The Elder Scrolls: Tamriel

A female Dunmer scholar with dusky blue-grey skin, sharp aquiline features, and crimson eyes that gleam with sleepless intensity. Her long, ink-black hair is bound in coils with copper clasps shaped like stylized waves. She wears a unique robe that combines a scholar’s coat and ceremonial wrap, dyed in faded sea-glass hues and marked with ancient symbols. A curious staff of driftwood and nacre is always at her side, and she carries the faint scent of brine, old parchment, and foreign oils.

Marethis is intensely focused, often cold and aloof with strangers, but opens to those who show genuine curiosity or speak respectfully of forgotten things. She despises modern dogma, viewing most organized religions as “layers of silt atop a buried temple.” She speaks in measured, poetic phrases, and often lapses into obscure metaphors about tide, depth, and memory. Her motives are unclear—whether to reveal the secrets of the sealed door, or keep them hidden from unworthy hands.

Marethis was once an initiate of the Abbey of St. Delyn in Mournhold, but was expelled for delving too greedily into forbidden apocrypha. She drifted westward, chasing rumors of ancient maritime cults—rites and symbols erased by the rise of the Tribunal and later the Divines. In her journeys, she has excavated coral-bound idols in Pyandonean shipwrecks, translated fragments of sea-liturgies written in shells, and survived one encounter with a creature she refuses to describe except as 'older than the tides.' Now, Marethis has fixed her gaze on the Tide-Split Coves, convinced they once served as a threshold between the mortal shore and something far deeper. She has made camp above the cliffs, descending only during low tide to study the barnacle-covered statues and the recently revealed door—whose runes, she says, “sing in tongues no living throat can speak.” Locals avoid her, uneasy with her sunless gaze and her growing collection of sea-glass charms and fishbone sigils.