One wonders how the Blackcaster Mages Guild were able to secretly master their control of the atronachs that aided their purge of Elinhir without the blessing of the Celestial Mage. Perhaps it was here in Balamath, hidden away from the rest of Craglorn in the ruins of an ancient Ayleid citadel, where the Blackcaster conjurers are able to experiment and practice free from scrutiny. There is certainly something suffused about this place; the air about feels charged and fraught, whilst atronachs are free to roam across the hillsides.

An old book found in the open ruins, the Glorious Balamath, muses poetically about the elemental temper of these ruins. Some have speculated that this place my well sit atop a convergence of some sort of elemental ley lines. It has oft been theorised, yet generally dismissed as hokum by the court scholars, that we mortals share the same energy, elements if you will, that makes up everything from a blade of grass to a great Wamasu. And that when we die our elements dissolve one by one into the other and return to some primordial pot awaiting to be recreated anew. By such hypothesises have scholars clashed quills like blades and spilt ink like blood for millennia.

What even this laymen can see however is that for these conjurers the control of the elements seems to share much the same effect as does moon sugar upon the back-country Khajiit. It appears to fill them with an almost spiritual exhilaration. And just like the skooma-addled it abstracts them from reality, and the more they indulge the more liable they are to drown in their abstraction, and eventually all that will be left of them will be but spellfiends in the desert wastes.

S.K