"Every Strand" author commentary pt. 6

[allekha]

Chapter 16:
After close examination, their investigators conclude that the carriage was tampered with.
This bit was inspired by reading about some 18th/19th century carriage crashes. None involving tampering, though, just things like poor maintenance and alcohol.

Every politician must wear a half-dozen faces, yet Nerevar's range is startling.
Another headcanon about what Nerevar's charisma may have looked like.

You prefer finding the truths of the world in other ways, I know....
This line came out of me writing Voryn as not being super impressed by visions in this fic, but thinking about how House Dagoth has a third eye motif both all over the place in present-day Morrowind and in their House banner (which presumably was the same in 1E), yet also had an association with the Dwemer (whose ideas about spirituality are a little ??? but the general implication is that they didn't really worship gods). The third eye is usually associated with spiritual enlightenment and supernatural powers like seeing visions or seeing things that are hidden to others, although also with being able to perceive the wider truth of reality without being hampered by preconceptions. I had the thought that maybe in the pre-Red Mountain House Dagoth, it symbolized a more mundane kind of enlightenment and seeing what others don't, and its meaning changed later, as it did with the ash statues in this story.

He's at her side in an instant. "She left one of those fucking statues again," Almalexia half-sobs through gritted teeth.
This scene got rewritten slightly because I thought it was too similar to the Lake Amaya scene, and Almalexia ended up angrier as a result.

She has taken to leaving me these tiny kwama queen statues. For fertility.
An animal that lays lots of eggs and lives in a big hive seemed like it might become a fertility symbol.

But people like the myths, even when they know they're false stories. And so many people believe them that they're nearly history, anyway.
You can even make up a bunch of stories about you and your besties and maybe put some poetry in, and if it happened long enough ago, who can say they didn't happen?

Even more awful things about Vivec
People being awful about you because you're clearly a commoner of some flavor and yet you rose to one of the most powerful positions in the country? Even more reason to write stories about how cool and smart you are, right?


If I had ended up dividing this + the follow chapter into three, the third one mostly would have consisted of the bits about the coronation debate. At the time (it expanded in editing) it felt a little skimpy to be its own chapter, and I was more concerned with the chapter-wise pacing of the Nerevoryn plotline.

(Also, does the timeline for the coronation technically line up very well with the time that's passed in the fic? Eh. It felt like long enough in fic-time, and that's what some of the vague time skips are for :p)

Chapter 17:
they have invited kings and lords and skipped over powerful women like Almalexia. Having an Empress for a founder was apparently not enough to disabuse them of old traditions
Obviously, I'm making the leap for this fic that Almalexia was not even invited in the first place as opposed to not attending for some reason... but sure enough, everyone important enough to bother mentioning as attending is a man.

The letter scene was one of those that just popped into my head as I was writing the fic rather than being in my outline originally.

Nerevar giving Voryn the soul gem and Voryn showing it off are cannibalized from another fic I never got around to writing. I don't think I had decided whether Nerevar was trying to woo Voryn in that one or if they were in an established relationship.

A moment later, the dremora inside the gem lets out a hushed cry, and they both crack smiles at the sound.
This idea is from the mod Sounds of Souls, which I recommend to make soul gems creepier.

You mentioned in your letter that recall spells become difficult to cast at large distances.
They may not have any strength range in the game, but it seemed reasonable for fic purposes that maybe it's harder to teleport halfway around the world than halfway down the block.

It was a lot of fun writing the description of how enchanting works.

it always useful for people to know that the leader of a House is an emblem of everything it stands for and not a figurehead
One of the pieces of advice I received for writing the kind of everyday medieval-ish politics that are shown in this fic is that if a clan/group is known for some kind of skill or craft, the leader probably needs to be a master at it themselves, which makes sense. I guess we often hear about that in the context of military skill.

"It's nothing," Nerevar assures him, "just thoughts. How I can best assist Ayem in preparing for the summer. Who to take on the journey. Things like that."
:) just thoughts :)

Chapter 18:
This one made my chest hurt to write (usually a good sign), and I gave it an extra editing pass; that is something I usually do to more difficult/important conversations, and that's essentially the whole chapter. (It also morphed a few times over from the original ways I imagined it, in part because I don't remember dialogue as well as action.) It was gratifying to see how strongly people reacted to it! Hope you all enjoyed signing up for that angst tag.

There are also a lot of callbacks to previous chapters in this one.

Nerevar doesn't move as Voryn casts it.
This was meant to imply that he trusts Voryn so deeply that even in the middle of an argument he knows Voryn won't hurt him (or actually try to hit him up with a manipulative illusion spell).

When Indoril has started to suggest that girls shove themselves at me when I'm gone from her, trying to get young widows with a child or two to seduce me [...] How am I meant to have you without hurting someone who is already suffering so badly because I can't give her the child she wants?
I've heard they've been trying to get her to sleep with whichever poor young man they think has a chance at her, which is bad enough already.
I purposefully had Nerevar only point to things that are happening to him/frame it as his fault.

Their argument was always planned to be in two parts, but Voryn going to find Nerevar to get from part one to part two was a later addition.

And if I had to share you with Ayem, that was no matter to me – have any of your other friends as well, for all I care—
I do like seeing the 1E characters in a happy (or maybe not so happy lol) polycule in other fic.

"Yes," says Voryn. "Hair does that."

Endus raises the scissors and begins to cut.
I actually don't tend to like a lot of Dramatic Haircut scenes (although there are a few I do), but this was one of those times where it just perfectly fit.

Chapter 19:
It's thick with marshmerrow, so it might do some good.
Out of curiosity, I looked up whether anyone has done a halfway decent study on marshmerrow marshmallow root, from which we get the original version of the candies, and coughs, for which it was an herbal treatment. I only found a few nice examples about how to lie about studies or "studies" even when you link to them to make your point look legitimate.

You remind me too much of your mother
Other scenes where Voryn's mother comes up have him putting her on a bit of a pedestal, so this was meant to be a contrast to that.

Their party is just large enough to make propylon travel almost too unwieldy
Can't make the magical transporter too convenient. (I wonder why they seem to have fallen out of usage? Were there just never many of the indexes and people lost theirs over the years, did the locations become irrelevant or were they always out of the way, or what?)

Chapter 20:
who has found himself a basket full of mud apples to stuff himself with
My mental image of these was the fruit equivalent of a mudcrab.

Voryn ought to sit to Nerevar's left, since Almalexia goes to his right
The sinister side! (But actually I was just thinking that right = weapon side for most people, seemed appropriate for Ayem.)

once he insinuated to Almalexia that she had slept with Sil, and he's lucky she took it playfully
"Seht had divided himself again" is one of my favorite lines from the 36 lessons. Oh, again, as he does. Just gonna casually imply that Ayem's cheating on her husband in a nice selfcest threesome and that they got some real pro tips.

If you have no real symptoms, then unless there is anything you are suspicious of, perhaps there is no real need for testing
Sorry to everyone hoping for season two of CSI: Mournhold 😔 I did originally have the idea that Nerevar might hand over some of his hair or blood, but it didn't feel like it fit the flow of the scene. (Also, I know they have magic, but both hair and blood testing for poison seems to be a very recent technological development, so it didn't feel like it fit the setting, except maybe at the magical level of something like that one Skyrim quest where you need to fake Dwemer blood. I'd head about the Marsh test for arsenic, but it's not clear to me how much of a sample it needed or how long it took to develop other tests.)

Supposedly, foreign alchemists have even made curative potions of the hair from sufficiently holy people, although I find those accounts dubious.
Things like bones or a lock of hair being held as a reliquary with supposed magic properties is not uncommon across various culture (and ESO includes references to this from what I've read on UESP). But also, in Daggerfall, saint's hair was an alchemy ingredient whose effect was cure disease.