No matter how much I achieved in service to both Sentinel and Bergama, I still find I am expected to prove myself worthy to receive training at the Leki’s Blade temple. So be it. First I must prove that I can draw wisdom from their history. Next I must prove my strength and skill in the duelling arena. And finally I am to prove my acuity and will by retrieving relics from Leki’s vision and returning them to the waking world.

I learnt a long time ago that from the moment you first pick up a weapon you will have spend the rest of your life proving yourself to strangers. You may prove yourself worthy a thousand times, but it takes just one failure to prove you unworthy forever.

S.K

The Redguard outpost of Leki’s Blade takes its name from the statue around which the settlement was built in the First Era. According to legend, it is where Leki, the Goddess of aberrant swordsmanship, adopted the form of a warrior of sand wielding a blade of rock, in order to meet the challenge of an over-proud swordsman.

The duellists met at the very heart of the Alik’r desert and battled for 3 days and nights with neither able to gain an upper hand. The proud swordsman however felt himself beginning to tire, and in desperation struck with all his might at the weakest point of Leki’s rock sword, breaking the blade in two. It is said that it was Leki herself who erected the shrine from the sands, and later the last of the great Ansei warriors founded a temple at the site to ensure the philosophy of the “Way of the Sword”, lived on beyond the time of the great Yokudan Sword-Singers.

The future of the temple however seems about as uncertain as the desert winds. A scholar should never limit his teachings to that of their own learning, for his students are born of another time. The Ansei are no more, the goblin tribes have been subdued, and the Corelanyan Elves vanquished. Yet a new more deadly enemy rises from the sands in the form of their own forebears. Necromancers use repugnant magics to reanimate the corpses from the desert peoples own mausoleums to send against them, knowing that the Redguard will refuse to raise their blades against their honoured ancestors.

Tradition is the whet stone upon which the Redguard sharpen their blades, yet it is also the trammel that inhibits the Redguard from unsheathing them.

S.K

At the very heart of Aldunz I come across a lone Argonian tinkering with an animated Dwemer spider. Whilst dressed neck to tail in an impressive set of Dwarven made armour, she appears more then just a common scavenger, or treasure hunter. Perhaps she too is searching for clues as to the elusive Guardian’s Eye, or maybe like the Altmer Neramo I last saw at Sentinel, she makes study of the Dwemer machines that still roam the corridors of these abandoned subterranean settlements. 

Alas that I shall never know, for as I approached with sword sheaved and open hands, she stood and raised her staff high to hail me, not in greeting, but in an opening salvo of blaze and flame, and the Dwemer spiders that were sat at her feet, fell upon me like a pack of angry Kwama.

S.K

Aldunz, one of many Dwarven cities hidden deep beneath the rocks of Hammerfell, preserved against the atrophy of time not only by the scouring sands, but by a self-sustaining society of automatons that scuttle the corridors long after their architects disappeared.

But Aldunz hides a peculiar secret, as I delve deeper towards its heart I come across the extinguished bodies of Atronachs and the charred shells of defunct machines. A hidden war is being waged in the deepest chambers of this forgotten city, between the machines of the Dwemer, and flame Atronachs of the volcanic mountains into which this settlement was built.

We may never know how or when it started, perhaps the machines burrowed too deep, or the mountains lava bit a fresh course. Maybe the land itself brought the two together with quake or tremor, or was it the bumbling excavations of a modern day archaeologist that sparked this conflict.

In truth, it is an inconsequential war, a war that cannot be won, only survived. A war without good or bad, right or wrong; a war fought solely because the two sides cannot communicate with one another… but then, aren’t all wars like that.

S.K