At the Pelin Graveyard, one of the largest cemeteries in all of High Rock, the dead are rising from their graves. One would have thought Bretons would have learnt to burn their dead by now, or at least stopped burying them with their weapons. But then something is very different about this necromantic attack from the ones I’ve witnessed before.

For a start, where are the necromancers? The Reachmen, for the most part, have been driven back into their mountains to the North, and by all reports the Seventh Legion are still consolidating their newly won position at the Bangkorai Garrison. And besides, to raise so many, so quickly, in such a vast cemetery as Perlin’s would require an army of necromancers; yet I have seen none.

And then there is Prince Adrien. The son of King Eamond who fell beside his father fighting the Reachmen at Northglen. He has not just risen, he has been resurrected, fully sentient and hearty, almost as if he had never been dead.

A mysterious voice in the royal crypts makes claim that Arkay himself is responsible, blessing the Prince to rise again to lead an army of the Undead to avenge his bloodline. Remembering what I was taught of the Divines as a child, and my experiences with the Arkay priest’s Marnest Barclay and Alvaren Garoutte in Rivenspire, it is utterly inconceivable that the mortals God, who champions the natural journey from birth to death would countenance such an act. And yet, and yet both Prince Adrien and his guardian Dame Valyrie Spenard are swift to accept it as true.

I’m beginning to learn that people are willing to believe in the most outlandish notions, despite them often flying in the face of all rationale like an agitated Cliff Strider, because they are desperate to believe in something, anything. The biggest fear we have is just not knowing. It is how so many cults flourish across Tamriel, because they offer people an explanation for their miseries that neither the priests of the Divines, nor society cannot. When you are an ugly man you do not worship the Divines for their beauty, you blame them.

S.K