Aggy: Pass down

Hailing from Silgrad stands Larndwerian, adventurer and hero whose mighty deeds are a proud testament to his Dark Elf heritage.

Having faced countless searches, dangers innumerable, and hordes of slobbering beasts and other non-elves in your richly fulfilled life, you can honestly say you don’t remember the last time your courage has faltered. Your spells are mighty, your wit is a razor, and you carry both wherever you find your brand of protection is needed. There is no treasure you can’t uncover, no prisoner you can’t recover, and no realm you can’t discover.

Today, you embark on your latest conquest: culling the kagouti population just outside Silgrad. These perilous beasts have been screwing with your homelands for far too long, so today is their day of reckoning. Dauntless as Lanrdwerian is, he should still keep his eyes open, for danger lurks around…

“No, really, Larndwerian, keep your eyes o—oh, for fuck’s sake.”

Well, at least about a tenth of him got out of the way.

With a sigh, you turn and head back to the city you and Larndwerian took off from that morning. The journey isn’t far; your great-something-grandson barely made it past the first hill before devoting himself to an afterlifetime of servitude to Mara as cement. At least he’ll do a better job at holding the shrine together than the original builders did.

Regardless, you arrive at Silgrad within the hour.

The village’s streets are as busy as you remember them; a few people, several humans, and even a couple of argonians are busying themselves with whatever errands sustain their still-mortal existences. You search from dunmer to dunmer, trying to determine if any of them are related to you. As with all things dunmer, the intricate subtleties of genealogy require a delicate touch. You can’t just leave it to random guesswork.

To that extent, you approach someone who is buying grapes. At one point in your family tree, you definitely remember a vineyard being involved.

“Hello, I’m—”

“Holy shit, a ghost!”

“Do you know if we’re related?”

“I… don’t… know? I can’t know! We just met, so I’d—”

“Let’s think about this logically. Surely, you’ve had a few relatives who have died. If you’re able to remember anything about any of them, we can narrow our search.”

“My family is huge, and a lot of us have died. The only one who really stands out was a distant uncle. His later years were marked by a descent into madness and an obsession with hunting witches. I remember it because it was the only funeral I’ve been warned not to go to.”

“Oh, come on now. I was always a witch hunter. It just took a lifetime of practice to un-become everything else that wasn’t part of my vocation. It’s hard to think circularly when everything else in your life is so linear, and without circular reasoning, it’s very difficult to sneak up on the proper conclusions.”

“That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.”

“Well, you’re clearly not a witch hunter.”

“Clearly.” A bitter hue paints the word. You express this by imagining it as neon pink.

“That doesn’t matter, however. Since transcending the traditional concept of mortality, I’ve decided to work on my family-crafting skills. So, I became an ancestral guardian. And just today, I led one of my great-nephews on a hunt through the lowlands, seeking to cull the argonian bandits or something that are overpopulating the area. Without giving myself any praise above what’s already due to a dunmer, I gave him every warning possible that a pillar was about to crush him into a paste.”

“Wait… you… hunting bandits? My brother left this morning spouting nonsense about making the countryside safer…”

“Yeah, well, he didn’t do a very good job at it. Now, granted, he didn’t do a bad job, either. He did no job, since he couldn’t quite master the not-dying portion of the job.”

“Oh my gods…” The elf buries his face in his hands and falls to his knees in a manner wholly unbecoming those of his race.

“Come on, now, there’s no need to get all human on me. This is really a positive turn of events. Sure, I have fewer descendants to guide, but the odds of any more of them dying from his exact set of circumstances have been greatly reduced!”

“Okay, okay. Maybe it doesn’t feel fine to you, but maybe trust the guy who’s had experience with actually being dead? The important part to take away from all this is to use Larndwerian’s death as a lesson on your own journey, so he didn’t die for nothing.”

“What the hell are you talking about with a journey?”

“If we’re related, it stands to reason that you also feel a spark-like call to adventure, something like a yearning to chase the horizon in order to find something. That should come naturally; the only weird members of our family settled down to live their lives in boring, non-dunmer cities… like this one, now that I look at it.”

“Larndwerian and I lived here for several decades… and everyone else in my family has lived in their respective homes for longer than I can remember.”

“Well, luckily, the only real difference between an adventurer and a normal person is their ability to stop being normal for a day. Our family must have been amazing if it brought me into the world, so exceptional abnormality has to be the norm. And therefore, when they act normal, it’s really just weird.”

“Think about turnips. The normal ones stay in their trees for most of their lives, until they’re harvested and planted for the next year. But the unusual ones, those weird ones have a chance at flying free and becoming something more than a mere, decorative fruit in some painter’s cornucopia”.

“T… turnips can’t fly!”

“You’re clearly used to normal turnips.”

Your descendant does not reply.

“But surely, you’ve had a few times in your life where you wanted to be more than a stupid, hanging fruit on some backwater farmer’s tree?”

“Even if that were true, I have a life here in Silgrad. I have a job. I can’t just up and leave whenever I get a flight of fancy!”

“That’s the only time to uproot yourself! Trees never dream of adventuring, which is why they’re stuck in one place all the time. If you don’t want anything, you won’t find yourself looking for it. And with you and me on adventures, you’ve got a guardian ancestor to just make things easier, since most of the hard answers are already asked about.”

Your descendant takes a long pause to think things through. Finally, he levels with you. “Look… I don’t know about adventures, or journeys, or turnips, even. But I do need to go get Larndwerian’s body, so I can properly lay him to rest. Can you take me to where he died?”

“Of course! I’ll take you to the shrine, and to any other tavern you wish to feed his instincts for wanderlust in. This is just a start, but with my guidance, I can promise you’ll truly become someone worthy of legend!”

The pair of you head back to his home.

“Well… either way, wait outside here. I need to get my cloak if I’m leaving the city.”

When he reemerges, you lead him to the northern gates.

“This will be an adventure you will tell your grand-nephews about!”

Or… not.

You can’t remember if these were the things your previous descendant was supposed to kill.

With an ethereal sigh, you turn back to town. You don’t believe in such things as “setbacks”; phrases like that just downplay the fact that backwards is simply forward in a different direction. However, there are definitely certain forward directions that imply you should make a turn, such as when there’s lava, tangible walls, or more than one Hlaalu. You’ve lost two of your descendants today by leading them out of town; if you find another, you might test the waters with a mini-adventure in town, before taking them out for the real thing.

Unfortunately, by nature of your current redirection, you have been set back to where you were earlier: finding a promising candidate to guardian as they undertake their natural state of adventuring.

Perfect.

A distinguished dunmer catches your attention, and you float over to him. You aren’t sure if the two of you are directly related, however, your family was never really one for branching outside of its comfort zone. With how much of your family ended up being related to itself, there’s a good chance if he’s a dunmer and he’s a purebred, he’s also related to you.

“You… why’re you breaking the law like that? Just floating… without gravity.”

“Laws are simply rules, and with the right adjustments to their terms, they can mean whatever they need to mean. I don’t break laws; I simply alter them to suit my needs.”

After a long draw from his bottle, he smiles at you.” It takes some pretty heavy brass ones to stand there, floating like that. I like that ‘bout you, not limiting yourself to arbitrary… limits.”

“Anyone can break past those limitations. It’s just a matter of seeing them as what they actually are, and realizing they’re only limits if you let yourself actually hit them. Once you figure that out, all you’re really surrounded with are advantages in disguise.”

“Hell yeah!”

You would marry this elf if it weren’t possibly incest, or definitely reverse-necrophilia.

“So, are you willing to give it a shot? Cast off limitations, weave your way not around walls and obstacles but through them? Surely, there must be something in your almost-complete life that isn’t there, and you need to go looking for it?”

“Yeah!” He climbs to his feet, grinning wildly. “Some douchebag stole my lucky knife last week, and I’ve been missing it ever since. But with all these badass inspirational words you’re saying, there ain’t no reason I can’t take it back, give back it to him other way around, and take it back again!”

While not the most grand adventure you’ve ever been on, you note this is a valid starting point. The dunmer leads you to a house, and he quietly fills you in on some of the details.

“Usually… this guy locks his windows to keep everyone out—an obstacle if anyone wanted inside. But if we change some of the rules about a window’s solidity…”

“Then we can get through the obstacle, instead of avoiding it!”

“While I respect your gusto, I have to admit this wasn’t precisely what I had in mind when I mentioned alternative styles of thinking.”

“But… doesn’t that just mean you were limiting your own way of thinking about thinking?”

Now this is a dunmer whose linear thinking you can respect.

He stumbles through the window, and you do your best to keep an alert gaze on his surroundings. There aren’t any pillars or kagouti or other beasts here to watch out for, but danger knows many forms. In fact, some of the safe forms of danger are really a simple change away from becoming the dangerous forms of danger, like the distinction of a pile of oily rags being on fire or not.

“Okay, I should definitely mention that it’s within your best interest to leave this house sooner rather than later.”

“I’ve completed the quest; anything remaining after that’s just ancillary details.”

“Technically true, but there are guards outside. If you get caught here…”

“What are laws to people who can just change them when it’s convenient? We’ll just figure out a way to float past all of their rules and regulations, and—”

“Halt! You’ve violated the law!”

The Redoran Guards read your distant relative the usual notecard about what his options are, vis a vis serving his sentence or paying impromptu taxes that will be used for road upkeep or somesuch. After a certain point, your own guardianship duties are tied, and this is definitely falling on the side of “he should have listened to you in the first place”.

Unfortunately, his passion isn’t balanced with a sense of truly understanding the workings around him. “Yeah, well what about the third option, you cuntankerous lawdogs?”

The Guard’s finest haul him out of the house, and you can hear him murmuring something about altering the terms of engagement. Once again, you find yourself at a crossroads; you admire his passion and high-level understanding of how a witch hunter thinks, but at the same time, you have to admit just how utterly stupid he ended up being. You hope he wasn’t a very close relative to you, at any rate.

With three attempts and just as many failures, you decide to move on to greener pastures. Not many memories about your life still remain, but by now, you feel as if you can distinctly remember not liking Silgrad. You still have your journey, and you still mean to pursue it. However, you’re ready to modify some portions of your search; mainly, where it’s taking place.

Screw this stupid city and its stupid kagouti.

Additional resource credits:
Ch’marr – programming
Cider- art. Like, actually all of the art. Don’t
worry guys, I wasn’t drawing a sidestory when I
was supposed to be working on the main one.