#h!nara

So lets break her down to the basics and build back something more interesting.

Falmer are supposed to be just monsters in-game, right? Not even granted the dignity of a black soul gem. Well fuck that. They're not necessarily nice, but they are people.

H!nara (The ! denotes a sort of back-of-the-throat click) is a falmer living with her clan under the rift. There's a deep seated resentment among her people for what was done to them, and there are growing calls to take vengeance on the surface. H!nara never really thought too deep about the things she was told, until one winter night she was sent to the surface to scout a nearby village in preparation for a raid.

She'd been told all her life that top-siders were evil, incapable of love and affection, of warmth.

Of music.

And yet, as she drew closer to the small, isolated village, she heard the sound of laughter, drums and flutes, as the villagers filled the winter nights with music to drive away the cold.

She didn't know nords could sing. She didn't know their songs were beautiful.

Lurking at the edge of the firelight, she spent the night listening to the songs and laughter, then returned home and told her clan that the top-siders were too many, too strong, clanking with steel armour. There was some grumbling, but they accepted her at her word. After all, quiet, ordinary H!nara had never lied to them before.

Now she creeps up every chance she can sneak away, to lurk on the edges of town at night and just take it all in. Sometimes she pilfers little items that she thinks won't be missed, small trinkets to run her fingers over and wonder.

There's a young nord lad, one of the singers that so enchanted her, whose been watching one of the "Clatter-coats" of camp-fire tales creeping about, no weapon in her hands as she steals small useless items, and lurks on the rooftops as he plays his flute. He hasn't told anyone, she doesn't seem dangerous. Curious. Almost sweet. One night he left his second best flute out in the snow.

H!nara: Just a nice place to explore. Her clan are on reasonably friendly terms with the clan that lives there so she's used to just roaming. The giants a relatively new addition. She's fascinated by him, but he's skittish and confused by the place he's stuck in so making friends might need to wait.

Gort and Bindi: The two accidently blundered their way into it exploring an underground pass. Bindi was awestruck by the sight of it, and Gort burst into tears and had to sit down for a while until he composed himself and they could move on. He'd never seen anything so beautiful...

Larkash:

H!nara had been following the pair of travellers making their way through the Betrayers ruins for a while now. They seemed competent, the deep voiced one leaving a bulky shadow through the eternal night, the other one the massive beast that talked with the throat of a woman. Together they'd been poking through the cold stone corridors, fighting the metal-rollers and stashing their twisted metal remains in their packs.

She'd always wanted to poke around the remnants of one, but metal-rollers and metal-scuttlers were dangerous. She ought to be reporting them. They were close to the Peoples territory, after all.

Instead she'd carved the markings for "Possible Danger, Steer Clear" on the fungal growths leading to the ruins, and slipped in after them.

Silent as the shadows she would never see, H!nara slipped after them, waiting, listening, hoping.

Finally, after what felt like hours, they made camp, close enough to her hiding space she felt she could reach out and touch the immense wall of heat that was the woman-talking-beast.

Time to act.

It was a skill she'd been cultivated for a while, a talent few of the People could do.

Heart hammering in her chest, she threw her voice, a snarling warning echoing from the other side of the hall.

The result was instantaneous, and she held her breath as the pair unfolded from their rest with twin war cries, the sound of a sword unsheathing making her gut twist with fear. This was stupid, so so so stupid...

Quickly, she grabbed at their bags, trying to rummage as fast as she could before the pair noticed her.

Cold Betrayer metal was under her palms and H!nara grinned.

Then...

That sensation she knew as danger on the surface, the searing feeling on her face that told her to flee back to the warm dark caves, but somehow it was right there, right now, sudden and burning, leaving her reeling as she fled.

<"WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!">

<"Gort, turn off the lantern, you fool!">

Dazed but elated, she vanished into the ruins, her prize clutched to her chest, and didn't stop running until she'd reached her little cave.

Gradually, her breathing became steady again, and she turned her attention to her newest treasure. A dead metal-scuttler, like a chaurus spun from Betrayer metal. It's finely wrought limbs dangled limply as she turned it over and over, brushing sensitive fingers over its surface.

He hadn't done this in a while, chiding himself for his sloth as withered dragonfly wings and old daggers he'd vaguely swept into his bag thumped out onto the snow.

A book he'd vaguely attempted to finish. Junk.

An interesting stone with a band of quartz running through it. Eh, that would look nice on the windowsill back home. Keep.

A hide he'd skinned from a deer then forgotten about. Urg. Toss.

The strange white many-sided sphere that had spoken to him in his head...better not throw that one...

The fire caught a nugget of sap in the wood and leapt, flaring brighter in the dark, and ice filled his veins as he saw the pale figure crouched by the fire.

Falmer.

Larkash froze, eyes trained on the being whose eyeless gaze was nevertheless fixed on him, his fingers slowly creeping towards Volendrung slung across his back.

"Wh...want?"

The falmer cocked its-no, her head, pointing a spindly, too-long finger at the pile of junk in the snow.

Larkash blinked.

"...Excuse me?"

"Want?" Her voice was soft and crackly, barely a whisper over the keening of the wind.

"I, uh...n-no?"

A strange gleeful chatter, a buzz he felt in the back of his throat, and in a flurry of snow and flicker of shadows, the figure and his pile of rubbish was gone.

Larkash breathed out slowly.

A doll.

Three saucepans.

A jar of someones baby teeth.

A wedge of cheese (Went smelly! Had to be thrown out.)

A bit and bridle set from a stable. This one was one of her larger thefts and took some care not only to not get caught taking it but not get caught bringing it home.

A small collection of hair brushes and hair pins.

A pot of face powder.

Various surface mushrooms and flowers.

Forks, knives and other cutlery.

Someones hat.

Someones false teeth.

A copy of the lusty argonian maid with a very worn spine.

A flute.

Huddled in her little hidey-hole, a jump and scuttle above a chasm, H!nara turned her newest acquisition over and over in her sensitive hands. Out of a bag of chaurus silk, she took out her old childhood toy to compare it to.

A vague person shape, fluffy and nice to hold, but spun of cave moss and chaurus silk. A treasured toy.

Just like the one she'd stolen from the hut with the little nord girl.

She hummed softly to herself, the echoes bouncing off her little cave, marking the shapes of her various finds. Pots, tools, scraps of cloth, little pieces of the upper world.

She wondered if maybe she should put this little doll back. If nords really were just people, the owner of this doll would be just as devastated as she would have been, if her treasured childhood possession was stolen.

Or maybe...

----

Freyen and her mother stared down at her bed, eyes wide and jaws slack. Dried tear tracks marked the little girls face, but her sorrow at the loss of her doll was momentarily forgotten as her mother had come to put the sad little girl to bed...to see a strange, pale doll draped across the pillow, a soft lumpy thing that smelled of mushrooms and insects and vast, empty spaces.