Chapter Text
When Tsimzani was told she was being sent back to Morrowind, she said, "Then drop this one off at Old Ebonheart, please. Tsimzani has business there." She smiled sweetly, with her fangs covered.
But the official had never met her before. He stood amid the smoking torches of the Imperial City Prison flinching from the distant skitters of rats, in a robe that had never yet known a patch, his Altmer skin sallow. He was a man who sucked lemons for fun, Tsim thought to herself. "My orders," he said in a wispy bureaucrat’s voice, "are that you will go to Vvardenfell. Now shut up and follow me."
She followed. Tsim wasn’t about to compromise her newly-offered freedom. If they were going to Vvardenfell, then they were probably going through the port of Old Ebonheart. She would run away before she ever got on the boat, she promised herself. She would find Mirr, though the trail was four years cold.
It was a long, boring journey. The carriage was small, but at points they picked up new passengers, convicts being moved from one prison to another. Tsim was patient. She sat cross-legged and felt the shape of the road beneath her. She had waited the whole twenty years of her life for freedom, and she could wait a little more.
She smelled Morrowind as they crossed the border: the deep earthy fragrance of tree-sized fungi; the sulphur-and-sweat scent of kwama mines; the perfume of flowers she’d forgotten she loved. Timsa-come-by, she recollected. When she was a kitten, she loved them so much that Mirr had teased her by calling them ‘Tsim-sa-come-by.’ Even in the bumpy carriage she heard the haunting call of silt striders.
She’d thought, as the carriage rumbled over cobblestones and she heard the roar of voices that meant they were in a city now, that she’d get a chance to run. She never imagined they’d walk the horses up onto the boat to deliver her into the unfriendly arms of the imperial navy.
They threw her in the ship’s brig. Tsim’s ears fell as she heard the key turn in the lock.
She scrabbled at the door, trying to tear off the lock, but the other prisoner, a Dunmer—stronger than he looked—yanked her by the collar of her prison clothes and pulled her back. "Settle down there, kitty cat," he said, not unkindly. "There’s nothing you can do."
Tsim panted, but shook off his grasp. "This is wrong," she said, to him, to the door, to the gods. "This is all wrong." She needed to get out, she needed to find Mirr!
"Sure is," said the other prisoner, settling back down into his straw nest. His manacles clanked. The ship creaked and rocked. Tsim wrestled inwardly with disappointment for a long time, her panting loud in the ship’s hold. In time, as the ship rocked more forcefully in open water, she curled up and went to sleep.
The dream came on slowly, as though she were blown along a wind. Below her she saw twisted landscapes through a haze of red: spiked rocks, strange crimson flowers, thorny roots roiling upwards from black soil.
She was looking at her hands, and they were like the hands of a mer, clawless calloused things, pale. Where was the spear that belonged in them, and the sword—not her own thoughts, and yet hers all the same.
The smell of roses filled her nostrils. The sky turned over, as if the world were an hourglass. She tumbled like a comet past Jode and Jone, where the stars clustered into the sands of a vast silver desert, sparkling.
Tsimzani felt Her, Azurah, at the end of all things.
Fear not. You have been Chosen.
"Hey now, wake up little cat." The Dunmer prisoner was shaking her, his rough hands gentle. She came awake slower than her wont. Was it because she had felt the distant mother Azurah, or because it had been so long since another person touched her without cruelty? She was not alarmed, exactly. She stared up at his red eyes and felt relieved. She wondered at this relief. She had no reason to love or trust Dunmer.
"You were dreaming," he was saying. “You were screaming, for a time. You’re safe now. What’s your name? I’m Jiub."
"This one is Tsimzani," she said.
He took his hand from her shoulder but gave her an encouraging look. "I heard them say we’ve reached Vvardenfell."
They had. It wasn’t long before Tsimzani found herself in a warm pleasant office blinking up at the tidy official Socucius Irgalla, who placed her and Jiub in the chair across from himself. He gave them strong tea and three miraculously soft biscuits each, and while she sipped he asked her questions as his quill scratched.
She was being released.
They were releasing her.
She was going to be free.
"And your parents, you … didn’t know them?"
She swallowed the last biscuit just about whole. Her parents? "This one cannot tell you about them," she said. They were long dead. She knew their names but she was reluctant to share. She knew they’d come from Elsweyr, and they had been slaves. She did not want to give their special names to this clerk of the Imperials. The Imperials had stolen her freedom from her and replaced it with a second slavery. Her parents’ names would not be written down in Imperial records, left to moulder in some crate. She would write them down someday, herself.
She would write of them, and of her sister Mirr, and of Zan'athad who had given his life to save all the kittens born at the Nileloth Plantation. Free names, written by those who loved them, to be cherished and passed down through history.
"Uncertain parents," said Irgalla to himself. "Very good. Now, the letter that preceded you mentioned you were born under a certain sign. And what would that be?"
When Tsimzani was a very small kitten, she thought everyone was born under a specific constellation. Mirr had a sign, Tsim had a sign, and she was told their mother had a sign, too. Tsimzani always felt close to the Tower, as if it were a special fortress just for her: a place she could wander through at will, a hundred hundred doors she could open with a touch. As a kitten, she’d set many of her imaginary games in her imaginary Tower. She repressed a smile, but her ears flicked with pleasure as she recalled the feeling of safety she’d conjured for herself long ago.
He wrote ‘the Tower’ down in his scratchy secretary hand, and pushed papers into her hands. He turned his attention to Jiub, while she was waved on to the next room. Then there was a horrible interview with a tall Imperial in uncomfortably ornate armour. He talked at her in a way that made her feel like a little slave kitten, and gave her even more paper.
Then that was it. She was standing outside, and the air stank of swamp and buzzed with clouds of gnats. Seyda Neen was an uncomfortable, soggy place in the middle of nowhere. She crept out onto the pier and watched the ship that had brought her drift away, too far for her to reach, back to the mainland where she should be.
Suddenly she felt heavy. She thought freedom would feel light. She thought it would feel like running. But it wasn’t clouds passing over the sun that made her shiver. She had ‘freedom’, but if she were here, and Mirr were somewhere out there, on the mainland where they had been born, then she was just in another, bigger, prison.