Ashborn.
It was a phrase Arvel Salvani had not heard bandied about in quite a while. 'Grey-skin' seemed to be the more popular sobriquet nowadays, at least in this part of the world. Less poetic, more descriptive. No less vitriolic; more so, in fact. His younger relatives railed against how the Nords spoke to the refugees. Arvel did not. He was too aware of his own hypocrisy. How many times had he spat the word out-lander, back when to be a denizen of Vvardenfell was a privilege?
Grey-skin. It was a simple phrase for a simple people, trying to make sense of a complicated time. Arvel had grown out of that folly a long time ago. Over the course of his long lifetime he had seen the death of his gods, the crumbling of an Empire that once seemed eternal, an invasion by the lizard race whom he had only ever seen as slaves, and the destruction of his home land. Everything he had ever considered simple or constant had been turned to ash by the raging inferno of the Fourth Era.
The more he thought about it – and, in his current position, Arvel had little better to do than think – the more appropriate the old phrase seemed. Ashborn. His race had been born in ash, emerging as they had from the battle at Red Mountain. He had hidden and prayed to the Tribunal when the Blight storms rolled across the sky. While it was the Argonians that had finally driven him from the land of his birth, it was the black clouds of Red Mountain that had made that land no longer worth fighting for.
Now, almost two centuries later, the dragons had returned to his new home, bringing with them flames and the choking daughter of flames. They huddled in their towns and tried not to think of the stories from Helgen, instead taking comfort in the tales of this mysterious Dragonborn, this hero come to save them all. Arvel wasn't fooled. He knew the ash would come for them in time, and now it had.
When the hastily aggregated rescue teams found the aged Dunmer, trapped under a smouldering fallen beam in the tinder box that had been one of the grey district slums, they had not expected to find him alive. They certainly hadn't expected to find him conscious. That he would be laughing had not even crossed their minds. Yet here he was, a wheezing, bitter chuckle escaping his cracked lips. Then, as they pulled him free, a single utterance:
"Ashborn."