You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'text' category.
Mounting the throat of the world above high Hrothgar, you pass a development line as clear as the timber line far below you. Nothing anyone made is here, in the mist which always wreathes the summit like the your breath on the cold clear air. Ice-mist settles in your bones, a grip like Death freezing that painful, long breath, small crystals shattering against each other—the sound of an Ayleid well. Solid ground always beneath your feet as you climb, but there are shapes in the mist which never approach, and are never there when you arrive. More of them move faster nearer the summit, whirl half-recognizable around you, some hideous from the Wild Hunt of legend, some so beautiful you stop very briefly to stare in wonder. Ever swirling, faster as you near the top, with no wind at all they erase your footsteps behind you. A sound, an exhalation, all words and none, so soft there are no syllables or inflection, but clearly intention and meaning, if you could but hear it clearly. Standing, finally, at the apex, the eye of the ephemeral translucent storm, all sounds cease, including your own. There is no sound here but blood, rushing to keep your ears from freezing, rings in high oscillating tones crowding out any others. So utterly still, and your life’s blood sings so loud in the unnatural quiet, nothing else you do is audible. Ringing constant and loud now, only what you brought yourself, your body’s need to stay alive. Your life, here: you are life, here, where life became here, now, and present. The ringing recedes slowly, stillness settles to an icy death so very cold through your scant protection. It looks like the shadows are looking at you, waiting to hear your breath form words in this place, but you can’t be sure.
[From a thread I posted to Skyrim for Oblivion.]
From a thread I posted to Skyrim for Oblivion. I worked through the Tamriel flora list at UESP, figuring out where it makes sense to put in Skyrim existing plants from other provinces. All these plants are in the games, nothing yet which is solely from the lore.
Floral Suitability for Skyrim
Where we may expect plants from other provinces to find purchase in Skyrim. Soil tests conducted by the academic colleges of Haafinghar and Winterhold. Published by the Ysmir Collective Press, 3E430.
Northern Cyrodiil
Some say in memory of her violent, haunted, race-hunted past, cairn bolete grows profusely in the caves and grottoes which honeycomb the Holds. Wisp stalks are just as common as in Cyrodiil caves. Clouded funnel and milk thistle grow profusely in high areas below the treeline. Motherwort and tinder polypore are especially suitable for the western Velothi mountains. Both mugwort seeds and wormwood leaves come from the Artemisia family, scraggy and sporadic in the highest alpine and glacial climes. Witches’ tasp lore recommends the seeds to control dream travel, and keep away ancestral moths. Mandrake in the highlands of the Pale. In low-lying forested areas, bergamot, fly amanita, garlic, ginkgo, lily of the valley, somnalius frond, St. Jahn’s wort, steel-blue entoloma, viper’s bugloss. Various hardy, especially tuberous farm crops in cultivated areas of the same clime.
Hammerfell Mountains
Black and white poppies in the mountains of the dragon’s tail.
The Province of Morrowind
At the same latitudes as Skyrim, any plant which grows in Vvardenfell outside the ashlands should find purchase in Skyrim’s soil. Lichens color the harshest climes, where almost nothing else will grow. Salty kreshweed in abundance on the shore and islands of the Sea of Ghosts. Chokeweed in the highlands of the Pale. Some bittergreen in the western Velothi mountains. Draggle tail, hackle-lo, a few isolated muck sponges and slough ferns, and some wild satrice and violet coprinus in the coastal lowlands. In more temperate areas, black anther, comberry, corkbulb, gold kanet, evergreen heather, stoneflower, willow anther. For fungi, you may see bungler’s bane or hypha facia amongst the more common russulas. We came by one lovely timsa-come-by, caringly planted and watered by an expatriate Dunmer, who also tilled with ash the soil of a small plot of wickwheat.
The Island of Solstheim
Holly berries in bushes well-suited to the climes of Skyrim. In more temperate areas, belladonna. It’s said wolfsbane grows in garlands on the throat of the world, but this is probably poetic license.
From the UESP timeline.
The original First Era High Elven wizard towers along the coasts of Tamriel are also abandoned about this time. Pre-literate humans, the so-called “Nedic Peoples”, from the continent of Atmora (also ‘Altmora’ or ‘the Elder Wood’ in Aldmeris) migrate and settle in northern Tamriel. Nordic hero Ysgramor, leader of a great colonizing fleet to Tamriel, develops a runic transcription of Nordic speech based on Elvish principles, and is the first human historian. Ysgramor’s fleet lands at Hsaarik Head at the extreme northern tip of Skyrim’s Broken Cape. The Nords build there the legendary city of Saarthal. The Elves drive the Men away during the Night of Tears, but Ysgramor soon returns with his Five Hundred Companions.
Find a highly evolved (artificial ok) runic writing system whose pale shadows look like Nordic runes. Tolkein’s Elvish words in Dwarven runes, or Dwarven speech if it’s elvish enough (not black speech). If we have 500 or more runes, each rune can be a concept, and a collection of runes can tell a story like chinese characters.
Write excerpts from this text in this language, painfully and incompletely translated by a rosetta-stone like marker with P.Q. (Falmer) above and Old Norse (Atmorans taught by Falmer) below, to demonstrate the limited grasp and different view of the Nords.
