still a perpetually falling salt pile in black-briar manor

This dialogue is essentially banter! It's in line with the way these two banter after they're first reunited, and it's a continuation of their banter during their arrival at the temple, when Delphine is calling Esbern a dweeb nerd geek again and he's teasing her back about how she could learn something about their history if she paid attention the stonework. The painful parts are buried inside the words: Esbern wishing he had people to talk to about architecture, and Delphine knowing she is not that and knowing she is not a person who is able to stop and smell the architecture right now.

They both have to be - painfully not be - "the rest of the Blades" to each other. Here they're dealing with that by turning it into banter, and the painful sharp edges under the surface of their personalities are not surfacing.

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DialogueSkyHavenTempleConversation02

Delphine: Do you ever think about them, Esbern? The others?

Esbern: The other Blades? No. Best not to think what the Thalmor do to their victims, my dear.

Delphine: You're right. Sorry to bring it up.

Now the devastating stuff. Despite several quests' worth of Delphine's traumatic grief being right at the surface of everything she does, this is the first time she explicitly brings up the other Blades, at a time in a place and with a person she might be able to talk to about them. Esbern's reaction is, of course, not evil; not thinking about his own traumatic grief is how he deals with what happened. Foreclosing the conversation and advising Delphine to not think about the others is awful to her, but it's a reaction deeply understandable in all of its awfulness and repression and vulnerability.

As badly as Delphine's attempt turns out (it ends with her apologizing to him! for bringing it up!), their care for each other is really visible here. Delphine's care shows in her trust in starting the conversation, and her immediate willingness to not push back when Esbern shuts it down. The way she tells him he's right as she apologizes feels like it's fueled by the kind of implicit shame someone would feel at bringing this up, but it is also in a very real way a willingness to avoid talking about something Esbern doesn't want to talk about and not externalize her pain the way they do when they're snipping at each other. Esbern is doing the stereotypical older person thing of deciding what is "best" for everyone based on what feels good and bad to him, but since he believes it, he is in a very real way trying to steer Delphine away from thinking about something he can only imagine causing her more pain.

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DialogueSkyHavenTempleConversation03

Esbern: I've been writing some notes about all the Akaviri designs we've discovered. If only the Imperial Library could see my research.

Delphine: Esbern, if the Empire could even acknowledge the Blades existence, we'd all have reason to celebrate.

Esbern: Now, now my dear. I'm talking about academia, not politics.

Delphine: There's a difference?

Another banter dialogue, but more actual discussion, less saying stuff recreationally to entertain each other. ("Now now, my dear" is also a starring example of Esbern veering from "He and Delphine are close, he's older, it makes sense for him to talk to her like that, okay sure" to "Okay Esbern you are taking the paternalistic thing too far," but we'll dig into that for Conversation04.)

Esbern is a scholar. After years in hiding with barely any opportunity for study and a constant dread of the end of the world, the miraculous appearance of a Dragonborn gave him hope the world won't end, and suddenly he has this opportunity for research about something he loves. It aches for him to have this and not be able to share it with other scholars. Meanwhile Delphine is like, the meme of the asteroid heading for earth and the dinosaur saying oh shit the economy - she's cut off from the Empire that she sees as the Blades' legacy and standing in a temple their dead colleagues will never see with the Dragon Crisis overhead and the next war with the Thalmor on the horizon, and Esbern is going oh shit the lack of peer review.

It's also intriguing to think about the differences in the "Empire" Delphine and Esbern are pining for here. Neither of them were alive two hundred years ago when the Blades last answered to the Empire and its final Dragonborn emperor. But Delphine, in her twenties when the Great War ended, experienced the Blades only as a group that at one point in their glorious past had been part and parcel with the Empire - her empire nostalgia in the present is running off pure secondhand nostalgia, Talos worship, and her own authoritarian tendencies (wouldn't it be great if a powerful Dragonborn could fix things?).

Even though Esbern is only a couple decades older, if he joined up as a young man he spent 2+ decades as a Blade before the Great War began in his forties. It's implied several times that before the Great War the Blades and the Empire were still a little intertwined. When Esbern talks about the Imperial Library, he's probably picturing buildings and people he visited in person in his 2+ decades as a Blades archivist. He has fond soft-focus scholar memories of a specific Imperial institution that was, to him, the center of the academic world of Nirn - it's telling that when he voices his yearning to share the Akaviri architectural record of Sky Haven he doesn't think about contribution to scholarship in general, or Akaviri academic institutions, but the Imperial Library. For him it's the library, the one he'd obviously be submitting his research to if he could.

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DialogueSkyHavenTempleConversation04

Esbern: I've been chronicling the recent history of the Blades. What would you like your entry to say?

Delphine: "I survived"?

Esbern: Come now. You did more than just survive all those years. Your evasion of the Thalmor would be useful for future Blades to study.

Delphine: What? Your heroic tale of locking yourself in the Ratway for years isn't enough?

Damn. Understandable that Esbern hears a rebuttal with a lot of pain and keeps pushing for something he thinks will make Delphine feel better; understandable that when he keeps pushing despite Delphine's growling dog warning noises she snaps at him.

This is how you get aggression issues in chihuahuas.

"Your heroic tale of locking yourself in the Ratway for years isn't enough?" is the roughest thing either of them says to each other, to me, your mileage may vary. The lashing out may not be surprising in context, but it feels significant as Delphine actually trying to punch Esbern in the bruise, as contrasted with all the times they manage to jostle each other in the bruise just by needing to be there for each other while being who they are.

Editing this, I realized this is one of those things where I'm making assumptions without stating them - I'm digging into the interpersonal dynamic of Esbern pushing Delphine and Delphine lashing out, here, because I don't think any of this is about Delphine being opposed to Esbern making a recent history encyclopedia! She is also a fan of record keeping! Her response is the only line in the Sky Haven dialogues to have a description in the…game files?…game data?…I don't know video game words?, and it's just "[QUOTE]I survived[QUOTE]? sarcastic". It's her riposte to Esbern's [holds mic out] What do you want your encyclopedia entry to say?, and it's grief and guilt and distress in the moment, not antipathy toward the chronicle idea.

Back at the academia dialogue I said I'd dig into the "Okay Esbern you are taking the paternalistic thing too far" moments here. In terms of word choice, the "Now now, my dear" from in Conversation03 might be most egregious to the modern ear, but that's also a low-stakes interaction where Esbern and Delphine are mediating their relationship through banter. The "Now now, my dear" can even be read as self-aware (…camp, if you want): an exaggerated tsking elderly man. The formulation of "Come now, [telling Delphine what she already knows about utility to future Blades after a subjective statement telling her she did more than just survive]," delivered when she's already snarling and flattening her ears, doesn't come across nearly as self-aware.

Describing Esbern's "Come now" as, for lack of a better word, unironic rather than camp, we can loop back to getting some insight on why Esbern is the way he is. Delphine's initial reply of grief -> sarcasm takes Esbern unawares because creating a chronicle of recent Blades history is something he can undertake without allowing himself to feel his own grief. He's looking back enough to make a record, but he's not looking back enough to grieve.

I think Esbern's panicky demeanor when the Dragonborn first meets him in the Ratway results in a kind of characterization misdirect. His first conversation with the player is full of his fear at the end of the world and his dread about being captured by the Thalmor. Not long after that, he and Delphine have their reunion where both are briefly emotional. After that, Esbern is cheerful and excited whenever history and architecture come up. It's easy to see him as a vulnerable old man who is willing to express his emotions! He doesn't come across as the stereotypical stern emotionally repressed character. But "Best not to think about [the torture of the other Blades]" over in Conversation02 is the acknowledgment, and even if people react to grief in different ways, would someone who never had a chance to mourn be this upbeat without us raising an eyebrow or two?

The valence of "Come now" in this conversation - encouraging, paternalistic, gentle, commanding - reads as a kinder manifestation of the classic parental Get over it. For whatever reasons in Esbern's history, shoving aside grief is the only approach he knows how to use; one imagines that spending the first part of his life in a formerly-Imperial military group had no small effect here. Delphine might be more overtly stern but she's never gotten over anything a day in her life and she isn't about to start now.

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