Native, Date (R18?)

{Slowing down chapter before it kind of speeds up again. Yuri's Spirit ritual is upon us, and it's going to start a multiple-chapter ordeal. I won't give a concrete timetable on how long I want to take to iron it out, but I want it to be perfect. Not too long though. Some R18 elements at the end, not much.}

Yuri floated silently for only a moment when he felt four souls float up from the great distance of sea and earth they were buried beneath. Three of them, colored in faint orange and blue hues reminiscent of Dovah, rose and collected within Alera's vessel before vanishing. The last was Miraak's, weakened and of some value to Yuri, but not enough to piss off Herma. He intentionally let it go despite retaining the ability to take it within the Record automatically as his follower's kill.

'Only three, huh? That damned Miraak used as much as he could to extend his cockroach existence.'

Yuri didn't even try to loot the body. He knew anything he had on him was either destroyed or not worth the effort to retrieve anymore.

Toni is better off thanks to her heart and blood composition, but is still exhausted from the Shehai and transformation strain among the physical. Alera used a lot of energy and did pretty much the same, she's a bit worse off but she'll heal just as easily. By the time they recover, they'll be marginally stronger.

"Our dealings are complete, if I'm not mistaken," Yuri led the conversation to departure.

"Before you go... do take this... as a token... of my appreciation," From within Herma, a neverending tentacle unfurled out of his underside for several seconds before it eventually revealed a book bound in the skin of every known Tamrielic race stitched into squares.

'The Oghma Infinium... why? Does he view me as his champion candidate and wish to trap me in that role? The book must be trapped, I'll investigate later even if they likely can't break past my Record.'

"Why thank you, my friend!" Yuri reached out to take the book from his tentacle and found the book to still be warm... "As a token of my gratitude, take this in its place!"

From thin air, Yuri manifested a book of his own. Colorful, whimsical, perhaps even childish, but what fascinated Herma was that the book was in a language he had never seen before! The colors of its cover were bright and vibrant, too much so to be of a manufacturing method of this era!

"Ahhhh.... You have my...deeepeeest thanks...Yuri my friend. I will investigate this tome...thoroughly."

Herma was ecstatic! He knew when Yuri died or succumbed to his ploy, he would regain the Black Books. After all, the Aurbis has a massive history of never letting artifacts stay in the same hands for long. But he profited even more than he had hoped!

Yuri let a smirk drift into his cheeks before placing the girls on a bed in the temporary home he made in Avalon and vanishing himself.

Alone now, Herma opened his newest intrigue without further delay and was shocked immediately!

The pages did not remain immobile, nay, they soared right out of their predisposed fetters and crafted from themselves a three-dimensional storytelling artifice! He did not know which creature had such a long neck while being yellow and having brown spots, but it was certainly new! Upon the flip of the page, the artifice collapsed neatly into the page it once was and a new one was born! This craftsmanship method could surely evolve into the perfect tool to surprise and entrap the next generation of ignorant readers!

It was on this day that Hermaeus Mora was introduced to the 3D picture book.

───※ ·❆· ※───

Yuri found himself hovering gracefully above a Solsteim with a more hopeful future. His ESP caught the images of fisherman along the entire ring of the island's shores, Nords on the bitter North and Dunmer in the ashen South alike. Ewok-sized and tribal Reiklings rode hogs in the snowy wilds searching for food to kill or cultural and survival items to loot while Skaal frantically wandered from crater to crater, shouting to one another and roaring into the skies...

'Oh, the Skaal. By god, they're being dramatic. I suppose I did do a number on their ancient worldview, it's my responsibility to at least extend an olive branch.'

Relying on Telekinesis alone, and without him even recognizing his development, Yuri flew at horrendous speeds across the island and reached the main Skaal settlement to the Northwest among the chilliest the climate had to offer. The barrier that was originally being used to protect their modest numbers from Miraak's/Herma's manipulations had already been lowered as many chose to scatter and search for the missing Allmaker Stones posthaste.

To Yuri's annoyance, nobody of importance in the village was present. A few people looked up to him and tried to ask either who he was or give him their own name immediately between All-Father or Deceiver. One man merely took notes. Yuri assumed that was Tharstan, the guy who was studying the Skaal and wasn't really a true villager.

Yuri closed his eyes and blasted a telepathic wave in the six directions where the villagers were gathering and looking around, bearing a singular message.

'If you want the location of the All-Maker stones, come back to your village'

Yuri set himself close to the ground and waited in meditation while hovering above the center of the village. He found this place to be a great source of Magicka, even if circulating it was easy it was still only effective for a past time at the moment. Two hours later, every single Skaal had gathered in the village and was surrounding the foreigner.

Storn Crag-Rider had asked Yuri his purpose many times, but was told to wait repeatedly until the very last Skaal made it into the village. Storn was already wary of this man, especially with his method of communication that was reminiscent of the mind control they had already suffered, but their village was a soft spot that they would sooner die in than leave out of fear.

"The last of us are here. Where are the Stones, Foreigner?! They must be purified!" Storn continued as the villagers nodded their assent.

"It's you!" Frea happened to be the last of the Skaal to arrive.

"Do you know this man, Frea?" Asked Storn, her father.

"He admitted to having taken the Stones! I did not believe him at the time, or I would have taken them from his flesh myself!"

"Is this true?!" Storn raised his voice while the villagers drew their axes and clubs more prominently.

"Indeed, though my flesh cannot give them back."

"Return them at once, Adversary!" Storn likened this Adversary level threat to the Adversary, Herma Mora himself.

"I can do that...or...I can take you to them instead."

"We will not leave our village, Adversary! Return the stones!"

"Who said anything about leaving the Village?"

*Voom!* A ward wrapped around Yuri so he wouldn't have to worry about the villagers getting any ideas while he went to work saving an endangered species.

The staff of Magnus made its way into his hand while a beam of pure white light erupted from its pointy bottom end and another from the orb at its top. The beam unraveled like a funnel over half a mile from the tips of the staff and curved back around into a current of white and air-like energy that was forming into a perfect sphere.

"What do you think you're doing!" Storn asked while Frea went ahead and started throwing her axes, which bounced harmlessly and did not ricochet into the heads of her fellow men like she didn't consider. Storn thought this looked an awful lot like their own village shield they use in times of need.

"Taking your village to the same place I took the stones." Yuri's eyes contained an unmoving yet distant gaze as his hair whipped about in the midst of the currents. For some reason, Storn knew he wasn't lying and told the villagers to back off.

"But father!-"

"Be silent, wait for the right moment to know how and when to act."

At the edge of the village, the shield wrapping visibly from above and invisibly from below connected at a hemisphere about 5 feet above the ground. Yuri was ready.

"Alright, hold on tight!"

*POOM.....FWOOOOOOOOOOSH*

A perfectly half-circle crater was cut from the ground in the northwest middle of the island, hundreds of feet deep and smooth as a bowl. With the instantaneous vanishing of so much solid matter, the air only lagged slightly before rushing into the bowl and throwing enormous drafts in every direction as it rushed, collecting enough dust to make the currents visible like waves and blowing trees close to the bowl aside. The sudden creation of a colony of tornadoes came and went in under thirty seconds.

In Avalon, over four hundred miles from the girls' location, Yuri arrived with his new natives and had to artificially make it daytime to not kill their first impression in the crib.

As Yuri lowered the village into a spot he was clearing to set down the dome, most of the villagers gathered to the nearest edge and looked out over a brand new and colorful world. Even in Storn's stubbornness, he had to investigate after they were all hollering so incredulously. And he found they were right to do so.

He saw seas dotted in islands with majestically multicolored and diverse arrays of vegetation, he saw rivers carving their way through unadulterated valleys and prairies filled with grazing herds of unknown creatures. He saw thickly crowned rainforests cascade up and down hills and plateaus that held and dropped waterfalls, mountains that could shelter entirely different climates and biomes in different altitudes, mesas that lifted secluded snapshots of tree-sized mushrooms providing wide berths of shade to strange yet peaceful creatures.

Storn and Frea couldn't close their orifices willingly, but managed to turn around and asked, "What is this place?..." far too quietly for any normal person to hear that far.

With a light jolt, their little village was flushed into a perfectly level mounting while the snow stopped exactly around their village and gradually started to melt already. They lifted their gaze after regaining their balance and couldn't believe their eyes. Just a little way through a clearing of warm-colored trees as the suns rays lit the way in angled and intermittent pillars, an outline of six obelisks could be seen.

They forgot their question and barreled through the forest while Yuri held a warm smile and dropped the shield.

Yuri took his time walking through the meadow among which birds chirped gleefully and the new people raised their voices in several different conversations, being glad the stones were back...or that they were here. When he reached the center of the area where the Skaal were petting their rocks, he started gaining the attention of the village once more without asking for it. But he used it anyway.

"For those of you who are unwilling to stay in this land with the stones, say so now and do not regret your decision. I will not hold anyone hostage."

"Where is this land, exactly?" Motioned Nikulas, a young man who had been eager to leave the village his whole life but couldn't muster up the courage to leave his mother Edla behind till she had passed on.

"This is my realm, and you are the second group and the fourth people to touch its soil. My two lovers and I made this realm to live freely and for our own purposes, but I wouldn't mind letting people inhabit the lands. It is far too much space for us to use alone anyway."

"...So besides us and the three of you, there are no humans here? How is that possible? Where on Nirn did you take us? What is a realm?" Frea fired off questions repeatedly, getting scolded by her father for a lack of patience yet he insisted on the same questions in a less direct approach after.

Yuri smiled and paused for dramatic effect, before letting it out: "You aren't in Nirn anymore. This world is mine, new and completely untouched. I made this world with my own hands."

"You used the breath of the All-Maker to shape a new world!!!" "Or perhaps he is the All-Maker..." "Don't be ridiculous!" There's no civilization here anymore?!"

Yuri had enough of the cacophonous noise, so he asked again, loudly, "If you wish to leave, say so now. I will not hold you here against your will."

Tharstan the foreign scholar was the first to say that he didn't agree to leave everything he knew and loved. He was sent out immediately.

"Can we make this decision later?" Asked Nikulas.

Yuri somewhat remembered that guy's backstory, so he promised to ask one last time before it was too late later.

The rest were not eager to leave their stones and new land. Some of them were already stripping due to the warmer weather. Storn himself was a man who knew when to change his ways as necessity demanded, and his visions of the realm on the way down helped assure that the values the village held of being close to nature would be even easier to realize. At the end of the day, he wished his village would prosper and hated when one of them suddenly died in the cold while simply fetching firewood.

"Forgive me for calling you Adversary earlier, Realm-Maker. We will stay," Storn addressed Yuri, then looked back at his flushed and brightly smiling villagers grouped together and ready to make a stand into a new world. Storn returned their smiles and looked back once more. "We will keep our old homes and make new ones among them. We will live and coexist with this new land." He too cast off his burdens and his heavy coats as he let his silver hair flow freely.

Yuri spread a gentle smile highlighted by the basking sun's rays, then his visage scattered into cherry blossoms and spread with an even gentler wind. For a while, only the birds could be heard until Frea broke the silence.

"Maybe... he really was the All-Maker?"

───※ ·❆· ※───

Yuri recollected his petals into his shape in a basic yet large and ancient Spanish-style stone building. In a bed with a golden frame and a luxurious mattress fitted with sheets of thin white silk linens and a canopy of golden rods and ornate stylings fitted likewise with see-through white linens, two enchanting women curled up to each other and had managed to release their armors in their delirium to attain some comfort. His ever-filling RP was well spent on this bed.

He pushed aside the canopy as he dressed down to his barest elements and Alera's eyelids fluttered awake to his presence. An enchanting and weak smile joined her upward curving eyes and she took his hand before bringing it to rest on her face.

"Did we win?" She whispered.

"Magnificently, my disastrous dragon girl," He affectionately palmed her cheek and rubbed her face.

"You promised..." She looked up to his line of sight with a glimmer of expectation.

"And I am more than ready to fulfill it. Where do you wish to go? Anywhere in Nirn, I can take you for our very first date," He dropped down to sit beside her on the bed in the empty spot inside her body curl. Toni's eyelids fluttered awake before she smiled peacefully and shut them again. It was finally time.

"...Here." She said softly yet firmly.

"...Hm?"

"Here! There are very few places as beautiful as Avalon and this one is ours! We haven't explored it to the fullest yet. I want to picnic across as many lands and seas as we can run in a single day!"

Yuri loved her idea. Even Toni decided to ask for that too, later. He could vaguely feel any part of Avalon to place something but he hadn't appreciated every part of it or gotten a real closeup look to familiarize himself.

"Give yourself a day to recover, and then we'll do exactly that!" He pressed her button nose with a kiss before moving to the other side of the bed and taking the lips of the pretend sleeper for himself, then excusing himself to let them actually rest.

A day and a half later, Alera was ready to depart in the early morning and after some mild flirting while Yuri assured her that he was ready to wine and dine her the whole way around the world, she suddenly took off in a full blitz through the forest.

Yuri smirked to himself, reminiscing about their first kiss happening this way, and started a fair and spell-free chase after her.

Alera stopped and hid behind a random tree while waiting for Yuri to pass her so she could switch directions, but Yuri stopped as well. She knew he wasn't using ESP, how did he know she stopped? The approaching footsteps as Yuri crunched leaves through the forest made her heartbeat skip faster and faster before an arm reached around the trunk and pulled her to the other side of it. She yelped gleefully as he pinned her to the trunk once more facing him.

"How did you do it?! Cheater!"

"When your heart beats into your throat I can't help but hear it," Yuri smirked and closed into her face, pressing his lips into hers to take his prize.

Ally let him take it for a blissful few seconds before forcing herself to push him off and grow a mischievous face, bounding into the forest all over again.

And so the date went, frolicking through jungles where the hollering of apes resounded and two human-shaped blurs tore through after each other or over mountaintops covered in dense snowcaps and hibernating beasts of epic proportions. Ally would either intentionally slow down to share in his prize or wait in a windy or loud area to wait and ambush him to take her own. Every few hours they would catch their own meal in an area that they felt like eating from while garnishing it with drinks and desserts from the Exchange. Giant shark-like beasts would be pulled from the depths to be cooked and joined with tropical fruits and exotic vegetables, game and cattle would be chased down in a joint effort to plate with smoky cheeses and rich beers, eggs of massive predatorial birds squatting on cliff faces would be prematurely gathered to accent caught fowl and sweet bread treats for a late breakfast.

As the sun was setting, the couple had made their way to a jungled cliff with a scenic waterfall to their immediate right. Yuri cast a small muffling charm so the noise of the roaring waters couldn't distract as much as the woman with binoculars about six kilometers away perched on a mountaintop overlooking them could for him. Glady, Alera seemed ignorant of Toni's voyeurism.

They had been hand in hand for hours now after their game of tag turned into a brisk and romantic walk. Their relationship seemed to have taken the whole step forward to completion as they both gave details about their past lives before their meeting.

"Thank you, Yuri..." Ally stated slowly but deeply, as if she meant more than just today, the date.

"For what, exactly?" But Yuri wanted details.

"...For bringing me into our family, for giving us this world, for changing my Fate for the better, and for promising a never-ending journey. I had thought my world ended back then at Helgen, even the few days before, but you built it back up and brought it higher than I could've imagined. I'm not wary of immortality anymore, I want my life with you and Toni to never end. I want this world to never end. We can do it, right?" She looked back at him.

"We can do anything. But do what, specifically?" He teased.

"Haha, we can build a new life, a new everything. We can cross worlds unknown like your examples and always have a home to come back to here, we can stay together no matter how far and wide we travel." She stated with confidence all her hopes that lay amidst her insecurities about eventually leaving everything she had ever known. Possibly for good.

"I can't promise that our relationship won't change, but that's because it will grow. I can't promise that this world won't change, because that is how you build. I can promise that no matter how far we travel, we will always be together and this world will never leave us. You are bound to me, to Toni, and I to the both of you, and her to the both of us. I'll never let that change," Yuri moved his Sigil to the left hand and rested it on her right, to which she then moved her own as the Gold and Blue overlapped to make an emerald green that matched a good part of the trees below them.

And from there, they shared a soft and very still kiss. They refused to move, resting their lips between each other in comfort for several minutes. They didn't know when they grew restless and when their tongues joined the picture, they didn't know when Ally put herself below Yuri and dragged him to the ground above her, they barely registered the fluid momentum when their hair intertwined and their limbs softly embraced each other as they rolled in the lush vegetation.

Their joining wasn't the least bit aggressive, they didn't push or pull, they moved with each other gracefully and barely made noise, they nourished each other instead of biting and breathed peacefully between the slow, deep, and tender dives their tongues took in the wet and warm caves.

Their clothes drifted off like water from a duck's back, their bare skin brushed each other softly as the moonlight contoured their perfect bodies. From above Yuri overlooked her flawless skin and guarded her like a powerful tree. Gently and gradually he entered her, softly she whimpered momentarily and stopped Yuri's healing hand to accept and relish the pain. With a tear of joy, she accepted him lovingly and with loving and relishing strokes he made sure she would never regret that night which they coronated the mountain beneath them.

{Full R18 chapter for her later, not next}