All right, welcome to my first piece of fan fiction, Shadows over Aleswell. Before I begin my story, I would like to introduce what this story is about. Shadows over Aleswell is, as the subtitle says, a semi-light hearted tale of Aleswell's "problem". This story will be using characters and places from my mod, http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=22553. I'll hopefully be updating daily, and with that, let's begin!

CHAPTER ONE
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The night had fallen on the day of Rain's Hand 18, and true to the month's name, the rain was in full force. Most of the citizens of Aleswell, a quaint little town somewhere north of the Imperial City, were already fast asleep, secure that there was a roof over their heads. Even the local beggar had taken shelter in the Hall of Dibella, knowing fully well of the weather's dangers. But not everyone was indeed this way. Gathered in an old tower on the edge of the town, two robed and hooded figures stood over a table.

"So why are we here?" asked the first figure, a Nord woman. She was leaning on her staff and wearing a grey robe, her raven hair covered to keep out the rain.

"Eiruki, you have not seen what this can do! Do not worry of the rain, my dear apprentice, for the tower's bare roof has been covered with my magical force field." said the second figure in reply. He was an Altmer, clad in a blue robe, and was sitting in a chair behind his desk. The desk was covered in a medley of alchemical equipment and ingredients, scrolls rolled out under calcinators and retorts, an alembic set upon one corner, and various mortar-and-pestle sets strewn with bone meal and saltpetre.

"Why, I have calculated this spell will work! Trust me, Eiruki, for this is the answer to all our problems."

Eiruki sighed and bit her tongue. The elf was her master Ancotar, who had taught her in the arts of magic and alchemy. Though allegedly a wise man, Ancotar's many experiments had a history of going terribly wrong, and Eiruki was sceptical about this one's success. Ancotar leaned over and picked up a few labelled bottles from a cask set under his chair. Producing a corkscrew, Ancotar opened up the fizzing and bubbling bottles.

"The combination," he described, as he poured out the contents of the flasks, "is two pinches of sulphur..." Eiruki's cat, Padwhacket, poked his head out from under his companion's robe. Eiruki held her familiar close to her, protecting him from any of the inevitable accidents.

"The ground-up powder from the teeth of a Daedroth..." Ancotar continued, as he dropped the sulphur into his retort. He took a few samples of Daedroth's teeth from one of the bottles and cast it into his mortar-and-pestle, then began to grind it up. Eiruki had summoned the Daedrorth herself to provide ingredients for Ancotar's spell. Eiruki backed away, holding her staff up in front of her face to guard off any explosions.

"Ripe comberry juice..." Ancotar told, as he squeezed some of the red berries into the retort. "And for the final ingredient, a lock of the wizard's own hair." Ancotar flipped back his hood and plucked out a few hairs from his head. Ancotar's scalp was nearly bald from all his experiments requiring hair, leaving only a tuft behind each of his ears and a ridge going from the back of his skull to his forehead left at the moment. "I'll shake all this well, and soon we will have the potion of which all alchemists dream. The ability to turn iron to gold!" As Ancotar shook the potion three times, each shake growing more vigorous, Eiruki grew more and more paranoid.

"Please...please...please..." she silently prayed, deathly worried that something bad might happen. Ancotar finished with the final shake, and opened up the cork on his retort. The tower shook with the resulting explosion, causing no damage, but producing a deafening sound that may well have risen the Daedra Princes themselves from their rest.

"Oh no, oh dear me, no!" Ancotar wailed. "It's too horrible! Why oh why could this happen to me?!? I'm blind!"

Eiruki sighed. "Stop over-reacting, master." She sarcastically emphasized the last word of her statement. "You're not blind. Open your eyes." Eiruki bent down and wiped the soot that had collected over Ancotar's face, blocking his vision.

"I can see! I can see! Thank Akatosh, I can see!" the Altmer sang, jumping for joy. "But...what...wait..." he paused and looked down at himself. "I can see right through me!"

Eiruki snapped back at him. "You're not that hard to figure out, you know." Ancotar would have yelled at his apprentice for her insolence had he not observed her transparency.

"Why, Eiruki, my apprentice, you're as see-through as pure glass! Oh dear gods, this is worse than I though. We've all died, and left our ghosts behind!"

"Calm down." Eiruki calmly told Ancotar. "I suppose this is some sort of side effect of your potion. See, I told you that you shouldn't be doing something like this in this phase of the moons, but no..."

"Ah, I see." said the elf, relieved. "I guess that this shall all wear off in a day's time. Time is growing short, now. Goodbye, Eiruki!" The alchemist waved farewell to his apprentice as he turned and walked out of the tower.

"Yes, yes. This will all wear off in a day's time..." Ancotar reassured himself, as he drifted off to sleep in his chair.

I will keep up with this and be sure to catch your next update! Thanks for taking the time out to write!

Such a wall of text...
Try some spaces and then i will be sure to read it.

All right, paragraphed.

And, on that...

CHAPTER TWO
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"Mayor? Mayor!? MAYOR!?!"

Alledus von Aleswell was fast asleep on the morning of Rain's Hand 19. He was still in bed by 9 in the morning, and his bodyguard, grown impatient, was trying to wake him.

"MAYOR!" cried the guard. He banged his sword on the ground to create enough noise to wake his master up.

"What calls me from my rest?" asked Mayor Alledus. He looked around and saw no one there. "Ah, must be just the wind. Those trees against m' walls aren't kind to me..." he continued on, and then drifted back to sleep.

"MAYOR!" the guard yelled again. This time he took no more ignorance, and ran over and shook the mayor out of his bed. Alledus landed on the floor with a resounding thud. Rubbing his head, the mayor of Aleswell slowly got to his feet. "What was that for?" he asked, his eyes still closed. When he opened his eyes, however, Alledus was surprised to see the calls were coming from nowhere at all.

"Yes, sir, I'm coming." Alledus called out down the stairs. As he walked to the door, in an attempt to go down the stairs and meet his bodyguard on the ground floor, he walked right into his bodyguard, knocking both men off their feet and onto the floor. The mayor was lucky enough to land on the rug that he had set on the floor in front of his bed. His bodyguard was less fortunate, and broke through the door, landing on the stairs to the first floor.

"Oh, good heavens, that was my door! Yriggs will have to come by some time today and fix that." the mayor muttered to himself. "And what the HELL is happening here? I've only just woken up and I've been banged upon the head twice today! What sort of poltergeist do we have here?"

The bodyguard called out in reply from the stairway. "No, it's not a poltergeist. That was me."

The mayor gasped. "You're a poltergeist? Why, to think that I had trusted my life with you, bodyguard!"

"No, I'm not the poltergeist. That was me, trying to get you out of bed, and that was me that you walked into." the bodyguard explained.

"Don't be so silly! Why, this is all just a dream I'm having! If you had really woken me, bodyguard, I would have seen you." von Aleswell said to himself.

"It is not a dream!" the impatient guard yelled out. "Look. We're all invisible. You and I are all invisible! Clearly this is one of that wizard's experiments."

"Oh! The wizard!" Alledus said. "What was his name again? Anoctar? Ancortrar? Acnotra?"

"Ancotar, and knowing him, this will just run out in a few days. Just act natural, m'lord, and hopefully we'll all be visible again by tomorrow." the guard reassured his mayor.

"Oh, yes, I remember now. Recall that time he said he was trying to make iron turn into gold, and all it did was make his hair turn green? That just wore off in a few hours. No doubt this will be the same."

And so, the mayor went about his mayoral duties for the rest of the day. He, like everyone else in the town, was invisible, but he tried to cope with it. It did give him a hard time putting on his hat, which would turn invisible the moment it came in contact with his body, no less keeping his beard trimmed, and he had to watch for bumping into people as he surveyed the streets, but other than that nothing out of the ordinary happened. At the end of the day, Alledus von Aleswell returned to his bed and slept soundly, hoping that the curse would run its course and be gone by the morning.

It didn't.

"Ancotar must be DETONATED!" yelled the angry mayor when he saw that he and the people were still invisible.

"I hope you mean detained, sir." said his bodyguard. "In any case, I would say that we should just write him a letter instead."

"Yes, yes, I suppose that is a good idea. Bring me my quill!" said von Aleswell, as he sat down to his writing desk.

Well, I'd like to say I'm sorry for not being able to get a chapter done yesterday. Let's hope this makes up for it!

CHAPTER THREE
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The Mayor concluded his letter to Ancotar with a swipe of the quill. "Done." he proclaimed, and handed to document to his bodyguard. "Now, do give this to Ruffini. He'll be the one to deliver it. Good man, that Ruffini..."

Ruffini Horatius was a citizen of Aleswell and its resident go-between. Every weekend he would travel on his horse, Brego, from Aleswell to the Imperial City's outlying farms and arrange trade of goods, typically the Imperial City's rice and fruits for Aleswell's crop of wheat products. He was a third-generation delivery man and integral to Aleswell's support. Because of his experience with the trade, Alledus would have Ruffini carry out any urgent transactions. This was one of them.

The Mayor's bodyguard opened the door to Ruffini's house. Ruffini's wife shrieked. "GHOSTS!" she cried. "Ruffini, get the holy water, now! There are ghosts about!" as she ran over to her husband in fear.

"Calm down, now, madam. There's no such things as ghosts." said the bodyguard. "Well, at least I don't think so. I've never seen one. Well, either way, there are no ghosts here." The bodyguard explained what he was doing to Ruffini, and told the delivery man of his duties. Ruffini nodded, listening to what he was being told.

"All right, I'll take that letter down right now." he duteously noted, as he took the scroll of parchment from the bodyguard's hand. Ruffini walked outside and over to Brego, who was currently chewing his afternoon bucket of oats. "Sorry, old boy, but you're not done for the day just yet." Ruffini said as he patted the horse on what he thought, and hoped, to be his flank. Brego, normally a chestnut Thoroughbred gelding, was now completely invisible. Ancotar's curse had spread not only to the citizens of the town but to their pets and livestock as well. Every beast from Brego, to the wandering chickens, to the mule hitched to local farmer Adrian Greenhawk's cart, to the sheep and goats in the fields were invisible. Ruffini sighed as he realized how difficult it would be to tack up his horse, but he acknowledged it was an urgent deed.

The messenger peered into the shed behind his house and brought out the saddle, girth, bridle, reins, and stirrups. Ruffini first attempted to sling the saddle over Brego's back, but dumbfoundedly watched as the saddle disappeared when it touched the horse. Ruffini stood silent and pondered the consequences of this. He would not be able to determine the right settings of the tack and could put the equipment on wrong, causing discomfort and inconvenience for horse and rider alike. When no solution seemed reasonable, Ruffini ran to Eiruki for help.

The witch was dusting her collection of soul gems, ready to be filled, when Ruffini entered her store. "Eiruki? It's me, Ruffini. Can you help?" asked the distraught messenger. He explained his predicament to Eiruki. "I need to deliver a letter to Ancotar, but I can't get my horse tacked up when he's invisible. Can you lend me a spell to help?" Eiruki walked over to her rack of scrolls standing by the door. Padwhacket, her loyal familiar, had curled up in front of the scrolls and was fast asleep. Being, of course, invisible, Eiruki took care not to trample him as she approached the scrolls.

"I do have this scroll of Life Detection." she reported back to her customer. "But in all my experiences, it doesn't show you the shape and form of the invisible object. It can only mark its location." Ruffini sighed, defeated. "I guess I'll have to go on foot now." he said as he walked out the door.

Eiruki walked the beaten path down the hill to Ancotar's tower. It was dilapidated from years of abuse and disrepair, lacking even a proper roof, yet the resident wizard was quite capable of using it. Ruffini climbed up the ledges of rubble allowing a clear, if inconvenient, path to the top floor where the wizard experimented with his spells. Ruffini could not find any sight of the Altmer, so he simply left the letter on his desk.

As Ruffini returned to the town, Eiruki ran into him. "Wait!" she said. "Here's that wand I keep enchanted with a Recall spell to the Mark I've placed at the tower!"

Ruffini hit his forehead with the palm of his hand in frustration.