#laataazin

[kettlequills]

Also 63 for laat and Miraak please

kiss 63: "trying to concentrate on a task but your lover kisses your neck, making your head spin." nsfw.

Miraak squatted comfortably in the dirt. His sharpened claw hovered over a chunk of driftwood he was practicing the carving on as he puzzled over the draconic characters, thinking of what more to add. The dedication was short and to the point, but he thought he could maybe add a bit more flair to the poetic memorialisation of the dragon’s name. He had known this dragon, once, hadn’t thought as terribly of it as he had some of the others, which was about a ringing commendation as Miraak ever made about any of his peers, except them, Laat, the Last Dragonborn. Every day their sheer humanity and the rawness of their dragon-soul confused and captivated him.

After the sweaty fight to down the dragon, he’d pulled off his mask, which was apparently his mistake.

Miraak twitched when blunt fingers gently moved the dripping, ink-sodden cascade of his limp green-black hair away from his shoulder and neck, flashes of fire-warmth against his skin. He held still, suddenly feeling cold, in need of their warmth. A cloth – the rough edge of Laataazin’s shirt, he thought – swiped over the skin to remove the excess ink seeping from his pores, and then Laataazin leant over his neck, lips mumbling at his skin. They hummed, a deep, low sound that tickled the bones of his ears and made something in his stomach twist. It was the sound they made when he pleased them, when they’d found something they liked, when they wanted to keep it. A wet tongue traced up the shell of his ear.

Miraak shivered, hard. How could they do this to him, every time? Make him into some bony, hungry, cold creature, aching for warmth, touch, pleasure? He swore there were nerves in his ancient, papery body that only woke up under the caress of their skin. Simultaneously, he wanted to arch his neck to make it easier for them to kiss him and sprint directly off the precipice of the cliff. Well-practiced at the horrible conflicting impulses that warred in him at his fellow Dragonborn’s touch by now, Miraak willed himself still as stone instead.

Laataazin’s rough lips curled into a smile against his sensitive flesh.

“You aren’t helping me focus,” he complained, wincing at how his voice husked, “And you’re the one who insisted on a Word Wall.”

A warm, brown palm crept over his hip. Miraak stilled, then aggravated, pushed it away. Laataazin let go with no fight and a chuckle that made the pebbles beneath his boots quake. One lonely pebble bounced its way down the rocky slope with a clatter that would wake the dead, if there were any but himself and the stripped bones of the dragon, hollow eyesockets turned to the sky. He’d already checked that he’d have no audience, of course, when he’d taken off his mask, just for a moment, just for a breath, but now he was reminded of it afresh with a strange, hot excitement.

Their broad chest remained pressed up against his back, a warm, hefty presence that chased away all thoughts in his mind with memories of how good they made him feel, when they had him down in the bedroll under the stars. He smelled them, the bear-tallow they’d greased their cracking facial scars with to protect them from the cold, the herbal scent they’d used in their greying hair, the persistent chill reek of armour oil and blood-rust. Their breath puffing against his skin was hot, warmed by the pounding of their living, human heart, fed by sun, wheat and wine.

“Don’t let me distract you,” they whispered in his ear, barely words, barely breath. The sky rumbled ominously in response, and distantly, lightning forked, split a barren tree directly in half with a thunderclap that made Miraak’s teeth itch.

“Don’t try and distract me, then,” Miraak retorted, then had to clamp his lips shut when they mouthed a tiny, sweet kiss at the base of his neck.

They shifted behind him. He dared think the worst was over, even returned to squinting at the carving, but what happened next completely derailed him. He heard the rasp of cloth on skin, the clinking of their belt buckle, felt their arm bend and flex against his back as they resettled. Then a slight, hitched breath as their hand slipped into their breeches. A short inhale, sighing skin on skin, a needy nip at his neck.

“Laat,” Miraak whined, and their free hand planted on the gravel by his foot, anchoring their weight. The other moved against his back, slow, sure strokes echoed in the tempo of the breaths huffed against his neck, the stifled sounds hastily muffled into his neck before they levelled the hillside.

Their skin on his made his body buzz, blood sparking alight in his veins. He stared without seeing at the carving ahead of him, blood pounding in his eyes and making his vision pulse red. Their breath swirled down the neckline of his robe, superheated his soul, made his heart race a rabbit’s thundering tattoo in his neck like it wanted to leap right out of his body into their waiting teeth.

“You’re shameless,” Miraak muttered to them, and their grinning lips dotted kisses up his neck, good as an agreement. Each one made his chest stutter and his knees tremble. His body was slowly turning to water, the greedy push of Laat up against him tipping him forward until he stumbled onto his knees.

Laat’s reaction was instant; their body rubbed against his backside, grinding into him, the hand not pleasuring themselves immediately gripping his jaw, muffling his gasping shout. Their hand was wet and slightly muddy from the ground, and there was gravel digging into his bony knees, but Miraak’s only option was to wheeze needily, his ribs digging against his thighs as Laat bodily bent him half.

Futilely, he tried to squirm free of the implacable hold, but their grip on him only tightened, their powerful arms as crushing as iron bands and hot as brands. He could still Shout; he could have blasted the fingers off their hand with a Fire Breath Shout, if he wanted, but he did not want that – he wanted them. Miraak whimpered, unable to easily free himself and suddenly, achingly aroused.

They shuddered hungrily against him, twisting their hips. They must have found an excellent angle, because he heard them stop their breath entirely, hips juddering in a silent circle for three long seconds before they slowly, carefully exhaled. Still, the ground rumbled warningly, and clouds gathered over the horizon. A pattering of rain began in odd flickers and darts, chill on Miraak’s knuckles where they twisted pleadingly into the dirt.

Miraak’s wet, long hair was plastered over his face, ink stinging at his blurring eyes. He gasped against Laat’s broad, callused palm, tasting the earthy mud and sour sweat on their skin. Their blunt nails spread over his cheek, roughly digging into his jaw.

Wolfishly, they attacked his neck with kisses and bites that made him arch and cry out, pain erring on the edge of pleasure. Their dull teeth scraped at his flesh like they toyed with eating him, shredding his skin under their teeth to get at the blood and meat beneath. Barely had they bit one bruise into him than they were chewing another welt, blood vessels bursting black-purple under the skin. When he hissed an invective, their hard, lustful bites soothed into long, luxurious laps of their wriggling hot tongue.

They growled when they came; a sound too low for human ears but which buzzed through his chest, through the shivering trees around them, through his body into his dragonsoul. The ground roiled beneath his knees, slithering away from his grasping hands like a push from the divines. His sil awoke with a throbbed roar, spreading through the skin, and Laataazin’s panting against his neck whipped it into a snarling flame.

Miraak’s nails dug through the dirt into his palms. The rain hissed down in thick sheets. Lightning forked – thunder followed half a beat later in a spat of raw, wind-shriek groans.

Their clothes shifted as they redressed themselves and wiped their hand on their breeches, breath still coming raspily against his neck. Their sweaty forehead pressed comfortingly heavy against him, the snarls of their hair soaking up the spare ink weeping from his. The rain was soaking them both to the bone, but they were perfectly warm, like an ember against his back. There, they slumped, the tension draining out of their thick, beloved body, powerful and grounding as a tree-stump.

“Are you quite finished distracting me?” Miraak managed, proud that his voice was only shaking a little. Laataazin nuzzled into his neck with a truly flagrant lack of regret.

Maybe, they signed coquettishly against his hip, how long til you’re done?

#laataazin #miraak #elder scrolls #tes #skyrim #inkwrites

[reachfolk]

uh so for your song ask game, if you want to do it?

so my ldb is called laataazin (last mercy) in dovahzul and they're old, tired, and full of regret and trauma lol. they have lots of scars, don't remember their past before helgen, are a big believer in proportional force (and therefore thinks they're way too OP to interact or fight anyone seriously anymore) and all they want is to live in a hut in the woods where no one goes so they cant hurt anyone, and they want to not feel the desire to fight anymore. they don't speak and use sign because they can't control their Voice too well, and they have like. three friends and two of them are dragons. Laat doesnt feel in control of their life and largely views it as just making the best of a bad situation caused by someone else.

they worship sanguine because they met their wife the hagraven moira cause of him. they vibe with moira cause moira doesn't really give much of a damn about stuff, being a hagraven, and therefore isn't weirded out or put off by laat's past or the fact they don't really feel human anymore. they also have a shared love of poisonous tea and looting tombs. their other love interest is miraak because. it's a classic. and they save his life because they have the power to avoid killing him so might as well. and then whilst occasionally checking in on him while hes being nursed back to health gets kinda fond of him cause they can relate on both wishing they were dragons and free to do what they want.

uh so laats polyam but you don't have to do both LIs lol! I hope you enjoy the ask :)

MOIRA MY BELOVED!!! maybe its my interest in the reachfolk but i love hagravens especially moira so seeing someone else that likes her makes me happy lol ❤ i focused on her rather than miraak bc i just did some songs for him, hope that's alright!

she doesn't sleep by anthony amorim | spotify.

"can you feel her? do you fear her? all she wants is for you to be near her. there's no cause for alarm, she means you no harm."

god only knows by the beach boys | spotify.

"but long as there are stars above you, you never need to doubt it. i'll make you so sure about it. god only knows what I'd be without you."

necromancer by joy again | spotify.

"oh necromancer, put a spell on me with kisses so sweet, they rot my teeth"

build a little world with me by laura shigihara | spotify.

"so before it's time to leave, would you build a little world with me?"

community gardens by the scary jokes | spotify.

"full disclosure: i am a monster, a creature of despair. not that that should be a cause for concern."

killing me softly by the fugees (cover by joseph vincent) | spotify.

“strumming my pain with her fingers. singing my life with her words. killing me softly with this song”

birds by thomas sanders and terrance william jr | spotify.

"i just want to watch the birds go by from my handy fold-able blue canvas throne. i wanna watch them fly and fly and see them soar up into the unknown."

from the gallows by IDKHOW | spotify.

"darling, lord knows, you're beautiful, but you're evil. fact is: you're downright vicious too."

baby you're a haunted house by gerard way | spotify.

i'll be the only one who likes the things you do. i'll be the ghost inside your head when we are through. sometimes you scare me, but i come around to you"

somewhere only we know by keane | spotify.

"oh simple thing, where have you gone? i'm getting old and i need something to rely on."

#this one was hard hshfjsjh i hope at least some of them hit the vibe!! #i was tryna go for a ''i'm too tired of the world but ur one of the few comforts i can always lean on'' kinda vibe #but also some songs that are like ''this is my wife. she's probably a demon but i love her :)'' #cause honestly?? yeah <3 #moira #tes #tesblr #cozy answers

[kettlequills]

Anyway what a time to reveal that my miraak was pretty young when he got schlorped to apocrypha - thirties - and laat is like. mid fifties by the time they hit the dragonborn DLC. Miraak has survived for a really long time, but practically, his wealth of life experience isn't that much, I'd say. Dude lived in a particularly sheltered and highly specific social role that's equipped him with a really specialised set of skills that he struggles to apply to the "real" world outside of the cult and Apocrypha. Idk man I think if you ask the average upperclass rich guy how to live off a normal budget for a week he'd be fucked and I truly don't think that likewise Miraak ever cooked a meal for himself once he was a priest. Laat meanwhile is just Exceptionately fucking tired and equally unequipped to deal with people throwing titles and houses at them now they're dragonborn. It's a symbiosis.

#laataazin #miraak

[kettlequills]

c7: a wife to remember

The Dragonborn has a drink or three with a stranger in a bar, and wakes up with a wife of the feathered persuasion.

"“Wife!” the Dragonborn thundered, loud enough to crack the sky. 

The heavens split and blood-wine poured forth to the baying of dogs and madwomen. Moira’s Reachblood froze with the nascent memories of striding Nords hunting between the hoary hills and hummocks of the Reach, hollering to their hateful hounds. From the north they poured like mead, thick and choking as honey, and in their wake washed up deadmen like daisies. She had been hag-hunted so many times by the sword-swinging, skald-singing legend-men that the baying of those rough voices was enough for terror to spark.

Who came now to Witchmist Grove in troop, whooping and shrieking their warsong?"

#my fic a wife to remember #moira #laataazin #inkwrites #tes

[kettlequills]

The woods are never quiet, except for when Laat speaks. The night sky is awash with serene colour and the stars are resplendent in their velvety beds, blotted by the circling wings of owls or distant dragons. The chattering of foxes chasing hares through the rustling undergrowth keeps the contented burbling of the stream company. At the banks, Laat is just another still grey stone, watching the deer drink in the dark.

The paranoid eyes of the herd's stag glitter watchfully as he raises his mighty head. His wives cluster close around him, too close for Laat to surge and leap across the stream to land with spineshattering force on his dusky back without injuring one of them, too.

They have sated their own thirst, cupping cool water in their gauntlets and lapping from their hands, uncaring of the icy water sluicing down the runnels of their armour into the gloves beneath. Any true human would fear frostbite, sitting out by the cold muddy bank on a night like this, but Laat's breath does not even fog the air and disturb the deer. They are an unreal thing, a glitch in the living night with a deathless soul eternally restless in their aching chest. Ignoring the growl in their belly and the loneliness in their chilled heart, they pillow their cheek against sharp hard armour and gaze out at the world that moves by them, yet never quite around them. It is calming, watching the rabbits come down to drink, hopping over their still legs like they are just another stone. The animals barely know Laat is there.

Laat does not speak, and the night stays loud.

#laataazin #tes #skyrim #inkwrites

[kettlequills]

10 for the kiss prompt for laat and Moira?

10. Surprise kiss eagerly returned!

A wisp of fire catches against a cream yellow sky, and Moira squats over a rock. Laat is setting up a firepit, shirtless skin bronzed by an afternoon of digging under the sun. The sun has been overripe for hours, mushing to a blotchy red and gold on the horizon, and the clear cold wind whistles like gaps between the teeth of the thorny dark green pines that shiver and clatter around Laat's remote little home. The stones are placed in a sootblasted ring, surrounding a haphazard creation of sticks and dry leaves. Moira's talon taps the first flicker of fire, and Laat's wrinkled, weathered face creases into a smile at the gesture.

Their hand is warm and large when it covers her knee. Their thick fingers spread over her leg, leaving heat in their wake. The feathers here are thinner, smaller, tapering off into the rough hide of her raven's feet. Laat toys with the edges like the glossy black quills are the hem of a skirt, and their eyes lid. They tilt their head, invitingly, their lips curving into that smile that makes Moira's guts clench with equal parts hunger and delirious anticipation.

The raven in her stirs quivering wings and surges frantically against the wall of her chest, cawing and shrieking. The dragon that coils at her side is too large, too powerful; Moira's entire self is nothing more than a puff of feathers between world-shredding teeth.

A slave to her nature, Moira crosses her arms over her skinny chest and looks away. Laat sighs, a little, but their head comes to rest against Moira's side anyway, a heavy, grounding weight.

She glances down at them, transfixed by the scars that part their hairline, remnants of past agony. Their hair is short at the moment, wispy and fresh-shorn, still soft. Their eyes are closed, cheeks warming over the fire. They look smaller, with their eyes closed, and nearly human.

Perhaps that is why Moira does it.

Laat's shoulders stiffen when Moira awkwardly twists and catches their chin in her clawed hand. The tips of her hag claws are so long they prick the sensitive skin around their eyes. They open them, surprised but not afraid, and search her expression.

She does not know what they see. Fear, probably, and a glitter of covetuous desire.

She leans in close, too close for them to sign to her. Their breath, acrid with smoke and charred flesh, washes across her prickling cheeks. Their teeth are yellow with the memory of old luxury. Their skin has the look of old leather, but when she touches them, it's soft. Their cheeks dimple under the force of her wiry grip.

She has never been brave. She is a raven woman, clever, quick, full of guile. Her victories are done with plotting, manipulation and curses, the finer arts, never a sudden dart or struggle. She has never been brave, and she has never kissed her spouse first, either.

There is a first time for everything.

Moira brushes her lips across theirs, and Laat's nostrils flare as they inhale sharply. It is nearly a gasp, nearly a sound, and nearly enough to knock Moira from her precarious, twisted perch.

Laat catches her immediately, of course. Strong arms wrap around her thin body like tethers, and their lips press up into hers, greedy and soft. They kiss like they live, hungrily, in each moment battering and striving for something more, with barely restrained force and deep and secret yearning.

She digs her claws in and feels them hiss into her mouth, a flicker of wyrmlike sparks against her tongue. They are as hot as fire in the enveloping cavern of their mouth, the fading taste of daedric wine burnt into their tongue like a brand of ownership. They caress her with one broad palm from her skinny shoulder to her jutting hip, and when she shudders under their touch, they smile into her mouth.

It is all she can ever do to keep up with them. She kisses back, feeling feverish, her dual heart thrumming so fast her world grows faint, and nothing else seems to matter but Laat, firm, solid, and unbearably real against her. She would not have it any other way, of course.

#moira #laataazin #inkwrites #ask games #thank u flare u always got me

[kettlequills]

the champion of the skein

for the wonderful @blazingsnark ! a bit of fdb laat feat. mephala. its not super long im afraid but !! enjoy!

The Spiral Skein has many doors, under chairs and inside cupboards, gathering beneath beds and the secret cracks just small enough for a spider to squirm through. Mephala’s eyes are thousandfold, her hooked legs sprawl across every nation, every age, every war tent and peace council. None are big enough for Laataaz to crawl through.

They search, exhaustively, in the early years. After the shine of silence, stillness, sleep, has worn off, before the hopelessness sets in. Like a poison, their awareness of their fate saps their strength. Underneath it, a hidden blade, is the cruel, sweet relief.

Paarthurnax gets slower and slower, the webs settle on him thickly as a veil, a thousand spiders make their homes in the dents of his scales, the cracks and chips of his horns. He doesn’t stir them away as often as he used to. Eventually, he stops doing even that.

Grey in scale and grey in wing and grey in soul, he curls up and shrinks like a spider fist-curled in death. Captivity and dragons don’t mix well; he is coiling into himself, voiceless and old and no longer the howling friend seizing them in his wings when the blast hit to save their stupid, fragile flesh. Oh, the scars are there, still, Morokei’s magical attack blazing through the membranes like they’re lit from beneath by a deep, cold blue, but the heart is gone. Paarthurnax looks at them, and in his eyes they see only tiredness, no recognition of the soul he damned himself to try to save one last time.

He shouldn’t have tried. There is nothing worth saving, only gossamer spidersilk stretched over the void of a person, catching flies too foolish to stay away. Killer, murderer, lover. How she had smiled, and smiled, and smiled, when she cupped Laataaz’s cheeks in her hands, scraped her nails down their throat, and told them with such loving pride: You are a Prince’s plaything now, champion.

Laataaz hugs their knees close to their chest, craving the pocket of warmth between their thighs and their ribs. Skin brushes skin; sensitive, erotic, but when they rest their forehead on their knees it makes the bruises of their eyes ache. The spiders whisper over their spine; Laataaz’s shiver is an afterthought, their bare toes curling into the stringy grey dust. Where did their boots go?

They look up, through the dreary, dusty darkness, the muted semi-glow, even after years here, they haven’t found where the light comes from. Some of the webs are pitch black, black as under cupboards, but some are only black as moonlit nights, with some faint greyness coming in from somewhere, just enough for Laataaz to see shapes that flicker and skitter in the gloom.

They can’t see her. Her. The queen of the webs, but they know she’s there. Watching, a finger in every pie, a smile for the dying, a dagger for the lying, as beautiful, as multifaceted, as the lights that bloom behind Laataaz’s eyes when they’re a wheeze from fainting, their own hands wrapped around their neck and squeezing like they can crush out the Voice that lurks like a traitor inside. They can’t tear it out, the dragonsoul, the death-trap jaw that hungers and hungers and hungers…

Wyrm-tongued, wyrm-hearted, a priest with no god, a warrior with no general. Except for her. Her.

There are always legs, moving, tiny tapping feet. Laataaz looks down at their hands and find them greyed out, longer and more than they remember, furred over with dust. They don’t notice the tickling, anymore. They don’t notice the webs. Their robes hang, but no breeze seeks the rents and the rips, and webs cover the holes, so they don’t have to see their skin. Skin lovers have caressed, once, that loyal worshippers rubbed with oils until they gleamed like a blade, like a beauty, every part of them exposed to the cold, old air with only a fur across their shoulders and a mask on their face. Skin lovers so tenderly wiped clean of the blood, afterwards. All the blood, all that blood, it takes them hours.

It doesn’t look how they remember. Soon, nothing will. Laataaz can feel themselves folding, being swallowed, digested into the Skein. It is not a bad thing. It is not a foul thing. It feels like cocoonment, like sleep, like drugged, dizzy daydreams. But, for her, her, Laataaz would curl up and let the daedra that lurk just out of eyesight take them, wrap them, make them, mark them, fuck them into churning oblivion. But Laataaz is a Prince’s plaything now, a champion, and all that they are is another’s to wield.

They have only ever been good at being a weapon. Believing, even for a moment, that they could think, that they could feel, that they could make decisions for themselves… No, Laataaz knows the cost of that folly now. So does the world. All those bodies burning, those lives ending, and for what? A dream of freedom?

The blood, all that blood. It takes them hours.

Laataaz inhales, then settles their will around their spine, and sinks their hand into the sticky webs. Something nips at their fingers, they grimace. It burns, it stings.

They’d had gloves, once. They don’t remember where they went. Frayed off, string by string, from their swollen knuckles, secreted away to webs and wisps. They’d gone to the fight, that final fight, on the steps of Bromjunaar with the power of the Cult arrayed against them clothed, not a pet, not leashed, lashed. The leather had rubbed against them, the robes had whispered around their ankles, but their face, their face…

Laataaz doesn’t think, they don’t feel, they don’t choose. They are a weapon, a hunter, a killer, a lover, wherever she needs, a wyrm-hearted, wyrm-tongued priest with one queen.

Gritting their teeth, they sink one hand in, then the next. It comes out with a squelch. In this way, hand over hand, they climb through the rings, to the heart of the Skein… and the spider queen at its centre.

Mephala awaits them, queenly and bored. Are there words for what she is? Too huge to speak words into existence, too small to see, with a thousand eyes and none at all, she is a presence, an inanimate darkness, a cutclaw smile around dripping jaws. She stretches out one hand and the realm bends to her will, and Laataaz is kneeling before her, the carapace of her thick spider half glossed and gleaming before their nose. Her red eyes smoke in the gloom, like embers, her purple skin bruised as the flesh of plums.

Laataaz has never seen a plum, before her, but just because they can’t leave the Skein alone doesn’t mean they are unused. In the markets, the palaces, the shacks and the woods of the world, they have done hot and cruel bloodwork, whenever their queen wills it. Some of them have things a human from the icebound north has never seen, but they all die the same way.

“What do you want from me?” Laat begs to know, and Mephala laughs.

Beautiful as the whisper of eightlegged revels, it washes sticky-soft the worries from their mind with the kiss of its venom. Paarthurnax, dying in the prison of his own mind, matters not when Mephala is looking down at Laataaz with such unbearable fondness in her lips wet with poison. Laataaz has been a possession all their life, never have they been so loved for it.

“What mortal mind do you think you have that you can fathom the purpose of a god?” Her claws curve the side of Laataaz’s face. “You take my gifts, you haunt my realm, and you worship me, because you know there are things beyond your ken in this world. I am one. Where is this trust now, my priest? Do you no longer think my webs are weaving round your enemies?”

“My queen,” says Laataaz, “I am loyal, you know I am loyal-“

“-which is why,” says Mephala, tilting a finger under their chin and lifting it sharply, enough that their spine has to strain straight, “I am kind enough to permit your doubt, this time.”

Laataaz sighs, their eyes sliding away from hers. Their breath is shallow. The claw digs slightly under their chin when their trembling muscles falter, and their stomach clenches around liquid fire. The pinpricks the claws leave remind them of the weakness of their human skin, no dragon scale to protect their vulnerable parts. The near-sexual excitement of the old bloodthirst wells like deep-plunged water poured over droughted lands, scudding across a hard surface, soaking thirstily into the cracks. Corresponding heat beats in time to the snick of her eyelids closing one by one, the flashing of dizzy red among the darkness. They want to hurt. They want to feel incandescently alive, in the way only she can make them feel, in this dead, decaying world of drying spiderskeins.

“I remain whatever you make of me, my queen.”

“Yes,” murmurs Mephala, and condescends to bend her great neck to kiss Laataaz’s forehead. Her lips are soft, and she lingers. Cascading fireworks alight under her lips, tingling through Laataaz’s aching body. They strain into her gentleness, eyes falling closed and swaying helplessly into her arms. How long has it been, since they have been touched, loved? Were they ever, by any but her? All that blood, it takes hours to scrub off. But when Mephala’s nails scrape down their shivering shoulders and catch in the rents of their robes, her hands come away clean, as if there is no blood there at all. “And I will make you glorious, my champion.”

“As my queen desires,” Laataaz says. Boldly, they touch her cheek, the flecks of scaling that cover her proud cheekbones rough under their hand. It is a blind touch; they are not so disrespectful to raise their head to look her in her manifold eyes. Not so foolish to think what is left of them will survive such a contact. “Whatever my queen desires.”

“Desire?” Mephala chuckles. “No, not mine, champion. But your queen is gracious - come and please her.”

“Thank you,” Laataaz whispers, entranced, and rises up on their tiptoes for a venom-laced kiss.

Mephala permits the illusion of mortality for a moment, feeding Laataaz her forked tongue, teasing them with scrapes of her snake’s fangs. Laataaz trembles and moans under her attention, the pricks of her legs closing around their back like the bars of a cage; Mephala could open her jaw and swallow their head whole. Her tongue is overwhelmingly long and sinuous, flexible as a snake it chokes Laataaz’s throat, laps against their palate as she draws back. Saliva and venom mix, stinging sweetly down their chin as her flicking tongue thrusts and curls down their throat. Laataaz clings to her shoulders, the ridges of her carapace clicking smooth against their skin, hard and unyielding.

“You are a wretched creation,” Mephala says to them, as she withdraws, “Your hunger cannot be sated by even this feast. You are naught but a blunt blade, godkiller, so close to once losing your edge.”

Laataaz shudders, not disagreeing but unable to hide the sharpness of her words aimed like a knife. It is true the emptiness yawns within them, that crying ache that split wide with the first dragon soul they ever swallowed and ever since lurks within them, a canyon between the two sides of their bloodied heart. It is all they are, on the inside; a hollow, craving fulfilment.  

Mephala rakes her nails over Laataazin’s chest, scoring fierce lines. Laataaz imagines dizzily that she could reach in and feel it, that snowstorm of catching hooks, could fold her fist into where dragon souls are crushed and force open the jaws long enough to feed something warm in its place.

“I have a god for you to kill, hunter.”

She steps back, a cruelness in her many eyes, and the webs swing and gravity yanks out from under their feet. Laataaz plummets through the abyss, ripping straight through one web with daedra screaming on their back. They twist midair and bite open the daedra’s throat, teeth scraping harshly against the carapace, blood and venom stinging their cheeks, their hands. They hit a web strong enough to bear them hard enough to bounce, but the second impact sends them straight through the strands.

They hook one hand into the webs and dangle from it, arms burning. A glow from below catches their eye; Mephala, many thousand times larger than before, stretching up towards them, one hand larger than Paarthurnax as it reaches to swat them, errantly as a fly.

Laataaz crawls away, but the stickiness of the webs hinders them. The webs cling to them closely, tearing their ragged robes when they pull away, ripping at their pruned flesh beneath. Venom bursts in bleeding pulses from the torn webs, glowing like silver purple veins. An arcane heart, and Laataaz dangling from the shredded ventricles, hands wet with stinging sap and blood.

Mephala catches them in one enormous hand and presses into their chest with one finger, hard enough the breath wheezes from their lungs, organs against spine. They hook their arms into the web and hang on doggedly, feeling their muscles burning but not daring to relax into the pressure of her pinch. Their legs kick helplessly over the yawning darkness, a thousand beetle-like eyes glitter back in the dark, carnivorous mouths stretched wide and ready.

Mephala would not let them die, they don’t think. But she would let them fall.

“Whoever you wish, my queen, I will find them,” Laataaz rasps out, “God or daedra, dragon or man, they are already dead, the moment you willed it.”

The Prince of Lies smiles.

#laataazin #inkwrites #mephala #tes

[kettlequills]

14 for Laat and 40 for Vira! And 31 for an oc of your choosing as well!

14. do they remember names or faces better?

Names! As a dragon, they embody a lot to Laat. In fact...

"Among dragons, a named thing was a known thing. They roared their essences into the sky to challenge each other, to meet death that did not stick to creatures that were never made to die. Only Laataaz could wring their immortal souls onto the coil which all mortals walked, only Laataaz shredded their names beneath the jaws of the dragonborn soul and turned meaning into memory. Perhaps it did not matter to them.

Perhaps Laataaz thought he needed the names of his victims to kill them."

Laat generally tries to find out the names of people they kill, if they consider that person a worthy opponent. They do however regularly fall into the trap of forgetting to realise that other people *are* real people, and feel bad about it later. In general, Laat prefers to know names so that they can hammer home to themselves that they did just take a life.

Faces are pretty forgettable, in the end. Laat's own connection to their face and body is kinda eh, especially considering their body dysmorphia (both the draconic and the regular gender kind), and how many of their close friends use masks, illusions, or other shapechanging features pretty regularly.

40. how do they treat service workers?

Viraneminwe, surprisingly, treats service workers well. She doesn't look down on people by default for being poor, an unusual attitude in Alinor, and considers them an untapped resource by many. She will act in whatever way she considers to boost herself and her reputation most in any circumstance, however. Most of the time, this means being dismissive and cold if not outright cruel to service staff as her peers expect her to be. Viraneminwe was perhaps a little more sensitive when she was younger to tradesfolk, as she was looked down on when first joining specifically high society at Fas' side for being a child of somebody who worked for a living, even tangenitally. True rich people don't. Despite growing out of this however, Viraneminwe pays well and is relatively respectful to her staff. She knows full well how easy it is to foster spies among an unhappy workforce and is perfectly willing to employ anybody of any background ... so long as their skills are of use to her, and their devotion is absolute.

31. Describe a scenario in which your character feels most comfortable.

Carmen and Faseladil have one thing in common, which is that they are both at their most comfortable at the very centre of attention in the middle of a party. Faseladil adores being fawned over and given attention, and will uncriticially lap up any praise sent his way. His selfishness and ego is such that he generally will accept such things as his due. He derives a lot of personal pride from his ability to be a good entertainer, and loves hosting because of the responsibility that it gives him to flit about and engage with everyone. He plays extremely well off Viraneminwe's colder, rougher personality in these kind of public displays, making himself the oozing, friendly point of contact that traps people beneath Viraneminwe's gaze... the honey to the fly.

Carmen, however, commands attention because she likes control. She believes herself the most interesting person in the room, and is usually right, but she has a lot more self awareness than Fas does. Carmen likes to work a party to make herself indispensible, less because of a desire to gain accolades and more because she wants and craves distractions from the quietness of her thoughts. Carmen spends a lot of time running away from what she feels herself to be, and as such thoroughly enjoys the fantasy of control and power she gains from people currying favour from her to advance within social circles.

#sorry i completely forgot about this #inkthinks #thank u for the ask! #viraneminwe sinahl #faseladil sinahl #carmen #laataazin

[kettlequills]

technically a lil followup to this . nsfwish themes.

“You mustn’t kiss me,” the priestess of Azura said, apropos of nothing.

Laat, halfway through wrapping their leg wound, grunted in frustration. “Just because I’ve been to a few daedric parties doesn’t mean I want to fuck everything,” they muttered, and then had the grace to blush when the whole shrine shook and rumbled. And not simply because they had been thinking it, before she had said.

The priestess was laying on the altar like an offering, bare to the waist. She had painted her evening-sky skin with swirls of paint in jagged, daedric symbols that reminded Laat of the scars caused by fishhooks. Peeking between the marks, Laat swore they could see stars moving slowly, constellations creeping and rising and falling like the oceanic rhythm of clouds inside the surface of her skin. Her dusky purple nipples were peaked from the cold, but if she felt the snowflakes that tangled in her firelight hair she made no sign of it. When the snow landed on her cheeks, her chest, the relaxed folds of her stomach, it melted immediately, washing trails of paint like tears down to the scrubbed altar. Slow curls of steam idled from her parted lips when she breathed, dancing with a thousand studded stars in every colour Laat had ever seen, and a few more that made their eyes ache as if they were never supposed to glimpse them.

Aranea lay and stared and breathed, and all the while smiled like she saw something inescapably, unutterably beautiful in the blank grey clouds beneath the upthrust arms of the snowdusted statue, content as a lizard in the sun.

Laat wasn’t prone to investigating anything that moved… but they weren’t dead, either, and though the priestess was unbearably strange she was pretty, and kind in a way that made them at once suspicious and desperately craving of a rest.

“Communing with Azura will be too much for you, Champion,” Aranea said in her dreamy, monotone way, “You will need me to help ground you.”

She shivered as if coming awake from some subtle trance, from spine to toe, and turned her cheek to look at Laat. Her crimson eyes flickered and shimmered, like sunlight on rushing water. She spoke flatly, as if she were commenting on the weather, and that strange, absent smile touched her lips, gaze fixed on some distant point, as if some pretty sunburst had illuminated the snowy flanks of the mountain behind Laat’s head. When they glanced over their shoulder, there was nothing but the dim mist and eternal pattering of light flakes.

Still, she smiled on, and through lowered lashes, said, “I have seen us … together. You will enjoy Azura's touch, but it will be too much for you, without my assistance. It will be my pleasure, but a kiss will cause confusion.”

“A daedric prince sent you visions of us ‘together’,” they signed, sceptically. “That’s not the worst pick up line I’ve heard.”

She had already begun to chuckle before Laat had finishing signing, like a familiar reader of a well-loved book delighted in the anticipation of each dogeared quote. Disquieted, they curled their hands into fists. Azura gave her visions, she had been clear about that. But Laat could not help seeing Aranea’s apparent inability to be surprised as a chain around their neck, one of many that had begun to creep around their body, hold them down, force them into the mould of a Dragonborn, a hero. A sacrifice.

What did it mean, if everything, even the words in their hands, were plotted out for them by the intangible wills of the gods? Didn’t she care, this priestess on her lonely mountain, watching the hours of her life slip away, completely devoted to some arcane god who filled her up with so much of the future that her connection to the present, to her self, was as frayed and tenebrous as morning mist?

Abruptly, they simply needed to get away from her, the steam that melted enticing trails over her breasts, the easy, smooth movement of her belly as she breathed, the curl of distant, prescient amusement that coloured the seemingly inexhaustible well of composure and communion that ruled over her. Get away from her, or shake her until she felt something they could understand.

Laat rolled onto their side, ready to begin the painful process of getting up.

“Going hunting,” they grunted, remembering to turn their head away so that their Voice broke upon the snow. Pulverised dust whispered in clawlike lines, draconic markings that itched at the back of their brain: nir, some susurrating, unquiet beast in their too-large soul hissed, hunt.

“Bring a bag to the third step from the shrine, to the left,” Aranea murmured.

“You mean to tell me Azura sent you a vision about that?” Laat demanded, and she smiled like the setting sun, a playfulness in her that seemed to make her face wash bright in the midday sun. "Did she tell you where I intend to take a piss, too?"

“Azura always provides, Dragonborn,” said the priestess merrily, “But, no, I simply saw the snowberry patch on my way to fetch water this morning.”

Laat scowled at her, and she laughed again, not the dazed chuckle of before but a deep-rooted snort that stuck in her chest and made the paint slither over her skin. She brought her hand to her lips and bit it, like a girl trying to muffle her giggles before a strict professor, but even silent her shoulders shook and her eyes danced with wicked humour.

It was the most alive, the most present, they had seen her, in the long few days they had been convalescing at the shrine.

“Why aren’t you like this all the time?” Laat signed, jaw knotted tight, glaring into her like it would force this version of her to stay, “Doesn’t it bother you, that so little of you is left?”

Aranea was still laughing, but her eyes were glazing again. Like a tattered paper in the shape of a person, the sunlight slid through the holes Azura had burrowed into her being and filled with terrible prophecy, and now it shone out, warm, golden, vivid – inhuman, alien, empty. She was as beautiful and removed as a star.

“Don’t kiss me, when it comes, Champion,” she repeated. “We will need your strength, more than your love, in the coming days. There will be… enough grief.”

“Grief? Whose? What’s happening in the coming days?”

Aranea shrugged one shoulder and stretched her lips woodenly, as if she were imitating a movement she saw some faraway stranger make to calm a restless child. “Azura has not told me what she sees coming to pass, after we restore the Star,” she said incuriously and tenderly both, “but I know the Lady of the Twilight will always watch over us.”

“What if she doesn’t?” Laat asked. “What if she looks away, this time? Don’t you have any drive to take care of yourself?”

Aranea stared at them blankly.

With a curse, Laat spun on their heel and stomped to get the snowberries, cursing daedra and priests under their breath until the mountain shook warningly. A few days for their leg to heal, they thought to themselves comfortingly, and they could leave the priestess to her dreamy joy among the silent goddess, think nothing more of her, and dire portents about grief and strength be damned. After all, what was the worst that could happen, after returning the Star?

#aranea ienith #laataazin #inkwrites #tes

[kettlequills]

I am once again thinking of the effect that powerful daedric magic has on surrounding people. I like to think, that much like Mephala's Blade in Whiterun, artefacts seep with a power that steadily influences the passersby closer to the daedra's sphere. Folk that live close to one of the Black Book sites become more inquisitive, more curious, people that live near Clavicus' shrine become more wistful, their fantasies stronger. I think that in worshippers who have gained a slight repository of their lord's power, you can also see this effect.

People that live around Aranea for too long have vivid dreams, nagging feelings of deja vu, a sense of restlessness, like they were supposed to be doing something, changing something, and just can't remember what.

Around Laat, also, you have people who find their desires are brought more strongly to the forefront: desires to cheat and lie, to while away the hours, to fight and fuck and feel. Productivity drops when they pass through places, because people spend more time doing what they want to do, rather than what they feel they have to.

And that is why both of them live alone, I imagine.

#laataazin #aranea

[kettlequills]

Laat but they're getting progressively worse (left to right: Brais, canon Laat, FDB Laat). Brais is the same height I just zoomed in. Thanks as always to the legendary susu for creating the initial model.

#laataazin #inkthinks #heroforge #tes

[kettlequills]

sup hi it's my bitch ass again. the one who recommended 'masks'. anyway aviators just put out a new album and 'teeth' is very. hmm. *hmm*. gives me laat vibes tbh 👀

I'VE BEEN BLESSED BY MUSIC ANON ONCE MORE! So I naturally immediately rushed to listen to this once I received this ask and the moment I got to the chorus I understood what you meant.

Maybe it's the moonlight Mixed with carnal insight Violent but it feels right You make me come unsheathed Like I'm a weapon Born and bred to threaten 'Cause when it feels like heaven I wanna bare my teeth

Honestly, this works for quite a few of them but spicy hedonist Laat who punches skulls in for sport is right up there.

#laataazin

[kettlequills]

So I've mentioned a bit about Sindorumeladil and Calana Sinahl, who are Laataazin's family from before Skyrim, when they were still known as Imperial veteran Brais.

For those who don't know, Brais, or Laat, came back from the Third War against the Aldmeri Dominion shattered and tired, and found their single remaining family member, sister Julia, pregnant and alone in their small house in the Imperial City. Julia did not survive long after the birth of her child, Calana, and remained tightlipped about the identity of the father - only that he was passing through, that she never thought to see him again, that she had loved him whilst she had known him. When the child was born, it became clear that she was half elven, and Julia admitted the other parent had been an enemy operative stationed in the Imperial City during Lord Naarafin's control of it. All she had of him now was a signet ring he had left her, which she begged Brais to keep safe for Calana, until the time came when she would be old enough to protect herself, if she decided to seek him out.

Brais took the infant Calana and left the City following Julia's death, unable to bear the memories and hoping to avoid exposing Calana to rising anti-elven sentiments in the capital with the signing of the White-Gold Concordat. They travelled for some time, driven from place to place by Calana's young and frequently explosive magical talents, and Brais' inability to hold a steady job whilst dealing with single parenthood and PTSD. Eventually, Brais found work as a carpenter's apprentice in Chorrol, where they stayed for the next few years.

In that time, Sindorumeladil, Calana's father, had gone back home to Alinor. Following the war and his secret role in helping the Imperials recapture their city, he was anxious to deflect attention from himself and secure his position, in the hope of one day finding and marrying his human lover, Julia, who he had no idea he had left pregnant. He lived at that time at his family's estate in Firsthold, under the watchful eye of his mother, Viraneminwe Sinahl. High-ranking, powerful, and calculating, Viraneminwe had personally trained many of the agents that Sindor had either betrayed directly or used during his subterfuge. Their troubled relationship, rocky from a lifetime of opposing views and emotional differences, exploded into outright animosity when Sindorumeladil confessed that he intended to return to Cyrodiil and seek out Julia. To prevent him from going, Viraneminwe assigned him her former trainee Elenwen as a guard, prompting Sindor to injure her and flee the country.

Now on the run, Sindor travelled to the Imperial City, hoping to find Julia. He found the house sold and no sign of where she had gone. Distraught and imagining she had either died or gone to hide from him, he was close to giving up, until the new neighbours mentioned the child that was born - a healthy human child, whose elf-freckled skin glowed in the sun like a star. Recognising he was the likely parent, Sindor braved reaching out to his connections through the Argonian bard and close personal friend, Plucks-the-Strings, desperate for any route to reach his daughter.

In exchange for throwing the weight of his family name behind Elenwen's promotion to First Emissary of the Thalmor to Skyrim, Elenwen used her personal acquaintances within Thalmor intelligence to track down Brais and Calana. She delivered the information to Sindor, who nervously went to visit.

Brais and Calana were reluctant to know Sindor, particularly Brais, who feared and despised the Thalmor battlemages following their experiences in the war. Sindor offered to support Calana and Brais any way he could, and promised he would not attempt to take Calana away or separate her from Brais. After some time, enough trust was built that Sindor suggested moving to Valenwood, where they would be further from both Alinor and the Imperial City, and the tensions that continued to flare in both. Viraneminwe in this time sent a letter to Sindor, commanding him to return home and present his daughter to Auriel in the Altmeri tradition. Cautiously optimistic that his mother had decided to accept Calana even if she had not been pleased by Julia, Sindor took Calana and Brais and went.

During their time in Alinor, Brais became familiar with Viraneminwe and other ranking members of the Thalmor council, through parties and scandals. Unofficially recruited as an operative of the double dealing and counter-Thalmor faction the Beautiful, Brais took a commission from the Thalmor, which they continued to serve out while living in Valenwood with Sindor, Calana and Plucks-the-Strings, who were also involved to greater and lesser degrees.

One such job was hunting an escaped Blade, last seen in Riften. Packing their bags, Brais took the next carriage to Skyrim ... and Helgen, and thus their story as Laataazin the Dragonborn begins after suffering intense injuries that affected their recollection and capacity to relate to their own memories, and their life as Brais ends.

But for Sindor and Calana, their life continues. Mourning Brais as dead at Helgen keep, Sindor attempted to continue raising the now teenaged Calana alone, who was resistant to him and highly rebellious, frequently getting into trouble with local Bosmeri anarchist groups. Facing increasing pressure from Viraneminwe to return to Alinor, Sindor now balances an extremely fine tightrope of lip service loyalty to his mother and supporting his daughter, continually fearing for his and Calana's lives. This is not without reason, given Viraneminwe's brutally efficient reputation, their past troubles, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding Sindor's father's Faseladil Sinahl's disappearance from public society. The gears of war and gathering zealotry within the ranks of the Dominion are beginning to grind, and once more, Sindor fears his small family being caught in the crossfire...

#inkthinks #laataazin #tes #Sindor #calana sinahl #sindorumeladil sinahl #viraneminwe sinahl #Plucks-the-Strings

[kettlequills]

c6, a wife to remember

Here we go; chapter six. read the story so far on a03

The Dragonborn has a drink or three with a stranger in a bar, and wakes up with a wife of the feathered persuasion.

Moira did not often leave the Grove, but even a hag needed to eat, and trade for what she did not make herself. Her skinny shoulder thrown against the thick leather strap attached to her cart, Moira trudged over the marshy ruts of the road to Kynesgrove, and thence, Windhelm. Her breath plumed in the predawn, the wheels a slow, eerie creaking in the mist.

It was gather-day, and so, like carrion crows come to pick, she bottled her wares, and went. The potions, wrapped in cloth and bottled in reused wine-bottles of dark daedric make, sealed with tallow-fat and twine, did not rattle, did not clink, did not whisper. The magic that hung over the cart spelled it light, made the rickety wooden wheels bounce rather than crack over the lumpy pebbles athwart the road.

Ghosts wandered the ruins of the old temple, flame-eyed and songful, and strayed close to the whispers of magic Moira wove into the mists. Moira left the Grove, but the Grove walked with her, through her. They watched her with their lamplight gazes, the waxy pallor of their skin gleaming like wet moons in the half-light. The slap of their footsteps followed her, half a beat behind, but she did not fear their hungry stalking. The tongues of mist licked her feathers clean of any scent they could use to track her, the magic she bled in the air easy as breathing.

Water squelched over the toes of her boots. Tattered and old, like all her clothes, steeped in illusion magic that shrouded her feathers, her claws, all but her cunning eyes. A Breton crone, the Reach in the prow of her nose, as old as the hills and as unmoveable. The crags of her wrinkled skin hid motes of power, her hand curled around a knotted wooden staff she did not need to be deadly. She had made this journey many times, enough times to know the value of subtlety.

When the road curved south and a lonely wooden post reared from the dark wet earth like a sword through a back, a boy waited for her. He eyed the mists with sensible caution, holding a lantern in one hand like the breath of dawn in the throat of a dying babe.

“Ma’am,” said the son of his grandfather who had first walked this route with her, who knew from his father’s knee to meet her here, and go no further into a hag’s mist than the lantern light shone.

“You’re taller,” Moira sniped, and the boy shrugged his round shoulders. He tugged his forelock, eyes of sky in skin of sand, hair of earth, and murmured bloodsalt greetings his juniper-loving grandmother had known, years and years hence, with the taste of sweet Reach-wine fading on her tongue.

“Your accent is horrible,” she added, waspishly, but the boy – a man now, she reevaluated hastily, as he stepped up to take the hand cart’s strap and dwarfed her – only smiled with crooked teeth.

“Yes’m,” he said, and set his shoulder to the road.

An ordinary traveller took days to walk where Moira’s mist-magic folded the land under their feet in hours. With a sturdy-maned horse from Kynesgrove, it went by even quicker, but still they had to spend one night out under the bright eye of the moon. Moira kept to herself, huddled in a ratty blanket in the back of the wagon, her eyes reflecting the stars like darting silver streams. She felt the hugeness of the night enfolding her like the Dragonborn’s hot arms, the smoke of their steaming breath, the points of their teeth so close to raking her skin. She woke, trembling, after brief and insincere dreams, to the strange, and profound sensation that they were close by; their Laataazin.

Close by, but too far to touch, a torment and mercy both. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to see them or send them further away. How dare they linger, close enough that their stifling immensity could be felt, like the ashes of tragedy carried on the breeze? Their-almost kiss still made her lips tingle with bitter memory.

They had left; they did not care.

Windhelm broke the sky early the next morning, hazed with bustle. The road grew wetter and busier, filled with traveller’s carts; most sensed Moira’s uncanny nature and stayed away, the hair prickling down their necks. They passed a Khajiit caravan and Moira smirked when one wide-eyed kitten’s fur stood straight on end when the oddly silent cart with its plodding horse and bespelled cargo rattled past, leaking mist.

The Nordic death-magic was strong here, in their fortress of icy stone. Moira smoothed a hand over her damp nape as they passed under the looming shadow of the bridge, up to the broad, grassy plain where a motley of colourful tents was already being set up. Here in the common market Moira would peddle her goods, to those who were not afraid to rub elbows with curious beastfolk. The fey charge she carried in the air was not kind to the hollow mausoleum that was Windhelm.

She was old-magic, Reach-magic, blood and daedra. The harsh static of necromancy could not catch a grip on her, pressed slipwise between the roots of the trees that drank blood from earth like water, watered well with sons and hearts that had broken here, under the mists on these cold, proud shores. Windhelm was Nord-land, once elf-land, and the fraying magics of a vanished people were palpable to her magesight, fading nets written around unsanctified bones. The walls were grey with it, looming with snow-elf sorrow, sorrow that echoed Reach-blood rusting the bronze gate of Markarth. She felt their grief like a weight on her old bones and missed the sharpness of juniper-wine on her lips, the old tongue in her mouth like a lonely and empty grave to the woman she had been, once.

She would not pass through Ysgramor’s teeth, to sell charms to his children.

The horse Moira brought to the stable herself. The boy busied himself heaving her wares out of the back of the cart and setting up the stall; she left him to it, there was no threat of stealing she had to fear from the son of his grandfather’s wife. Her magic had beckoned the fecundity in that barren womb, of a sort, his father was her hag-son, a creation of mist, blood, and secret pacts. He would no more turn on her than kin, not that he knew her glossy, true-feathered self.

The horse trudged at her side, its pink nose bowed low and ears fallow-forward. The stablemaster’s wife pursed her thin lips when she saw the pair of them, the stooped crone and the horse that sleepwalked at her side.

“It’s not sick, is it?” she demanded to know, and Moira grinned a gap-toothed grin.

“Not at all,” she said. The coins she rooted out of her purse were dented and dull, prized from the dead fingers of draugr. Arivanya’s nose wrinkled, the picture of elven disdain, but she took the coins; gold was gold, and to her kind, better than blood and salt of old pacts and familiarity. Ulindil wouldn’t have dared charge her. “Take yourself to the market, dear.”

“I am older than you, human,” Arivanya said, drawing herself up, and Moira pinched her cheek, too quick for the offended elf to twist away.

“Such soft skin you have,” Moira told her, “A butcher’s prize.”

“The Butcher!” Arivanya slapped her hand away, though her ears perked a little, flattered. “I’ll thank you not to mention that name around me, I’ve heard quite enough of it from Viola. But the guards won’t do anything, not about that squirrelly Aretino boy’s devil pacts, and not about our serial killer! You should watch yourself, old woman.”

“The boy?” Moira asked, cocking her head in birdlike intrigue, and Arivanya chewed her lip, halfpenny eyes flicking about, as if searching for anyone more interesting to speak to. But she bent closer all the same, as if drawn by the fey-fire in Moira’s illusioned eyes, the visage of the aged and stooped woman she might have been, under a different and darker star.

“Oh yes,” said Arivanya, sotto voce, her mint-stained breath pluming white in the chill between them, “They say he escaped and came back to disturb his parents’ ghosts; they say he’s summoning the Dark Brotherhood in that haunted house!”

“What happened to his parents?”

“Mother died in that skirmish in Falkreath, I heard,” Arivanya said, “Father gone to drink. They say he saw what his boy would become!”

“A dark tale.” Moira chewed over it a moment while Arivanya leant back, apparently satisfied with her audience’s reaction to her scary gossip. Moira spun another coin into her dirty palm, and then said, “Falkreath. Take pity on an old woman, and tell me when the next carriage comes?”

“A while,” said Arivanya, pocketing the coin. “Your best bet may be meeting at Whiterun, if you can handle the trip. It’ll be a month or two til his carriage comes round again, then he’s to Winterhold before the snows come.”

“My thanks,” said Moira, and left her staring at the bespelled horse.

Trading went quickly. She listened to the whispers of the people, stories of blood, ice, and war. She sold her potions faster than expected, all on the first day when word of her healing tinctures spread, and the priest came down from the temple to barter for her wares for the war. He tried to give her low prices for it, citing the jarl, but Moira only let a flash of her true shape through in her smile, and he backed down.

So it was that that night they wheeled the cart round and made the trip back to Kynsgrove. The horse plodded, and Moira perched on the box, listening to the snoring of the boy.

Out of the normalcy came a great and terrible cry; a Shout. Laataazin, she knew at once, though it was just noise to her, there was a vibration, a thunderousness, all of their very own to the horrendous sound that echoed off the wooded hills pocked by hot pools and scraggy plain. The world cracked in two, and in the deafening silence left behind, the heavens slid apart. Rain poured from the rift in the clouds, a palpable, weighty sorrow so immense that Moira grew drenched in seconds. She knew, without knowing, that something was wrong.

“Was that – ma’am?” the boy called, but she was already shrugging off her skin, folding into ravenfeathers.

Up, up into the sky she bolted, driving her wings as fiercely as she could against the screaming rain. The wind faltered under her wings, pushing her forward then dropping away, coquettish as a maiden and uncertain if she came to help. Moira’s beak clamped and she ignored the pain of the wind wrenching at her feathers, and flew on, a hag’s resolution dark and true beating in her bird heart. She had been a woman too, once. It was on that primordial, unspoken instinct she fell on now, somewhere, Laataazin had Shouted, not in victory but in grief, and so, Moira went to them.

She saw the wreckage before she saw them. The rain fell hardest on an old, crumbling fort not far from Windhelm, its decaying walls shattered and smashed open to reveal an ashen belly glutted with blood. Destroyed bodies littered the snow, turning it rapidly crimson as a freshly torn out heart. The blood lapped down over the steps like languid wine, like a caress. The sisters of Morvunskar were scattered like roses on the altar of the Lord of Revelry.

She tilted her wings and followed the destruction south. Laataazin had blundered through the trees, tearing and snapping branches in their hurry. Their hammer stuck from the ground like an accusing god's finger.

At last, between a crack in the trees, her eye knew them. Kneeling in the dirt and weeping, the rain gilded them as the realest and weightiest of all creatures, the very ground sloping like a muddied brow to frown beneath their feet. 

Here she could see the Shout; flecks of green scale were embedded in the trees metres away, and there was a long skidding mark of blood and pulverised bone that might have been an Argonian once, wrapped in armour that looked more red than black.

The ground shuddered and rumbled with the aftershocks of their voice. Draconic marks seared the soil, shatters of clutching claws and dark words hissed on forked tongues.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the Dragonborn wept, “I didn’t see you, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

Moira carked loudly, and the Dragonborn stuffed their hands over their mouth at once, hunching in on themselves like it could stopper the sound made to fell gods. She swept over their head and landed in her true form, hopping lightly onto her talons.

“Beast,” she chastised, “Beast, I heard you from miles away.”

“Forgive me,” Laataazin signed. Their hands trembled, and then lapsed, as if they couldn’t bear more. Their head hung low. A familiar flickering red glow was in their eyes, winking bright like wine beneath the sun.

“You have been to see the Laughing Lord,” said Moira, in slow realisation, “Do you know where you are?”

Slowly, Laataazin shook their head.

“Hmph,” said Moira, and ruffled her feathers. “I assume you don’t know how long it’s been, either! Weeks, and weeks!”

The rain made tear trails in the blood on Laataazin’s face. She hopped closer, tentative, and lurched back with a surprised squawk when Laataazin lunged at her as if to embrace her. They fell back at her movement, like a tide, and their mouth twisted in sorrow.

Moira snorted and turned away from this display, going to investigate the corpse instead. Curiously, she landed on his shredded chest – he had been smashed as if dashed by the hand of a diety, by an enormous force, breaking every bone in his body. His flesh was unpleasantly yielding under her claws, and barely any traces of his features remained.

She raked through his things with her claws, poking in his satchels. With a caw of triumph, she found his belt pouch, full of gold, along with some smashed vials of what her nose told her was poison, and a note, soaked and stained. Only one word was legible; Grelod. Carelessly, Moira dropped the note into the mud and tied the coin to her belt.

“At least there’s some good from this,” she murmured, eyeing the coins greedily.

“He startled me,” Laataazin signed, flat terror and guilt in their eyes. “I called out, without meaning to.”

“And the coven at Morvunskar, too?”

“I asked them to put down their weapons,” Laataazin did not look at her. Their red gaze sharpened to brown, deep and withdrawn like the soft tremulous secrecy of the insides of lungs. “They wouldn’t listen. In the basement, I found… experiments.”

“So, you ripped them all apart,” Moira purred. Laataazin heard the approval in her voice; their gaze snapped up, and their bloodied shoulders relaxed. It should have scared her, a reminder of how deadly they were, but Moira had never liked the witches of Morvunskar. “Fierce beast.”

Laataazin’s head fell, as if it weighed too much to keep raised for long. “After I … killed them, Sanguine spoke to me. He wishes to bless us. But I didn’t know whether you wanted me to return,” they signed, and Moira scoffed.

They would deny Blood-Made-Pleasure, for her? A blessing, a boon, from a daedric lord had immense power. And yet, they had delayed out of something so insipid as worrying over whether Moira wanted them to return?

She forbade it to soften her, but felt their admittance sneak deep like a rogue into some shy place, half-forming and shrinking from the light still, lighting a small candle there. That guttering warmth was absent from her icy tone as she swept her deadly claws through the silvering rain. 

“ You left, claiming you wouldn’t come back,” she reminded them, spitefully. “My desires weren’t in question. What do you want, oh mighty Dragonborn?”

Their head jerked up, their eyes fierce. “You,” they signed, and Moira stilled, her feathers twitching. She hadn't expected that answer. “Devil-woman, do you know how you have haunted me?”

They rose to their feet and stalked towards her, and Moira flinched back. They stopped, a dark impatience unbridled in their red eyes. Her heart picked up; she fought the birdlike urge to run. The woman in her blushed, a splotchy redness ugly and bold against her sallow skin. She hesitated, raising her claws like the sharp tips could protect her from the feeling that rose like a strangled vine inside her, unfamiliar and agonising; desire. 

They did not mean it like that, they did not mean… what they had said.

“Cruel beast,” Moira whispered around a suddenly dry throat, “You know my name.”

“Moira,” they mouthed, and the trees still bloodied with the death caused by their unbridled Voice shuddered and groaned.

They took another step close to her, and this time, she let them, with only a panicked skitter of her feet. Inexorably, they pursued her, narrowed the distance, until they were right in front of her, rain dripping with the blood and sweat off their armour. They stank of wine, sorcery, and death. Moira's stomach flipped with lust when they reached out, so gently, so tenderly, as if they feared breaking her, and clasped her shoulder.

The weight of their gauntlet pressed her talons into the mud like a grindstone. She fluttered anxiously, but Laataazin rumbled deep in their chest, draconic and soothing. Moira met their eyes again, slitted and red as a dragon's fire. The pupils dilated as she looked up at them, and Laataazin blew faintly across her face, nudging their nose against hers.

They made, for an instant, as if to pull back, and Moira made a sharp, angry caw in the back of her throat, all raven. Laataazin inhaled sharply.

"Are you sure?" they whispered, near soundless, and every part of Moira hummed as if she sat upon the rickety bouncing cart, stark vibrations thrumming through her blood. 

"Second thoughts?" rasped Moira, cruelly as she could, and Laataazin adjusted their grip on her shoulder and used it to tug her very carefully closer.

"Never," she felt them sign against her belly, brushing their fingers through the soft, sodden feathers there. Light exploded under their touch and she felt herself quiver, pathetically, an old hag waiting in the rain for a kiss.

Her resolve nearly broke, fearing mockery, but then, but then …

Their lips brushed – so strange, so foreign a sensation that Moira’s mouth tingled and itched, then washed over her nerves as if a bucket of hot, searing coal had been upended, fluttering ashes licking her cheeks and her breasts and her palms on the way to the base of her spine where they drew into taut life, as if they had never been extinguished, as if it had not been years – decades, since Moira had been kissed. With ardour, as if it were true, as if it were possible.

Laataazin was warm here – soft here, soft unlike anywhere else, and their lips gave as they took. Gentle, unassuming, mumbles of tender pressure against Moira’s bottom lip, a negotiation of noses. Moira’s bones shook in some sigh of theirs too quiet for her ears to hear, but she knew it in how their hand tightened on her shoulder, as if they fought the urge to pull her in close in favour of not scaring her.

Her heart felt as if it was going to fall right out of her chest, there was an emptiness, a completeness, a vast whistling immensity that notched into rightness when they chased her for another kiss after a bare moment apart – impractical, gentle, at once spoiled and made perfect by their smile. 

They drew back to gaze at her. Their haunted eyes narrowed in startled pain; their skin burst like an overripe fruit against Moira’s clutching claws, blood mixing with the salt of the rain.

“Don’t you dare,” she hissed, leant up on her clawed toes, and pulled them in again.

It was her turn to moan when Laat’s startled mouth opened for her, and she slid her tongue against theirs – thinking of the dragonsouls they ate, tasting the food she had given them, palpable proof they had nourished this creature, beyond mortal with the touch of death already woven in every scar on their stiff face. Laataazin’s arms closed round her like a vice, Moira broke their kiss to squawk when Laat lifted her bodily into their arms, as if she weighed nothing at all to them.

It strained her hips to fit her legs round their broad waist, exposed her, opened her. She was aware of a vibrant blush staining her cheeks, her feathers – dull, not nearly as dark and glossy as Esmeralda’s – pricked all aflutter like a startled hedgehog. The rain was not kind to her, making her long dark hair stringy and limp, plinking off the tip of her nose and soaking her feathers. The rain tapped against her bare arms like tickling grass, numbing her skin.

She shivered in their arms, a weak, raggedy collection of bones, wrinkles, tattered cloth and feather wrapped against claw, and Laataazin's broad palm rubbed up her back soothingly. A noise fell out of her mouth, harsh and guttural as any raven's croak, but Laataazin only huffed warm breath over her neck, trails of smoke wisping from their nostrils with the unmistakable reek of char and ash.

Despite everything, Laataazin looked at her so hungrily, as if they couldn't wait to devour her like a dragon they had recently slain, split her open and drink of her flesh until the mad red glow in their eye was sated. She shuddered under the strength of their gaze but the gentleness of their touches, their restrained and terrible power and their flickering red eyes deep crimson-brown in the light. Rain lashed with the blood on their face, tasted of iron and ash on Moira's tongue.

She leant up, hopefully, at once Laataazin bowed their head to meet her.  A small eternity passed in the roughening exchange of lips and tongue; Moira had tasted iron before she had drunk her fill, and Laataazin’s noiseless sounds had started to shake the trees. 

They pressed her close to their body, supporting her with one powerful arm as the other caressed her skinny hip and tugged at the tassels of her skirt. Their blunt, warm fingers grazing her flesh hotly made sparks in Moira's belly fly and spin, even as her skin near-shrivelled with eagerness at the touch. She cawed with restless excitement, scratchy, sharp and pulsing deeply in places she had not felt come alive in years.

She wanted them to touch her like she was a woman, even as her claws shredded steaming lines over their neck and shoulders, shrieked over the metal of their armour. She could feel her own slickness at each helpless twitch of her hips; shame was just as quick to follow that needy excitement, churning uneasily in her thundering heart. She was a hagraven, a matriarch, her sisters would laugh to see her kissing a mortal, even a dragonblooded, dragon-souled one, even one that against all odds looked at her with desire like there was a softness in Moira good enough to kiss like a lover.

She was struggling to breathe, struggling to see, her talons scratching their shoulders, frenzied clawmarks. Laataazin leant back on their heels like a painting, like an offering, like a sacrifice on a rough and rustic altar, their cheeks appled red as wine and twice as lustful. They breathed in short jerks through their flaring nostrils, their veins limned with a subtle glow that flickered in and out of Moira’s perception as her mage-sight bled into reality – or Laataazin’s soul remade it.

“What have you done to me?” she demanded, hearing her own voice as a roughened echo of even its usual rasping creel. Laataazin shivered minutely under her, but their hands remained on her hips, supporting her, holding her, thumbs digging circles into her hipbones.

It was poisonously distracting. Flares of fire followed the gentle touches, mellowing Moira’s muscles, urging her to sink further into Laataazin’s generous hold. Allow her spine to fold and melt, the crook of her nose to find shelter in the curve of the soft folds of loose skin and fat from a lifetime of steady food and muscle. She bit their neck and Laataazin hissed out a breath that made the wind shake and Moira's gut clench.

She wanted, how she wanted.

“Perhaps if you come back, I’ll not curse you,” she managed.

Moira shook too much to maintain her hold on their shoulders. Laataazin nodded, and released her. She stumbled back with more urgency than grace.

“Two days,” she said, eyes drawn like a magnet to their bloody lips, the rain that washed their face clean of a coven's blood. “Don’t be late. I won’t wait for you, beast.”

#my fic a wife to remember #inkwrites #laataazin #moira #elder scrolls #skyrim #tes

[kettlequills]

ah yes. the difference between laat and brais is who gets the kate bush original (brais) and who gets the placebo cover (laat) of running up that hill in the inspirational writing song queue

#laataazin #inkthinks

[kettlequills]

in the first chapter of wife to remember, laataazin sticks an arrow into moira's door with a note. Laat doesn't own a bow. This arrow was hurled, from the treeline, with incredible force.