[hider=Four Winters]
[center][h2]Four Winters[/h2][/center]
[center][sup]*From a Discord, Elder Scrolls RP[/sup][/center]

[center][img]https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/7ec56cc81ba4.png[/img][/center]
[center][sup]Original Character Artwork by me[/sup][/center]

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[right][i][sup]Winter is the time you pour out your heart to silence. Winter is the hole in your heart, drifting past someone else's warm hearth. Winter is the first time you see the world end.
Winter is the theft of what is found here and remade.[/sup][/i][/right]
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[center][u][b]Seron[/b][/u][/center]

At eighteen, her world was already made of stone.

A daughter of House Redoran and a child of Morrowind. Iviverys held no whispers of lullabies, her tongue knew no songs. Iviverys only knew the taste of blood in her mouth and the sharp blade of discipline like carved runes upon obsidian. Neat, sharp, and permanent as scarification. Prayer after prayer, day after day, night after night, every season anew began again and her parents brutal attempts to claw away the addled curse of her mind, her spirit, and her body. She was a useless thing. Too thin, too frail, too quiet and too loud. There was a tilt to her smile, a softness in her voice, and she sought for colours too much. She would never be a Redoran bride, and no great house would have their son meet her.

So they beat her. Not only to reshape her, but for the inconvenience of her blighted birth. She learned not to cry. She learned that she should volunteer into a bow, or be bent into it.

Seron was her instructor then and older by only a few years. His gaze was heavy and of soot stained glass. He was austere, and his shoulders carried the weight of the entire world. Even with that weight, his posture did not falter. He was quiet. The kind of quiet that came from inside a man where something had been broken early and left that way. He was so still and dutiful that others were afraid of him, but he never shouted at Iviverys, and he never humiliated her. He knew that she bore that enough from behind her family walls.

Whatever friendship was between them, bloomed in silence. It was a mutual understanding, and a rebellious respect. Small gestures in the form of passed contraband. A cup of water if her lip was split. A proud nod on the occasion she landed a blow. A longer break between drills. Stolen moments of each other's time.

When Seron died, there was no fanfare. No scrolls, no public rites, no celebration. Just a shallow grave dug in choked ash-soil and his name scribbled onto a roster with six others. Iviverys stole his sword from the training racks before it was reassigned. Kept it wrapped in her things, the hilt worn smooth by his hand. She did not cry. She did not pray.

House Redoran would eat them all in the end.

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[right][i][sup]Winter is the way it feels to love in the dark on the hardest days. Winter is a fire that burns brightest in difficult times. Winter nurses the words that die in your throat.[/sup][/i][/right]
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[center][u][b]Minna[/b][/u][/center]

Minna was a raucous laugh that travelled to every corner of a tavern. She lived, nestled out somewhere in a sun-and-rum-soaked corner of Hammerfell. Ale was golden, and the stars at their brightest sprawled in reflection across the glass still surface of the wide Iliac Bay.

Ivy was sixty then, though she appeared no more than half that, and Minna? Minna was etched with her deep-set laugh-lines and youthful wickedness had been stained in. Grey-haired, grinning and beautiful as if she knew all the secrets of the world, and she’d simply decided to keep them to herself. “Sit your pretty arse down,” Minna had said after meeting Ivy’s eyes, and immediately the attention of this Redguard woman felt special. Minna slid over a bottle, a pipe, and gave a nod. “You’ve the look that you’re running from something, and not nearly fast enough.” They were fast friends.

Nights with Minna blurred into stories and smoke whenever Ivy was in town, the old woman would pour her closely guarded secrets into Ivy’s lap like she was spilling moonlight itself. In the dark, away from the blinding sun, she would teach Ivy to chew juniper to clear her head, to always keep frost salt tonic for burns, and “if a man ever dares make you weep,” she’d whispered, “just put nightshade in his tea. Just a little. Just to keep him guessing.

Minna loved to cook and she revered in celebration for just about anything. Everything was cause for a celebration and a party. Small things like a child learning to read, to a daughter in law giving birth. All of these things, and whatever fell in between. She also celebrated the periods of surviving the rainfall in her head. Minna had a family and that family had their own family until they were four generations in and all had come from Minna’s womb, and all were made of the fragments of stardust she held in her eyes.

It rained in Minna’s head a lot. Storms of great turmoil ran her ragged inside, but never did she let it take away the smile at the corner of her lips and never did it dim the sparkle of her eyes. She weathered those storms alone, never wanting them to burden the hearts of any of her seven sons, or weigh down their proud shoulders.

The two of them never spoke at length of where Ivy came from or what haunted her bones. They didn’t need to. Minna only knew that something did haunt her, and so her voice was gentle, and between the jokes and her mirth, there was always a shoulder to cry on, a place for her own moonlight to be safely stored. With Minna, there was laughter sharp as flint and hands stained from herbs and the thick smell of sage that clung to Ivy’s clothes for days.

One day, there was no Minna. She had left no note, bid no farewell, just slipped into silence. One of Minna’s sons met Ivy on the road and told her.

Ivy arrived too late to bury her. Too late for the wake. Too late to hold her hand and whisper a thank you. But she came still, in her own time, and alone. She came to the site that was tucked in the mouth of a cave by the water, surrounded by warm amber sands and Ivy knelt there for a long time and said nothing. Just unpacked a small pouch of dried desert flowers and green leaves, the same kind Minna would have tucked into the lining of her pockets. She scattered them one by one.

“Old woman,” she murmured, her fingers tracing the sand like it might answer to her. “Why didn’t you tell me you wished to leave.” She stayed there until the wind picked up across the Iliac and then she whispered her prayers into it, leaving the scent of her offering behind.
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[right][i][sup]Winter is trying to find something you never knew the shape of. Winter is a story you almost don’t tell . Winter is the end of innocence.[/sup][/i][/right]
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[center][u][b]Tristyn[/b][/u][/center]

Grief is a bird that is caged in your ribs. Grief flutters and makes you miss what you never had and only knew existed. Iviverys was thirty when she arrived in Skyrim. Born again under the ribbons of colour in the pitch black maw of its sky. The air tasted of beginnings and was cold, clean, and unburdened by stifling ash. There was no such thing as blight here.

Tristyn was a tall and unassuming figure of wind-tossed hair, fingers smudged with charcoal, and his brow was always furrowed in search of the next burst of inspiration. Painter. Poet. Artist. He called her star-born and storm-kissed and could not say her name and called her Ivy instead. He painted her one hundred times or more in their first month. On canvas, on wood, on the backs of letters he never sent, and on the very walls of his home. Ivy had never before tasted love, and so they married, and her bird flew away.

They called a tiny house north of Whiterun their home, at the edge of the pines where the winds howled stories to those who’d listen, and Ivy did. To the rumblings and rumours from the Reach, to the prophecies and warnings that came to her in sleep. In their house, she laughed and wore paint on her fingers and kissed him with ink still drying on her mouth.

Tristyn’s love began to rot. Not suddenly, and not all at once, but like fruit bruising beneath its skin. He grew hollow and unblinking, said Ivy was his and his alone. He stopped painting anything that wasn’t her. Frantic paintings that shredded the canvas with his force, sketches that tore paper with the knife-sharp edge of a pencil. There had been whispers that an illness ran in his family, but whispers don’t leave bruises and illness wasn’t a person who would chain a girl in a cellar for four entire summers.

When the fourth of those years came, the air was only ever damp and fetid and Tristyn was the only sound. She could always hear him above her. Some days he would be pacing, weeping, or laughing through his madness. Other days he did them all at once. On rare days there was complete silence. Some days, he returned to her, happy and full of love but even her most gentle suggestion of her freedom would return him to his ghoul-self.

There was a night he came to her half-man and half-madness, whispering things in her ear she would never forget, and never repeat. He was there to shape her, not on canvas, but with his own hands. To feed his starved mind. To refill his cup with the inspiration she once brought him. Whether above her skin or beneath it this time, he would find it. His hands burned with magic, and when he touched her he left a searing welt. A wound, deep and furious upon her tender storm-kissed skin, the inside of her thigh. Now he had painted the shape of himself onto her skin in fire.

Even in memory now, it doesn’t matter what was grabbed, only that it was a single blind and desperate swing that did it. One scream that echoed through her. One exhale that separated she, her, and him. He didn’t rise. In the silence that followed, she wept over his body as it lay in the illuminated strip of light from the open stairwell that stretched the length of her cellar. She tried with her own weakened hands to make him better again but it was too late. She climbed the stairs, barefoot, blood-slick, and did not look back. The Ivy who had never killed and had never felt death in her hands stayed buried.
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[right][i][sup]Winter is a promise to keep. Winter is a song and poem. 
Winter is the gift of night before Spring.[/sup][/i][/right]
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[center][u][b]Joy[/b][/u][/center]

Joy was an orphan left in a blanket in Riften, passed and then raised behind a perfumery in Windhelm, where the snow tasted of smoke and the streets hummed out a stench of gutter-rats.

Ivy remembered her first and remembers her still, as a voice.

[center][i][sup]Come gather in my lungs, oh Skyrim wind,
Belt out your blackest poems,
As the sea around you sings,
When that gulp takes to the air,
A single note to raise my hair,
Carry songs beyond my lungs, cold Skyrim wind…[/sup][/i][/center]

A keening lilt in a dockside tavern, woven through with laughter and with wit sharper than a knife’s kiss. Her hair a tumbling red mess of thick flame against the cold. Her eyes were so full of the mischief of someone who’d never belonged to anyone, but learned to love the world anyway. She always smelled of fig jam.

For thirty-seven years, they shared a friendship. Sometimes they met in spring when the trees blushed pink and the air was sweet with a thaw. Other times they met in winter, only songs and company warmed the blood. Once a year, every year, tethered by their unspoken promise. Finally, in her life Joy found her love and settled in Skingrad with a Colovian man, and the movement of that life continued ever on, her songs happier, her smile brighter, and her heart bigger.

Joy was bedridden at their last meeting. Her voice, once rich with Kyne’s breath, was a croak now, and Ivy brewed fennel tea, warming it with the magic from her hands as if it would be enough to call back all the time that had passed. Joy’s hair had faded over the years to soft silver. “You’ve not aged a day,” Joy whispered, her thin and fragile fingers wrapping around Ivy’s.

“Nor have you, my dearest friend.” Joy’s skin was creased like scrunched parchment, but warm still, and Ivy kissed the back of it and her palms and her forehead. Her fingers trembled with a sadness she didn’t want to confront. “Not where it matters.”

Joy died that night still holding Ivy’s hand. There was no struggle and no pain, no grand final words, only the slow and quiet closing of a chapter. In the days that followed, Ivy saw to the burial herself, and she placed Joy beside her beloved Colovian who had left two winters earlier. She hadn’t been the same since. Ivy dressed Joy in a gown that she had always admired so that she could be laid down to rest beneath the roots of a tree outside of the city, and she could stay there and be as beautiful as she had always been, and she could be there forever as the flowers.

Ivy wept until her chest was hollow. “I will miss you for all of my years, but the love of knowing you is worth each tear.”
Joy’s tiny room above a baker’s shop in Skingrad was emptied by Ivy’s gentle hands, and as she packed away a rich life, she held onto a shawl of Joy’s that had worn soft at the edges, and had the sticky scent of fig jam in every thread. There were other handfuls of items she couldn’t part with. Clothing, a waistcoat with beautiful buttons she remembered watching Joy sew on and then perform in. She folded all of these moments of Joy’s life into a lacquered box and pressed a sprig of lavender there.

Ivy kept her promise the following year, arriving in Skingrad to sit beneath Joy’s tree. Joy had kept her promise too. She was the flowers and she was the warmth in the breeze that sang as it floated by. She was the petals falling like soft snow, and the spring drizzle that settled on Ivy’s lashes. She was the relief and touching sensation from beyond and the voice that told her to please smile today, please smile with me.

Ivy laid out wildflowers there so that it was covered and she spoke a blessing not from any temple, but from ancient memory.

The air drew thick with amber and smoke that night, incense in spirals above her head in her tent. Her palms held together in quiet meditation and she murmured out her prayers of farewell again. The sound of footsteps outside, and a voice, uncertain, but sweet.

“Hello? Miss? I’m sorry to bother you but I heard you’re a fortune teller and maybe you could help me. Please?”

Ivy opened her eyes, the tent felt suddenly warm and she stood and walked to the flap, brushing a tear from the edge of her eye with the back of her hand. When she pulled it aside, light spilled in. A young woman stood there, flame-haired and smiling in a way that made Ivy’s heart ache strangely. Her brightness. Her warmth. Her -

Ivy nodded and smiled with a softness that had not quite become a habit again, but would yet. “Of course, come on in. I’ll make us tea.

The young woman grinned. “Thank you!” she said, “I’m Marguerite, by the way.”[/indent]
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[indent][sup][u][b]Author's Notes[/b][/u]
Written from the heart after the complete and unexpected death of a close friend last year. I worked through the initials of that grief by exploring at the same time how it would feel to be a Dunmer/Elf and live a long, long, long life and see so many friends pass on while you stay young.[/sup][/indent]