Speaks-With-Bones

Speaks-with-Bones hails from the deep Black Marsh. She does not consider herself a necromancer, as she believes that the magic that manipulates dead bodies and that which manipulates souls are two distinct things, as her tribe considered the bodies of the dead abandoned husks, which should be put to use to honor their former occupants rather than let them rot, as a last way of providing service to their community. She has since learned that this is not a common belief in the rest of Tamriel, and is a bit more circumspect with her reanimation magics now than she was upon first arriving in Murkmire, several years ago. Typically, she will use animal souls for her magics, if one is required, or a daedric for more intelligent constructs. The latter is usually only for short times however, as she does recognize them as intelligent an releases them shortly after, none the worse for wear. She refuses to do anything with intact black souls, but if a soul has already been torn apart, much like the body she will make use of its shards to at least honor its sacrifice.

Due to her natural abilities, before she left her Hist tree and tribe she was trained as a gravesinger. Though she still will perform her duties as such if they are needed, there is not much call for Argonian rites for the dead outside of the Black Marsh itself.

During her adventures across Tamriel, she discovered books, and finds them fascinating. While she still has a tendency towards letting the past be forgotten like all Argonians, she values the memories of the living, and books are like memories shared with others. Fiction however is her vice, if she were to have one, as the idea that someone could just -make up- memories for entertainment confounded her, and she quickly became a fan of the Investigator Vale series.

She also sees little difference between the Daedra and the Divines - the Divines are better only in that they keep their noses out of your business, but both are just powerful beings better left alone, unless they have something you want. Despite that however, she's found herself caught up in their macinations a few times - most recently with Hermaeus Mora, though his plane of Apocrypha was quite fascinating to her.

Currently, when not out travelling, she has claimed a path of swamp on the coast of Glenumbra to call home. The stone hut may be falling apart, but it serves her well enough as shelter and a place to keep her things, until it eventually falls apart, as Sithis teaches all things must. The only regular visitor she receives is a fellow Argonian named Sharp-As-Night, whom she helped with some very personal things, and grew fairly close to in the process - though only the future can say if anything more will come of that.

Lastly, she does have a construct pet, made out of bones to resemble a dragon. It contains the soul of an old pet of hers, but she accidentally made the bonding magic too strong at the time, so she does not know when or even if it will finally fall apart, and she refuses to intentionally destroy it and potentially destroy her old pet's soul, despite it "only" being an animal's soul.

Speaks-With Bones was originally born Xulveeka, a prodigy gravesinger for her tribe deep in the Black Marsh. There, she discovered a gift for communing with the dead themselves. Primarily, she used this gift to assist trapped souls in returning to the Hist, such as by completing the gravestick that they could not, or separating them from the bog blights they had become trapped in.

Her tribe often made use of the dead's remains as well, much in the way of the Naga-Kur of Murkmire. Eventually though, her curiosity got the better of her, and she began experimenting with repurposing the entire skeleton itself, imbuing it with an imitation of life - after making sure it was truly empty of course. These seldom lasted long, but for one: an experimental construct resembling a miniature dragon, utilizing a sep-adder as the base, and imbued with the soul of the same.

The Elders grew uneasy with her progress, but a passing nisswo(a priest of Sithis, after a fashion) was fascinated by her magical techniques. At his urging, they consulted the Hist, which granted the council a vision. Though the Elders afterwards refused to speak of its contents, Xulveeka was informed that her destiny lay elsewhere. A Hist-amber crystal was fitted to her staff, so that their Hist would always be near, and when the nisswo left to continue his travels, he did not do so alone.

During these early travels, she met several dryskin travellers, and got into a few sticky situations alongside her nisswo ally. After one particualrly harrowing encounter, the ojel she saved granted her the moniker and name most non-Argonians know her by: Speaks-With-Bones. As it was much easier to respond to that than try to convince them to use her birthname, she kept it, eventually growing used to it as they neared the destination where the two travellers would part: Lilmoth.

Upon reaching it she was quickly drawn into the events leading to the rebirth of not only a Hist tree, but the entire tribe that had once served it. With such a great honor, she could have simply returned back home, but rumors had caught her ears while in town, and after asking her Hist's blessing through the staff she bore, she left to take ship to the Gold Coast and seek out this Dark Brotherhood that sounded so like the Shadowscales she knew. Unfortunately that trip was cut short by worm cultists, who took her to Mannimarco's execution table.

Being reborn in Coldharbor was disorienting, and even more so being seperated from the Hist. For the first time in her life, she was truly alone, but before she could succumb to depression, one of the soul-shriven started a jailbreak. Joining up with them, she escaped back to Nirn, landing off the coast of Auridon of all places. There, she was recruited by the Queen's Eyes despite her... questionable origin, and she agreed as there was nowhere else to go. Ultimately, events led to an assault on Coldharbor, and a strike at Molag Bal that freed many souls, including her own. And while she did not find her actual corpse, she did finally recover her so-very-important staff. With the staff reclaimed and her soul whole, she was at peace... at least for a short time, before she recalled her original journey.

This time she made it there without issue, and her talents even proved fruitful to the Brotherhood as they sought a culprit assassinating their own number. The actual work of the Brotherhood was useful, in that it could often bring about necessary change, but by the time the ordeal was over, Speaks knew it was not for her. It as around that time that she heard word of Dragons having awakened in Elsweyr, and now she had a new goal to investigate.

The series of events there would have made quite a telling, but her part in things was not especially well-known, by her choice. Becoming famous would only constrain the river she swam in, not to mention after the past year or two, she felt she needed to just find some solitude to re-find herself. So decided, she slipped away during the celebrations, and headed off in a random direction, not particularly paying attention at first until she was well on her way to.. somewhere.

Eventually, she found herself on the edge of what was calling itself the Daggerfall Covenant, though she did not know this at that time. What she did find was an abandoned hut that she could sense yearning from; a desire for someone practiced in the Arts to claim. Claim it she did, and over several weeks transported the various oddities she had gathered in her travels. It was far from the Marsh, but it still felt very much like home. Though there was no Hist, she could still feel a renewed connection to her tribe's tree through the swamp itself, when calling upon the hist-amber in her staff. It would do... for now.

Not long after, she received a strange letter, attached to a book she had been seeking. Accepting the invitation therein, she found herself caught up in a machination of Hermaeus Mora - a very old one. The Prince of Knowledge had hidden some great secret that he claimed would bring ruin to all of Tamriel(though Speaks suspected it was only a matter of his self-preservation), and he offered access to Apocrypha, and to not meddle in -any- of her affairs as long as she aided him. A Daedra Prince always keeps their word, if only to the exact letter of it, and it was a powerful enough incentive for her to finally agree. That chain of events afterwards led to the discovery of a lost Daedric prince, but for the moment, reality(or at least Mora himself) was safe. It was more than worth it beyond the books alone, however, as it allowed her to meet Sharp-As-Night, a fellow Argonian that she has started to develop some sort of feelings for. She suspects the same of him, given some of his correspondence, but given the trauma he had gone through in regards to a former Telvanni slavemaster, she is willing to be patient. If he only wishes to remain close friends in the end, well, that is enough for her.

Speaks was created in 2019 with the release of the Elsweyr chapter and necromancer class in Elder Scrolls Online. Inspired by the new lore in the Murkmire area, and in particular the attitude of the Dead Water tribe towards the bodies of the dead, I came up with the idea of an Argonian from the deep Black Marsh with a similar attitude, and blending in a dash of the Witch Doctor class from Diablo. When I got to actually try and make her though, I found her name was already taken, and had to settle for Scatters-The-Bones for a while, though I did eventually manage to find a way to get her original intended name, which she has used since.

Leaning into the Diablo Witch Doctor vibe, I originally created her with black scales and the skull facepaint option, but then in one of the crown crates, ZOS released a skin based on the Dead Water tribe, a black iridescent skin with much more detailed scales, and a perfect fit for Speaks. On using it however, I found I couldn't use both it and her facepaint, which led to the idea of her eventually realizing it was making others uncomfortable and ditching it at least part of the time, except when performing her ceremonial role as a gravesinger, or other similar appropriate times.

I ended up making her my Aldmeri Dominion vestige, given her relationship to the Elsweyr content, as well as the Dark Brotherhood, and more recently the proxy of fate for Hermaeus Mora. As I had expanded her character, I found she had developed a liking for books, with the Investigator Vale books being a guilty pleasure. Speaks also became my designated antiquarian, despite the usual attitudes of Argonians towards the old - this was because of how much she valued memory and remembering for others. The past is still the past to her, but as long as you remember something, it is still alive, in a way. Finally, I set up the exorcised cottage in the Glenumbra swamps for her. While it is a ways from the Black Marsh, it felt like the kind of place she might call home when not traveling.

Her most recent development, besides the deal with Herma Mora, was gaining Sharp-As-Night as a semi-permanent companion. Besides both being Argonians, his attitude seemed a good compliment to hers, and she had also already become my main fisher, which was Sharp's main pastime. If ZOS ever does add the proper romance options they teased us with in the past, I may very well make them an actual couple, but we shall see.