bright moons, dark moons
"Namiira's darkness swirls amid our dreams and doubts. All the evils of Oblivion rake their claws and gnash their fangs against the Lattice, seeking to take our old souls as a prize. Be cautious. Move swiftly. Hide your hearts away in the thick jungles of the self and think often of their great worth. For if you fail to hear the beating of your own heart, the beat of Lorkhaj's will take its place forevermore."
(A collection of tales for my ESO character, Riin-daro.)
the cantor
“…That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Riin-daro came to a slow awareness, the fog of Lorkhaj’s heart beating its constant doom song almost lifting. What was going on? She was standing, yes, a sword in paw, an awful headache bouncing between her ears, and in front of her was… a khajiit. Priestess? Singer?
A twilight cantor, she remembered, one who fought the dro-m’athra off with song, and it was as if all the knowledge of her situation came back at once. Perhaps 10 seconds late, she registered what the cat in front of her had said.
“One is… a fallen cat now, isn’t she? You came to banish Riin?” she said, finding every word strange, almost hard to spit out. The jungle all around them was dark, bathed in moonlight alone.
“This one was certainly planning on it,” the cantor said, hesitance in her voice. “One did not expect to find the true cat beneath the darkness. And yet… here you are. Strange.”
Riin noticed she was still holding her sword - with stumbling hands she put it on her belt, where she remembered she had kept it - still kept it? She shifted uncomfortably under the cantor’s scrutiny. “Your songs are… conflicting.”
“How so?” the cat asked, taking the sudden shift in topic in relative stride. Her eyes were piercing, almost too intensely so.
“Hmm.” Riin-daro narrowed her eyes in thought. “Kind. Bright. …Too bright. Like a hammer on one’s skull.”
The cantor took a few steps forward, and Riin instinctively stepped back. “Ah, but this one could help with that! You could become yourself again, move on to the sands behind the stars like all cats should. You could appreciate the songs once more.”
It was something about that look in her eyes, or her suggestion to listen to the head-pounding songs once more, or her overeagerness, or all of it. Riin saw it, and everything in her screamed to leave, to run. She turned and sprinted away in a sudden panic, not heeding the words the cantor shouted after her.
“Wait! Please, you can’t outrun Namiira, let this one help you!”
The way Riin-daro was running, though, she certainly intended to. She crashed through the jungle all around her like a mad storm, not knowing anything but the need to escape, to get away.
She only stopped when she tripped and fell face-first into a pond. Frogs croaked and hopped away all around her. Riin sat up, shook the water out of her fur, and paused upon seeing her rippling reflection in the water below.
Dark fur, pale blue stripes, white eyes - it was familiar and at the same time foreign, distant. “…How long has one been like this?” she said out loud, attempting to process. She remembered a life of adventuring, a risky one - and then an encounter that ended poorly, and a time of fog and rumbling drumbeat. Even now she could hear it, faintly, tempting her to come back to the darkness.
She frowned, glanced over her shoulder. The cantor hadn’t followed, or hadn’t been fast enough. She was well and truly alone now.
“Riin-daro can run as much as she needs to,” she said, almost as reassurance to herself. “And she’ll fix this on her own. If it’s not supposed to happen, then this one will have to prove the assumptions wrong.”
She put a paw on her sword, got up from the pond, and started walking, somewhere - unaware that her footsteps were in tune with a dark beat.