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Her spell was broken, but her seduction remained.

I can no longer sleep but for thinking of her voice.  That narcotic melody which have conducted me in a hundred dreams, and led me to such intense abstractions that all else now seems flavourless.  That siren’s enchantment, an aria of infinite possibilities where darkness and emptiness are but a blank easel for her imagination.  It is her whispers still that lead me across those pin-pricked skies at night, past a thousand blazing suns, to a place deep in the everlasting cosmos where the flame-haired comets caper, and where Nirn is but a spec on a dark horizon.

I stood ready to brave her beauty, and raised my shield in defiance of the night, but alas Tamriel, for as her eyes pulled me ever deeper into her rhapsody, this land for which I fight have never seemed so dark to me; as if the sun itself were shamed into an eternal eclipse by the radiance of her palate.

Yet just as I began to slip beyond, she cast an Entropic Bolt knocking me to the floor.  Destruction magics rained down upon me from her staff, and as the air grew thick with mist and fizzle, she summoned forth a spectral minion and giant bone colossus with sole intent to crush me.

But I stood once more to endure her torrent, although I could not, would not, strike at her.  She baited me to let go my shield and give in to her, whispering directly into my mind; and I wished for nothing more.

Before me she stood imperious and my shield finally yielded as I fell deep into her eyes.  But as I stumbled forward into her lethal embrace, I felt my blade sink deep into her chest, and with all the grace of a sleepy swan she sank to the floor, and I was empty once more.

S.K

Beneath the stately halls of the Dorell Manor, the ghostly visage of Verandis guides me towards a possible fissure in the veil of Lady Montclair’s enchantment that has ensnared the nobles of the city above.  Perhaps the Lady was remembering the Lorkrata Ruins when she set her bloodfiends to guard her grand illusion’s only visible weakness.

The two bloodfiends look almost identical, in life I suspect they may well have been sisters.  But then I recall the endless rows of the destitute Soul-Shriven chained up in the Castle of the Worm, each one so indistinguishable from the next that I could tell not Man from Mer.

Perhaps it is that when we lose our soul to unnatural cause, we also lose those things that give our faces the characteristics that mark our individuality; our personality, our memories, and our emotions.

And I begin to wonder… how long before I am no longer able to recognize my own reflection.

S.K

Inside the Dorell Manor I am met with a most macabre scene.  The nobles celebrate, seemingly oblivious to the dead bodies of their peers that litter the halls.  Reality seems aslant and frayed, a mist hangs heavily upon the air, and it is difficult to keep focus and not just sink into the haze.

Lord Ellic Dorrell has indeed succumbed to the Lady’s influence, and talks of receiving her blessing, ‘…then we will never die’.  The sound of the party ends abruptly, and I turn to find the revellers hanging in the throne room like forgotten marionettes; then I hear the Lady’s call… and I follow.

Lady Llyria Montclair is nothing as I expected, she is… intoxicating. 

As I stared entranced by the beauty of her celestial eyes, her voice began to devour me.  And whilst my conscience screamed silently to resist, my heart sang a symphony of surrender, extolling her boundless beauty, promising obedience and fealty.  The more the Lady spoke, the more desire, need, and compulsion swelled within me.

Indeed, if it were not for the ghostly visage of the vampire Count Verandis appearing through the mists to guide me, I fear I may willingly have become the Lady’s sharpest blade.

S.K

If you wish to find survivors and resisters in Tamriel, the first place you should always look is in its Inns and taverns.  Thus it was no surprise in Northpoint that we discover a band of townspeople hiding from the Montclair’s preternatural incursion in the Sloshing Tankard.

We learn from Qariar, the Blademaster of House Dorell, that there are in fact many survivors hidden about the city under the protection of the Northpoint Guard.  He warns though that the Baron’s son, Ellic Dorell, is now so completely under Lleraya Montclair’s influence, that he was fully compliant in the Lady’s wicked deeds.

S.K

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It is said in Northpoint that a person’s worth is not measured by the weight of coins in their pockets, but by the weight of the ambitions in their hearts.

Founded in the First Era by an enterprising trader to take advantage of the deep waters of the Boralis coastlines and create a waypoint on the maritime trade route between the great cities of Daggerfall and Solitude.  That merchant was eventually to take the name Dorell, after the Dore Elard heights, upon which he founded his walled city.

Not so long ago this was still a bustling hub full of tradesman and brokers, of pioneers and pirates, and of the ambitious and the resourceful, all seeking to claim a slice of the wealth that flowed daily through the Northpoint docks.  The city’s marketplace was a theatre of trade and commerce, with House Dorell for generations acting as puppeteers from behind the curtains.  The current ruler, Baron Alard Dorell, spent most of his days in the regions capital Shornhelm serving as part of Rivenspire’s ruling triumvirate, leaving the everyday running of his city to his son Lord Ellic Dorell.

But everything changed with the arrival of the daughter of House Montclair.   Utilizing the power of the Lightless Remnant, Lady Lleraya Montclair manipulated the young Dorell and his Breton nobles to take control over the entire city.  And just as she did in Moira’s Hope, turned many of the citizens into the feral bloodfiends that now roam the city’s avenues making feast upon the corpses of their former friends and neighbours.

A stench of blood and carrion hangs heavily over the laconic streets, which are held easily against the once vaunted Northpoint guard by the giant roaming gargoyles.  Meanwhile Lleraya’s vampire troops search building to building, sniffing hound-like for any living that remain.  It is surely only a matter of time before this once dynamic city is little more than a cadaver.

Now the only ambition of any worth for the people of Northpoint is to survive the day.

S.K