In all the years I served in the Imperial City I never once visited the Nobles district. It’s not that as a common soldier I was ever barred from visiting here, it was just not somewhere I ever wanted to visit. I held no aspirations to ever live amongst the rich, or to be considered a noble. Growing up in rural Cyrodiil the nobility weren’t people we respected or admired, they were more ridiculed, and sometimes pitied. You see our opinion was that people who live with an abundance of wealth seem to get lost somehow. They don’t have to worry about their next meal, the holes in their shoes, or affording necessities like medicines. They worry about nonsense like spirituality, happiness and relationships. Their lives are comfortable, vapid, and stale. We are meant to be hungry, it is what drives us to endeavour, to achieve. When you are wealthy you no longer hunger, and your life becomes so stuffed full of little things that there is no room for anything great.

I meet a stout Redguard woman stalking the Nobles district hunting daedra in order to sell their parts to alchemists and traders. She says that the Legion Zero have been hindering her movement through the district of late, and so she has been unable to bait her Ogrim traps with ‘fresh’ Daedrat meat. I question whether she could build a trap large enough to capture one of those bulky, lumbering monsters, but she claims only to want their fingers. She asks my aid, for payment of course. “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay” she calls it. Profiteering I call it. Although perhaps not of the same repugnant nature as that of the Crossroads Profiteers in Craglorn. The difference I suppose is that Brihana’s exploitation aids our cause, even if our motives are not shared. Perhaps she dreams of earning enough from this tragedy to one day live a nobles life… comfortable, vapid and stale.

S.K