Through a large cavern beyond the Westwind Lighthouse, a solitary vampire can be found at a beach-side camp. The reclusive Klaandor Axe-Bearer possesses a journal in which he contemplated his final days of mortality. ‘I pray someone slays me soon’.
I wonder, if I knew the ‘blood-curse’ to be my fate, would I have the courage for self-slaughter to save others from me? Or would I hope that I could display the same strength of Verandis and Gwendis to repress blood-lust, and become as a fulcrum for a world that abhors my very existence?
When a young man back in Cyrodiil, I would have those heroic daydreams that all young soldiers have, of sacrificing the summer days of my youth for a noble end and would even carry a hidden bodkin to avoid the odium of a lingering death. But perceptions and attitudes age with the skin. Now I meet old soldiers who grip with fervid desperation to the last moments of the gloomy winters night.
It was the unusually long-lived Breton scholar Ciara Santeanu, who wrote in her final year, ‘Time has been my most treacherous companion; my most generous friend, my greatest teacher, and my most honest critic, but now turned my unsympathetic executioner.’
S.K
The Tamriel Drifter 