I discover the Water Spirit of the Halcyon Lake is stealing her disciples memories in order to create her water stone. The memories will be lost to them forever, making her followers, both free-willing and forced, little more then the automatons of the Dwemer. Hermaeus Mora is little better. He claims not to care for the individual yarns of mortals, only the tapestry that they weave. To both the nereid and the daedric prince their followers are but sheep, cattle and guar.

Lorelia holds self-preservation above all else, even nature, she possesses neither compassion nor comprehension. Knowledge and wisdom are two separate things; anyone can gain knowledge, but one needs to gain an understanding of it. This nereid can see only what her mind is prepared to comprehend and that is why she must be stopped.

As for Hermaeus Mora, today he may get to keep his precious knowledge hidden, but it is always present. It is only a mater of time before it is found by thirsty mortals minds, or perhaps one day the insatiable desert that Lorelia is trying to stop will devour these ruins and his forbidden knowledge will be lost forever; what need then will Tamriel have for Hermaeus Mora.

It is with glorious irony that I entered the halls of Bisnelsel on a fine sunny day, and yet emerge just as the rains of a storm began to fall.

S.K

This once majestic city was thought to have been built equal parts above and below the Halcyon Lake by an Ayleid clan who fled north from the great slave uprisings of Cyrodiil early in the first era. Their ruler at that time was one Laloriaran Dynar, who would later become known as the Last King of the Ayleids; that very same ‘Ayleid king’ I met on the haunted battlefields of the Glenumbria Moors.

Some time after the city’s founding however, cultists worshipping the daedric lord of fate and knowledge, Hermaeus Mora, would rise up against Dynar’s ruling family and drive them from their own city. Thousands of years later, and now the spiritual successors to those cultists, the Primal Seekers, have themselves been driven from the crumbling subterranean halls of Bisnensel, by a water spirit and her disciples, seeking knowledge forbidden to mortals.

This spirit, an ancient nereid the Rain Makers call Lorelia, endeavours to create a water stone, a powerful relic that could help foster life here in Mournoth for many thousands of years to come; surely a noble cause?! For the desert to the south is inexorably expanding, and someday it will consume this life sustaining lake along with the verdant forests of Northern Bangkorai and all that live here.

Yet is it not the natural progression for this land to evolve into a desert? Is this spirit of the Halcyon Lake fighting for nature, or against it?

S.K

That night another of Molag Bal’s iniquitous anchors fell upon Tamriel at the Mornouth Dolmen in Bangkorai; and that night another group of strangers set aside their colours to unite under a single banner in the defence of Tamriel. It is vital that even up here in the wilds of Northern High Rock, where the Reachmen forge base havoc, and the agents of the Seventh Legion provoke and incite, that no Daedric horn goes unchallenged.

Why do those treacherous worms continue to sacrifice themselves to the dread horns of Coldharbour? Is it fear? Greed? Or perhaps they see the Prince’s wings but not its tail? Whatever the reason for their betrayal of their families and kin, they are as much monsters as the Daedra they summon forth. And as for these Daedric monsters that cannot die, that fight unencumbered by remorse or compassion, we shall fight them all the same, because here on Nirn they are but all flesh and blood.

We must cede not an inch more of Tamriel to Oblivion. For I have witnessed first hand the surrender of the Imperial City to the Daedric cults, and beheld the desolation of the Aswala Stables in the Alik’r. I have walked amongst the Shiven of Coldhabour, I have delved into those most hidden depths where monsters from all parts of Oblivion plot and ploy in the darkest corners of this land. And I have come face to face with an aspect of the Lord of Brutality and the hate I saw reflected in his eyes is most dreadfully remembered.

Not one inch more…

S.K

It is with a twist of irony that the crows of Mournoth, those black spies of the Reachmen, lead me willingly to the Hagraven’s lair; there is an old Bosmer adage that goes, ’there is nowt so treacherous as the caw of the crow’.

The lair of Uela the Hagraven is a dark, dank hole, filled only with the roots of those vile Reach vines upon which even insects dare not crawl. Detritus and old bones litter the broken stone floor, and near the far wall stands an ill-fashioned alter from which the crone commands her crows. Her black spies do not alert her to my arrival and so she does not sense my presence until I am already upon her.

There are few more hideous creatures in all Tamriel then the Hagravens of the Reach. Grubby gray hair, pallid skin stretched taut over bony limbs, beady black eyes and beaked-noses, talons for hands and feet, with straggly black feathers growing from every open appendage.

The ‘old magics’ of the Reach have twisted and corrupted the Hagraven’s body, mind, and soul so that it can feed freely upon the old crones hatred and barbarity for the world about. The only way to cleanse the Hagraven’s turpitude influence over this land is with the blood of the Hagraven herself, to feed nature with her life essence just as it fed the ‘old magics’.

For the dark magics of the Reach are as much a part of Tamriel as all the splendour and beauty of nature, because for all Nirn does to sustain us, we in turn must do our part in sustaining her.

S.K

Hidden amongst the lakeside ruins of Jackdaw Cove I discover a Wyress gently tending to a sickly spriggan. There used to be hundreds of spriggans cavorting between the trees here, as in most of the forests of Tamriel, but according to the Wyress this is the last spriggan in Jackdaw Cove; the rest having been corrupted into lurchers by the vile magics of the Reachmen.

I have no affection or affinity for spriggan. They attack me without cause, they rouse their forest companions against me, and they spit their sap at me as I ride by. I feel their enmity and hatred toward me more severely then from any other being on Nirn, indiginious or daedric, and it disturbs me, because they hate me for what I am, not who I am.

And yet… and yet I cannot let this spriggan die without at least making some effort to save it.

But it is not for pity or empathy for the spriggan, the Wyress, or the forest. Nor to spite the insidious interlopers from the Reach. It’s not even for Tamriel herself and her balance of nature; the idea that the loss of the spriggans from the forests of northern Bangkorai might in some deterministic manner have a negative effect upon the rest of the country.

No, not for any of these reasons, It is for me. Because when I lost my soul I was left with a sense of unrelenting emptiness deep inside me, but that abrading emptiness soon became filled by the echoes of my conscience in such vociferous clarity, that I have long forgot the sound of peace.

S.K