Found deep within the Great Forest of Cyrodiil the Pothole Caverns were thought to once be used as a mausoleum by the curious Ayleids. Now it is but another hole full of wicked necromancers of the Shadowed Path Cult. Here again they laboriously search for that nameless relic which they believe will enable them to finally conquer the Imperial City and all of Cyrodiil in the name of Molag Bal. That is some lofty ambition for a cult which nobody had heard of before the falling of the Dark Anchors upon our realm.

So how has this Shadowed Path Cult grown so swiftly to become such a threat is such a short span of time? Why have so many seemingly flocked to join a cult which values them little more then disposable tools. They willingly sacrifice their own personal ambitions and stories for those of this cult. Surely when these people were growing up they had the same ambitions as the rest of us? Perhaps they were idealistic and wanted to change the world. Or mayhap their aspirations were a little more modest and they just wanted to get married and have kids, perhaps learn a craft or open their own stall. Yet now.

Somewhere along the line these cultists discovered that life was in fact harder than they thought. Perhaps they felt like flightless birds out in the wilderness, looking back and realizing that none of the trees behind them were getting smaller and none of the trees ahead were getting bigger, they sought an easier story to follow, one being written by another’s quill. In life there is always the right path, and there is always the easy one, but there is also always the downright foolish one too.

The truth is that if you are being approached, or invited to join a group of people who are intent upon destroying the world, they aren’t calling on you because you are brave or special, but because you are stupid and gullible. They know that you are foolish enough to believe their highly reductive, easily expressed, definitive sounding phrases, that reduce you into a primitive, mindless tool whose thoughts are easily and directly converted into deed. Soon enough you’ll forget what is right and wrong, and become capable of any evil, whilst at the same time being incapable of seeing it as evil.

Men weigh other men by their ambitions, the cult weighs men on their lack of it; the Divines however will weigh us all solely by our stories.

S.K