From a military perspective the Improvised Garrison seems to me to be strategically worthless. Being an isle in a sea of daedra it cannot be supported, it does nothing to impede enemy actions, and offers no clear path to the White Gold Tower. It is just as Caudex himself describes it, ‘bricks, old ledgers, and broken chairs’. Some may point to the garrison as a symbol of mortal defiance, a warning to Molag Bal that not a brick of Tamriel shall we surrender without fight. But when that symbol is eventually torn-down, then how quickly it becomes forgotten; for only the heroes and martyrs of the victors of battle become lyrics for the bard. Yet this night I choose to risk my life, and to risk my duty in support of the Drake’s quest, to aid the soldiers of the garrison in defending their doors against the deadric storm.

From the first moment I walked through the old forum doors I sensed there was something more to the survival of these eight soldiers then can been seen with the mortal eye. Perhaps it is because the scroll that Caudex later passes to me for the Drake. He claims it dates back to St. Alessia herself and credits it for bringing them back from the dead when they fell in battle. He says some priest, a Father Egnatius, was obsessed with it. It’s funny how when the dead are resurrected for their cause priests proclaim it is some sort of divine intervention, yet when it is not in their favour it is decried as foul necromancy, Reach magic, and devilry.

Call it providence if you will that these eight soldiers have survived so long, but surely not solely for a scroll, for it could have been manoeuvred by a much quicker and safer route into the hands of the Drake. Perhaps then for distraction, for the distrustful eyes of Molag Bal are certainly now fixed upon the garrison, searching for reason and comprehension as to their unnatural resilience.

Even with the scroll gone I believe the story of the Immortal Eight at the Improvised Garrison is not yet done. I recall the Elf Neramo when we first met upon Stros M’Kai telling me that the Dwemer automatons were full of cogs and wheels, and that if you could stop but one of those wheels, then you stop every wheel because they are dependent upon one another. I believe these soldiers are part of something bigger, a wheel in something we cannot yet see. That is why I was guided here to stand with them tonight, and to risk everything, and as others will stand with them on other nights, because there are many things that will depend upon this one thing. You see providence is the Divines sowing the fields with their seeds, but it always requires mortal hands to till the land for those seeds to grow.

S.K

In all the years I served in the Imperial City I never once visited the Nobles district. It’s not that as a common soldier I was ever barred from visiting here, it was just not somewhere I ever wanted to visit. I held no aspirations to ever live amongst the rich, or to be considered a noble. Growing up in rural Cyrodiil the nobility weren’t people we respected or admired, they were more ridiculed, and sometimes pitied. You see our opinion was that people who live with an abundance of wealth seem to get lost somehow. They don’t have to worry about their next meal, the holes in their shoes, or affording necessities like medicines. They worry about nonsense like spirituality, happiness and relationships. Their lives are comfortable, vapid, and stale. We are meant to be hungry, it is what drives us to endeavour, to achieve. When you are wealthy you no longer hunger, and your life becomes so stuffed full of little things that there is no room for anything great.

I meet a stout Redguard woman stalking the Nobles district hunting daedra in order to sell their parts to alchemists and traders. She says that the Legion Zero have been hindering her movement through the district of late, and so she has been unable to bait her Ogrim traps with ‘fresh’ Daedrat meat. I question whether she could build a trap large enough to capture one of those bulky, lumbering monsters, but she claims only to want their fingers. She asks my aid, for payment of course. “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay” she calls it. Profiteering I call it. Although perhaps not of the same repugnant nature as that of the Crossroads Profiteers in Craglorn. The difference I suppose is that Brihana’s exploitation aids our cause, even if our motives are not shared. Perhaps she dreams of earning enough from this tragedy to one day live a nobles life… comfortable, vapid and stale.

S.K

I enter the Arboretum District of the Imperial City through the sewers drainage system. I had prepared myself for the worst, but it was worse. As thick smoke bellows from fires all across the district, daedra roam the streets unchallenged, and the stone buildings crumble strewing rubble across the once pristine avenues. These botanical gardens and the libraries of the Imperial Academy were once the aspiration for scholars from all across the empire. For what more can one ask but flowers at ones feet, a book in hand, and the stars above. After-all what is a book but a garden of words, and what is more joyous then the touch of a page and the feel of a petal; except perhaps the whisper of a lover.

Yet the scholar’s utopia has turned to horror, for the smoke that now cascades above the district comes from the daedra’s attempts to eradicate our very history and culture by burning every book they can lay their claws upon. It is folly of course, for you cannot erase a peoples identity by burning their libraries. Our culture lives on through the people. From parent to child, bard to patron, priest to congregation, teacher to student, we pass down our stories, songs, traditions and folklore from generation to generation. It is something the immortal daedra cannot possibly understand, for their culture is doomed to never grow, never cultivate. Indeed, they are enslaved not by their princes, but by their own immortality.

And for that same reason is why we humans should never tolerate being under the yoke of the long lived elves. They are a stagnant race, you can see it in their architecture. Beautiful though it is, it has not changed, not altered, not advanced for thousands of years. If an elf sits atop the Ruby Throne then our own advancement would become smothered and restricted, and we would lose our capacity, and our advantage, of innovation and invention.

We manage to save what few documents we can, including one book the daedra were not attempting to destroy at all. Realising the importance of the ‘The Sublime Brazier’ the quick witted Chief Archivist managed to scramble the text of the book with a distortion spell as the daedra broke into his libraries. Once I had reclaimed it, and it was again deciphered, we discovered it describes a relic the emperors once used to light the Dragonfires that kept the daedra from entering our world. Since the daedra are here in increasing numbers and long it has been since Akatosh blessed us with a Dragonborn emperor, I was under the impression the Dragonfires had been forever extinguished. I shall pass the book onto the Drake. Perhaps the Dragonguard might discover what danger the daedra believe this Brazier holds for them… or for us.

S.K