I enter the Arboretum District of the Imperial City through the sewers drainage system. I had prepared myself for the worst, but it was worse. As thick smoke bellows from fires all across the district, daedra roam the streets unchallenged, and the stone buildings crumble strewing rubble across the once pristine avenues. These botanical gardens and the libraries of the Imperial Academy were once the aspiration for scholars from all across the empire. For what more can one ask but flowers at ones feet, a book in hand, and the stars above. After-all what is a book but a garden of words, and what is more joyous then the touch of a page and the feel of a petal; except perhaps the whisper of a lover.

Yet the scholar’s utopia has turned to horror, for the smoke that now cascades above the district comes from the daedra’s attempts to eradicate our very history and culture by burning every book they can lay their claws upon. It is folly of course, for you cannot erase a peoples identity by burning their libraries. Our culture lives on through the people. From parent to child, bard to patron, priest to congregation, teacher to student, we pass down our stories, songs, traditions and folklore from generation to generation. It is something the immortal daedra cannot possibly understand, for their culture is doomed to never grow, never cultivate. Indeed, they are enslaved not by their princes, but by their own immortality.

And for that same reason is why we humans should never tolerate being under the yoke of the long lived elves. They are a stagnant race, you can see it in their architecture. Beautiful though it is, it has not changed, not altered, not advanced for thousands of years. If an elf sits atop the Ruby Throne then our own advancement would become smothered and restricted, and we would lose our capacity, and our advantage, of innovation and invention.

We manage to save what few documents we can, including one book the daedra were not attempting to destroy at all. Realising the importance of the ‘The Sublime Brazier’ the quick witted Chief Archivist managed to scramble the text of the book with a distortion spell as the daedra broke into his libraries. Once I had reclaimed it, and it was again deciphered, we discovered it describes a relic the emperors once used to light the Dragonfires that kept the daedra from entering our world. Since the daedra are here in increasing numbers and long it has been since Akatosh blessed us with a Dragonborn emperor, I was under the impression the Dragonfires had been forever extinguished. I shall pass the book onto the Drake. Perhaps the Dragonguard might discover what danger the daedra believe this Brazier holds for them… or for us.

S.K