Still-Born Shout [#wattys2017]

Chapter Sixteen

Julius Patrinius was born to his destitute mother long before the Great War ravaged the land. By the time the Aldmeri Dominion invaded Cyrodiil, he was well past the prime of his life.

As a child, his mother had given him all that she could afford. His father had been taken by sickness long before his birth, leaving his mother to raise him in the sewers of the Imperial City. There was a small population of beggars that lived beneath the streets, beneath the splendor of the White-Gold Tower, and he grew up among them. They did everything they could to adopt him into their assembly; they taught him the ways of survival, eating the charred bodies of rabid sewer rats and sleeping in ditches along the walls, so that the Emperor's guards might've missed them during their patrols. It was a pitiful existence, but it was all that Julius knew, and he took shelter in it.

Until his mother died, she did all she could to inform Julius of the Patrinius family's unfortunate fate.

At the time of the Oblivion Crisis that was so well known across Tamriel, Julius's great-grandfather Silas Patrinius had been a loyal ally to Uriel Septim, carrying on a tradition the Patrinius family had established hundreds of years ago when the Septim Dynasty began. The legacy of their family was, and always would be, to serve the Dragonborn; to protect them, advise them, and sacrifice their lives for them if need arose. The Patrinius family knew that the Dragonborn were the direct descendants of Akatosh himself; to refuse to serve a noble descendant of the Nine was not only treason to the Crown, but treason to the Nine as well. Refusing to serve a descendant of the Nine meant a direct path to Oblivion.

At the time of Uriel Septim's assassination, members of the Mythic Dawn sought out his allies and did everything they could to erase them from existence. Knowing that his son and his daughter would be murdered as well, Silas sent them together into the Jerall Mountains to make passage into Skyrim's southern border. Silas's daughter and son were separated during the journey (Julius's mother did not specify how or why) and his son was slaughtered. However, his daughter Uriella (named after His Grace himself) was able to hide out with a group of monks in the Jerall Mountains until she heard that the Oblivion Crisis had ended with Martin Septim's death. Distressed by the news that the Septim Dynasty had come to a bloody end, she returned to Cyrodiil. Potentate Ocato had taken on the Imperial Throne as the Emperor de Facto and had severed all ties with the Imperial families that had supported the Septim Dynasty. His goal was to usher in a new era of peace, which he effectively held, but that required banishing some of the more radical supporting families from their positions as nobles.

With that, the Patrinius name was wiped away.

Uriella tried to sell everything they owned, including their lavish manor, but eventually there was nothing else for her to get rid of. She did manage to marry one of the lesser nobles and birth three more children, two sons and a daughter, but was forced to leave when she realized that her noble husband was extorting from her all that she had left to her was her name. With three young children and nothing left to the Patrinius name, she left the capitol.

One of those three children was Julius's father. In fact, the only surviving child was Julius's father. Sickness and diseases were rampant among those who had neither the money nor the skill to craft remedies for them. They were quick to spread among populated areas, and since Potentate Ocato had opened the borders to refugees from the secession of Black Marsh, Cyrodiil was more populated than it had been in hundreds of years. Uriella's youngest two were taken swiftly, one by disease and the other by raiders. She and her teenage son Camello were forced back to the security of the capitol, where she took residence in the sewers beneath the White-Gold Tower.

The beggar community there was friendly and welcoming to Uriella and Camello, and Uriella lived out the rest of her years beneath the streets of what was once her home. Camello was left to carry on the Patrinius name and legacy. He met Julius's mother among the members of the beggar clan and quickly fathered a child with her. Their first child perished. Their second child was Julius; but Julius's life costed Camello his own.