Miraak X Dragonborn - Tumblr Posts

Miraak: Honestly, I am so evil. So full of darkness. I feed off the souls of the living I strike fear into- Freyja: You sleep with a teddy bear. Miraak: He’s my sECOND IN COMMAND IN MY ARMY OF DARKNESS!

Miraak: Freyja... you've been cuddling with me for over an hour now. Freyja: *muffled* mm hmmm :) Miraak: Fuck. I should be annoyed but you're adorable.

Miraak: Valentine’s day is just a consumerist holiday that holds no real value other than driving people insane by buying heart-shaped chocolates for their significant others and pos- Freyja: I wrote you a poem. Miraak, already crying: You did?

IT'S UP!!!!!!! description from ao3:

“You are a beast, Tharya Stormhand. Dragonborn, soldier, werewolf - all beasts of different titles, but beasts nonetheless. You have never been anything more. You will never be anything better. Isn’t that why you gave your soul to me?”

Last Seed, 4E 208. Almost a full year since the events of Revenant, the Dragonborn - and their burgeoning family - have found home in Whiterun, with work and adventure to keep them happily busy. When the summer nights grow watchful and the moons deadly, Tharya finds herself at the center of the Wild Hunt, desperately outrunning a secret that has both plagued and formed her life and relationships for the past eleven years. Unwilling to let her long years of evasion go unpunished, the Daedric Prince Hircine gives chase, and the Hunt begins.

i like dropping little tidbits about upcoming fics as if i'm a huge name brand movie studio dropping tiny crumbs of information to goad people so they freak tf out when the full thing drops 😌

tesfest day 6: mirror

hello all!!! i haven't been posting these on tumblr but i really enjoyed writing this one, so i figured why not 😎 maybe i'll post the rest after tesfest is done! otherwise they are all on my ao3 :3

This time, when he walked by the tall, slender mirror in their bedroom, he actually stopped.

He avoided mirrors if he could, rarely ever checked himself prior to going anywhere or doing anything. If Tharya complimented him on their way out, then he knew he'd done fine. But he hated it, his own stupidity with these things. It was utterly trivial. In Apocrypha he had moaned and wept and prayed for a mirror to remember his face by, anything to grant him his reflection that he had forgotten. And now that he walked so freely amongst mirrors large and small, he disliked them.

But he made himself stand in front of this one. One of the great joys of his mornings was watching from bed as Tharya got ready in front of this mirror. One of his great joys in the evening was watching her undress and step into her sleeping clothes, watching her inspect herself in this mirror. She did it so easily. It was foolish of him to run from his own reflection like a scared deer. He forced his gaze to his own body, the vessel he so often felt...unnattached from. The thing he had lost sight of in Apocrypha as well, not for lack of a reflection, but for lack of its preservation. Hermaeus Mora had ravaged his skin and bones countless times, torn him, knit him together, touched him, split him, crushed him.

Yet the mirror showed his body as whole. How strange. It was...different than he thought he remembered from the Merethic Era. He'd been a bit thinner then, the muscles in his stomach more prominent. Now his midriff was cushioned by a healthy layer of fat, though he was sure if he tensed, it would all go rigid. The muscle had not vanished, just changed shape. His chest had perhaps been a bit smaller, his arms not as big. He could heard Morokei's voice in the back of his mind, a fleeting memory from his childhood, at the point where Miraak had learned that if he would never be taller than his peers, he would have to be stronger. Aelskling, you've gotten bigger! He thought those words and found himself...brightened by their presence. He was sure Morokei would say the same now - in the Merethic Era he had been strong, but less hulking, less dense.

His legs had never been so thick either, but as he examined them they were nicely proportionate to the rest of him. Faint stretch marks decorated his inner thighs. Softer at rest, a good cushion for the woman who so often occupied his lap. And...quite long. Had they always been like that? He supposed it made sense because of his height. Atmorans were a long-limbed people. Still, he peered at them in the mirror, dressed in only his smallclothes and with tight concentration behind his eyes. Both Tharya and Bhijirio had remarked before that he looked taller the less clothes he wore. He didn't know how that happened, but it seemed a fair statement. Here, now, the optical illusion of wearing less did seem to make him...a bit bigger than he thought he was.

Hesitantly he lifted one arm, curled it, and watched his bicep contract, bulging against his forearm before he stretched the arm out. Thick veins decorated the hinge of his shoulder and shot down into his arm. Veins that carried real blood, not the sludge of Apocrypha. Strange. He put the arm down to twist it, examining his tricep and elbow in the mirror. All strangely mundane parts of the body, yet he couldn't help as if he'd never seen them before. Holding his arm like this made it press into his chest, creasing his pectorals together and disfiguring the long scar slashing over them. Warily he held his chest in both hands, trying to emulate the sensation of the way Tharya did it. No, that was ridiculous. He didn't need to grope himself just for- for research.

But that scar...as he traced it, the open-mouthed concentration in his face settled into grim deliberation. That scar had almost torn his heart out. Almost ruptured his lungs and ripped through his ribs. He was lucky his healers had grabbed him when they did, otherwise he would have surely lost his life to Paarthurnax that day. The old worm had left him to bleed out in the lush foothill they fought upon. Perhaps he had known it was the crux of his Thu'um, its home nestled to his heart between his ribs. Perhaps he had merely been living up to his name.

Silently he let his hand slip up to the base of his neck, but immediately it felt itchy just sitting there. He didn't like things around his throat. He wore his necklaces loose and low because of it. He let Tharya touch his neck, but she never held it in the way he did hers. A pang of guilt slithered into his gut at that. That didn't seem fair.

He stepped a bit closer to the mirror and bent down to examine his face closely in the reflective silver. It was difficult, but he felt he must. Carefully he took in his eyes and nose, his undefined cheekbones. The neat edge of his beard. Absently he ran his fingers through it - soft, trimmed, and oiled. Little things. He thanked the gods he'd been blessed with the ability to grow one so fully. Vahlok always used to have a little stubborn patch below his chin that refused to grow. The memory made him smile however faintly, chuckling to himself, but he zeroed in as quickly as possible to catch the expression before it faded. Gods. What a dreary sight. He remembered smiling with his teeth once upon a time, laughing freely. Did he always look so...bland? Poor Tharya.

He ran a hand through his dark hair, ruffling it a bit to let it fall looser. He didn't have Althëa's curls, but his hair had little waves in its inner layers that sometimes curled if he let it grow long enough. It, like his beard, was one of the very few things about his appearance he truly cared about. More for habit than any real love of his own visage. Humming curiously, he decided to comb his hair back with his fingers, pushing away the little pieces that usually framed his forehead. He wanted to know why Tharya always said he looked so different with his hair swept back.

The change was small, but very noticeable. Even removing those few strands seemed to...open his features more. He realized she was absolutely right - it did look good. As he straightened out and examined himself in the mirror again, he hardly recognized his own face. It all seemed to flow differently.

His concentration was broken by the door coming open, but, in a brief panic, his feet remained rooted to the spot. Gods, he would look like an idiot standing here. No one did such foolish things unless they were daft in the head. He found himself warming with - what was that? Shame? The guilt of being caught? - as Tharya stepped in, still dressed from the day.

"Hi, beautiful," she said easily, smiling at him. Heat creeped into his neck. Gods, how many thousands of years since he'd blushed? He almost wanted to laugh at himself. Almost. "What are you up to?"

"Nothing," he said quickly. "I am...I had a bath."

"That's exactly what I'm about to do," she snickered, joining him to put her hands on his hips. She squeezed him lovingly, and he noticed for the first time how that little extra bit of fat that he hadn't had before pooled into her palms so perfectly. "You look spooked." Her hands traversed his body so easily, drawing up his arms, rounding his shoulders and settling on his chest. He had admitted to her before she seemed to know his body better than he did, and it was true. She knew the strongest parts of him, and she knew the softest. She knew where to touch him to make him crumble into her palms and where exactly to touch him to inflate him, to make him stand straight. She knew how to hug him to make him feel the thousands of eyes on his back retreat. She knew how to stroke his hair and trace his face to tease him into sleeping. She knew the places on his body that had never healed completely in Tel Mithryn, and she knew which scars he still felt the most, and which she could kiss. "Everything okay?"

He blinked at her and then merely nodded, feeling dazed at how many things she knew of him, how he could so easily list them. He liked to think he returned it, but she had a certain intimate knowledge of his body that he simply could not have with hers. She had been the one to take care of him for so long, after all. It only made sense. He glanced in the mirror again - if she knew him so well, then there was only one question his curiosity begged to ask.

Wordlessly he held her hips and turned her around, watching her peer at him in the mirror.

"Tell me what you see," he whispered. "Please."

Pygmalion and Galatea (1763) by Étienne Maurice Falconet Paul and Virginia (1844) by Alessandro Puttinati Worship of the Female Form (early 20th century) by Alméry Lobel-Riche Kneeling man embracing a standing woman (1908) by Gustav Vigeland In Paradise (1918) by Max Svabinsky Thief of the Moon (1924) by Norman Lindsay