Valenwood. The Summerset Isles. Elsweyr. Hammerfell. High Rock. Cyrodiil. Black Marsh. Morrowind, or what remained of it. She had spent nearly a century searching for her missing child. The Great War had not stopped her. Skyrim's civil war wouldn't stop her either. This was the final province she could search. This was her last hope.
Lydia Nightwind stood above the burning village of Helgen, the flames dancing and casting shadows that she would have used years ago. She sighed and readjusted her iron plate gauntlets. Dragons be damned, she had a son to find. Dervenin, that fool, may have spent a century mourning him, but she knew that Ronthil was still out there somewhere.
Lydia Nightwind is a 356-year-old Bosmer assassin who has always been an independent agent doing assassinations through Morrowind and Cyrodiil. She was also once the Nerevarine during the downfall of both Dagoth Ur and Almalexia 207 years ago and the Champion of Cyrodiil during the Oblivion Crisis 201 years ago, but she doesn't use those titles anymore. Also she stole a unicorn one time. She tried to give that all up many years ago in order to raise a family with another Bosmer named Dervenin, even moving back to Valenwood with him so that their family would grow up in the Bosmer homeland.
They had one child together, a son that they named Ronthil who showed promise as a wizard; he grew up due to a fascination with magic that Lydia encouraged in him. When Ronthil was young, she would call him her little sprout, and she and Dervenin had plans to have more children before Ronthil went missing when he was seventeen. Dervenin went completely mad from the grief, becoming one of Sheogorath's worshipers and heading to the Shivering Isles to serve the Madgod's court just so he didn't have to think about the son he lost.
Lydia, meanwhile, began her search for her son, refusing to believe that he was dead, and has been searching all of Tamriel - Valenwood, the Summerset Isles, Black Marsh, Cyrodiil, Morrowind, Elsweyr, Hammerfell, and High Rock so far - for 97 years despite the Great War between the Empire and the Aldmeri Dominion interrupting that search 30 years ago. She recently made it to Skyrim to continue her search and has been looking for clues about her son's whereabouts despite the civil war going on. She is a dour and humorless woman due to a century of grief, but repays the kindnesses paid to her and will take up a fight to defend Dunmer and other Bosmer from the Nords of Skyrim.
Despite newly arriving in Skyrim, she knows she isn't alone. Through the years, many members of her family - her siblings' children and a handful of cousins - have also made their way north. This creates a web of connections across Skyrim that she can tap into in order to find shelter and even support in combat if need be, particularly in the form of her nephew Faendal and her niece Beleval.
Despite the years, despite the pain, she holds out hope that her son is still out there somewhere. She just needs to find him.
One might say that she's just as mad as her former husband to continue her search for this long.
During her search for her son, she's willing to do anything she can to get people to owe her favors, regardless of her own morals (equally supporting and selling out Talos worshipers, fucking over rich people every chance she gets, accidentally getting dragged into the Companions and then promptly abandoning them) but she's well past the point where she cares about stealth, leading to her ignoring the Thieves Guild while dropping by Riften to check with her family there and ignoring the ominous letter after putting an arrow in Grelod on pure reflex. She's too busy searching to sleep, much less get kidnapped by a bunch of tryhard assassins, but if she were...well, she'd just put arrows in Astrid and keep moving. Naturally, it's painful for her to see Dervenin in Solitude and have him not even recognize her, but she figures he deserves it for succumbing to despair when their son vanished.
Naturally, the biggest turning point is when she inevitably decides to get involved in this whole "vampire menace" mess she's heard so much about. While Beleval puts her lot in with the Dawnguard, Lydia doesn't care much about a Vigilants of Stendarr offshoot. That's not her god, that's not her job. But she's the one to find Serana and warms up to this long-lost daughter of someone, seeing parallels with her own search for her own son. And once she steps inside of Volkihar Keep and casts her gaze around the gathered vampires who have come to see Serana's return...
Who cares about this prophecy and this Lord and this Keep?
As a character, Lydia's notable skills have changed between her Morrowind and Oblivion version. Where she used to be a pretty standard Bosmer stealth archer, I chose to take her Skyrim build in a very different direction: an archery tank who summons a bow rather than worrying about lugging around arrows.
Ideally, she has maxed-out perk trees for Archery, Heavy Armor, and Smithing (because armor of both Light and Heavy versions can be found on both sides due to the addition of Creation Club content in Anniversary Edition, and dammit I'm gonna use it). Out of the Conjuration skill tree, she has Novice to Adept Conjuration and Mystic Binding.
In practice, while she's easy to level (especially with the money laundering training method for Faendal as an early follower to get you to 50 Archery with the cash you get from dumping tutorial-gathered armor off with Hod), she's also a bitch to level (I still haven't gotten her to 50 Conjuration or very high in Heavy Armor and Smithing). While she's not the Dragonborn (and thus shouldn't use Shouts, which I try to avoid using while playing as her), she is around while one is kicking about, and nothing hits better than literally knocking a dragon out of the sky.
As far as Lydia goes, it's a common thing for me in games with elven protagonists to make a wood elf (or equivalent) named Lydia. I've done it for years, literally since I was a kid. I figured I would finally haul this omnipresent character in my life up out of a default state and into a proper character of her own.
(Divider by @saradika-graphics)
