Great victory requires great risk, yet too oft it is only in such victory that one discovers the prize was not worth the risk at all.

In the ancient Yokudan tombs of Kardala the eternal Anka-Ra have risen from the dust. Incorporeal spirits of the heroic Ra Gada roam the repositories coarse chambers under the sway of a powerful Lich; and Izrunath the Corrupter of the Scaled Court stands guardian before the defiled Apex stone of the fallen Warrior. The Celestial Thief cannot aid me here beneath the sands for fear of ambush, so this grim fight must be fought and won by mortal alone.

With this fiendish cartel overcome I am thus able to call upon the Aspects of the Lord, Lady and Steed using the Skystone Amulet to cleanse the Warrior’s Stone of the Serpent’s venom. But their ghostly visage is swiftly usurped by the umbral form of the Serpent itself, gloating that mine is but a victory vain. For whilst I have prevented further corruption to the Celestial Warrior’s stone, I am too late for it’s master is already trapped in mortal form and fully under serpentine control.

Sometimes it is the hardest fought victories that seemingly achieve the least.

S.K

Another day and another Dwarven ruin in Hammerfell. Other then the most studious of scholars, it is perhaps only the treasure hunter that fully appreciates the vast scale of the Dwemer civilization across Tamriel, and just how seismic and monumental must have been their sudden, unexplained disappearance.

The broad and tall caverns of Mtharnaz seem unsuitable for a place of domicile, yet these ruins also lack the giant furnaces, pipes and work stations that suggest it might have once been a place of manufacture. And whilst there appears to be what looks like an ancient orrey, there are no other furnishings or fittings to imply that this may have been a place of study either. What was Mtharnaz’s purpose is now alas a mystery. If only these Dwemer constructs had a voice, of what wonderments they would sing.

The automatons still roaming the tunnels do not enjoy complete dominion over Mtharnaz however, for a cluster of giant spiders has made their nest in the inner delve. These most unfriendly neighbours have between them created a rather macabre battlefield of spiders limbs and metal parts. What is perhaps more bizarre is the thought of the brass constructs trapped in the huge webbed cocoons suspended from the ceilings.

This curious struggle between nature and machine reminds me of the philosophical debates that rage between the scholars whether nature is itself but a deterministic machine of intricate design by the Aedra. Indeed some even suggest that one of the dark elves so-called ‘living gods’, Sotha Sil, was somehow trying to replicate this theory with the building of a ‘Clockwork City’. Absurd of course, and besides that glorified tinkerer has not been seen for centuries; if he ever existed at all.

The only contribution this soldier can add to their debate is that once you have fought enough of their kind, the giant spiders behaviour in battle becomes just like that of the Dwemer automatons, as predicable as the journey of the two moons.

S.K

I travel west out of Belkarth to a cave full of crocodiles, giant snakes, and lamias that the locals call Zalgaz’s Den. Finding lamia lurking in the caves of Craglorn is perhaps just as aberrant as finding draugh in a Dwemer ruin. Though this curious phenomenon has been studied by scholars, it seems that just how these amphibious creatures first came to be in the arid wastes of Hammerfell remains a mystery still.

Perhaps I should not be surprised though, for is it any more strange to find lamia in a Craglorn delve then to find a former Imperial Legionnaire searching every cleft and cranny for souvenirs to trade with a daedric prince? Or is it stranger even then the tavern tales I hear told of a whole Argonian tribe making a home in the jungles of the Valenwood. Or even the curious story I heard from a ships captain in Wayrest that the Maormer have laid claim to a small island off the coast of Elsweyr? Sometimes Tamriel is not only stranger than we think it, but stranger than we can imagine.

However the lamia got here they now hide underground because there is no home for them in Craglorn between the earth and the sky. Yet like cured fish these lamia still carry the smell of the sea. Most of us at some point in our lives will have shared that same sense of displacement, feeling we have no part in a place we call home, a place in which we long but can never belong. We may well think ourselves masters of our destiny, but we are also but slaves to our fate.

S.K