#josh!fest

Part One- Pre-Corprus

Part Two- Post Corprus recovery

Part Three- Arkanis design (or the one I draw the most)

Part Four- Molag'shaln

Part Five- After Red Mountain

Rounding out this um... awful day that started ok with Joshi's designs from between the end of Morrowind's main quest to post Dragon Crisis.

After he defeated Dagoth Ur, Josh is at a bit of a loss. He lost his husband, his joy and his ability to move with ease. His pelvis and femurs get crushed under the hand of Akulakhan and he's lucky that he can walk mostly unassisted at all.

As a part of Ashland mourning rituals, Josh has three ritual scars cut into his cheeks (loss of a spouse) and his head shaved. He starts growing it back a year into his three-year mourning rite courtesy of Nerevar taking the reins and sending him to Mournhold for a "reunion" with his ex-wife. Josh does front at times but he really only has tiny fragments of memory from that time. He flees Morrowind after the death of two of the Tribunal and finds himself in Cyrodiil pawning off Nerevarine memorabilia to feed his alcoholism.

He meets Jiub again and finds a shed of joy and stability. Things start looking up for a few years before the Oblivion Crisis. Of course his time had to be ruined by more daedra. (Josh can't handle affection, also his hair's cute here)

Which sends him to his first of many rock bottoms. He shaves his head, though the scaring can only be done by wise-women so he feels like he can't even mourn right. Josh wanders Cyrodiil with nothing but the clothes on his back until he steals enough cash to take him to Sunhold, where his mother currently lives. He knows he needs someone to take care of him after everything. (Sidenote Josh is upset here over his son rejecting him in that letter.)

He starts doing better with care and starts focusing again on cracking Dwemeris. He gets his work published in Summerset under an Altmeri pseudonym and has submitted his work to the last shreds of the Arcane University by the time he runs back to Vvardenfell to get his family (the Urshilaku confederacy and his son) out before Red Mountain blew. He spends a lot of time after Red Year leading refugees out of Morrowind, though he keeps his face covered. He starts wearing a mask in public permanently. No one needs to know what became of the Nerevarine. (Josh cuts two new scars into his face that represents the concept of mourning a group, he mourns for sixty years)

Jump a few centuries into the future and ya boi is fresh out of luck once again. He ends up taking the blame for the death of a child and finds himself on the run for years. This is when we join up with the Skyrim timeline- or just before in my fic. (He had his ear notched and his earring- ringmail of Alandro-Sul taken as a trophy)

He's a mess by the Dragon Crisis, sobriety becomes a rarity. He finds a bit of joy once he and Sydari stop doing the on and off again thing though that ends when Sydari goes and deals with Alduin. She's gone for six years and that leads him to picking fights with dragons, ancient Nords and deadra alike.

And he doesn't come out the other side unscathed. A dragon mauling sees him lose most of his right ear, part of his left and scaring that causes him facial paralysis and slightly slurred speech.

He does, after way too long drowing, get himself a modicum of peace. He sobers up after Sydari comes back, hoping to be a better father to their daughter than he was for his son. Sydari manages to patch up things between him and Adren well enough. Vyna should know her older brother after all. The length of his hair is kinda indicative of his turmoil. Longer hair means more time between losses, shorter hair indicates grief. Shaved hair indicates mourning etc.

I don't have any end game Josh designs that I'm fully pleased with. Though Molag'shaln co-occurs with Josh rising to Hortator.

(olders design) Josh takes any opportunity to don a disguise and his pursuit of revenge is one of them.

He starts all this after a chance request from an enslaved Khajiiti waitress in Suran not long after his release. He ends up successfully helping her and her partner escape and ends up burning down Suran's docks and several warehouses in the process.

He gets contacted by the Twin Lamps around the time he's recovering from Corprus. His burning down of the Suran Slavemarkets and the slaughter of every Camonna Tong inside is the catalyst for his move to Vivec, his brief training with the Morag Tong and his re-entanglement with the Nerevarine Prophecies.

His attempts to get some assassination training and his work with Twin Lamps are all in an attempt to weaken their kingpin, Orvas Dren. He's responsible for almost all of Josh's misery and the misery of thousands of others. Before he takes down Dagoth Ur, he needed to erase that mer from existence.

I've drawn and painted his Arkanis design the most. This one is when he starts taking the Nerevarine thing seriously and starts incorporating a lot of Ashlander aesthetics into his over all look. It's also when he and Erra become an item and he starts using his father's last name (Ensirhaddon) a lot more.

Josh in his ash gear. Complete with amulets made by Erra.

He's in a constant fight between himself and the call of the Ascended and often loses himself to their calls. (Hence amulets). After Kogoruhn he gets a second scar on his nose (he breaks it a lot).

As can be seen here. He uses a lot of Ashlander motifs from this point onwards. He starts applying kohl around his eyes and a dark paint on his fingers.

He's a big fan of anything hot. He's awful at cooking so anything instant would make him happy. He'd live off of Shin Ramyun and complain that it wasn't hot enough.

Corprus. I look like this because of fucking Corprus! A lot of the hair on top of my head fell out after I got sick and like hacked off a lot of the top in frustration after seeing my own reflection in the fucking ocean! The hair did grow back but only a few centimetres. Idk I guess I just ran with it. I used to shave my hair at the sides and leave a long stripe down the centre that reaches my hips. It was hard to do in prison but I had my ways.

My hair's all super thick and coarse but I like wearing it long so I like decided to shave down the sides to lessen the weight of it. I thought it looked good idk...

I'll level, my mother may have tried evening it out during my recovery but there's no fixing it and I refuse to have it short all around. What am I gonna play with when I'm bored? Okay, yeah there are points where I've shaved it but it's a cultural thing. I keep my hair long these days because Ashlanders just like...do that? You don't see an Ashlander walking about with a shaved head unless he's mourning something. I have a lot of people to mourn.

🫂

Hey Winterfriend, thanks for the ask. I really appreciate it. 🫂 Josh likes drawing what he sees, usually things he thinks are interesting. He also doodles a lot out of boredom, and this ends up on his armour most of the time. He draws Erra a lot and also doodles as he's taking notes.

He finds netch hunts to be entertaining. Particularly ones that Erra heads. He tends to doodle that more often than anything else. When he tinkers he tends to write messy notes and ideas in his journals in a cypher that he came up with when he was a tween. It tends to be hard to crack so he feels good about his notes being safe. He designed his own prosthesis that connects to his own magicka pool via enchanted points that he noticed were already embedded within Dwemeri constructs. He has tonnes of notes about various prototypes. What works, what doesn't. He later does this with his leg brace. He has a lot of sketches that detail puzzle locks and how it relates to tonal architecture and a substance called Aetherium. Though he seems to have lost those.