Barenziah's bastard?

(Sent to people on “Royal Hlaalu family is interesting” mailing list)

My reputation as expert in matters of former royal family of Morrowind has no doubt reached far and wide as evident by strange visitor I received a week ago. This shady character wanted to hear my opinion of book called “The Nightingales Volume II”. It’s weird to receive second book from the series but the stranger assured me that I don’t need to read the first one. So slightly reluctantly I started reading.

It was nothing but hogwash! According to the book the famous Nightingale who seduced Queen Barenziah wasn’t Jagar Tharn but rather his servant, some bloke called Drayven Indoril. Like in other sources Nightingale seduces Barenziah and steals the Staff of Chaos. The book even references The Real Barenziah -series but mistakenly says that these events occurred in the 9th volume while in fact it occured in 4th one. This on itself should say something about research abilities of the author but I still kept reading to see how much worse the book could get.

I didn’t have to wait long for that to happen. You see, Barenziah got pregnant. She gave birth to a daughter, Dralsi, and then the Queen promptly abandoned the child with midwife. This is unrealistic in so many ways. It’s a historical fact that right after the theft Barenziah indeed got pregnant and bore a child but the father was Symmachus and the child was Helseth. For Nightingales Vol. II to make any sense it would require that Dralsi and Helseth were twins. In that situation why would Barenziah decide to keep one child and abandon the other. How she could have even decided which to keep? Eeny, meeny, miny, moe? And knowing how much Helseth resembled Symmachus I have hard time believing even hypothetically that his real father was Drayven Indoril.

Still I persisted even when with each passage story made less and less sense. At some point Dralsi learned the true identities of her parents. How? Never explained. Presumably the midwife told her but even then how would she know who Drayven was? Long story short Dralsi found her father, become thief like him, got married, had a daughter of her own, told this story to the author and finally died.

To be honest this story sounds exactly like something sad orphan girl would come up with. “I’m secretly a princess! My mom is Queen Barenziah and my dad is cool thief. But not Jagar Tharn because he’s EVIL.” However Dralsi must have kept her childish views to her adulthood to even tell this story to the author. I wish that this whole book was just fictional tale even if it isn’t presented as such. But just in case it’s fictional I have some choice words to the author. If you want to write believable story of Barenziah’s bastard write about the child she had with Jagar Tharn. The one that was mentioned in The Real Barenziah Vol. V and of whom we never heard of again. Simple as that.

In conclusion at the best case scenario the book is nothing more than historically incorrect fiction but at worst scenario Nightingales Vol. II is a sad story of childhood delusions and desperate attempts to cling to them. And somewhere out there there’s Dralsi’s daughter who believes all this. Poor girl.

Yesterday the mysterious stranger returned to hear my thoughts. I explained all I’ve explained here and she just said: “Figures.” After she took the book back she disappeared. Indeed very mysterious.

-Gabberton Everet