twilight sun (elder scrolls online | seryn & vastarie)

[fiachairecht]

twilight sun. elder scrolls online, seryn & vastarie. azura's champion dreams and azura's priestess works. 576w, rated t. for kartaylir in everywoman 2023.

To have the words of a god in your mouth and come away unmarked is, Seryn thinks, the sort of thing one should know better than to expect. It takes time, though to discover the changes — the way her throat sometimes burns in a way no drink can ease, the way her senses sharpen in the twilight and her body pushes her to wake for the dawn.

She is changed. Chodola was no Nerevarine, and Seryn knows she is not either, but nor is she a fool — whatever she is now, she is because of Azura, and she is not so cowardly, nor so untrusting of the Lady of Twilight, that she will try to run.

Priestess sits wrong on her lips. Champion tastes odd on her tongue as well, but it comes to her with an undeniable ease.

I became the champion of Azura, she says in the middle of Vivec's city, and she finds it feels right, like a reminder that the Tribunal, too, would one day be lost to time itself — forgotten, like they had tried to forget the god-ancestors. Champion of Azura, she thinks to herself, watching the early stars beginning to blink into existence above the Urshilaku camp, and she is cold, in the twilight, in the dusk that is her home.

Seryn falls to sleep in the true darkness, and when she does, she dreams, more deeply and more undeniably than she ever has. She dreams of an Altmer woman who carries souls in her hands as surely as her Lady's statues carry a crescent and a star. She dreams of the woman underground, of the woman with shards of shattered gems embedded in her pale skin, of the woman wreathed in the cold blue flames that could only belong to Oblivion.

Of the woman walking towards her.

Seryn dreams, and when she wakes she wakes with an unfamiliar need burning in chest, a need matched in intensity only by the deep foreboding gathering at the base of her skull. Something is coming, she thinks, and she will need this woman if she is to have any chance at— at—

Specifics slip away when she opens her eyes, and she will not demand more from Azura than the Lady is willing to give. But one day she wakes with a name, Vastarie, and it is enough. Enough to find her, enough to send her a message, enough to know that she too loves Azura and she, too, feels the same rising dread.

There is too much land and too many wars between them. But they need not rely on travel to meet, not when magic spills from Vastarie's fingertips and dreams come so easily to them both.

It isn't working, Seryn thinks, poring over Vastarie's notes. I will become my brother, and then it will all be for naught.

And sometimes she thinks: it will never work, when the gulf between them seems too deep to ever be bridged, even by a god's will, when Vastarie's love is cold and foreign and far too bright.

But it must work, she thinks, in the pre-dawn grey of their shared dreams when it feels as though they are the only two beings to inhabit not just this world but any other. Vastarie's hand is in hers, sometimes, and it makes her believe in terrible, impossible things.

The world is still closing in around them. But in Azura's hands, they will be enough.