Next on Iris's Divine Design Concepts: Kynareth.
Kynareth is a goddess of the wind, nature, animals, and the one who supposedly created the races of Man gave them the Voice.
Her sacrifice is one I've had a little trouble pinpointing, so I'm going to lead with my visual notes:
- I see Kynareth's body being very disjointed, even down to her skeleton, which if you could look at it would be made of essentially assorted scrap animal bones that have been tied together to try and form something approximating a humanoid skeleton.
- Nothing is complete; I see the surface of her skin as this patchwork of skin interchanged with fur, interchanged with scales, interchanged with carapaces, interchanged with gills, interchanged with tree bark, and it's always changing. No patch of her body will remain the same for long.
- Plants are burgeoning out of her body too, but they can never reach maturity. Just before a mountain flower on her shoulder is set to bloom, it begins to rot.
- I think that there is a scar on her neck, and a depression that shows something has been removed from it. If you were to ask her a question, she would answer in signs. Her vocal cords are gone, as giving mankind their Voices came at the cost of her own.
- There's a certain beauty to how she's constantly changing. No plant can mature on her, but everything that possibly counts as alive has had the honour of sprouting from her body.
- Her hair isn't all one colour, or one length for that matter. Every natural hair colour that has ever existed grows out of her scalp, as every fur colour can form a patch of her skin. Similarly, every possible hair texture can grow.
- Every possible anatomical feature has grown on her body at least once: wings, antennae, claws, you name it.
In this way, she is a visual representation of all the natural life she protects and watches over, constantly changing like the wind she wields. I think the tragedy of her form is that none of it gets to reach maturation.
It's a bit abstract, but I think it makes the most sense for this to represent her sacrifice as the loss of wholeness. I think the ability to mature and persist is what Kynareth has given to Nirn and its creatures.
And so, like the winds, she is forever changing.
