get too high because that would burn the substances and thereby remove their modest magical properties.

“Ouch, it’s hot,” by accident Nienna had brushed her little finger against the side of the alembic. She quickly put the finger in her mouth to cool it off, tears of pain in her eyes. Lila rushed to get some water from the well, came back with a bucket and sat it beside her daughter.

“Here, put it in the water and let me do the rest.”

“No, I’ll do it,” Nienna protested, “it doesn’t even hurt anymore.” A cluster of blisters appeared on the finger, contradicting her words. This was the first time, she was making a potion without any help from her mother, and she was determined to finish it herself. She had kept a close eye on the alembic all the time, and now she took the complementary container and held it snug to the mouth of the alembic to catch the vapour that was condensing. With the vapour gone, the distilled substances would then have the desired magical properties and a diminished amount of the undesired.

Nienna used a pair of wooden pincers to remove the alembic and placed it gently on the grass to cool off. Then she took a small stick, dipped it lightly in the substance and licked gingerly at the tip that was now tinted with a dark greenish paste then handed it to her mother who tasted, too.

“Perfect, Enna,” Lila smiled approvingly, since the result depends on the quality of the apparatus and the skill of the alchemist.

Nienna beamed, appreciating the praise for a job she knew was well done.

“I could not detect any negative properties, you must have tended the temperature like a cliff racer its nest.” She was hugged, and then Lila swung her around, until they were both out of breath, giddy and laughing.