unfinished, slightly slightly slightly nsfw nerevarine alavesa & dagoth ur fic because i can’t sleep and i’m sexie. cc: @fillianore @snowthroat @dolcesiva @bosmer 🌋👀
Coin may as well have sputtered out from Balmora’s underbelly like a fountain once it was sliced into; it was aplenty. She had been handed dirty laundry left right and centre and cleaned it with trained aplomb—the Dunmer, her people, accepted assassinations both personal and political as a part of daily life. Murder was to be expected. Slavery was often even if the Imperials whined about it—it was in the treaty. The Morag Tong had yet to catch the shadow poaching their, unnervingly, very legal contracts to kill. Alavesa would try to keep it that way.
Caius was barely in the home he had extended to her. She knew he was addicted to skooma but that was a man’s business. He trained her and kept her fed, and conveniently wasn’t there to bother her when she inevitably came to roost. She had every comfort handed to her on a platter in Vvardenfell, which a former prisoner should have been grateful for, but she wasn’t.
Because someone or something wanted so much more than she could give. It was a primordial, gnawing feeling that hadn’t ebbed away since stepping into Seyda Neen.
Sleep was the one comfort Alavesa could not take. It evaded her every night—or dawn—or perhaps she was evading it. That someone or something was watching her in her dreams too. In the onyx depth behind her eyelids, various figures would emerge and throbb on the horizon of her mind, but one always towered over the rest, stalwart and significant. He was a red, pulsing monolith, and he felt too familiar and too close to her.
One of her most vivid dreams had been some mockery of a wedding procession: of being herded through an adoring crowd that laid stars themselves at her feet. The crowd were corpses. The monolith’s… hand, she assumed, had covered most of her back. He had been the one guiding her, and though his grip was cautiously gentle then, Alavesa’s chest had been stiflingly tight. When she had, somehow, been able to will her neck to crane and stare up at the captor of her dreams, she had been greeted by an ornate gold mask, with three soulless eyes, and three protruding tendrils.
What is this?
Her voice echoed and barely came out at the same time.
Morrowind, free of the n’wahs, sweet Nerevar.
His voice was like a long, dark hallway, baritone and poisoned.
Who are you?
I have risen, to give you the Heart—and you also have need of mine.
Who am I?
Nerevar… My sweet Moon-and-Star, you have come, how I had waited thousands of years for you to come to me!
Alavesa’s ribs weren’t as scrawny. She felt the weight of decorative jewellery and a silk robe on her. There was a veil sheen in front of her black eyes, she realised, and something weighing her down on her head, too—a crown. The monolith’s fingers were so elongated and sharp, claw-like. They touched between her breasts…
She woke to sweat and an uncomfortable awareness that she was aroused.
She tentatively asked Caius when they broke their fast what she should make of something that seemed laughably prophetic, and he told her they were just so: nonconsequential dreams. But his shoulders were tense and his voice unusually strained.
And she was lucky to escape the effect even in reality when she was awake: all manner of hobbling people were acutely able to sniff her out in any town and speak in clipped, cryptic tones, like they had dreamed the same and knew her.
“I am a sleeper, one among thousands,” one had chirped.
“Father of the Mountain,” another chimed.
“He sleeps, but when He wakes, we shall rise from our dreams,” yet another added.
Alavesa shoved them away brusquely when they accosted her, because she was soon growing tired of whatever fate the Blades were obviously cooking up for her. Then, one evening at the riverbank in Balmora, one did not speak so cryptically.
“Pure Dunmer, I bring you a message.”
She started at the voice but quickly regained composure. It was another ‘sleeper’ to be sure.
“Go away, s’wit,” she said dismissively, because she had a sword whirring against a grindstone. When had she begun using Dunmeri? “I’ve had enough riddles to last a lifetime—“
“Dagoth Ur calls you,” the sleeper interjected.
Alavesa lurched and dropped her sword, curtains of inky hair falling to cover her face. It clattered to the ground but felt on the edge of her vision now. Something very instinctual and previously dormant swept through her bones like a chill.
“I know that name,” she said. “I know Dagoth… Why do I know that?”
She wheeled around to face the sleeper. They were just another messenger in dark garb. They looked satisfied but their eyes were faraway too.
“You are the Nerevarine,” they said. “You cannot deny your Lord. The Sixth House is risen, and Dagoth is its glory…”
The hooded figure wore on to her of Red Mountain, the landmark that eclipsed most of Morrowind and could be seen bubbling and choking the sky with smoke from almost anywhere. The volcano had only become active recently, and for good reason—Dagoth Ur was rising within just the same. Alavesa went to press about the Sixth House, but the sleeper was away on the wind as quickly as they had come to her.
She bolted home feeling like fire was threatening to rip apart every piece of sinew and marrow inside her.
