As any who have crossed the Alik’r wastes will tell you, nowhere abandoned in this desert remains forsaken forever. In Volenfell It has been centuries since the Dwemer’s sudden disappearance and in that time many different desert creatures have made the ruins of this once great city their home. But amongst them, there are a few extraordinary creatures that in this isolated ecosystem have grown to monstrous size.

One such creature is a huge Shalk I found living within a large hall my guide called the ‘Guardian’s Helm’. The hall houses a lever that operates the city’s inner defensive gates, which we will need to open if we are to delve deeper into these ruins.

Shalks are native creatures to the volcanic areas of Morrowind where the Ashland tribes reportedly herd them like guar. So just how did this massive Shalk came to be so far from its natural habitat?

Perhaps the Dwemer Rourken clan bought a herd of Shalks with them when they first came east across the provinces of Morrowind, and Cyrodill to make their home in the desert. Could it be that this giant is the last remaining kin of the original Rourken herd, or perhaps it is a descendent of creatures bought here centuries ago for the very purpose of protecting the doorway mechanisms to the inner city.

It is all supposition now best left to the scholars, for I am far too preoccupied trying to avoid its frightful pincers and pernicious bouts of spontaneous combustion.

Once beyond these halls and further into the city I witness a disturbance in the dunes up ahead. When I go to investigate a huge Duneripper bursts from beneath the sands and attacks.

Even a regular sized Duneripper can prove to be a formidable threat, heavily armoured with thick plating from nose to tail, even their necks, usually a point of vulnerability on any armoured opponent, are protected by long sharp spines. This behemoth’s movements are as slow and stiff as you might expect from such a massive reptile, but without due care one might quickly find oneself cornered against the rock face with nowhere left to hide or run.

The beast has terrifyingly long sharp claws like blades on every foot, a thickly muscled tail which it swings like a heavy mace, and massive jaws with teeth like daggers. An unprotected underbelly appears to be the creatures only weakness and the obvious target for any warrior’s blades, whilst for the spell-caster and the archer, the aim must be to keep a constant distance at all times. 

Just remember, never let your back hit the canyon wall.

S.K

Deeper into the ruins of Volenfell we delve, the rose-tinted skeleton of this once great Dwemer city refusing to fully surrender to the insatiable voracity of the desert.

We walk down broken pathways covered in brittle slate and ashen sands, past the hollow façades of what may once have been temples, workshops, storerooms and homes. We walk under collapsed columns and crumbling archways, and through halls and corridors built into the canyon walls, littered with metal wheels and cogs belonging to steam machines whose purpose was we know not what.

Back we emerge into the canyon under an iridescent sky, and as we delve deeper still into the bleak ruins my Redguard companions bow their heads in sorrow; perhaps in remembrance of a people lost, or perhaps reminded of their own tomorrow.

S.K

Imperial men like Quintus Verres measure a man’s worth not by his deeds, but by the weight of his ambition; it is the seed from which all his nobleness flowers, and to an ambitious man like Verres, a nobleman without ambition is like a vulture without wings.

But what is ambition but desire, desire for power, for wealth, for knowledge, that same desire that feeds our passions, our greed, our jealousy, and our cruelty. That same desire that led Verres to betray his wife, poisoning her, stealing her notes and journals and leaving her for dead in the desert. That same desire that has led Verres here, to this moment, standing face to face, blade to blade, with a soulless man.

Ambition is not the measure what a man can do, or will do, only what he desires to do, as Quintus Verres is about to learn.

S.K

I vaguely recall on my first visit to the Rosy Lion tavern in Daggerfall a Breton minstrel singing the tale of how a great Dwemer chieftain of Morrowind threw his mighty warhammer far, far into the sky and declared that wherever it would fall, there he would settle his clan. Thus the intrepid chieftain led his tribe across the swamps of Morrowind, through the forests of Cyrodiil, and into the southern deserts of Hammerfell, to establish Volenfell, the City of the Hammer.

Despite the harsh desert environment the city grew swiftly and soon became a beacon of Dwemer industry, until that is the sudden disappearance of the Dwarven people, and the city was lost to the sands as quickly as it had risen.

Now however the fabled city has been rediscovered by modern day treasure hunters like the Redguard Tharayya, whose journey I have followed from one end of the desert to the other. Although a rival band led by her estranged husband appears to have made it here first, whilst the notorious Seventh Legion of the now corrupted Empire are not so very far behind.

What the treasure hunters found when they first entered the city though was not the empty carcass they might have expected, but a city full of eyes, all watching them.

Numerous prides of lions watch from beneath the rock walls where they shelter from the burning midday sun, giant assassination beetles watch as they scuttle from rock to rock, huge dunerippers watch from their shallow burrows beneath the sands as they impatiently await to ambush their next meal, and behind every door and every wall watch the heritance of the Dwemer, the automations, working fastidiously to keep their crumbling city breathing still.

But I can’t shake the feeling that the city of Volenfell is itself also watching through the many eyes of the Dwemer faces carved into the façades of every broken building, searching the distant horizon for the return of it’s masters, much like the widow of Northsalt who stares forlornly into the ocean for the lost sail-boat that can never return home.

S.K

Throughout my journey through the Alik’r I have been following in the footsteps of treasure hunters searching for an esoteric Aylid relic I know only as the Guardian Stone. I have no idea of the relics worth, purpose, or even what it looks like, but its trail, which has already led me through the Dwemer ruins of Santaki and Aldunz, does not end here in Yldzuun. But what I do discover in Yldzuun is something far more valuable to me then any ancient artefact, a company of soldiers from the Imperial army.

These are the first organized members of the Imperial legions, my legions, that I have encountered since my return from the sepulchral prison cells of Coldharbour. Indeed, the last time I was in company of my own people was the night my unit was ambushed by those wretched Worm Cultists on the road back to the Imperial City. And now I find my former comrades here, deep under the sands of the Alik’r, defending themselves against the pernicious automations of a long lost civilization. I can only surmise that these soldiers came here for the same reason as I, which means this Guardian Stone is far more important then I had previously thought.

My first mistake was to call out, I should have known better, these soldiers were fighting for their lives after all; I came under fire from a battle-mage almost instantly. My pleas of restraint fell upon deaf ears and I was forced to defend myself from my own brethren. As I moved deeper through the ruins I was attacked on sight again and again by both the soldiers and the Dwemer constructs.

This was not the legion as I remembered, these soldiers are impulsive, emotion-driven and ill-disciplined. Operating this deep into Hammerfell these would have to be the soldiers of the Seventh Legion, led still I believe by the enigmatic Septima Tharn. The Seventh had always had an irregular reputation. Their recruits often came from the soldiers the other divisions either did not want or had given up on, and yet somehow Tharn managed to turn her legion into the Empires most feared and notorious. Cruel and ruthless to their enemies, arrogant and haughty to their allies, surly and pitiless to civilians.

They are far from the disciplined, committed, proud legion I remember; but perhaps that legion is no more. Perhaps that legion ended with the fall of the Imperial City, and perhaps I am now the irregular. Or perhaps it was always like this and I am just remembering the legions through the silvered hazed memories of a time when I was content, of a time when I wasn’t always lonely, of a time when every day I did not feel the abrading emptiness deep within where my soul should nest.

I guess I’ll have to learn to accept that the Cyrodiil I once called home, the legion I once lived for, and the legionnaire that I once was, are no more.

S.K