This is my wife's new character. She wanted someone different from anyone I had played, and we came up with her backstory as her face emerged. I promised to tell her story, dark as it may be.
Life is pain, and death was a gift stolen from me by a monster.
My parents were stolen from me by slavers when I was seven. The slavers took me to Stormhold in Black Marsh, and there, I was forced to work maintaining roads that were overtaken by jungle again the next day. When I cried, I was whipped and called a “filthy dark elf” and told that my people “had brought this on ourselves.”
I don’t even know how old I was when I escaped. I remember the biting flies and the rot, and the itching feet, and the horrid lizard men who chased me down, not to recapture me, but to kill me and bring back my corpse so the others would not run. They didn’t expect a little girl to fight back, didn’t expect the stabbing blade shooting up from the cowering child.
Finally I found the dry land, and the slaving lizards didn’t follow me anymore. I remember the caves full of monsters, and the murderers and animal-men on the roads, and then I came to Cheydinhall, where the people looked like me.
They didn’t want me there. They didn't see me as kin, and the only way to get what I needed was to take it without getting caught, whether it was money or food. And when I did get caught, I still had the stabbing blade. When there was no place left there to hide, I moved on to the Imperial City.
Cyrodiil was much bigger than Cheydinhall, and there were more people, of all kinds, and more places to hide—reeking sewers that reminded me of Black Marsh. And at night, I could emerge into the clean-smelling night air and take what I needed. And if most of my victims were lizard-men, then they brought it on themselves.
The sewers were dangerous. There were other people hiding in the sewers, living like I did, and I had to hide or fight to make a place for myself and keep it. If I had given them a chance to hurt me, use me, or take what was mine, they would have. The smaller and weaker someone is, the more they like it when they find someone even weaker.
One day, the Emperor sent armored men into the sewers. They were easy to hide from. You crept into a shadow or a tube, and they clomped past, uncaring, in a hurry to get back above and have a delicious hot meal in their warm, dry homes. They killed mud crabs and goblins, and they were welcome to those.
Then the Emperor sent in the lizard men. The lizards can breath underwater, and they can smell you, and you can’t hide from them. They move too fast and too quietly, and the Imperial sewers were no good as a hiding place anymore.
In the forest, living from meal to meal, stealing from the wolves and the bandits and the bears, and the question was, where did I want to go? The only good memories I have are from before my parents died, when we lived in Morrowind, the land of my people. Life there was hard, but there was always someone to hold you and share food with you and tell you stories and tuck you in at night.
The people in Cheydinhall weren’t my people. They looked like me, but they weren’t. I figured that out in the Imperial City. Imperials can look like anyone, but they are all the same. If you have money, then they love you for it, and if you don’t, then they hate you.
So I decided to get back to Morrowind. I stole a map from a bookstore in the town of Bruma, and started trying to figure out how to get back to where I belonged. I didn’t know how to read it, but I figured it out by tracing the towns I had been to, and drawing lines from one to another. If I went through the mountains from where I was, and followed the other side of them, then I could come to Morrowind without going anywhere near Black Marsh. That’s what I was trying to do when the armored men captured me, tied me up and took me to a town to take my head.
I thought that maybe this was right. Maybe this was the end of the pain and the loneliness. Maybe, if there were another side to go to, maybe my parents would be there. I watched in quiet curiosity as they chopped the head off an armored man. When they ordered me to come forward and lay my head on the block, I was ready, maybe even eager. I kept my eyes open as the hooded man raised his axe. And that’s when the dragon showed up and knocked the hooded man down with his voice and the fire raining from the sky.
In the screaming and running and fighting that came next, I did what I knew how to do--ran and hid. I followed an armored man who said he would take me to safety. I’d have killed him if he’d tried to hurt me, but he didn’t. I took armor, weapons, food and potions wherever we found them, fought when we were attacked, and followed him down, down, down through the keep, into the dungeons where they killed their enemies slowly in cages, and then through a cave that finally let us out on the side of the mountain.
It was quiet then, and the man I had followed was the only threat left. I kept my weapons lowered, not letting him know I was ready for him, waiting for him to try. But he didn’t. He pointed to a road heading down the mountain, told me that I could follow him to a town called Riverwood if I wanted, because he had family there. Then he set off in the direction he had pointed.
I don’t know his game. He was a big armored man and I was a small girl, and I don’t know why he didn’t just try to take what he wanted right then, but I am not stupid enough to follow him into the hands of his clan.
I pulled out my map to try to figure out where I was and which way led home to Morrowind.
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