Lore:Our Story, Part I

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Our Story, Part I
An account of the life of the Nord-Reachfolk Archmage

For the sake of our future children and grandchildren, I'll put these tales to paper for posterity, for I know my husband will not. Even if he wrote about such sentimental things, you know how he is. Sometimes I think his notes just grow wings and flutter off.

I was a wild thing back when we met. Raised by Clever Folk who made their homes all over Skyrim. They were not the parents of my birth, but told me my mother was a Nord and my father was a Briarheart, and that I was stolen as a babe from the nest of a Hagraven. I was a wild, tempestuous, and beaky child, sharp and spiteful beyond my years.

I loved to talk and play with the birds in the wood or the animals in the glen and I guarded my heart with brambles, so I never doubted this truth to this tale of my parentage. I grew steady like a reed on the riverside, the whorls of magic I could see moving across the land guiding my hand and teaching me so very much. My way of looking and speaking and acting in the world made me beloved by my clan for what I could do. Even if not for who I was.

Shalidor just appeared one day, quite suddenly. I rarely got a moment to myself, someone always after me for my magic. I valued my solitude. I was not happy to see it disturbed by some bewildered stranger appearing in the middle of my alchemy garden, stumbling all over my white caps and imp stools.

I tore into him for his irresponsibility and scolded him for his sloppy portal magic. Opening a passageway to a place one had never been before! He seemed to get his bearings, and he argued right back that he had been here before, when the place was a broad glacier and not a swamp. And thereby not inhabited by shouting swamp-witches like me.

That gave me pause. Not the insult. The title of swamp witch rather charmed me. But the cottage where I took residence had stood there for an age or longer, shared for generations by wandering Clever Folk. I'd never known the land around it as anything but marshlands. By the state of things, it had been so for hundreds of years. I was annoyed, but the wind picked up as a blizzard roared in, so I sourly bade him into my hut for shelter.

There, I learned he had returned to Skyrim after many years abroad in search of someone called the Warrior-Witch of Kyne's Aegis. And another someone who was a Priest of Jhunal wandering the Pale. And another someone who was a Clever-Woman living in the Druadach mountains. I told him that I happened to be all three of those things, and that I was happy to add "Shouting Swamp-Witch of Hjaalmarch Hold" as of that day.