4E 201 some time in Mid Year before the afternoon mail courier

Azuyia sat at the table in the Winters household while a pot of vegetables in herbs simmered over the fire. She had also put on a pot of water to boil for tea. Ryvanni appeared at the door right on schedule.

"Afternoon!"

"Hey you," the Bosmer said to the glowing ranger, in from a forage walk.

Ryvanni loosened the shoulders of her pack and set it down on the floor next to the door, walked over to sit down at the table. "Something smells great! You been to the market, hm?"

"Yeahs, got some carrots and onions, sprig of fresh sage. Get this. There was a vendor

through from Hammerfell, getting his way on to Winterhold. Had trunks lined with metal, filled with ice."

"Sweet," Ryvanni said, pulling her hair back.

"Ohyeah. In that pot," Azuyia leaned forward a bit, "tomatoes. And rosemary."

"Hmm," the ranger said, eyes off, getting up, "'v had it before." She walked up the stairs to her bedroom.

Should I do this? Azuyia sat there for a few minutes.

She was sitting at her dressing table in front of a small mirror propped against a wooden collection box, changed out of her leathers and boots into a long cotton shirt embroidered with blue and pink flowers.

"Yes," Ryvanni asked as she daubed at her face.

Azuyia walked over and put her hand on Ryvanni's shoulder. "Your mom make this for you," she rubbed one of the flowers.

The ranger continued to apply things from small bottles across her lips, on her cheeks. They were not cosmetic colors, more lotions and oils with natural earth tones. She did not respond. Closing her lips and rubbing them together, she picked up an ivory hair brush and pulled it slowly through her hair, downwards on the left side.

She's practiced that toss, Azuyia thought, but better not to say something quite yet.

"Listen, Ryv. I wanted to tell you something."

The ranger stopped brushing and sat with her hands in her lap. Her eyes met Azuyia's in the cloudy mirror on the table.

"What?"

Taking a slight breath and moving to sit on the edge of Ryvanni's bed, Azuyia put her hands in her lap, too, momentarily, then raised one hand palm up, briefly, as she began.

"Iiiii ... I've been going to your stream pool, too. The one next to the little cliff west of town."

Ryvanni turned and looked at Azuyia briefly, then resumed brushing her hair. "So?"

Expecting different response, the Bosmer continued, "Heh, okay ... I followed you one day when I first got here. Just curious. It's a beautiful location! I ... "

The ranger put her brush down with a tack and spoke towards the mirror. "Is there a point to this? I reallllllly enjoy my leave time to myself, see."

"I know, I know. I don't mean to bother. I just wanted to ask you something."

"About?"

"Heh," Azuyia stalled, "since that day I've been sneaking off when Den and Wys are at their stuff, and you're with your mom or something. I like to bathe and lay out, too," she said, standing up and walking over to Ryvanni. "Which is more important to you, Ryv, a bath or a tan?" She put her hand back on the ranger's shoulder.

"What kind of a stupid question is that," she retorted, combing her hair a little harder. "What's it to you, huh? Can't a girl have some time to herself?!"

"It does have to do with those dyes," Azuyia grinned slightly, "that give you the platinum."

Ryvanni rolled her eyes and scoffed.

"No ... wait. I don't want beauty tips, and I don't care about yours. This is something else."

"What!"

Azuyia lifted her shiny hair up and pulled it behind one ear, keeping the tip of the ear in her fingers. Ryvanni looked her dead in the eye, set the brush down precisely and kept her hand on it. She bit at her lip slightly.

"Please. Talk to me."

Ryvanni pushed her arm away roughly enough to have her take one step back.

"Ryv! Please! It's me. I just ... "

"You have no idea."

"Yes, I do."

"You are not Nord! You do not know what I've been through."

"And you are not Bosmer. No Nord can understand what we've suffered from the Thalmor."

"My grandfather DIED ... "

"I know he did."

"Then how can you possibly say they don't understand?"

"They? You mean your fellow Nords?"

Azuyia saw rage and fear in Ryvanni's face as she said this. Up until now, she had never felt anything less than a jostling comraderie when the ranger got into her cups over dinner and others from the rangers or the Ninth were around, that and the ribbing about dwemercraft and such.

"Don't play with me, mage," she said at her lowest register.

"Hey," Azuyia waved her hand side-to-side in Ryvanni's face, "it's me? Your friend?"

Another stare.

"Okay," the Bosmer shrugged, "I'm Mer, Mer-folk, right? If you were one amongst a crowd of Bosmer wouldn't you be able to spot ... it?"

Ryvanni's face trembled slightly.

"Hey," Azuyia stepped forward and held Ryvanni's right arm, "it's okay. It's o-kay."

A tear dripped down the ranger's face, and she shrugged Azuyia's hand off, stood up with her back turned.

They sat downstairs later.

"How did you know?"

"Like I said, if you were in a crowd of Bosmer, say all wearing hooded cloaks or armor, wouldn't you be able to spot a Nord? Or a Breton or Redguard?"

"Welllll," Ryvanni sighed and played with her spoon in the bowl of soup she handn't touched, "Nords tend to be broader across the chest and heavier."

"And both Bretons and Redguards have skin that could be mistaken for ... Mer, in some cases."

"Yeah."

"I mean subtler things. Movements, vibes, your blood tells you."

Ryvanni turned her head. She had been doing this for much of their conversation.

"You could spot a human in Valenwood, right? Especially with your training."

"I suppose so."

"Civia ... for starters, you're the only Nord I've ever met with eyes that shade of purple. I mean, occasionally you see someone with a sort of lilac. Yours is ... unique to my experience."

"You have no idea," Ryvanni replied bitterly.

"Of what?"

"Growing up I got it. Made fun of. Picked on, heh although only occasionally," she said, stirring at her soup, "stared at. Oh yes, and hit on. A lot."

"I'll bet."

"You think," she turned with a bit of a scowl, "I liked it? I mean growing up is hard enough ... "

"No ... I mean, it's your blood they sensed. They just didn't know what it was."

Ryvanni looked up at an angle, taking a breath through her nose. "Hm, right. Then my skin."

"I know."

"Heh," she put down the spoon and walked back upstairs, returning with a miniature mauve glass bottle with silver stopper, "my company calls me Regalia." She screwed at the bottle, and pulled the stopper out with its miniature brush. "Learned this," she said, resting one palm on the table and daubing the silver paint on her clipped fingernails, "from a prostitute in the crossroads camp at north post, not far from Pompa. She also taught me how to dye my hair."

"Would it have been so different from your mother's?"

Ryvanni continued on her nails without looking up. "It would have been slightly blue-green just like my skin." She concentrated on the paint.

"That why you lay out so much?"

"Yes. I've spent a lot of time since I was little either laying out or acquiring Cyrodiilic bronzers. I can catch a tan very fast, and I discovered when I was young that it doesn't catch a ... human's eye, not all that much. I've once or twice gotten a look from a magic type, a non-Mer that is, but they ... heh, you guys don't seem to mind," she looked up and smiled ever so slightly, blowing her nails.

"Mages come from all over, even overseas so no, we don't much care."

"Problem is," Ryvanni continued on her other hand, "Nords do. Remember ... my ancestors are Eastmarch and Winterwarp."

"So that doesn't overrule the ... I mean what does a St ... "

Ryvanni interrupted her. "The Stormcloaks are the cause of that the same way the Thalmor get common Altmer to murder Bosmer. It's blind hatred from ignorance and privation. I can never tell a Stormcloak that my father was Dunmer. At least I didn't get the ears, not much at any rate. I always thought they were ugly."

"It would take Mer-kind to even think of it, Ryv. To a human you just have 'exotic features,' right?"

"That prostitute said the same thing."

"You know it wasn't your looks that tipped me off."

"What, then? My sparkling personality," Ryvanni joked airily.

"It's the rage. Something far more than your mother's stories could account. Like I said, it's Mer blood."

"Dunmer."

"Yes. Our neighbors, the folk from Morrowind, you know they have a ... tendency, a combination of physics and magicka running through them. It translates to 'ancient rage' from the Bosmer I learned as a girl."

"Ancestor's Wrath."

"Have you ever been told your skin is a little warm?"

Ryvanni finished her nails and blew on them, holding the one hand up in front of her face, assiduously performing the manicure ritual by screwing the silver stopper with the delicate twist that to a discerning eye says she could crush the bottle in her palm.

"The prostitute was Dunmer."

"Oh, I'm so sorry, I ... "

"Don't be," the ranger tossed her mane, threw it back, and pushed the inlaid circlet over her hairline, "don't be sorry for her or any of Dibella's workers in the camps. They know what they're doing. She showed me how to distract anyone from anything, including a half-Nord."

"I meant ... hm, never mind. But about that heat. Has it ever, well, come out? In battle?"

Ryvanni leaned forward and set one elbow in the other hand, rubbed her chin.

"I've seen it used once," Azuyia continued, "a Dunmer in our town stood between his wife and a scum Thalmor sergeant. Fried the bounder's face off."

"What happened?"

"You know, constabulary hassling the village, getting fresh to put it politely. My neighbor disappeared afterwards."

"I can," Ryvanni said slowly, "use it a bit. Found out a long time ago."

"Go on."

"I was twelve. There was this ... guy in the neighborhood."

Azuyia felt in her stomach what she was about to hear.

"I told him to stop, and since he was not going to ... it came out of me, the flame. Burned him. When he screamed," the ranger's voice hardened, "I grabbed his knife." She sipped at her tea. "Nobody suspected me, given the type of wounds. I just had to," sipping again, "put up with acting like a scared kid and all their cakes and teas, there there. All I wanted to do was kill. For a while."

Azuyia looked at her and said nothing.

"I can control it, though," she smiled, "I practiced. Got so good at roasting wolves that I started bringing the singed hides and racks of meat into town. Made a cape with a big wolf's face as the hood, heh, brought smoked legs to parties. Didn't have to deal with any players much, although didn't get any dates either," she laughed drily.

"Did they laugh when you joined the Legion?"

Ryvanni beamed. "Yes, they did."

"It's not completely unheard-of, Ryv. I grew up around mixed friends."

The ranger went quiet.

"That's easy for you to say."

"Easy? Why does everyone think that a comfortable Greenheart home is like Sovngarde-on-earth?"

"I didn't say Sovngarde, Zuyia. I meant that you know who you are, you were born knowing it. I'm neither Nord nor Dunmer. I'm both. I go to Morrowind, they see a Nord. I tell anyone in the Legion, all they think is Dunmer. When I walk in a pub, they see a Dibella in armor with pretty purple eyes."

"Kar doesn't think that."

Ryvanni laughed heartily. "That's because a human cuirassier might live to see thirty. Besides," she said craftily, "he's the only man ever beaten me with his fists."

"What?!"

The ranger winked at her slender friend. "On the training ground, silly."

"Oh, right," Azuyia half-rolled her eyes, tossed her hand.

"I caught him looking at me when the Ninth was in the area a year or so ago. I had been sent from the Rangers station with a message for their company tribune. Walked into the forum, and there he was with his brothers ... and sisters, if I might add. Got a wolf-whistle or three as I headed into the tribune's tent. Do we have any wine?"

"Um, no, but we could go get some."

"Hm, later. I walk back out, and the calls continue. See, heavy cavalry aren't known for their manners. And that's saying something in the Legion. They tend to roll in and do as they please, heh, they also stink like donkeys. Where high command gets that lot, who knows. Your typical woman in the Ninth bloody prefers her horse."

Azuyia smiled into her tea.

"I dunno. I do know that my Regalia act gets this sort of thing, that's the price I pay, only that day I was in a bad mood, I forget why. So I catch Kar looking me up and down when I pass, making some comment to a horsefaced vahy next to him, and I call him out on it. Six-nine, twenty-some stone, no problem, boy."

Azuyia hummed a few bars of Our hero, our hero to a wry look from Ryvanni.

"So I call him 'boy' in front of his crew and challenge him to a barefoot match on the sand," she smiled broadly, "and we damn-well almost killed each other."

"I've heard," Azuyia pointed upwards to a giggle.

"We're equal on the mat, different styles but complementary moves. The Mer blood makes me faster than a Nord my size, his frame absorbs that many more than mine. And Akatosh can he land a roundhouse kick. Wouldn't have expected it."

"This something you do often?"

Ryvanni gave her a look. "Thank you, no. We train together when we can. Hoo-WAAH you shoulda seen the centurion's look when they stopped us. Both of us had blood at that point. We got a lecture from the tribune about inter-company relations and a reminder about the rules to unarmed challenges," she motioned a yawn with her palm.

"And these rules stipulate what, exactly? You know he coulda used a battle cry on you, too."

"Oh, I know. That's why I went to bed with him and rode his brains out," she arched her back and stretched, rubbed her stomach.

"Puh-lease!"

"Why," Ryvanni stood up and shook Azuyia's face, compressing her cheeks, "can I not tell my widdw friendy-wendy about hot sex? Did I mention sex, hmm? Sex sex sex!"

"Would you," Azuyia pulled her face gently away from her friend's hands, "get over yourself. You remind me of my sister."

"Oh good! I'd love to meet her."

"And ... Legion regulations, and?"

Ryvanni grinned and pulled the other chair closer, sat down close to Azuyia. "Anyway! Challenges may only be made within a company, not between members of, say, the Ninth Cuirassiers and the Falkreath Rangers, and only carried out in the presence of an officer within said company. They were all just milite rankers, and I was from outside. The rule," Ryvanni continued, "keeps old grudges between units from becoming armed engagements. See, you get one company of Legion infantry has a beef with a unit of cavalry, or maybe some spitpolish puffers from the City and roughriders from the southern steppe. Remember my brother is a centurion in the Guards IV Main, a centurio pilus prior."

"Which cohort, might I ask," Azuyia inquired.

Ryvanni looked at her with surprise. "Dainty magelet, you know your Cyrodiilic."

"My last name was adapted from it. House Greenheart has strong ties to Imperial City."

"More on that. Since you ask, he's pilus prior for II Cohort, a command of four hundred eighty, not bad. The primus of any first cohort tends to be at least in his late thirties, and more often than not an Imperial."

"Yep."

"Royt. I've heard that the Imperial top-percenters don't think much of the Falkreath Rangers. He has to bite his tongue as much as I do, combs his hair in one of those tacky fly-forewards with the oiled curls, even dies it with charcoal. Otherwise, well, he'd look like my mother and father. All blond and shaggy. At least he got the brown eyes."

"Were there, well, I dunno how to ask this, others among your brothers and sisters?"

Ryvanni took a minute to answer. She pulled her soup back over and took a few mouthfuls.

"You mean by my Dunmer father," she asked as she blew on a spoonful.

"Yes, that's what I mean."

"You can understand why I don't want to discuss this often, or with anyone much at all. No, I was mom's only child with him. That's the part took her until I hit puberty. I think she had noticed my odd actions, and it had always made me wonder why she never said a thing about my wolf-girl style. Truth is my Nord dad came home to find mom with a tiny baby that looked completely different than his other children."

"Must have been hard for them, the whole situation."

"Yeah, like I told you," she continued, "it had been. She had nursed and brought up others already with him gone. My biological father was just a commoner, a migrant deciding whether to live the rest of his life in Skyrim or take the boat to Solstheim and on to the current Dunmer nation. I don't know much about that place, though."

"Haven't been, but seems our western neighbors traded one country destroyed by the Red Mountain's eruption for another equally desolate place. Solstheim, from what they teach kids in Greenheart, is both a volcanic desert and a bitterly cold island off the extreme northeastern coast. You have to take a ship from Windhelm to get there."

"Hence the hard feelings among Nord dockworkers."

"More complex than that, as you know, but yes, part of the mix."

"Hmm, well," Ryvanni replied, "mom has never even told me his name. I asked not too long after ... the incident, the time I found out the flame. I had to. I had known since I was a little girl that there was something different about me, and I was becoming a woman. She only told me that he had been working in the village and staying wherever he could. Said he'd stopped one day and merely said 'hello.' You know how it goes."

Azuyia looked off, said nothing.

"Seems they took to each other for a spell. Get it, a ... oh nevermind. It's one of the reasons I hate that bitch Vylonna Yaj next door. She ... saw it happening. My mother has never been anything but an honest, hardworking Nord!"

"I don't think anyone, anyone thinks otherwise. These have been hard times for most folk. Nobody cares."

"I don't mean it as a refrain, but it's different. In a village there are no secrets, and reputation has a meaning altogether separate from the guilds or royals. She was the subject of some gossip and a few unkind stares at the pub, and she didn't deserve it. Apparently, my father left quickly at her asking."

Azuyia shrugged. "You're right. Valenwood just doesn't have the same social traditions."

"Hm, yes," she sighed, "so mom worked on. She was still months away from hearing of dad's redeployment here to Falkreath when she realized she was pregnant. Dad apparently said nothing when he walked in their bedroom and saw me in the crib. She claims, and I have never doubted her, that he even held me and helped change me."

"There may have been affairs with him, too."

"I know, as I'm sure she did. Seven years away at war. Like I told you before, she's never spoken ill of him, and yet I don't think they were ever truly happy after he returned. Still, they were together until he was stationed in the west. We apparently had a good run on the harvests for several years. I don't remember him, so I have never known either of my fathers, Zu. The man I grew up with as my dad was just one of her close friends."

Her face was contracting, and she turned her head. Azuyia put her arm around Ryvanni and they sat there as the evening sounds drifted in.