Post by Varitia on Jan 9, 2012 17:17:40 GMT 8
| [atrb=cellSpacing,20,true][atrb=cellpadding,0px,true][atrb=border,0,true] [atrb=style, width:500px; bTable] [atrb=background,http://i.imgur.com/uNZDJ.png,btable][STYLE=background-color: transparent; font-size: 30px; text-align: center; font-family: wire one; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 75%; border-bottom: 3px #c2c2c2 solid; border-top: 3px #c2c2c2 solid; float: right; width: 480px; height: 30px; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 0px; padding-top: 5px; overflow: auto; color: #444444; letter-spacing: 2px;]CHARACTER FILE: VARITIA[/style] [STYLE=background-color: e1e1e1; font-size: 10px; text-align: justify; float: right; width: 300px; height: 300px; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 20px; overflow: auto; color: #353535; padding: 5px;]APPEARANCE BIOGRAPHY |
And the worst part: aside from the summers and the holidays, I've never lived in Anvil since.
I dream about being brave. I dream about walking these pretty roads without an ounce of fear in my step, I dream about looking those Stormcloak men straight in the eye, I dream about telling people my name, Varitia, Imperial of Cyrodiil, without a quaver in my voice. And I dream about these things at the same time I dream of love stories where the girl gets swept off her feet and we go back and live in Anvil forever sailing. I dream about showing somebody, anybody, the poems and stories squirreled away in my desk drawer and I dream about running through these streets as fast as I can, determined and brave and faithful.
I wrote lots of letters when I stayed with my Uncle – letters home. Father would write back to me in his clumsy, loopy scrawl, and even if he didn't write much, he was dutiful. I never saw him read a book, and he had a thick accent – it's funny, we all sort of drop the T if it isn't the first letter, and our Os are very long – and he worked with his hands, more than his mind, but I think he liked learning. I think he liked learning how things worked.
But I think it pained him, too, to see me come back from Skyrim during the summers with my accent diluted, my speech much more composed and controlled, into this very stiff speech you're listening to now, rather than the breathless syntax of my youth, and flush with novels and plays and stories that my father didn't know. My father knew fish, he knew Anvil, he knew emotions, love and loyalty and war, on such a deep, primal level, ungovernable and inarticulate. He didn't know what I was learning, and we grew apart.
During my last year of being in Cyrodiil, though I didn't know it a that time, we went fishing one more time. The boat, the paddles, the thick tunics and heavy boots. The sun hid behind the clouds. Our neighbor sat with Mother. And so we went out to sea and caught the fish, and my father handed me the reel.
I caught one fish. It flopped around helplessly, struggling to breathe in the stiff cold air. I looked at Father and I let the fish go. "I can't watch, Daddy," I said. The waves rippled out in circles. "Oh, Daddy, I can't."
One day, I realize, I'm not a kid anymore. But I still have an imagination – I hear my mother's voice in the rain, and I see my father's writing looped up in the clouds. I imagine what could happen if the war never ended. I imagine being sixty years old and still in Skyrim and never going home.
I have to write these things down, otherwise I will fall apart – poems, mostly, and none of them are good. I used to write stories about all the tragic sad lovely romances that permeated the world, but now they stay in my dreams, the fleeting thoughts of a hopeless romantic.
A civil war starts, after the Jarl of Windhelm kills High King Torygg. My uncle told me that he would join the Legion against the Stormcloaks, because they were tearing their province apart and, as he said, were too silly to realize that the Empire, while crumbling, were not the real enemy. That the real trouble started with the Thalmor, and they were making us waste or resources and time with this petty war.
Then he dies.
My uncle. He dies because those Stormcloaks kill him while he's unarmed on the streets.
I am angry, of course. I am angry, and my first thought is to join the Legion myself because, as weak and sheltered and little as I have always been, scared of the Stormcloaks and scared of the war, I do not stand for having my family taken away.
They didn't take me. Not as a warrior, at least. Even though I told them that my uncle had told me how to use a bow, they don't take a liking to such a pathetic frame. But I beg, and eventually they make me a courier, to send important notes and letters and information to soldiers in camps.
I write letters to my father, but he does not know that his brother-in-law is dead or that I am a part of the Legion. I make up the life I was supposed to have. I tell him not to worry, I am fine and thriving. I tell him that I am in love and I will send him a letter when we marry – his name is Alren, I decide, and he is a hunter, just like Uncle. He has dark hair and even when he looks serious there is a hint of a smile on his face. I create a beautiful village for me to live in, even though I am mobile and have no home, and invent flowers for Alren to shower upon me.
I worry that when I come back to Anvil, it won't be the same – the air won't be so salty, the sea won't look so pretty, and nobody I know will be the same and I will be different and unwelcome – and so I force myself to stay in Skyrim.
And every time when I write my father's address on the envelopes I send, I hesitate, and then I leave the place for my address blank.
I think I would like Skyrim. I think I would find it dashingly romantic, and its pretty atmosphere filled with tragic sad lovely stories that I could tell. I would find its little homes and settlements charming. I would appreciate the mountains, the rivers, the Holds. I think I would like Skyrim, if it weren't the Fourth Era in the middle of the war and if I were not so frightened.
Late at night, I sometimes imagine that I will be given a package, and it will be the last package I deliver, because I will be killed. "That Imperial woman," they might say. "This was the undeliverable package."
Or I won't have a funeral at all. Nobody will say anything. They will forget to send a letter to Daddy and he will find out later, after all this war is over and after everything is done. I'll have died on my journey trying to send a letter, and I won't even know what the letter is about.
I have to have faith, and although I've never really believed in the Eight Divines all that much despite my parents' teachings, I have to believe that the war will end.
And I have to believe that someday I can go back to Cyrodiil, and that I will be welcomed there, and most of all, that it will still be the home I know."[/ul]
MISCELLANEOUS
[STYLE=background-color: e1e1e1; border-left: 5px #c2c2c2 solid; text-align: center; font-family: wire one; font-size: 20px; float: left; width: 150px; height: 25px; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 10px; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; overflow: auto; color: #353535;] RITIA [/style]
[STYLE=background-color: e1e1e1; border-left: 5px #c2c2c2 solid; text-align: center; font-family: wire one; font-size: 20px; float: left; width: 150px; height: 25px; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 10px; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; overflow: auto; color: #353535;] FEMALE [/style]
[STYLE=background-color: e1e1e1; border-left: 5px #c2c2c2 solid; text-align: center; font-family: wire one; font-size: 20px; float: left; width: 150px; height: 25px; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 10px; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; overflow: auto; color: #353535;] TWENTY-THREE [/style]
[STYLE=background-color: e1e1e1; border-left: 5px #c2c2c2 solid; text-align: center; font-family: wire one; font-size: 20px; float: left; width: 150px; height: 25px; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 10px; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; overflow: auto; color: #353535;] IMPERIAL [/style]
[STYLE=background-color: e1e1e1; border-left: 5px #c2c2c2 solid; text-align: center; font-family: wire one; font-size: 20px; float: left; width: 150px; height: 25px; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 10px; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; overflow: auto; color: #353535;] PANSEXUAL [/style]
[STYLE=background-color: e1e1e1; border-left: 5px #c2c2c2 solid; text-align: center; font-family: wire one; font-size: 20px; float: left; width: 150px; height: 25px; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 10px; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; overflow: auto; color: #353535;] IMPERIAL LEGION [/style]
[STYLE=background-color: e1e1e1; border-left: 5px #c2c2c2 solid; text-align: center; font-family: wire one; font-size: 20px; float: left; width: 150px; height: 25px; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 10px; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; overflow: auto; color: #353535;] IMAGE [/style]
[STYLE=background-color: e1e1e1; border-left: 5px #c2c2c2 solid; text-align: center; font-family: wire one; font-size: 20px; float: left; width: 150px; height: 25px; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 10px; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; overflow: auto; color: #353535;] CORA [/style][/td][/tr][/table][/center]
