"Every Strand" author commentary pt. 3

[allekha]

Chapter 8:
AKA the CSI: Mournhold episode. I had a lot of fun writing this one, so I hope people had fun reading it! A lot of the poison-related detail is inspired by both the in-game alchemy system and some real chemistry (thank you to everyone who wrote the Wikipedia pages I cribbed off of), though I didn't feel the need to stick too closely to anything from real life since it's a fantasy world.

it's been kept in the heart-fold of his robes, the one made where his collars cross
'Heart-fold' was my made-up term for this thing that is called a futokoro in Japanese - it refers to how when you wear a kimono, where the collars cross at the chest, you get a kind of pocket (I assume the same is true for the kimono's ancestor, hanfu, and other forms of dress derived from it, but I'm only very familiar with kimono and only speak Japanese). There are various idioms associated with the term related to people keeping their money there (in addition to knives and paper and whatnot) and with it being near the heart, which was seen as the center of emotions and thought in old times. So between that, Voryn (eventually) being tied to a different Heart, and trying to make up a term that wasn't too confusing, I went with 'heart-fold'.

their code, too, was a rather amateur choice and not one that would defeat even the least experienced of Dagoth spies
I have to say, one of things I liked about writing this chapter was having Voryn's comments about them screwing up various aspects. Obviously, when he plots to murder someone, he does a much better job.

you said there is no simple way to detect most poisons, is there?
There are spells, which I'm sure your cooks use, but they are unreliable outside of basic cases, such as when a forager has mistaken certain common mushrooms for a poisonous lookalike.
I went with the in-game 'cure poison' spell and what not as being a simplification for gameplay purpose. There might be an in-universe arms race between people trying to invent spells that detect more esoteric poisons and people developing new poisons that can't be detected so easily.

Similarly, he had long ago advised her that most advice nobles believed about protecting oneself from poison was nothing but pointless rituals; better to place a piece of godsblood on an altar to Mephala than to make one's cutlery from it, for example
At least in Europe (which is where most things I've read about historical poisoning focus on), nobility was historically terrified of poison and came up with all sorts of protective measures... while slapping lead on their faces (which could also contribute to them getting rickets!) and eating magical-looking mercury. From what I've read, there's actually not much in the way of clear stories of poisoning cases, for all the worry. Was someone fed the wrong mushroom on purpose, or did they simply get sick? Other accounts stop at 'X was totally poisoned and died' with no details. Anyway, making cutlery from something very special and magical seemed like a reasonable anti-poisoning superstition that might pop up in-universe.

their supper: fresh fruit and kwama eggs still in the shell, items that are difficult to poison
A servant brings him plain saltrice porridge
Apparently one habit to avoid getting poisoned was eating bland food, so that spices couldn't be used to cover up the bitter taste a poison might have.

It's the kind of color seen in the lovely cinnabar crystals in the mines near Red Mountain, the ones that look like drops of comberry wine frozen into a mineral.

One of the Indarys has bought vermilion recently, one of his spies noted.
The beautiful red crystals of cinnabar, which is ground to make scarlet/vermilion pigment, are full of mercury.

the wine reacts again with an essence of luminous russula
Luminous russula and noble sedge flowers both have the generic 'poison' alchemy effect.

which cause digestive problems and a rapid heartbeat
Real poison inspiration: nightshade and digitalis/foxglove

The wine is made from grapes; while those aren't cultivated in Vvardenfell, he knows that they, like many common foods, can be made into a poison by a very skilled alchemist.
Why is 'damage health' an alchemy effect (usually the last one, hence 'very skilled alchemist') of so many foods in Oblivion? With apples I could see it being a reference to the minute amount of cyanide in the seeds, but I've got no idea for most of them.

Their derived poison can cause dizziness and even seizures
Real poison inspiration: water hemlock (which is in the same family as some common food plants)

Scathecraw extract turned blue
Real not-poison inspiration: anthocyanin acting as a ph indicator - a lot of foods rich in them are red, like scathecraw.

indicating that the wine was meant to cause weakness and vertigo on top of everything else
Real poison inspiration: poison hemlock - the part about it reacting with the wine is totally made up by me, though (and when Voryn poisons people, he chooses more carefully than these amateurs, thank you very much).

it is Voryn who delivers most of it, lending it credence by his reputation
I ran with the 'spycraft and diplomacy and magic' stuff in this fic (like some other fic featuring Voryn), but while it's not surprising that we learn basically nothing about the original House Dagoth given that they're the villains, it would be nice to get something as basic as what their "theme" was. We have the line "the treacherous diplomacy of the subtle House Dagoth", but that is written by a character living four thousand years later, albeit a dissident priest who has slightly more access to suppressed information.

his cheeks and ears have an odd redness to them, his legs do not quite move in synchronicity with each other as they should, and he wobbles as though struggling to balance
Real poison inspiration: mercury poisoning symptoms

Red skies will reign night and day, and blight will choke us! The four corners of violence and madness will cover Resdayn!
Pfft, like that's ever going to happen.

Chapter 9:
This and chapter 8 were a little tricky for me to balance - chapter 8 is plot-heavy, and this one both follows up on the plot stuff from there and has more focus on Almalexia and Nerevar, but I didn't want to entirely drop the Voryn & Nerevar throughline for two chapters or push it in a way that distracted from the concurrent plot. I ended up focusing mostly on the plot in the first draft and then going back to add in a couple more hints at the slowburn.

And I ought to reward you for saving our lives!
One of the reasons why I couldn't stand to finish In the Shelter of the Pine, a historical diary by a woman whose husband was close to the shogun, was just how much time it spent on nauseatingly lavish gift exchanges on every possible occasion. I feel like 'you just saved our lives' is a very good reason to reward your friends and 'you condescended to visit little old me' is not, and this is one reason why I would probably not make a good politician.

of course those mushrooms trap the air horribly
A lot of the Morrowind interiors feel claustrophobic to me, especially since they tend to lack anything like real windows (although lighting mods help), but while Redoran and Hlaalu architecture does manage 'cozy' for me sometimes, Telvanni towers just look damp, lol.

supposedly it was the candles
One can even poison cloth with enough persistence
Did Voryn miss the poisoned incantations because he skips out on going to the temple, or did the Tribunal come up with that one themselves? 🤔

I kept asking for his help on the small decisions like the plates at the wedding dinner, as I was hoping I could arrange everything so that nobody would be offended or slighted in some way, and he thought I was simply decorating. That he was being kind and letting me have the wedding I wanted by telling me I could pick it all.
Not about a wedding in particular, but I have definitely heard of communication breakdowns where one partner keeps going 'oh, you can choose!' to everything because they think their partner cares more and will have fun choosing everything, and their partner starts to hear 'I don't care and I want you to do all the work'.

The description of Almalexia's parents' symptoms pulled in part from descriptions of hat-makers with chronic mercury poisoning.

It seems likely that your headaches are caused by your incense
I like incense, but breathing in smoke isn't the greatest for you, even when it smells nice. (And who knows, they might have been sensitive to a particular ingredient in that incense as well.)

Chapter 10:
I know that the Dagoth dyers are justly proud of their deep, robust blacks and charge accordingly
A good black dye was historically expensive and difficult - I once saw a museum exhibit that was about the multiple steps and dye baths that black cloth produced in that area had to be put through.

It's simpler when you're only discussing the magicogeometric connections between animating enchantments and conjuration spells
I had to make him a nerd based on how Ash Vampire Tureynul is in the fortress with Kagrenac's library :p

Initially I struggled a little bit with why they were meeting in this chapter; once I came up with 'census', I spent more time than I probably needed to reading up on the history of census-taking to make sure it at least sounded plausible. (Hey, the Nords did a census even earlier in canon, the Chimer can be thinking of doing one, too.)

There are a handful of Chimer merchant families who live near the market chamber, at least part-time, most of them trading in cloth, which the Dwemer seem to prefer to buy rather than weave themselves.
I sometimes wonder what the Dwemer daily life was like when they weren't cooly steampunking about, especially if I'm in one of the more underbaked ruins. What did they eat? Was it the same as the local Chimer? Did they have a different cuisine even if they did start with the same ingredients? They have lots of mystery machines, yet I don't see a single loom (which were an early step in computing in our world) or any other tool used in clothing production, but we know they wore clothes?

Perhaps even sweeter because you are the only one of our friends to still call me by my full name.
You know, I wrote all 50k preceding this line with this idea in mind, and when I was editing, I went, wait, did this ever actually come up in the fic at any point? Voryn used his name in dialogue somewhere, right? (Yes, in the chapter before this. So at least once, lol.)

Thinks, feeling acutely every hot pulse of energy that seems to run down his body: Fuck.
:)

I was very excited to finally post this chapter. And thus ends, more or less, act one.

Chapter 11
though by tradition such things are best kept secret until the child is presented to the ancestors.
I think some form of delaying naming a baby (at least "officially") is/was fairly common in a lot of cultures, and I liked the idea of tying it in with the Dunmer ancestor worship.

Because it is not terribly unusual for nobles of any kind to take on several spouses
I went back and forth on this piece of worldbuilding a little bit. It's pretty clearly not the case by 3E, but you know, it's been a few thousand years, I can see it falling further out of fashion. (Sorry, UESP-as-of-writing, I do not take Vivec's nonliteral account about the founding of a religious order to be evidence that polygamous marriage was totally accepted in Dunmer society and just quietly left out of the game because it was 2002.)

Voryn and his mother's conversation was the hardest part of this chapter for me. Part of it was that I didn't want it to feel too much like a normal conversation with the living (even though we do see that with TES ghosts).

in the worst case, there will still probably not be war even if the alliance between their people breaks down
The case: eventually gets much worse :(

though somehow I never got so nervous speaking in Dwemeris
Differences in emotional valence when speaking in one's native vs non-native language is a well-studied phenomenon, though maybe it would also create more of a difference if you're immersed in a culture that favors 'logic' more than religion. (Getting off the track of the fic a bit, usually the difference is described as emotional words feeling stronger in your native languages/being able to be more rational in your second languages, but I recently read an article about Shiori Itō where she describes making a documentary about her sexual assault, and for her it was easier to talk about her experience and emotions in English because she doesn't have the cultural barrier she has in her native Japanese.)