» Fri May 04, 2012 6:39 am
The Great Thalmor concludes perfectly.
Indeed, The Count Arkmont kept her sequestered in the private hidden suite of his Alcaire-upon-Alcaire manorhouse, able to be entered only from concealed backdoor, wherein through keyhole occulance Mantis peepspied the Count’s rapturous spelyngological explorations of Ysigny’s own subtle apertures every evening before supper with his wife, the Countess, and their three legitimate sons – Eustache, Gaufre, and Ecureuilbleu. Despite her rude genesis, she was na?ve and unplastic in the techniques and rigors of spastic pollination and had to be chained down by eunuchs to prevent her from kicking, feeding further into the Count’s bespoken fancies.
When her stomach swelled - which Ysigny reasoned, with practiced daftreckoning, had come from all those deep mouth-tickling tongue kisses that her seigneur liked to perform on her – The Countess for fear of her adroit and salic sons, stamped her feet and demanded maractomy before term. But against fortune the Count, proved all to foolish, falling in-prayer to feeble mannish sympathies and the fallacy of plurality over purity. All calipers and other instruments capable of the great culling art, on which all sensible societies have come to rely, were broken and forbidden from the manor.
Eos ipso the bleedin’ obvious of our endeavors to this very day, mother and child survived to term. The child, hale and pink and swaddling in red and purple silk from an old hand-me-down Niben chiton, she named ‘Hjalti’ after his grandsire and great-grandsire.
After an incident in his toddling years involving the release of a highly poisonous and extremely rare breed of spider in his nursery, the Argonian Green-bellied Grammarian, which was most certainly if unprovably performed at the prudent order of the Countess, ‘Hjalti the Batard’, as he was known, and Ysigny were moved far off to Arkmont in the foothills of the Wrothgars.
A frighteningly precocious child, he effluves without effort his mother and father tongue while managing to wax intelligibly in that system of mutual perfidy that the Imps call ‘Cyrodiilic’, all by the age of four, which my research staff assures me, is quite uncommon amongst mannish brood.
In his sixth year, Ysigny dies very suspiciously in the night, being found by a chambermaid the next day missing several organs vital and reproductive. Young Nu-Mannoid outwardly displays none of the lacriliminal grief that is common to mannoids at this stage, instead drawing deeply inward and affecting dark inertia in all post-crisis coping trajectories with subrosa punctuation by way of minor arson and animal mutilation. He scales up his activities when he comes under the tutelage of his father’s palace mayor, Gideon Dalomax, who taught him by hungry candleflicker the first antiprinciples of writful plundering of the peasant countryside with heinous tax and penalty. A widower straddling himself an arbor infelix, Dalomax came to view maggot-stage Nu-mannoid like his own brood and took personal responsibility for the protection of his body and honor, even beheading a much beloved Champion of the realm for the crime of blood libel against his young master.
Yet in his ninth year, the Nu-mannoid is sent away from Arkmont to serve as a page in the household of his father’s retainer, Sir Hiraeth Queensleigh in Reyborne. Hjalti protests strongly, setting fire to the bed that they shared, but Dalomax insisted, feeling that the boy’s only hope for legitimate debutante into Adamantieth high society lies in the time honored, caparisoned lifeway of knighthood, of learning the finer points of placing lancepoint into peasant flesh from the saddle at gallop. Hjalti did have to be drugged with skooma dissolved in uncut wine, but he was halfway across the kingdom in a majickwarded coach when he regained enough of himself to protest with his boots and stiletto.
At the Queensleigh manor, he was mixed in the scampery of five other pages, including the youngest of his half-brothers, Ecureuilbleu (with Eustache taking the mantle of primogeniture, Gaufre in training for the priesthood, military service became the cadet-brother’s lot).
He did his chores, cutting corners and whole chapters of quadrivial nirnimetry when possible, while viciously competing with the others for the notice of the master. Hjalti the Bastard was especially keen to monopolize Queensleigh’s attention during their sessions of combat instruction. At age twelve, a few days after a heated dispute with Ecureuilbleu that broke out over an impassioned ludisession of ‘King-of-The-Hill’ and quickly descended into a maternal counter-defamation scrap, he permanently blinds his half-brother by tossing hot embers in his eyes while on kitchen duties
