Inspired by a Tumblr post made by @outofcontextelderscrolls:

“I wanna know what part of tamriel makes my followers feel most at home. For me home is wherever my guild is.”

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I like this question because I’m having a REALLY hard time deciding on an answer. This is a cool thinky-question.

After going on a tour of the map in my head, I have two answers. The shortest and easiest one is that to me, Carrickfergus, Ashlander camps feel like places I would like to call home.

The next part of this I have decided to call

by Carrickfergus V.G. and Getheven Still-Water-Sky

Author’s Note: I did not start writing this with the intention of making fanfiction. As far as I am concerned, this isn’t fanfiction, this is something that happened when I wanted to explain why my Nerevarine associated Balmora with home-feelings and my Nerevarine overheard me and climbed right on into the control booth and threw narrative convention out the window because this document was simultaneously co-authored by two different people who were both trying to tell their own story and the other person’s.

In other words, if you’re wondering at any given time whether the narrator is me or my only-slightly-fictional Dunmer Nerevarine, the answer is “yes.”

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??To me, as the player-who-is-PC-who-is-an-extension-of-me-but-also-an-individual, as the weird two-souled being that makes us, home is Balmora. It’s not a perfect home -- it’s not a HAPPY home. But it’s my first and last and sometimes only hope. It doesn’t hold me as a home should, as one expects a home to be full of the family that is bound to you by blood or better, willing and wanting to share your company, laugh with you, cry with you, confirm bonds through rituals of food and chores and six and nicknames... It’s not THAT home. But it’s where your weird uncle takes you in after the Event that split you from that family and its fortress of four walls that should have always made you feel more protected than any palace could, and richer than any king. It’s where there are allies who are aware and sympathetic to the state you’re in from the storm you blew in on, and they’re all wise enough to give you work instead of kindness when you want it, and otherwise let you lick your wounds in your own world. Now you are safe in a new way: you are taught to take advantage of getting for free what is there to take by contract, freeing you of the shame of charity.

Dunmer gentleness shows itself through what looks to other races like a cruel lack of empathy and a taboo against sympathetic gestures or comments of any kind. Outlanders don’t understand that the Dunmer are very confused by accusations that this behavior is heartless and mean. From the perspective of the Dunmer, the greatest mercy they can show to someone in need is to let them exercise their strengths by giving them ways to provide for themselves and showing them no consideration for whatever hardship has befallen them, let them show themselves that they are still able to get along in the world, and then above all, let them keep their pain private, respect the sacred space of one’s own healing, alleviate suffering by letting it happen unwitnessed while the world outside waits patiently, its opportunities present and only becoming riper the longer it takes for the spell to pass.

Balmora is where I spend my first days or weeks in Morrowind. I sleep at Caius’s home, preferring the skooma-hovel of a washed-up warmonger to the uncomfortable crispness of guild dormatories, their identical and anonymous beds and chests reminding me too much of the vague impression-memories I have of where I came from… the prison before I became myself. For all his personal shortcomings, Caius has, at least, been long enough in Morrowind to have gone native enough to treat me as one of my own race would. It’s not enough for me to consider him a friend or feel grateful to him for providing the shabbiest afterthought of the bare minimum of what the Emperor Himself has ordered him to provide, but as I suffer through the growing pains of my infancy as a free citizen, I take great… comfort… in being able to process my… my pain… in Caius’s dwelling and sometimes even in his company. I sleep in the day mostly. He does not, mostly. If one of us wishes to sleep and the other is already in the bed, the floor serves well enough. I spend my nights working my errands or when I am ay my abilities’ end, I return to brood on the roof. Sometimes I find myself just sitting inside with him… just sitting on the floor, leaning back against the wall, pretending to thumb through one of his books but eventually I always end up posed as still as a statue, my arms resting casually on raised knees, watching him. I can watch him for hours. He goes about his business as if I am not there. I watch him answer letters, water the plant on his table, prepare a meal, read a book, take a nap… I watch him, numbly fascinated, as he prepares a syringe and injects it into his own arm. I am distantly aware that it is likely he has just allowed me to witness a ritual that is intensely private and personal to him. I wonder if he expects me to feel moved to reciprocate. I am suspicious of his motives. I say nothing. I move not at all. I blink at him through the dim candle light as he writhes. Eventually I feel compelled to be busy, and depart on my own business.

I watch him often; it becomes a way for me to suffer without suffering. In a way, he has become my project as much as I have become his. I reflect that there is some irony in our situation — the old general, pulling at the end of his chain at the end of his days, is sent the very spirit of stillness as a project to keep him occupied. And I, the long-time prisoner finally free, have looked out over the undulating swampy hills of home, my ancestral land, all mine to disappear into, a leafy path winding off into the soupy, ashy air spelling out promises of all I could have now, my own fortune to seek, lovers to pursue, vices to indulge, adventures to be had, all so deeply hidden in this land of tombs and tunnels that I need never worry overly much that the Empire’s efforts could ever find me… and here I am, willingly returning after every other errand or so to this same spot against the wall in this dump with this man, my provider, my jailor. I find this thought so amusing, I break one of my long watches enough to laugh. It genuinely startles him out of the book he has been reading. He looks around, then looks at me, confused. I allow him the courtesy of a shake of my head and resume watching.

… Getheven stays with Caius until he leaves Balmora. He attributes his clearer mind and heightened mood to his work with the Mages Guild. Although he would never admit it if asked directly, he had taken a liking to Ajira within moments of meeting her. Her kittenhood — normally a trait he had no patience for in Khajiits — turned their interactions and her tasks all into play — uncomplicated, agenda-free schoolyard games, as raucous and naughty and innocent as any child’s games are.

She gives him context for himself. He is reinvigorated. He remembers the fact of his own youth. The chronic physical pains that have been plaguing him since he arrived disappear when he stops trying to fall into stoops and hunches and other ailments his body is too young to have developed yet — too young, even, to mimic particularly well. His muscles uncoil, his bones stop straining to accommodate the arthritic stiffness that does not exist, the weak joints still operating with mechanical perfection and a flawless record, and the curved spine straightens as the weight of Getheven’s duende disappears.

When he reports to Ranis for further instruction, she wonders to herself if he is a wizard with much greater skill than he pretends, swearing that she had inducted an elf who could have been Getheven’s father when he came asking for work. But her instincts haven’t told her to dislike or distrust him. His games with Ajira have actually lightened the usually somber mood in the guild halls recently, and that’s been nice, especially in a city where it rains so much she could swear the sun regularly gets as fed-up looking at this ugly country as she does and goes on strike.

One of these days, Ranis thinks, when her studies are done, she’ll move her practice somewhere so far away from Backwash Swamp out there and its permanently-PMS-ing inhabitants, she might just be able to forget it right out of the mundus…

I enjoy Ranis’s tasks as a set of more grownup training wheels. She broadcasts her authority well, an effect sharpened by Ajira’s complete lack of it, but she can’t possibly be aware of that. If she is, it’s a pity such a useful talent is wasted on someone who isn’t clever enough to figure out how to use it to her advantage to do anything more than send unwitting participants off to both cause and clean up her messes. Whatever little respect I was willing to grant to her based on her rank disappears as I learn quickly that she is nothing but a petty, vengeful, paranoid bully with delusions of grandeur. Still, as soon as I realize that part of doing a job for Ranis is having to commit to the unwise task of meddling in the affairs of wizards but really OWN that choice as if it was mine to make, and then be cleverer than she is at it, I have even more fun with her foolishness than I had with Ajira’s, and as I play, I LEARN. I feel deliciously devious. By the time she has the gaul to send me all the way to the Guild’s leader to bother him about spies, I am tempted to report her as the double agent just to give her a taste of what she’s asking for by being so careless in the way she stirs up trouble. It would make me laugh to see the look on her face as someone marches into HER guild hall and informs her of her crime. Tempting… until Trebonius hands me some credentials that are so poorly forged they haven’t even bothered to spell Ocato’s name correctly.

It’s not out of loyalty to the guild that I make my final decision about what to do next. I would let a spy slip through the cracks among these quibbling ninnies if it meant seeing Ranis brought down a few pegs. It’s the claim he makes about his upbringing. I have only to hear his voice and I KNOW he’s probably never set foot outside Morrowind. Nor is he one of us… the Legion Lads and Lasses, that disastrous experiment that landed me on that accursed continent in the first place. Orphans from all the lands under the Empire’s control, hunted down and collected up like stray dogs, by race into groups of 20 or so, then “adopted” by Imperial Legion garrisons all over the empire. What a swell, what an optimistic dream. No more orphans on the streets! Where are they? In the barracks, where problems with unruly behavior among the enlisted will virtually disappear as they will feel compelled to behave around the young ones, and the children will grow up with not just one or two parents, but DOZENS of mommies and daddies teaching them to fight and love the Empire and raising a generation of perfect soldiers.

A beautiful [censored] dream. The streets free of starving, thieving brats. The soldiers more disciplined, and surely also all the more fierce and desperate in battle knowing that they fight to protect their garrison sons and daughters. And in only a few short years, the oldest of the kids enlist and train, and every year after that there come more, and they show up on their first day to training more prepared than the previous year’s children, stronger, harder, with more fire in their eyes, their hearts yearning to learn how to give their all for the love of the Empire, yearning to fight with the force of tornados, unstoppable, fearless, willing to lay down their lives for any cause that the Emperor requires…

I DO respect the ruthless genius it took to come up with the idea to use the Empire’s expendable advlts to turn its expendable children into more useful expendable advlts. It’s so elegantly evil as soon as the patriotic songs die down and the parade ends. It might even have worked if they hadn’t thrown in their cherry on top of the already too-good-to-be-true deal: Let improved race relations begin with our empire’s soldiers! Send children of all shapes and colors to every location. Thousands of “Heal The World” model communities sprung up in the time it took to make the travel arrangements.

That mixing of an already foolishly overagitated pot is what doomed them. It didn’t matter how long any of us had been orphans, almost all of us had at least been orphans in our own ancestral lands and came into the program as fully indoctrinated with their region’s traditions of racism as they would have been had they had parents. Probably more so. When I came to the Imperial City at the age of 6, I arrived with a whole ship full of other Dunmer kids. We were moved into a temporary compound they had built for us to live in while we waited to be assigned to a garrison and sent “home.” We were told that when it was our turn, we would go to meet our new siblings and all be adopted together. They made it sound like all of our prayers had been answered.

The day my turn finally came, I took the nothing that I owned and counted how many steps I took from my tent in the compound to the last last LAST door. FINALLY I was going home, and I was going to have sisters and brothers!

I was not assigned to a group of siblings. I was assigned to a war. I was horrified when the door opened and I saw all the nations of Tamriel throwing fits or objects while guards and people who looked like nurses held back the older ones and comforted the younger ones.

I ran to the most hidden spot I could find and sat there in the shadows, there against the wall, with my arms resting on my raised knees, perfectly still, perfectly silent, watching and learning and hoping the nightmare wouldn’t notice me before I figured out how to escape it.

I didn’t escape it. Eventually, the noise subsided as all the warring factions simply exhausted themselves or were smacked into subservience. Eventually, someone came with food. Eventually, the advlts found things that the children with less civilized dietary needs could eat. Eventually, someone noticed me.

The Argonian woman with fins that glittered and skin that was warm scooped me up into her arms too quickly for me to run away, but she only wanted to sit where I had been sitting and put me in her lap. She crossed her legs and rested her arms on her knees, holding me without HOLDING me, and she sat perfectly still and perfectly silent, watching.

The trauma of that first long day and night with his new “family” in the program still throbbed like an old war wound from time to time in Getheven’s heart. The program certainly looked like it was failing before its smallest parts had even left the Imperial City. But like any program with a solid foundation made of bureaucratic red tape, a book of goals and policies written by several committees, and an affected area many, many, many times too large for anyone to be able to reliably manage or send advocates to monitor little details like health and safety, it was YEARS before the Legion Lads and Lasses very gradually stopped advertising its existence on every wall that could hold a poster, then very quietly stopped importing and redistributing children from the outer provinces, being careful to start with the easiest ones to explain (the expense of providing special meals for Green Pact observers… We simply cannot afford to welcome any new sons or daughters of the Bosmer race to our garrisons at this time, so be sure to donate…!)

The full extent of the abuse, neglect and racial violence suffered by the Legion Lads and Lasses will never be disclosed or admitted to by the Empire. It was a beautiful dream that died slowly over the course of many years, one family annihilation after another, most of them hidden by expanses of wilderness, lines of politics, distrust between races, and the Empire’s lies. What a common citizen knows is that the Legion Lads and Lasses is a great cause to support, they’ve heard amazing things about it, their goals are so progressive but most folks hope they succeed over time and expand to the area near them. Oh sure, there were a few garrisons where things got really bad in the beginning, those poor kids, but that’s not how things are now, you never hear about anything like that happening anymore, they really ironed out the kinks in a hurry…

The average citizen has heard of two or three garrisons whose programs failed in ways that couldn’t just be cleaned up by the night crew before anyone noticed. Travel the length of the Empire and that number will never change. But ask the NAMES of those forts. Mark their locations on your map. Move to the next town over. You will fill your map with pinholes until it falls apart.

The average citizen is absolutely certain that most of the “30? Or was it 50 garrisons? One of those, most of ‘em out far from the cities to keep the kids from running away” experiments were successful, and that the Empire is currently doing an intensive study on what MAKES them successful so they can avoid any other disasters when they expand in the future.

I tell you there are no more children living as the adopted sons and daughters of our army. And I tell you if you ever meet one who was, you’ll know them when you notice them pause what they’re saying or doing and dart their eyes or turn their heads, for that one split second looking exactly as if they are utterly, irretrievably lost.

The weight of the implication written into these credential papers —all those words I’ve given you just so you can understand “Though a Dunmer, he was raised in the Imperial Provinces” — threatens to make my hand shake with the effort holding it aloft. A wave of rage pulses through me like nausea. That this man can DARE to carry around such powerful implications so casually, that he is able to lift them so easily, for they weigh no more than paper to him, it is not HIS story pouring out of him from the wound in his gut that was carved there by over a decade of iwanttogohomeiwanttogohomeiwanttogohomeiwanttogohome the sound of a scarf in an ash storm, cloth buffeting your ears challenging the wind to roar so loudly I can’t hear it while every step he takes through that storm teaches his body the new walk, and the grains of foreign sand fly into his mouth and turn into glass on his tongue and change his accent until he becomes aware that every gesture he makes and every word he speaks mark him as an outlander to his kin whom he has endured so much to return to.

I remain silent as I place the papers in my bag, perhaps a little too quickly but I feel as if I might lose my grip on them at any moment and let all of it spill everywhere. I remain silent as I leave.

I return the papers to Ranis. She rewards me handsomely — she has given me the means to give myself powers like the beastfolk have. As I leave the guild hall, I decide to think of her a little better. She has her story, too, and it has hurt her just as deeply. I think Ranis would do well in Telvanni.

The irony of that makes me laugh as I cross the river. I intend to leave Balmora. Now. Or nearly now. I can see the corner of Caius’s rooftop and I halt in my tracks.

I think, I do not owe him an accounting of my whereabouts as if I were some child to be looked after and called in at bedtime.

I think, Ajira made me happy, Ranis made me satisfied with a job done and smug at a job done through mechanisms outside her muddled mess.

I think, there is suddenly nothing in the world I want more than the quiet, still warmth of that small room and the solidity of my spot against the wall.

I think, I do not want to take this man’s drug of comfort anymore.

I think, I do not want to face this man with the taste of all those memories on my tongue. He doesn’t deserve to see my pain.

The wave of rage returns, reddening my vision, roiling my stomach. I turn and start back towards the river. My head throbs. I will not allow the Empire to have conditioned me to return to my own self-imposed imprisonment, I will not allow that spot against the wall and the silence and stillness and the company of one man intent on ignoring me to become what I mis and what I yearn for. Rage. Tunnel vision. My determined march degrades into a desperate stumble. I fall to my knees at the edge of the Odal and release the contents of my stomach into it. Panic. A light rain has begun to fall. It blurs my vision. I look into the water for something… What am I looking for? I need to recognize something. Panic. The water;s ripples throw me into vertigo. I vomit again. I want to go home. I want to go home. iwanttogohomeiwanttogohomeiwanttogohomeiwantto—

I don’t hear the guard’s boots approach me, but I see them flash familiar shine and begin to try to run. Not fast enough. There’s a light… I go nearly limp and struggle to remain sitting upright. The guard kneels beside me and eases the weight of my torso into his arms before I fall. He has cast a Calm charm on me. I become aware of being able to breathe freely. I take several deep, slow breaths and revel in the feeling of the rain on my skin.

“Are you all right?” the guard asks. “Are you ill, or poisoned?”

I shake my head. Slow, deep breath. “I—“ I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve been talking about it all night. I don’t know this man. How could I say what I feel to a Legion guard? I need to talk about it. Careful. “I can’t remember.” Calm. “Where I used to live.” Don’t you DARE [censored] cry, Getheven, you emo little gothplume.

The guard nods, saying nothing. He is still trying to decide whether I am under the influence I drugs or wine, I think. He helps me sit up straighter, puts a small glass flask in my hand, helps me raise it to my lips. “Here,” he says. “This will calm your stomach.” It tastes… familiar, bright, something fresh that washes the foul taste from my mouth. I immediately begin to feel strength returning to my limbs. I shift a little, gauging their responsiveness, and wince as the general consensus is not to run any marathons right just now.

“Give it a couple of minutes,” says the guard. His tone is kind. He takes off one of his gauntlets and runs his fingers gently over my head, feeling for evidence that I’ve hit it recently. I almost laugh.

“No. Pardon me. What I mean is I—“ was taken

left

was taken

left

was taken

I don’t want them to judge me

“—have been living in Cyrodiil since I was six years old.”

His eyes tell me he understands. He diplomatically responds with a neutral “I see” before hoisting me up to my feet and keeping me there with my arm over his shoulders and his around my waist. The streets by now are empty, everyone gone to escape the rain. It sounds like echoes of small feet running through the alleys where the voices of the wild creatures who would grow up to tell our stories should have been singing their wild calls to one another, but aren’t, of course, and haven’t been, and Getheven doesn’t want to think about the blighted future and growing old without the activities of youth to snag pieces of his shadow from him as they passed and lightening the load for him.

“Well, citizen, where were you headed before you were detained?” he inquires, all smiles, the model Boy Scout.

“Stilt Strider. I have business in” anywhere, everywhere, nowhere, name a city, just start walking, don’t stop until you find the lee of the mountain. That’s where your home was. That’s what you’re looking for. No. Don’t look. Your eyes will deceive you. Listen. Always listen. Listen for when the buffeting stops, when the wind dies back. You’ll hear the song whose lyrics are your life, whose rhythm is your heartbeat, who has your dreams waiting in the rests, a base line that follows the contours of the horizon in every direction, and a habit of resolving the tune regularly into good places for someone else to join in, in case you find a harmony or two.

The guard helps Getheven into the stilt strider’s plush and sheltered shell cavity. Money exchanges hands. The great beast lurches off the dock. Getheven pulls himself inside his robes and nests down into the cushions as well as he can. He feels cold, but sweats in the dense swamp air. He feels comfortable. He sits perfectly still in perfect silence, watching the scenery pass, listening to the strider move through it, thinking about the possibilities of what enchantments he could afford to have crafted if he had all the gold in the world, imagining himself striding confidently across the open ocean water, his body exuding its own light, firing lightning spells down at the Dreugh…

Perched in a seat above, the strider’s master sways and bobs and holds the reins he will never have to pull on, the bug has made this trip so many times. His eyes droop. His lips part. He sings a directionless tune to himself.

“Lee lee lee lee, lee lee lee, lee lee lee lee lee…”

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