I- I don’t know how. It happened so suddenly.
*sob*
It came out of nowhere. One day, it was sunny, and warm, and cheerful, and the world was kind. and then…
And then…
Well. You know what happened then.
- Transcript from an interview with Angel Casey, circa 2000
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She wakes slowly. Her eyes shift behind closed eyelids, her hands move through thick liquid, then-
Freezing.
Her eyes snap open at the sudden shock of cold air, goosebumps raising all along her unclothed body. She shivers and pulls herself into a ball.
“C-c-cold,” She chatters.
After a few minutes, the cold is no better, and she forces herself to get moving. She doesn’t quite remember why she’s here, or where here is, or anything at all really. She tumbles out of the tub she’d woken up in, winded by the minor exertion.
"Ugh, fuck," She groans. Head spinning, she sits up and spies a pair of cabinets opposite her. After a moment to let her head settle down, she stands up and walks over to them, head lowered against the chill.
One of them opens to a mostly empty now tank, of a purple liquid. The liquid is glowing, a light pink-purple. Weird. For now, she’s cold, and doesn't have time to explore it. Maybe she’ll have more luck in the other cupboard.
She does.
“Clothes, thank god.” She mutters. The cupboard only has one set of clothing, a forest-green tunic, a brown jacket to go on top, and loose brown pants. There are also two belts, one that fits over her shoulders and one that loops around her waist. A pair of tan boots rounds out the ensemble.
Now clothed and marginally warmer, she’s able to fully appreciate her surroundings. She’s in a cave. There are lines, glowing with a soft purple light, forming runes and swirling patterns on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the cave. Same purple as the tank in the other cabinet. Probably related then.
There are a few tables dotted around the room, and the cabinets she’d opened before. There’s also a central… tub, where she’d woken up. It’s a raised square-ish container, with bits of a viscous purple liquid on the edges of the tub.
She walks over and runs her finger along the tub's edge, gathering some of the liquid on the tip of her finger. She sniffs it, then puts it in her mouth.
"Oh god- Fuck," She gags, spitting and dragging her fingers on her tongue to try and get the taste off. It didn’t taste bad just…overly familiar. LIke she'd done nothing but eat that for years. She shakes herself, and decides to go look at the tables. One of them has a mess of papers surrounding a few books. Curious, she picks one up.
“Daedran and Their Origins.”
That first word…she feels fear at that. A deep, all consuming fear. Just seeing the word makes her feel…hopeless.
“What’s a Daedran?” She mutters.
She decides to read.
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Daedran are a creature populating the island of Calamite, a bleak and damp rock deep in the North sea. They're a creature shrouded in fear and mystery, and we know very little about them. We don’t know where they came from, when they began, or what they are. We don’t know if they can think, or what they would want if they do.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
So what do we know?
Daedran are a species native to the island of Calamite, and have never founded colonies outside of it. They did not always exist, with no records of them prior to 300 years ago, and seemed to appear suddenly. They are beings that feed on magic and, it seems, fear. They are unstoppable, unkillable, and inevitable.
This text is an attempt to understand how these creatures came to be, where they came from, and what they are. We will delve into theories of them being the creations of ancient Mages, a magical by-product of rituals, demons, and even the reapers of Death Itself.
Do not discount any of these theories. One is as likely as the other, and at the end of the day, we do not know.
And I hope we never find out.
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The book is fascinating. Daedran, it seems, are shrouded in mystery. They’re cloaked beings of immense power, or perhaps immense inevitability, and they aren’t stopped by anything. Not stone, not magic, nothing except for certrum, a liquid that glows a different color depending on the observer. It’s the only known substance that can stop a Draedan, though it is not as indestructible as they are. It's a source of immense power, but it will drain away if contained for too long.
She thinks she knows what the liquid of the cave is.
But she’s gotten distracted, and she doesn't have time for this. The lights, the certrum, has noticeably dimmed in comparison to what it was before, so she has to finish her exploration of the cave and then leave it.
That prospect was…terrifying, to say the least, but she had time before she would be forced out.
In the meantime, she sticks the book in one of the pockets of her jacket. It disappears with no lumps, the pocket falling flat again. She moves on to another table, and finds no papers, no books. Instead, there’s a pair of scabbards.
One is big, twice the length of her arm and about as thick, though it isn’t round. Another is much smaller, with a one-handed grip, and it’s about the length of her forearm. They’re both straight, square, simple things, with only a metal casing around the top of each for ornamentation.
The smaller one makes a hiss as she pulls the scabbards off, a sound that makes her very excited. The sword, is made of a deep black metal, the edges blunt but something about it makes her very wary of touching the edge. There are symbols etched in the material, and when the blade makes it all the way out of the scabbard they light up a soft purple.
She yelps and drops the sword, the lights disappearing the moment it leaves her heand. She frowns and bends down. Touches the blade, and nothing happens. Touches the handle… it lights back up again.
“Huh, that’s nifty.”
She puts it back in the scabbard, and when the metal casings touch there’s a flash of purple light and then the glow subsides. Her clothes have a clamp on her side that would fit the smaller baton, and one on her back that would fit the larger one. She clamps them on. It feels…natural, instinctive, to do that.
She looks around the rest of the cave, but there’s not much more to find. Under the table with the swords on them there’s a box with dried meat and other preserved foodstuffs in it, which she puts in her magic pocket. There are a few more books, and a few loose notes, but it’s gotten too dark for her to read them. She puts them in her pocket for later.
As the lights dim further, she prepares to leave her little world. The cave had been kind to her, for all that she’s only been there for a few hours. She sighs, and hesitantly walks towards the exit. When she gets there, she's met with a blank white wall. She pauses, a thought occuring to her.
Then she draws the small sword. Who’s to say what’s out there, huh?
She steps forwards into the white and-
…n
..an…ear…e
..awn
…elp
…I-we-all
…eed…ou
…elp
D…
…awn
…dawn
…Dawn
…DAWN
HELP US
I-YOU-WE-US-ALL NEED YOU
DAWN
BRING US HOPE
BRING US AN END
BRING US RELEASE
TODAY, A NEW DAWN RISES
Dawn’s feet crunch on frost and dead leaves.
And she doesn’t know why, but that makes her very, very scared.