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by Enric Milres
I might never have gone to the Alik'r Desert had I not met
Weltan in a little tavern in Sentinel. Weltan is a
Redguard poet whose verse I had read, but only in
translation. He chooses to write in the old language of the
Redguards, not in Tamrielic. I once asked him why.
"The Tamrielic word for the divinely rich child of rot,
silky, pressed sour milk is ... cheese," said Weltan, a huge
smile spreading like a tide over his lampblack face. "The
Old Redguard word for it is mluo. Tell me, if you were a
poet fluent in both languages, which word would you use?"
I am a child of the cities, and I would tell him tales of
the noise and corruption, wild nights and energy, culture
and decadence. He listened with awed appreciation of the
city of my birth: white-marbled Imperial City where all the
citizenry are convinced of their importance because of the
proximity of the Emperor and the lustration of the streets.
They say that a beggar on the boulevards of the Imperial
City is a man living in a palace. Over spiced ale, I regaled
Weltan with descriptions of the swarming marketplace of
Riverhold; of dark, brooding Mournhold; of the
mold-encrusted villas of Lilmoth; the wonderful,
dangerous alleys of Helstrom; the stately avenues of grand
old Solitude. For all this, he marvelled, inquired, and
commented.
"I feel as if I know your home, the Alik'r Desert, from
your poems even though I've never been there." I told him.
"Oh, but you don't. No poem can express the Alik'r. It
may prepare you for a visit far better than the best guide
book can. But if you want to know Tamriel and be a true
citizen of the planet, you must go and feel the desert
yourself."
It took me a little over a year to break off engagements,
save money (my greatest challenge), and leave the urban
life for the Alik'r Desert. I brought several books of
Weltan's poems as my travel guide.
"A sacred flame rises above the fire, The ghosts of great
men and women without names, Cities long dead rise and fall
in the flame, The Dioscori Song of Revelation, Bursting
walls and deathless rock, Fiery sand that heals and destroys."
These first six lines from my friend's On the
Immortality of Dust prepared me for my first image of the
Alik'r Desert, though they hardly do it justice. My poor pen
cannot duplicate the severity, grandeur, ephemera and permanence of the Alik'r.
All the principalities and boundaries the nations have
placed on the land dissolve under the moving sand in the
desert. I could never tell if I was in Antiphyllos or
Bergama, and few of the inhabitants could tell me. For them,
and so it came to me, we were simply in the Alik'r. No. We are
part of the Alik'r. That is closer to the philosophy of the desert people.
I saw the sacred flame of which Weltan wrote on my first
morning in the desert: a vast, red mist that seemed to come
from the deep mystery of Tamriel. Long before the noon sun,
the mist had disappeared. Then I saw the cities of Weltan. The
ruins of the Alik'r rise from the sand by one blast of the
unbounded wind and are covered by the next. Nothing in the
desert lasts, but nothing dies forever.
At daylight, I hid myself in tents, and thought about the
central character of the Redguards that would cause them to
adopt this savage, eternal land. They are warriors by
nature. As a group, there are none better. Nothing for them
has worth unless they have struggled for it. No one fought
them for the desert, but the Alik'r is a great foe. The battle
goes on. It is a war without rancor, a holy war in the sense
the phrase should always imply. By night, I could
contemplate the land itself in its relative serenity. But
the serenity was superficial. The stones themselves burned
with a heat and a light that comes not from the sun, nor the
moons Jone and Jode. The power of the stones comes from the
beat of the heart of Tamriel itself.
Two years I spent in the Alik'r. As write this, I am
back in Sentinel. We are at war with the kingdom of
Daggerfall for the possession of a grass-covered rock that
belongs to the water of the Iliac Bay. All my fellow poets,
writers, and artists are despondent for the greed and pride
that brought these people into battle. It is a low point, a
tragedy. In the words of Old Redguard, an ajcea, a spiral
down.
Yet, I cannot be sorrowful. In the years I spent in the
glories of the Alik'r, I have seen the eternal stones that live
on while men go dead. I have found my inner eye in the
tractless, formless, changeless and changeable land.
Inspiration and hope, like the stones of the desert, are
eternal though men be not.
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