Chapter Text
"It was the Telvanni that ruined us," her father would say every so often under his breath, and Asthore would look up from her mending, or a book, or from lightly balancing flames on her fingertips. This was when she was still plump with youth and regular dinners. "We are Telvanni," she would say, and he would ignore her, which suited her fine. It was not being Telvanni that ruined the Sadryon family, it was a lack of business sense, and trouble that came of selling slaves on one side, and then dealing with Imperial business partners who did not like the slave trade on the other. Or perhaps if more in the family had possessed magical talent, their fortunes might have been different. As it was, their flow of gold was adequately dammed to a trickle, and all Sadryons felt their lives split into a 'before' and an 'after.'
But for Asthore that lack, and the move from their manor to a little housepod outside Sadrith Mora proper—perched precariously over the rocks jutting from the Inner Sea—hardly registered, because her 'before' and 'after' had already happened. Her grandmother had died when Asthore was seventeen, and the shock still hadn't left her. Ten years later, the family fortunes had sunk. Her father blamed the Telvanni council and his business partners. Her six older brothers struggled to set up their families and keep them fed.
Asthore felt as if someone had yanked her grandmother's funeral from the rest of time and isolated Asthore within it.
For ten years, she only had to close her eyes, and she knelt by the bier while dim candlelight flickered. It was just Asthore in the ancestral tomb, lingering while others left, by her grandmother's body covered in a white sheet. Nestled by the covered head was that little icon inscribed on a shalk shell Grandmother Renthasa had always carried with her, an icon of the Tribunal, worn impossibly smooth by two centuries of stroking and touching.
Renthasa Indoryon had been Indoril, had taught Asthore everything she could in the brief time they had together. Had loved the seventh child no one had had time for, and saw the spark of magic in her. "At least I know someone was born with my gifts," Grandmother would tell Asthore, stroking her hair, "I had thought there was something wrong with me, to have so many children and grandchildren who were not sorcerors." And Asthore would laugh and feel special and inhale Renthasa's bug musk perfume, sweet and safe.
Then the blight came in on an ill wind, and stole away Asthore's grandmother.
Asthore should have seen where her fate led all along. She was twenty-seven and otherwise a useless mouth to feed, even if she did mend everyone's clothes and keep the fire going and renew enchantments on the cold-box so that the food would not moulder. "We have a trade deal with the Hlaalu," said her father in the last days of Sun's Height, "we're moving to Vivec, to the Telvanni canton. I know this is an enormous change, but it is a tremendous opportunity. I promise we will find a good, advantageous match for you. You'll see, Asthore."
Cold flooded her entire being. Move to Vivec? She had always wanted to see it—the moon improbably hovering, the shrines full of bright-eyed worshippers, to kneel at the temple of Vivec himself—but on her own terms, on pilgrimage. Not to be dragged there by her money-obsessed family, and then to be bartered off like a guar or an argonian. And what if her new husband would be Hlaalu? That was an indignity not to be bourne.
It wasn't hard to slip away, to miss the boat at the last minute. She had only the clothes on her back and a pouch with no money. Sadrith Mora loomed alien and unfriendly all around her, this city she had known all her life.
It was only natural to visit Grandmother first, in the tomb on the other side of the island. She laid petals and kresh fibres by Renthasa's ashpit, bowed her head, and prayed. It was dark all around her—the lone candle she had found in the tomb had long since burnt out. She kept vigil, thinking: every minute the ship takes my father and brothers farther away. My family is leaving, but I remain.
Grandmother, what must I do?
Hours, it was hours later—she realized muzzily that she had dosed off. She groped for the wall, and finding it, left, her feet dragging. I love you, she wanted to say into the dark, but found she could barely open her mouth. She needed a drink, but besides that, she could not comprehend her own emotions.
The door groaned when she opened it. She stumbled wincing out into the daylight. A very different groan and a clacking to the side alarmed her. She stumbled. When had a tomb guard been animated? A skeleton advanced on her, armed with an old, shabby dagger and a battered round shield, both showing signs of rust. Somehow it did not recognize her for a Sadryon, or perhaps it was not one of her ancestors at all.
She called within herself for fire and threw up her hands, but nothing happened. There was no time to gawk at her own failure. She turned and ran, tripped over the loose round stones. If not fire, if she could not summon a simple burst of flame, what could she do? Inside herself she still knelt, young and grieving, by the bier of her grandmother. Then, another ghost had come with anger in its soul, and—but that was a nightmare, wasn't it? That wasn't a true memory—
There was a horrible 'gack', a sound made by a creature who could not breathe, and clatter of bones. Asthore turned to see the skeleton lumbering up to her, now an arm's-length away.
"Help," she rasped, looking left and right. She threw out her arms even though the fire did not come.
Again, desperately, she threw up her arms. Something twisted all around her, invisible and strange, pulling her skin taut—and her grandmother stepped out from nothingness. Renthasa's robes swirled like smoke. She raised her arms up to ward away the skeleton, and there was a strange thick smell, a tightness in the air, that told Asthore powerful magics were taking place.
Asthore stood in shock for a moment, then ran forward unthinking. The air and the force of magicka around her guided her. The skeleton turned to her and she threw out her hand and fire burst out all around them, licking over the skeleton's yellowed bones, browning them, charring them. Her grandmother did not speak but made a gesture, crossing her fingers in a strange sign, and the skeleton stumbled back and fell soullessly to the ground.
"Grandmother!" said Asthore, faltering, her hands warm from the flame and her heart sore from grief.
In her dream-that-was-true-memory, when she had been seventeen, her grandmother's ghost had spoken to her, and told her to love the Tribunal, and to know herself loved, and then she had gone away. This ghost, this same ghost, almost invisible in the light of even the overcast day, said nothing now, only looked down sternly, and collapsed in on herself in a faint glitter of golden sparks.
Asthore fell to her knees, mouthing a prayer. She barely knew which one. She was so grateful, so grateful, her breath came hard, and she was alive. The air stank of burned bone.
Her living family had left her, but the dead were faithful. There would be choices to make, later, and this basic truth would inform all of them.