» Sun Jun 03, 2012 4:46 pm As strange as it may sound to us in the Fourth Era, having been exposed only to the wondrous face of High Elven militant magnuscience and the dark glamour of the Emperor’s Thalmor ambassadors, agriculture is, in fact, the primary occupation of a large segment of Altmeri society. It would have struck our ancestors of past Empires just as strangely, no doubt, as Alinor – or Summerset, as the isle was known as a province – was always among the least humanly-frequented regions of Tamriel, even when under Imperial rule – but the fact was just as true then as now. And for all that time, soil sorcery has been the heart of agriculture in the heartland of the Altmer. The ‘Kemendelia,’ they name themselves – ‘soil offering,’ in Aldmeris. They are – from what I can tell so far with the information I have been given – regarded as an exceedingly backward bunch by most of society, spurning the company of almost all outside of the agronomic sphere, even disdaining the formal education system which provides a unifying thread through each caste of Altmeri society. Instead, the Kemendelia recruits and trains its members – whether destined for edaphomancy or some other discipline of agricultural magic – independently, and usually on a hereditary basis. Yet again we see that, irregardless of their purported ancestry, inherent arrogance, and ‘ears of great stature,’ elves differ little, except superficially, from the races of men; in Alinor, as everywhere else on Tamriel, the foundation of an individual’s life almost always dictates the form of its course – the sons of farmers become farmers in turn, their flesh and blood tied eternally to the land. Some escape, of course, but only rarely. I am one of the lucky few.
Perhaps embarrassingly for the inbred Altmeri intelligentsia of urban Alinor – presupposing that elves are capable of being embarrassed, of course – the Kemendelia seems to exemplify many of the traits foundational to the society as a whole. Primarily, I speak of their stagnation, here; for as obstinate and resistant to the recombination of ideas as the elves are in fields of intellectual merit, so too are their agromancers unwilling to accept new practices. The claim – the boast, from Altmer – is that agriculture in Alinor has existed without change since nearly the beginning of recorded history. The island and its corollaries are divided into the same twenty-four geographical regions today as they were when the Dominion was conquered by the Empire in the Second Era. What that says about the progress of elven thought in that time is self evident. Purportedly, the isle was delineated according to formulae from the Dawn, and thus the original divisions remain ‘the pinnacle of managerial sublimity.’ Ridiculous claims, naturally, but we will leave the question – if you can call it a question – aside until I have evaluated the situation firsthand.
The agricultural activity of each of these two dozen regions is meticulously managed by a local central agency, headed by the region’s edaphomancers. Housed in a facility the Thalmori pamphlet calls a ‘Solum,’ this agency regulates how, when, and what the growers of the area will produce in any given season. Again, note how perfectly the Kemendelia exemplifies Altmeri society on the grander scale; even their agriculture is bound in pointless formal rigidity, removing free will from the individual owner and alienating him from his product. To be clear, I say ‘pointless’ only in reference to the formality of the institution, for there can be no doubt that agricultural productivity benefits from the implementation of explicitly formulated management – only leave the specifics to the landholders’ private decision. To remove choice from the hands of the individual, as is done so pervasively in Altmeri culture, is blatant injustice; the traditional, collective merish model is but one more form of tyranny, however its proponents may claim otherwise.
Alinor: territory of angles and alienation. The land is blatantly reflective of the sharp edges so prominently featured in the Altmer national countenance, both physical and psychological. As the faces of the elves are harsh and hard with bony chins and slashing noses, with peaked brows and long, knife-pointed ears, so too is their terrain sculpted into a visage of refined cruelty. What were no doubt once rolling hills immediately outside Alinor city rising to a low spine of mountains parallel the coast has been rendered instead into a series of rigid and unnatural galleries, an expanse of artificial steppes; the elves have laid scalpels of sorcery to their land without remorse, carving the countryside into white walled terraces for as far as the eye can see; broader as the slope decreases at the base of each hill and narrower near the crest, and precisely delineated, curving with the contours of the terrain as though the island were flesh tattooed in emerald rings and stripes. Oh, aye, it is verdant, to be sure – each terrace overflows with vegetation of such chromatic supersaturation that it seems almost to run under one’s gaze, the dripping emerald lines of the vibrant ‘fields’ oozing up to meet the impossibly perfect azure of the skies like wet paint in the sun – but it is a harsh verdancy; there is nothing here of tender Kynareth. Tiny ramps and sweeping stone staircases in innumerable variety scale the hillsides – if hillsides these mer-manufactured edifices can still be called – connecting each level to the next and the strange, crystalline or metallic architecture of the homes of the Altmer each to the other where they jut from the flattened crests. See: the owners of this artificial land do not suffer themselves to live embraced in the arms they have so ravaged, but rather must elevate themselves above their twisted creation. As the elves distance themselves from authenticity and sincerity in their relationships, both personal and professional, so too do they distance the land from the organic, guileless expression of nature and replace it with their cold and comfortless elven synthetics. One hesitates even to call it ‘countryside,’ now, so completely have the Altmer obscured whatever the land’s original form may have been, and so little does it resemble what any human would consider wilderness. It would be more accurate to say that we have entered Alinor’s agricultural district than that we have left the city, in truth, for there is no clear distinction to indicate where the Skeining City’s strands end and the ‘countryside’ begins; Alinor’s spiraling crystal towers, its effulgent walls and shimmering quartz-paved streets spin away into the stepped fields without regard for the confines of urbanity, spawning arched colonnades and mirror-spined domes and arcing out its glassy suspended streets in rays across the chiseled hills of jade.
And no, I do not exaggerate this last point, as incredible as it may seem. Even now, as I roll my Mangler in my fist, composing this message for your transcription, the carriage that carries me to my destination slides along suspended hundreds of feet in the air by an enormous bridge of translucent glass, and in all directions and at a panoply of levels do other such constructions jut across the landscape, arrowing out from the city proper in shining beams to meet the wavering horizon, supported at exact intervals by jagged black struts jutting from the earth below. I look out and down through the narrow window of this dark carriage and – no. No, what I see cannot be described as ‘wilderness,’ or even ‘nature.’ It is but Alinor extended, nature subsumed in elvish artifice and arrogance. I see a city, a city that goes on for miles, unending – perhaps unended. No wonder that the Altmer discarded the title under which their homeland passed when it stood as a province of the Empire and reverted to its ancient title; for why name it Summerset Isle when it is but a single metropolis, Alinor, sprawled in uninterrupted architecture from sea to sea?
But supposition at this point, of course; I have yet seen only a tiny portion of the isle. More than any other of the College’s Ambassadors, perhaps, but still not yet enough to pass generalizations on the whole of the region. Surely – surely – the situation will be more natural farther inland, under the auspices of these edaphomancers I go to meet. Surely they cannot be quite as given to the subjugation of the natural world as their urban cousins; I cannot imagine that a group of mages specifically given to the study of the fundament of agriculture has not long since come to the realization that Kynareth does it best, and that neither man nor mer nor beast should treat so invasively with her domain. I expect to see smooth hills and more organic, earthy architecture soon.
But there are hours and hours left in the journey, yet, even at the prodigious rate this contraption’s soap-bubble belly bearings slick it along behind these strange, narrow-hipped horses. A strange mode of transportation as a whole, this, the vehicle as well as its motivators. All elven conveyances baffle the human mind at first sight, of course, with their preposterous grandeur and incredible intricacy, the brilliance of their mirror-bright shells and the beauty of their arch-necked specimens of equinity, but the Thalmor’s model strikes one in quite another way entirely. Low to the ground where most perch high on their enchanted goniochromatic sphere-wheels, and dull-dark where most shine like the noon-sun, the carriages of the Thalmor leave one ever unnerved. There is something sly and feline in the long curving line of the low compartment’s shell, with its narrow view screens slashing its grey-black sides like tiger stripes or the gills of a shark of midnight. They slink, where others prance, sliding around Alinor’s circular corners with the grace and confidence of a leopard; ever a surprise to find suddenly at one’s side, and ever a queer unsettled relief to find silently vanished in a second’s lapse of attention. To be here, now, within these dark velvet padded walls, in this low sling of a seat, is, surprisingly, less like having entered the belly of the beast than it is to having the wide black eyes of the leopard or shark pressed a few short inches from my own, the blacks of our pupils swirling together in mutual superficial disregard. Not the most comforting conditions for a journey; but let us press on.
The carriage’s oddities, as no doubt the Assemblage will already be aware, are but one more of the superficial divergences the Thalmor uses to distinguish itself, as the ruling party, from the rest of their society. One need look no further than my travelling companion to find another example of the phenomenon; he sits there, legs coolly crossed beneath stiff grey-black folds, his delicate, long-fingered hands folded across his narrow knees, a picture of pale reserve; his robes cut with the starkly simple elegance of straight lines and acute angles characteristic of the uniforms of clerks and magisters of law, when the nobility among whom his political station has seated him clothe themselves in flowing, voluminous wraps of sea-silk as shimmeringly vibrant and variegated as the wings of flutter-bys or the iridescent scales of water snakes; his hair one dark, thick braid pulled forward over his robes’ jutting, gold-rimmed collar, sparkling darkly with its oily sheen, when the usual trend is the increase of stylistic complexity in direct relationship with an elf’s stature in society, simple braids and woven caps for laborers and the simplest of artisans, towering knotted lock-labyrinths for the most high; the soft skin of his pinched face pale like yellowed parchment where the universal love of the sun’s kiss keeps all other sects of Altmeri society a healthful tawny, a gold that nearly glows no matter what hue of light happens upon it.
[...] I have been so far frustrated in my attempts to delve the inner workings and original foundations of the Thalmor as a political entity, I have managed to learn something of the group’s philosophy. While all Alinorian Altmer I have ever met have been inextricably bound in dedication to regulation and rigidity, the Thalmor carry their reverence to the level of obsession. The Word, as the body of Altmeri law is known, is almost sacred to this organization, and they hold the enactment of its dictates as their highest directive. Why should such a group have risen to power, you ask, if their only passion is the interpretation and perpetration of the law? I cannot yet answer that question with confidence. Perhaps it is the very honor that the law carries with it in the collective mind of Alinor that has elevated them thusly. Perhaps what we see as the rulers of Alinor are but the executive arms of some hidden legislative. Or perhaps the Thalmor see their actions in politics as a mere extension of their philosophy… perhaps in ruling, they see themselves upholding a higher Word in the world than that of their people – the Word of Divinity, perhaps? Perhaps not. We shall see.
Dusk rises now before us. Our road has snaked its way across western Alinor for much of the day, passing from the wider terrace-steppes of the port’s immediate surroundings to plains tilted at shallow angles in periodic ridges as though the land had been shoved up from below, where terraces were unnecessary except on the lee slope and where a thousand glittering streams and rivers split and tangle with the cross hatches of the land, and then on to the abrupt cliffs of the mountain range roughly paralleling the coast, where the faces of the granite walls are draqed in vining vegetation from carven, arched balconies and the gnarled branches of bent fruit trees stretch out their withered arms from the orchards atop the flat crests above the aerial paving stones’ sheen. Yes, even the mountains, haven of wilderness to the human mind, bear the indelible stamp of elven artifice. Switch backing stairs etch the sheer granite slopes, so old that much of their preciseness has been worn away, the edges rounded off. Decorative stonework, too, mark the rock in similar softened grandeur; cruelly noble statues and bewildering mandala, robed elves with ears blunted by time and arch-necked horses, unidentifiable beasts with mandibles and fur and three sets of wings tangled among intricate knots worked with the grain of the stone, so masterfully integrated with its compositional irregularities as to make it seem a hundred stones of a hundred colors had been woven together by sculptor sorcerers of old. An awe-inspiring promenade it is, to be sure, to ride that twining suspended street between those looming worked walls, aromas undocumented by man rising up to meet one’s olfactory organ as crisp hooves crush in muffled sonority the petals fallen from the budding trees above. It brings to mind the tales one hears of the Imperial City in past years, when Emperors would process through their neat, gleaming capital to the cheers of the people, showered in herbs and flowers cast from the windows and roofs lining the way. An echo twisted in the warped mirror of the elves, that afternoon passage through the Alinorian mountains; resonating with emptiness where humanity resounds with the clamor of life, the only heralds insensible vegetation, our single carriage the only example of intelligent life in that stony district of the city isle, a single speck of motion in a hushed gallery of stasis.
And now the mountains part before us, falling down in slumped-shoulder slopes to yet more stepped fields – they do not end, it seems; city-isle, in truth – and the dusk rises up before us in its seven shades of bruise. We have left the mountains to their amber-antlered blaze, and entered what I take to be the vast central valley of the island; a massive oval bowl rimmed in the same sheer-faced, ravine-riven peaks, gaping so broad and long that its northern cusp is lost already in the indistinctness of twilight. The road turns ahead, to follow the line of the mountains, and an anologous structure is visible in the east, though gone dull and vaguely violet with the dusk where ours yet blazes with the sunset thrumming through its glassy veins. Narrower paths splinter and spiral away from ours and from its dark sister, criss-crossing the bowl at heights less prodigious than that of their parents but never quite touching the earth. They gleam like flax, or the fuzzy strands of a Nord woman’s hair, slowly withdrawing the mantle of day from the vale in delayed reflection of the already fallen sun. Their rays sweep and swirl like the tide over the swaying crops below.
Dawn is a remarkable thing, in Alinor – though Jon was not, understandably, in any mood to appreciate its beauty. It comes in tendrils, crawling over the land’s sleeping etched curves in silent amber threads. The roads are its heralds; their glassy strands net the first true rays of the sun’s rising as they break the crests of the eastern waves, and the trapped light seeps through the enchanted aerial paving stones and across the land, ever farther west, washing into intersecting paths and spilling all the time out of its soldered vehicle and into valleys and fields and ravines yet possessed by the velvet of night. The anticipation of dawn in Alinor is a creeping awakening, a slow sweeping of ragged glowing threads to wake the city-isle to the wonder of the sun. When that does, at last, truly break the horizon, the metropolis has been awake and lighted by its glory for hours.
‘The Skeining City,’ they call Alinor on the seas. A strange moniker, it seems at first exposure, and not at all suited to the tales one hears of the place. Then one learns a bit more of the metropolis’ particulars, and the name is suddenly lessened in its unsuitability. Alinor lies on the west coast of the main Summerset, guarded by the Nenepalla Reef that parallels that stretch of shore, a few miles into the ocean. It is this reef that is and has been the city’s greatest asset, not only militarily, as its intricacies necessitate the service of an Altmeri guide to safely make port, but economically and culturally as well. The Reef hosts a plethora of oceanic life, which bounty the elves have never been shy of exploiting; coral for their jewelry and the minisculely toothed pestles so sought after by Tamriel’s alchemists; the rare mirror pearls, whose unending layers have been said to provide the only objective reflections of self; the oil of the cephalomer; the hides of sharks and dolphins; tuna and squid for the sea-tuned palate of the elves; luxuries and staples in innumerable variety and indiminishable surfeit. The goods Alinor draws from this endless aquatic mine are distributed throughout the Isles, and have made it the single most influential of the Summersets’ urbanities for most of history.
One creature looms above all others of the Reef’s inhabitants, however, in its import to Alinorian influence, and, indeed to Altmeri culture as a whole; the clepsydra, or sea-serpent. These are not the fabled beasts of the deeps, whose solitary habits rarely bring them so near the surface and so close to the shore at once, but their their much smaller – albeit still dangerous – cousins, which attain at most a length of five feet and are found with varying degrees of regularity throughout Nirn’s known seas. The serpents themselves are common, and not of any particular value, but their breeding sites are rare, and their eggs of great worth. The Nenepalla Reef is one of the very few known nesting sites; clepsydra from all over the oceans, presumably, gather in its inner recesses to form their orgiastic mating tangles, and lay their precious eggs in the crags of the coral to be guarded by the older, infertile, and sedentary females. The Altmer, then, harvest the eggs – not without risk; the sorcerers that lead, defend, and breathe for the teams who do the collecting are formidable individuals, but have one of the lowest of elvish life expectancies – and excise the developing embryos. The embryo is of no importance; it is the shell the elves want, for it is from that unique material only that the favored cloth of Alinor can be made – byssus, or sea-silk. So valued is this product and so extensive is the industry of extraction built up to satisfy the elven demand that I find it almost wondrous that serpents have not been exterminated from the Summersets’ seas as they have from its valleys. The boats were out at work, when our ship was being led through the Reef’s circuitous safe passage; hundreds of them, bobbing silently in place on their tethers as their crews dove into the interstitial spaces of the coral below on their unending hunt. The waves seethed for miles in the moonlight with pale, tangling embryos; the excision is enacted as the eggs are collected. Much later the shells are processed and filtered, and woven into the scale-sheening cloth almost all elves in Alinor, high or low, wear. And all of it from this single city, for nowhere else can the clepsydra be depended upon to gather in perpetuity. Thus does the suitability of the name reveal its first layer.
But there is more to it than that, of course. There is always more to understanding; it is an endeavor wrapped in alternating layers obfuscation and realization. Such with Alinor. So you understand its industry, and think you understand its name, though still it seems a bit strange that the whole of the place’s vaunted wonders become subsumed in the minds of its visitors by such a paltry thing as its predominant trade item. Then your ship breaks the last swell, and the city bursts up on the horizon; effulgent, glimmering, a confluence of splintered light and metal, overwhelming in its height and so impossibly straight as to make the rest of the world seem bent and cramped. Closer, on the spear-spire docks, and you realize that even the rainbows refracted from the prismatic angles of the multifaceted towers jutting up from the waves are odd, hard and sharp instead of blurred and blended. And it soon becomes apparent that you are not mistaken; light does not diffuse, does not scatter, does not bend, in the Skeining City’s harsh, polychromatically stark confines. And it seems there can be no less suitable name for such a place than ‘the Skeining City.’
But step within – lay your feet on the iridescent marble – wander the multileveled street-struts and mirrored stairways, and you will begin to see that there could be no more suitable moniker. When you have stared up from the paving and seen the sky but a pinprick above, enmeshed in the impossibly spiraling swirl of the paralleled towers all around you, when you have walked the infinite interlinking pathways through the air and seen the stairways wrapping four cornered horizons round eight-edged glass spires, when your feet have sworn the stairs descended that led you to a topmost balcony, when you have heard the echoes of long dead conversations intermingling and intercommunicating, when you have experienced the nauseating tangle of time and space that is the elven capital – then, then you will see why it is known as the Skeining City.
