Books of Skyrim

by Bethesda Softworks

  Thaurbad was surprised to get a message from the Temple on Loredas. Before he read the content, he could tell from the style that it wasn't from Alfiers. The handwriting wasn't Alfiers's usual belligerent slashing style, and it wasn't all in Alfiers's usual capital letters, which read like a scream from Oblivion.

  "Thaurbad, I thought you should know Alfiers isn't at the Temple anymore. She quit her position yesterday, very suddenly. My name is Vanderthil, and I was lucky enough (let me admit it now, I begged pitifully) to be your new Temple contact. I'm overwhelmed by your genius. I was having a crisis of faith until I read last week's Bulletin. This week's Bulletin is a miracle. Enough. I just wanted to say I'm honored to be working with you. -- Vanderthil."

  The response on Sundas after the service even astonished Thaurbad. The archpriest attributed the massive increase in attendance and collection plate offerings entirely to the Bulletin. Thaurbad's salary was quadrupled. Gorgos brought over a hundred and twenty messages from his adoring public.

  The following week, Thaurbad sat in front of his writing plank, a glass of fine Torvali mead at his side, staring at the blank scroll. He had no ideas. The Bulletin, his child, his second-wife, bored him. The third-rate sermons of the archbishop were absolute anathema, and the deaths and births of the Temple patrons struck him as entirely pointless. Blah blah, he thought as he scribbled on the page.

  He knew he wrote the letters B-L-A-H B-L-A-H. The words that appeared on the scroll were, "A necklace of pearl on a white neck."

  He scrawled a jagged line across the page. It appeared in through that damned beautiful Feyfolken quill: "Glory to Auri-El."

  Thaurbad slammed the quill and poetry spilled forth in a stream of ink. He scratched over the page, blotting over everything, and the vanquished words sprung back up in different form, even more exquisite than before. Every daub and splatter caused the document to whirl like a kaleidoscope before falling together in gorgeous asymmetry. There was nothing he could do to ruin the Bulletin. Feyfolken had taken over. He was a reader, not an author.

  Now," asked the Great Sage. "What was Feyfolken from your knowledge of the School of Conjuration?"

  "What happened next?" cried Vonguldak.

  "First, tell me what Feyfolken was, and then I'll continue the story."

  "You said it was a daedra," said Taksim. "And it seems to have something to do with artistic expression. Was Feyfolken a servitor of Azura?"

  "But the scribe may have been imagining all this," said Vonguldak. "Perhaps Feyfolken is a servitor of Sheogorath, and he's gone mad. Or the quill's writing makes everyone who views it, like all the congregation at the Temple of Auri-El, go mad."

  "Hermaeus Mora is the daedra of knowledge ... and Hircine is the daedra of the wild ... and the daedra of revenge is Boethiah," pondered Taksim. And then he smiled, "Feyfolken is a servitor of Clavicus Vile, isn't it?"

  "Very good," said the Great Sage. "How did you know?"

  "It's his style," said Taksim. "Assuming that he doesn't want the power of the quill now that he has it. What happens next?"

  "I'll tell you," said the Great Sage, and continued the tale.

  Book Three

  by Waughin Jarth

  Thaurbad had at last seen the power of the quill," said the Great Sage, continuing his tale. "Enchanted with the daedra Feyfolken, servitor of Clavicus Vile, it had brought him great wealth and fame as the scribe of the weekly Bulletin of the Temple of Auri-El. But he realized that it was the artist, and he merely the witness to its magic. He was furious and jealous. With a cry, he snapped the quill in half.

  He turned to finish his glass of mead. When he turned around, the quill was intact.

  He had no other quills but the one he had enchanted, so he dipped his finger in the inkwell and wrote a note to Gorgos in big sloppy letters. When Gorgos returned with a new batch of congratulatory messages from the Temple, praising his latest Bulletin, he handed the note and the quill to the messenger boy. The note read: "Take the quill back to the Mages Guild and sell it. Buy me another quill with no enchantments."

  Gorgos didn't know what to make of the note, but he did as he was told. He returned a few hours later.

  "They wouldn't give us any gold back for it," said Gorgos. "They said it wasn't enchanted. I told 'em, I said 'What are you talking about, you enchanted it right here with that Feyfolken soul gem,' and they said, 'Well, there ain't a soul in it now. Maybe you did something and it got loose.'"

  Gorgos paused to look at his master. Thaurbad couldn't speak, of course, but he seemed even more than usually speechless.

  "Anyway, I threw the quill away and got you this new one, like you said."

  Thaurbad studied the new quill. It was white-feathered while his old quill had been dove gray. It felt good in his hand. He sighed with relief and waved his messenger lad away. He had a Bulletin to write, and this time, without any magic except for his own talent.

  Within two days time, he was nearly back on schedule. It looked plain but it was entirely his. Thaurbad felt a strange reassurance when he ran his eyes over the page and noticed some slight errors. It had been a long time since the Bulletin contained any errors. In fact, Thaurbad reflected happily, there were probably other mistakes still in the document that he was not seeing.

  He was finishing a final whirl of plain calligraphy on the borders when Gorgos arrived with some messages from the Temple. He looked through them all quickly, until one caught his eye. The wax seal on the letter read "Feyfolken." With complete bafflement, he broke it open.

  "I think you should kill yourself," it read in perfectly gorgeous script.

  He dropped the letter to the floor, seeing sudden movement on the Bulletin. Feyfolken script leapt from the letter and coursed over the scroll in a flood, translating his shabby document into a work of sublime beauty. Thaurbad no longer cared about the weird croaking quality of his voice. He screamed for a very long time. And then drank. Heavily.

  Gorgos brought Thaurbad a message from Vanderthil, the secretary of the Temple, early Fredas morning, but it took the scribe until mid-morning to work up the courage to look at it. "Good Morning, I am just checking in on the Bulletin. You usually have it in on Turdas night. I'm curious. You planning something special? -- Vanderthil."

  Thaurbad responded, "Vanderthil, I'm sorry. I've been sick. There won't be a Bulletin this Sunday" and handed the note to Gorgos before retiring to his bath. When he came back an hour later, Gorgos was just returning from the Temple, smiling.

  "Vanderthil and the archpriest went crazy," he said. "They said it was your best work ever."

  Thaurbad looked at Gorgos, uncomprehending. Then he noticed that the Bulletin was gone. Shaking, he dipped his finger in the inkwell and scrawled the words "What did the note I sent with you say?"

  "You don't remember?" asked Gorgos, holding back a smile. He knew the master had been drinking a lot lately. "I don't remember the exact words, but it was something like, 'Vanderthil, here it is. Sorry it's late. I've been having severe mental problems lately. - Thaurbad.' Since you said, 'here it is,' I figured you wanted me to bring the Bulletin along, so I did. And like I said, they loved it. I bet you get three times as much letters this Sundas."

  Thaurbad nodded his head, smiled, and waved the messenger lad away. Gorgos returned back to the Temple, while his master turned to his writing plank, and pulled out a fresh sheet of parchment.

  He wrote with the quill: "What do you want, Feyfolken?"

  The words became: "Goodbye. I hate my life. I have cut my wrists."

  Thaurbad tried another tact: "Have I gone insane?"

  The words became: "Goodbye. I have poison. I hate my life."

  "Why are you doing this to me?"

  "I Thaurbad Hulzik cannot live with myself and my ingratitude. That's why I've put this noose around my neck."

  Thaurbad picked up a fresh parchment, dipped his finger in the inkwell, and proceeded to rewrite the entire Bulletin. While his original draft, before Feyfolken had altered it, had
been simple and flawed, the new copy was a scrawl. Lower-case I's were undotted, G's looked like Y's, sentences ran into margins and curled up and all over like serpents. Ink from the first page leaked onto the second page. When he yanked the pages from the notebook, a long tear nearly divided the third page in half. Something about the final result was evocative. Thaurbad at least hoped so. He wrote another note reading, simply, "Use this Bulletin instead of the piece of trash I sent you."

  When Gorgos returned with new messages, Thaurbad handed the envelope to him. The new letters were all the same, except for one from his healer, Telemichiel. "Thaurbad, we need you to come in as soon as possible. We've received the reports from Black Marsh about a strain of the Crimson Plague that sounds very much like your disease, and we need to re-examine you. Nothing is definite yet, but we're going to want to see what our options are."

  It took Thaurbad the rest of the day and fifteen drams of the stoutest mead to recover. The larger part of the next morning was spent recovering from this means of recovery. He started to write a message to Vanderthil: "What did you think of the new Bulletin?" with the quill. Feyfolken's improved version was "I'm going to ignite myself on fire, because I'm a dying no-talent."

  Thaurbad rewrote the note using his finger-and-ink message. When Gorgos appeared, he handed him the note. There was one message in Vanderthil's handwriting.

  It read, "Thaurbad, not only are you divinely inspired, but you have a great sense of humor. Imagine us using those scribbles you sent instead of the real Bulletin. You made the archbishop laugh heartily. I cannot wait to see what you have next week. Yours fondly, Vanderthil."

  The funeral service a week later brought out far more friends and admirers than Thaurbad Hulzik would've believed possible. The coffin, of course, had to be closed, but that didn't stop the mourners from filing into lines to touch its smooth oak surface, imagining it as the flesh of the artist himself. The archbishop managed to rise to the occasion and deliver a better than usual eulogy. Thaurbad's old nemesis, the secretary before Vanderthil, Alfiers came in from Cloudrest, wailing and telling all who would listen that Thaurbad's suggestions had changed the direction of her life. When she heard Thaurbad had left her his quill in his final testament, she broke down in tears. Vanderthil was even more inconsolable, until she found a handsome and delightfully single young man.

  "I can hardly believe he's gone and I never even saw him face-to-face or spoke to him," she said. "I saw the body, but even if he hadn't been all burned up, I wouldn't have been able to tell if it was him or not."

  "I wish I could tell you there'd been a mistake, but there was plenty of medical evidence," said Telemichiel. "I supplied some of it myself. He was a patient of mine, you see."

  "Oh," said Vanderthil. "Was he sick or something?"

  "He had the Crimson Plague years ago, that's what took away his voice box, but it appeared to have gone into complete remission. Actually, I had just sent him a note telling him words to that effect the day before he killed himself."

  "You're that healer?" exclaimed Vanderthil. "Thaurbad's messenger boy Gorgos told me that he had just picked up that message when I sent mine, complementing him on the new, primative design for the Bulletin. It was amazing work. I never would've told him this, but I had begun to suspect he was stuck in an outmoded style. It turned out he had one last work of genius, before going out in a blaze of glory. Figuratively. And literally."

  Vanderthil showed the healer Thaurbad's last Bulletin, and Telemichiel agreed that its frantic, nearly illegible style spoke volumes about the power and majesty of the god Auri-El."

  "Now I'm thoroughly confused," said Vonguldak.

  "About which part?" asked the Great Sage. "I think the tale is very straight-forward."

  "Feyfolken made all the Bulletins beautiful, except for the last one, the one Thaubad did for himself," said Taksim thoughtfully. "But why did he misread the notes from Vanderthil and the healer? Did Feyfolken change those words?"

  "Perhaps," smiled the Great Sage.

  "Or did Feyfolken changed Thaurbad's perceptions of those words?" asked Vonguldak. "Did Feyfolken make him mad after all?"

  "Very likely," said the Great Sage.

  "But that would mean that Feyfolken was a servitor of Sheogorath," said Vonguldak. "And you said he was a servitor of Clavicus Vile. Which was he, an agent of mischief or an agent of insanity?"

  "The will was surely altered by Feyfolken," said Taksim, "And that's the sort of thing a servitor of Clavicus Vile would do to perpetuate the curse."

  "As an appropriate ending to the tale of the scribe and his cursed quill," smiled the Great Sage. "I will let you read into it as you will."

  The Final Lesson

  By Aegrothius Goth

  "It is time for you to leave your apprenticeship here," said the Great Sage to his students, Taksim and Vonguldak.

  "So soon?" cried Vonguldak, for it had been but a few years since the training began. "Are we such poor pupils?"

  "We have learned much for you, master, but you have no more to teach us?" Taksim asked. "You have told us so many tales of great enchanters of the past. Can't we continue to learn until we have reached some level of their power?"

  "I have one last story for you," smiled the Great Sage.

  Many thousands of years ago, long before the Cyrodilic Dynasty of Reman and even longer before the Septim Dynasty ruled Tamriel, and before there was a Mages Guild, and when the land called Morrowind was known as Resdayn, and the land of Elsweyr was called Anequina and Pellitine, and the only law of the land was the cruel ways of the Alessian Doctrines of Marukh, there lived a hermetic enchanter named Dalak who had two apprentices, Uthrac and Loreth.

  Uthrac and Loreth were remarkable students, both equally assiduous in their learning, the pride of their Master. Both excelled at the arts of the cauldron, mirror castings, the infusion of spiritas into mundus, and the weaving of air and fire. Dalak was very fond of his boys, and they of him.

  On a springtide morn, Dalak received a message from another enchanter named Peothil, who lived deep in the forests of the Colovian heartland. You must remember that in the dark days of the First Era, mages were solitary practitioners with the only organized consortium being the Psijics of Artaeum. Away from that island, mages seldom saw one another and even more rarely corresponded. Thus, when Dalak received Peothil's letter, he gave it his great attention.

  Peothil was greatly aged, and he had found the peace of his isolation threatened by the Alessian Reform. He feared for his life, knowing that the fanatical priests and their warriors were close at hand. Dalak brought his students to him.

  "It will be an arduous and perilous journey to the Colovian Estates, one that I would fear partaking even in my youth," Dalak said. "My heart trembles to send you two forth to Peothil's cave, but I know that he is a great and benevolent enchanter, and his light must continue to burn in the heart of the continent if we are to survive these dark nights."

  Uthrac and Loreth pled with their teacher not to order them to go to Peothil. It was not the priests and warriors of the Alessian Reform they feared, but they knew their Master was aged and infirm, and could not protect himself if the Reform moved further westward. Finally, he relented and allowed that one would stay with him, and the other would journey forth to the Colovian Estates. He would let them decide which of them would go.

  The lads debated and discussed, fought and compromised, and at last elected to let fate make the choice. They threw lots, and Loreth came up short. He left early the next morning, miserable and filled with fear.

  For a month and a day, he tramped through the forests into the midst of the Colovian Estates. Through some planning, some skill, and much assistance for sympathetic peasants, he managed to avoid the ever-tightening circle of the Alessian Reform by crossing through unclaimed mountain passes and hidden bogs. When at last he found the dark caverns where Dalak had told him to search for Peothil, it was still many hours before he could find the enchanter's lair.


  No one appeared to be there. Loreth searched through the laboratory of ancient tomes, cauldrons and crystalline flutes, herbs kept alive by the glow of mystic circles, strange liquids and gasses caught in transparent membranes. At last, he found Peothil, or so he presumed. The desiccated shell on the floor of the study, clutching tools of enchantment, scarcely seemed human.

  Loreth decided that he could do nothing further for the mage, and began at once the journey back to his true master Dalak and his friend Uthrac. The armies of the Reform had moved quickly since he passed. After more than one close near encounter, the young enchanter realized that he was trapped on all sides. The only retreat that was possible was back in the caves of Peothil.