From "Literature of the Spine":

"Uloh Jent’s satire ‘In the Deep Nibben’ is, like much fiction popular in the 2200s, based upon travels in a caricature of a distant land. This stands out as one of the more political works of the period - originating in the Colovian midlands, it naturally chooses the rule of the Alessian order as its principal target - and also one with a trace more sharp intelligence than the bulk of works contemporary with it.

Every chapter describes a different Nibenese settlement, with some humorous defining feature, with a corresponding chapter devoted to a town or village that manifests the opposite feature but is no less absurd. For instance, the town of Bikmunassos, lampooning the preoccupation with the spirit distinct from the flesh prevalent in much eastern philosophy, has a collective aversion to the dead:


This corresponds in theme and structure to the city of Pei Tamwyll, whose people have a ritualistic obsession with the bodies of the deceased:


And similar (for instance, the ready contrast of the ritual cleanliness and soap-industry of one village with the stinking beauty of another, whose natural fortitude removes the need for hygiene).

The most interesting aspect of this structure is that Nibenay is not held up against the West as a distinctive other half, but rather shown to contrast with itself. By showing the Heartland to be bifurcated, composed of contradictions and dualities, Jent is suggesting that the East is a nation unto its own, and furthermore, that the two parts of Cyrodiil do not fit together. Although it dwells exclusively on Nibenay, it is a separatist text for his own land.

‘In the Deep Nibben’ also forms part of a Colovian literary tradition which predates and continues well past the War of Righteousness. Colovians will often observe Nibenay, either in fiction or fact, as an anomaly by comparison to their own world. They will either decry it as a sordid nation of pleasure-priesthoods, or praise its refinement, glamour and complexity; but whether positively or negatively, the distinction is always magnified.

The foremost contemporary example of this style is Ulusia Cephid’s ‘A Kolhovian travels the Mystic River’, a travel journal which was famously quoted, uncredited, in the First Pocket Guide’s entry on Cyrodiil. Out of context, it loses some sophistication: it is as much self-parody as West caricaturing East.

And humorously, the Nibenese writers count themselves as a few steps ahead of the Colovians, in abstraction if not subtlety. There have been a number of ‘impressionistic’ works written with an incredulous, aggrandizing western narrator, but by and for Heartland readers. Ulusia Cephid’s work has often been confused for this variety of satire.”

From "The Demi-Hasphat's Oracles":

"The author of the Guide to the Pocket Empire was apparently unfamiliar with the Interregnum 'year', which their priesthood used to record all dates. We now know this refers to the length of the long vision-trances undertaken by the High Simian Priestess, which might last anywhere from a few weeks to several years. Based on anolysis of the surviving trance scrolls, as well as murals and friezes from Cuhlecainian temples, I estimate that the Cacophonous Order actually lasted only about 50 years, rather than the famous 'four hundred and thirty-three' given by the Guide to the Pocket Empire. The 'mystery' of the 4-century-plus rule of the Brass Man was accepted but unexplained until the spread of the Lorkhan cults in the late Mede era, when the doctrine of the Dragon Break took hold. Because this dating (and explanation) was so widely held at the time, and then repeated by historians down through today, it has come to have the force of tradition. Recall, however, that the 5th era historians were already separated from the TalOS by a gulf of more than 1000 years. And history was still in its infancy, relying on the few archives from those early days."

From "Mede-time Histories":

"The earliest questings of the Thal Mor regime [in that time] were marked by a certain cocksure suddenness. They ignored the existence of earlier bureaucratic structures tying the Sumset to Cyrodiil, and instead built entirely new embassies, supplied them with proper Altmeri sustenance, entertainment, maintenance staff, and even a small defensive armory apiece, but oddly only a few of these ‘glittering bastions of aurielate adularia in the mire’ were ever actually occupied by their ambassadors or clerks. In addition, the assignment of embassies to the variety of oblasts, duchies, counties, sub-provinces and city-states comprising the Empire was entirely independent of native political or geographic divisions, and seemingly without reason.

A fascinating example of this would be the Thal Mor embassy overlooking an area locally synonymous with that barony it neatly overlapped, Duvmen Uttyu, sat wistfully in an area that was neither Kreath nor Volen Highlands nor Reach nor Great Forest - being certainly roughly West-ish and certainly not South. The official Thal Moric division - whose name in those books that know it is neither easy to remember nor necessary - was a perfect pentagon of map, countless hundreds of miles across in rolling, grunting grassland, and strangely only occupied by one insolent village of a hundred or so peasants and their baron. Presumably, its sparsity and rurality simultaneously frustrated and bored the Elvisch mind when census day came around.

The embassy then must have looked such a sight, glittering among the peatlands and oatfarms like a serene theorem tattooed on a roughneck’s briast, that one can’t have known whether to laugh or perform exorcism. Even more amusingly, it was occupied: the first Thal Mor ambassador of Duvmen Uttyu, as conspicuous as her castle, was a mer remembered by the baron as ‘ane leering crowess, with a voice like thick, thick gravy in a glass pitcher, served well chilled.’"

From "The Discourse of Dolf Dream-Smoke in the Cyrod":

"'Everyone should question their beliefs,' you have said.

Now, let us suppose that I have a dog. Or any pet really. It is young and energetic, capricious and whimsical, and cherished by me. Let us suppose afterwards that you come to my place of dwelling with a staff and proceed to beat this cherished pet of mine. Say the poor dear dies - or, no, since we are in sensitive company, say instead that after this beating the creature runs off into the brushes and ferns and emerges, an entire month later, glad to be in my presence again but nonetheless mentally and physically scarred from the experience, and with a generally lower quality of life.

And now, if you were, hypothetically, to say that it is entirely my fault that the pet has suffered so from its beating, as I have not adequately trained it to fend off attackers - ludicrous, yes - but this as I see is just as ridiculous as claiming that all of us should question our beliefs. You see, some beliefs are fighting dogs and some are sled-bullocks, but others still are mere kittens and hamsters or sop-eyed honey-newts to sit on the shoulder. There are beliefs that paw desperately when an owner is not present and also those that have no more than hisses and threatening glares.

Of course, there are also beliefs that are like the terror-birds you have here, that one hears stories about coming in twos and threes to bring ruin upon entire villages; and there are beliefs like the Rift-Olm that, unknown, fastens its mouth around your foot and leaves when it turns green at the edges…

But now, to return from our vacation in the humid depths of imperfect anology, I will say that this is true: that beliefs are people and people are their beliefs. And ideas, like people, are never truly as bad or as good as you believe them to be."

And a discriminating reader's note:

'Got this oddity out of the meta-documentary section of the Cyrodcity library. It’s called “Since You Know All Things: On the introduction of sleeve-tech to the Hlarro-Skaal, and further studies”. It seems to deal with the effects of introducing modern technology, along with the vast access to nearly infinite information that it conveys, to a more primitive people in whose society it was possible for one person to obtain all of that community’s knowledge during a human lifetime.

The title comes from a typical style of myth in which a Hlarro-Skaal wise man, who “knows all things” - not an impossibility from their perspective, you must remember, since their understanding of the world was so restrictive - confronts a shaman. The shaman has little factual knowledge but, through communicating with nature spirits, has experience and ability that cannot be rendered into mere facts and words; an art without medium.

Of particular interest is the final section on the Elven heirarchs of the Summerset, who are neither primitive nor short-lived and at the same time can be said to have nonetheless accumulated a vast store of knowledge and art; if their eldest have not experienced all cultural information available to them, they have experienced at least a majority, which is a countless degree more than any mortal of human stock can claim. The term “polymath” doesn’t even begin to describe that kind of mind.

It’s a pretty interesting book, although the descriptions are often too shallow, and it doesn’t go on to ask probing questions about epistemology. However, the suggestions about the effect on the mind of data “outside our world-model” - and the moment when your understanding of the universe is “broken” - are notable.'