» Fri Feb 18, 2011 11:50 pm I dared not recount what I saw that day for years to come, but now, as I lie on my deathbed, I think it time to warn the world of the dangers still abundant in this Empire. It is easy for one to believe in this modern era that there are no dangers among the people inhabiting this province, aside from the occasional bandit or marauder, but there still exist terrible pockets of inhumanity, practicing there dark worships in peace. I speak not of Aedra or Daedra, but of gods beyond mortal comprehension, waiting in the dark corners of the earth, asking for naught, yet receiving worshippers of their awesome power. As a young man, I had the mind-shattering experience of encountering one such group, and it is my solemn duty to recount this fully before I pass on.
I was a fresh-faced young man of 24, and I had just graduated from the Arcane University in the Imperial City. To celebrate this I decided to take a trip to each of the towns in this province, starting with Chorrol and looping my way around to Bruma. I had filled my ruck-sack with everything I thought I would need on the trip, and set out looking for transport. I had no luck at the stables at first, none of the carriage-drivers there had a trip to Chorrol on their schedule, and I had just missed the only one who did.
Resigning myself to waiting another day, a run-down one-man carriage with a disturbingly thin horse caught my eye. The man on the horse had a pallid pale-gray skin, and bulbous eyes, giving the off-putting appearance of a fish or subterranean creature. I caught a man walking by by the arm and asked him where the one-man carriage was scheduled to travel. Hackdirt, he told me, but he warned me away from there. Strange people lived up there, he told me. He had heard that the Imperial Legion had to burn the town down 30 years back, but any information regarding the event was kept firmly under wraps. Repulsed by the stories and the carriage-owner’s appearance, but captured by a morbid curiosity, I decided to buy passage on the carriage. As I neared the man I realized his gray skin was unsettlingly moist, and he had thin rolls of fat around his thick neck. A few minutes later the man whipped the horse and we started off in the direction of the town.
The trip to the town was wholly uneventful, and the man at the reins offered no words with which to ease my growing sense of uneasiness. As we arrived on the edges of the decrepit town, I began to feel very uneasy, but I could not explain exactly why. Perhaps it was the groups of huddled gray-skinned men in the dark streets or the haunting corpses of houses burned down years ago. Whatever it was, I at once knew that this town was the rotting carcass of a once booming village, now picked over by the hideous carrion birds of the moist, grey-skinned men. One of the most intact buildings we passed was what seemed to be a church, and the glances I caught through the windows as we moved by revealed abandoned pews and a terrible sense of foreboding.
The man stopped off by a run-down inn, and motioned for me to get out. The inn was terribly maintained, and was staffed by the same type of terrible man as I had seen throughout the town. I inquired on how much the rent of a room for a night was and he seemed intent on scaring me off. I was persistent, though, and was able to get a room for a reasonable price. The room I rented was spacious and well lit, but had the same inexplicably horrifying sense of the abandoned as the rest of the town. I realized that the lock seemed to be broken, and wouldn’t close, but a quick bit of magick fixed that up. Still uneasy, I forced myself to sleep.
I did not sleep well that night, which was not wholly unexpected, and I found myself rudely awakened in the night. Outside my door, I heard a gelatinous mumbling, and a fumbling with the lock that I had fixed not many hours before. Horrified by this sudden event, I franticly began to search the room for exits. To my horror, the only one was the door. Bracing myself and gathering my courage, I finally flung myself at the door, bowling through it and into the man outside.
After this my report may not be accurate, for this is the definite moment in time in which I began to lose grip of what was real and wasn’t, because there before me was a man, yet not a man. He was most wholly unhuman, only resembling my kin in basic structure, his skin was gray and had no pinkish tint, and his eyes dwarfed all other features of his face. Their colorless irises surrounded their tiny pupils, pupils which captivated me and finally drove me over the edge. My memory after that is clouded, and the first moment I remember clearly was hiding in the woods for my dear life, knowing only that my sanity was beyond repair. Hordes of the gray-skinned men along with the subterranean creatures seethed through the forest, and it was merely luck that allowed me to crawl my way to Chorrol, gibbering of what I had seen. My reports were not met with the expected skepticism, however, and a group of guardsmen were dispatched to the city immediately. In the night I spent there I once glanced a hysterical Argonian woman, crying over the fact that her daughter was last seen on her way to that dreaded town.
I was escorted back to the Imperial City the day following, and I do not know of what transpired there that night after I escaped, or of what the fate of the Argonian girl was. All of this interest was eclipsed as I went through my family records while I was confined to my room at the University for a day. In a small painting of my great-grandmother I noticed something wrong, yet I couldn’t place what. Then I looked at her eyes, and then to a mirror. And, to my horror, there was a certain family resemblance.
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I've been reading a lot of Lovecraft lately, and I thought it would be fun to write up an account of the "A Shadow Over Hackdirt" quest. I wrote it pretty quickly, so its not very good.
