Birth of a Hero: The Early Years of the Last Dragonborn by Lord Emile Castellane of Daggerfall
"Common wisdom teaches that to kill your own parents is the lowest of the low. Indeed, parricides are reviled by men and cast from the mercy of the gods. Yet when that parricide is a powerful Dragonborn, it is 'justice'. Isn't it twisted?" - Marcia Calvisius, the Last Dragonborn, Vanquisher of Alduin, Harkon and Miraak, Rider of Odahviing, Stormblade, Thane of Whiterun, Archmage of Winterhold and Countess of Bruma, 4E 208
As a member of House Castellane, I, Emile, have the unique privilege to access my family's archives and collect first hand accounts of my cousin. The Dragonborn was always a private individual, therefore many of the claims here are reconstructions from both historical archives, and the accounts from her associates and contemporaries. As for these accounts, many details stem from what they were able to infer from the few times she commented on her past and the resulting work, from my best attempt to reconcile the sometimes conflicting and contradictory evidence I have gathered. So if the tale seems fanciful at points, I hereby confess my own impotence in the matter. Nevertheless, I hope that it would prove edifying for the reader. So indulge me.
Born in 4E 182, Marcia Calvisius (or as she was known to my grandfather, Cousin Marcelle) hails from Bruma. Her father, Marcus Calvisius, who named her after himself, was from an ancient equestrian family with pretensions to nobility. Her mother, a Breton named Berenice Castellane, was the unfavored fifth daughter of a prestigious but loveless Great House in Daggerfall. Failing to make a political match and knowing she would never inherit, Berenice left Daggerfall to join the Synod in Bruma, where she met and wed Marcus. Separately, they might have remained on the straight and narrow. But together, let's just say the couple was a match made in Oblivion.
Berenice was an exceptional enchantress, and Marcus had a fox's nose for profit. Over time, their combined drive for wealth and status led them down a dark path, Marcus to glorify his family, and Berenice to spite hers. They began dealing in black soul gems and even found a particularly heinous way to "refine" human souls. They grew fabulously wealthy nearly overnight, and before long, impoverished noble clans were offering to marry their scions, or sometimes themselves, to Marcia. Eventually, the couple settled on the middle aged and widowed Count Carvain. Their political machinations also enabled them to foster Marcia with the Count of Anvil in order for her to learn courtly manners, where she developed a fraternal relationship with the heir, Viscount Regulus Umbranox. Some historians speculate that but for her friendship with "Reggie" Umbranox, Marcia would have followed in her father's footsteps. Indeed, she was often compared to Marcus in both appearance, favorably, and character, less favorably.
Marcia spent every summer in Anvil up to her early adolescence and would always dread returning to Bruma. Her father severed the arrangement with Anvil when she was fourteen, having deemed her courtly education complete. The next four years were a lonely and dreary time for her. On rare occasions when she would visit Daggerfall, she would witness the hostile indifference with which her mother was received by her kin, and she started to understand her own home life. Her cousins didn't have time for her and treated her like a pest. After all, there was nothing to be gained from the acquaintance of their lowborn Breton cousin who didn't share their Breton culture.
It was only in Anvil that she experienced the warmth commonly associated with family. There, under the instruction of the Viscount's tutor Annaeus, she became obsessed with military history. Growing up, her hero would be General Tullius. She would memorize all of his campaigns and endlessly bore Regulus with the details. Along with her foster brother, she developed an interest in and affinity for mounted archery (a popular aristocratic pastime of that era), becoming one of the foremost equestrians in her age group. He would always be the better archer, but could not match her in horsemanship. The youthful Viscount enjoyed pyrotechnics, so much of their summers would be spent hunting local game and terrorizing everyone in the castle with loud bangs. Their motto was: "To Mayhem", which they would say before every prank.
As with most secrets of this nature, this one was eventually uncovered by none other than the Marcus' own daughter. The rumor around town was that Lady Berenice was a vampire, and that she was kidnapping children for vile experiments. To be clear, nobody was a vampire in this sordid tale, but "vampirism" is not an inappropriate metaphor for what Enchanters do. Time after time, a child would disappear around the Calvisius estates. The Calvisii kept to themselves and often talked down to the local population. Their magic-using reputation aroused the paranoia of the local Nords, and their meteoric political ascent made them both feared and respected. Marcia, being gone half the year and holing up in the family estate during the bitter winters, never bothered with the locals. She was an educated Imperial Lady, she reasoned, and the locals were superstitious Nords who too much preoccupied themselves with mead and too little with bathing. She was aware that her family was hated and of the rumors, but wrote them off as imaginative peasants' tales to help the hoi polloi pass the unforgiving Bruma winters. If nothing else, she certainly inherited her family's disdain for the lower classes, her own class by a hair of social distinction, given that the Calvisii were equestrians and not nobles. I ask you this, however, dear readers: can a clan truly be ambitious social climbers without some contempt for their simple origins?
When Marcia discovered the rumors were true in all the ways that mattered, she was devastated. She used to take comfort in the notion that if her parents didn't love her, at least they served the Empire faithfully and pulled themselves out of anonymity by their own merits. Despite these revelations, deep down she still hoped for their love. Nevertheless, she did her best to expose her parents crimes to the local authorities but discovered that everyone up to Count Carvain has some knowledge of what was going on, but because the money was too good and her family too well connected, they all looked the other way. After all, the Count was going to marry Marcia, so why investigate his own in-laws and risk the dowry, part of the blood money, being confiscated by the Emperor? Why marry a lowborn merchant's daughter if not for the dowry? And in any case, due to her father's magical wards and precautions, these allegations were impossible to prove by third parties despite the best efforts of a local priest of Julianos.
Marcia appealed to the Emperor in a letter, but it was intercepted and never reached the monarch. It was then that her idealized image of the Emperor was shattered. The Empire, which she once thought of as the crystallization of just rule, now seemed to her a nameless, faceless machine that ground up and spat out those in its power. The middling bureaucrats, she learned, held all of the actual power, and most of them had no interest in anything beyond keeping their own hides and wielding their petty influence. In any case, the Emperor would be too preoccupied by the political and military chaos that followed the Great War to truly follow up on this case, had the letter been delivered. In 4E 206, Emperor Titus Mede II himself would be assassinated by the Dark Brotherhood for his controversial concessions to the Aldmeri Dominion. His heart was no doubt in the right place, the Dragonborn would quip years later, but so much for his heart.
Out of options but determined to see justice done, Marcia led the priest and the village elder into her father's workshop. Understandably enraged, the villagers coalesced into an angry mob, launching a bloody invasion of their home, killing her father, her mother* and many of the household servants. In the ensuing chaos, local imperial functionaries were not spared the people's wrath. The unfortunate deaths of these officials would spell the end for many of these rioters and in the years to come, the village would never recover from the consequent oppression. Horrified, Marcia fled, spending the next year in the wilderness hunting for a living, selling pelts and living off the meat.
Marcia became demoralized following these developments, learning that there was no justice in this world, and this would haunt her as Dragonborn, knowing that the one good deed she tried to do ended up in the barbaric deaths of her family and more importantly, the innocent servants. She began to wonder whether it would have been better to look the other way like everyone else. It seemed that they understood what she didn't as a fiery adolescent: there couldn't have been a good outcome. The complexity of the situation was just too overwhelming for any given individual, whose moral cowardice was not only understandable, but inevitable. Having reached this conclusion, she no longer blamed the bureaucrats or the Emperor, but despaired that all of them were bound by the same chains of fate and causality. Any "heroics" she performed subsequently, I think, can be read in the same vein: she did it all with gritted teeth, forever cursing the ingrates and cowards she was supposedly saving.
"I know twice two makes four, but that doesn't mean I have to like it". - The Dragonborn to Sorine Jurard, date unknown. Celann contends that she actually said: "That doesn't mean I have to submit to it." Either way, she was nothappy with reality. Fortunately for us, she chose not to take up the issue with Akatosh and dutifully performed her function as fate's instrument.
Marcia would later learn that for this act of rebellion, Count Bruma declared a state of emergency and her village was decimated in the old sense, a practice that was by then considered dated and inhuman. Unfortunately, in 4E 200, with Bruma's economy having already been hit hard by the Great War and the Stormcloak Rebellion, and the population made mutinous by poverty and taxation, it was easy to justify. The writings of Count Carvain himself testify as much.
In 4E 201, the 19 year old Marcia, now calling herself "Mars", chased an elk across the Pale Pass into Skyrim and was captured by the legion. Being dressed in animal skins didn't help distinguish her from the Stormcloaks. As she faced her executioner, she had a brief moment to contemplate the irony that General Tullius, her hero, would order her death. Moreover, the execution was due to a fluke, and not for what she considered her real crimes. In the following months, Marcia would relentlessly use this incident to torment her pious friend Ralof for what she thought of as his pie-in-the-sky conception of justice. If the gods existed, she insisted, they were surely reveling in the suffering of mortals. No other explanation would fit all of the facts.
After Alduin attacked, Marcia escaped Helgen alone and spent two days hunting around Whiterun, once being nearly raped by bandits. Realizing she had no facility with the hardier and more aggressive Skyrim game, and the rumored bandit problem being worse than she had thought, she was running out of options. Even then it seemed to her to that anything would be better than returning to Bruma. In Skyrim where she was a nobody, Marcia breathed freely for the first time in years. Bruised, starving and broke, she narrowly escaped her would-be rapist and stumbled upon the cave to Helgen Keep, where she found and rescued a dying Ralof. The rest, as they say, is history.
Here, dear reader, is where I will end my tale, and it is with a wry smile that I settled on the title of this tome. Can Marcia Calvisius truly be called a hero? Is there anything we can learn from her biopic on the makings of great men and women? In a hundred years, when her true history is erased and her life embellished into legend, what can we infer about the rise of other so-called heroes, such as Reman Cyrodiil or Tiber Septim? Or are they all, as the Dragonborn herself would say, exceptionally prolific murderers who didn't stop murdering until none stood in their way? As for the rest, Tamriel does not need yet another take on the Dragonborn's subsequent exploits; that sequence of events has been done to death by better (and worse) storytellers than I can ever hope to be.
*Lady Berenice would be captured and subject to unspeakable disgrace. Marcia encountered her mother again after the woman's mind finally broke under the strain. Due to the political demands of the time and her own sense of culpability, the Dragonborn, now Countess following her violent conquest of Castle Bruma, had Berenice beheaded according to the usual procedures. This, but not before Lady Berenice gave a tortured apology to the newly enthroned Countess and begged for a swift release. The quotation in the frontmatter of this book represents our best reconstruction of the Dragonborn's comments after the deed was done.
Inspirations:
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim by Bathesda
Alternate Start: Live Another Life mod for Skyrim by Arthmoor
Ab Urbe Condita by Titus Livius
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Shinsekai Yori by Yusuke Kishi
Fate/Zero by Gen Urobuchi
Historical Events:
The Life of Erszebet Bathory
The Life of Marcus Furius Camillus
The Life of Lucius Annaeus Seneca
The Life of Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos
The Fall of the Roman Empire
The Fall of the Byzantine Empire
Author's Note: I discovered the TES V later into my life than most, and this story grew out of my need to account for, in lore, the unfocused way my character progressed through the main quest. Why does she waste so much time at the Bard's College when the world is at stake? Why is she a sneak archer when she's actually a Breton? This is the result.