Fey - Changeling
Shapeshifting beings of great power and unpredictable motivation. Encounters with mythical beings that change their forms appear in legends all across Tamriel in antiquity, but today are rarely heard of outside the Aldmeri realm. Bosmeri legend states that their ancestors were wild creatures of unfixed shape, who were granted the gift of singular form by the god J'ffre. The siblings of their ancestors who rejected this gift continue to stalk the dark and forgotten corners of Valenwood with malevolence in their hearts.
In ancient times, in the myth of the Boiche, the world and all its inhabitents were unfixed and ever-shifting. Nothing could hold the same form for more than a few seconds, swept along by the broken mind of the mother-goddess Nir. Her lover J'ffre suffered at the sight of His beloved losing Herself every second of Her existence, and He felt the plight of Her children on Her back. In His desperation He turned to Dzidj, the hunger of Padhome. Dzidj taught Him the Secret of Silence, a cure for the madness inflicted upon Nir's children.
J'ffre had a grim choice to make. To allow His beloved and Her children to suffer for eternity, or to trade Her life to give them a chance. With incredible sorrow, He gave His divinity to silence the cacophany, slaying Nir and fixing Her realm and its inhabitants into their true, final form.
One small section of the chaos remained. This vestige of Nir's curse came to be called the Ooze. J'ffre's power was too depleted to smother it completely. In one final act of sacrifice, J'ffre gave up His own body, turning it into the Valenwood to contain it. The Changeling spirits who inhabited the wood saw the sacrifice that J'ffre had made to bring sanity to their world. They entered into a covenant with Him, becoming living extentions of the Green itself to protect the world from the darkness contained within their forest. This Green Pact forbade any destruction of plantlife within their domain, and any kind of shapeshifting which would further weaken . In return for their devotion to protecting the legacy of Nir, J'ffre gifted these beings with their true form, making them the true children of Nir and J'ffre. These became the Boiche, the people of the wood.
Some Boiche discovered their lives as mortal elves more troublesome than they had bargained for. Death, pain, and disease were all trials faced by those who walk Nir's decaying bones. Death is certain for all mortal-kind, for they are born from it, and so to death all shall return, in repayment of J'ffre's debt to Dzidj. These elves rejected the sacred duty they had sworn allegience to, forsaking the shapes gifted to them by J'ffre. They became the Oathbreakers, who long to unleash the Ooze and return Nir's realm to madness.
The people of the root and their betrayers went to war. This bitter, ten-thousand year conflict ended in the defeat of the Changelings, who were sealed away in the Ooze. The Boiche live in hope that one day the Oathbreakers will choose to return to J'ffre and uphold their oath alongside them. However, the threat they pose is known to all who protect the Green, for some have escaped over the generations. They haunt the woods, luring unsuspecting travelers to their doom, and whisper lies in the ears of the young and the desperate to tempt them from the Pact.
From Sprites to Spriggans to Gheatus, the god-like mountain avatars which once thwarted Aldmeri settlers from conquering mount Eton nir, numerous entities roamed Tamriel since before recorded history. Neither mortal nor daedra, these ephemeral beings eluded classification and study for millennia. Then, in 2E 456, an Altmeri naturalist named Ahrtabazus published a treatise which hypothesized that these beings were fundamentally the same species, classifying them in a rough hierarchy of spiritual power.
Ahrtabazus' revolutionary theory of the Faerie Chain swept across the scholarly world. Not only did it explain how these disperate creatures were related, it offered a mechanism by which they may have come to be, linking them to the mythical Ehlnofey, the fallen Gods who were the ancestors of the mortal races according to Aldmeri myth. However, this connection to the elves raised a worrying question about the connection of Mer and Fey. Five years after its initial publication and broad scholarly success, Ahrtabazus published a revised edition, supplimented by years of interviews with various fey folk across the continent. In his amended treatise, Ahrtabazus theorized that Mer-kind were themselves members of the Faerie Chain, sitting somewhere in the middle of its hierarchy. For this blasphemy, his works are suppressed to this day in Summerset, and Ahrtabazus was eventually executed for his apostacy.
Despite its repression, the Faerie Chain Theory remains a convincing framework, evidenced by the highly malleable nature of elf races, such as the transformation of the Falmer or the birth of the Dunmer. This connection is most evidenced by the Nephrine, a race of fey purported by Ahrtabazus to exist just above elves in the proposed hierarchy.
These beings appear to hold some supernatural sway over the lower order of faeries, often appearing with an enterage of Pixies, Nixads, or Nymphs in the vein of a king's court. They take many appearances, but most often as elves with large eyes and colorful features, dressed in dream-like approximations of regal attire and occationally adorned with insect wings, feathers, or whisps of clouds adorning them. Haughty and mischevious, they appear to take pleasure in mocking the proud high elves with their royal affectations.
Some scholars link the middle orders of the Fey, particularly the Nephrine and the Ilyadi; many-eyed forest giants of old Summerset, directly to the Changelings of Valenwood. Though these spirits aren't known to flit between forms as quick as breathing, they are both feared shapeshifters, who take on different appearances at different times. Individual Nephrine are known specifically to maintain the same face for many years before undergoing Renewal, a process by which they relinquish an old identity, becoming essentially the same entity, but in a new body with different features, personalities, even genders.
Nephrine are antagonistic toward the mortal races, though rarely actively hostile. They subtly warp reality around them, using this power to prank those who wonder too far off the beaten path, sometimes luring them there by commanding Wisps. Their jokes range from harmless inconveniences, to cruel lifelong curses. Always unexpected and beyond what any mortal sorcerer is capable of. Despite this god-like power, they flee at the first sign of a fight, seemingly stepping out of reality itself alongside their court. They are especially fearful of the Daedra and have never been documented in Oblivion. In the numerous folktales of encounters with Nephrine, only one speaks of their death.
A Breton folktale speaks of a Direnni king named Asliron who was pestered by a Nephrine for many years. The Nephrine was Macis, himself a king whose realm existed unseen in the same borders as Asliron's. Macis considered them to be friendly rivals and made a point to challenge the dour and serious elf in numerous inane contests ranging from river rafting to bird finding to riddle solving to pie eating. Invariably, Macis bested the mortal monarch, making sure to boast of his greatnes in front of his court before vanishing again.
Proud Asliron grew weary after years of humiliating defeats. Determined to have his revenge, he ordered his court mage to find a way to ensure his victory. The mage constructed for him a hidden blade made of Infernal Obsidian in a mechanism hidden in the folds of a wrist-band. When Macis next showed himself, the Direnni was for once the one to issue the challenge. They would wrestle at dawn, and the victor would be crowned the King of Kings, and all glory would forever be his.
Macis was disappointed to hear this contest would be their last. He had grown very fond of their games. But he could not decline a challenge put to him, especially one from an honored friend. At dawn, they wrestled. No magic aided the Faerie king, and he was quickly overwhelmed by the elf's brute strength. Pinned twice, he just managed to wriggle his way free. The clever Macis realized he could not beat match Asliron's strength, but the aging elf had noticably slowed since his youth, and there was the advantage of an immortal.
Rather than facing him head-on, he avoided his friend's attacks, wearing him down slowly until the old man could barely breathe. When the mortal king was exhausted, Marcis presseed his attack, pinning him down with surprising ferocity. It was all the king could do to wrest his arm free and place his hand upon Marcis' heart. Elated from his impending victory, he grinned at his friend below him, offering to relinquish the title so that they can continue to play together. Those words, spoken in joy, darkened Asliron's heart. His desperation for victory turned to grim resolve. With a subtle channeling of his magicka, the device on his wrist triggered, and the Demonic shard pierced his rival's heart.
Asliron felt no remorse as he saw his rival's look of betrayal as life drained away. His blood was too hot in the moment, too caught up in his victory to realize what he had lost. Marcis' body turned to solid opal as Asliron addressed the crowd before him, elves and orcs and men and the Faerie King's loyal court witnessed him proclaim his greatness.
"Thy king is dead!" He decreed. "Hie back to thy adjacent place, thou loathsome sprites! Thy King of Kings commands it!"
King Asliron the Mighty was rejuvinated by his victory. He returned to his court plotting a golden age for his kingdom. Bountiful harvest and trade. Conquest and glory. Surely, all things were possible for the slayer of a Faerie king. What he did not understand was that he did more than kill a monarch. Marcis' very kingdom died with him, consumed by the gray march. Because Asliron banished the fey court with the binding authority of the King of Kings, none could escape its fate and take over the throne.
When the Faerie kingdom died, so too did Asliron's. Within weeks, every tree, every blade of grass, every mote of pollen in the air turned lifeless. Its precious metals turned to brittle rock. Its rivers and streams dried up. Even the birds began to fall from the sky. Asliron beseached the neighboring kingdoms to lend food and water, but none would dare risk the curse of the feykiller to spread to their own lands. His people fled the kingdom en masse, leaving Asliron alone in the entire kingdom. He refused to leave, desperately looking through the abandoned library of his turncoat court mage for a way to undo what he had done. His stores of food and water ran out before he found an answer, if there was one to be found.
To this day, Asliron Direnni the Mighty: King of Kings sits alone, a dessicated mummy hunched over a sun-bleached tome in a tower obove a desolate kingdom. Two kings entombed forever within its borders. The name and location of his country is lost to time. An eternal testimate to one elf's hubris stands alone somewhere in Tamriel, whispering his lementation to the howling, indifferent wind.
The Oathbreakers
The Faerie Chain
The Nephrine
Asliron and the Faerie King
Viti Qara'a
Parent ethnicities
Diverged ethnicities
Related Locations
Comments