I arrive at the outskirts of Satakalaam in search of the final Ansei Ward only to find the entrance to the city barred to me. The Seventh Legion of the corrupted empire have somehow managed to cross the Dragontail Mountains from Bangkorai in large enough numbers to overrun the city, and hold out against the outlying forces of the Redguard General Thoda.

The city’s main entrance from the Tigonus wastes is well fortified with high walls and palisades, whilst the surrounding mountains provide natural barriers preventing incursion, so our only course is to infiltrate the city by subterfuge and loosen the legion’s grip from within. And so just past midnight I enter the city dressed as a Seventh legionnaire with orders to free any hostages, discover how the legion managed to capture the seemingly impregnable Satakalaam, and prevent any more reinforcements from joining the invaders.

Named after the Yokudan god Satakal the Worldskin, the city is also the location for the largest burial ground in the desert, the Motalion Necropolis. It is here I suspect I will find the necromantic cult of the Withered Hand who hold the final ward. Are the Seventh Legion really now working with this death cult? Their invasion is just too well planned to be but opportunism on the Withered Hand’s chaos.

Oh how far the morality of the empire has fallen, where now is the famed integrity of the legionaries? Is it not true even the most august warrior with a thousand noble victories, losses all honour in the scrolls with but a single ignoble deed.

As dawn arrives and the desert sun blooms over the mountains, Satakalaam’s minarets shimmer like golden petals upon the wind, and the city is ours. With tensions continuing across the sands between Crown and Forebear kin, I wonder, will the future bards of the desert even recall that it was a Forebear force that liberated this most devout of Crown cities.

S.K

Spare a thought for the treasure-huntress Tharayya, who spent months delving the darkest depths of the harsh Alik’r in search of a long-lost relic. Along the way she was betrayed, poisoned and left for dead, all for the promise of what? Gold coins that are to easily spent, reputation that is so swiftly forgot, or a lost treasure that she was never fated to hold.

Perhaps one Frostfall evening twenty years from now, she will be sitting alone by a log-fire, where she might close her eyes and be back again in the Guardian’s chamber in Volenfell, but was all this worth it just for memories?

Perhaps when we nowt but dust and bone, our memories we be all we own.

S.K

Finally in a grand chamber deep within the ruins of the Dwarven city of Volenfell, we find what we came for, the resting place of the esoteric artefact known as the Guardian’s Eye.

Whatever function it served, whatever power it held, the Dwarves obviously feared its loss for they saw fit to protect it with three imposing sentinels, a trinity of mechanical Centurions duty bound to stand dormant watch over the artefact centuries after their builders have disappeared.

Dormant that is until I approach the relic, at which point the trio seemingly wake in unison, steam hissing, joints and pistons all creak, grind and chirr as one, a malevolent mechanical overture perhaps not heard echoing through this chamber for hundreds of years. Slowly the three giants converge around the relic, preventing me from getting any closer.

Perhaps the harboured relic was once a weapon of terrible potency, maybe it is the key to how the Dwarves powered all the machines of their desert cities, or mayhap it is a vital clue to the greatest mystery of them all, the disappearance of the Dwemer people themselves.

Whatever its worth or purpose, I have not come so far to baulk at such a blaze of bellicosity, and so as I unsheathe my sword and raise my shield, I ask of life once again… what more does a soulless man have left to lose?

S.K

I was never comfortable with the theory I was taught concerning the fate of the Dwarves, that all at once they just suddenly disappeared. I’ve always harboured the suspicion due to the misanthropic nature of their automatons, that they were in fact wiped out by the very machines they had created to help sustain them; their bodies being efficiently disposed of in the great kilns and furnaces of their own design.

My campfire theory was thus. All societies, even this totalitarian society of machines, are like music boxes. Each member of the society is expected to take their obedient place and become yet another cog, spring, coil, or pin in the boxes inner workings, letting the mechanism spin them around, passively accepting the compositions and orchestrations handed down to them from their leaders, teachers and preachers; lest they are to become persecuted or ostracised. Because the one universal sin in every society, whether it be a society of men, mer, or machine, is to be different. And the vagaries of the Dwarves from the precision of their automatons may have been such that the machines felt the need to remove them from their music box, in the most efficient way possible.

Yet here in the ruins of Dwarven city of Volenfell, I find my theory about to be rebutted by the automatons themselves. For in these halls known as the Guardian’s Skull which houses yet another of the city’s defensive levers, I come face to face with an aberration from the uniformity. An Unstable Construct, seemingly malfunctioning with charged blue sparks fizzling across its surface, erratic, out of tune, and not at all following the established score. Yet the machines around it do not attack it because it is different and does not fit in with their melody, they try to maintain it, treat it as any other machine, tolerate its idiosyncrasy, and finally, defend it against my blade.

So much for my campfire theories… perhaps I’ll take up the lute instead.

S.K

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