Skyrim: The beginning of Aria's journey

Aria grumbled under her breath as she continued to walk down the forest paths that led deeper into Falkreath. As an Imperial, blessed by the Divines, it had been easier than she expected to make her way not only into Skyrim but through it.

Despite that, she still had to work for her meals, she still had to pay off her lodgings, and she still had to sleep in the Helgen stables. Never mind that she had once been a noble of the house of Polusus. Let us not mention that she was the daughter of Jirotav, a man of royal descent and an esteemed advisor to the Elder Council. No, let us not mention any of that, nor her birth name. Riavolia. Even thinking of her own birth name made Aria shudder.

She hadn't known, of course. She hadn't known at the time that her father was not only responsible for her grandmother's death but also for her mother's illness. She hadn't known, she couldn't have known. Aria had been kept so sheltered and secluded, only being allowed to learn how to be a noble lady. How to be a pretty little trophy for some royal or noble to buy off her father when she came of age. She had barely gotten permission—at her mother's insistence—to learn how to defend herself, to study at least some magic, both to heal and to harm. So she knew a little of that, enough to defend herself, but no more. But she hadn't known about her grandmother... nor had her mother.

Aria's mother, Cassia, had been ill for so long that Aria barely remembered a time when she hadn’t been weak and pale, coughing fits wracking her frame until she was bedridden for days at a time. Her father had always looked worried, always seemed to be in some degree of pain when he saw Cassia like that. But Jirotav, it turned out, had actually been the reason for his own wife's illness. All because she had once threatened to leave him, to take Aria with her after a fight of trivial significance.

Jirotav had always been a selfish and possessive man, the way some hoard wealth or power. He clung to Cassia not out of love, but out of a need to own, to control. He would have burned the world down just so she had nowhere else to go but back to him.

Aria's grandfather, Septimus, had been a different kind of man. He, too, had been fierce, a force of nature unto himself. But where Jirotav’s love had been a cage, Septimus’s had been a shield. If Juliana, his wife, had ever asked for the world, he would have burned it to bring it to her feet, not to trap her within it.

That was the difference.

And that was why, when Juliana died, Septimus had become something terrible.

Jirotav had underestimated the sweet, older woman who was Aria’s grandmother. He had assumed that because her husband barely let her out of his sight, she was powerless. That she would never find out what he had done to Cassia. But she did. And more than that—she confronted him. She threatened to take Cassia and Aria away if he didn’t stop. 

That was why she had to die.

Jirotav made it seem like a tragic accident, a cruel twist of fate that not even her husband would suspect. And he might have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for one thing: Juliana had been careful. She had left a letter within a stuffed toy she gave Aria soon after her confrontation with Jirotav, explaining everything.

Aria mourned her grandmother, but her grandfather had been inconsolable. He had gone from a vibrant, active man to a hellstorm of death and destruction. Septimus had once been a Spellsword of the Legendary skill. He had traveled all over Cyrodiil, slaying and destroying as he both commanded and pleased. Only Juliana had tamed the beast, only she had quieted the fire that burned in him. It had been her music that had calmed him, her kisses that had soothed him. And now that she was gone, there was nothing to hold him back.

He nearly destroyed the Imperial City itself as he meticulously dissected and annihilated the entirety of the underworld in search of answers—because he had no doubts. Someone had murdered his beloved, and he would find them. But even as years passed, even as his daughter begged him to stop, he wouldn’t. Perhaps he couldn’t. And eventually, Cassia succumbed to her illness.

That was when he found the letter.

Juliana had left it in the one place she knew he would find it. She hadn’t thought it would take him years to visit her vanity, to finally touch her things again. But once he did…

There was no stopping what came next.