Zan: Case Report, by Alaanay Fenimar
This is a bit of morrowind fan-fiction i wrote a while ago and never got around to finishing. Zan is the only character that i managed to finish the game with, including the 2 expansions that bethesda released. This is a sort of run down of events as seen by the agent who was sent to watch over her.
well anyway, enjoy
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Alaanay Fenimar (Blades internal spy)
Case Report
Name: Zan (described herself as non-aligned when queried regarding family name)
Profession: stated Adventurer, have not been able to get a more detailed answer.
Race: high-elf
Mission: detailed to watch Zan after reports of her “odd” behaviour by local Blades members.
Log Entry 1
This is a case you don’t see very often. Zan is one seriously demented young elf. She’s nearly totally psychotic, unaware of her lycanthropy and thinks she’s perfectly normal. Out of respect for my fellow Blades member I have refrained from drawing locals’ attention to the fact that she is the beast that has been plaguing the towns these past few months.
From what I can gather from sources and patching clues together Zan’s psychosis began the day she killed the merchant in Balmora. The killing was unsanctioned and unreasoned. As much as I can figure it played out something like this:
Zan needed a little extra cash and decided to sell of some of her excess baggage. One of the items happened to be an extravagant robe she had pulled off a dead body outside Seyda Neen. So there she was in the shop, handing it over as normal, when soon after the transaction she noticed the merchant wearing the fancy robe. Jealousy flared. She tried to buy it back off him but he refused to sell so she hacked his head off, right there on the shop floor.
She still wears the robe on occasion and if you look closely, as I have, you’ll notice the blood stains that have never fully washed out. As far as I can figure this was the first sign of a madness that would only worsen as the days progressed.
Log Entry 2
Now, don’t get me wrong; Zan preformed diligently in all the factions she joined. She rose rapidly to the lead of the Mages, Thieves and Fighters guilds and also the Morag Tong and House Hlaalo. She was truly amazing, surprised everyone. What could the odds have been of an outsider doing so well in hostile Vaardenfell? But then it turned out that she was the Nerevarine incarnate. No wonder she excelled at everything.
It couldn’t have been an easy fact to swallow, though. I think the realization hit her a little too strongly. Imagine being told one day that the hope of an entire province rested on you? Imagine how she must have felt. Uncertain would not even begin to describe it. She must have felt alone, strange, massively unsupported. The obvious next step was to turn to skooma, moon sugar and living on the edge to bury the feelings within her.
She hauled off to the great metropolis of Mournhold for a time and immersed herself in the seedy gangland of the sewers and ancient ruins of the old city. Not to join the gangs, but to kill them. She was a weapon unto herself, accountable to no one. Wiped out scores of the buggers, and all the while relishing the kill and the gore and the bloody satisfaction. Her only saving grace was that she always refrained from killing innocents or locals.
Log Entry 3
Too soon it was back to Vaardenfell province where the battle for Red Mountain was about to re-enact itself. The bickering among the houses and their lack of faith in this outsider female calling herself the Nerevarine seemed not to affect Zan as much as it might have done before her trip to Mournhold. She passed all the Ashlander tests and rites with minimal difficulty. It seemed that her little rampage in Mournhold had sorted her problems, cured her dementia, absolved her psychoses. The defeat of Dagoth Ur went exactly according to plan, ho hitches or hiccups.
No one actually knows what came to pass in the Chamber of Akulakhan but as the days after the defeat of Dagoth Ur grew longer Zan’s eyes grew more sunken and drawn, her demeanour more eccentric and antisocial. It appeared that she had saved the people but at the price of her own sanity.
She turned back to the drugs, becoming completely addicted to moon sugar, unable to function without it and the effects of withdrawal bringing her to her knees after just a few short hours. Then one day the clouds broke and light shone through in the form of a break away from everything.
Log Entry 4
Solstheim, a new country, a new beginning, a chance to leave her problems behind and start again. For a while everything was perfect. People liked her again, people who had never heard of the Nerevarine or its surrounding prophecies treated her no differently than anyone else. People saw her as an equal, well capable of helping them set up a new colony. She was a person that they desperately needed. She managed to hide her addiction from them and over time she came to depend on the drug less and less.
Everything was perfect. But perfection could never last in this harsh outskirt of civilization. One evening Zan became entangled in a series of events that would shape the rest of her life. I lost all track of her for over half a year as she underwent her transformation into lycanthropy . I would catch glimpses here and there of a were-wolf pack, but could only guess at which one she might have been.
There were many rumours about the return of the great Deadra Prince Hircine, but none were confirmed until I once again happened to track Zan down. She had managed to swim back to the mainland and was hiding out in the Gnisis hinterland. She was mostly naked, using the Spear of the Hunt as a prop while the Hircine Ring glittered on her finger. Obviously prizes accorded to her by the Prince for surviving his hunt.
Log Entry 5
I think that was the last shock. By night she prowled as the vicious beast, killing humans for their precious, bloody sustenance. Then every morning she would wake dazed, naked and unaware of where she was or how she got there. By day she wandered the four cities of Vaardenfell, aimlessly adrift, a person who had lost her reason for being. Her life had come to a confused and enchanted end.
And the beast? Well, I think it is developing a conscience. Some nights it howls pitifully at the uncaring stars and eventually just curls up behind a rock to wait for morning. I think, vaguely, in the back of her mind Zan realizes she’s the beast; the beast realizes it is Zan and both suffer without ever being totally aware of the other. Two sides of the same coin, forever destined to share the same path but, like the difference between the sides of the coin, forever in different forms.