From my earliest years, I have yearned for novelty, for rarity, for adventure. In the small town of Umbaaqwan in the kingdom of Sentinel I was born and raised, daughter to laughably Imperial parents whose own relatives regarded them as traitors to their Redguard heritage. And so it was that I came to be named 'Lellynhall', a name my mother and father seemed to have chosen at random from a book, deciding that it sounded 'Imperial' enough.
As could be expected, this name did not serve me well in my youth. The divided family of idiots, and the taunts of the children were enough to convince me to depart from Umbaaqwan, but it was my own wanderlust that drove me further, to the Imperial City. But that is another story, I suppose.
Rarity. As much as I try to convince myself that I am motivated by avarice, I cannot truly bring myself to believe it. Money is well and fine, the more gold the merrier, but I know that is not the reason for the life I have chosen, a life of dungeon delving and exploration. I want to be excited, thrilled, nervous, and so on. I want to discover lost cities and ancient artifacts in which are woven magicks beyond comprehension. Why? Because I would be bored, otherwise.
On my person at most times are all manner of rare artifacts from my travels: a full set of ebony armor, an enchanted cloak, a Daedric longsword, and, embarrassingly, a brassiere that grants me the power of levitation. All these, and more, I have found in my travels. Yet, not all of rarity is worth having. The Vampire's Disease, the Knahaten Flu, and other rare maladies come to mind. However, there are other, far worse things of rarity to come into possession of. An Elven child, for instance.

The infant stirred softly in her arms, quivering with...something. Was she going to cry? Was she sick? A cold, collywobbles, what?
The infant sneezed.
"Ridiculous," Lellynhall muttered, looking down at the baby. She grabbed the child by the cheeks in her approximation of gentleness and turned her this way and that, inspecting her small, fragile face. Her skin was like ash, and her hair like blood; typical of her race.
A Dunmer child with a Redguard mother. The thought would be amusing if it were someone else's responsibility. And scandalous, at that. It was the third era, the four-hundred-and-tenth year, and in the generally cosmopolitan and liberal atmosphere of the Niben. Still, her new responsibility was bound to raise eyebrows. Lellynhall took her eyes off the infant and stared outside the carriage window.
"Motherhood won't change me," she thought. "That's what my mother would have told me, to embrace my 'natural role' in life. To be a wife, a mother, a homemaker, and all those other things I so despise. The 'Feelings of Motherhood' my mother spoke of are nowhere to be found. My womb does not instill in me a magical desire to raise a child from its wriggling larval stage, nor does it instill in me a desire to darn socks and toil at a loom. My heart was made for harder, grander things."
Lellynhall took her eyes off the approaching town of Weye, White-Gold Tower in the distance, and glanced back down at the child. She seemed to have opened her eyes while she was looking away.
Her eyelids drooped and strained to stay open, but, there they were, the typical Dunmer eyes, red as fire.
"Endryn," Lellynhall thought, shaking her head. "I never even loved him. If this waif is anything like her father, though, I may be tempted to pass her off just as he did."
Lellynhall reached into her haversack and pulled out a worn note, giving it a, hopefully, final read.

Lelly,

Ranosa and I have had a child together. Wait, actually, that's probably not the best way to start...

Lellynhall,

Ignore that first part. I'm in a hurry, and I don't have time to write another note. Ranosa had a child. I may or may not be the father. You will be the mother. Ranosa is dead, and I can stay in the Iliac no longer, I must return to my homeland. My maid, Anara, will be at the old room in Daggerfall, with the infant. If you're not there to get it in three months, Anara will likely throw the thing in the rubbish.
Empty threat? Probably. Still, she needs a mother, and you owe me a big favor.

-Endryn

Lellynhall sighed, and folded the note carefully. On the back, she noticed a nearly illegible postscript that she'd missed before.

"By the way, her name is Nelezavra, and it'll remain that way. Register her with it at the Imperial City. I want her to grow up Imperial."

Until reading this, Lellynhall had already come up with a dozen names for the child, most of them improper to say aloud. This simplified things, she thought, putting the note away.
But, why the Imperial City? "I want her to grow up Imperial" was a rather odd thing for Endryn to have written. Endryn hated the Empire, and even more, its capital.
The driver of the carriage brought the horses to a halt, and stepped down onto the road leading to the Imperial City and spoke with a Legionnaire manning a toll post at Weye. The driver showed the soldier a series of papers and pointed to the small set of covered wagons tied to the carriage. The driver was waved along and got back to his position, reins in hand.
The carriage eased forward, and soon they were on the bridge, headed towards the mighty City, Heart of the Empire.
"To the Market District?" the driver turned and asked.
"To the Market District," she replied.

Lellynhall fell backwards onto a bed, the first she'd felt in months. The beds at the Merchant's Inn were far from exquisite, but were still a welcome change. The gold amassed from her exploits in the Iliac was now safely deposited in an Imperial bank after much arguing about taxes and fees with the City's bankers, and the child Nelezavra was now an official citizen of the Empire, after another long bout of arguing with the local census and excise agents. The looks she got from the clients were still strong in her mind. A young Redguard woman clad in ebony armor, arguing with officials, a Dunmer infant clinging to her breast, crying. Their responses were only natural, she thought. It wasn't that the adventures of the day yielded this general response that bothered her, it's that she knew, if she were to decide to raise the child to adulthood, she would have to endure those looks for years.
Still, she was bound to Endryn's request far stronger than she would have liked. A chapter of her history she'd vowed to forget was now reopened against her will.
It was not an accident that Lellynhall neglected to list herself as legal guardian to Nelezavra, instead opting for the gray area of 'temporary caretaker'. She wanted to be able to run away at any moment, and she already had vague plans in mind to do so.
Plans she was not likely to act on, she admitted. With Nelezavra being cared for by a kind old woman she'd met earlier in the day, Lellynhall drifted off into sleep.