Peik

The Elder Scrolls: Endless Night

Don't suppose there's a spot for an old timer? Haven't had a chance to scratch the TES RP itch in a long, long time.

Exiled

I like the teaser and would say I'm interested, but I'm not going to push my chips forward without knowing exactly what this is going to be about.

The Elder Scrolls: Stormcrown Interregnum

_{ft. @Hank}

---

The meeting had since been adjourned and its participants had gone on to spend the rest of the night in their own way, whether that be drinking or resting or frolicking with the others or huddling into isolation and watching the dances of firelight and shadow from afar and Ando was amongst those who had taken the lattermost option. He was perched atop camp, sitting on a tree branch that kept him at the very edge of the light, his feet dangling into bare visibility from above as if it were a foreboding premise for the sight of a hanging corpse. Save pulling a piece of firewood in his hand into the edge of the blade sitting in his lap in a reverse chiseling motion, he was motionless, more automaton than man, and he was liberating a small blade, liberating it from the excess of material that which surrounded it, and as such giving it purpose like the warrior-woman gave to those that gathered around her.

He had stood by her side in the council, and only stood, like a macabre figure of taxidermy, and he had not spoken a word nor was there any response elicited from him. He was not the final authority in the council and he knew for a certainty that were he to add an opinion, it would only muddle the waters further, even if his opinion was put forth to snuff out the other opinions and cease the contention, a pointless endeavor. But he also knew well that women of Isobel’s sort were far too loving of their confederates and far too merciful to clamp down on their notions of individuality and entertained it as some sort of respite for them, for questioning one’s place in the great machine of fate was an act which brought with it much dejection and weakness.

He turned his head and his gaze fell upon the camp. They were a bunch of broken and or fleeting spirits, unpolished and inconsequential despite their power. Some had been hooked into her act out of curiosity and some out of ambition and some for new purpose for no living being could knowingly accept its purposelessness. Life sought will like moths sought flame, whether its own or someone else’s, for life did not care for whose purpose it served, only that it served one, and as such one could become a pawn with the same ambition that one sought its own ends with, whether to leech off that larger will and rebuild its own or to lose all individuality and learn to love being a tool. A blade. Few could appreciate that the strength of a blade did not lay in its construction but in its wielder’s mastery and it was a common mistake for a blade to see the acts of cutting it served as a means to as its own planning and doing.

What of him, then? Amongst this crowd of fools and undesirables, was he really cutting his own path or had he taken up the path of the pawn again?

His thumb slipped and licked the edge of his blade and he lifted it up and saw a cut on it. It was a minuscule cut and it had barely penetrated the skin and there was no blood, but the blade had cut nonetheless and his brows furrowed and he grasped the tang of the blade as if it were a flyswatter and he slapped the flat of the blade into a nearby branch and did it again and again. He stopped, abated, and he pulled his weight forward and landed on the leavy clearing underneath and put the blade back in its resting place in the ropes wrapped around his waist. The half-carved wooden blade stood in his other hand like a tasteless reminder and he threw it away and began walking through the camp, his mantis gaze wandering upon the surroundings and the inhabitants as if eyeing potential fodder.

Akamon was the first to spot Ando as he dropped down from his perch and he followed him with his gaze as he made his way through the camp until the two men locked eyes. Perhaps emboldened by the Stros M’Kai rum that he was still nursing, the Redguard stood up from his place by one of the fires and yelled out the Rimmenese swordsman’s name. “Come, sit with me,” he added and gestured for Ando to join him, an inviting smile on his face even though he knew that the man was not susceptible to being manipulated into interaction by adherence to the social contract. Hell, Akamon didn’t think Ando even knew what the social contract was. “I have rum,” he added, and wiggled the bottle and the sloshing of the rum almost spilled some over the rim.

The sandy-skinned figure first gazed at the Redguard for a couple of seconds without a response before moving forward slowly yet in a peculiar loping gait, and sat in front of the fire across the man. He looked blinklessly at his face, as if Akamon were an animal or a foreign creature or perhaps vice versa, for either way the behavior was alien all the same, and his expression seemed slightly fascinated as if comprehending a newfound object or a beetle before growing complacent and he proceeded silent and expressionless and without movement.

“Do you want some?” Akamon asked and wiggled the bottle of rum again. There was an easy smile on his face that hadn’t wavered, even when Ando lumbered towards him and stared at him and sat down without saying anything. He had come to accept the man’s strange ways and insular nature and he was just glad that he had replied to his invitation and that they were now sitting together. Conversation could follow later, if it was to happen at all. “You might like it.”

Ando reached forward, perhaps unexpectedly, and grasped the bottle’s bottom with an open palm as if holding up a ball. He pulled his arm back and brought the bottle’s mouth to his face, and held his nose over it and took a curious whiff and his face grew sour and his brows curled down in a frown. “No,” he said, and he grasped the neck of the bottle with his other hand before leaning forward and handing the bottle back to Akamon. “Alcohol. Not good for you, not ever. Especially not today. Tomorrow is the day of battle. Would cease if I were you.” His voice was not as hard as it normally was, and his expression seemed unconcerned and without judgement, as if voicing a fact.

The Redguard laughed. “No, no, you have it all backwards. It’s good for me especially today, precisely because tomorrow is the day of battle.” He did not explain himself and instead took the bottle of rum back from Ando without further argument, threw back a gulp with smacking lips and much appreciative grunting, and then put the bottle down and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and stared at the swordsman with a tilt to his head and a curious gleam to his brown-green scarab-eyes, and at long last he spoke again and voiced an empathic question. “What is a sword?”

Despite the lack of context for the question and the frivolous behavior he’d shown beforehand, Ando received the Redguard’s question without any surprise, as if a lecturer or a student in a place of higher learning where such questions were the norm. “A sword is a tool for cutting,” Ando replied in a tone that belied the inquiry as a matter of fact. “A beginner’s tool, but a tool nonetheless.” He stopped and smacked his lips. “…You are a swordsman. You know what a sword is. If you ask for some other reason, you would better be direct.”

“I know what a sword is, but until I asked you that question I did not know what you know a sword to be,” Akamon said by way of explanation, and he smiled because he had learned something about Ando now. “A beginner’s tool. How do you mean? Is the sword inferior to other weapons? You carry a sword,” he said and pointed out the katana that poked out from inside Ando’s ragged robes. “You would prefer something else?”

Ando’s eyes followed the Redguard’s index finger to the tang that stuck out from his belt and he seemed pensive for a brief moment before he grasped it and pulled it out of the wrap of rope around his waist. “This is no sword,” he spoke, his eyes following the tempering patterns of the blade. “It is a blade.” With a swift movement he flipped the blade’s orientation and thrust it into the ground by him. Lacking any sort of handle or cross guard it seemed more like the unfinished or unadorned work of a smith than a proper weapon. “And no. I would not call the sword inferior. You must define weapon for a clearer answer, however.”

“Blade, then,” Akamon conceded. But that only raised more questions. Why would Ando choose to wield an unfinished weapon, of any kind? And if the sword wasn’t inferior, then why was it only a beginner’s tool? He shook his head and chuckled and reached for the bottle, the act of drinking giving a moment’s respite to prepare a new avenue of questioning. “Let’s go back a step. You called it a tool for cutting, but only a beginner’s tool, yet it is not inferior to any other weapon. So, then,” he said, thinking out loud, looking up at the canopy, until the right question had come to him and his eyes found Ando’s again, “what is cutting?”

“To cut is to create a difference in space,” Ando replied flatly. “A sword, a blade, a rock, a tree, a wall, a man, a city. These are all cutting instruments. The sword is a beginner’s tool because it is expressly designed for its purpose. Would your swordsmanship fare better were you to wield a rock for a sword, or worse?”

“Worse, of course,” Akamon replied, puzzled. He felt like he wasn’t understanding what Ando was getting at. “The rock has no cutting edge, no balance, no hilt.” He reached over his shoulder for his own sword now and unsheathed the weapon and lowered it in front of him, and he observed the faint green ripples in its make and the way its edge caught the light. “This is a cutting tool,” he said with certainty. “A rock cannot cut, nor can a man, or a city. But I think you mean something else. They do… affect change, I suppose.” Confusion had crept back into his voice and he stared at his sword for a few more seconds before he laid it flat across his lap and focused his attention back on Ando. “What is a master’s tool for cutting?”

Ando’s mouth curled in a faint smile, somewhat predatory but still more enthused than gloating. “Master’s tools, you ask. A rock. A man. A city.” He raised an arm and slowly waved it to one side, like he was presenting the scenery. “Trees all around us. Shrubbery. They cut your sight, do they not? You cannot see behind it.” He reached down with the same arm and picked up one of the smaller stones framing the fire. “A rock. You say it is not cutting, yet strike with the right alignment and it will sever all the same.” He stopped, lost in thought, before beaming with a hint of entertainment. “Or the right force. Watch this.” He held the stone between his thumb and his middle finger and he stood contemplative for some time and he sprung his arm back, and then he shot his arm forward along with a flick of his fingers, sending the stone cutting through the air and the fire and promptly smashing into the bottle of rum standing by the Redguard.

“Cutting and swordsmanship are two different things,” Ando spoke as his calves curled inward and pushed him to stand up in an odd display of human anatomy. “You would do well to consider what separates them and which it is that you seek.”

He turned his back on Akamon to disappear into the darkness, but then he turned again and he looked at the Redguard with his usual, blank gaze. “Appreciate the hospitality. Good night.” With that he turned once more and then he was gone.

Stunned into silence, Akamon watched Ando leave and his gaze remained fixed on the darkness where the Rim-Man had disappeared. “My fucking rum!” he exclaimed eventually, to nobody in particular, and grumbled and swept the shards of glass away from him with his foot. “Cutting my ass. That was throwing.” He sighed and got to his feet and swung his sword idly around him, a languid one-handed grip around the hilt, eyes focused on nothing as he listened to the singing metal swishing through the air. “Cutting is not swordsmanship,” Akamon mumbled to himself. Then he returned his sword to its scabbard and decided to give the matter some more thought when he was sober again. For now Akamon headed deeper into the camp in search of more company and conversation -- and a new drink.

The Elder Scrolls: Stormcrown Interregnum

Ando

Name: Ando Isei
Age: 30
Gender: Male
Race: Rimmenese Imperial

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Appearance:

_{A portrait of Ando, commissioned by his father}

With a wiry stature and skin hued a burnt yellow, Ando doesn’t quite look Imperial and if you did not notice at first sight his height would let you know it. He is a gangly man with a gaunt, bony face, with the roof of his skull bulging thick towards the front above his eyebrows like a battering ram, and his thin green eyes, despite their size and intensity, are stuck and left impotent between his bulbous brow ridge and his high and sharp cheekbones. His nose juts down between his besieged eyes, smooth like a ramp, and although it reaches forward quite a bit, his nostrils are thin enough to make one think they were incised by surgery. He is sparse of hair, devoid of facial hair save a few spots which are more like whiskers or remnants of a forest fire than anything else, and with eyebrows growing visible only towards the edges of his face. His hair should be unkempt given his conditions, yet it stays mostly obedient – the top is kept short as is his peoples’ tradition, and the longer strands have been loosely gathered and tied into an upwards knot which pokes out above his skull in an almost exclaiming manner.

Ando’s physique is thin, with his shoulders set close and his ribs visible like they’re a size too large for his skin, yet despite this, he is quite a physical presence, for his limbs are long and his extremities are large, his hands and feet monstrous and almost juxtaposed from a body of different dimensions, the tips of his fingers and toes calloused and rough. His chest is hairless like his face, and his lower limbs are not covered with hair but with cracked patches of skin which when closely examined betray a pattern not unlike that of a snake’s. Although not of a stature like a Nord’s or an Orc’s, what muscle Ando has is dense, visible, and well-exercised, his skin thin over them not unlike a cloth cover stretching and weak around an expanding object.

The man’s dress is frugal and tattered, yet exotic – covering his upper body is naught but a sheepskin vest worn over a beige, short-sleeved robe devoid of buttons, its left side wrapped over the right. Around his waist a piece of crude rope is wrapped and tied like a belt, out of which the tang of a sword prominently pokes out, its blade sticking out the side, unsheathed and erect. Beneath all of his attire, pleated breeches of dull blue color puff down to his ankles. He is barefoot and in no weather does he change or mend his attire.

---

Personality: Ando is a fairly single-minded figure from whom responses and behaviors like that of a normal sapient being should not be easily expected. He is an isolated figure even amongst the crowds and that he comes from isolation as well makes him a rather hard figure to reach and have meaningful dialogue with. He has a tendency to take idioms at face value and answer in all seriousness and to most people he can seem without any humor in him. In truth he is not completely separate from people but having already been hurt by one experience of reaching out one can consider him twice shy. He speaks with a soft but sure tone albeit a repeat listener can easily notice his rather limited vocabulary.

It is not hard for one to earn a first impression of Ando as a slow-witted person or one who’s not all there, but Ando can prove conversative should the topic be of interest to him. While lacking in pleasantries and subtlety and flowery words Ando can be surprisingly eloquent, it’s just that there are few opportunities for him to showcase this side of him and one can be certain that he has no innate desire to seek such opportunities. When enthused, however, he’s almost naïve, although a good judge of character can tell that the naivety is perhaps baked into his every manner, just well-kept behind a strong façade of ‘distant, strong figure’, and in certain aspects Ando’s reticence stems not from disinterest but from sentimentality.

Childishly honest and sincere, a person who gets to know Ando can be certain that he is no liar, albeit also very sparse at giving out information, often leaving awkward blanks in his narratives instead of spicing it up or changing topics. He does not warm up easy but he does not give up easy on people either and can be loyal to friends even after their passing, even if he’d never admitted the friendship. One can notice that Ando moves rigidly and purposefully with not an ounce of relaxation in him and the same stiffness can be sensed about him in social situations as well. Despite all this, Ando can be observed to visibly soften around strong and compassionate female figures and grow oddly fond and protective of them.

Ando is not humble in his deeds or skills but he is no a braggart either, and says it outright when he does not know or is not skilled at a subject, for Ando’s worldview is concerned only with truthfulness and he views life through a lens of is and is not rather than a lens of right and wrong. For him, all living beings are tools in a greater game, and in this game, it does not matter what they do – what matters is if they can or cannot do it. Still, he is not completely without ethics and has a tendency to be disgusted by those who prey upon the weak, for in his eyes the act alone is a sign of weakness, and Ando does not tolerate weakness. He expects the most out of everyone in what they can do, even if all they can do is to die.

A believer in conflict first and foremost, Ando looks at every facet of life through the lens of war and considers every individual undertaking a clash of wills for which one has to do their best, lest they lose and accept subservience to another, and for him, to do so is blasphemy.

---

History: To know Ando, one needs to know the Rim, a stretch of land within the Imperial Province of Elsweyr bordering Cyrodiil. Here live the eponymous Rim Men, although no true Rimmenese would consider that more than a slur. No, these people consider themselves Tsaesci – distant they may be in terms of bloodline, but the traditions of their ancestors and their ways of life carry on as it were in Akavir, and with their off-colored, patchy skin, serpentine eyes and sharp cheekbones and the occasional child with the forked tongue, perhaps it is not too much of a stretch when they consider themselves to be of a separate race than that of Cyrodilic Man.

But pride alone does not make for a prosperous life, and the House of Isei knew this firsthand. A distant relative of the previous Viceroy’s bloodline, they were pure of blood for a certainty, for not only did they all have green eyes, a telltale sign of undiluted patrilineal descent, but the family was still in possession of its Blood Patent, dating all the way to the First Akaviri Invasion and renewed without error by the Ancestor-Clergy with the death of each family Patriarch. While not considered to be the same as the lowborn riffraff, the family was duly lacking in finance, thanks to the actions of a previous Patriarch, who’d bought a lot of land claims in a war against the Khajiit, only to lose them all in the next one when the Khajiit came back in a vengeful wave of reclamation.

By the time Ando was born, the family was stuck in a small, two-story house made of adobe and wood with a roof so low that one could not stand upright in the upper floor. His father was a man by the name of Toda, who despite having the privilege to carry a sword did not and worked as a tradesman. His mother was an ailing woman by the name of Yue and despite her sickly stature worked as a seamstress. Born under the sign of the Apprentice, they expected Ando to be a scholar of some sort and pushed him to his studies, but he grew to be a quarrelsome and stubborn child and was expelled from school by the local superintendent when he bit off the nose of a classmate who insulted him. The child fell into house care, helping his sickly mother with the chores and her work with the loom and the spinning wheel.

While Ando showed some semblance of normalcy alongside his mother and even some remarkable competence at spindling, her illness had her sleep more and more each day, leading Ando into much frustration. He was but a child and could not be left with the work on his own but Toda did not have the time or inclination and there were days when Yue could not even get up from bed, let alone getting to work alongside his son. As his wife’s capacity for work decreased, Toda’s workhours increased – someone had to make up for the loss of income and it was not going to be the child, who could not bear the sight of his near eternally slumbering mother, with her brow glistening with sweat and her presence reeking of the musty stench of sleep, and went out and spent his days in the streets like an orphaned urchin in an unending scuffle with whatever he could fight.

Toda was a mild-mannered man and did not have the willpower to beat sense into his boy, and the family in its current state did not have the finances to afford private tutelage. Toda apprenticed his child to a craftsman, from but there too Ando ended up expelled. Showing no sign of civilized manner at the age of fourteen, Toda resigned to his child’s affinity for violence and had him enroll in one of the sword-schools of Rimmen, one named Diamond Mind. There, Ando quickly earned the students’ ire and the masters’ attention when he with only a wooden training sword left a cut on a fellow student’s face. The assistant teachers planned to have him punished, but the master of the school, Ono Kagei, instead developed for him a test. He had Ando strike at a gourd with the same wooden sword, and his suspicions were confirmed once Ando struck as the child had cut through the gourd with a blunt edge.

Gifted, Ono thought of Ando – gifted, but unrefined. He sensed the taste the child had for violence and Ono knew that such folk only learned from violence. He had his attendants bring his sword to him, and told Ando to raise his sword. The child, despite being sapped of strength by the implication, still took the standard stance and Ono cut through the guard and the child alike with a single strike. Ando fell as if cloven in twain – yet after a few moments of expecting death, he found that, despite the cut in his clothes, front and back, and the strands of his hairlocks on the floor, his flesh was unharmed. Ando took this lesson to heart, and never again would his teachers or fellow students feel the compulsion to correct him.

There, Ando learned the Act of Cutting. This was more than to simply strike with a sharp object. To cut was to make a difference in space, and what was space but a manmade concept? “The concept called space is moot without an observer,” spoke Master Ono. “And thus, any difference in space depends entirely on the observer’s mind. Therefore, cut with your mind, and you can cut anything.” Ando took this to heart. Master Ono taught him the malleability of space. With a strong mind, flesh would be rendered as iron, and a feather would weigh as much as a lead ball, and the touch of flames would feel like the morning breeze and water would become a pathway underneath the soles of one’s feet. It all depended on just how dedicated and disciplined one were.

Ando spent the next nine years of his life as Master Ono’s pupil, honing his skill in Cutting, isolated from the rest of the world. The news of the Blight missed him, so did the news of the Nerevarine and the fall of the Tribunal. The Oblivion Crisis he found only upon news of the fall of the nearby city of Verushae, climbing the Spire of Late Potent Silimxi to watch the flames devour the city and the desert dust devour the flames in turn, like the parable of bigger fish lined up to swallow each other. It was in those days that Ando first felt fear. Yet fear of things to come did not lead to anything of importance, save famine, and famine did not matter for him much, for the students of the Diamond Mind were strictly rationed in any case.

Some years after that, Ando learned of his mother’s passing, and wept for the first time in his life, and wept like a grown monster, his agonized groans echoing through the school halls, deep and nerve wracking. He took a short leave from the school to visit his family, and with the lack of his mother found them alien. His siblings he’d never gotten along with, and his father seemed almost like a man he’d never met. Ando felt a pang of pain in his stomach and realized that it was the pain of realizing that he had not just lost a mother but lost a family, yet despite feeling the pain, he was not affected by it. His visit of the family house felt dead and purposeless and Ando returned to school early.

At school, tempered by loss, Ando wondered upon the meaning of existence. There were beings of worship, certainly – the Nine Divines, the Great Spirits and the Seventeen Devils, but the parables he’d heard did not paint them in a light worthy of respect. The parable of Malacath’s birth was proof that these beings were great, but not immutable, and thus subservient to the Act of Cutting. There must be a greater hand at work, he thought, but could not find the hand which was worthy to cut creation. He sought Master Ono with these questions and did not receive a satisfactory answer. Thus, Ando understood that Master Ono was no master of Cutting, but a pawn himself. With new understanding, he left the Diamond Mind and decided to seek a path of his own.

To be a lone individual was difficult and amongst the crowds one felt like a drop rather than a man. He traveled south to Mistral to see the ocean in all its glory, and within the ocean saw naught but the Act of Cutting, with waves cutting waves back and forth and foam cutting into the rocky beach and ebbing back only to cut again. He felt like throwing himself in the sea, hoping to dissolve in it like salt, yet that alone did not satisfy him. Back in the city, he cut into a boulder in frustration and found to his amazement that people were willing to pay him to see it. He cut various objects in Mistral, until he was approached by a group of people who took him to a dusky, sweet-smelling office where a housecat asked him to find and cut a tiger hiding in the island woods.

Ando wandered the woods for a few days, subsisting on rocks and tree bark, until one night, when he was pounced by a large Khajiit and cut it in twain with a single strike. As he watched the beast’s pink blood froth and bubble out of its cloven lungs and grow thick and dark upon the earthen soil he wondered if this was the tiger he was asked to kill, and took its head to the housecat to verify and he was rewarded with a purse of gold the size of his head, and taken to a household full of women, some alike and some unlike his mother, some an ashen dark and some green and some golden and all laughing and prancing and in various stages of undress. It was here that Ando first learned that there were other ways to loving a woman and when he woke from the haze, he felt musty and his sweat was heavy as if he were caked in molasses head to toe.

He did not stay in Mistral any longer save a cleansing dip in a spring so cold it was as if the filth was being grated off his skin. He traveled even further south, finding a stretch of atoll barely above the sealine at what he assumed to be the very edge of the world with the ocean before him endless and all-encompassing. Here he spent some time ponderous on the nature of the Cut, and during this time found that if one merely accustomed the power of his Mind to it, one could feast on mud and sleep under the rain and over the moist sand and wake as if having enjoyed the comforts of a King in his slumber. He practiced Cutting on the rocks to the sunsetting side of the island and soon found himself adept at it but still could not emulate what Master Ono had demonstrated on his very person years before.

A few years passed. By then Ando had learned to swallow coals and swim to depths where the light of Magnus hardly reached and saw all sorts of beasts which made him wonder what horrors lay beyond the knowledge of mortals. But even still he could not strike with his sword without dealing a cut, and with his growing failures desperation too began growing strong in him. He cut rocks so deep and so sharp that a late arrival would likely reckon that they were the remains of an unknown civilization of masons and it was only in a thunderous night of rain when he struck a mossy rock and cut the stone without harming the moss that he felt that he was on the right path again. Emptying his mind, he began practice on branches and pebbles and found he was indeed making progress.

Pride began swelling up within him. At his spry age he was close to what Master Ono had shown to be capable of and he did not have a doubt that by the time he was at his tutor’s age that he would have the ability to cut God itself. With newfound dedication he took on bigger targets and found the hard way the price one can pay for rash undertakings when he struck a rock the size of a troll and all was good until for a moment he lost focus and the stone exploded with the might of what seemed to Ando’s eyes the power of a thousand suns. His eardrums shattered the same as his eyeballs and by the time he came to his senses his flesh sizzled, his ears were ringing and the air had a stench acrid and electric.

For a day or two Ando wandered about the island, partially in resignation to his punishment for misjudging his place in the scheme of things and partially in grief for the disappointment he’d made of himself. He expected to die there, to die a half-blind and half-deaf wretch of no consequence, but one day he felt a vibration in a similar cadence as brisk footsteps upon the island grounds and moments later his flesh was touched by a crowd of questioning yet soft and motherly fingertips. His sight came back first and introduced him to his saviors, a group of puzzled elves with moist flesh the color of turnips.

As he healed further with the magic care of his unexpected visitors, Ando came to truly appreciate the catastrophe he’d survived in earnest and as he told them of what happened, his saviors did so along with him. The side of the atoll where he practiced had been utterly demolished, with his landing spot on the opposite side distinct and deeply carved into the sand. A scar reached across the atoll as far as the eye could follow it on land, meters deep and perfectly cut as if it were left by a titanic scalpel. In the midst of the scar lay the sword in an opening, pedestal-like as it were unharmed by the blast, with no trace of the rock that was cut to be found anywhere.

Alterationist, his saviors called him, although he did not know why, and they explained to him in simple terms the metaphysics behind his Act of Cutting, and they explained to him that they were learned mer and that they had come for the island upon seeing a flash of light intense like the mother of all lightning strikes. The elves argued amongst each other as to pinpoint precisely what Ando had done wrong, but Ando did not listen for he had already learned his lesson. He’d disrespected the Cut and had been punished for it and he took his salvation as a sign that while punished he was not forsaken. He returned to civilization after bidding the pallid elves farewell and returned humbled, without any pretense of mastery.

By the time he was amongst civilized peoples the land had grown tumultuous with cries of insurrection and rebellion beyond the Mane’s reach of influence. Ando often found himself in hostile company, and his blade was often debased with the blood of the unworthy for he was ragged like a newly slain corpse and naked save his sword and made for a sore sight wherever he went and it took Ando some time before he realized he needed to blend in with the crowds. In a fateful stroke he stumbled across his father who had taken to traveling since his wife’s death, and his eyes grew heavy and wet upon seeing his son as such and took him to a bath where he washed and scrubbed and groomed his son back into the ways of civility the way his wife done when Ando was but a child would have many years ago.

He left his father’s company early, for his presence stirred feelings he had long forgotten and did not want to remember, but the damage was struck as Ando found himself contemplative not on abstractions as the Cut but on matters of crowds. He traveled north and felt pangs of pain almost unknown to him whenever he stumbled across folks of welcome company but he could not know why. He tried to make a living as other men did and found himself and his skills with the blade to be an attraction and soon enough, he was approached and recruited by an exhibition of freaks, with jesters and cardsharps and a man the size of a troll and a thin child with a head the size an overgrown pumpkin’s, who could recite the Annotated Anuad by heart, and a woman who wore his beard in braids, and twins whose limbs cracked out of shape like bodies broken on the wheel and then snapped back as if rewound in time.

Among them he found himself in sweet company yet as much as he felt he tried to reach out he also felt distant. They would have him cut melons, gourds, tomato and maize and mats of straw, and the masses for this sight would give them coin, and with coin came the feasts and during those feasts Ando would see the smile on their faces and be pleased, as alien as he were in the music and revelry, and the twins would make heathen propositions to him with whorish grins on their faces and he would retreat to his quarters as they laughed, unsure and impotent. Some time passed with them and Ando felt something new like kinship flare each time the bearded matron with her soft and delicate fingers tied his hair up for the next show.

It was not to last.

They were in Cheydinhal when the twins were found in possession of a wealthy burgher’s jewelry and a lynching crowd came after them, with clubs and torches a head, and the crowd would have torn and beat and jailed them were it not for the troll-man’s great bulk and Ando’s practiced art. They left town battered and broke and the sight they made was so conspicuous that they had nowhere to hide amongst folks of the city. They camped in the woods and the hills and they foraged for food with bow and arrow and stole from the fields and grew scared with every passing day, every passing horseman, every passing caravan. Soon they seemed forgotten and with the idea came slackness and with slackness came the troupe’s doom.

Ando woke one night to cries and waves of heat and saw tents aflame, spared such a fate by his tendency to sleep on trees, and he saw men and women barely dressed and awake and continuously punctured by arrows, and guardsmen, wielding torch and sword and spear alike, their weapons glistening a heretic crimson in the moonlight, dripping with blood and gore and constantly refreshed as they caved into the entertainers’ skin. The troll-man’s hands were dirty with brains and he fell punching and swinging as a lancer speared him from behind and the tip punctured out his left bicep with bits of dark red muscle dangling from its mineral tip. The twins ran naked and screaming, their flesh crisp and seared and the flames still dancing in their hair as they hobbled along as if in a macabre duet. Ando’s muscles grew rigid and his eyelids twitched and he unsheathed his blade and rushed into the abattoir.

He swung and he cut, and he cut leather, wood, flesh and bone and he cut men where they stood standing and he cut men they as they void back or ran shrieking. He cut through men in armor and he cut them such that their armor was untouched yet the flesh behind it burst bloody. He cut through men in twain and he cut through the blades of their swords and he felt punctures in his limbs but held it in disregard as he cut, again and again as men fell, some clutching their guts and some in a display of viscera, and by the time he was done even the dead were cut with the ground beneath him a blasphemous mix of flesh and blood and stone and mud. Men lay broken, folded into horrible shapes and bleeding from the orifices despite their intact skin and others lay blood red and pink and purple and white and adipose.

Tired and wheezing, Ando fell to his knees amongst the carnage now its sole living inhabitant and he felt a growing pressure within his skull as if his brain were soon to burst, pulsing and painful. He took his leave from the site but he was dizzy and bleeding and it was only a few days before he was found, this time by men of the mind and not of the blade. He was soon cornered in a cave and peppered with flame and lightning and shackled with a metal that sapped him of all potence and even though he did not wish it he fell asleep. He would come to his senses in a dark cell cut from stone, bare of necessity but not uncomfortable, and he was fed with rations of sparse taste and questioned and left to himself.

While some of the guards told him that they planned for him to be one of the new arrivals for the Arena, it seemed that fate had something else in store for him, for not a week had passed in his cell before Ando was woken to a fatal commotion and the door to his cell was torn off its hinges by a man-bull.

An auspicious start.

---

Attributes:

Major- Willpower
Minor- Agility

Skills:

_Expert:

Alteration

Ando has learned Alteration as the Act of Cutting and his primacy in this school of magic is eponymous. Blades are naught but matter and as the school’s purpose to bind matter to your will, Ando exercises this on his blade first and foremost, most fundamentally giving him proper handling of it given its complete lack of a handle. The blade’s density is subservient to Ando’s will and when he exercises Cutting, it is almost in a physical state of its own, impossible to tell when it responds to touch and when it simply phases through life and limb like a mirage. He can and has killed men without leaving a nick in their skin let alone a dent in their plate and he has cut solid stone with it as if it were bamboo. Nonetheless, Ando’s practiced the Act long enough to find other uses such as rendering himself impervious to the elements, turning lifeless elements into edibles and even if for moments coming to clash with gravity.

Long Blade

Swordsmanship as it was practiced in Akavir has changed little amongst their Tamrielic descendants, and Ando’s style is no exception to the rule. His comprehension of the Akaviri style can be described as pure, almost textbook in its lack of personal quality. His overhead and upward swings are mesmerizing in their flawless repetition and mixing and he never strays from proper footwork or reach come foul or hardy terrain. He is ready at all times and precise when he strikes and to see him draw and strike in one motion is a sight to behold. He obeys the teachings without error and as such imagination or interpretation does not have a place in his practice. He performs without deviation and a wary observer given time would notice the fact indeed, for better or worse.

_Adept:

Athletics

Having spent most of his life in training, Ando is no stranger to fatigue and his body is used to it, whether it be from sleeping on pebbles or walking up hills that would tire a goat. His feet and palms calloused from a decade of constant use, his muscles coiled and taut like springs, when Ando needs to move, he can do so swiftly and without repose. Still, one has to consider the Act playing a role in all of his exertions, and as such his persistence does not rely on flesh alone and if it were to, it would likely not be up to his usual standard.

Unarmored

A practitioner of the Act of Cutting knows well that armor is merely a hindrance and knows to avoid the hit or take it such that it does not strike a place of importance. As a man who would simply forgo all clothing if it were not for human company, for Ando the idea of having barriers between him and the elements, whether they be hostile or natural, is presumptuous. While Ando’s flesh is nowhere as malleable as his blade, it is nonetheless an acquaintance to the Act, and knows when to react to blade or arrow or magick.

_Apprentice:

Hand-to-Hand

While the idea of violence is inherently linked to the blade in Ando’s mind and muscle, he is nonetheless human with a rough upbringing and as such privy to the most instinctual movements of self-defense. While he’s been taught some fundamentals in the Diamond Mind, he has considered them no more than warmups for the blade and if it were not for his tempered flesh and surprising affinity towards dealing harm it would be hard to consider him a brawler to be reckoned with.

Spells:

-Burden
-Ebonyflesh
-Feather
-Jump
-Slowfall
-Shield (Fire, Frost, Shock)
-Transmute
-Water Breathing

Equipment:

-An Akaviri sword, without handle or scabbard

Belongings:

-None

---

Birthsign: The Apprentice

Miscellaneous: Ando is relatively resistant to poison, owing to his Tsaesci ancestry.

The Elder Scrolls: Stormcrown Interregnum

We were to have some fun with our character biographies, weren't we?

The Hunt

What remained of the Town Guard had returned to Bravil by dawn and with them had arrived the news of massacre and with the news came a commotion. Aldric had been in the pub then and drinking, as she did now, but she had drunk far more greater quantities of a far more potent drink and unlike now, nothing had made sense and as she listened she wondered if staying such would have been a better alternative, for what she heard made old wounds ache with grim reckoning.

“A stray demon, most likely. Cut off from their plane they may be, but they are no less dangerous for it. We’ve had some incidents since… Since then, but nothing like this.”

A cough.

“Similar thing in Elinhir, about two years back. Archaeologists receive odd geomantic readings, gather men to dig, expecting something Dwemer. Turns out to be Xiv. Eighteen dead there, four more in pursuit.”

The Altmer was called Endimion and the bailiff had confided to Aldric that she along with all others were hired for their competence and renown but Aldric had never heard of him nor any of the others. He looked pale and sick, burly with tiny eyes and Aldric had never seen an elf that fat before but he spoke with a fine voice, without the usual Altmer arrogance and such was not immediately dislikable. There were five of them in total and nearly all were from different races, Aldric the sole Imperial. The Dunmer woman was said to be blind but she moved so gracefully and so well in touch with her surroundings that she might have never needed sight at all and the other two were Orc twins and Aldric immediately disliked them.

“You will be rewarded handsomely for this, and each of you will earn a bonus if it’s a live capture. Our Court Magician has prepared these Cuffs of Binding which will be sure to sap its strength. Report immediately once the job is done so that our men can safely gather the bodies of their fallen comrades and give them a proper burial. May the Divines guide your way.”

They made preparations that day and by come the next a coach was prepared to take them through the Green Road, even if they would see little of it from its caged tiny windows. The stagecoach was only meant for four and Endimion, being the fattest of them all was persuaded to ride shotgun and Aldric was stuck alongside the Dunmer woman with the two Orcs in posed front of her like some sort of satirical painting. The twin Orcs both wore fineries of Breton style, dressed in the same outfit the both of them, and both their nostrils flared upwards such that they seemed to look down on her even when they were staring straight.

“We haven’t met each other,” spoke the Dunmer as she extended her hand out to nobody in particular. “I am Iveri Bandas.”

“Aldric Oranio.”

“Herz gro-Bashtugh and Dulroy gra-Bashtugh,” the twin with the red cravat replied. Aldric wondered which was which but she decided not to ask, not wishing to risk a faux pas and create unnecessary animosity. Iveri’s hand was still extended and one of the Orcs eventually reached out and shook it seemingly more out of pity than genuine appreciation. There was a lull and Aldric peeked out of the grated windows of the coach to watch the overgrown greenery surrounding and at parts consuming the stone road.

“We are Destructionists both, originally, but Dulroy has begun practicing spellbreaking techniques. Widens the repertoire,” the Orc in the white cravat said. So this one’s Herz, thought Aldric. When they spoke it was soft and gentle and obviously practiced and Aldric found them pretentious but still had to appreciate them for humbling themselves by breaking their own silence.

“So I see,” replied Iveri. “Sensible. This party of ours does need some people who can take dangers head-on.” Aldric wondered if that was a jab meant at her or the fat Altmer sitting outside or the both of them but the idea of entering an argument in this cramped space felt like fire and brimstone and she kept silent.

They exited the stagecoach by noon and the air was scalding hot and Aldric felt beads of sweat forming on her brow not long after first exposure to the sun. Endimion was surprisingly nimble on his feet and he hopped off his seat but nearly lost his balance and in that moment began spinning and he pirouetted and ended his impromptu performance with a surprisingly feminine curtsy. The Dunmer responded with a soft, joking applause and Aldric became certain that she was merely pretending to be blind. The coachman pointed up a hill, on which a track was seen, made of the grass decimated by heavy footprints, and up the tracks they went, silent and contemplative of the florally decorated scenery as they carved a path through the butterflies and the sweet scents and the spiky shrubs, their green masses decorated with flowers like beauty marks or colorful kisses left by the brush of an unknown painter.

They reached a wooded clearing and the picturesque scene was hijacked by one of devastation. The ground was a dead grey, decorated with dried blood and bits of burnt wood and fabric and corpses were strewn afoot, some burnt and some clubbed and some pierced with appropriate tools of any kind – lances, daggers, arrows. To one part of the clearing lay an ape of a man, nearly gargantuan in size, with his arms dotted with holes red and bleeding and leaning back into a lance stuck into the ground, its tip poking out his chest like a pin wrapped in muscle, and near them stood the corpse of what seemed to be a scamp, a child, misshapen with the right side of his gigantic head caved in with brains and fluids leaking out the eyeholes and the top of the head, and others had been left in the flames for so long they were more charcoal outlines than anything once living.

Then there were the guardsmen, who seemed folded to pieces like broken toys after a child’s tantrum or samples of some macabre form of origami. Some were simply dismembered, and some in heavy armor seemed more like they were taking naps on the ground, not a dent to be found on them, yet lying in a pool of their own blood, dripping still from the orifices. Some had been cut in twain, cut horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and some had limbs grown bloated and purple as if their skin were overfilled with blood. Some had their weapons and shields cut through like butter while others lay intact while the limbs that held them were separated from their bodies and left in their pools of brown and crimson.

Aldric felt her throat knot tight.

Endimion was nonplussed. The twins were awful silent. Iveri walked out into the scene and opened her arms and then lowered them again.

“He is lying.”

“Huh?”

“The Count’s Bailiff. He is lying. This is not Daedra work.”

“Well, so long as we’re still paid,” said Aldric, silently.

Iveri headed east and the group followed and as they went downhill they passed by two corpses, almost identical and naked and crisped, the scalps of their heads burnt away to expose darkened bone, their hands together. They moved on.

That night they camped on a plain under clear and starlit sky and ate from their supplies and Endimion volunteered for watch duty. They slept wrapped in their cloaks against the cold and they woke and followed the track again. They soon entered another wood and Iveri began pointing out signs of their quarry, with bite marks left on the trees and nearly invisible bits of torn fabric, lint and cord. A day passed on the track and it ended in a cave, which Iveri was certain kept their prey, and they spent the remainder of that day resting while the Orc twins watched the cave entrance, ready to annihilate anything that would dare come out.

Come night they went in, hoping to catch their target in sleep, with Iveri and Dulroy as vanguard and Endimion a value target in their midst as the only Restorationist in the group, while Aldric and Herz kept the rear secure. They were well-coordinated, each of them like the limb of a quadruped, but then suddenly Iveri stopped and told them that they were going to die and then she did, something pouncing her from right above and piercing her skull from the top and punching out through the jaw, keeping her standing but nailed to the ground, like some sort of twisted marionette. Dulroy screamed and the metallic pin keeping Iveri up burst through her face, cleaving it open, and cut off the Orc’s right hand and with the left she set the roof of the cave on fire.

Aldric looked about. Endimion was gone and the magic fire kept the shadows dancing all around and she unsheathed her leaf-bladed sword and felt it crackle with energy as a gangly bipedal outline fell onto the ground right in front of them, catlike, agile and aflame. Herz with his left hand grasped Aldric’s shoulder and pulled her down as he roared and reached out with his right, and beyond it cracked the sound of thunder deafening and rumbling, and pure light illuminated every nook and cranny of the cave for a moment before crashing into their figure, which raised only a metallic limb to defend against the blast, a sword, and was flung into a corner with it and disappeared.

“Dulroy!” Herz roared and he sticked his arms through his bleeding sister’s armpits and pulled her up, and they grew stiff as the figure appeared and pulled something out of them, his sword, and they dropped together in embrace and they were dead. Aldric dashed backward and the sword licked the air where she once was and she raised an open palm in her aggressor’s direction and a beam shone out and punched a surgically small hole in its searing flesh. He fell to a knee and Aldric leaped forward, her arm sprung back and ready to thrust her sword in, but he was gone. She swung backward out of instinct and her sword clashed with his midair and there was an electric explosion and both their weapons flew away.

The enemy leaped into Aldric before she could raise her arm and blast him to smithereens and Aldric, left in a pinch, stabbed into his gut with an ethereal knife but the grip around her neck was like a vice and she felt her windpipe begin cracking under pressure. Then Endimion appeared and miraculously pulled the would-be killer off her with surprising strength, and he cracked into his nose with the side of his hand and smashed one of his soles into the impossible swordsman’s knee, caving it, and in his grip the man under him began growing pale and he withered and fell, a barely breathing mess.

By the time Aldric came back to her senses, their gangly prey was laid down on the floor and he was twitching, his arms and legs tied and bound with the enchanted irons, and his sword placed on his chest like a trophy while he hissed and sobbed silently with tears in his eyes, like a caged and humiliated animal. Endimion patted his hands to clear off the filth and he seemed surprisingly refreshed and healthy and Aldric looked at him with horrified amazement, then she looked back down on the monster. His clothes were a bloodied and crisped mess and his flesh a seared, filthy yellow, and the wet green eyes in their sockets seemed like they could burst open any moment, so intensely hateful they were. He was ugly and his teeth were bared in some primitive animal instinct.

“Where were you?”

“Just finding an opportune moment. You did well out there.”

Aldric looked at the corpses.

“What about them?”

“Well, we’ll share it fifty-fifty.”

She felt distraught. Dirty in a way.

“No, I mean, about them.” She waved an arm towards her fallen acquaintances.

Endimion walked over to them, and he knelt and reached out and appraised their clothes and items with his fingers.

“Well, we’ll share it fifty-fifty,” He said again, grinning. “You carry him.”

The Elder Scrolls: Stormcrown Interregnum

<Snipped quote by CollectorOfMyst>

Perhaps a combination of both might join what you like about both archetypes? An expert or adept in stealth and restoration perhaps? Earlier games had restoration spells that allowed you to drain and absorb health, stamina, magicka, and even attributes. If you wanted a rogue type character, I can see how restoration would be useful for silent, merciful takedowns by draining their stamina and endurance to make enemies fall unconscious. It'd be a pretty unique take on a Restorationist too!

@Spoopy Scary

don't give out my character concepts ree

The Elder Scrolls: Stormcrown Interregnum

Your Skills Are Inferior

Name: Ando Isei
Age: 30
Gender: Male
Race: Rimmenese Imperial

---

Appearance:

_{A portrait of Ando, commissioned by his father}

With his wiry stature and tallow-colored skin, Ando doesn’t quite look Imperial and if you did not notice at first sight his height would let you know it. He is a bony man with a gaunt, bony face, with the roof of his skull bulging thick towards the front above his eyebrows like a battering ram, and his thin green eyes, despite their intensity, are stuck and left impotent between his bulbous brow ridge and his high and sharp cheekbones. His nose juts down between his besieged eyes, smooth like a ramp, and although it reaches forward quite a bit, his nostrils are thin enough to make one think they were incised by surgery. He is sparse of hair, devoid of facial hair save a few long and thin spots, more like whiskers or remnants of a forest fire than anything else, and with eyebrows growing visible only towards the edges of his face. His hair should be unkempt given his conditions, yet it stays mostly obedient – the top is kept short as is his peoples’ tradition, and the longer strands are loosely gathered and tied into an upwards knot which pokes out above his skull in an almost exclaiming manner.

Ando’s physique is rather thin, with his shoulders set close and his ribs visible like they’re a size too large for his skin, yet despite this, he is quite a physical presence, for his limbs are long and his extremities are large, his hands and feet monstrous and almost juxtaposed from a different body of different dimensions, the tips of his fingers and toes calloused and rough. His chest is hairless like his face, and his lower limbs are not covered with hair but with cracked patches of skin which when closely examined betray a pattern not unlike that of a snake’s. Although not of a stature like a Nord’s or an Orc’s, what muscle Ando has is dense, visible, and well-exercised, his skin thin over them not unlike a cloth cover stretching and weak around an expanding object.

The man’s dress is frugal and tattered, yet exotic – covering his upper body is naught but a sheepskin vest worn over a beige, short-sleeved robe devoid of buttons, its left side wrapped over the right. Around his waist a piece of crude rope is wrapped and tied like a belt, out of which the tang of a sword prominently pokes out, its blade sticking out the side, unsheathed and erect. Beneath all of his attire, pleated breeches of dull blue color puff down to his ankles. He is barefoot and in no weather does he change or mend his attire.

---

Personality: Ando is a fairly single-minded figure from whom responses and behaviors like that of a normal sapient being should not be easily expected. He is an isolated figure even amongst the crowds and that he comes from isolation as well makes him a rather hard figure to reach and have meaningful dialogue with. He has a tendency to take idioms at face value and answer in all seriousness and to most people he can seem without any humor in him. In truth he is not completely separate from people but having already been hurt by one experience of reaching out one can consider him twice shy. He speaks with a soft but sure tone albeit a repeat listener can easily notice his rather limited vocabulary.

It is not hard for one to earn a first impression of Ando as a slow-witted person or one who’s not all there, but Ando can prove surprisingly conversative should the topic be of interest to him. While lacking in pleasantries and subtlety and flowery words Ando can be surprisingly eloquent, it’s just that there are few opportunities for him to showcase this side of him and one can be certain that he has no innate desire to seek such opportunities. When enthused, he’s almost childishly naïve, although a good judge of character can tell that the naivety is perhaps baked into his every manner, just well-kept behind a strong façade of ‘distant, strong figure’, and in certain aspects Ando’s reticence stems not from disinterest but from sentimentality.

Childishly honest and sincere, a person who gets to know Ando can be certain that he is no liar, albeit also very sparse at giving out information, often leaving awkward blanks in his narratives instead of spicing it up or changing topics. He does not warm up easy but he does not give up easy on people either and can be loyal to friends even after their passing, even if he’d never admitted the friendship. One can notice that Ando moves rigidly and purposefully with not an ounce of relaxation in him and the same stiffness can be sensed about him in social situations as well. Despite all this, Ando can be observed to visibly soften around strong and compassionate female figures and grow oddly protective and fond of them.

Ando is not humble in his deeds or skills but he is no a braggart either, and says it outright when he does not know or is not skilled at a subject, for Ando’s worldview is concerned only with truthfulness and he views life through a lens of is and is not rather than a lens of right and wrong. For him, all living beings are tools in a greater game, and in this game, it does not matter what they do – what matters is if they can or cannot do it. Still, he is not completely without ethics and has a tendency to be disgusted by those who prey upon the weak, for in his eyes the act alone is a sign of weakness, and Ando does not tolerate weakness. He expects the most out of everyone in what they can do, even if all they can do is to die.

A believer in conflict first and foremost, Ando looks at every facet of life through the lens of war and considers every individual undertaking a clash of wills for which one has to do their best, lest they lose and accept subservience to another, and for him, to do so is blasphemy.

---

History: To know Ando, one needs to know the Rim, a stretch of land within the Imperial Province of Elsweyr bordering Cyrodiil. Here live the eponymous Rim Men, although no true Rimmenese would consider that more than a slur. No, these people consider themselves Tsaesci – distant they may be in terms of bloodline, but the traditions of their ancestors and their ways of life carry on as it were in Akavir, and with their off-colored, patchy skin, serpentine eyes and sharp cheekbones and the occasional child with the forked tongue, perhaps it is not too much of a stretch when they consider themselves to be of a separate race than that of Cyrodilic Man.

But pride alone does not make for a prosperous life, and the House of Isei knew this firsthand. A distant relative of the previous Viceroy’s bloodline, they were pure of blood for a certainty, for not only did they all have green eyes, a telltale sign of undiluted patrilineal descent, but the family was still in possession of its Blood Patent, dating all the way to the First Akaviri Invasion and renewed without error by the Ancestor-Clergy with the death of each family Patriarch. While not considered to be the same as the lowborn riffraff, the family was duly lacking in finance, thanks to the actions of a previous Patriarch, who’d bought a lot of land claims in a war against the Khajiit, only to lose them all in the next one when the Khajiit came back in a vengeful wave of reclamation.

By the time Ando was born, the family was stuck in a small, two-story house made of adobe and wood with a roof so low that one could not stand upright in the upper floor. His father was a man by the name of Toda, who despite having the privilege to carry a sword did not and worked as a tradesman. His mother was an ailing woman by the name of Yue and despite her sickly stature worked as a seamstress. Born under the sign of the Apprentice, they expected Ando to be a scholar of some sort and pushed him to his studies, but he grew to be a quarrelsome and stubborn child and was expelled from school by the local superintendent when he bit off the nose of a classmate who insulted him. The child fell into house care, helping his sickly mother with the chores and her work with the loom and the spinning wheel.

While Ando showed some semblance of normalcy alongside his mother and even some remarkable competence at spindling, her illness had her sleep more and more each day, leading Ando into much frustration. He was but a child and could not be left with the work on his own but Toda did not have the time or inclination and there were days when Yue could not even get up from bed, let alone getting to work alongside his son. As his wife’s capacity for work decreased, Toda’s workhours increased – someone had to make up for the loss of income and it was not going to be the child, who could not bear the sight of his near eternally slumbering mother, with her brow glistening with sweat and her presence reeking of the musty stench of sleep, and went out and spent his days in the streets like an orphaned urchin in an unending scuffle with whatever he could fight.

Toda was a mild-mannered man and did not have the willpower to beat sense into his boy, and the family in its current state did not have the finances to afford private tutelage. Toda apprenticed his child to a craftsman, from but there too Ando ended up expelled. Showing no sign of civilized manner at the age of fourteen, Toda resigned to his child’s affinity for violence and had him enroll in one of the sword-schools of Rimmen, one named Diamond Mind. There, Ando quickly earned the students’ ire and the masters’ attention when he with only a wooden training sword left a cut on a fellow student’s face. The assistant teachers planned to have him punished, but the master of the school, Ono Kagei, instead developed for him a test. He had Ando strike at a gourd with the same wooden sword, and his suspicions were confirmed once Ando struck as the child had cut through the gourd with a blunt edge.

Gifted, Ono thought of Ando – gifted, but unrefined. He sensed the taste the child had for violence and Ono knew that such folk only learned from violence. He had his attendants bring his sword to him, and told Ando to raise his sword. The child, despite being sapped of strength by the implication, still took the standard stance and Ono cut through the guard and the child alike with a single strike. Ando fell as if cloven in twain – yet after a few moments of expecting death, he found that, despite the cut in his clothes, front and back, and the strands of his hairlocks on the floor, his flesh was unharmed. Ando took this lesson to heart, and never again would his teachers or fellow students feel the need to discipline him.

There, Ando learned the Act of Cutting. This was more than to simply strike with a sharp object. To cut was to make a difference in space, and what was space but a manmade concept? “Space is a moot concept without an observer,” spoke Master Ono. “And thus, any difference in space depends entirely on the observer’s mind. Therefore, cut with your mind, and you can cut anything.” Ando took this to heart. Master Ono taught him the malleability of space. With a strong mind, flesh would be rendered as iron, and a feather would weigh as much as a lead ball, and the touch of flames would feel like the morning breeze and water would become a pathway underneath the soles of one’s feet. It all depended on just how dedicated and disciplined one were.

Ando spent the next nine years of his life as Master Ono’s pupil, honing his skill in Cutting, isolated from the rest of the world. The news of the Blight missed him, so did the news of the Nerevarine and the fall of the Tribunal. The Oblivion Crisis he found only upon news of the fall of the nearby city of Verushae, climbing the Spire of Late Potent Silimxi to watch the flames devour the city and the desert dust devour the flames in turn, like the parable of bigger fish lined up to swallow each other. It was in those days that Ando first felt fear. Yet fear of things to come did not lead to anything of importance, save famine, and famine did not matter for him much, for the students of the Diamond Mind were strictly rationed in any case.

Some years after that, Ando learned of his mother’s passing, and wept for the first time in his life, and wept like a grown monster, his agonized groans echoing through the school halls, deep and nerve wracking. He took a short leave from the school to visit his family, and with the lack of his mother found them alien. His siblings he’d never gotten along with, and his father seemed almost like a man he’d never met. Ando felt a pang of pain in his stomach and realized that it was the pain of realizing that he had not just lost a mother but lost a family, yet despite feeling the pain, he was not affected by it. His visit of the family house felt dead and purposeless and Ando returned to school early.

At school, tempered by loss, Ando wondered upon the meaning of existence. There were beings of worship, certainly – the Nine Divines, the Great Spirits and the Seventeen Devils, but the parables he’d heard did not paint them in a light worthy of respect. The parable of Malacath’s birth was proof that these beings were great, but not immutable, and thus subservient to the Act of Cutting. There must be a greater hand at work, he thought, but could not find the hand which was worthy to cut creation. He sought Master Ono with these questions and did not receive a satisfactory answer. Thus, Ando understood that Master Ono was no master of Cutting, but a pawn himself. With new understanding, he left the Diamond Mind and decided to seek a path of his own.

To be a lone individual was difficult and amongst the crowds one felt like a drop rather than a man. He traveled south to Mistral to see the ocean in all its glory, and within the ocean saw naught but the Act of Cutting, with waves cutting waves back and forth and foam cutting into the rocky beach and ebbing back only to cut again. He felt like throwing himself in the sea, hoping to dissolve in it like salt, yet that alone did not satisfy him. Back in the city, he cut into a boulder in frustration and found to his amazement that people were willing to pay him to see it. He cut various objects in Mistral, until he was approached by a group of people who took him to a dusky, sweet-smelling office where a housecat asked him to find and cut a tiger hiding in the island woods.

Ando wandered the woods for a few days, subsisting on rocks and tree bark, until one night, when he was pounced by a large Khajiit and cut it in twain with a single strike. As he watched the beast’s pink blood froth and bubble out of its cloven lungs and grow thick and dark upon the earthen soil he wondered if this was the tiger he was asked to kill, and took its head to the housecat to verify and he was rewarded with a purse of gold the size of his head, and taken to a household full of women, some alike and some unlike his mother, some an ashen dark and some green and some golden and all laughing and prancing and in various stages of undress. It was here that Ando first learned that there were other ways to loving a woman and when he woke from the haze, he felt musty and his sweat was heavy as if he were caked in molasses head to toe.

He did not stay in Mistral any longer save a cleansing dip in a spring so cold it was as if the filth was being grated off his skin. He traveled even further south, finding a stretch of atoll barely above the sealine at what he assumed to be the very edge of the world with the ocean before him endless and all-encompassing. Here he spent some time ponderous on the nature of the Cut, and during this time found that if one merely accustomed the power of his Mind to it, one could feast on mud and sleep under the rain and over the moist sand and wake as if having enjoyed the comforts of a King in his slumber. He practiced Cutting on the rocks to the sunsetting side of the island and soon found himself adept at it but still could not emulate what Master Ono had demonstrated on his very person years before.

A few years passed. By then Ando had learned to swallow coals and swim to depths where the light of Magnus hardly reached and saw all sorts of beasts which made him wonder what horrors lay beyond the knowledge of mortals. But even still he could not strike with his sword without dealing a cut, and with his growing failures desperation too began growing strong in him. He cut rocks so deep and so sharp that a late arrival would likely reckon that they were the remains of an unknown civilization of masons and it was only in a thunderous night of rain when he struck a mossy rock and cut the stone without harming the moss that he felt that he was on the right path again. Emptying his mind, he began practice on branches and pebbles and found he was indeed making progress.

Pride began swelling up within him. At his spry age he was close to what Master Ono had shown to be capable of and he did not have a doubt that by the time he was at his tutor’s age that he would have the ability to cut God itself. With newfound dedication he took on bigger targets and found the hard way the price one can pay for rash undertakings when he struck a rock the size of a troll and all was good until for a moment he lost focus and the stone exploded with the might of what seemed to Ando’s eyes the power of a thousand suns. His eardrums shattered the same as his eyeballs and by the time he came to his senses his flesh sizzled, his ears were ringing and the air had a stench acrid and electric.

For a day or two Ando wandered about the island, partially in resignation to his punishment for misjudging his place in the scheme of things and partially in grief for the disappointment he’d made of himself. He expected to die there, to die a half-blind and half-deaf wretch of no consequence, but one day he felt a vibration in a similar cadence as brisk footsteps upon the island grounds and moments later his flesh was touched by a crowd of questioning yet soft and motherly fingertips. His sight came back first and introduced him to his saviors, a group of puzzled elves with moist flesh the color of turnips.

As he healed further with the magic care of his unexpected visitors, Ando came to truly appreciate the catastrophe he’d survived in earnest and as he told them of what happened, his saviors did so along with him. The side of the atoll where he practiced had been utterly demolished, with his landing spot on the opposite side distinct and deeply carved into the sand. A scar reached across the atoll as far as the eye could follow it on land, meters deep and perfectly cut as if it were left by a titanic scalpel. In the midst of the scar lay the sword in an opening, pedestal-like as it were unharmed by the blast, with no trace of the rock that was cut to be found anywhere.

Alterationist, his saviors called him, although he did not know why, and they explained to him in simple terms the metaphysics behind his Act of Cutting, and they explained to him that they were learned mer and that they had come for the island upon seeing a flash of light intense like the mother of all lightning strikes. The elves argued amongst each other as to pinpoint precisely what Ando had done wrong, but Ando did not listen for he had already learned his lesson. He’d disrespected the Cut and had been punished for it and he took his salvation as a sign that while punished he was not forsaken. He returned to civilization after bidding the pallid elves farewell and returned humbled, without any pretense of mastery.

By the time he was amongst civilized peoples the land had grown tumultuous with cries of insurrection and rebellion beyond the Mane’s reach of influence. Ando often found himself in hostile company, and his blade was often debased with the blood of the unworthy for he was ragged like a newly slain corpse and naked save his sword and made for a sore sight wherever he went and it took Ando some time before he realized he needed to blend in with the crowds. In a fateful stroke he stumbled across his father who had taken to traveling since his wife’s death, and his eyes grew heavy and wet upon seeing his son as such and took him to a bath where he washed and scrubbed and groomed his son back into the ways of civility the way his wife done when Ando was but a child would have many years ago.

He left his father’s company early, for his presence stirred feelings he had long forgotten and did not want to remember, but the damage was struck as Ando found himself contemplative not on abstractions as the Cut but on matters of crowds. He traveled north and felt pangs of pain almost unknown to him whenever he stumbled across folks of welcome company but he could not know why. He tried to make a living as other men did and found himself and his skills with the blade to be an attraction and soon enough, he was approached and recruited by an exhibition of freaks, with jesters and cardsharps and a man the size of a troll and a thin child with a head the size an overgrown pumpkin’s, who could recite the Annotated Anuad by heart, and a woman who wore his beard in braids, and twins whose limbs cracked out of shape like bodies broken on the wheel and then snapped back as if rewound in time.

Among them he found himself in sweet company yet as much as he felt he tried to reach out he also felt distant. They would have him cut melons, gourds, tomato and maize and mats of straw, and the masses for this sight would give them coin, and with coin came the feasts and during those feasts Ando would see the smile on their faces and be pleased, as alien as he were in the music and revelry, and the twins would make heathen propositions to him with whorish grins on their faces and he would retreat to his quarters as they laughed, unsure and impotent. Some time passed with them and Ando felt something new like kinship flare each time the bearded matron with her soft and delicate fingers tied his hair up for the next show.

It was not to last.

They were in Cheydinhal when the twins were found in possession of a wealthy burgher’s jewelry and a lynching crowd came after them, with clubs and torches a head, and the crowd would have torn and beat and jailed them were it not for the troll-man’s great bulk and Ando’s practiced art. They left town battered and broke and the sight they made was so conspicuous that they had nowhere to hide amongst folks of the city. They camped in the woods and the hills and they foraged for food with bow and arrow and stole from the fields and grew scared with every passing day, every passing horseman, every passing caravan. Soon they seemed forgotten and with the idea came slackness and with slackness came the troupe’s doom.

Ando woke one night to cries and waves of heat and saw tents aflame, spared such a fate by his tendency to sleep on trees, and he saw men and women barely dressed and awake and continuously punctured by arrows, and guardsmen, wielding torch and sword and spear alike, their weapons glistening a heretic crimson in the moonlight, dripping with blood and gore and constantly refreshed as they caved into the entertainers’ skin. The troll-man’s hands were dirty with brains and he fell punching and swinging as a lancer speared him from behind and the tip punctured out his left bicep with bits of dark red muscle dangling from its mineral tip. The twins ran naked and screaming, their flesh crisp and seared and the flames still dancing in their hair as they hobbled along as if in a macabre duet. Ando’s muscles grew rigid and his eyelids twitched as he unsheathed his blade and rushed into the abattoir.

He swung and he cut, and he cut leather, wood, flesh and bone and he cut men where they stood standing and he cut men they as they void back or ran shrieking. He cut through men in armor and he cut them such that their armor was untouched yet the flesh behind it burst bloody. He cut through men in twain and he cut through the blades of their swords and he felt punctures in his limbs but held it in disregard as he cut, again and again as men fell, some clutching their guts and some in a display of viscera, and by the time he was done even the dead were cut with the ground beneath him a blasphemous mix of flesh and blood and stone and mud. Men lay broken, folded into horrible shapes and bleeding from the orifices despite their intact skin and others lay blood red and pink and purple and white and adipose.

Tired and wheezing, Ando fell to his knees amongst the carnage now its sole living inhabitant and he felt a growing pressure within his skull as if his brain were soon to burst, pulsing and painful. He took his leave from the site but he was dizzy and bleeding and it was only a few days before he was found, this time by men of the mind and not of the blade. He was soon cornered in a cave and peppered with flame and lightning and shackled with a metal that sapped him of all potence and even though he did not wish it he fell asleep. He would come to his senses in a dark cell cut from stone, bare of necessity but not uncomfortable, and he was fed with rations of sparse taste and questioned and left to himself.

While some of the guards told him that they planned for him to be one of the new arrivals for the Arena, it seemed that fate had something else in store for him, for not a week had passed in his cell before Ando was woken to a fatal commotion and the door to his cell was torn off its hinges by a man-bull.

An auspicious start.

---

Attributes:

Major- Intelligence
Minor- Agility

Skills:

_Expert:

Alteration

Ando has learned Alteration as the Act of Cutting and his primacy in this school of magic is eponymous. Blades are naught but matter and as the school’s purpose to bind matter to your will, Ando exercises this on his blade first and foremost, most fundamentally giving him proper handling of it given its complete lack of a handle. The blade’s density is subservient to Ando’s will and when he exercises Cutting, it is almost in a physical state of its own, impossible to tell when it responds to touch and when it simply phases through life and limb like a mirage. He can and has killed men without leaving a nick in their skin let alone a dent in their plate and he has cut solid stone with it as if it were bamboo. Nonetheless, Ando’s practiced the Act long enough to find other uses such as rendering himself impervious to the elements, turning lifeless elements into edibles and even if for moments coming to clash with gravity.

Long Blade

Swordsmanship as it was practiced in Akavir has changed little amongst their Tamrielic descendants, and Ando’s style is no exception to the rule. His comprehension of the Akaviri style can be described as pure, almost textbook in its lack of personal quality. His overhead and upward swings are mesmerizing in their flawless repetition and mixing and he never strays from proper footwork or reach come foul or hardy terrain. He is ready at all times and precise when he strikes and to see him draw and strike in one motion is a sight to behold. He obeys the teachings without error and as such imagination or interpretation does not have a place in his practice. He performs without deviation and a wary observer given time would notice the fact indeed, for better or worse.

_Adept:

Athletics

Having spent most of his life in training, Ando is no stranger to fatigue and his body is used to it, whether it be from sleeping on pebbles or walking up hills that would tire a goat. His feet and palms calloused from a decade of constant use, his muscles coiled and taut like springs, when Ando needs to move, he can do so swiftly and without repose. Still, one has to consider the Act playing a role in all of his exertions, and as such his persistence does not rely on flesh alone and if it were to, it would likely not be up to his usual standard.

Unarmored

A practitioner of the Act of Cutting knows well that armor is merely a hindrance and knows to avoid the hit or take it such that it does not damage a place of importance. As a man who would simply forgo all clothing if it were not for human company, for Ando the idea of having barriers between him and the elements, whether they be hostile or natural, is presumptuous. While Ando’s flesh is nowhere as malleable as his blade, it is nonetheless an acquaintance to the Act, and knows when to react to blade or arrow or magick.

_Apprentice:

Hand-to-Hand

While the idea of violence is inherently linked to the blade in Ando’s mind and muscle, he is nonetheless human with a rough upbringing and as such privy to the most instinctual movements of self-defense. While he’s been taught some fundamentals in the Diamond Mind, he has considered them no more than exercise compared to the blade and if it were not for his tempered flesh and surprisingly strong grit, it would be hard to consider him a reckonable brawler.

Spells:

-Burden
-Ebonyflesh
-Feather
-Jump
-Slowfall
-Shield (Fire, Frost, Shock)
-Transmute
-Water Breathing

Equipment:

-An Akaviri sword, without handle or scabbard

Belongings:

-None

---

Birthsign: The Apprentice

Miscellaneous: Ando is relatively resistant to poison, owing to his Tsaesci ancestry.

Concordance of Demiurges: Princes of the World (K6BD)

@Peik Yeah this is assuredly dead, though I am mulling over how I could recycle the concept into something more generic and easily accessible.

That said I don't know if Allison's story is exactly small-scale. She meets the Conquering King and has the Key of Kings thrust into her head in the first chapter, and then spends the rest of the story rubbing elbows with the Seven.

@Dead Cruiser

Well, there are stories other than Allison's in the book, and they always felt more appealing to me than the stuff going on higher up on the scale. See the Pursuers, the battle in Hell 71, the stuff noodle vendors go through, the criminals that Allison busts up while training etc.

Concordance of Demiurges: Princes of the World (K6BD)

I'd be interested in this if it's still alive, although I can't help but wonder if a smaller-scale story set in Throne would be more interesting. That's where all the fun stuff was in the comic.

The Elder Scrolls: Eye of the Hurricane

Garo Minassian

Name: Garo Secundus Minassian
Race: Imperial
Age: 32
Birthsign: The Lady
Family Origins: Cheydinhal, Cyrodiil

Appearance:

_{A portrait of Garo upon his return from Elsweyr}

With a somewhat thick figure and a welcoming expression on his face, Garo is about as Imperial as Imperial gets. Standing about 5’9’’, Garo’s silhouette stands rather average, although his large brown eyes, expressive, long eyebrows and thick neck do allow him bear a certain visual presence. His thick nose juts down from between his eyes like a stone pillar, flaring right above his reddish lips, whose vibrant color creates a slight contrast with his fair skin. While a curly reddish beard further accentuates his wide chin, his hairline has not been so lucky and, save a widow’s peak stalwartly hanging on, the remainder of his brown hair has entered a recession.

Garo carries himself with confidence, and though he is not muscular enough to look threatening or bear any martial connotations, his limbs are thick enough to persuade most from challenging his body language. Should he show it, Garo’s presence can be felt even when he is in a large crowd; the man seems certain that he has a right for the attention he attracts, and does not exert any caution in acting like he owns it, either. All this is further reinforced by a strong voice, which Garo holds commendable control over – it is not deep or fundamentally intimidating, but he has a stark voice, and he will make it heard should it be a necessity.

His attire, while not extravagant, also speak of a similar level of confidence; his green coat bears false sleeves, is fastened with silk cords and is trimmed with light embroidery, and his leggings are of a red color. Although he has a dagger tucked into his white, florally patterned waist sash, a sword belt also dangles below it, the weapon’s scabbard decorated with a velvet covering. A camel hair cape acts as his all-purpose insulator, being strong enough to deflect glancing blows, and wonderfully keeping cool in the summer and keeping warm in the winter.

While his physique is devoid of any scar or tattoo or any other kind of marking, Garo’s palms are lightly marred with dark, discolored spots, like faded ink spots; a side effect of the various dyes and alchemical substances that he had to handle in his youth.

---

Personality: Garo is a rational man, awfully rational, maybe one could say – oftentimes finding himself in situations far too irrational for his liking. Of course, he’s not an insufferable genius who is constantly infuriated with the world not playing by his whims, on the contrary, Garo has a strange, almost saintly resignation to the ways of the world, often finding the situations he finds himself in more darkly funny than truly harrowing. He’s come to realize that his plans may not go the way he wants and has become an adaptive creature, trying to present an amiable impression towards anyone he meets, not out of some moral duty, but merely because it is convenient. While he bears no joy in the more disturbing aspects of survival and adult life, he’s accepted them for what they are and, though he does not enjoy it, does not see himself above relying on them as a last resort.

A Nibenese gentleman at heart, Garo can be quite jolly when the opportunity presents himself, and although some may see this as a vice rather than a virtue, does have a streak of greed in his veins, never averse to a little profit. Perhaps the only thing keeping this in check is the well-earned wisdom that sometimes, moral profit outweighs financial profit, and Garo, while not a frivolous spender of money, is not above making ‘moral and social investments’ for his friends and comrades. Garo is often a serious man but can be witty when he needs, or wants to be – and although he hides it well, he can get about as petty as everyone else. Still, even though he is not without his darker side, if things should take a turn for the brutal, Garo does not have it in him to be actively life-threatening. He is a self-defender at best and a passive observer or a runaway at worst.

---

History: Garo has always considered himself a city man, and his story, fittingly, begins in a city – the City of Cheydinhal. Of course, born a Minassian, it would be hard to separate the early chapters of his life from the story of the Minassians – a family of well-known glassmakers, the family profession easily traced all the way back to Vvardenfell in the Third Era, being one of the few families brought along by the East Empire Company to overtake local glass production for the Empire. By the time Garo was born, however, the family was but a vestige of its former days, as with most of the rest of the Empire. Vvardenfell was long gone, with all their holdings and estates there, and the Minassian family had stooped down to the production of common glass. Still, once a craftsman, always a craftsman – even with such great losses, the family business soldiered on, as it had through the centuries.

Garo, named after a long-dead patriarch of the family just like one elder brother, was the eighth of thirteen brothers, all of them toiling in the family workshop. Their father, Aram, was a strict disciplinarian, more a master to his workers than a father to his children. That is not to say that Aram was a cruel, loveless or unfair man; the business had simply occupied too large a part of his life for him to see family outside the business. Schooled at home by his mother, Anush Minassian, until he was old enough to bear the heat of the workshop, Garo found himself handling the warm produces of the workshop to carry to the market at the age of thirteen. Minassian glass was in high demand, even outside Cheydinhal, and Aram’s ties to various wandering merchants meant that they got a cut from sales outside the province, let alone the city. It was not a significant amount of money, for the bulk of the profit still came from personal orders, but the fact that Minassian glass was a thing meant quite a lot to the man.

Of course, this all did not mean much to young. The Minassian family was respected in the city community, but there were greater families than them, Imperial, Breton, even Dunmer – the Indarys family, for one, founders of the Thorn Knights and Heroes of the Oblivion Crisis. Garo knew and appreciated the meager wealth and luxuries that he could only enjoy thanks to being Minassian, and while he did not want to downplay how glad he was for those, couldn’t there be a way to rise above molding and rolling red-hot glass all day? Garo yearned to find out, and in an attempt to do so, began spending more of his free time in the market, befriending traders and investing in safe venues such as antiques. His mother Anush, having been educated in the Synod as a youth, knew of Daedric tongues, and so he could easily verify if the things he bought were fake or not. One Ashlander idol, one fake Akaviri Katana and one giant’s thumb later, Garo finally found something of use – a Dwemer auto-drill, which, with the help of a carpenter and a blacksmith, was converted into a dough kneading machine for his mother.

While Aram was personally cautious about his son’s seemingly meaningless hobby, did not voice any concerns or act to stop him; it was his son’s own money, and he figured his son was old enough to know the value of it. It was a pleasant surprise when he found out that Garo was also selling them and even making a meager profit. What he definitely did not expect, however, was Garo approaching him with a business proposition one day. Still, his son had grown old enough to grow facial hair, and so, recognizing him as a fellow adult than one of his younger sons, he decided to sit down and hear what Garo was to say. It was not about antiques, as he expected, but instead a long and well-framed explanation of how they weren’t making all the money they could from exports; were a member of the Minassian family sell their wares by themselves, instead of selling them to a trader for them to sale wherever, they would be bringing in far more money.

Aram was more a craftsman than a tradesman, but he could tell a profitable deal when he saw it. Garo was far from his best glassworker, and he understood, from the very fact that Garo himself showed the opportunity, that the boy’s aptitude was outside the workshop. And thus, Aram loaned Garo the money necessary to join a trading caravan – were Garo to make a loss, he would have to pay for it; were Aram to make a profit, he would get his fee and the Minassian workshop would get its rightful due. For a true, dyed-in-the-wool tradesman, it wasn’t exactly the best deal, but for Garo, whose primary motivation was to get himself some agency than to get himself some Septims, it was perfectly acceptable. The young Imperial got to work immediately – he bought two small wagons, two horses, the precautions necessary for the glass to not shatter on the way to its destination, and off to Skyrim he was sent.

Garo’s journey towards the cold lands of the North was not a particularly favorable one, for even though he’d sold off half his inventory in Bruma (there was an upcoming wedding and the groom’s father wanted the best of the best), the journey through the Jerall Mountains made it a nerve-wracking endeavor to traverse with a wagon full of glassware. By the time they were down the Pale Pass and in Helgen, Garo had sacrificed one of his horses to save a wagon, and loaned the dogs of a musher in its place. Thankfully, the clientele of Whiterun were affluent enough for Garo to sell some of his remaining stock to make up for his losses during the journey, and from Whiterun on, it was smooth sailing. Plains were crossed, giants were observed from afar, and many an astonishing sight was witnessed on the way to Solitude, as if to strengthen Garo’s desire to stay on the road. It wasn’t without its problems, of course, but what experience was free to man without any toil and suffering?

It was in Solitude where Garo revealed the crown jewels of his wares; flexible glass. Folks first thought of it as Malachite, but Garo was quick to prove the claimants otherwise by help of an alchemist who appraised it. While not as durable as something made of Malachite, it was bona fide glass, as opposed to a material with a glassy look, and more importantly, it was far cheaper. Though he’d only brought one exhibition piece and one dinner set, it was bought for the Blue Palace itself, selling for more than the worth of his entire wagon. While he would later learn that his profit from the dinner set was due to noble families competing for a unique gift for an upcoming wedding, and not because of its actual value, the profit was made, and so was the point – this was all the proof Garo needed for his father to continue this new business venture. In a hurry to bring the good news, Garo even sold the wagons to make for a faster return.

The entrepreneur’s return was much celebrated by the family, and the money he made was well accepted. Turned out that, in Garo’s absence, a fire had broken out in one of the apprentice workshops, and although insured, compensations had to be made for the families of the workers that had lost their lives. While the family was tangled in the ensuing busywork, Garo learned that his father had already paid for preparations for a repeat trip, this time with a much larger stock. Unable to explain the conditions in which he’d made such money, he found himself obliged to make even bigger profits, and with a younger brother in tow, he was sent again to Skyrim. While anxious about the increased responsibilities at first, on the road up to the Jeralls, he found enough time to socialize with his younger brother, Decimus, to realize that others in the family shared his feelings about the business. Perhaps it was brotherly vigor, or perhaps it was the desire to see his desires act further, but Garo managed to put his fears aside and begin considering how they could make a profit from the trip that they had found themselves in.

More knowledgeable about the Pale Pass than the last time, the brothers Minassian were able to pass the border without issue, and although the sights of Skyrim were no less exhilarating to see the second time than the first, foreboding omens clouded the brothers’ journey. Learning that the High King was killed on their way to Solitude, and that Nord separatists, named Stormcloaks, were rebelling throughout the land, Garo and Decimus decided to avoid the possible rumble awaiting them in the city and made their way back to Whiterun to unload their remaining goods, and leave the province for good. However, they ended up finding themselves beset by separatist bandits on the road. Decimus was about to unsheathe his sword when Garo decided to leave one wagon behind as an offering and get away with Decimus on the second. Although the bandits were quick to turn back on their heels once they found that the wagon was full of glassware, the brothers’ wagon had covered enough distance for the bandits to decide that the chase was not worth it.

The rest they had in Whiterun was short, and was not exactly filling them with confidence. Glassware was not exactly in high demand during times of civil war, and the brothers had unloaded their wagon for a pittance. Decimus was fearful of looking like a failure upon their return, and Garo was fearful of his venture being shut down. But fear was no cure for fate, and thus, they accepted their lot and decided to return. While passing through Helgen, Decimus remarked of the Colovians’ demand for the beverages of the north, and Garo made his last gamble, buying some barrels of Helgen Juniper Mead before making their way back home. Their wagons filled with booze, their hearts filled with fear, the brothers made their way through the Pale Pass into the Jeralls – and woke in the early day to unearthly roars, bearing witness to a great black dragon laying waste to the town they’d spent the other day in.

Alduin had made the brothers rich.

Descending hurriedly to Bruma with news of the situation, the brothers were first lauded as fearmongers, but when official reports of Helgen’s destruction reached the city, they were promptly summoned to report for the Count of Bruma. For their ‘service to the Empire’, they were given a meager sum of money, but they would later learn that the jackpot lay in their wagons. With the breweries of Helgen burnt to ash, and their workers similarly gone, the brothers Minassian were in all likelihood the owners of the single largest amount of the remaining Juniper Mead on all Tamriel, a vessel with which they could strike deep into the pockets of rich Colovians. Saving a barrel for the family to keep, the brothers began traveling through Colovia, telling tales of how Alduin had laid waste to an entire town before their very eyes, and then selling the heavily impressed, fearful Nords the ‘last bottles of Helgen’s finest’. By the time they returned to Cheydinhal, their coffers were full of gold.

Nonetheless, the experience was not without its damage. Garo was somewhat harrowed by their fear of being attacked through the journey, and the apocalyptic sight of an antediluvian monster wiping out a city before his very eyes was not exactly beneficial for his mindset. He quit traveling for a while, leaving it to his more adventurous brother Decimus and whoever Decimus could convince, himself taking to bookkeeping for the family’s trade venture and planning for the future. He began reading up on contemporary accounts of the Dominion, wondering if there was any money to be made in the southern provinces – they would not have the protection of the Empire, but it was not like it had served them any in Skyrim anyway. He figured that Aram would not mind if he spent some time for himself, having created an excellent business opportunity for the family to capitalize upon and bringing in the lion’s share of the profit.

Garo’s next five years were spent at home, refining himself – at first, he joined the town militia in case of the Civil War going awry and reaching south, although the Cheydinhal Trained Band soon proved to be no more than a bunch of grown men dressing and marching like toy soldiers. Nonetheless, because of his status as a member of a prominent family, and his presence in the militia, he was approached by a Knight of the Thorn to be inducted into their brotherhood. Garo accepted the offer and quickly made use of his newly forged connections to make his family the sole supplier of glassware for the families of the young nobles that were now his brothers-in-arms. From his knighthood onward, Garo spent most of his time joining the Knights in hunting parties, drinking parties and, well, just parties. Not only was it a good time, but it also allowed him to deepen his family’s influence in the city, which never hurt.

It was around this time when Garo, constantly urged by his parents to settle down and start a family of his own, decided to heed their advice. While he’d had a few escapades in his youth, and some short-stint lovers to accompany his partying with the Knights of the Thorn, when he looked back upon it, there was nothing concrete in his personal life. He began accompanying his mother Anush to ladies’ gatherings, and after hours upon hours of listening to the tales of the wives of burghers and stealing glances at their daughters, he eventually found a suitable candidate. Elena Albarnian was her name, a well-built lass about eight years younger than Garo, and even though Anush was concerned about her having Colovian or Nord ancestry, her argument being that no true Nibenese woman could stand at the same height as a man, the Albarnians were well established for their reputable ancestry as bankers, and more importantly, Garo had found something captivating in the girl’s gaze.

The marriage was arranged quickly, his father and his brothers congratulating Garo on finding a proper girl with a proper family (think of all the investments they could make!), and although Elena was not entirely loveless towards Garo, finding him a decent man, their feelings for each other did not seem to go beyond the initial spark. Along with that came the problem of Elena’s father, Hasphat, dying soon after their marriage – with no living child other than Elena and two other daughters, there was no man left to handle the family business, and the responsibility fell on his sons-in-law, one of them being Garo. Being only properly introduced to his in-laws at a rather tense dinner, he found that oversight of the Albarnian banks were divided to three upon Hasphat’s death, with Garo being responsible for the bank’s activity in Elsweyr and Valenwood. While somewhat peeved about his lack of consent to his new responsibilities, Garo was not exactly in a position to refuse and ended up abiding, for the sake of his newly wed wife, if nothing else.

Of course, after some dinners and some time, Garo would receive news that his in-laws had used their position to take considerable loans from the Imperial Treasury, before selling their shares in the bank and running off to parts unknown; last Garo heard, they were in southern Morrowind, supposedly planning an expedition to Akavir. Whatever the plans of the two were, Garo found that he alone was responsible for paying off the in-laws’ loans, as to not get into further legal trouble with the bank’s new shareholders – one fat, quarrelsome Dunmer by the name of Helseth Girano, one Khajiit whose name he forgets, even fatter than Helseth, and worse, the Imperial Treasury itself. Under threat of legal action, Garo began seeing to the liquidation of the bank, considering it the safest option since he had no knowledge of banking nor any enthusiasm for it, and made his way to Elsweyr with the fat Khajiit to proceed.

And boy, it was a doozy.

Caught up in a chain of events involving a completely emptied bank vault, at least three drug syndicates, an attempted coup, a Daedric cult, a gigantic toad swordmaster and copious amounts of Skooma, Garo found himself returning to Cyrodiil three years later a disheveled, balding mess, and found that he had been legally declared dead and that his wife had inherited his share of the Minassian wealth and remarried. While Garo did not hold any contempt against his now ex-wife, since he himself wasn’t sure if the whole ordeal wasn’t a dying dream, the fact that he was alive was the cause of a lengthy legal battle, which he was only able to fund thanks to his family. Some years later, the court was settled, with Garo still responsible for liquidating the bank assets in Valenwood, and Elena still a divorcee. In debt to his family both spiritually and financially, and in debt to the Imperial Treasury, Garo ended up journeying to Valenwood to wrap up his business, and had just managed to write off the Albarnian Bank and chase new trade opportunities with the Dominion before finding himself tangled in yet another adventure.

Biggest Regret: While he has since been divorced, Garo considers marrying his ex-wife Elena to be the worst mistake of his life, mostly because of the matters that he found himself having to contend with after marriage. He is still partial to Elena and the two are coolly civil with each other, but nonetheless, having lost nearly three years in Elsweyr, and almost his life, in trying to save his in-laws' debts from taking his family down with them, Garo is understandably not very chill about the matter.

Garo‘s Goal: Garo has a simple goal in life, to be rich enough to not worry about work or debts anymore. While he is not without greed, the goal is fueled more by a desire to settle back down and live his life in peace, rather than a Sisyphean desire to amass more money.

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Skills:

Expert: Mercantile
Adept: Alchemy, Hand-to-Hand, Speechcraft
Novice: Acrobatics, Athletics, One-Handed Blade

Spells:
None

Equipment:
-A burgher’s outfit
-A sword belt
-A potion satchel
-A Nibenese sword
-A Khajiiti dagger
-A Camel hair cape
-A purse heavy with Septims

Misc. Possessions:
-A quill and inkwell set
-A few wraps of parchment
-A bundle of financial documents
-A ledger of sales
-A personal journal