#but whereas tesh is brimming with power myrrha is mysteriously emptied of it

[astrovagrant]

its kind of hard for me to codify myrrha's Extremely Bad Ritual for tes bc it's much better suited to my fantasy-ish worldbuild at this point but like. imagine a 16 year old very well educated but very sheltered girl is desperate to avoid a 'marriage' (read: basically just being sold off for political favors at that point) to a stranger who she's met twice and a future she never planned on - and now she's poring over her asshole mage father's extremely restricted books, she finds something she thinks can help her, she goes as far in her research as she feasibly can - but she cannot share this with anyone, cannot ask anyone's opinion or guidance. she wants to, she really does, but she is sooooo paranoid that even her friends (who are all her father's indentured servants, again bc he's an asshole) will rat her out because that's how the world works.

ok i'm actually putting a cut in a post for hte first time in years bc i realized this got longer than intended. anyway ummm body horror ig

the ritual is a meditation on pain, and how pain can empower the caster with greater willpower blah blah blah, your only admission fee is a lot of your own blood, turning your body into a ritualized canvas, and swearing fealty to [entity] (in this case i do think molag is the best fit, because this ritual was absolutely a trap, all things considered) - it's meant to take place over months. she doesn't have that much time; she does it in one fucking night and nearly exsanguinates herself. it Works... obliquely. it does indeed cause something to happen, she does talk to the entity, she does communicate her wishes and a deal is struck - she is too young to have a real grasp on what she's doing, here, but she has a chip on one shoulder and desperation on the other.

her blood payment was rich with suffering and would serve nicely, but power wasn't really the problem here - the suitor was. wouldn't it be better if he was out of the picture? what if [entity] took care of him for you? she agrees, half-unconsciously, because she assumes this entity would take care of it for her without any further action on her part. i tells her more payment would be required later, when she was in a better state, and next thing she knows she is waking up from her bed like the whole thing was just a bad dream. there's no blood, no wounds in her skin, nothing that would indicate the hours-long ritual that nearly killed her the night before.

she's dressed up and made presentable for the wedding, half delirious with joy that her problem is solved - any moment now, someone will come and tell the terrible news that he's dropped dead - and then half-stricken with terror that the entity's end of the deal is not being upheld as the hours tick down towards the ceremony. the music swells, the doors open, the bastard is standing there waiting for her, and all her fear and desperation and anger and hatred broils to the surface and whatever glamour was cast to hide her actions is broken - blood is seeping through the white wedding dress from every now-visible wound she put in herself, every carved ancient letter (in tes, daedric obvs) in the sacred geometric invocations. something vile and black takes over, heaving up and out from her ribcage, spreading along her limbs with the trails of blood and leaving her changed - she rips him apart with hands that no longer look like her own, rips the priest apart, rips any and all wedding guests apart, rips the servants apart, til her wounds are more filled with their blood than her own.

those who managed to flee are screaming bloody murder outside, and the dawning horror that's washing over her combined with the amount of blood she's now lost means that the haze breaks, she is back in her own body rather than the grotesque, elongated facsimile of it she was in just a moment ago, and she flees, trailing blood into the darkness.

it takes her months to successfully leave the country, and she has to kill at least a few more people before she gets her shit together enough to learn how to avoid people altogether. she's exhausted and weak and terrified, and the ritual wounds she carved into herself just keep bleeding - she has to cauterize them with magic to get them to stop, making their already ugly appearance more exaggerated and permanent. her magic runs out so quickly, now, and she has no idea why - it's like it's all running right out of her, and she can only have and use as much as she can catch in her cupped hands, where before there was a whole lake, undisturbed. she can't sleep - she goes days without it, and passes out for a terrible few hours at a time only to see spindly spectres standing over her when she wakes in fits of sleep paralysis.

eventually, she makes her way to a neighboring country, and lays extremely, extremely low. every inch of her life she claws back is 95% done without her magic, because it's next to useless in those first few years after the ritual. her nightly rest continues to be fucking terrible, and she often remembers fleeting moments after sleep that seem like she's a tourist in someone else's dreams, but she'd rather remember nothing than have the vivid and extremely gruesome nightmares she sometimes has - almost all of which are centered around the wedding night, and what she did. but to her knowledge, she's never become That Thing again, and she's never killed anyone else due to it, so that becomes a weary sort of consolation prize.

then myrrha lives the next decade or so of her life by continuing to pursue knowledge and slowly building up a reputation as an appraiser and restorer of artifacts - for legitimate or illegitimate reasons, she doesn't care as long as she's paid. after about five years or so she starts venturing out on archaeological trips for clients, as well, and eventually does additional ones for her own benefit/interest. her magic is still relatively weak, and seems worse at certain times than others, but she's found no real reason or pattern to it. she learns to store extra magic/energy in mineral specimens and occasionally other objects for her to use later, and that expands her options a bit as far as her magic use goes. it's not foolproof and it's not always convenient, but it's better to have that option instead of completely running out.

she DOES want to solve her problem - she wants to 'fix' herself, rid herself of the deal she's made, but all of her subsequent attempts to contact the being that she made the original deal with have resulted in failure, up to the point that she's almost at the point of giving up by the time her father finds her and yoinks her back to her home country/morrowind.

anyway. dumb bitch but also she's valid. can turn into a super scary monster but has thus far avoided whatever cocktail of triggers that made it happen in the first place, and does Suffer from it, generally, but not in ways she fully understands. she covers her ritual scars as much as she can because she doesn't care to answer questions or be scrutinized, and also because looking at them in Full raises some bitter combination of regret and self-hatred in the back of her throat that takes days to dissipate.

#i'm refitting some tesh stuff here bc i don't really ever plan to pull tesh out of star wars #and this is already very close to how myrrha's wedding went anyway. just added some spice for more consequences later in her life #but whereas tesh is brimming with power myrrha is mysteriously emptied of it #makes u think