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The Elder Scrolls: Fruits of Contention - Chapter 1 (Completed)

@gcold You're killin' me with the antici-

@Dervish

The Elder Scrolls: Fruits of Contention - Chapter 1 (Completed)

By the time Wylendriel arrives, and assuming she takes notice, who is still wounded? She'll preoccupy herself with that before anything else. Also tell me if you don't want to Deus ex Machina yourself out of an injury if you think it's important for the character. I don't want to be That Guy.

The Elder Scrolls: Fruits of Contention - Chapter 1 (Completed)

Wylendriel Greensky, the Cursed Priestess of Kynareth

Wylendriel Greensky

_{Female Bosmer | 60 | The Lady}

Profile

Place of Origin

Grahtwood, Valenwood

Appearance

Her overall demeanor is as unsuspecting and as humble as she is dressed, in the layered robes bequeathed to her by the temple where she worships her goddess, Kynareth. One critical look at the Bosmer and her identity as a priestess becomes quite apparent. She seems as gentle and dainty a thing as one might suspect, looking doe-eyed around her as though she were at constant risk, and as ever agile like so many of her kind, with her lithe frame moving with disguised grace. She has become fairly fit though a nomadic lifestyle, though weighing in at just 110 lbs. Standing at 5'3", her height seems as any other wood-elven folk, but her stance is a tall one, or at least like she's attempting to make herself seem taller than she really has; how the arc in her back seems to exist to support shoulders weary from hardship. You wouldn't think so to look at her, but she's actually lived through 60 years of life! That's technically pretty short for a Bosmer and is considered to be barely scraping by as an adult.

A heart-shaped face bears a stiff upper lip, but perhaps only to steady the quivering lip beneath it as she tries her damnedest to stay strong. It is this very same face that also bears an upturned button nose which she keeps raised high in the air, as if to hold herself above whatever degrading or shameful – inexplicable thing, in lack of better wording, for she does not carry with her an air of arrogance or nobility; more as though there are intrusive thoughts in her head that she seeks to prove herself to be above. Her long, silky auburn hair is usually braided up haphazardly into a bun. It reveals a youthful - almost wild - face, given the thin jawline and pointed chin, the high cheekbones and wide forehead - but only attractive if a person could bring themselves to look past the those wide Bosmer eyes and the array of sharp teeth made for tearing through meat.

Her robes are made from hide and thin leather in the middle of layers for durability and protection, with wool stitched over the outside as the outer layer, and treated with wax to protect against the rain. The inside of the robes is all grizzly bear fur warming her skin and absorbing whatever perspiration there may be. These robes adorned with a number of buttons made from polished bone and apparently just as many pouches hanging from a belt made from a thick leather, and with it, a curious trophy of an eagle skull. The robe's tailoring even applies to the hood, making this outfit a very heavy one to be lugging around - good for the regions of Skyrim, High Rock, and Wrothgar, but less so anywhere else south of Bruma. Beneath, she wears tight-fitted, black-colored, wool undergarments that cover her torso and thighs, but otherwise leaves exposed her arms and her legs from the knees down. Her feet are covered with fur boots and her hands are usually bare, but as a part time alchemist who follows the Green Pact, her hands are stained with all manners of ichors and ingredients, and frequently smell... obnoxiously robust, to be putting it gently. The sight of pointed nails that seem like claws can only lend more anxious energy to the smell of her hands. A leather satchel hangs at her side from a strap going across her chest and over one of her shoulders.

The robes can fortunately be separated from the inside layer of bear fur in case of warmer weather. The hide and wool outside layers function like a shell or windbreaker of the inside. Underneath her garments however, this young elf's sand colored skin is littered with scars. Some small, and others very, very large. If one didn't know better, they would think she had died terribly and was stitched right back up. Gnarly gouging scars in her abdomen, punctures in her legs, slashes over her arms, a smaller one down the side of both her lips, a bite mark on her chest, lashes across her back, and a slash around her throat. Any attempt at questioning these are met with silence and never answered. So gruesome is this sight, you may not immediately noticed the tattoos on her body, markings of the winged herald. Feathered wings stretch out from the center of the back with the tips of its furthest feathers reaching down the back of her arms. Smaller wings are placed on her chest by her collarbones, reaching to her shoulders. Feathers rest above both of her eyebrows.

Personality

Lately, there has been a buildup of disturbing events that have left her emotionally distant and afraid to get close to people. She doesn't want to put anybody at risk out of this acquired fear of accidentally hurting those around her through whatever accident may arise from her compulsions. Yet, there also exists an element of distrust that makes it difficult for her to get close to people. This distrust is not so pervasive in her personality that it breeds conflicts with others, but impedes any progress in the development of a real, meaningful relationship. How this distrust affects her most is how, over the last couple of weeks, she has learned to put her own life in her own hands instead of relying on others. She has great potential for love, platonic or otherwise - she feels those emotions, but she fearfully rejects any oncoming advances and closes her heart to interested parties.

Continuing with this duality theme of withdrawn concern, she, as suggested before, prefers to take measures into her own hands. While some of it may come from a priestess' humility in not wanting to burden others with her own responsibilities, it too comes from that same distrust factor. Unaccountable variables could compromise the outcome, and therefore she would prefer to do it herself and take responsibility for any failure should failure occur. Insisting to her that it does not have to be that way, that she can rely on others sometimes, is a vain effort since her stubbornness blocks off any attempt to appeal to her vulnerability. She is paranoid, stubborn, caught up in her own sense of responsibility, and would just as quickly sit them down by force if they continue to pester her. This hedgehog's dilemma is not an ingrained flaw, but was acquired, and only recently.

This doesn't Wylendriel make callous though. She is still a healer, she has compassionate - on that same note, she's not a pushover. Her commanding tone is useful for bedside manner and her timid nature is thrown out the window when her areas of responsibilities (healing, sermon, etc.) come around. This dutiful disposition is tempered with motherly care, putting every ounce of effort into making sure her patients have a healthy recovery. Additionally, she is nonjudgmental of the other races. This even applies to the Nords – she understands that she entered Skyrim during a time of fear and struggle. She takes no absurd amount of pride in her elven heritage like the Thalmor do. Instead, she believes that there is something to learn from every culture. Still, she is understandably cautious while approaching nords he hasn't met yet (or any race of men for that matter, considering the Dominion's siege on the rest of Tamriel has left them suspicious of elves, and even the Dominion itself wants her head on a pike). She also has a love for poetry.

Even through her endearing visage, it is not difficult to tell that there is something more beneath the surface, and it cannot be pointed toward any one thing. It is an anger, it is an itch, it is a compulsion, an intrusive thought - it is a guilty conscience. It is as though a seed of evil was planted in her heart, and with all of her might she tries to reject it - bury it - kill it - but try as she may, it is like a craving and it only grows hungrier with time. The line between her desires and the compulsions of this seed are blurred, the feelings that she feels feel alien, because - Gods help her, she's a priestess for Kyne's sake, a healer. All of these little suggestions in her head, ever-so-sublte, this feeling of craving - is almost like a lust for violence, to feel in control, a sort of bestial blood-lust that is so damn insatiable that she just barely feeds into it with just the barest degree of violence so that it does not totally overwhelm her. She knows it's not her, she knows it does not belong there, and she knows exactly where it came from.

Her guilt stems from many things – one being the doubt of her faith to her Lady. This guilt best summarizes her her real self. She feels guilty for making the decision of accepting a deal that costed her soul, for choosing a daedra over Kynareth, this evil that has planted itself inside her, and about her growing doubt in the Nine Divines. She once tried to justify it, after all, had they not left her to die at the hands of her betrayers? For Arkay's sake, perhaps it would be right for her to die, but where was Stendarr's mercy? Or Kynareth's gift to her faithful? Then comes the feelings of guilt regarding that sense of entitlement and her expectations of the gods. The guilt of her bloody crimes. The guilt of her own betrayal of another. She is torn in many different ways and wishes for peace inside herself to ease that discord, and there's little question as to why she has so little inner strength to spare.

With all her years as a healer and priestess under her belt, she thought herself ready for death, but in the end she found herself no more at peace than the lost and wounded souls she preached to. She beats herself up for it and belittles herself, and Molag Bal's corruption further taints her. With all of this inner turmoil, Wylendriel is growing more convinced there is no saving one such as herself. In the end though, she has come to find that there is greater justice to be found in healing as many as she can than in taking the easy way out. After some time and coming to terms with herself, she feels that it would be best to work at bettering herself one step at a time, and that the first step would be to remove the daedra's influence once and for all - which in itself is a monumental task, but prays that the mercy of the Nine Divines would be such that they would cleanse her spirit: the last few shreds of her faith clings to this desperate gambit: the deciding act that would finally determine the fate of what remained.

Background

The Journey

Wylendriel was born in Valenwood, to a respected mother and father that devoted their lives to Y'ffre in Elder Root, Grahtwood. They especially had taken to the Green Pact and were loyally faithful to the religion as Spinners, its enforcers. So much, in fact, their first born daughter, named Wylendriel, was conditioned to follow the Green Pact out the womb and would be raised with the intentions of making her a priestess as well. For the earliest years, the young and impressionable Bosmer lass adhered to family tradition, studying her people's history and following each and every rule obediently - there was nothing else, only Y'ffre - and was on the road to receiving the same kind of respect her parents had in her society. It went this way for a couple years, learning more and more about Valenwood, it's friends and enemies, healing; and all the while, the Aldmeri Dominion, formed a couple hundred years before she was even born, assumed a larger presence inside Valenwood. As she learned more about her allies, she learned more about their culture and about the Dominion's enemies, she discovered something about the Imperial Empire: their Nine Divines. They had a parallel to Y'ffre through Kynareth, except that she seemed to exemplify the beauty and force of nature. Wylendriel's family did not expect her to discover Kynareth in the world around her.

She didn't replace Y'ffre, no. Rather, the goddess only added to the enrichment of Wy's world. If Y'ffre was the father, the state of existing, of only being - Kynareth was the mother, its force, it's passion, beauty and danger, she breathed the soul into life and made it beautiful. Life was essential, yes, but it was simply existing - what would life be were it not the soul and beauty that made life worthwhile? Kynareth was nature. This self-found philosophy touched Wylendriel so profoundly that she chose to educate herself how she could in order to follow in the footsteps of her newfound Lady. Such material was hard to come by in Valenwood, so her knowledge was only rudimentry, and her family never quite looked at her the same after it - but as long as she didn't forsake the Green Pact, they figured there was nothing wrong with it. She looked happy! She was interested in helping others. They still intended on keeping her faith a secret from the Thalmor of the Dominion. Who knows what they might think of it?

All that the Altmer and the Aldmeri Dominion had brought to Valenwood were not so great, though. They brought also strife to some few, select Bosmer communities. Rumors of purges spread across Valenwood, of isolated executions by the hands of Altmer inquisitors in the north. Word had it that the victims were deserving of such a fate. They were "unworthy savages, not befitting to be part of this grand alliance of Mer." Not many questioned it, they had this idea that their "close bond" with the Altmer was far too valuable to forsake. Wylendriel's family would of course be spared, being far too valuable and important to Bosmer society. It was not unheard of that some Bosmer took the Green Pact to extremes, and it was no wonder that the Altmer thought they were a barbaric people. While Wylendriel followed a watered-down version of it, where she and others rejected cannibalism, the purists hunted their enemies and consumed their flesh. It was a revolting thought in her mind, though despite that, there was still the sense of racial kinship. Then you have the ones supporting Imperial occupation, which would no doubt prove them as traitors. It was depressing to hear of the Altmer killing them, but she followed two deities of nature, and death and survival was part of the cycle of nature. All she felt she could do was pray for them in honor of perpetuating that cycle.

The years had gone on and Wylendriel was growing into a full-fledged woman, and she and some others of her community has remained fairly ignorant of the events occurring in the outside world. She practiced her skills of restoration magic to heal wounded hunters after their return from the forest, and using conventional medicine to follow after, or if the wounds were too small. As her reputation grew, she found herself healing soldiers doing only-Gods-know-what, but it wasn't her place to ask or to judge. While she had taken a path of faith that had warranted some disappointment from her family, she gained value in the eyes of some few Altmer agents of the Dominion. They took notice of not just her intense devotion, but her skills as a healer. Offered ever so diplomatically to enlist with the Dominion as a field medic, Wylendriel felt obligated to decline for she was no warrior. They saw it as a reasonable defense, though she was curious about the influx of Aldmeri soldiers coming their way. Had they been at war all along? Though they found her naivety cute, all they said to her was that it was nothing to worry about. Just some few skirmishes with the human empire up north. They let her be without further harassment on that note, but continued to send Altmer infantry to her in Valenwood if they were near enough. She came to be idolized as a highly regarded citizen in her community, endeared for her compassion and healing ability.

She found it pretty humorous. Rarely was one found without the other.

Though ignorant of world events she may have been, the news of conflict that broke out in northern Valenwood spread like wildfire. Separatist dissenters lashed out against the Aldmeri Dominion, and with the help of the Empire, drove them south. Dominion presence became more prevalent in the south and were organizing to make counter-attacks against the separatists and the Imperial Empire that backed them. The outside world's trouble have broken in, and truth of the Dominion's deeds had gotten clearer. The rumors of executions of the Bosmeri people were more than just rumors, and they weren't just isolated incidents. The purges were more like a systematic slaughter. Indeed, they saw the Bosmer as little more than barbarians. Though elven, they were still more like second class citizens than trusted allies. When a close friend of Wylendriel was ruthlessly murdered, only because they found her on her haunches and leaning over a bloody rabbit - for simply eating - she saw these purges for what it really was: cultural cleansing. They were the judge, jury, and executioner of any that the Altmer thought weren't good or "civilized" enough to be their underlings.

It was at the turn of her adulthood when Wylendriel defamed the Aldmeri Dominion, and sure enough, it wasn't a popular opinion. She was branded as a traitor, and before she could turn to flee Valenwood, she was briefly stopped by her family. They parted ways with a hug and a kiss, proud of their daughter's courage, and with a gift in the form of an eagle's skull. It was the acknowledgement and acceptance of her faith in Kynareth. What could have been more symbolic of the nature goddess of the wind than that? She escaped shortly after to the far corners of Tamriel attempting to evade the Dominion with war waging around her as she went. Whether it was by foot or by caravan, she eventually found herself in the wilds of southern Skyrim by the end of the year. She was found by a Markarth patrol in the Reach, and they reigned her in for questioning – mostly to her potential ties to the Dominion. She managed to convince them that she was no friend of the Thalmor, but they were still suspicious of the elf passing through. Still fearful of the Dominion's discovery of her, Wylendriel fled once again as soon as she was fed and rested towards the east, where the Nords of Eastmarch were notorious for their particular disdain of elven kind. This didn't worry her though; whatever vulgarity or mud they wanted to sling her way would be nothing compared to the punishment the Thalmor would deliver unto her.

She payed the carriage a hearty sum to take her to the other side of Skyrim, and instead she landed in front of Whiterun. They learned that the road ahead was blockaded by bandits and the man refused to go further. So she remained in central Skyrim. From the beginning, things were hard, but it was though the goddess herself was watching over her - she found her place in a Temple of Kynareth, much to her fortune, in front of the Gildergreen. Here, her restoration magic and medicinal skills were highly valued. Her safety was assured here, behind tall walls and Skyrim's staunch stance against the Aldmeri Dominion. Also being a servant of the goddess, she could find respite from the Dominion under the Jarl's protection. When she first arrived at the temple, she stood at the door in ragged furs and hide, nearly destroyed by the long trip across Tamriel. She nearly looked like a beggar! But her devotion was unquestionable. They took her in and made her sturdy, warm, and reliable robes that reflected her Green Pact, but was befitting of a priestess. They reminded her of home.

The path ahead presented far more difficulties than she had anticipated. Cultural roadblocks, miscommunication, and just a general misunderstanding of how nord society even functioned. It proved difficult to gain the trust of the local nords, but her devotion to the goddess Kynareth was almost tangible and she treated every visitor with the utmost respect and humility. She poured everything she had into every restoration spell and genuinely cared about her patients. Such diligence guaranteed her respect from Skyrim's most stubborn nords. It was heartwarming to find a place where she belonged. During her stay at the Temple of Kyne, the priestesses that already lived there taught her everything there was to know about Kynareth. Wy's rudimentary understanding was greatly expanded upon and she was taught practices that seemed totally unnecessary back home. For instance, it was tradition to learn how to summon a familiar, a guardian of nature, to perhaps protect or lead the way. The familiar would, in one way or another, guide the caster along their path. In addition, human priesthood expanded their services beyond just healing. She was expected to learn how to repel and banish the undead and daedric forces that threatened Nirn. They helped to bolster her powers of Restoration magic, and gave her a basic understanding of Conjuration. Conjuring familiars came easy, but banishment is where she really struggled with. Turns out she has a much harder time with making things go away than she does with making things stay.

It wasn't before long that she decided to go on a pilgrimage to visit the Eldergleam. On the 26th of Mid Year, she hired mercenaries. They were nords from Eastmarch, and their job was to escort her on her hike eastward and protect her from the likes of bandits, and honestly, it was also a precaution to increase her chance of survival should a dragon find her (assuming that there was still one in hiding that the last Dragonbon had not yet slain). She left with her temple's blessing and set out on the long road ahead.

But all went south once on the 30th once they circled around the mountain, High Hrothgar. In the middle of nowhere, miles from any sign of civilization, Wylendriel was struck by betrayal. The very men she payed to protect her turned around and jumped her, before dragging her off to some remote location at a ruined site where she was thrown onto a stone slab. She was mugged, beaten, stolen from, and... Gods, violated. They passed her around like a toy, taking turns, laughing! They told her, every time they beat her... stabbed her... lashed her, and bit her - they told her that she had this coming. This was she got for being an elf. When they were finally finished with her, when she finally thought they would leave her be and let her wallow in her suffering, one of them slid their knife across her throat. She was spat on and left for dead, Wylendriel was spending her final moments bleeding out, gurgling and drowning in her own blood and unable to breath, laying there and clutching her throat. She spent her last moments fearful and in tears and in silent prayer. First to her lady Kynareth, but she was silent. Thoughts of the circle of life intruded into her mind, the lessons of the temple - but she couldn't let go feeling so betrayed – it was too unfair. As she felt her life slipping away, she prayed to any of the Divines asking for mercy and a second chance. Her prayers went unheard, and with her consciousness on the verge of slipping, she made a final cry for mercy to anything that would listen.

A gutteral, malevolent voice filled her mind. "I can save your life," it offered, "if just for now, and if you would pledge your soul to me..."

Blinded by desperation, she accepted the offer. Her vision went black and she remembered nothing between then and when she finally awoke in the small village of Ivarstead three days later.

When she awoke on the 3rd of Sun's Height, she was seemingly in complete recovery, though covered in gruesome looking scars strewn across her body. As fortune would have it, a hunter found her unconscious far off in the middle of nowhere, but said he found her unharmed. If he didn't know better, it looked as though she lied down and took a nap... were her clothes not torn in several places, mostly over her chest and around her waist. They were folded next to her with a needle and some thread for her to fix her torn clothing – apparently whoever took her in didn't have any confidence in patching it. Physically, she felt fine save for a gross feeling pit in the center of her chest. It felt empty. She felt violated. As she recalled back to the last thing she could remember, the horrifying scenes of her abusers wracked her mind. The mere memory was torture and she felt sick to her stomach, and no longer felt at home inside her own skin - as her memory returned, so did the same malevolent voice. What happened? What had she just done?

Painful headaches wracked her head. Ear-splitting droning sounds, a cacopheny of whispers, all trying to talk ove rone another - nothing was getting through - all of it - too much - an onslaught of sensory overload as she felt tears well up her eyes over the stress of everything over the last couple of hours - what had to have been hours - the sounds, the screeching, the incoherent chaos - it fell silent. She took deep, heavy breathes as she looked around the room feeling traumatized.

"What... what in Oblivion was tha--" The piercing frequency came out louder than before and was accompanied by what had to have been a thousand red images in rapid succession, "--AAAAAHHH! Gah! Ha... ha! What... What is--"

A thousand more images, barely decipherable, and she was clutching her head and squeezing her eyes shut as the chaos unraveled itself in her head. A man burst through the door of the cabin she was in, a fretful looking man, alarmed by Wylendriel's screaming, found her in this position with tears silently rolling down her cheeks. Among these images, she was able to discern the bloodied maw of a laughing daedric face and the realization of what she has done finally hit her. The blasphemy of her actions stabbed sharper into her chest than any weapon her betrayers used.

"What happened?" Asked the panicked man. She couldn't see what he looked like, she was just wanting to make everything stop.

"This... this migraine..." She told him in weeping. "Make it stop..."

"You look like you've gone through Oblivion and back," he commented, "what's with all of your scars, what happened to you?"

Another thousand images played in her head, but they played slightly slower, almost like a recording of what happened to her. Her mind's eye stretched over Skyrim through red-colored spectacles, and found herself watching her own abuse from a bird's eye view. Over... and over again... she felt the rage and fury build up inside of her, this hatred. The images shot across Skyrim to the northeastern region of Eastmarch and into a cabin, where she got a close up view of her betrayers, their ugly mugs, laughing and drinking... Gods, this unnatural hatred that she did not understand, but at the same time... wasn't it natural? Wasn't it natural to hate the people who did this to hurt, the people who violated her as she watched over and over again... to crave their pitiful! Bloody! Murder--

No... no, no, no! No! This! Wasn't! Normal! Why is she thinking this? Why is she wanting and craving this?!

As she watched these images, as fast and as abrupt as they were, stalled for just a second on the slab she was layed on. Beneath the dust, she could barely trace out the faint imprints of daedric runes. One last image of herself being hurled into the mouth of a massive daedric beast before it stopped and a single whisper echoed through her ears: "I own you."

Suddenly, everything stopped liked she was hoping it would. The stranger's voice was barely able to break through and Wylendriel was barely able to understand the flashes of images behind her eyes at face value, but something inside her gave this intuitive understanding of what was happening to her. The daedric face she was seeing had imprinted on her, and for some reason, recognizable. It's name was clear, and it wanted her to know what exactly that was. Molag Bal. Prince of Domination. Of Schemes.

"Ma'am? Can you hear me?" The stranger asked. "Where did you get your scars?"

The thought of her betrayers sprung back to mind. The sheer anger that she felt at just the image of their faces made her hands shake.

"Ask about my scars again, and I'll show you exactly how I got them." Wylendriels said without thinking. She paused and reeled for a moment. "That did not just happen..." she muttered to herself. The words had just fallen out of her mouth, there wasn't any hesitation, they just - they just...

"Shor's bones, fine!" The stranger retorted. "I won't pry any further, but I was just trying to help, damn it!"

Wylendriel speechlessly watched him march out of the cabin. She knew this wasn't good, but emphatically, for some reason, could not bring herself to care. What she was an image of the people who hurt her, and as far as she felt concerned, Molag Bal offered her a chance for revenge and she planned on taking him up on that offer. Stitching her robes back together the best she could (making it more of a patch job, she wasn't concerned with prettiness), and set out on the open road with nothing but the clothes on her back. Only resting when her knees felt like buckling marching across Eastmarch, finding raw food on the way - utilizing aspects of of Restoration magic she never dared to use before by sapping the vitality of animals and leaving their husks behind. It nearly took a whole week to reach the place that her visions scarred her mind with, but she eventually found the riverside shack in Eastmarch.

Staring it down, the same house from the images that flickered in her head, seemed to trigger flashes of individual images, almost like a magical flow, but something more sinister like a daedric energy. They made her aware of something that was apparently there from the moment she awoken in Ivarstead. Whatever it was she knew of Conjuration magic, it felt expanded upon. A sort of intuitive knowledge, but it didn't quite belong in the brain. She knew what it meant to take magicka and use it to summon a familiar. The sort of direction in which to swing it. The intuitive knowledge that Molag Bal had imparted unto her only concerned itself from where she could draw her power from. There was no plan of action. Calling upon this Conjuration magic, an ethereal daedric mace rippled into existence into her hand before she kicked open the door, surprising the three nords inside - and they looked at her in horror when recognition of her face set in.

Wylendriel roared at them in unbridled rage, fueling the hatred and blood lust that had seeped into her heart. "Did you think you could betray me?!"

Two of them scrambled for their weapons, but one of them was too surprised and confused as to how the Bosmer bitch was still alive, so much that he did not expect the wild aggression the Kynareth priestess exhibited as she lunged towards him and grabbed him by the throat with one hand with crushing force, her sharp nails sinking into his throat. A green aura surrounded her hand that sapped away the nord's energy. His arms fell weakly at his sides. The second and third nord came rushing towards her with axe and sword in hand. In her berserk, she ripped out the first nord's esophagus to be flung at one of their faces and swung the mace with all of her unrestrained might, knocking the second bearded attacker onto the ground with a crack of his sternum and another swift swing knocked away the third who was stunned by the bloody piece of flesh she threw at him - destroying his spine through the fur armor. Wylendriel contently watched them both squirm on the floor, savoring this moment while it lasted.

"I own you." She growled.

She turned to the bearded nord, squirming and scrambling to get away. She dropped onto her knees over his body with one palm firmly planted on his chest. It glowed a sickly green and steadily drained away the man's stamina, fueling repeated rage-filled swings of the the spectral mace into the nord's head until virtually nothing was left but shards of bone and liquefied gore. She was unable to feel it at this moment, but muscles in her shoulder were tearing with each swing, unable to hold themselves together with all the force she was forcing herself to exert. The third, crippled nord was later met the same fate.

When the last deed was done, the energy and the bloodlust that she felt coursing through her body dissipated until her body felt pained and weary. The mace evaporated into the air, and she weakly fell to her knees. Her conscience was now clear, and she looked around at the scene that surrounded her. Three utterly obliterated men, now unidentifiable, their blood seeping into floorboards - the scenes kept replaying inside her traumatized head. The emotions. Rage and blood lust. Their faces - splitting, with each and every crack... crack! Crack! Crunch! She - she... these unspeakable acts of, just... violence - committed by her own hand - they betrayed her! They were supposed to deserve this! Yet - her memories fell back to home, both in Valenwood and to her place in the Temple of Kyne. Recalling everything they had known then, and her values - even the Green Pact said not to kill wastefully. It all came rushing back to her, and all of the justification she thought she had melted away. What she had done here was indisputably evil, and here she was... almost... enjoying it. She broke down into sobs, all the while hugging her arms in trying to bear the agony they were under. It took a long time to bring herself to move, but she eventually mustered herself the will to use Restoration magic on herself. She felt the muscles sort of stitch themselves back together, and she would be okay - at least physically - but the the phantom pains will remain for a little while longer.

The moment she could bring herself to her feet, she ran. She fled from the scene, from the cabin, as fast as she could - as far south as her legs could carry her. Until finally, she fell down exhausted in the middle of Eastmarch. After their deaths, Molag Bal's corruption seemed to have disappeared from her mind. The images hadn't returned, but she still feared the possibility of hearing his voice again like from the time he offered to "save" her life. She prayed and prayed as her tears soaked the ground, but the Divines were deathly silent. They'd forsaken her. She had to do something about this. She had to do something other than run - she had to make a pledge to herself to reject the daedric prince. She'd prove it through a pilgrimage around Tamriel. She had to pray to each of the Nine Divines at their shrines, then maybe she could cleanse herself of this evil... but a sinking feeling told her that she would have to do a lot more than just simply pray to earn their forgiveness. In spite of her doubts, she knew from her studies that there was a shrine to Akatosh here in Eastmarch, and it should have been nearby. But weak from the journey, she just found the nearest bush and fell fast asleep.

When she awoke the next day on the 11th, it took some looking around. When she found Akatosh's shrine, she spent an entire day devoted to prayer in front of the dragon god's shrine. Even after an entire day of prayer, she heard nothing. Found nothing, just silence. She had to be persistent. Word had it that Fort Amol held a shrine of Julianos, which wasn't far from here – it was still in Eastmarch. When she arrived at the fort on the 12th, it was bristling with activity, filled with nervous and suspicious nords. They questioned her immediately, brandishing weapons, and she quickly explained herself while withholding some of the truth: she was on pilgrimage. They allowed her to stay for just that one day only because she was on pilgrimage, but warned her not to head to Windhelm to pray at Arkay's shrine. That was when she learned the city was completely overrun and taken over by an Akaviri army. This was the reason for the crowded occupancy of Fort Amol.

“Please,” Wylendriel pleaded, “let me help you. Show me your wounded.”

“There aren't many to show you.” One of the soldiers replied. It wasn't as much a blessing as the soldier made it sound – the battle was catastrophic. Those who participated were lucky to escape with wounds. Most of them died. Those “lucky” few could only manage to escape at the cost of missing limbs. With what few there were to take care of, the medics had already attended to them. But they did manage to do one more thing for Wylendriel after her unanswered prayer to Julianos: they pointed her to a direction. To the west was a shrine of Dibella inside this old abandoned fort, but was likely overridden with bandits or occult practitioners. Necromancy, and the like. Wylendriel was hesitant to pursue this shrine, fearful of not just the risk of going, but because there was also no telling what Molag Bal's curse might do to her. She asked for a different shrine.

“Well, to the northwest are a couple shrines to mighty Talos, just hugging the base of High Hrothgar. The closest one is actually where you follow the river north, then keep going north after it forks off.” They suggested. Then he narrowed his eyes at the Bosmer. “But last I checked, you knife-ears didn't like him very much. Damn near outlawed Talos worship a couple years back – I fought that war.”

“That was the Thalmor.” Wylendriel insisted. “I may not have prayed to Talos before, but I promise you that I will get to know him.”

After Wylendriel rested up and replenished her supplies, and set north for Talos' shrine, making sure to follow the river. Though a rather wet journey, she was greeted that day by the gorgeous sight of a weathered statue overlooking a pond. There she found another person in prayer. When she greeted him, he was alarmed and reeled back in terror. His face revealed pain with red eyes and a puffy faces. He was a man whose tears had run dry.

“What happened?” She asked.

“My wife,” the nord sobbed, “my home! Windhelm, ransacked. The akaviri... I... I've never seen anything like... like--”

The stranger took a deep breath to compose himself. Wylendriel's heart swelled with pain and fear. She had no idea what it meant when they spoke of the akaviri. An entire city was seized. By men or creatures she heard of only just yesterday by name. An alien force of unknown strength – chills ran up Wylendriel's spine as she looked over her shoulder expecting a monster, but found nothing there. When she looked at the man sitting on the ground, in the most humiliated and humble state possible, wracked with pain, she could help but feel tears well in her own eyes. He had something precious taken from him, and that was all it took for her to form an attachment with this stranger's kindred spirit.

“I'm just trying to make sense of it all.” The nord continued. “I want to know what Talos would do. What he'd have me do.”

Wylendriel sat beside the miserable widower, placed a soft hand over his own. “What's your name?” She asked.

“Torvald...” He answered.

“Wylendriel.” She whispered to him. “Let me pray with you, Torvald.” Torvald said nothing, but she felt his fingers wrap tightly around hers, occasionally quivering. The two sat in silence for what must've been hours, and she prayed and prayed – not just for forgiveness and not just in pledge to a god who, honestly, she did not even know, but also on Torvald's behalf. She prayed for his safety, his heart, and his fulfillment. She also prayed not for answers and direction, but for understanding, so that she could know who Talos was – she felt a guilty conscious for having ignorantly supported the Aldmeri Dominion and Thalmor. She wanted to seek peace with Talos on behalf of elven-kind. Her thoughts returned to home and those she left behind, wondering if they were safe or if any more of her friends or family would see themselves be victim to one of the Altmer's purges. A sudden chill breeze blew against her neck, prompting her eyes open. The sun had begun to set, casting a pink canopy across the sky. Her years of interpreting the signs of the divines instinctively led her to an epiphany, and read the situation as though the voice of an emperor was speaking to her:

“I am all that makes Skyrim; it's bite and it's boldness – but also it's beauty and it's glory. We are of blood spilled, but strength provided, we reward in bounty. Visit the North star at the break of dawn, then retrace your steps.”

Warmth filled her chest and she looked to Torvald beside her with a smile, his eyes still shut. There was a riddle to be solved. She was about to stand and help him to his feet, to help guide him along his way.

Her body suddenly seized. Her blood began boiling. Pain was stabbing her from behind her eyes. Her hand clenched around Torvald's -- he was shouting in pain!

'N-no... no! No, no!' Wylendriel thought desperately as squeezed her eyes as tightly she could. 'Gods, no, please! Save me!'

Dozens more of gruesome, haunting images burned her mind as they flickered through with hundreds of angry whispers in the background, but there was a difference this time. When before they sounded mindless and were whispering over one another, these were unified and had one clear message: punish.

Her emotions began flaring and became more intense with each passing second. She felt furious, but also powerful, tantalized, excited - but for what? She felt a growing hunger develop in the pit of her stomach as one suggestion after another inserted itself into her mind. For a moment, she managed hold down the urges and thoughts as her own emotions kept them at bay. They had arisen as soon as she realized what she was being made to do, and horror had begun to envelop her.

"Please... don't..." Wylendriel muttered to herself, struggling to keep herself from enjoying this moment as the corners of her mouth began twitching. “I don't want this.”

Torvald, too, in his fear and confusion, found tears welling in his eyes. “W-what are you doing? Wylendriel? Please... get off me!”

More images began rushing to her, the same blood-red sort of haze as they gave her rapid, broken up glimpses of Skyrim. Suddenly she saw herself. Walking, almost zombie-like, covered in blood. The gap across her throat was slowly closing itself. She fell limply onto the ground. Another image, almost as if it rewinded, and then more - she mindlessly picked something up while she was at the sight. A stone. The last few images that flickered into her head and revealed to her that it was a fragmented piece of the slab she was thrown upon, and on it was a daedric sigil. Then suddenly, there was darkness.

A slow laughter filled every crevice of her mind and felt to stretch on for years, until finally, after a long pause, she could hear Molag Bal's voice clear as day.

"Enjoy the meal."

Wylendriel felt her muscles jerk as every urge and every emotion she tried so hard to suppress came rushing back and overwhelmed her. This time, she was overcome by an animalistic frenzy, and she felt with her a presence infinitely more evil. She felt feelings inside her that she knew did not belong to her, but to something else that co-resided with her. Regardless of whatever it was she was feeling at the time, the priestess' cannibalized Torvald alive with a sense of euphoria. Her poor friend's screams and sobs cut the air. It, and the sound of wet gnashing of flesh and the tearing rips of muscle and skin were the most horrific band of instruments she'd ever heard, and for some reason, just made it more reason to love what was happening.

When Torvald's last scream finally cut short, her eyes stared into his as his eyes slowly fell back and the light vanished. The energy she felt coursing through her body vanished as well, just as quickly as it came. Everything that she knew to be normal came back, and what flesh that still resided in her mouth fell out as her jaw dropped in horror. Her gut wrenched and she threw her head to the side to let bile come pouring out. With each gag and each convulsion, her stomach removed the last drop of fluid in her stomach that it could until she was dry-hurling into the river. Gasping for breath, she took a long look at Torvald, lying lifeless on the ground with a gaping hole in his neck with streams of blood trickling down into the river. With tears streaming down her face, she went scrambling to rip open her robes and search every damned pocket to find the stone she saw in her visions. When she finally did, she pulled it out and threw it as hard as could with a scream and set herself off balance. She fell to her knees layed her head on the ground until sobs turned into whimpers.

'Kynareth, what have I done?'

She jumped down into the water to wash the blood off of her face. When she climbed back up the rocks, she stared at Torvald a couple minutes, her face just as red and puffy and tears ran dry as Torvald when she first found him. She dragged his eyelids shut with her fingers, and prayed for his spirit to cross safely into Sovngarde. Among her sorrows, being wracked with devastation at the loss of a new friend and a newfound crippling fear of the daedric prince's curse, what plagued her most was the sense of betrayal that Torvald must've felt in his last moments by her own hand. She knew what that betrayal was like. She felt she had to find solace in that he was lucky to remain dead. She had to find solace in blaming Molag Bal for this. She had to convince herself that this wasn't her fault, no matter how much it hurt. Wylendriel moved his body in front of Talos' statue and set a hand on his head – already cold – and her other hand grasping the eagle skull hanging from her belt. Closing her eyes, throat swollen in her mourning, she focused all of her restoration magic on him as she began reciting Arkay's rites of consecration. His spirit deserved to rest in peace and reunite with his lost love.

As she finished the final verses, she closed her eyes and sighed deeply. Leaning down to gently kiss Torvald's forehead, she quickly muttered under her breath, “rest easy in Sovngarde, my friend...”

Later that night she turned west back towards the river, with her mind replaying the thoughts that played in her head. North star. Break of dawn. Retrace your steps. The only problem with this is that sunlight sheds the sky of its stars. Unless there was something she can only see in daylight, or if it referred to something else. Was it Dawnstar? It's along the northern coast, about another two days of travel! Sighing in resignation, she started setting up camp. She was treading unfamiliar ground in the middle of the night, and hasn't had any rest yet. For the next couple of days it followed this pattern. Ducking under branches, climbing over boulders, and treading through water. She knew that this was the river she followed at the start of her journey, but she think she was on the other side of it on her way there. This was a different angle and not as familiar.

Her mind fell back to the Eldergleam. Such a simple journey had gone so awry. She could've gone, could've finished it. She didn't want to desecrate such a holy place with her presence. Maybe once she was purified, she'll go back and try again - but not now. The sixth night, of travel, Wylendriel was exhausted. She swore that perhaps she had missed a turn somewhere. Did she miss civilization? Was it just around a tree that she didn't bother to look past? She was about to give up hope until torchlight shone some distance away, just north of a bunch of other flickering lights. She instantly recognized it. This was Whiterun Hold! That was Whitewatch Tower! Another twenty minutes straight of running on her weary, pained legs was dulled slightly at the sight of a familiar landmark, and as she inched closer, even the guards at the tower seems to have taken an interest.

“Who goes there?” One called out, waving their torch in front of them. As Wylendriel got closer, unable to answer through her panting, the light lit up her face. “Shor's bones – priestess! Where have you been! You've been missing for weeks!”

“Commander Sinmir!” Wylendriel exclaimed between breaths.

“Is that Wylendriel?” Another asked.

“It's... it's a long story...” Wylendriel answered. “But my journey has turned into pilgrimage... would you mind if I rest here?”

“Uh, of course priestess,” Sinmir replied, “but wouldn't you much rather resting inside the city where it's comfortable?”

She just laugh slightly in response, but it sounded hollow and fake in the face of what she has had to suffer through lately. “I'm afraid I don't feel up to spending all night explaining myself to the whole city...”

“Are you okay?”

“I will heal.” Wylendriel answered softly. “In time...”

That night, before she slept, she prayed a silent, unanswered prayer to the daedric prince - to allow her to finish her pilgrimage. She suggested it would present the lord with an opportunity not often seen: an opportunity to battle and dominate a Divine. While Wylendriel has great faith that the divines could easily purge the daedra and recover her soul, Molag Bal has so far remained silent and seems to be permitting her pilgrimage, indicating that she might have appealed to his arrogance and lust for power...

The next morning, she met with the townsfolk of Whiterun, shocked by the poor condition Wylendriel returned in - and her scars! Wylendriel kept the truth a secret, only telling that the men she hired had betrayed her. She told them that it was the kindness of Ivarstead that nursed her back to health, and here she was! She lied and said that she was motivated by her trip to the Eldergleam to make a full pilgrimage to communicate with the rest of the Nine Divines. She couldn't possibly allow them to know the truth. There wouldn't be any saving her. The rest of that day was spent preening herself and stocking up on supplies and belongings. She left by the carriage outside Whiterun on the 22nd of Sun's Height and payed the man to bring her to Dawnstar. It would take her there in half the time and would allow her an opportunity to reflect on the road that has brought her here. Her flee from home. The Temple of Kyne. Her betrayal. Her, Gods, her sickening... rape, her savior and then the voices.... her breakdown. Her mind fell back on Torvald as well, but her mind, in the end, always returned to home. Back to Valenwood.

Capabilities

Skills

Expert: Restoration – (Wylendriel's long time commitment to Kynareth did not go without merit – she is valued as a healer and has fixed up even gutted soldiers on the brink of death, while supplementing her magic with practical medical expertise. On the other side of the coin, she can use the same magical powers that allows her to revitalized others to inflict great harm upon them... not that she'd ever willingly do so.)

Adept: Medicine – (The healers back home and the priestesses in the Temple of Kyne in Skyrim both taught her many things about medicine, and how to heal by utilizing Her Graciousness' gifts instead of relying on magicka. Specially talented, perhaps, as her Green Pact forbids her from harvesting her own vegetation for her craft. Working around that gave her a specialized niche in medicine using strictly animal-based ingredients, but still knows a select few recipes utilizing plant-life.)

Adept: Conjuration – (At first, Wylendriel was just a novice. Just like any of us are when we learn something new. But in this case, Wylendriel has very little gained or practical knowledge. Most of what she now knows is intuitively gained. One of Molag Bal's "gifts". His boon used her existing knowledge of Conjuration as a foundation for him to selectively impart his intuitive understanding of magic onto her, and determining what she is and is not allowed to know. There's a cruel irony to be found in that he chooses not to champion Wylendriel with the true Mace of Molag Bal, yet arms her with a magic spectral daedric mace anyways.)

Adept: Bosmeri – (She's a Bosmer who grew up in the center of Valenwood, enough said.)

Novice: Speech - (Her nature and disposition keeps her from being a true silvertongue, but as a priestess, sure can give a mean sermon. This shows that she can at least publicly speak about something passionately enough that it could possibly convert prospective worshipers.)

Novice: One-handed (Blunt) – (Wylendriel doesn't have much in the way of actual skill in using maces. It's more like Molag Bal's curse making her really angry and putting her into a berserker state, and swinging it really fucking hard.)

Novice: Athletics – (Bosmer are naturally stringy and swift, and it only helps matters that Wylendriel enjoys being active and is prone to embarking on pilgrimages.)

Novice: Acrobatics – (Bosmer are agile, and Wylendriel is no exception. She spent much of her time growing up traversing the wilds, and she can climb trees with ease.)

Novice: Tailoring – (She has a basic grasp on how to stitch her clothing back together, but it's gonna look like patchwork. It's either that or sporting holes. Your choice.)

Weaknesses

Pseudo-pacifist: Wylendriel's naturally pacifistic nature is actually somewhat compromised, but now she consciously tries to avoid getting involved in the middle of the fray. She'll do anything to get out of fighting in all-out battle to avoid the risk of going mad. Also, a lack of conditioning and natural strength keeps her from helping with any of the heavy lifting without hurting herself. Though to some degree, she has to learn to give herself in to these impulses just enough and direct them towards people who would do others ill, just so the glass won't overfill.

Hedgehog's dilemma: She's distant and emotionally unavailable even to her friends and allies. It's different parts paranoia – on one hand, even if you're close enough to her that there's zero chance of you betraying her, she fears there's the possibility of her hurting you.

Foreign ignornace: She's was isolated in Valenwood for a while without much news of the outside world seeping into her circle. When she left Valenwood, she barely knew a thing about the other cultures outside of home except for a few details that are typically common knowledge across the world. I.E. Nords don't like elves, Altmer don't like humans or beast races, and Dunmer don't like anybody at all. Not even each other.

Cursed: The curse is a slowly eroding corruption of her soul. She gets intrusive thoughts, feelings that shouldn't be there, and there are subtle inklings of violent urges implanted into her nature, and the compulsion to dominate. Another unfortunate side effect is, when she finally does give in to this curse, the sort of berserker mode she enters does not serve her well. She is going to hurt herself. The body puts limits on itself, and it's to keep things like that from happening.

Wanted: Avoid Dominion soldiers.

Other priorities: She's still on a pilgrimage, and that might put her at odds with some of the party's plans. She's dead-set on finishing what she started and cleansing the curse from her soul as soon as possible.

Spells

Spells

Expert: Restoration

• Expert: Grand Healing
• Expert: Circle of Protection
• Expert: Repel Undead
• Expert: Devour Health^
• Adept: Close Wounds
• Adept: Heal Other
• Adept: Greater Ward
• Adept: Cure Disease
• Apprentice: Healing Hands
• Apprentice: Fast Healing
• Apprentice: Cure Poison
• Apprentice: Cure Paralysis
• Apprentice: Greater Fortify Fatigue*
• Novice: Healing
• Novice: Absorb Fatigue^

Adept: Conjuration

• Adept: Conjure Mace!
• Adept: Conjure Dremora Caitiff!
• Adept: Banish Daedra
• Apprentice: Reanimate Corpse!
• Apprentice: Soul Trap!
• Apprentice: Summon Scamp!
• Novice: Summon Familiar

^ Isn't normally used. She actually knows this spell.
* Re-flavored as a blessing of Kynareth. Re-purposed so that it can be cast on others.
! This spell was not learned naturally. This is part of Molag Bal's boon.

Tactics

If she can help it, Wylendriel won't. Aside from being a healer at heart, the stress of combat and intense feelings such as anger, misery, or fear actually has her run the risk of succumbing to Molag Bal's suggestions and her own dark urges and intrusive thoughts. Say she succumbs, though: there isn't any real strategy. She seeks to surprise and overpower her foes with unbridled aggression and summons a bound mace. Then she can use her restoration skills to drain away her foes' health or stamina, rendering them weak and helpless as she beats them repeatedly into the ground until they're liquefied. Her mind is not so clouded and her willpower is not so weak that she cannot tell between foe or ally, so she will (at least for the most part) will be able to restrain herself from taking out that same aggression on her friends. Anyways, in this respect, her "berserker mode" has her serve as a glass cannon. She cripples and executing enemies, but is totally armorless and lacks the natural durability to take very many blows herself. Only in dire situations where she cannot fight an enemy or horde of enemies on her own will she call upon Molag Bal's conjuration magic to summon dremoras or reanimate corpses. Note that never in her right mind would she consider using such vile magic.

Relations and Affiliations

Wylendriel is a priestess of the Temple of Kyne in Whiterun, and is a rather respected member of the clergy among the locals despite her elven blood. She has not been there for very long, but she has proven her devotion and ability to the nords and they've taken her as one of their own. Most have, at least.

Opinions

N/A

Other Capabilities

Has a cast iron stomach and is able to digest damn near any edible piece of food available. Having a strict meat-based diet, some of it even raw, tends to build up your immune system like crazy. She has some resistance to disease and poison effects because of this.

Inventory

Cash

Her last 10 Septims

Keys and Lockpicks

Only the key to the Temple of Kyne in Whiterun.

Clothing and Armor

• A set of robes; water-resistant (waxed wool), leather supported, cold-weather (bear fur), hooded, seperable (bear fur)
• Fur boots
• Black wool top, sleeveless
• Black wool tights, down to knees
• A leather belt

Weapon and Ammunition

It's not really a weapon, but she has a skinning knife if she's feeling desperate.

Potion and Arcane Supplies

• 3 bottles of Potion of Magicka

Jewelry and Novelty Items

An amulet of Kynareth with a minor stamina enchantment, and an eagle skull hanging from her belt (a memento from home, also serves as a second divine focus).

Books and Documents

• Unsent letters addressed to Valenwood, sealed with wax.
• Several pieces of blank parchment and empty envelopes.
• A copy of each: Healers Fieldbook, Herbalist's Guide to Skyrim, Notes on Racial Phylogeny, Nine Commands of the Eight Divines, The Consecrations of Arkay, and the poems Hymn to Kyne and Kyne's Tears on single pieces of parchment.
• A book containing a compilation of poetry, alphabetically listed, from the Death Blow of Abernanit to The Warrior's charge, and all of the lesser known poems that came before, in-between, and after.

Food, Drinks, Provisions

Preserved beef and venison, water, medicinal herbs, a mortar and pestle, dressings, bandages, a splint, and a tourniquet.

Load Bearing Equipment

• A satchel, carrying most of her stuff.
• Five pouches hanging from her belt, carrying medicinal herbs.
• A waterskin, on sling slung over her shoulder.

Other

• A feathered quill and inkjar.
• Threading needles and a spool of sinew fiber.

The Elder Scrolls: Fruits of Contention - Chapter 1 (Completed)

Alright, I'm gonna try hinging this timeline based around Fort Amol. On the eighth, so based on the scale you've given me...

Hider

- So, late last month, she was anticipating an expedition to the Eldergleam Sanctary, beginning on the 26th of Mid Year that could've lasted at least a week. But as they moved around High Hrothar a couple days later - lets say four - they betrayed her on the 30th. Where, I'd say somewhere west of Fort Amol and brought her to an unmapped ruined site maybe twenty minutes away from where they first betrayed her, and two and a half days travel from Ivarstead. She spent a lot of time unconscious. That's reasonable, she practically died. Let's give her 3 days of rest, she deserves it.

- She woke up on the 3rd of Sun's Height in Ivarstead. The trip from Ivarstead to the Riverside Shack would have taken multiple days, especially given the scale you've given, the difficult terrain and land formations to bypass. I might give it 6 days? It seems to fit, and plus a day to prepare. That would make an entire week between then and the massacre. I'll make sure to include an edit that reflects that length of time. She got there in the middle of the 10th of Sun's Height. After the events in Riverside Shack, she ran as far south as her legs could take her, until she fell down exhausted. Needing rest, that's how she spent the rest of the 10th.

- She spent most of the 11th in prayer to Akatosh. The trip from there to Amol has some distance, so leaving on the 12th, she would have arrived there in the middle of the day, assuming an early start. She spent her time there resting into the next day, and spent the 13th in prayer. They gave her just a few things to help the priestess on her travels and she left before the sun had risen on the 14th

- With easy-to-follow directions and a plan in mind, I don't think it would've taken her very long to get to Talos' shrine. She could've made it there in the middle of that day. Sunset that day is when Torvald died. She didn't rest there, leaving him to rest in peace (and escape the scene where she murdered her friend) and turned west.

- Between there and Whiterun, given rests and slow travel... 5-6 days to Whiterun. I will reflect that travel time in her history. She would've gotten to Whitewatch tower on the night of the 20th. She can spend time in Whiterun recovering, resting, and restocking before she moves on to Dawnstar by carriage early on the 22nd, which would cut down on time. I think they could make it there by the 26th.

I'm gonna apply this stuff pronto. As for her reasons of being hired on, the chaplain bit is a unique twist that I like. Also, given the war, potential for Thalmor finding her, good help being hard to find, and the dangers which she learned of that lurk Skyrim, there's safety in numbers. I think that, along the way, we should figure out how to balance her own personal arc (the pilgrimage) and service to the troupe. The conflict between the two would no doubt create for some good story, but you know, she's still pretty determined to finish it and we wouldn't want to starve either plot. Perhaps instead of asking for monetary payment, all she asks in return is to help her with her own journey when it's feasible. Updates on shrine locations, a scenic route, whatever - she's more concerned with her pilgrimage than she is with septims.

Also, I was looking at her skills. Weapon skills actually do determine just that - skill - and she hasn't had any real training in weapons. She doesn't really have mace skills, she just swings it really hard. I think it'd be alright for me to break down that 1 apprentice skill to make her a novice in 1H-Blunt and make her a novice in Speechcraft to sorta reflect her ability to give sermon.

EDIT: And done!

Wylendriel Greensky

Wylendriel Greensky

_{Female Bosmer | 60 | The Lady}

Profile

Place of Origin

Grahtwood, Valenwood

Appearance

Her overall demeanor is as unsuspecting and as humble as she is dressed, in the layered robes bequeathed to her by the temple where she worships her goddess, Kynareth. One critical look at the Bosmer and her identity as a priestess becomes quite apparent. She seems as gentle and dainty a thing as one might suspect, looking doe-eyed around her as though she were at constant risk, and as ever agile like so many of her kind, with her lithe frame moving with disguised grace. She has become fairly fit though a nomadic lifestyle, though weighing in at just 110 lbs. Standing at 5'3", her height seems as any other wood-elven folk, but her stance is a tall one, or at least like she's attempting to make herself seem taller than she really has; how the arc in her back seems to exist to support shoulders weary from hardship. You wouldn't think so to look at her, but she's actually lived through 60 years of life! That's technically pretty short for a Bosmer and is considered to be barely scraping by as an adult.

A heart-shaped face bears a stiff upper lip, but perhaps only to steady the quivering lip beneath it as she tries her damnedest to stay strong. It is this very same face that also bears an upturned button nose which she keeps raised high in the air, as if to hold herself above whatever degrading or shameful – inexplicable thing, in lack of better wording, for she does not carry with her an air of arrogance or nobility; more as though there are intrusive thoughts in her head that she seeks to prove herself to be above. Her long, silky auburn hair is usually braided up haphazardly into a bun. It reveals a youthful - almost wild - face, given the thin jawline and pointed chin, the high cheekbones and wide forehead - but only attractive if a person could bring themselves to look past the those wide Bosmer eyes and the array of sharp teeth made for tearing through meat.

Her robes are made from hide and thin leather in the middle of layers for durability and protection, with wool stitched over the outside as the outer layer, and treated with wax to protect against the rain. The inside of the robes is all grizzly bear fur warming her skin and absorbing whatever perspiration there may be. These robes adorned with a number of buttons made from polished bone and apparently just as many pouches hanging from a belt made from a thick leather, and with it, a curious trophy of an eagle skull. The robe's tailoring even applies to the hood, making this outfit a very heavy one to be lugging around - good for the regions of Skyrim, High Rock, and Wrothgar, but less so anywhere else south of Bruma. Beneath, she wears tight-fitted, black-colored, wool undergarments that cover her torso and thighs, but otherwise leaves exposed her arms and her legs from the knees down. Her feet are covered with fur boots and her hands are usually bare, but as a part time alchemist who follows the Green Pact, her hands are stained with all manners of ichors and ingredients, and frequently smell... obnoxiously robust, to be putting it gently. The sight of pointed nails that seem like claws can only lend more anxious energy to the smell of her hands. A leather satchel hangs at her side from a strap going across her chest and over one of her shoulders.

The robes can fortunately be separated from the inside layer of bear fur in case of warmer weather. The hide and wool outside layers function like a shell or windbreaker of the inside. Underneath her garments however, this young elf's sand colored skin is littered with scars. Some small, and others very, very large. If one didn't know better, they would think she had died terribly and was stitched right back up. Gnarly gouging scars in her abdomen, punctures in her legs, slashes over her arms, a smaller one down the side of both her lips, a bite mark on her chest, lashes across her back, and a slash around her throat. Any attempt at questioning these are met with silence and never answered. So gruesome is this sight, you may not immediately noticed the tattoos on her body, markings of the winged herald. Feathered wings stretch out from the center of the back with the tips of its furthest feathers reaching down the back of her arms. Smaller wings are placed on her chest by her collarbones, reaching to her shoulders. Feathers rest above both of her eyebrows.

Personality

Lately, there has been a buildup of disturbing events that have left her emotionally distant and afraid to get close to people. She doesn't want to put anybody at risk out of this acquired fear of accidentally hurting those around her through whatever accident may arise from her compulsions. Yet, there also exists an element of distrust that makes it difficult for her to get close to people. This distrust is not so pervasive in her personality that it breeds conflicts with others, but impedes any progress in the development of a real, meaningful relationship. How this distrust affects her most is how, over the last couple of weeks, she has learned to put her own life in her own hands instead of relying on others. She has great potential for love, platonic or otherwise - she feels those emotions, but she fearfully rejects any oncoming advances and closes her heart to interested parties.

Continuing with this duality theme of withdrawn concern, she, as suggested before, prefers to take measures into her own hands. While some of it may come from a priestess' humility in not wanting to burden others with her own responsibilities, it too comes from that same distrust factor. Unaccountable variables could compromise the outcome, and therefore she would prefer to do it herself and take responsibility for any failure should failure occur. Insisting to her that it does not have to be that way, that she can rely on others sometimes, is a vain effort since her stubbornness blocks off any attempt to appeal to her vulnerability. She is paranoid, stubborn, caught up in her own sense of responsibility, and would just as quickly sit them down by force if they continue to pester her. This hedgehog's dilemma is not an ingrained flaw, but was acquired, and only recently.

This doesn't Wylendriel make callous though. She is still a healer, she has compassionate - on that same note, she's not a pushover. Her commanding tone is useful for bedside manner and her timid nature is thrown out the window when her areas of responsibilities (healing, sermon, etc.) come around. This dutiful disposition is tempered with motherly care, putting every ounce of effort into making sure her patients have a healthy recovery. Additionally, she is nonjudgmental of the other races. This even applies to the Nords – she understands that she entered Skyrim during a time of fear and struggle. She takes no absurd amount of pride in her elven heritage like the Thalmor do. Instead, she believes that there is something to learn from every culture. Still, she is understandably cautious while approaching nords he hasn't met yet (or any race of men for that matter, considering the Dominion's siege on the rest of Tamriel has left them suspicious of elves, and even the Dominion itself wants her head on a pike). She also has a love for poetry.

Even through her endearing visage, it is not difficult to tell that there is something more beneath the surface, and it cannot be pointed toward any one thing. It is an anger, it is an itch, it is a compulsion, an intrusive thought - it is a guilty conscience. It is as though a seed of evil was planted in her heart, and with all of her might she tries to reject it - bury it - kill it - but try as she may, it is like a craving and it only grows hungrier with time. The line between her desires and the compulsions of this seed are blurred, the feelings that she feels feel alien, because - Gods help her, she's a priestess for Kyne's sake, a healer. All of these little suggestions in her head, ever-so-sublte, this feeling of craving - is almost like a lust for violence, to feel in control, a sort of bestial blood-lust that is so damn insatiable that she just barely feeds into it with just the barest degree of violence so that it does not totally overwhelm her. She knows it's not her, she knows it does not belong there, and she knows exactly where it came from.

Her guilt stems from many things – one being the doubt of her faith to her Lady. This guilt best summarizes her her real self. She feels guilty for making the decision of accepting a deal that costed her soul, for choosing a daedra over Kynareth, this evil that has planted itself inside her, and about her growing doubt in the Nine Divines. She once tried to justify it, after all, had they not left her to die at the hands of her betrayers? For Arkay's sake, perhaps it would be right for her to die, but where was Stendarr's mercy? Or Kynareth's gift to her faithful? Then comes the feelings of guilt regarding that sense of entitlement and her expectations of the gods. The guilt of her bloody crimes. The guilt of her own betrayal of another. She is torn in many different ways and wishes for peace inside herself to ease that discord, and there's little question as to why she has so little inner strength to spare.

With all her years as a healer and priestess under her belt, she thought herself ready for death, but in the end she found herself no more at peace than the lost and wounded souls she preached to. She beats herself up for it and belittles herself, and Molag Bal's corruption further taints her. With all of this inner turmoil, Wylendriel is growing more convinced there is no saving one such as herself. In the end though, she has come to find that there is greater justice to be found in healing as many as she can than in taking the easy way out. After some time and coming to terms with herself, she feels that it would be best to work at bettering herself one step at a time, and that the first step would be to remove the daedra's influence once and for all - which in itself is a monumental task, but prays that the mercy of the Nine Divines would be such that they would cleanse her spirit: the last few shreds of her faith clings to this desperate gambit: the deciding act that would finally determine the fate of what remained.

Background

The Journey

Wylendriel was born in Valenwood, to a respected mother and father that devoted their lives to Y'ffre in Elder Root, Grahtwood. They especially had taken to the Green Pact and were loyally faithful to the religion as Spinners, its enforcers. So much, in fact, their first born daughter, named Wylendriel, was conditioned to follow the Green Pact out the womb and would be raised with the intentions of making her a priestess as well. For the earliest years, the young and impressionable Bosmer lass adhered to family tradition, studying her people's history and following each and every rule obediently - there was nothing else, only Y'ffre - and was on the road to receiving the same kind of respect her parents had in her society. It went this way for a couple years, learning more and more about Valenwood, it's friends and enemies, healing; and all the while, the Aldmeri Dominion, formed a couple hundred years before she was even born, assumed a larger presence inside Valenwood. As she learned more about her allies, she learned more about their culture and about the Dominion's enemies, she discovered something about the Imperial Empire: their Nine Divines. They had a parallel to Y'ffre through Kynareth, except that she seemed to exemplify the beauty and force of nature. Wylendriel's family did not expect her to discover Kynareth in the world around her.

She didn't replace Y'ffre, no. Rather, the goddess only added to the enrichment of Wy's world. If Y'ffre was the father, the state of existing, of only being - Kynareth was the mother, its force, it's passion, beauty and danger, she breathed the soul into life and made it beautiful. Life was essential, yes, but it was simply existing - what would life be were it not the soul and beauty that made life worthwhile? Kynareth was nature. This self-found philosophy touched Wylendriel so profoundly that she chose to educate herself how she could in order to follow in the footsteps of her newfound Lady. Such material was hard to come by in Valenwood, so her knowledge was only rudimentry, and her family never quite looked at her the same after it - but as long as she didn't forsake the Green Pact, they figured there was nothing wrong with it. She looked happy! She was interested in helping others. They still intended on keeping her faith a secret from the Thalmor of the Dominion. Who knows what they might think of it?

All that the Altmer and the Aldmeri Dominion had brought to Valenwood were not so great, though. They brought also strife to some few, select Bosmer communities. Rumors of purges spread across Valenwood, of isolated executions by the hands of Altmer inquisitors in the north. Word had it that the victims were deserving of such a fate. They were "unworthy savages, not befitting to be part of this grand alliance of Mer." Not many questioned it, they had this idea that their "close bond" with the Altmer was far too valuable to forsake. Wylendriel's family would of course be spared, being far too valuable and important to Bosmer society. It was not unheard of that some Bosmer took the Green Pact to extremes, and it was no wonder that the Altmer thought they were a barbaric people. While Wylendriel followed a watered-down version of it, where she and others rejected cannibalism, the purists hunted their enemies and consumed their flesh. It was a revolting thought in her mind, though despite that, there was still the sense of racial kinship. Then you have the ones supporting Imperial occupation, which would no doubt prove them as traitors. It was depressing to hear of the Altmer killing them, but she followed two deities of nature, and death and survival was part of the cycle of nature. All she felt she could do was pray for them in honor of perpetuating that cycle.

The years had gone on and Wylendriel was growing into a full-fledged woman, and she and some others of her community has remained fairly ignorant of the events occurring in the outside world. She practiced her skills of restoration magic to heal wounded hunters after their return from the forest, and using conventional medicine to follow after, or if the wounds were too small. As her reputation grew, she found herself healing soldiers doing only-Gods-know-what, but it wasn't her place to ask or to judge. While she had taken a path of faith that had warranted some disappointment from her family, she gained value in the eyes of some few Altmer agents of the Dominion. They took notice of not just her intense devotion, but her skills as a healer. Offered ever so diplomatically to enlist with the Dominion as a field medic, Wylendriel felt obligated to decline for she was no warrior. They saw it as a reasonable defense, though she was curious about the influx of Aldmeri soldiers coming their way. Had they been at war all along? Though they found her naivety cute, all they said to her was that it was nothing to worry about. Just some few skirmishes with the human empire up north. They let her be without further harassment on that note, but continued to send Altmer infantry to her in Valenwood if they were near enough. She came to be idolized as a highly regarded citizen in her community, endeared for her compassion and healing ability.

She found it pretty humorous. Rarely was one found without the other.

Though ignorant of world events she may have been, the news of conflict that broke out in northern Valenwood spread like wildfire. Separatist dissenters lashed out against the Aldmeri Dominion, and with the help of the Empire, drove them south. Dominion presence became more prevalent in the south and were organizing to make counter-attacks against the separatists and the Imperial Empire that backed them. The outside world's trouble have broken in, and truth of the Dominion's deeds had gotten clearer. The rumors of executions of the Bosmeri people were more than just rumors, and they weren't just isolated incidents. The purges were more like a systematic slaughter. Indeed, they saw the Bosmer as little more than barbarians. Though elven, they were still more like second class citizens than trusted allies. When a close friend of Wylendriel was ruthlessly murdered, only because they found her on her haunches and leaning over a bloody rabbit - for simply eating - she saw these purges for what it really was: cultural cleansing. They were the judge, jury, and executioner of any that the Altmer thought weren't good or "civilized" enough to be their underlings.

It was at the turn of her adulthood when Wylendriel defamed the Aldmeri Dominion, and sure enough, it wasn't a popular opinion. She was branded as a traitor, and before she could turn to flee Valenwood, she was briefly stopped by her family. They parted ways with a hug and a kiss, proud of their daughter's courage, and with a gift in the form of an eagle's skull. It was the acknowledgement and acceptance of her faith in Kynareth. What could have been more symbolic of the nature goddess of the wind than that? She escaped shortly after to the far corners of Tamriel attempting to evade the Dominion with war waging around her as she went. Whether it was by foot or by caravan, she eventually found herself in the wilds of southern Skyrim by the end of the year. She was found by a Markarth patrol in the Reach, and they reigned her in for questioning – mostly to her potential ties to the Dominion. She managed to convince them that she was no friend of the Thalmor, but they were still suspicious of the elf passing through. Still fearful of the Dominion's discovery of her, Wylendriel fled once again as soon as she was fed and rested towards the east, where the Nords of Eastmarch were notorious for their particular disdain of elven kind. This didn't worry her though; whatever vulgarity or mud they wanted to sling her way would be nothing compared to the punishment the Thalmor would deliver unto her.

She payed the carriage a hearty sum to take her to the other side of Skyrim, and instead she landed in front of Whiterun. They learned that the road ahead was blockaded by bandits and the man refused to go further. So she remained in central Skyrim. From the beginning, things were hard, but it was though the goddess herself was watching over her - she found her place in a Temple of Kynareth, much to her fortune, in front of the Gildergreen. Here, her restoration magic and medicinal skills were highly valued. Her safety was assured here, behind tall walls and Skyrim's staunch stance against the Aldmeri Dominion. Also being a servant of the goddess, she could find respite from the Dominion under the Jarl's protection. When she first arrived at the temple, she stood at the door in ragged furs and hide, nearly destroyed by the long trip across Tamriel. She nearly looked like a beggar! But her devotion was unquestionable. They took her in and made her sturdy, warm, and reliable robes that reflected her Green Pact, but was befitting of a priestess. They reminded her of home.

The path ahead presented far more difficulties than she had anticipated. Cultural roadblocks, miscommunication, and just a general misunderstanding of how nord society even functioned. It proved difficult to gain the trust of the local nords, but her devotion to the goddess Kynareth was almost tangible and she treated every visitor with the utmost respect and humility. She poured everything she had into every restoration spell and genuinely cared about her patients. Such diligence guaranteed her respect from Skyrim's most stubborn nords. It was heartwarming to find a place where she belonged. During her stay at the Temple of Kyne, the priestesses that already lived there taught her everything there was to know about Kynareth. Wy's rudimentary understanding was greatly expanded upon and she was taught practices that seemed totally unnecessary back home. For instance, it was tradition to learn how to summon a familiar, a guardian of nature, to perhaps protect or lead the way. The familiar would, in one way or another, guide the caster along their path. In addition, human priesthood expanded their services beyond just healing. She was expected to learn how to repel and banish the undead and daedric forces that threatened Nirn. They helped to bolster her powers of Restoration magic, and gave her a basic understanding of Conjuration. Conjuring familiars came easy, but banishment is where she really struggled with. Turns out she has a much harder time with making things go away than she does with making things stay.

It wasn't before long that she decided to go on a pilgrimage to visit the Eldergleam. On the 26th of Mid Year, she hired mercenaries. They were nords from Eastmarch, and their job was to escort her on her hike eastward and protect her from the likes of bandits, and honestly, it was also a precaution to increase her chance of survival should a dragon find her (assuming that there was still one in hiding that the last Dragonbon had not yet slain). She left with her temple's blessing and set out on the long road ahead.

But all went south once on the 30th once they circled around the mountain, High Hrothgar. In the middle of nowhere, miles from any sign of civilization, Wylendriel was struck by betrayal. The very men she payed to protect her turned around and jumped her, before dragging her off to some remote location at a ruined site where she was thrown onto a stone slab. She was mugged, beaten, stolen from, and... Gods, violated. They passed her around like a toy, taking turns, laughing! They told her, every time they beat her... stabbed her... lashed her, and bit her - they told her that she had this coming. This was she got for being an elf. When they were finally finished with her, when she finally thought they would leave her be and let her wallow in her suffering, one of them slid their knife across her throat. She was spat on and left for dead, Wylendriel was spending her final moments bleeding out, gurgling and drowning in her own blood and unable to breath, laying there and clutching her throat. She spent her last moments fearful and in tears and in silent prayer. First to her lady Kynareth, but she was silent. Thoughts of the circle of life intruded into her mind, the lessons of the temple - but she couldn't let go feeling so betrayed – it was too unfair. As she felt her life slipping away, she prayed to any of the Divines asking for mercy and a second chance. Her prayers went unheard, and with her consciousness on the verge of slipping, she made a final cry for mercy to anything that would listen.

A gutteral, malevolent voice filled her mind. "I can save your life," it offered, "if just for now, and if you would pledge your soul to me..."

Blinded by desperation, she accepted the offer. Her vision went black and she remembered nothing between then and when she finally awoke in the small village of Ivarstead three days later.

When she awoke on the 3rd of Sun's Height, she was seemingly in complete recovery, though covered in gruesome looking scars strewn across her body. As fortune would have it, a hunter found her unconscious far off in the middle of nowhere, but said he found her unharmed. If he didn't know better, it looked as though she lied down and took a nap... were her clothes not torn in several places, mostly over her chest and around her waist. They were folded next to her with a needle and some thread for her to fix her torn clothing – apparently whoever took her in didn't have any confidence in patching it. Physically, she felt fine save for a gross feeling pit in the center of her chest. It felt empty. She felt violated. As she recalled back to the last thing she could remember, the horrifying scenes of her abusers wracked her mind. The mere memory was torture and she no longer felt at home in her own skin - as her memory returned, so did the same malevolent voice. What happened? What had she just done?

Painful headaches wracked her head. Ear-splitting droning sounds, a cacopheny of whispers, all trying to talk ove rone another - nothing was getting through - all of it - too much - an onslaught of sensory overload as she felt tears well up her eyes over the stress of everything over the last couple of hours - what had to have been hours - the sounds, the screeching, the incoherent chaos - it fell silent. She took deep, heavy breathes as she looked around the room feeling traumatized.

"What... what in Oblivion was tha--" The piercing frequency came out louder than before and was accompanied by what had to have been a thousand red images in rapid succession, "--AAAAAHHH! Gah! Ha... ha! What... What is--"

A thousand more images, barely decipherable, and she was clutching her head and squeezing her eyes shut as the chaos unraveled itself in her head. A man burst through the door of the cabin she was in, a fretful looking man, alarmed by Wylendriel's screaming, found her in this position with tears silently rolling down her cheeks. Among these images, she was able to discern the bloodied maw of a laughing daedric face and the realization of what she has done finally hit her. The blasphemy of her actions stabbed sharper into her chest than any weapon her betrayers used.

"What happened?" Asked the panicked man. She couldn't see what he looked like, she was just wanting to make everything stop.

"This... this migraine..." She told him in weeping. "Make it stop..."

"You look like you've gone through Oblivion and back," he commented, "what's with all of your scars, what happened to you?"

Another thousand images played in her head, but they played slightly slower, almost like a recording of what happened to her. Her mind's eye stretched over Skyrim through red-colored spectacles, and found herself watching her own abuse from a bird's eye view. Over... and over again... she felt the rage and fury build up inside of her, this hatred. The images shot across Skyrim to the northeastern region of Eastmarch and into a cabin, where she got a close up view of her betrayers, their ugly mugs, laughing and drinking... Gods, this unnatural hatred that she did not understand, but at the same time... wasn't it natural? Wasn't it natural to hate the people who did this to hurt, the people who violated her as she watched over and over again... to crave their pitiful! Bloody! Murder--

No... no, no, no! No! This! Wasn't! Normal! Why is she thinking this? Why is she wanting and craving this?!

As she watched these images, as fast and as abrupt as they were, stalled for just a second on the slab she was layed on. Beneath the dust, she could barely trace out the faint imprints of daedric runes. One last image of herself being hurled into the mouth of a massive daedric beast before it stopped and a single whisper echoed through her ears: "I own you."

Suddenly, everything stopped liked she was hoping it would. The stranger's voice was barely able to break through and Wylendriel was barely able to understand the flashes of images behind her eyes at face value, but something inside her gave this intuitive understanding of what was happening to her. The daedric face she was seeing had imprinted on her, and for some reason, recognizable. It's name was clear, and it wanted her to know what exactly that was. Molag Bal. Prince of Domination. Of Schemes.

"Ma'am? Can you hear me?" The stranger asked. "Where did you get your scars?"

The thought of her betrayers sprung back to mind. The sheer anger that she felt at just the image of their faces made her hands shake.

"Ask about my scars again, and I'll show you exactly how I got them." Wylendriels said without thinking. She paused and reeled for a moment. "That did not just happen..." she muttered to herself. The words had just fallen out of her mouth, there wasn't any hesitation, they just - they just...

"Shor's bones, fine!" The stranger retorted. "I won't pry any further, but I was just trying to help, damn it!"

Wylendriel speechlessly watched him march out of the cabin. She knew this wasn't good, but emphatically, for some reason, could not bring herself to care. What she was an image of the people who hurt her, and as far as she felt concerned, Molag Bal offered her a chance for revenge and she planned on taking him up on that offer. Stitching her robes back together the best she could (making it more of a patch job, she wasn't concerned with prettiness), and set out on the open road with nothing but the clothes on her back. Only resting when her knees felt like buckling marching across Eastmarch, finding raw food on the way - utilizing aspects of of Restoration magic she never dared to use before by sapping the vitality of animals and leaving their husks behind. It nearly took a whole week to reach the place that her visions scarred her mind with, but she eventually found the riverside shack in Eastmarch.

Staring it down, the same house from the images that flickered in her head, seemed to trigger flashes of individual images, almost like a magical flow, but something more sinister like a daedric energy. They made her aware of something that was apparently there from the moment she awoken in Ivarstead. Whatever it was she knew of Conjuration magic, it felt expanded upon. A sort of intuitive knowledge, but it didn't quite belong in the brain. She knew what it meant to take magicka and use it to summon a familiar. The sort of direction in which to swing it. The intuitive knowledge that Molag Bal had imparted unto her only concerned itself from where she could draw her power from. There was no plan of action. Calling upon this Conjuration magic, an ethereal daedric mace rippled into existence into her hand before she kicked open the door, surprising the three nords inside - and they looked at her in horror when recognition of her face set in.

Wylendriel roared at them in unbridled rage, fueling the hatred and blood lust that had seeped into her heart. "Did you think you could betray me?!"

Two of them scrambled for their weapons, but one of them was too surprised and confused as to how the Bosmer bitch was still alive, so much that he did not expect the wild aggression the Kynareth priestess exhibited as she lunged towards him and grabbed him by the throat with one hand with crushing force, her sharp nails sinking into his throat. A green aura surrounded her hand that sapped away the nord's energy. His arms fell weakly at his sides. The second and third nord came rushing towards her with axe and sword in hand. In her berserk, she ripped out the first nord's esophagus to be flung at one of their faces and swung the mace with all of her unrestrained might, knocking the second bearded attacker onto the ground with a crack of his sternum and another swift swing knocked away the third who was stunned by the bloody piece of flesh she threw at him - destroying his spine through the fur armor. Wylendriel contently watched them both squirm on the floor, savoring this moment while it lasted.

"I own you." She growled.

She turned to the bearded nord, squirming and scrambling to get away. She dropped onto her knees over his body with one palm firmly planted on his chest. It glowed a sickly green and steadily drained away the man's stamina, fueling repeated rage-filled swings of the the spectral mace into the nord's head until virtually nothing was left but shards of bone and liquefied gore. She was unable to feel it at this moment, but muscles in her shoulder were tearing with each swing, unable to hold themselves together with all the force she was forcing herself to exert. The third, crippled nord was later met the same fate.

When the last deed was done, the energy and the bloodlust that she felt coursing through her body dissipated until her body felt pained and weary. The mace evaporated into the air, and she weakly fell to her knees. Her conscience was now clear, and she looked around at the scene that surrounded her. Three utterly obliterated men, now unidentifiable, their blood seeping into floorboards - the scenes kept replaying inside her traumatized head. The emotions. Rage and blood lust. Their faces - splitting, with each and every crack... crack! Crack! Crunch! She - she... these unspeakable acts of, just... violence - committed by her own hand - they betrayed her! They were supposed to deserve this! Yet - her memories fell back to home, both in Valenwood and to her place in the Temple of Kyne. Recalling everything they had known then, and her values - even the Green Pact said not to kill wastefully. It all came rushing back to her, and all of the justification she thought she had melted away. What she had done here was indisputably evil, and here she was... almost... enjoying it. She broke down into sobs, all the while hugging her arms in trying to bear the agony they were under. It took a long time to bring herself to move, but she eventually mustered herself the will to use Restoration magic on herself. She felt the muscles sort of stitch themselves back together, and she would be okay - at least physically - but the the phantom pains will remain for a little while longer.

The moment she could bring herself to her feet, she ran. She fled from the scene, from the cabin, as fast as she could - as far south as her legs could carry her. Until finally, she fell down exhausted in the middle of Eastmarch. After their deaths, Molag Bal's corruption seemed to have disappeared from her mind. The images hadn't returned, but she still feared the possibility of hearing his voice again like from the time he offered to "save" her life. She prayed and prayed as her tears soaked the ground, but the Divines were deathly silent. They'd forsaken her. She had to do something about this. She had to do something other than run - she had to make a pledge to herself to reject the daedric prince. She'd prove it through a pilgrimage around Tamriel. She had to pray to each of the Nine Divines at their shrines, then maybe she could cleanse herself of this evil... but a sinking feeling told her that she would have to do a lot more than just simply pray to earn their forgiveness. In spite of her doubts, she knew from her studies that there was a shrine to Akatosh here in Eastmarch, and it should have been nearby. But weak from the journey, she just found the nearest bush and fell fast asleep.

When she awoke the next day on the 11th, it took some looking around. When she found Akatosh's shrine, she spent an entire day devoted to prayer in front of the dragon god's shrine. Even after an entire day of prayer, she heard nothing. Found nothing, just silence. She had to be persistent. Word had it that Fort Amol held a shrine of Julianos, which wasn't far from here – it was still in Eastmarch. When she arrived at the fort on the 12th, it was bristling with activity, filled with nervous and suspicious nords. They questioned her immediately, brandishing weapons, and she quickly explained herself while withholding some of the truth: she was on pilgrimage. They allowed her to stay for just that one day only because she was on pilgrimage, but warned her not to head to Windhelm to pray at Arkay's shrine. That was when she learned the city was completely overrun and taken over by an Akaviri army. This was the reason for the crowded occupancy of Fort Amol.

“Please,” Wylendriel pleaded, “let me help you. Show me your wounded.”

“There aren't many to show you.” One of the soldiers replied. It wasn't as much a blessing as the soldier made it sound – the battle was catastrophic. Those who participated were lucky to escape with wounds. Most of them died. Those “lucky” few could only manage to escape at the cost of missing limbs. With what few there were to take care of, the medics had already attended to them. But they did manage to do one more thing for Wylendriel after her unanswered prayer to Julianos: they pointed her to a direction. To the west was a shrine of Dibella inside this old abandoned fort, but was likely overridden with bandits or occult practitioners. Necromancy, and the like. Wylendriel was hesitant to pursue this shrine, fearful of not just the risk of going, but because there was also no telling what Molag Bal's curse might do to her. She asked for a different shrine.

“Well, to the northwest are a couple shrines to mighty Talos, just hugging the base of High Hrothgar. The closest one is actually where you follow the river north, then keep going north after it forks off.” They suggested. Then he narrowed his eyes at the Bosmer. “But last I checked, you knife-ears didn't like him very much. Damn near outlawed Talos worship a couple years back – I fought that war.”

“That was the Thalmor.” Wylendriel insisted. “I may not have prayed to Talos before, but I promise you that I will get to know him.”

After Wylendriel rested up and replenished her supplies, and set north for Talos' shrine, making sure to follow the river. Though a rather wet journey, she was greeted that day by the gorgeous sight of a weathered statue overlooking a pond. There she found another person in prayer. When she greeted him, he was alarmed and reeled back in terror. His face revealed pain with red eyes and a puffy faces. He was a man whose tears had run dry.

“What happened?” She asked.

“My wife,” the nord sobbed, “my home! Windhelm, ransacked. The akaviri... I... I've never seen anything like... like--”

The stranger took a deep breath to compose himself. Wylendriel's heart swelled with pain and fear. She had no idea what it meant when they spoke of the akaviri. An entire city was seized. By men or creatures she heard of only just yesterday by name. An alien force of unknown strength – chills ran up Wylendriel's spine as she looked over her shoulder expecting a monster, but found nothing there. When she looked at the man sitting on the ground, in the most humiliated and humble state possible, wracked with pain, she could help but feel tears well in her own eyes. He had something precious taken from him, and that was all it took for her to form an attachment with this stranger's kindred spirit.

“I'm just trying to make sense of it all.” The nord continued. “I want to know what Talos would do. What he'd have me do.”

Wylendriel sat beside the miserable widower, placed a soft hand over his own. “What's your name?” She asked.

“Torvald...” He answered.

“Wylendriel.” She whispered to him. “Let me pray with you, Torvald.” Torvald said nothing, but she felt his fingers wrap tightly around hers, occasionally quivering. The two sat in silence for what must've been hours, and she prayed and prayed – not just for forgiveness and not just in pledge to a god who, honestly, she did not even know, but also on Torvald's behalf. She prayed for his safety, his heart, and his fulfillment. She also prayed not for answers and direction, but for understanding, so that she could know who Talos was – she felt a guilty conscious for having ignorantly supported the Aldmeri Dominion and Thalmor. She wanted to seek peace with Talos on behalf of elven-kind. Her thoughts returned to home and those she left behind, wondering if they were safe or if any more of her friends or family would see themselves be victim to one of the Altmer's purges. A sudden chill breeze blew against her neck, prompting her eyes open. The sun had begun to set, casting a pink canopy across the sky. Her years of interpreting the signs of the divines instinctively led her to an epiphany, and read the situation as though the voice of an emperor was speaking to her:

“I am all that makes Skyrim; it's bite and it's boldness – but also it's beauty and it's glory. We are of blood spilled, but strength provided, we reward in bounty. Visit the North star at the break of dawn, then retrace your steps.”

Warmth filled her chest and she looked to Torvald beside her with a smile, his eyes still shut. There was a riddle to be solved. She was about to stand and help him to his feet, to help guide him along his way.

Her body suddenly seized. Her blood began boiling. Pain was stabbing her from behind her eyes. Her hand clenched around Torvald's -- he was shouting in pain!

'N-no... no! No, no!' Wylendriel thought desperately as squeezed her eyes as tightly she could. 'Gods, no, please! Save me!'

Dozens more of gruesome, haunting images burned her mind as they flickered through with hundreds of angry whispers in the background, but there was a difference this time. When before they sounded mindless and were whispering over one another, these were unified and had one clear message: punish.

Her emotions began flaring and became more intense with each passing second. She felt furious, but also powerful, tantalized, excited - but for what? She felt a growing hunger develop in the pit of her stomach as one suggestion after another inserted itself into her mind. For a moment, she managed hold down the urges and thoughts as her own emotions kept them at bay. They had arisen as soon as she realized what she was being made to do, and horror had begun to envelop her.

"Please... don't..." Wylendriel muttered to herself, struggling to keep herself from enjoying this moment as the corners of her mouth began twitching. “I don't want this.”

Torvald, too, in his fear and confusion, found tears welling in his eyes. “W-what are you doing? Wylendriel? Please... get off me!”

More images began rushing to her, the same blood-red sort of haze as they gave her rapid, broken up glimpses of Skyrim. Suddenly she saw herself. Walking, almost zombie-like, covered in blood. The gap across her throat was slowly closing itself. She fell limply onto the ground. Another image, almost as if it rewinded, and then more - she mindlessly picked something up while she was at the sight. A stone. The last few images that flickered into her head and revealed to her that it was a fragmented piece of the slab she was thrown upon, and on it was a daedric sigil. Then suddenly, there was darkness.

A slow laughter filled every crevice of her mind and felt to stretch on for years, until finally, after a long pause, she could hear Molag Bal's voice clear as day.

"Enjoy the meal."

Wylendriel felt her muscles jerk as every urge and every emotion she tried so hard to suppress came rushing back and overwhelmed her. This time, she was overcome by an animalistic frenzy, and she felt with her a presence infinitely more evil. She felt feelings inside her that she knew did not belong to her, but to something else that co-resided with her. Regardless of whatever it was she was feeling at the time, the priestess' cannibalized Torvald alive with a sense of euphoria. Her poor friend's screams and sobs cut the air. It, and the sound of wet gnashing of flesh and the tearing rips of muscle and skin were the most horrific band of instruments she'd ever heard, and for some reason, just made it more reason to love what was happening.

When Torvald's last scream finally cut short, her eyes stared into his as his eyes slowly fell back and the light vanished. The energy she felt coursing through her body vanished as well, just as quickly as it came. Everything that she knew to be normal came back, and what flesh that still resided in her mouth fell out as her jaw dropped in horror. Her gut wrenched and she threw her head to the side to let bile come pouring out. With each gag and each convulsion, her stomach removed the last drop of fluid in her stomach that it could until she was dry-hurling into the river. Gasping for breath, she took a long look at Torvald, lying lifeless on the ground with a gaping hole in his neck with streams of blood trickling down into the river. With tears streaming down her face, she went scrambling to rip open her robes and search every damned pocket to find the stone she saw in her visions. When she finally did, she pulled it out and threw it as hard as could with a scream and set herself off balance. She fell to her knees layed her head on the ground until sobs turned into whimpers.

'Kynareth, what have I done?'

She jumped down into the water to wash the blood off of her face. When she climbed back up the rocks, she stared at Torvald a couple minutes, her face just as red and puffy and tears ran dry as Torvald when she first found him. She dragged his eyelids shut with her fingers, and prayed for his spirit to cross safely into Sovngarde. Among her sorrows, being wracked with devastation at the loss of a new friend and a newfound crippling fear of the daedric prince's curse, what plagued her most was the sense of betrayal that Torvald must've felt in his last moments by her own hand. She knew what that betrayal was like. She felt she had to find solace in that he was lucky to remain dead. She had to find solace in blaming Molag Bal for this. She had to convince herself that this wasn't her fault, no matter how much it hurt. Wylendriel moved his body in front of Talos' statue and set a hand on his head – already cold – and her other hand grasping the eagle skull hanging from her belt. Closing her eyes, throat swollen in her mourning, she focused all of her restoration magic on him as she began reciting Arkay's rites of consecration. His spirit deserved to rest in peace and reunite with his lost love.

As she finished the final verses, she closed her eyes and sighed deeply. Leaning down to gently kiss Torvald's forehead, she quickly muttered under her breath, “rest easy in Sovngarde, my friend...”

Later that night she turned west back towards the river, with her mind replaying the thoughts that played in her head. North star. Break of dawn. Retrace your steps. The only problem with this is that sunlight sheds the sky of its stars. Unless there was something she can only see in daylight, or if it referred to something else. Was it Dawnstar? It's along the northern coast, about another two days of travel! Sighing in resignation, she started setting up camp. She was treading unfamiliar ground in the middle of the night, and hasn't had any rest yet. For the next couple of days it followed this pattern. Ducking under branches, climbing over boulders, and treading through water. She knew that this was the river she followed at the start of her journey, but she think she was on the other side of it on her way there. This was a different angle and not as familiar.

Her mind fell back to the Eldergleam. Such a simple journey had gone so awry. She could've gone, could've finished it. She didn't want to desecrate such a holy place with her presence. Maybe once she was purified, she'll go back and try again - but not now. The sixth night, of travel, Wylendriel was exhausted. She swore that perhaps she had missed a turn somewhere. Did she miss civilization? Was it just around a tree that she didn't bother to look past? She was about to give up hope until torchlight shone some distance away, just north of a bunch of other flickering lights. She instantly recognized it. This was Whiterun Hold! That was Whitewatch Tower! Another twenty minutes straight of running on her weary, pained legs was dulled slightly at the sight of a familiar landmark, and as she inched closer, even the guards at the tower seems to have taken an interest.

“Who goes there?” One called out, waving their torch in front of them. As Wylendriel got closer, unable to answer through her panting, the light lit up her face. “Shor's bones – priestess! Where have you been! You've been missing for weeks!”

“Commander Sinmir!” Wylendriel exclaimed between breaths.

“Is that Wylendriel?” Another asked.

“It's... it's a long story...” Wylendriel answered. “But my journey has turned into pilgrimage... would you mind if I rest here?”

“Uh, of course priestess,” Sinmir replied, “but wouldn't you much rather resting inside the city where it's comfortable?”

She just laugh slightly in response, but it sounded hollow and fake in the face of what she has had to suffer through lately. “I'm afraid I don't feel up to spending all night explaining myself to the whole city...”

“Are you okay?”

“I will heal.” Wylendriel answered softly. “In time...”

That night, before she slept, she prayed a silent, unanswered prayer to the daedric prince - to allow her to finish her pilgrimage. She suggested it would present the lord with an opportunity not often seen: an opportunity to battle and dominate a Divine. While Wylendriel has great faith that the divines could easily purge the daedra and recover her soul, Molag Bal has so far remained silent and seems to be permitting her pilgrimage, indicating that she might have appealed to his arrogance and lust for power...

The next morning, she met with the townsfolk of Whiterun, shocked by the poor condition Wylendriel returned in - and her scars! Wylendriel kept the truth a secret, only telling that the men she hired had betrayed her. She told them that it was the kindness of Ivarstead that nursed her back to health, and here she was! She lied and said that she was motivated by her trip to the Eldergleam to make a full pilgrimage to communicate with the rest of the Nine Divines. She couldn't possibly allow them to know the truth. There wouldn't be any saving her. The rest of that day was spent preening herself and stocking up on supplies and belongings. She left by the carriage outside Whiterun on the 22nd of Sun's Height and payed the man to bring her to Dawnstar. It would take her there in half the time and would allow her an opportunity to reflect on the road that has brought her here. On Torvald as well, but her mind, in the end, always returned to home. Back to Valenwood.

Capabilities

Skills

Expert: Restoration – (Wylendriel's long time commitment to Kynareth did not go without merit – she is valued as a healer and has fixed up even gutted soldiers on the brink of death, while supplementing her magic with practical medical expertise. On the other side of the coin, she can use the same magical powers that allows her to revitalized others to inflict great harm upon them... not that she'd ever willingly do so.)

Adept: Medicine – (The healers back home and the priestesses in the Temple of Kyne in Skyrim both taught her many things about medicine, and how to heal by utilizing Her Graciousness' gifts instead of relying on magicka. Specially talented, perhaps, as her Green Pact forbids her from harvesting her own vegetation for her craft. Working around that gave her a specialized niche in medicine using strictly animal-based ingredients, but still knows a select few recipes utilizing plant-life.)

Adept: Conjuration – (At first, Wylendriel was just a novice. Just like any of us are when we learn something new. But in this case, Wylendriel has very little gained or practical knowledge. Most of what she now knows is intuitively gained. One of Molag Bal's "gifts". His boon used her existing knowledge of Conjuration as a foundation for him to selectively impart his intuitive understanding of magic onto her, and determining what she is and is not allowed to know. There's a cruel irony to be found in that he chooses not to champion Wylendriel with the true Mace of Molag Bal, yet arms her with a magic spectral daedric mace anyways.)

Adept: Bosmeri – (She's a Bosmer who grew up in the center of Valenwood, enough said.)

Novice: Speech - (Her nature and disposition keeps her from being a true silvertongue, but as a priestess, sure can give a mean sermon. This shows that she can at least publicly speak about something passionately enough that it could possibly convert prospective worshipers.)

Novice: One-handed (Blunt) – (Wylendriel doesn't have much in the way of actual skill in using maces. It's more like Molag Bal's curse making her really angry and putting her into a berserker state, and swinging it really fucking hard.)

Novice: Athletics – (Bosmer are naturally stringy and swift, and it only helps matters that Wylendriel enjoys being active and is prone to embarking on pilgrimages.)

Novice: Acrobatics – (Bosmer are agile, and Wylendriel is no exception. She spent much of her time growing up traversing the wilds, and she can climb trees with ease.)

Novice: Tailoring – (She has a basic grasp on how to stitch her clothing back together, but it's gonna look like patchwork. It's either that or sporting holes. Your choice.)

Weaknesses

Pseudo-pacifist: Wylendriel's naturally pacifistic nature is actually somewhat compromised, but now she consciously tries to avoid getting involved in the middle of the fray. She'll do anything to get out of fighting in all-out battle to avoid the risk of going mad. Also, a lack of conditioning and natural strength keeps her from helping with any of the heavy lifting without hurting herself. Though to some degree, she has to learn to give herself in to these impulses just enough and direct them towards people who would do others ill, just so the glass won't overfill.

Hedgehog's dilemma: She's distant and emotionally unavailable even to her friends and allies. It's different parts paranoia – on one hand, even if you're close enough to her that there's zero chance of you betraying her, she fears there's the possibility of her hurting you.

Foreign ignornace: She's was isolated in Valenwood for a while without much news of the outside world seeping into her circle. When she left Valenwood, she barely knew a thing about the other cultures outside of home except for a few details that are typically common knowledge across the world. I.E. Nords don't like elves, Altmer don't like humans or beast races, and Dunmer don't like anybody at all. Not even each other.

Cursed: The curse is a slowly eroding corruption of her soul. She gets intrusive thoughts, feelings that shouldn't be there, and there are subtle inklings of violent urges implanted into her nature, and the compulsion to dominate. Another unfortunate side effect is, when she finally does give in to this curse, the sort of berserker mode she enters does not serve her well. She is going to hurt herself. The body puts limits on itself, and it's to keep things like that from happening.

Wanted: Avoid Dominion soldiers.

Other priorities: She's still on a pilgrimage, and that might put her at odds with some of the party's plans. She's dead-set on finishing what she started and cleansing the curse from her soul as soon as possible.

Spells

Spells

Expert: Restoration

• Expert: Grand Healing
• Expert: Circle of Protection
• Expert: Repel Undead
• Expert: Devour Health^
• Adept: Close Wounds
• Adept: Heal Other
• Adept: Greater Ward
• Adept: Cure Disease
• Apprentice: Healing Hands
• Apprentice: Fast Healing
• Apprentice: Cure Poison
• Apprentice: Cure Paralysis
• Apprentice: Greater Fortify Fatigue*
• Novice: Healing
• Novice: Absorb Fatigue^

Adept: Conjuration

• Adept: Conjure Mace!
• Adept: Conjure Dremora Caitiff!
• Adept: Banish Daedra
• Apprentice: Reanimate Corpse!
• Apprentice: Soul Trap!
• Apprentice: Summon Scamp!
• Novice: Summon Familiar

^ Isn't normally used. She actually knows this spell.
* Re-flavored as a blessing of Kynareth. Re-purposed so that it can be cast on others.
! This spell was not learned naturally. This is part of Molag Bal's boon.

Tactics

If she can help it, Wylendriel won't. Aside from being a healer at heart, the stress of combat and intense feelings such as anger, misery, or fear actually has her run the risk of succumbing to Molag Bal's suggestions and her own dark urges and intrusive thoughts. Say she succumbs, though: there isn't any real strategy. She seeks to surprise and overpower her foes with unbridled aggression and summons a bound mace. Then she can use her restoration skills to drain away her foes' health or stamina, rendering them weak and helpless as she beats them repeatedly into the ground until they're liquefied. Her mind is not so clouded and her willpower is not so weak that she cannot tell between foe or ally, so she will (at least for the most part) will be able to restrain herself from taking out that same aggression on her friends. Anyways, in this respect, her "berserker mode" has her serve as a glass cannon. She cripples and executing enemies, but is totally armorless and lacks the natural durability to take very many blows herself. Only in dire situations where she cannot fight an enemy or horde of enemies on her own will she call upon Molag Bal's conjuration magic to summon dremoras or reanimate corpses. Note that never in her right mind would she consider using such vile magic.

Relations and Affiliations

Wylendriel is a priestess of the Temple of Kyne in Whiterun, and is a rather respected member of the clergy among the locals despite her elven blood. She has not been there for very long, but she has proven her devotion and ability to the nords and they've taken her as one of their own. Most have, at least.

Opinions

N/A

Other Capabilities

Has a cast iron stomach and is able to digest damn near any edible piece of food available. Having a strict meat-based diet, some of it even raw, tends to build up your immune system like crazy. She has some resistance to disease and poison effects because of this.

Inventory

Cash

Her last 10 Septims

Keys and Lockpicks

Only the key to the Temple of Kyne in Whiterun.

Clothing and Armor

• A set of robes; water-resistant (waxed wool), leather supported, cold-weather (bear fur), hooded, seperable (bear fur)
• Fur boots
• Black wool top, sleeveless
• Black wool tights, down to knees
• A leather belt

Weapon and Ammunition

It's not really a weapon, but she has a skinning knife if she's feeling desperate.

Potion and Arcane Supplies

• 3 bottles of Potion of Magicka

Jewelry and Novelty Items

An amulet of Kynareth with a minor stamina enchantment, and an eagle skull hanging from her belt (a memento from home, also serves as a second divine focus).

Books and Documents

• Unsent letters addressed to Valenwood, sealed with wax.
• Several pieces of blank parchment and empty envelopes.
• A copy of each: Healers Fieldbook, Herbalist's Guide to Skyrim, Notes on Racial Phylogeny, Nine Commands of the Eight Divines, The Consecrations of Arkay, and the poems Hymn to Kyne and Kyne's Tears on single pieces of parchment.
• A book containing a compilation of poetry, alphabetically listed, from the Death Blow of Abernanit to The Warrior's charge, and all of the lesser known poems that came before, in-between, and after.

Food, Drinks, Provisions

Preserved beef and venison, water, medicinal herbs, a mortar and pestle, dressings, bandages, a splint, and a tourniquet.

Load Bearing Equipment

• A satchel, carrying most of her stuff.
• Five pouches hanging from her belt, carrying medicinal herbs.
• A waterskin, on sling slung over her shoulder.

Other

• A feathered quill and inkjar.
• Threading needles and a spool of sinew fiber.

The Elder Scrolls: Fruits of Contention - Chapter 1 (Completed)

10-4 gcold! Looking forward to it.

<Snipped quote by Spoopy Scary>

<Snipped quote by Chrononaut>

The attempt seems well averted so far. Probably a couple of IC days later when Niernen pisses off her brother again.

@Peik

A success in saving his life doesn't always have to equal wound free though! 😜

The Elder Scrolls: Fruits of Contention - Chapter 1 (Completed)

Thanks for the update, Dervy-bird!

@Hank @Peik

Raelyn could join in on peacekeeping efforts, if only because she has a vested interest in keeping Do'Karth (and any other member of the mercenary company aside from Gustav) from being murdered.

@Chrononaut

Assuming I'm accepted, and accepted in time, Wylendriel might be able to help Do'karth recover, should her help be required, from said murder attempt!

I mean, there's a lot of novice and apprentice level restoration practitioners, sure, but you know.

The Elder Scrolls: Fruits of Contention - Chapter 1 (Completed)

@gcold, @Dervish, so all of the changes were made. All of the important edits are highlighted in yellow, things would significantly impact the character. I made other edits along the way that fixed typos, funny wording, and moved some things around so that it simply read better and might evoke a more powerful response. One of the spells, Banish Daedra, is actually an adept level spell that Wylendriel would not have been able to learn upon joining the temple in Skyrim - but, given how Molag Bal giving her knowledge of conjuration, and her having a basis to work on with knowing how to repel undead, what training she did received in attempting to learn how to banish daedra, I'd imagine that it wouldn't be too hard for her to figure out how to do that after the Prince's daedric boogaloo (I love that phrase now).

Also, Molag spoke twice and not once because I'm a rebel (not really I'm a huge softie and loud voices scare me). I figured, once, to seal the deal (and she was on top of an ancient altar site), and the second time because she carried a piece of it with her. Even then... it's not much. A couple of words.

Let me know if I missed something. As usual, input is appreciated.

Wylendriel Greensky

Wylendriel Greensky

_{Female Bosmer | 60 | The Lady}

Profile

Place of Origin

Grahtwood, Valenwood

Appearance

Her overall demeanor is as unsuspecting and as humble as she is dressed, in the layered robes bequeathed to her by the temple where she worships her goddess, Kynereth. One critical look at the Bosmer and her identity as a priestess becomes quite apparent. She seems as gentle and dainty a thing as one might suspect, looking doe-eyed around her as though she were at constant risk, and ever agile like so many of her kind with her lithe frame moving with disguised grace. She has become fairly fit though a nomadic lifestyle, though weighing in at just 110 lbs. Standing at 5'5", her height seems as any other wood-elven folk, but her stance is a tall one, or at least like she's attempting to make herself seem taller than she really has; how the arc in her back seems to exist to support shoulders weary from hardship. You wouldn't think so to look at her, but she's actually lived through 60 years of life! That's technically pretty short for a Bosmer and is considered to be barely scraping by as an adult.

A heart-shaped face bears a stiff upper lip, but perhaps only to steady her quivering bottom one as she tries her damnedest to stay strong. It bears an upturned button nose raised high, as if to hold herself above whatever degrading or shameful – inexplicable thing, in lack of better wording, for she does not carry with her an air of arrogance or nobility; more as though there are intrusive thoughts that she seeks to prove herself to be above. Her long, silky auburn hair is usually braided up haphazardly into a bun. It reveals a pretty face in the innocent sense, what with the thin jawline and pointed chin, the high cheekbones and wide forehead - but only attractive if a person could bring themselves to look past the those wide Bosmer eyes and the array of sharp teeth.

Her robes are made from hide and thin leather in the middle of layers for durability and protection, with wool stitched over the outside as the outer layer, and treated with wax to protect against the rain. The inside of the robes is all grizzly bear fur warming her skin and absorbing whatever perspiration there may be. These robes adorned with a number of buttons made from polished bone and apparently just as many pouches hanging from a belt made from a thick leather, and with it, a curious trophy of an eagle skull. The robe's tailoring even applies to the hood, making this outfit a very heavy one to be lugging around - good for the regions of Skyrim, High Rock, and Wrothgar, but less so anywhere else south of Bruma. Beneath, she wears tight-fitted, black-colored, wool undergarments that cover her torso and thighs, but otherwise leaves exposed her arms and her legs from the knees down. Her feet are covered with fur boots and her hands are usually bare, but as a part time alchemist who follows the Green Pact, her hands are stained with all manners of ichors and ingredients, and frequently smell... obnoxiously robust, to be putting it gently. The sight of pointed nails that seem like claws can only lend more anxious energy to the smell of her hands. A leather satchel hangs at her side from a strap going across her chest and over one of her shoulders.

The robes can fortunately be separated from the inside layer of bear fur in case of warmer weather. The hide and wool outside layers function like a shell or windbreaker of the inside. Underneath her garments however, this young elf's sand colored skin is littered with scars. Some small, and others very, very large. If one didn't know better, they would think she had died terribly and was stitched right back up. Gnarly gouging scars in her abdomen, punctures in her legs, slashes over her arms, a smaller one down the side of both her lips, a bite mark on her chest, lashes across her back, and a slash around her throat. Any attempt at questioning these are met with silence and never answered. So gruesome is this sight, you may not immediately noticed the tattoos on her body, markings of the winged herald. Feathered wings stretch out from the center of the back with the tips of its furthest feathers reaching down the back of her arms. Smaller wings are placed on her chest by her collarbones, reaching to her shoulders. Feathers rest above both of her eyebrows.

Personality

Lately, there has been a buildup of disturbing events that have left her emotionally distant and afraid to get close to people. She doesn't want to put anybody at risk out of this acquired fear of accidentally hurting those around her through whatever accident may arise from her compulsions. Yet, there also exists an element of distrust that makes it difficult for her to get close to people. This distrust is not so pervasive in her personality that it breeds conflicts with others, but impedes any progress in the development of a real, meaningful relationship. How this distrust affects her most is how, over the last couple of weeks, she has learned to put her own life in her own hands instead of relying on others. She has great potential for love, platonic or otherwise - she feels those emotions, but she fearfully rejects any oncoming advances and closes her heart to interested parties.

Continuing with this duality theme of withdrawn concern, she, as suggested before, prefers to take measures into her own hands. While some of it may come from a priestess' humility in not wanting to burden others with her own responsibilities, it too comes from that same distrust factor. Unaccountable variables could compromise the outcome, and therefore she would prefer to do it herself and take responsibility for any failure should failure occur. Insisting to her that it does not have to be that way, that she can rely on others sometimes, is a vain effort since her stubbornness blocks off any attempt to appeal to her vulnerability. She is paranoid, stubborn, caught up in her own sense of responsibility, and would just as quickly sit them down by force if they continue to pester her. This hedgehog's dilemma is not an ingrained flaw, but was acquired, and only recently.

This doesn't Wylendriel make callous though. She is still a healer, she has compassionate - on that same note, she's not a pushover. Her commanding tone is useful for bedside manner and her timid nature is thrown out the window when her areas of responsibilities (healing, sermon, etc.) come around. This dutiful disposition is tempered with motherly care, putting every ounce of effort into making sure her patients have a healthy recovery. Additionally, she is nonjudgmental of the other races. This even applies to the Nords – she understands that she entered Skyrim during a time of fear and struggle. She takes no absurd amount of pride in her elven heritage like the Thalmor do. Instead, she believes that there is something to learn from every culture. Still, she is understandably cautious while approaching nords he hasn't met yet (or any race of men for that matter, considering the Dominion's siege on the rest of Tamriel has left them suspicious of elves, and even the Dominion itself wants her head on a pike). She also has a love for poetry.

Even through her endearing visage, it is not difficult to tell that there is something more beneath the surface, and it cannot be pointed toward any one thing. It is an anger, it is an itch, it is a compulsion, an intrusive thought - it is a guilty conscience. It is as though a seed of evil was planted in her heart, and with all of her might she tries to reject it - bury it - kill it - but try as she may, it is like a craving and it only grows hungrier with time. The line between her desires and the compulsions of this seed are blurred, the feelings that she feels feel alien, because - Gods help her, she's a priestess for Kyne's sake, a healer. All of these little suggestions in her head, ever-so-sublte, this feeling of craving - is almost like a lust for violence, to feel in control, a sort of bestial blood-lust that is so damn insatiable that she just barely feeds into it with just the barest degree of violence so that it does not totally overwhelm her. She knows it's not her, she knows it does not belong there, and she knows exactly where it came from.

Her guilt stems from many things – one being the doubt of her faith to her Lady. This guilt best summarizes her her real self. She feels guilty for making the decision of accepting a deal that costed her soul, for choosing a daedra over Kynereth, this evil that has planted itself inside her, and about her growing doubt in the Nine Divines. She once tried to justify it, after all, had they not left her to die at the hands of her betrayers? For Arkay's sake, perhaps it would be right for her to die, but where was Stendarr's mercy? Or Kynereth's gift to her faithful? Then comes the feelings of guilt regarding that sense of entitlement and her expectations of the gods. The guilt of her bloody crimes. The guilt of her own betrayal of another. She is torn in many different ways and wishes for peace inside herself to ease that discord, and there's little question as to why she has so little inner strength to spare.

With all her years as a healer and priestess under her belt, she thought herself ready for death, but in the end she found herself no more at peace than the lost and wounded souls she preached to. She beats herself up for it and belittles herself, and Molag Bal's corruption further taints her. With all of this inner turmoil, Wylendriel is growing more convinced there is no saving one such as herself. In the end though, she has come to find that there is greater justice to be found in healing as many as she can than in taking the easy way out. After some time and coming to terms with herself, she feels that it would be best to work at bettering herself one step at a time, and that the first step would be to remove the daedra's influence once and for all - which in itself is a monumental task, but prays that the mercy of the Nine Divines would be such that they would cleanse her spirit: the last few shreds of her faith clings to this desperate gambit: the deciding act that would finally determine the fate of what remained.

Background

The Journey

Wylendriel was born in Valenwood, to a respected mother and father that devoted their lives to Y'ffre in Elder Root, Grahtwood. They especially had taken to the Green Pact and were loyally faithful to the religion as Spinners, its enforcers. So much, in fact, their first born daughter, named Wylendriel, was conditioned to follow the Green Pact out the womb and would be raised with the intentions of making her a priestess as well. For the earliest years, the young and impressionable Bosmer lass adhered to family tradition, studying her people's history and following each and every rule obediently - there was nothing else, only Y'ffre - and was on the road to receiving the same kind of respect her parents had in her society. It went this way for a couple years, learning more and more about Valenwood, it's friends and enemies, healing; and all the while, the Aldmeri Dominion, formed a couple hundred years before she was even born, assumed a larger presence inside Valenwood. As she learned more about her allies, she learned more about their culture and about the Dominion's enemies, she discovered something about the Imperial Empire: their Nine Divines. They had a parallel to Y'ffre through Kynereth, except that she seemed to exemplify the beauty and force of nature. Wylendriel's family did not expect her to discover Kynereth in the world around her.

She didn't replace Y'ffre, no. Rather, the goddess only added to the enrichment of Wy's world. If Y'ffre was the father, the state of existing, of only being - Kynereth was the mother, its force, it's passion, beauty and danger, she breathed the soul into life and made it beautiful. Life was essential, yes, but it was simply existing - what would life be were it not the soul and beauty that made life worthwhile? Kynereth was nature. This self-found philosophy touched Wylendriel so profoundly that she chose to educate herself how she could in order to follow in the footsteps of her newfound Lady. Such material was hard to come by in Valenwood, so her knowledge was only rudimentry, and her family never quite looked at her the same after it - but as long as she didn't forsake the Green Pact, they figured there was nothing wrong with it. She looked happy! She was interested in helping others. They still intended on keeping her faith a secret from the Thalmor of the Dominion. Who knows what they might think of it?

All that the Altmer and the Aldmeri Dominion had brought to Valenwood were not so great, though. They brought also strife to some few, select Bosmer communities. Rumors of purges spread across Valenwood, of isolated executions by the hands of Altmer inquisitors in the north. Word had it that the victims were deserving of such a fate. They were "unworthy savages, not befitting to be part of this grand alliance of Mer." Not many questioned it, they had this idea that their "close bond" with the Altmer was far too valuable to forsake. Wylendriel's family would of course be spared, being far too valuable and important to Bosmer society. It was not unheard of that some Bosmer took the Green Pact to extremes, and it was no wonder that the Altmer thought they were a barbaric people. While Wylendriel followed a watered-down version of it, where she and others rejected cannibalism, the purists hunted their enemies and consumed their flesh. It was a revolting thought in her mind, though despite that, there was still the sense of racial kinship. Then you have the ones supporting Imperial occupation, which would no doubt prove them as traitors. It was depressing to hear of the Altmer killing them, but she followed two deities of nature, and death and survival was part of the cycle of nature. All she felt she could do was pray for them in honor of perpetuating that cycle.

The years had gone on and Wylendriel was growing into a full-fledged woman, and she and some others of her community has remained fairly ignorant of the events occurring in the outside world. She practiced her skills of restoration magic to heal wounded hunters after their return from the forest, and using conventional medicine to follow after, or if the wounds were too small. As her reputation grew, she found herself healing soldiers doing only-Gods-know-what, but it wasn't her place to ask or to judge. While she had taken a path of faith that had warranted some disappointment from her family, she gained value in the eyes of some few Altmer agents of the Dominion. They took notice of not just her intense devotion, but her skills as a healer. Offered ever so diplomatically to enlist with the Dominion as a field medic, Wylendriel felt obligated to decline for she was no warrior. They saw it as a reasonable defense, though she was curious about the influx of Aldmeri soldiers coming their way. Had they been at war all along? Though they found her naivety cute, all they said to her was that it was nothing to worry about. Just some few skirmishes with the human empire up north. They let her be without further harassment on that note, but continued to send Altmer infantry to her in Valenwood if they were near enough. She came to be idolized as a highly regarded citizen in her community, endeared for her compassion and healing ability.

She found it pretty humorous. Rarely was one found without the other.

Though ignorant of world events she may have been, the news of conflict that broke out in northern Valenwood spread like wildfire. Separatist dissenters lashed out against the Aldmeri Dominion, and with the help of the Empire, drove them south. Dominion presence became more prevalent in the south and were organizing to make counter-attacks against the separatists and the Imperial Empire that backed them. The outside world's trouble have broken in, and truth of the Dominion's deeds had gotten clearer. The rumors of executions of the Bosmeri people were more than just rumors, and they weren't just isolated incidents. The purges were more like a systematic slaughter. Indeed, they saw the Bosmer as little more than barbarians. Though elven, they were still more like second class citizens than trusted allies. When a close friend of Wylendriel was ruthlessly murdered, only because they found her on her haunches and leaning over a bloody rabbit - for simply eating - she saw these purges for what it really was: cultural cleansing. They were the judge, jury, and executioner of any that the Altmer thought weren't good or "civilized" enough to be their underlings.

It was at the turn of her adulthood when Wylendriel defamed the Aldmeri Dominion, and sure enough, it wasn't a popular opinion. She was branded as a traitor, and before she could turn to flee Valenwood, she was briefly stopped by her family. They parted ways with a hug and a kiss, proud of their daughter's courage, and with a gift in the form of an eagle's skull. It was the acknowledgement and acceptance of her faith in Kynereth. What could have been more symbolic of the nature goddess of the wind than that? She escaped shortly after to the far corners of Tamriel attempting to evade the Dominion with war waging around her as she went. Whether it was by foot or by caravan, she eventually found herself in the wilds of southern Skyrim by the end of the year. She was found by a Markarth patrol in the Reach, and they reigned her in for questioning – mostly to her potential ties to the Dominion. She managed to convince them that she was no friend of the Thalmor, but they were still suspicious of the elf passing through. Still fearful of the Dominion's discovery of her, Wylendriel fled once again as soon as she was fed and rested towards the east, where the Nords of Eastmarch were notorious for their particular disdain of elven kind. This didn't worry her though; whatever vulgarity or mud they wanted to sling her way would be nothing compared to the punishment the Thalmor would deliver unto her.

She payed the carriage a hearty sum to take her to the other side of Skyrim, and instead she landed in front of Whiterun. They learned that the road ahead was blockaded by bandits and the man refused to go further. So she remained in central Skyrim. From the beginning, things were hard, but it was though the goddess herself was watching over her - she found her place in a Temple of Kynereth, much to her fortune, in front of the Gildergreen. Here, her restoration magic and medicinal skills were highly valued. Her safety was assured here, behind tall walls and Skyrim's staunch stance against the Aldmeri Dominion. Also being a servant of the goddess, she could find respite from the Dominion under the Jarl's protection. When she first arrived at the temple, she stood at the door in ragged furs and hide, nearly destroyed by the long trip across Tamriel. She nearly looked like a beggar! But her devotion was unquestionable. They took her in and made her sturdy, warm, and reliable robes that reflected her Green Pact, but was befitting of a priestess. They reminded her of home.

The path ahead presented far more difficulties than she had anticipated. Cultural roadblocks, miscommunication, and just a general misunderstanding of how nord society even functioned. It proved difficult to gain the trust of the local nords, but her devotion to the goddess Kynereth was almost tangible and she treated every visitor with the utmost respect and humility. She poured everything she had into every restoration spell and genuinely cared about her patients. Such diligence guaranteed her respect from Skyrim's most stubborn nords. It was heartwarming to find a place where she belonged. During her stay at the Temple of Kyne, the priestesses that already lived there taught her everything there was to know about Kynereth. Wy's rudimentary understanding was greatly expanded upon and she was taught practices that seemed totally unnecessary back home. For instance, it was tradition to learn how to summon a familiar, a guardian of nature, to perhaps protect or lead the way. The familiar would, in one way or another, guide the caster along their path. In addition, human priesthood expanded their services beyond just healing. She was expected to learn how to repel and banish the undead and daedric forces that threatened Nirn. They helped to bolster her powers of Restoration magic, and gave her a basic understanding of Conjuration. Conjuring familiars came easy, but banishment is where she really struggled with. Turns out she has a much harder time with making things go away than she does with making things stay.

It wasn't before long that she decided to go on a pilgrimage to visit the Eldergleam. She hired mercenaries, Nords from Eastmarch, to escort her on her hike eastward and protect her from the likes of bandits or increase her chance of survival should a dragon find her (assuming that there was still one in hiding that the last Dragonbon had not yet slain). She left with her temple's blessing and set out on the long road ahead.

But all went south once they circled around the mountain, High Hrothgar. In the middle of nowhere, miles from any sign of civilization, Wylendriel was struck by betrayal. The very men she payed to protect her turned around and jumped her, before dragging her off to some remote location at a ruined site where she was thrown onto a stone slab. She was mugged, beaten, stolen from, and... Gods, violated. They passed her around, taking turns, laughing! They told her, every time they beat her... stabbed her... lashed her, bit her - they told her that she had this coming. This was she got for being an elf. When they were finally finished with her, when she finally thought they would leave her be and let her wallow in her suffering, one of them slid their knife across her throat. She was spat on and left for dead, Wylendriel was spending her final moments bleeding out, gurgling and drowning in her own blood and unable to breath, laying there and clutching her throat. She spent her last moments fearful and in tears and in silent prayer. First to her lady Kynereth, but she was silent. Thoughts of the circle of life intruded into her mind, the lessons of the temple - but she couldn't let go feeling so betrayed – it was too unfair. As she felt her life slipping away, she prayed to any of the Divines asking for mercy and a second chance. Her prayers went unheard, and with her consciousness on the verge of slipping, she made a final cry for mercy to anything that would listen.

A gutteral, malevolent voice filled her mind. "I can save your life," it offered, "if just for now, and if you would pledge your soul to me..."

Blinded by desperation, she accepted the offer.

She awoke several days later in the small village of Ivarstead. Seemingly in complete recovery, covered in gruesome looking scars strewn across her body - as it happens, a hunter found her unconscious a couple miles out, but said he found her unharmed. If he didn't know better, it looked as though she lied down and took a nap... were her clothes not torn in several places, mostly over her chest and around her waist. They were folded next to her with a needle and some thread for her to fix her torn clothing – apparently whoever took her in didn't have any confidence in patching it. Physically, she felt fine save for a gross feeling pit in the center of her chest. It felt empty. She felt violated. As she recalled back to the last thing she could remember, the horrifying scenes of her abusers wracked her mind. The mere memory was torture and she no longer felt at home in her own skin - as her memory returned, so did the same malevolent voice. What happened? What had she just done?

Painful headaches wracked her head. Ear-splitting droning sounds, a cacopheny of whispers, all trying to talk ove rone another - nothing was getting through - all of it - too much - an onslaught of sensory overload as she felt tears well up her eyes over the stress of everything over the last couple of hours - what had to have been hours - the sounds, the screeching, the incoherent chaos - it fell silent. She took deep, heavy breathes as she looked around the room feeling traumatized.

"What... what in Oblivion was tha--" The piercing frequency came out louder than before and was accompanied by what had to have been a thousand red images in rapid succession, "--AAAAAHHH! Gah! Ha... ha! What... What is--"

A thousand more images, barely decipherable, and she was clutching her head and squeezing her eyes shut as the chaos unraveled itself in her head. A man burst through the door of the cabin she was in, a fretful looking man, alarmed by Wylendriel's screaming, found her in this position with tears silently rolling down her cheeks. Among these images, she was able to discern the bloodied maw of a laughing daedric face and the realization of what she has done finally hit her. The blasphemy of her actions stabbed sharper into her chest than any weapon her betrayers used.

"What happened?" Asked the panicked man. She couldn't see what he looked like, she was just wanting to make everything stop.

"This... this migraine..." She told him in weeping. "Make it stop..."

"You look like you've gone through Oblivion and back," he commented, "what's with all of your scars, what happened to you?"

Another thousand images played in her head, but they played slightly slower, almost like a recording of what happened to her. Her mind's eye stretched over Skyrim through red-colored spectacles, and found herself watching her own abuse from a bird's eye view. Over... and over again... she felt the rage and fury build up inside of her, this hatred. The images shot across Skyrim to the northeastern region of Eastmarch and into a cabin, where she got a close up view of her betrayers, their ugly mugs, laughing and drinking... Gods, this unnatural hatred that she did not understand, but at the same time... wasn't it natural? Wasn't it natural to hate the people who did this to hurt, the people who violated her as she watched over and over again... to crave their pitiful! Bloody! Murder--

No... no, no, no! No! This! Wasn't! Normal! Why is she thinking this? Why is she wanting and craving this?!

As she watched these images, as fast and as abrupt as they were, stalled for just a second on the slab she was layed on. Beneath the dust, she could barely trace out the faint imprints of daedric runes. One last image of herself being hurled into the mouth of a massive daedric beast before it stopped and a single whisper echoed through her ears: "I own you."

Suddenly, everything stopped liked she was hoping it would. The stranger's voice was barely able to break through and Wylendriel was barely able to understand the flashes of images behind her eyes at face value, but something inside her gave this intuitive understanding of what was happening to her. The daedric face she was seeing had imprinted on her, and for some reason, recognizable. It's name was clear, and it wanted her to know what exactly that was. Molag Bal. Prince of Domination. Of Schemes.

"Ma'am? Can you hear me?" The stranger asked. "Where did you get your scars?"

The thought of her betrayers sprung back to mind. The sheer anger that she felt at just the image of their faces made her hands shake.

"Ask about my scars again, and I'll show you exactly how I got them." Wylendriels said without thinking. She paused and reeled for a moment. "That did not just happen..." she muttered to herself. The words had just fallen out of her mouth, there wasn't any hesitation, they just - they just...

"Shor's bones, fine!" The stranger retorted. "I won't pry any further, but I was just trying to help, damn it!"

Wylendriel speechlessly watched him march out of the cabin. She knew this wasn't good, but emphatically, for some reason, could not bring herself to care. What she was an image of the people who hurt her, and as far as she felt concerned, Molag Bal offered her a chance for revenge and she planned on taking him up on that offer. Stitching her robes back together the best she could (making it more of a patch job, she wasn't concerned with prettiness), and set out on the open robe with nothing but the clothes on her back. Without rest, marching across Eastmarch, finding raw food on the way - utilizing aspects of of Restoration magic she never dared to use before by sapping the vitality of animals and leaving their husks behind. She eventually found the cabin in Eastmarch.

Staring it down, the same house from the images that flickered in her head, seemed to trigger flashes of individual images, almost like a magical flow, but something more sinister like a daedric energy. They made her aware of something that was apparently there from the moment she awoken in Ivarstead. Whatever it was she knew of Conjuration magic, it felt expanded upon. A sort of intuitive knowledge, but it didn't quite belong in the brain. She knew what it meant to take magicka and use it to summon a familiar. The sort of direction in which to swing it. The intuitive knowledge that Molag Bal had imparted unto her only concerned itself from where she could pull it from. There was no plan of action. Calling upon this Conjuration magic, an ethereal daedric mace rippled into existence into her hand before she kicked open the door, surprising the three nords inside - and they looked at her in horror when recognition of her face set in.

Wylendriel roared at them in unbridled rage, fueling the hatred and blood lust that had seeped into her heart. "Did you think you could betray me?!"

Two of them scrambled for their weapons, but one of them was too surprised and confused as to how the Bosmer bitch was still alive, so much that he wasn't expecting the wild aggression that she exhibited as she lunged towards him and grabbed him by the throat with one hand with crushing force, her sharp nails sinking into her throat, and a green aura surrounded her hand that sapped away the nord's energy. His arms fell weakly at his sides. The second and third nord came rushing towards her with axe and sword in hand. In her berserk, she ripped out the first nord's esophagus to be flung at one of their faces and swung the mace with all of her unrestrained might, knocking the second bearded attacker onto the ground with a crack of his sternum and another swift swing knocked away the third who was stunned by the bloody piece of flesh she threw at him - destroying his spine through the fur armor. Wylendriel contently watched them both squirm on the floor, savoring this moment while it lasted.

"I own you." She growled.

She turned to the bearded nord, squirming and scrambling to get away. She dropped onto her knees over his body with one palm firmly planted on his chest. It glowed a sickly green and steadily drained away the man's stamina, fueling repeated rage-filled swings of the the spectral mace into the nord's head until virtually nothing was left but shards of bone and liquefied gore. She was unable to feel it at this moment, but muscles in her shoulder were tearing with each swing, unable to hold themselves together with all the force she was forcing herself to exert. The third, crippled nord was later met the same fate.

When the last deed was done, the energy and the bloodlust that she felt coursing through her body dissipated until her body felt pained and weary. The mace evaporated into the air, and she weakly fell to her knees. Her conscience was now clear, and she looked around at the scene that surrounded her. Three utterly obliterated men, now unidentifiable, their blood seeping into floorboards - the scenes kept replaying inside her traumatized head. The emotions. Rage and blood lust. Their faces - splitting, with each and every crack... crack! Crack! Crunch! She - she... these unspeakable acts of, just... violence - committed by her own hand - they betrayed her! They were supposed to deserve this! Yet - her memories fell back to home, both in Valenwood and to her place in the Temple of Kyne. Recalling everything they had known then, and her values - even the Green Pact said not to kill wastefully. It all came rushing back to her, and all of the justification she thought she had melted away. What she had done here was indisputably evil, and here she was... almost... enjoying it. She broke down into sobs, all the while hugging her arms in trying to bear the agony they were under. It took a long time to bring herself to move, but she eventually mustered herself the will to use Restoration magic on herself. She felt the muscles sort of stitch themselves back together, and she would be okay - at least physically - but the the phantom pains will remain for a little while longer.

The moment she could bring herself to her feet, she ran. She fled from the scene, from the cabin, as fast as she could - as far south as her legs could carry her. Until finally, she fell down exhausted in the middle of Eastmarch. After their deaths, Molag Bal's corruption seemed to have disappeared from her mind. The images hadn't returned, but she still feared the possibility of hearing his voice again like from the time he offered to "save" her life. She prayed and prayed as her tears soaked the ground, but the Divines were deathly silent. They'd forsaken her. She had to do something about this. She had to do something other than run - she had to make a pledge to herself to reject the daedric prince. She'd prove it through a pilgrimage around Tamriel. She had to pray to each of the Nine Divines at their shrines, then maybe she could cleanse herself of this evil... but a sinking feeling told her that she would have to do a lot more than just simply pray to earn their forgiveness.

In spite of her doubts, she knew from her studies that there was a shrine to Akatosh here in Eastmarch, and it should have been nearby. It took some looking around, but when she found it, she spent an entire day devoted to prayer in front of the dragon god's shrine. Even after an entire day of prayer, she heard nothing. Found nothing, just silence. She had to be persistent. Word had it that Fort Amol held a shrine of Julianos, which wasn't far from here – it was still in Eastmarch. When she arrived at the fort, it was bristling with activity, filled with nervous and suspicious nords. They questioned her immediately, brandishing weapons, and she quickly explained herself while withholding some of the truth: she was on pilgrimage. They allowed her to stay for just that one day only because she was on pilgrimage, but warned her not to head to Windhelm to pray at Arkay's shrine. That was when she learned the city was completely overrun and taken over by an Akaviri army. This was the reason for the crowded occupancy of Fort Amol.

“Please,” Wylendriel pleaded, “let me help you. Show me your wounded.”

“There aren't many to show you.” One of the soldiers replied. It wasn't as much a blessing as the soldier made it sound – the battle was catastrophic. Those who participated were lucky to escape with wounds. Most of them died. Those “lucky” few could only manage to escape at the cost of missing limbs. With what few there were to take care of, the medics had already attended to them. But they did manage to do one more thing for Wylendriel after her unanswered prayer to Julianos: they pointed her into the direction. To the west was a shrine of Dibella inside this old abandoned fort, but was likely overridden with bandits or occult practitioners. Necromancy, and the like. Wylendriel was hesitant to pursue this shrine, fearful of not just the risk of going, but because there was also no telling what Molag Bal's curse might do to her. She asked for a different shrine.

“Well, to the northwest are a couple shrines to mighty Talos, just hugging the base of High Hrothgar. The closest one is where you follow the river to until you're in the valley, then go east and pass Cradlecrush Rock.” They suggested. Then he narrowed his eyes at the Bosmer. “But last I checked, you knife-ears didn't like him very much. Damn near outlawed Talos worship a couple years back – I fought that war.”

“That was the Thalmor.” Wylendriel insisted. “I may not have prayed to Talos before, but I promise you that I will get to know him.”

After Wylendriel rested up and replenished her supplies, she took a couple days to travel to the shrine north-east of High Hrothgar, making sure to follow the river. Though a rather wet journey, she was greeted by the gorgeous sight of a weathered statue overlooking a pond. There she found another person in prayer. When she greeted him, he reeled back. His face revealed pain with red eyes and a puffy faces. He was a man whose tears had run dry.

“What happened?” She asked.

“My wife,” the nord sobbed, “my home! Windhelm, ransacked. The akaviri... I... I've never seen anything like... like--”

The stranger took a deep breath to compose himself. Wylendriel's heart swelled with pain and fear. She had no idea what it meant when they spoke of the akaviri. An entire city was seized. By men or creatures she heard of only just yesterday by name. An alien force of unknown strength – chills ran up Wylendriel's spine as she looked over her shoulder expecting a monster, but found nothing there. When she looked at the man sitting on the ground, in the most humiliated and humble state possible, wracked with pain, she could help but feel tears well in her own eyes. He had something precious taken from him, and that was all it took for her to form an attachment with this stranger's kindred spirit.

“I'm just trying to make sense of it all.” The nord continued. “I want to know what Talos would do. What he'd have me do.”

Wylendriel sat beside the miserable widower, placed a soft hand over his own. “What's your name?” She asked.

“Torvald...” He answered.

“Wylendriel.” She whispered to him. “Let me pray with you, Torvald.” Torvald said nothing, but she felt his fingers wrap tightly around hers, occasionally quivering. The two sat in silence for what must've been hours, and she prayed and prayed – not just for forgiveness and not just in pledge to a god who, honestly, she did not even know, but also on Torvald's behalf. She prayed for his safety, his heart, and his fulfillment. She also prayed not for answers and direction, but for understanding, so that she could know who Talos was – she felt a guilty conscious for having ignorantly supported the Aldmeri Dominion and Thalmor. She wanted to seek peace with Talos on behalf of elven-kind. Her thoughts returned to home and those she left behind, wondering if they were safe or if any more of her friends or family would see themselves be victim to one of the Altmer's purges. A sudden chill breeze blew against her neck, prompting her eyes open. The sun had begun to set, casting a pink canopy across the sky. Her years of interpreting the signs of the divines instinctively led her to an epiphany, and read the situation as though the voice of an emperor was speaking to her:

“I am all that makes Skyrim; it's bite and it's boldness – but also it's beauty and it's glory. We are of blood spilled, but strength provided, we reward in bounty. Visit the North star at the break of dawn, then retrace your steps.”

Warmth filled her chest and she looked to Torvald beside her with a smile, his eyes still shut. There was a riddle to be solved. She was about to stand and help him to his feet, to help guide him along his way.

Her body suddenly seized. Her blood began boiling. Pain was stabbing her from behind her eyes. Her hand clenched around Torvald's -- he was shouting in pain!

'N-no... no! No, no!' Wylendriel thought desperately as squeezed her eyes as tightly she could. 'Gods, no, please! Save me!'

Dozens more of gruesome, haunting images burned her mind as they flickered through with hundreds of angry whispers in the background, but there was a difference this time. When before they sounded mindless and were whispering over one another, these were unified and had one clear message: punish.

Her emotions began flaring and became more intense with each passing second. She felt furious, but also powerful, tantalized, excited - but for what? She felt a growing hunger develop in the pit of her stomach as one suggestion after another inserted itself into her mind. For a moment, she managed hold down the urges and thoughts as her own emotions kept them at bay. They had arisen as soon as she realized what she was being made to do, and horror had begun to envelop her.

"Please... don't..." Wylendriel muttered to herself, struggling to keep herself from enjoying this moment as the corners of her mouth began twitching. “I don't want this.”

Torvald, too, in his fear and confusion, found tears welling in his eyes. “W-what are you doing? Wylendriel? Please... get off me!”

More images began rushing to her, the same blood-red sort of haze as they gave her rapid, broken up glimpses of Skyrim. Suddenly she saw herself. Walking, almost zombie-like, covered in blood. The gap across her throat was slowly closing itself. She fell limply onto the ground. Another image, almost as if it rewinded, and then more - she mindlessly picked something up while she was at the sight. A stone. The last few images that flickered into her head and revealed to her that it was a fragmented piece of the slab she was thrown upon, and on it was a daedric sigil. Then suddenly, there was darkness.

A slow laughter filled every crevice of her mind and felt to stretch on for years, until finally, after a long pause, she could hear Molag Bal's voice clear as day.

"Enjoy the meal."

Wylendriel felt her muscles jerk as every urge and every emotion she tried so hard to suppress came rushing back and overwhelmed her. This time, she was overcome by an animalistic frenzy, and she felt with her a presence infinitely more evil. She felt feelings inside her that she knew did not belong to her, but to something else that co-resided with her. Regardless of whatever it was she was feeling at the time, the priestess' cannibalized Torvald alive with a sense of euphoria. Her poor friend's screams and sobs cut the air. It, and the sound of wet gnashing of flesh and the tearing rips of muscle and skin were the most horrific band of instruments she'd ever heard, and for some reason, just made it more reason to love what was happening.

When Torvald's last scream finally cut short, her eyes stared into his as his eyes slowly fell back and the light vanished. The energy she felt coursing through her body vanished as well, just as quickly as it came. Everything that she knew to be normal came back, and what flesh that still resided in her mouth fell out as her jaw dropped in horror. Her gut wrenched and she threw her head to the side to let bile come pouring out. With each gag and each convulsion, her stomach removed the last drop of fluid in her stomach that it could until she was dry-hurling into the river. Gasping for breath, she took a long look at Torvald, lying lifeless on the ground with a gaping hole in his neck with streams of blood trickling down into the river. With tears streaming down her face, she went scrambling to rip open her robes and search every damned pocket to find the stone she saw in her visions. When she finally did, she pulled it out and threw it as hard as could with a scream and set herself off balance. She fell to her knees layed her head on the ground until sobs turned into whimpers.

'Kynereth, what have I done?'

She jumped down into the water to wash the blood off of her face. When she climbed back up the rocks, she stared at Torvald a couple minutes, her face just as red and puffy and tears ran dry as Torvald when she first found him. She dragged his eyelids shut with her fingers, and prayed for his spirit to cross safely into Sovngarde. Among her sorrows, being wracked with devastation at the loss of a new friend and a newfound crippling fear of the daedric prince's curse, what plagued her most was the sense of betrayal that Torvald must've felt in his last moments by her own hand. She knew what that betrayal was like. She felt she had to find solace in that he was lucky to remain dead. She had to find solace in blaming Molag Bal for this. She had to convince herself that this wasn't her fault, no matter how much it hurt. Wylendriel moved his body in front of Talos' statue and set a hand on his head – already cold – and her other hand grasping the eagle skull hanging from her belt. Closing her eyes, throat swollen in her mourning, she focused all of her restoration magic on him as she began reciting Arkay's rites of consecration. His spirit deserved to rest in peace and reunite with his lost love.

As she finished the final verses, she closed her eyes and sighed deeply. Leaning down to gently kiss Torvald's forehead, she quickly muttered under her breath, “rest easy in Sovngarde, my friend...”

Later that night she turned west back towards the river, with her mind replaying the thoughts that played in her head. North star. Break of dawn. Retrace your steps. The only problem with this is that sunlight sheds the sky of its stars. Unless there was something she can only see in daylight, or if it referred to something else. Was it Dawnstar? It's along the northern coast, about another two days of travel! Sighing in resignation, she thought about setting up camp until torchlight shone some distance away, just north of a bunch of other flickering lights. This was Whiterun Hold! That was Whitewatch Tower! Another twenty minute of straight running on her weary, pained legs was dulled slightly at the sight of a familiar landmark, and as she inched closer, even the guards at the tower seems to have taken an interest.

“Who goes there?” One called out, waving their torch in front of them. As Wylendriel got closer, unable to answer through her panting, the light lit up her face. “Shor's bones – priestess! Where have you been! You've been missing for weeks!”

“Commander Sinmir!” Wylendriel exclaimed between breaths.

“Is that Wylendriel?” Another asked.

“It's... it's a long story...” Wylendriel answered. “But my journey has turned into pilgrimage... would you mind if I rest here?”

“Uh, of course priestess,” Sinmir replied, “but wouldn't you much rather resting inside the city where it's comfortable?”

She just laugh slightly in response, but it sounded hollow and fake in the face of what she has had to suffer through lately. “I'm afraid I don't feel up to spending all night explaining myself to the whole city...”

“Are you okay?”

“I will heal.” Wylendriel answered softly. “In time...”

That night, before she slept, she prayed a silent, unanswered prayer to the daedric prince - to allow her to finish her pilgrimage. She suggested it would present the lord with an opportunity not often seen: an opportunity to battle and dominate a Divine. While Wylendriel has great faith that the divines could easily purge the daedra and recover her soul, Molag Bal has so far remained silent and seems to be permitting her pilgrimage, indicating that she might have appealed to his arrogance and lust for power...

The next morning, she met with the carriage outside Whiterun and payed the man to bring her to Dawnstar. It would take her there in half the time, and would allow her an opportunity to reflect on the road that has brought her here. On Torvald as well, but her mind, in the end, always returned to home. Back to Valenwood.

Capabilities

Skills

Expert: Restoration – (Wylendriel's long time commitment to Kynereth did not go without merit – she is valued as a healer and has fixed up even gutted soldiers on the brink of death, while supplementing her magic with practical medical expertise. On the other side of the coin, she can use the same magical powers that allows her to revitalized others to inflict great harm upon them... not that she'd ever willingly do so.)

Adept: Medicine – (The healers back home and the priestesses in the Temple of Kyne in Skyrim both taught her many things about medicine, and how to heal by utilizing Her Graciousness' gifts instead of relying on magicka. Specially talented, perhaps, as her Green Pact forbids her from harvesting her own vegetation for her craft. Working around that gave her a specialized niche in medicine using strictly animal-based ingredients, but still knows a select few recipes utilizing plant-life.)

Adept: Conjuration – (At first, Wylendriel was just a novice. Just like any of us are when we learn something new. But in this case, Wylendriel has very little gained or practical knowledge. Most of what she now knows is intuitively gained. One of Molag Bal's "gifts". His boon used her existing knowledge of Conjuration as a foundation for him to selectively impart his intuitive understanding of magic onto her, and determining what she is and is not allowed to know. There's a cruel irony to be found in that he chooses not to champion Wylendriel with the true Mace of Molag Bal, yet arms her with a magic spectral daedric mace anyways.)

Adept: Bosmeri – (She's a Bosmer who grew up in the center of Valenwood, enough said.)

Apprentice: One-handed (Blunt) – (Wylendriel doesn't have much in the way of actual skill in using maces. It's more like Molag Bal's curse making her really angry and putting her into a berserker state, and swinging it really fucking hard.)

Novice: Athletics – (Bosmer are naturally stringy and swift, and it only helps matters that Wylendriel enjoys being active and is prone to embarking on pilgrimages.)

Novice: Acrobatics – (Bosmer are agile, and Wylendriel is no exception. She spent much of her time growing up traversing the wilds, and she can climb trees with ease.)

Novice: Tailoring – (She has a basic grasp on how to stitch her clothing back together, but it's gonna look like patchwork. It's either that or sporting holes. Your choice.)

Weaknesses

Pseudo-pacifist: Wylendriel's naturally pacifistic nature is actually somewhat compromised, but now she consciously tries to avoid getting involved in the middle of the fray. She'll do anything to get out of fighting in all-out battle to avoid the risk of going mad. Also, a lack of conditioning and natural strength keeps her from helping with any of the heavy lifting without hurting herself. Though to some degree, she has to learn to give herself in to these impulses just enough and direct them towards people who would do others ill, just so the glass won't overfill.

Hedgehog's dilemma: She's distant and emotionally unavailable even to her friends and allies. It's different parts paranoia – on one hand, even if you're close enough to her that there's zero chance of you betraying her, she fears there's the possibility of her hurting you.

Foreign ignornace: She's was isolated in Valenwood for a while without much news of the outside world seeping into her circle. When she left Valenwood, she barely knew a thing about the other cultures outside of home except for a few details that are typically common knowledge across the world. I.E. Nords don't like elves, Altmer don't like humans or beast races, and Dunmer don't like anybody at all. Not even each other.

Cursed: The curse is a slowly eroding corruption of her soul. She gets intrusive thoughts, feelings that shouldn't be there, and there are subtle inklings of violent urges implanted into her nature, and the compulsion to dominate. Another unfortunate side effect is, when she finally does give in to this curse, the sort of berserker mode she enters does not serve her well. She is going to hurt herself. The body puts limits on itself, and it's to keep things like that from happening.

Wanted: Avoid Dominion soldiers.

Other priorities: She's still on a pilgrimage, and that might put her at odds with some of the party's plans. She's dead-set on finishing what she started and cleansing the curse from her soul as soon as possible.

Spells

Spells

Expert: Restoration

• Expert: Grand Healing
• Expert: Circle of Protection
• Expert: Repel Undead
• Expert: Devour Health^
• Adept: Close Wounds
• Adept: Heal Other
• Adept: Greater Ward
• Adept: Cure Disease
• Apprentice: Healing Hands
• Apprentice: Fast Healing
• Apprentice: Cure Poison
• Apprentice: Cure Paralysis
• Apprentice: Greater Fortify Fatigue*
• Novice: Healing
• Novice: Absorb Fatigue^

Adept: Conjuration

• Adept: Conjure Mace!
• Adept: Conjure Dremora Caitiff!
• Adept: Banish Daedra
• Apprentice: Reanimate Corpse!
• Apprentice: Soul Trap!
• Apprentice: Summon Scamp!
• Novice: Summon Familiar

^ Isn't normally used. She actually knows this spell.
* Re-flavored as a blessing of Kynereth. Re-purposed so that it can be cast on others.
! This spell was not learned naturally. This is part of Molag Bal's boon.

Tactics

If she can help it, Wylendriel won't. Aside from being a healer at heart, the stress of combat and intense feelings such as anger, misery, or fear actually has her run the risk of succumbing to Molag Bal's suggestions and her own dark urges and intrusive thoughts. Say she succumbs, though: there isn't any real strategy. She seeks to surprise and overpower her foes with unbridled aggression and summons a bound mace. Then she can use her restoration skills to drain away her foes' health or stamina, rendering them weak and helpless as she beats them repeatedly into the ground until they're liquefied. Her mind is not so clouded and her willpower is not so weak that she cannot tell between foe or ally, so she will (at least for the most part) will be able to restrain herself from taking out that same aggression on her friends. Anyways, in this respect, her "berserker mode" has her serve as a glass cannon. She cripples and executing enemies, but is totally armorless and lacks the natural durability to take very many blows herself. Only in dire situations where she cannot fight an enemy or horde of enemies on her own will she call upon Molag Bal's conjuration magic to summon dremoras or reanimate corpses. Note that never in her right mind would she consider using such vile magic.

Relations and Affiliations

Wylendriel is a priestess of the Temple of Kyne in Whiterun, and is a rather respected member of the clergy among the locals despite her elven blood. She has not been there for very long, but she has proven her devotion and ability to the nords and they've taken her as one of their own. Most have, at least.

Opinions

N/A

Other Capabilities

Has a cast iron stomach and is able to digest damn near any edible piece of food available. Having a strict meat-based diet, some of it even raw, tends to build up your immune system like crazy. She has some resistance to disease and poison effects because of this.

Inventory

Cash

Her last 10 Septims

Keys and Lockpicks

Only the key to the Temple of Kyne in Whiterun.

Clothing and Armor

• A set of robes; water-resistant (waxed wool), leather supported, cold-weather (bear fur), hooded, seperable (bear fur)
• Fur boots
• Black wool top, sleeveless
• Black wool tights, down to knees
• A leather belt

Weapon and Ammunition

It's not really a weapon, but she has a skinning knife if she's feeling desperate.

Potion and Arcane Supplies

• 3 bottles of Potion of Magicka

Jewelry and Novelty Items

An amulet of Kynereth with a minor stamina enchantment, and an eagle skull hanging from her belt (a memento from home, also serves as a second divine focus).

Books and Documents

• Unsent letters addressed to Valenwood, sealed with wax.
• Several pieces of blank parchment and empty envelopes.
• A copy of each: Healers Fieldbook, Herbalist's Guide to Skyrim, Notes on Racial Phylogeny, Nine Commands of the Eight Divines, The Consecrations of Arkay, and the poems Hymn to Kyne and Kyne's Tears on single pieces of parchment.
• A book containing a compilation of poetry, alphabetically listed, from the Death Blow of Abernanit to The Warrior's charge, and all of the lesser known poems that came before, in-between, and after.

Food, Drinks, Provisions

Preserved beef and venison, water, medicinal herbs, a mortar and pestle, dressings, bandages, a splint, and a tourniquet.

Load Bearing Equipment

• A satchel, carrying most of her stuff.
• Five pouches hanging from her belt, carrying medicinal herbs.
• A waterskin, on sling slung over her shoulder.

Other

• A feathered quill and inkjar.
• Threading needles and a spool of sinew fiber.

The Elder Scrolls: Fruits of Contention - Chapter 1 (Completed)

I actually had this conversation about Jyggalag earlier today. Whereas the Divines represent aspects of life and of community, these individual traits, the Daedra are less about contributing to life, but rather to meddle with or control it. Dagon was a great example, Molag another - even Meridia. She's so damn insulted by something, that she sends you somewhere as her hand, to directly interfere with the plans or actions of another and to snuff out this evil. There is no real choice in the matter, no bargain, simply the direct interference of Nirn.

Jyggalag, as harmless as his domain of order might seem, would actually be a huge threat to Tamriel. Imagine a tall office building, with cubicles among cubicles among cubicles. Zombies in their cubicles. Going in. Going out. They move like clockwork, are totally obedient, and there's no soul in this place. Humanity has enough order to function, but we're far too much a free spirit to really accept that, especially in Tamriel. I don't think any race in Tamriel would be open to that sort of subjugation.

The Elder Scrolls: Fruits of Contention - Chapter 1 (Completed)

AAAHHHH! I was just thinking of Mass Effect, actually! I'm so glad you know about that game! I was imagining that yeah, while similar to indoctrination, the actual sounds and images she might hear and see would be like using the Prothean beacons, where it's a bunch of horrific noises and clips. I think she would be less deluded than Saren was, and would be able to identify the fine lines and what is and isn't normal for her, but still struggling to resist what Molag wants from her. I reread it and it looked as though that's exactly where I was going with it, but in the backstory, possession came out from the left field. That may be one of the remnants of her first character sheet.

We can shake and call it a deal on Conjuration. It'd be reasonable to expect a priestess of Kynereth to learn that school in order to summon nature based familiars and banish daedra. That also means I don't have to carry that scroll around.

There actually isn't much out there about the purges, it's somewhat obscure. You're right that Valenwood probably wouldn't side with them if the Thalmor consistently slaughtered anyone they didn't like. Apparently it was just small enough that the Silvenar and Green Lady, for some reason, would let them get away with it. Perhaps because their alliance was too important. Without them, the empire would try to rule them and they didn't want that either. I just know they existed, but anything more than that is fan theory.

I'll make the changes when I can. Thanks for the help! I'm looking forward to what gcold has to say.

The Elder Scrolls: Fruits of Contention - Chapter 1 (Completed)

Thanks for the reply @Dervish. First of all, thanks for your compliments. They mean a lot. You brought up a lot of really points that I will both implement as soon as possible (I'm at work ATM) and take into heavy consideration.

Like I said before, I got VERY carried away with the character, and by the end, I knew some things were gonna have to change - but I also felt pretty proud and just wanted people to look at it, lol. Anyways, I'll be addressing the points you made in a list in chronological order for convenience's sake.

Strength: it was compared in her skills that her strength was like an orc's - but you're right that in Tamriel, that's still pretty much the same as super-strengths d can be very hard to justify, if at all possible. It would be better described that perhaps her inhibitions were practically stripped from her. It still serves the same image of a small Bosmer woman dealing more damage than you'd reasonably expect her to, but there's the added bonus of her harming herself in the process. So less Hulk, more berserker. Thanks!

Possession: this is actually a fantastic concern, and the alternatives you offered are routes I should have taken instead. Normally I would've done what you said about irresistible urges and the line between her desires and MB's being blurred, but I literally spent 12 hours straight writing her and sometimes you forget about where you're going and the flow steals you along. I did a huge literary no-no in submitting the rough draft instead of rereading and assessing. Enough excuses though, it's an absolutely lovely idea and I'll be sure to incorporate it when I can.

Voices: this is understandable. The veil between Nirn and Oblivion may not allow for clear communication, and the image of a more chaotic, confusing form of communication would be much more eerie - this was something I did not take into consideration, mostly because I played a lot of Skyrim and ESO, and you can clearly hear Bal's voice in both games. Is there a reason that would've changed? At least from Skyrim, in ESO, Coldharbor was anchoring itself to Nirn, so it would make sense that his voice would be clearer. You could also only hear him at his shrine, but couldn't I argue that Wylendriel also serves as a medium?

Conjuration: understood, only problem I think is that the theme of her wielding a mace is iconic of Molag Bal, and the Oblivion spell required you to be adept. Could we rectroact act, given how Skyrim only requires you to be a novice to conjure a bound sword?

Mercenaries: this is probably the most important as it determines whether she's a good fit for the role play or not. I like what you said about Molag Bal's influence making her at least a little bloodthirsty - corruption, like you said, is far more compelling than Ball Prince sitting next to a button under a label that reads "Fuck Up Her Day".

Aldmeri Dominion: there's a lot here I'm sure I misunderstood. There's a lot of history here that Im sure I'm not aware of - I studied Valenwood, not the Dominion. What I do know is that the Dominion actually did conduct purges even in Valenwood, though that information was really hard to find. I know that cannibalism started going out of practice around the 2nd Era. It definitely still exist, but you'll still find Bosmer who think such a thing is kinda gross. Wylendriel is actually a massive rework of an older sheet, so some inaccuracies and awkward wording might still exist, and definitely would've restricted my creative ability by putting me in this box to work within - but I genuinely didn't know hold long the Third Dominion has been around. That will get fixed (I told you you were gonna find problems!) Back to the purges, they were likely worded to be an (unintentional) exaggeration of the truth. I don't actually know how widespread these purges are or how many Bosmer were killed at a time. Just that this incarnation of the Dominion, or at least the Thalmor, are massive dicks. I made it sound like the Altmer's Dominion probably because, yknow, the Altmer's are the ones who run it. I actually didn't know (or forgot) about the Aldmeri. Huh. Cool.

As always, input is appreciated. I may not be able to make immediate changes on my phone, but I'll see what I can get done. If it turns out to be too much of a hassle, I'll just wait till I get home. Night. Shift. Sucks.