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Character Trivia Game

tagged by @flycasual and @cresu!

this is… long due to her long and active life! (3.4k) taking this as an excuse for massive info dump. In no way do I expect all who I tag to actually read this insane lore dump :) sorry not sorry

Name: Lilliandra Nivulirel

Age: 108 (as of 4E 208)

Born: 25th of Morning Star, 4E 100

Occupation

Scholar, mage, independent researcher, singer and occasional performer, and Daedric Champion. She formerly served as the Herald of a hidden Hermaeus Mora cult on Auridon before becoming Mora’s Champion. Lilliandra also spent several years as an Arena combatant in Cyrodiil, eventually earning and holding the title of Grand Champion shortly before the Great War. From the 4E 170s through 4E 199, she worked intermittently as a travelling mercenary, magical consultant, and collector of rare knowledge and artifacts. In 4E 201, she was shown to be the Last Dragonborn. She also briefly served as Listener of the Dark Brotherhood, although the position was more temporary stewardship (merely the hand that guides brotherhood out from the ashes) and surrendered control after identifying the true Listener. By the later LDLS timeline, Lilliandra has largely withdrawn from public work. She continues her independent magical research but devotes much of her time to her household and family. She’ll still accept work that interests her, particularly when it involves unusual magic, dangerous ruins, forbidden knowledge, or an opportunity to interfere in something she finds personally objectionable.

Background

Lilliandra was born into an influential Altmeri family just north of Shimmerene. Her upbringing was privileged, highly controlled, and shaped by the political expectations of a family closely entangled with the Thalmor. She received extensive education in magic, history, music and the arts, courtly conduct, and the scholarly disciplines expected of an Altmer noblewoman. Her strongest magical talents emerged in Illusion, alongside thaumavocalism that she brute forced her way into learning (not born with it), mysticism, and other forms of experimental spellcraft. She was groomed by her mother Psylia — champion to Mephala and Dominion Spymaster — to become useful to the family and the Dominion. Her unusual magical talents, relentless curiosity, and desire for independence eventually drew her toward forbidden research and the worship of Hermaeus Mora. She rose rapidly through a cult devoted to Hermaeus Mora, eventually becoming its Herald. In 4E 127, after completing a series of trials and sacrificing something important to her, she became Mora’s Champion and took up partial residence in Apocrypha. Her long association with Apocrypha gave her access to knowledge few mortals could survive possessing, but it also separated her from ordinary life and gradually worsened many of her most destructive qualities. During this period, she met Miraak, with whom she was forced to share the Tower of Unutterable Truths. Their relationship develops over decades from mutual hostility into collaboration, friendship, possessiveness, and eventual love. Lilliandra continued moving between Apocrypha and Nirn. By the time she arrived in Skyrim in 4E 201, she had already lived several very different lives. Becoming Dragonborn drew those lives together and ultimately forced her to confront both Miraak and the master they shared. In both main and AU timeline, she resurrects Miraak after his death. In LDLS, he settles with her (and her brother Elikar and Serana) at Lakeview Manor. Her later life is quieter but not necessarily gentler. She becomes increasingly devoted to their unconventional household, particularly after the unplanned and difficult birth of their daughter, Ophelia, while remaining a dangerous mage, an obsessive scholar, and a Champion.

Notable Relationships

Miraak

Lilliandra’s eventual husband, fellow Dragonborn, and the most important relationship of her life. They first met after Lilliandra became Mora’s Champion and was forced to share Miraak’s territory, the Tower of Unutterable Truths. Their relationship developed over several decades, beginning with hostility and territorial conflict before gradually becoming collaboration, friendship, romantic attachment, and fierce mutual devotion. Neither knew at the time that Lilli would be dragonborn — they only felt the constant pull to the other. Miraak is one of the few people Lilliandra considers her intellectual equal. He understands her cruelty, ambition, possessiveness, and relationship with Mora without requiring her to disguise them as something gentler. In turn, she understands his pride, rage, and need for freedom more intimately than anyone else. Their relationship is argumentative, competitive, and sometimes destructive, but built upon profound trust and recognition. After Miraak’s death in 4E 202, Lilliandra dragged his remains from Oblivion, resurrected him, and severed his remaining entanglement with Apocrypha. Later they form a private marriage according to their own promises rather than any formal religious tradition. Lilliandra’s intensely tactile and emotionally dependent upon him, although she rarely admits the extent of that dependence aloud.

Ophelia

Lilliandra and Miraak’s AU daughter in LDLS. Ophelia was unplanned, and Lilliandra struggled severely with pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum illness. As a result, her bond with Ophelia developed more slowly than Miraak’s did, something that remains a source of private guilt/shame. Lilliandra recognises many of her own childhood traits in Ophelia, particularly her quiet observation, intense interests, etc. She’s determined that Ophelia will never be treated as defective or inconvenient for those traits. Although Lilliandra’s not naturally maternal in a conventional sense, she’s deeply attentive to her daughter’s preferences and protects her autonomy with near-ferocious intensity. Ophelia receives a patience and gentleness that Lilliandra rarely offers anyone else. Motherhood doesn’t erase Lilliandra’s darker qualities, but it forces her to consider what parts of herself she wishes to pass on and what cycles she intends to end.

Elikar

Lilliandra’s older brother and one of her longest-standing moral counterweights. Elikar was protective of her when they were children, but military service repeatedly drew him away from home and left Lilliandra increasingly vulnerable to their mother’s influence. Both siblings carry resentment and guilt over this separation, though neither places the blame entirely upon the other. Elikar is kinder, more principled, and more hopeful than Lilliandra. He believes people can improve and institutions can be changed from within, while she is more likely to view both people and systems as tools, threats, or failed experiments. Despite their moral differences, they remain fiercely loyal to one another.

Serana

A close friend and eventual member of Lilliandra’s household. Their relationship is based more on mutual understanding than on moral similarity. Both carry complicated relationships with their families, and both know what it means to have their bodies and futures treated as belonging to someone else. Serana is capable of challenging Lilliandra without approaching her with Elikar’s open moral concern. She often serves as a practical mediator between members of the household, particularly between Elikar and Miraak. Lilliandra trusts her judgement more than she openly acknowledges and considers her one of the few people entitled to interfere when Lilliandra is endangering herself.

Cinnara

Lilliandra’s childhood friend, first lover and partner for roughly thirty-five years. Cinnara represented familiarity, comfort, and a connection to the person Lilliandra had been before Apocrypha and Hermaeus Mora consumed so much of her life. Their relationship gradually deteriorated as Lilliandra became more distant, secretive, and absorbed in Apocrypha. Lilliandra’s infidelity and increasing inability to remain emotionally present contributed to its eventual collapse. Despite the harm she caused, Lilliandra never regarded Cinnara as insignificant. Cinnara remained tied in her mind to childhood, innocence, and a version of home that could not survive what Lilliandra became.

Hermaeus Mora

Lilliandra’s Daedric patron and the figure with the greatest influence over the direction of her life. She began as a worshipper, rose to become a cult leader, and eventually became Mora’s Champion after completing his trials. Lilliandra entered Mora’s service with abundant passion. She was drawn to the promise of forbidden knowledge, intellectual freedom, and access to mysteries denied to ordinary scholars. Her devotion was genuine, though never simple or entirely obedient. She resented being controlled even while repeatedly choosing to remain close to the source of that control. Mora encouraged her curiosity, rewarded her ruthlessness, and offered her opportunities that helped transform existing flaws into defining characteristics. Lilliandra’s relationship with him contains reverence, ambition, resentment, dependence, and the persistent belief that she can negotiate with something far older and more powerful than herself.

Psylia

Lilliandra’s mother and top-ranking Thalmor spymaster. Psylia ensured that her daughter received an exceptional education, but regarded Lilliandra’s talents as resources to be cultivated and directed. Much of Lilliandra’s composure, secrecy, perfectionism, and instinctive manipulation can be traced to her mother’s influence. Lilliandra spent much of her youth seeking Psylia’s approval while simultaneously resisting the future designed for her. Their relationship is marked by admiration, fear, resentment, and uncomfortable similarity. Lilliandra rejects many of her mother’s political goals yet often reproduces Psylia’s methods in her own relationships.

Vandoril

A respected magistrate and legal scholar who represented the more moderate side of Lilliandra’s upbringing. He was warmer and more accepting than Psylia, though not always willing or able to prevent the harm occurring within their family. Lilliandra regarded him as one of her last connections to restraint and conventional morality. His affection mattered deeply to her, particularly because it was offered with fewer conditions than her mother’s approval. However, his tendency to remain supportive without directly confronting Psylia also complicated Lilliandra’s trust in him.

Strengths

Exceptional intelligence and scholarship with a relentless curiosity

Magical versatility: Illusion — particularly fear magic — is her speciality, but she’s not dependent upon a single school. Thaumavocalism, mysticism, alteration, conjuration, necromancy, destruction magic, and her Dragonborn abilities give her a broad range of options. She is particularly dangerous because she combines these disciplines unpredictably.

Highly observant, adaptable and resourceful

Strong-willed and independent

Charismatic when she chooses to be

Fearless — or very good at functioning while afraid

Determined loyalty: Her devotion is not always healthy or gentle, but it is rarely uncertain. She will cross realms, challenge gods, violate natural laws, and endure enormous personal harm for the people she loves.

Comfortable making difficult decisions

Weaknesses

Obsessive curiosity: Lilliandra struggles to leave questions unanswered, even when the answer is dangerous, unethical, or personally destructive. “I need to know” frequently overrides “I should not do this.” Mora understands and exploits this exceptionally well.

Arrogance

Poor relationship with control: Lilliandra reacts intensely to being ordered, confined, monitored, or denied information. Even reasonable boundaries can feel like challenges to her autonomy. She’s particularly likely to make reckless decisions when someone tells her she’s not permitted to do something. Her need to prove she cannot be controlled sometimes allows others to manipulate her through predictable defiance.

Morally unrestrained/Morally bankrupt

Emotionally avoidant: She may intellectualise distress, bury herself in work, provoke an argument, or redirect intense emotion into sex, violence, or magical experimentation rather than admitting vulnerability.

Deep sensitivity to failure: Her arrogance conceals a fear that anything less than excellence makes her disposable, disappointing, or unworthy of respect. Failure can cause disproportionate anger, shame, and fixation.

Dependent upon rare approval: Lilliandra dismisses most outside opinions, but the approval of someone she genuinely respects carries immense weight. Miraak’s recognition, her father’s affection, and formerly Psylia’s approval can affect her far more than she wishes.

Possessive

Limited empathy: Lilliandra can understand what another person feels without emotionally sharing it. This cognitive empathy makes her socially perceptive, but it can also make her an effective manipulator. She may recognise that someone is suffering and still conclude that the suffering is acceptable, useful, or simply not important enough to change her course.

Vindictive

Physically vulnerable despite great power: Lilliandra is an extremely capable mage and fighter, but her body carries lasting injuries from over the century. Partial hearing loss, impaired peripheral vision, chronic respiratory difficulties, and later complications from pregnancy and childbirth can restrict her endurance and environmental tolerance. She dislikes acknowledging these limits and may conceal symptoms until she is already in danger.

Overreliance on self-sufficiency: She’s accustomed to handling problems privately and may withhold information until others can no longer help without first managing the consequences of her secrecy. This nearly killed her in Come Back, My Shadow. In LDLS, family gradually teaches her to accept care, but she still tends to treat needing assistance as a personal failure.

Difficulty with ordinary comfort: She’s more comfortable resurrecting the dead, researching a cure, or killing a threat than saying, “I am frightened,” “I need you,” or “I was wrong.”

Her attachments are exploitable

No Interest In

Being Universally liked || Respectability: Lilliandra cares intensely about the opinions of a very small number of people and very little about everyone else’s. She can behave charmingly when it serves a purpose, but popularity itself holds no value for her. Same with an honourable reputation. She’s been a cultist, Daedric Champion, mercenary, assassin, necromancer, Arena fighter, and experimental mage. Scandal matters only when it interferes with her work or harms her family.

Conventional morality

Doing things the proper way: Tradition has to justify itself before Lilliandra will respect it. She has no objection to taking shortcuts, combining incompatible disciplines, breaking institutional rules, or inventing an entirely new method when established practice becomes inconvenient.

Fair Fights

Mundane Gossip

Intellectual orthodoxy: She is willing to learn from experts but not to treat their conclusions as sacred.

Public recognition — eventually: Younger Lilliandra enjoys proving herself, commanding attention, and being recognised as exceptional. By the later LDLS timeline, however, she’s largely lost interest in fame for its own sake. She already knows what she’s capable of. She would rather pursue private research and remain with her family than continually perform greatness for strangers.

Traditional Domestic Roles: She can value domestic life without caring about conventional ideas of being a spouse or mother. She has no interest in becoming socially agreeable, nurturing everyone around her, managing a respectable household, or pretending family life has transformed her into a harmless person.

Redemption: She’s more interested in living according to her own chosen loyalties than earning moral absolution.

No Concept Of

Leaving well enough alone: A sealed door, unresolved mystery, forbidden spell, unknown creature, contradictory account, or unexplained magical phenomenon will remain in her thoughts until she investigates it. The fact that something appears stable is not an argument against touching it; to Lilliandra, it is evidence that no one has examined it thoroughly enough.

Moderation: Lilliandra rarely possesses an interest casually. She studies, pursues, collects, tests, and obsesses. This applies to scholarship, magic, grudges, affection and sex, curiosity, and self-destruction.

Healthy work-life balance

Personal space (with others): Around strangers, Lilliandra is guarded and dislikes unwanted observation or contact. With those she loves, especially Miraak, her concept of ordinary physical boundaries becomes much weaker. She leans, drapes, crowds, follows, watches over shoulders, occupies shared furniture inefficiently, and treats proximity as reassurance. She may claim she is not seeking comfort while physically attaching herself to the person providing it.

Proportional retaliation

"Too Dangerous"

Asking permission: Lilliandra may inform others of what she intends to do. She may negotiate when she respects someone’s authority or when cooperation is useful. She rarely feels an inherent need to seek permission before acting. When she does ask, there is a reasonable possibility she has already begun.

Quitting while ahead: Success tends to convince her that the method works and should therefore be pushed further. Rather than taking a favourable result and stopping, she asks what happens if she increases the power, changes the variables, repeats the experiment, or tests the outer limit. Many of her worst mistakes occur immediately after an impressive success.

An uncomplicated relationship

Causal loyalty

Accepting physical limitations gracefully: Lilliandra understands that her body has limits. She simply treats those limits as hostile theories requiring repeated testing. She hides symptoms, works through exhaustion, resents supervision, and insists she can continue long after others recognise that she should stop.

Character/Personality

Lilliandra is brilliant, observant, intensely curious, and almost pathologically unwilling to leave a mystery alone. She approaches magic, people, and even occasionally her own emotions as problems to be examined. She's capable of extraordinary patience when pursuing knowledge, although she becomes reckless when curiosity, pride, or personal attachment overrides her judgement. She’s arrogant and fully aware of her own abilities. Lilliandra enjoys being the most knowledgeable person in a room and reacts poorly when dismissed, underestimated, or controlled. Her confidence isn’t entirely performative, but it conceals a deep sensitivity to failure and a persistent need to prove that she’s exceptional. Approval matters most when it comes from the very few people she respects. Around strangers, she’s composed, mannered, and difficult to read. She can be charming when she chooses, especially after years of noble and performance training, but rarely offers sincerity without calculation. She watches people closely and has a talent for identifying fears, insecurities, and desires that can later be exploited. Her humour is dry, cutting, and frequently shared at someone else’s expense. Lilliandra isn’t compassionate in any conventional sense. She’s capable of calculated cruelty, unethical experimentation, manipulation, and murder without remorse when she considers the outcome worthwhile. Curiosity often takes precedence over morality. Her affection doesn’t make her harmless; it merely makes her dangerous on someone else’s behalf. With those she loves, she’s intensely loyal, possessive, tactile, and far more emotionally dependent than she would willingly admit. She tends to express care through proximity, practical assistance, gifts, research, and the quiet removal of threats. She may struggle to provide ordinary reassurance, but she remembers small preferences, anticipates needs, and will reorganise entire parts of her life around someone while insisting she has done nothing unusual. Motherhood and domestic life don’t redeem or fundamentally soften her. Instead, they give her a small circle toward which she directs the tenderness, protectiveness, and patience she withholds from most of the world. By the later LDLS timeline, she’s more withdrawn and less interested in recognition, but no less proud or dangerous. She has simply decided that her family and her work are more deserving of her attention than the wider world.

In Battle

Predatory, quick, and relentlessly adaptable. Lilliandra uses fear magic to control the battlefield, turning enemies against their own senses before closing in with mysticism, alteration, the Voice, or direct physical violence. She mixes magical disciplines freely and uses every environmental or psychological advantage available, with no interest in fighting fairly. When she requires greater strength or durability, she can transform into a Bone Goliath — abandoning subtlety to become the very monster her illusions have taught her enemies to fear.

Distinguishing Marks/Traits

her exceptional height (6'10"/208cm; has yet to meet any mortal taller)

the slight clouding and impaired peripheral vision in her left eye

partial hearing loss in her left ear — she wears an enchanted earring as a hearing aid (prolonged use causes headaches though)

her controlled and magically resonant voice

old magical and combat scars

Trivia

She’s actually genderfluid! She uses illusions to change her gender presentation to match what she feels.

She's actually half Altmer, half Nord. Psylia has some explaining to do—

She has two distinct styles of handwriting: an elegant, precise hand learned during her noble education and an almost illegible shorthand used when she’s thinking faster than she can write.

She claims her workspaces are organised. They are, but according to a system based on visualisation mnemonics rather than conventional categories. Moving anything without asking is one of the fastest ways to irritate her.

She is very good at remembering other people’s habits and preferences but may forget whether she herself has eaten, slept, or taken medicine.

She unconsciously angles her right ear toward quiet speakers because of the partial hearing loss on her left side. Those close to her adjust their positions without thinking.

She’s meticulous about the care of enchanted jewellery and magical tools, but much less careful with ordinary possessions.

She enjoys jewellery with useful enchantments and becomes offended when someone assumes decorative objects cannot also be dangerous.

She has learned several languages partly for scholarship and partly because she dislikes relying on translators who might omit information.

She appreciates inventive criticism more than empty praise. A genuinely insightful correction can earn more respect from her than admiration.

In the early years of sharing the Tower of Unutterable Truths, her use of phrases such as “last week” and “in two months” became one of Miraak’s few reliable ways of tracking time.

Lilliandra and Ophelia can spend long periods quietly working beside each other without either considering the silence uncomfortable.

She’s slower to wake than Miraak, particularly after the birth of Ophelia and during periods of poor health. Miraak’s also usually the first person to notice when she’s awake because she immediately begins reaching for him before opening her eyes.

Her marriage ceremony involved private promises/claims rather than established religious tradition. She and Miraak still chose rings because rings had already carried years of personal meaning between them.

No ref sheet finished yet, but here's part of it

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