» Sat Nov 22, 2014 4:27 am The difficulties of memoric transcription by Penbrother Filaxes Arvernus of the Scrivial Orders Initially circulated by way of songbrick, memory stone and mossed communicate - by way, in other words, of direct exchange between the minds and memories of the author and their audience - the following text must inevitably reach you, my esteemed reader, limited and imperfect. Arguably, the sole fact of its transcription is already a triumph for knowledge and understanding. Countless similar communicates never escape the immediate confines of their local society in High Rock - where, as time goes by, they are either forgotten, or otherwise undergo so many alterations and imperfect transitions that the message of the original communicate is largely lost under layers of different memories and associations. Countless others make it to Cyrodiil only to then gather dust in the scrivial archive for centuries on end when the task of transcribing them proves too difficult, or too hazardous; indeed, the earliest parts of the transcription process for this text you see before you were plagued by maddening nuances of thought - Shegorathine labyrinths erected, consciously or not, to protect the communicate from outside minds. All these considerations in mind, I nonetheless feel a scholar's responsibility to underline the shortfalls and limitations of this transcript. Much of the colour and vibrancy of the original descriptions could not be conveyed in text. A communicate of this nature engages with its audience on countless levels - smell, a glimpse of vision, associations, triggers dependent on shared ancestral memories, mindsets or conventions; language is only a small fraction of the experience, yet it is all I have at my disposal here. As such, the resulting text (unless presented to the original target audience, which is not at all the case here) cannot be anything but heavily annotated - yet even that is hardly enough to impress upon the reader all the countless worlds and meanings lost in squeezing words out of another's memories. One need only consider the use of the word 'knight' - the label I chose to convey a whole wealth of experiences that might more directly be expressed as hunter-cutting-scamp-iron-blade-stone-hill-stupid-wall-smell-men. These are but a fraction of the emotions meant to be triggered, reduced to basic forms; however, it is enough to give us some sense of the value dissonance that any transcript of a memory communicate read by anyone but a member of the original target audience is bound to conceal. The text that follows is no exception. That said - it is one thing to remember and lament the limits of our knowledge, and another entirely to forswear the pursuit of this knowledge for fear of complications. In this, we must give praise always to the Divine Julianos, who inspires us with the strength and will to resist the seductive comforts of blind ignorance, and teaches us to strive constantly for perfection - even when it is certain to elude us.
A Witches' Guide to Daggerfall
by Anonymous
I etch this so others know, and so the mother-covens sing their angers no longer.
The covens of Daggerfall are no lie! The Rock is strong here, yet with enough cracks for all to hide. Its stretch is centuries, tangled in the crafted towermagics of the birded Direnni; its memories are thirteen thousand voices, whispers of a forest cut of rock, metal and bone.1
You sing us betrayers - deaf-daughters sold and bound to the throned men from beyond wall and clearing. You sing that we no longer recall the voices of the wyrdbones, that we no longer hear the land's doombeat. In your songs, you gouge our eyes out and tear our ears off; you shave our heads, and leave us lost and wanting. You think us fallen - stonemen, wickermen, empty husks to hang up as warnings for the younger daughters.
But we hear. And we remember.
It is true what you've heard - that the Tower's heart beats loud and heavy, that its binding yoke-chains rest heavier still.2 But in the deep dark places below-rock, we hear so much more than the haughty echoes of the covens' ghostwise matriarch; we hear a hundred doombeats - thousands born and thousands dead, thousands loved and thousands lost, all harmonized. The man-crags sing to us, not because we are lost or sold - because we have cut our bones of wall and tower, because we have learned to listen quick and clever. We are not root and bark - we are soot and iron, and the washed-up dregs of the furnace groves.
The streets, the cracks and alleys are more than the pale echoes of your groves and forests. They breathe and speak with force overwhelming - do not sing angers at us only because what deafens you, makes us strong. Their grime, their filth, their energy, their magicks all trickle down the drains and soak into the ground, all sink into the sewers - do not curse us simply because we have the steel-lined stomachs to sift through it and understand. A forge burns brighter, roars louder than a wyrd tree - don't hate it; try and embrace it. The sooty brick is our memory; the mossy crack is our ear, pressed to the ground.
We are you, but we are not all like you. We have no roots, but only so we may better drift along the street-rivers we've made ours.
These man-crags are nothing like the old forests and wyrdgroves, or the babbling bluffs by the sea.5 I clawed myself from the covens' mossy brick-womb, and even I had to learn - they are not yours, and they'll never be yours until you reach out and make them, make yourself like them. No gentle meditations, no hanging from the branches waiting for any slightest whisper from the bones below; the bones below roar. They live, they breathe, and they feed - on careless witches, if need be. Keep your daughters close at hand and gripped by the hair, at least until you and they learn to live to the furnace-groves' doombeats.
The mother-covens sing, "listen there-and-now. Dance to Meridia's rhythms."6
I sing instead, listen here-and-then! The Rock here runs deep, far too deep, and to stray down its oldest chips and chinks is to drown under memory's weight. Rather, skip barefoot across its surface, listening always for echoes reaching up from below. This is no idle country hillock cracked by dynast after fallen dynast - the birded Direnni's chains have grown it into hierarch's rock, thick and unbroken.7
Be mindful! Knights nest in their dozens in the towers high overhead, and they'll snatch a daughter up and drag her off to their wizards quick as clicking your heels. If you can, live by the Water - where potmen make poor floaters, a lighter step will always find something to grab hold of. It may smell queer and stonebound, but at least the bargees there know something of our songs and our dances.8 Sing them friends, if it pleases you; they'll certainly sing a witch clinging to the side of their boat a good omen.
Above all: don't let fear gnaw at you, don't wait for her yoke-chains to find you. These towers and man-crags have loomed here for eons, but we were there to stalk their first shadows; and we've survived, and we've prospered. We live not in hundred-year slumbers below root and branch - we live in flashes brief and brilliant; each lasting but a single doombeat, yet counting voices beyond counting. We dance our nights away in narrow alleys and mossgroves, where our memories cling to the cracks in the stone and the gaps between bricks. The Rock is strong here; its stretch is centuries, all the way down to the world's thrumming heart.
From our gutters and furnace-groves, from below iron root and stone branch, we sing and I etch - the covens of Daggerfall are no lie.
1"The birded Direnni" appears to be a reference to the famed First Era enchantress, Raven Direnni. Arguably the most famous of all Daggerfall's early inhabitants, Raven is often credited with the construction of Castle Daggerfall's central keep, the "Tower of Raven" - which, in turn, is believed to possess a number of alchemagical and geomantic properties. 2Many of Daggerfall's most eminent scholars and geomancers have long argued that the Tower of Raven exerts a particular homogenizing narrative pull over much of the Bretic West - particularly those areas where the political influence of Daggerfall's kings and queens is at its strongest (neighbouring Tulune being one popular example). 3This is doubtlessly a reference to the Iron Street - the district that houses most of Daggerfall City's metallurgical industries. For further details, refer to Dame Evelyn Pembrooke's A Guide to the City of Daggerfall, which is a helpful introductory text for acquainting yourself with the landmarks and broad-brush geography of the city of Daggerfall. 4In this context, "the Water" can only mean Daggerfall's principal body of water - the River Dirne, together with all its canols and tributaries that crisscross the southeastern part of the city. 5Many of Daggerfall's oldest witch covens seem to dwell along the kingdom's wooded, rocky southwestern coast - known to the Daggerfallians themselves simply as "the Bluffs." A fascinating region well worth a dedicated study of its own, for our purposes it is enough to note that it would be the likely home of most of the traditionalist witches, daughters and matriarchs that comprise our text's target audience. 6Meridia is a popular Daggerfallian witch-goddess; for more information, refer to one of my earlier works, Varieties of Faith in the Empire, Volume XII: the Bretons of Daggerfall. 7It seems even the local witches are familiar with one of the traditional cornerstones of Daggerfallian geomancy: any construction (of any nature) attempted in the city of Daggerfall must account for the inexorable ideological and alchemagical pull exerted by the unbroken legitimacy of its ruling line. 8Even the Bretons themselves regard the bargee clans of Daggerfall's River Dirne as a mongrel race. In truth, they are not so drastically different from the West Bretons; however, a combination of unfortunate characteristics (the bargees typically place no value on land and hill, and most spend their lives as waterbound nomads) means that many Daggerfallians consider their river-kin untrustworthy at best. 9A reference to the rivergate system that divides the River Dirne and regulates traffic and the flow of water along its length. Overshadowed by Wayrest's (admittedly stunning) advances on the Bjoulsae, the water engineering skills of the West Bretons are often overlooked, yet for no good reason - the Dirne rivergates are but one example of the ingenuity of Daggerfallian artificers and enchanters.
