Bless Us As We Hunt

Lilliandra

My LDB. We’re gonna talk about everything for her that’ll eventually happen by the end of her story.

Sensory disabilities

These physical disabilities come from a research explosion that was entirely her own fault, and the damage was done to the left side of her body. It’s also one of the first to happen.

She has partial vision loss in her left eye, especially peripheral vision, with cloudiness or reduced clarity. This affects how she navigates space, how easily someone can approach her from that side, and how much she relies on magic or habit to compensate.

She also has partial hearing loss in her left ear. It’s not total deafness, but enough that it changes how she positions herself in rooms, how easily she can follow conversation, and how vulnerable she feels when someone is on her impaired side. Miraak walking on that side later becomes both practical and intimate — a quiet way of guarding what she cannot fully perceive. She wears an earring that’s enchanted to help with her hearing but cannot wear it 24/7 without headaches.

She even has small scars on the left side of her face from glass shards; she has a habit in the beginning of masking with illusions but eventually gives up/comes to terms with it.

Chronic respiratory issues

Just before the start of Skyrim, around 4E 198, she suffers a lung injury that should have killed her (arrow to the chest). Elikar’s skills and Divine intervention helped, but only enough. Her right lung is now scarred from it. She has to be more conservative in fighting, and it limits her Thu’um and use of Thaumavocalism.

Later in post-Canon/DLC, especially with the aftermath of Miraak’s resurrection and with Skyrim’s climate, Lilli develops chronic breathing problems. The cold makes it worse. Her old tobacco use contributes to it. It’s coughing fits, shortness of breath, reduced stamina, chest pain or tightness, and needing teas, spells, rest, or warmer environments to manage it. This one is more prevalent in the Family AU fic LDLS.

This is one of the disabilities that becomes harder for her to hide with age. It also clashes painfully with her self-image, because Lilli is used to being agile, powerful, and able to push her body past its limits.

Neurodivergence

Lilli can easily be read as autistic. And it’s so funny that I’ve only been noticing in the last half year or so. XD

As a child, she struggled socially enough that Cinnara was introduced partly to help her socialize. She has long-standing patterns of intense focus, masking, difficulty being truly “seen,” and retreating into controlled roles or performances. She can be observant, quiet, and highly analytical, but also easily overwhelmed when her control over a situation collapses.

This also mirrors Ophelia later, which gives Lilli a complicated recognition of traits she herself was never properly helped through.

Trauma-related conditions

Lilli has complex trauma, given her upbringing, family control, Thalmor environment, Daedra meddling, bodily violation, and repeated loss of autonomy. Her trauma often centers on control, consent, being observed, and being used.

It manifests as: hypervigilance, dissociation, spiralling, (rare) panic attacks, avoidance of vulnerability, difficulty trusting care, need to control how others perceive her (or controlling through manipulation), fear of being trapped/owned, and anger when others make decisions “for her own good.”

This is also why pregnancy hits her so violently in LDLS. It’s not simply fear of motherhood — it’s her body becoming uncontrollable, visible, occupied, and impossible to fully command.

Depression and postpartum mental illness

In LDLS, Lilli develops significant mental health struggles. This shows as prenatal and postpartum depression. In the end, this is all somewhat tied to her complex trauma.

Magical and metaphysical conditions

Lilli also has conditions that are not medical in a modern sense but absolutely affect her body, mind, and life. Memory tampering, soul entanglement with Miraak, and consequences from resurrecting Miraak. The consequences of resurrecting Miraak were the most disabling, but told eventually were worked through.

Elikar

Brother to Lilliandra. A lot of Elikar’s are related to the Great War and his time as a Thalmor and Dominion soldier. Much like Lilli, we’ll talk about everything that’ll happen by the end of his story.

Permanent knee injury

Elikar’s primary physical disability is a permanent knee injury from the Great War. It healed enough for him to walk, work, travel, and fight when necessary, but it never healed cleanly. It was the unfortunate situation of picking between slow, thorough work vs quick, immediate work. There’s lasting damage: scar tissue, stiffness, and pain that flares under strain. In earlier years, Elikar frames it as “an old injury” rather than a disability. Not because it doesn’t affect him, but because calling it a disability would force him to admit that his body has limits. And Elikar is very used to treating his body as something that must continue functioning because others need him.

Most days, he can manage it well enough that others may not notice much beyond a slight stiffness or carefulness in how he moves. But during flares, it becomes much more obvious. And as he ages and continues pushing himself, the knee begins to wear out, slowing him down more and more.

In LDLS, he eventually starts using a cane when it starts bothering him. At first, he resists it because it feels like admitting decline. It feels like surrendering to age, injury, and limitation. Worse, it feels like making his pain visible. Elikar can endure pain privately, but the cane announces that something is wrong before he has the chance to minimize it.

Early on, he only uses it when things are “really bad.” Even then, he’s stiff about it. But over time, the cane becomes something different. Not defeat. Not uselessness. It becomes permission to stay present without destroying himself to do it. Because the cane gives him rest. It lets him walk farther without paying as much for it later. It lets him keep up with Ophelia in a different way. It lets him remain part of the household rhythm without quietly punishing his body for failing to be what it used to be.

War Trauma

His other conditions are deeply tied together: PTSD, insomnia, and moral injury, all rooted to the Great War, especially most heavily in the Sacking of the Imperial City. Elikar witnessed and enabled atrocities committed by the Dominion. The trauma isn’t only that he saw horror, but that he failed to stop it. As someone heavily religious, that failure shattered his sense of himself for a time.

He does work through the PTSD, but the insomnia and moral injury persist as he almost self-punishes by trying to save/help as many people as possible after he deserts the Dominion.

The moral injury is the center of everything. It’s a betrayal of his own values. “My lack of action has bred indifference.” That has haunted him in many forms as three core pillars of belief collapse: Faith, Family, Duty. He has failed his gods, he has failed his sister Lilli, and duty has led him to atrocity.

He eventually heals in LDLS with his slow movement away from serving society’s expectations and back toward serving family — the new one he has with Lilli, Miraak, Serana, and his niece Ophelia. It’s not about forgetting what he did. It’s about learning that destroying himself will not resurrect the dead, and that care, mercy, and protection still matter even when he believes he failed them once.

Ophelia

Ophelia is the daughter of Lilliandra and Miraak. She only shows up in Little Dragon Little Shadow. She’s gonna be much shorter because she’s just a child :)

Ophelia

Ophelia is the daughter of Lilliandra and Miraak. She only shows up in the Family AU Fic. She’s gonna be much shorter because she’s just a child :)

Autism

This is basically the main thing, and obviously, she gets this from Lilliandra. No one in her life (we’re not counting strangers) treats this as a fault. In fact, because she has Lilli, Miraak, Elikar, and Serana around her, there’s room for her to be recognised and accommodated in ways Lilli was not as a child. Lilliandra and Elikar especially recognised her early patterns.

A major part is that she sometimes loses access to speech when distressed, overwhelmed, tired, or frightened. So, she’s semi nonverbal, but the family has learned how to sign to give her another form of communication.

She has anxiety — not exactly something like generalised anxiety disorder, but simply the anxiety of being misunderstood because people outside her family can commonly misunderstand her. Especially when strangers might mistake her for being rude, unintelligent, spoiled, disobedient, or “strange.” That makes public outings stressful. This is where Miraak’s protectiveness becomes very sharp. >:) This does get better as she gets older.

Shutdowns are more common than meltdowns for her. If these happen at home, she has safe spaces set up by her family for her to retreat to and emotionally regulate.

There are also interoception differences — she needs gentle reminders to eat, drink, rest.

Miraak

I gotta add him because he’s so interesting to think about.

Physical Condition

His body is scarred and visibly marked by what was done to him, but he doesn’t have any body-based disability. After Lilli resurrects him after the DLC, the Apocrypha corruption no longer appears as active inky-black corruption. Instead, it has healed into pale, scar-like markings over the far-right side of his face, neck, torso, right arm and hand, and left leg.

Those markings matter, but mostly symbolically. They’re proof that Mora had him. They’re proof that Mora touched him, changed him, kept him. They are also proof he survived. (Technically)

Complex PTSD

This is the biggest one.

Miraak spent thousands of years trapped in Apocrypha under Hermaeus Mora. Even if time worked strangely there, it’s still an unimaginably long imprisonment. He wasn’t exactly isolated, but he was watched, controlled, punished, studied, and denied escape.

That gives him complex PTSD, especially from captivity.

It shows through hypervigilance, hatred of being watched, intense control issues, difficulty trusting safety, territorial behaviour, emotional shutdown, rage when he feels cornered, panic disguised as anger, difficulty accepting comfort, nightmares or waking visions of Apocrypha, inability to tolerate helplessness, or fear of being owned again.

For Miraak, fear often does not present as fear. It presents as command, irritation, violence, silence, or withdrawal. He’s very much someone who would rather be monstrous than vulnerable.

Captivity trauma

This is slightly separate from C-PTSD.

Miraak has spent so long in a prison-realm that freedom itself would be destabilizing after resurrection. Nirn is not just “home.” It’s overstimulating, unpredictable, and painfully alive. After Apocrypha, he initially struggles with open skies, natural weather, normal silence, unmonitored rooms, making choices without calculating Mora’s reaction, accepting that Lilli can leave and return, and accepting that he can leave and return.

Freedom does not automatically feel safe. Sometimes freedom feels like waiting for the leash to snap tight again.

Miraak’s not traumatized because he’s fragile. He’s traumatized because even someone as powerful as him was kept in a cage long enough that the cage became part of how he thinks.

Sensory reacclimation after Apocrypha

After thousands of years in Apocrypha, Nirn’s sensory world would be overwhelming. It all hits strangely. He may have periods of sensory overload, especially soon after resurrection. Struggling with hunger, thirst, and fatigue are most common.

Dissociation and Time displacement

Miraak has lived an impossible amount of time in an impossible place. That should affect his sense of time and self.

He may not experience time normally after Apocrypha. Thousands of years passed, but not in a normal mortal way. His memories of Nirn are ancient. His body was preserved. His culture is gone. His name is a myth. His temple is ruin. His old enemies and followers are dust.

That creates a kind of temporal dissociation. This isn’t a physical disability, but it is absolutely a condition of his existence. He is displaced from his own era, his own language, his own culture, and his own body’s expected life.

Memory damage

Miraak’s memory is complicated.

Thousands of years in Apocrypha erode, distort, or rearrange memory. Knowledge that he learns in Apocrypha through books and research and practice sticks — his memory has always been near-eidetic. Yet his life from before Apocrypha can be foggy in parts. Devoured by time. Then by Mora. And then even himself — where emotion outlives the truth.

Emotional dysregulation

Miraak is extremely controlled — until he is not.

He spent so long surviving through willpower, dominance, and refusal that ordinary emotional regulation is not something he learned in a healthy way. His main tools are control, threat, withdrawal, command, and possession.

This is why high-emotion moments with Lilli tend to become fighting or sex rather than calm conversation. He knows intensity. He knows power. He knows desire. He is much less practiced at gentleness, especially when frightened. (Equally Lilli can be a problem in this too.)

Attachment trauma

Miraak’s attachment patterns are deeply damaged.

He’s been betrayed. He has also spent thousands of years with no ordinary intimacy or equal companionship. So, when he attaches for the first time, he attaches intensely.

With Lilli, she’s not just a lover to him. She is witness, equal, liberator, obsession, home, and proof that he is not alone in the cage anymore. Later, after resurrection, she’s also the reason he has a life outside it.

That means separation, perceived rejection, or threats to her safety can hit him disproportionately hard. It’s trauma shaping how he loves. And with Lilli, that works because she’s also intense, dangerous, and autonomy-driven.

Magical and Metaphysical Conditions

Memory tampering (through Mora)

Ancient temporal displacement

Residual Daedric marking from Apocrypha

Soul entanglement with Lilli

History of being bound to Mora

Aging again after being preserved for thousands of years

The aging part might seem odd to add, but it would be psychologically significant. He was frozen for thousands of years somewhere in his mid-to-late thirties. Then, after resurrection, he is mortal in time again. He ages. Slowly, perhaps, but truly. That would be unsettling in a way he would not admit. Aging means he is free from Apocrypha’s stasis, but it also means time has him again.