J'Zel's Story
#1 of Scraps/Drafts/Odds and Ends
J'Zel stepped off the boat and onto the Anvil dock, shivering. A light dusting of snow began to settle onto her fur, trimming it crystalline white. Her burgundy cloth shirt, which had seemed more than sufficient in Elsweyr, now provided little comfort, and despite her fur, the chill of this place cut to the bone. She had never considered that it might snow this far south, but then again, she'd had little choice in making the journey.
She was heartened, however, by what this place wasn't. It wasn't a bloodstained bed in a run-down, out-of-the-way in, on which lay a nasty, brutish man, the space between his legs destroyed in a mess of red, destroyed flesh, his life soaking the linens with a deep, uniform crimson. And it wasn't the abyss she'd found in an Ayleid ruin she'd sheltered in a week later, a broke, desperate and hurting fugitive in tattered clothes, where she'd seriously considered taking one last, solemn leap into its beckoning darkness. It had seemed, at the time, to be so fitting - a descent into madness and pain, with a detour through the worst society had to offer, finished by one last tumble into the depths. She'd sat on the edge, exhausted, crying until her eyes ran dry, but just as she was about to toss herself over in one last act of defiance against a horrible world, something around the edge of the rim glinted ever so slightly in the dim light, catching her eye. She squinted, focusing, her eyes amplifying the light naturally to make out the shape of a pendant. She crawled along the edge, grimacing, until she was able to hold the thing in her hands - an amulet made of a cold, dull metal, but with an inlay of polished jade upon which an intricate design had been carved. Running her fingers over it, she somehow felt more relaxed, and for a brief moment, the pain in her body and soul began to dissipate, borne away by a sudden burst of curiosity. It was too dark to see the amulet in detail, and she was far too exhausted to conjure up what meagre spells she could muster, so she resolved to rest and emerge in daylight to examine the amulet further.
As she slept, she dreamt of her childhood. Brief glimpses of it flashed through her vision - living in tents, traveling from town to town, standing around in her best clothes looking cute to attract the eye of customers for her father to ply with his finely dyed and embroidered cloth. Of course, she also had flashes of another city, at night, in a warehouse, and the weight of the low-caste Khajit thugs as they lay atop her, one after another, and the pain as they'd carved the hateful slur in her native tongue across her stomach after they'd finished. Then the look on her father's face, like his whole world had caved in, and his tail, carving a pathetic furrow in the dirt road as he slunk out of town, broken, leaving her on the doorstep of an inn with only her sobs and her ripped, stained clothes.
She didn't need a dream to recall the rest, as it had been her life for too many years after - her shame kept the rest of her brethren at a distance, and few others had seemed to care. The pain faded to numbness, and then to nothing more than the basic impulse to survive. She'd done odd jobs when she could, which was rarely, and when she couldn't, she grabbed whatever food she could find until she got caught, and she was then traded around the town guards who used her body to pay for her fines. Eventually, she found that the guards couldn't care less if she skipped the thievery and simply whored out her body for food and a bed for the night, but that took its toll as well. She was just a flea-bitten Khajit whore, hardly respectable, and so the clients she attracted were not the best. She took beatings, some worse than others, and did things she'd never even imagined. The sheep was bad enough, but then one night she'd taken up with a novice mage with some kind of kink involving her reaction to spells. After an hour of absorbing all sorts of energy, her body had become wracked with spasms, and a horrible electric charge coursed through her. Her client got off powerfully on this, and paid her enough to rent a room for a whole week, but the encounter had twisted her insides somehow, and things felt horribly wrong. She began to experience strange sensations, and started to erratically go into heat, spending days binging on sex to the point where it hurt massively, but she felt compelled to continue anyway. The energy ran rampant, and one day she somehow summoned a skeleton out of nowhere, among other unusual things. Somehow, she was learning magic, but her body was still trying to reject the energy, and things felt even more twisted and wrong. The entire world had seemed to begin bending and twisting impossibly, and she felt her control slipping away.
Then, it had happened. He hadn't even been that bad of a person - just another sloppy, belligerent, cruel drunk who would rather enjoy her by beating her senseless before spreading and brutalizing her dazed body. But his first blow dislodged what little sense she'd had left, and her bare instinct took over, her claws finally doing what her head could never allow. When she'd come to her senses, the man was screaming in pain, bleeding out, and as his screams subsided her sanity returned in a sudden shock. She had finally fought back against her cruel fate - and as a reward, she was now a killer. She turned in shock, the door swinging open to display the stunned face of the Dunmer proprietor, their eyes locking for a single moment before she turned and made a desperate dive out the window, fleeing into the darkness and surely now a wanted fugitive in Elsweyr. In her homeland, there was only one way to deal with a killer, and that was to kill in turn - so all she could do was run, and her flight had led her, finally, to the ruin, and the abyss.
She emerged from the abyss, though, and the ruin, and examined the amulet in the light of day. It featured an intricate carving featuring the bust of an idealized Khajit warrior, saber in hand, bare-chested and brave. Somehow, just looking at it gave her courage. As she felt the amulet in her hand though, she realized that it had a clasp, and a hidden hinge - it was actually a locket. She pried it open, and inside was a scrap of parchment, with the fine, filigreed lines of a magically-scryed portrait. The woman in the portrait was a Khajit woman, dressed in a fine formal dress, her regal posture and powerful gaze almost seeming to reach out from the drawing itself. She seemed almost fearfully perfect, but one corner of her mouth appeared to betray just the slightest hint of a smile, and the tip of her left ear was gone, replaced by a scarred, jagged edge. There was something about her that compelled J'zel, and she sat in the shade of one of the pillars, just staring at the drawing as the minutes wore on, and a new resolve seemed to emanate from her chest of its own accord.
That had settled it - no abyss, no cruel fate, and especially no Elsweyr. She pressed on, somehow finding her way to a port, and then a ship, and then a captain of Imperial birth, calculating but not entirely unkind, and she'd bought passage to wherever the ship was going and the courtesy of no questions with a combination of cooking, menial labor, and a warm bed and warmer company for the captain during the few nights that the journey required. At the end of it, the captain had even thrown a few septims her way, and now here she was, in the snow, with the meagre clothes on her back and perhaps enough for the most basic of meals. Then again, though the murder would not soon leave her consciousness, the penalty for it was long behind her in another land. There, she was a sorry, degraded stranger, and a killer condemned for a crime that was as horrific as it was deserved, but here, she was just a displaced Khajit with a murky past, just another person scrabbling to survive.
Of course, there was one more important difference, one that she could feel, in the cold metal of the amulet that she wore around her neck - and the colder, more imposing metal of the wrought-iron dagger that she'd managed to palm in town before her boat ride. She was done being a whore, something to be used and abused. Things had to be different this time. She shivered, running her hand over the hilt - after what had happened, there was a part of her that feared she could never raise even a bare hand in anger, for fear that in her violence she'd lose whatever she had left of herself. This was a second chance, though, and she knew the likelihood of there being a third, so she had to find the determination to see it through. She would survive, and maybe more, however she had to; whether it was with a smile on her face... or a blood-spattered dagger in her hand.
(I decided to randomly try to write a backstory for a character in Oblivion. It turned out a bit darker than I thought... Once I wrote it I realized it was actually a half-decent story, so I decided to post it on the off chance someone might find it interesting.)