Travelling through the southern Alik’r, I discover the crumbling vestiges of an ancient temple deep in the eastern Tigonus. There are no signposts to direct you to these secluded ruins, and no map will tell you that this is known to only the few as the Tears of the Dishonored; because this is the shame of the Redguard.

These cursed grounds serve only as an open graveyard for the bodies of those thought beyond redemption, the disgraced, the sullied, the dishonoured. Their dead bodies are dumped, unwashed, unconsecrated, and unburied. Redguards who in punishment for crimes they committed in life, are denied passage to the Far Shores in death.

Remains of both women and men lay all about the ruins in varying states of decay, their exposed limbs sun-blanched and distorted, the dank, putrid smell of their rotting corpses hanging so heavily that even the jackals refuse to dine here. Instead harpies and buzzards gather in the air about to pick and squabble over the freshest of the cadavers.

The only other visitors that the residents of this graveyard receive are the Hagravens seeking fresh additives for their vile concoctions, and the ghosts of those denied their journey to the Far Dunes, howling injustice upon the desert winds.

These are criminals condemned in the name of honour, killed in the name of law, and damned in the name of justice. For the Redguards, honour, law, and justice are the homefires around which their colonization of Hammerfell has been built, yet sometimes smoke from those fires can becloud the eyes of even the most wise, and the innocent can be condemned as guilty.

Is justice best served by condemning an innocent person to eternal damnation, at the risk of saving a guilty one from the same fate? Is it not enough for people of the desert to punish the guilty by forfeiting their life, or have they now usurped their own Gods by deciding themselves who is worthy of making the journey to the Far Shore?

In the Alik’r the unconsecrated dead have developed the rather unpleasant habit of rising again of late. Bury them all I say for the sake of the dead… and for the sake of the living.

S.K