A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
-George Edward Moore
I am Kor, Bringer of the Night, and this is my story...
I rose with the sun. The morning came with a calm stillness. As I emerged from the tent, a cool wind chilled my core. Oh how I longed to take this camp with me on my travels, but without proper supplies I could not afford to haul even the tent. Reluctantly, I gathered my meager belongings, strapped the laces of my worn boots a little tighter than the day before, and reclaimed the path ahead.
The journey up the mountainside toward Skyrim took me near the old fortress called Cloud Ruler Temple. Legends tell of defenses there that go back for millenia. Now, much of the outer wall lay in ruins. I was certainly sad to see the majesty of the once mighty Blade fortress had come to end. Truly, even the mightiest shall one day fall and all will become ashes.
Strangely, an odd familiarity came with a survey of the high Jerall mountains that surrounded the deserted rubble. After several hours of trekking through the mountains, hunger gripped me. Fortunately, I found a freshly killed deer, most likely the left-overs of a cat attack. Taking a few moments to make a small fire, I quickly cooked a few pieces of venison. It might be the last thing I had to eat for the day. I never knew the struggles and energy necessary to trudge through deep snow up a mountainside, even if most of the journey was along an established road.
As I neared the top of the mountain trail, the snow fell with an intensity I had not witnessed to that point. Vision became difficult, the road became harder to discern, my feet grew frigid. This was a critical time. If I didn't come off this mountain soon, I might never come off at all. The snowstorm belted me relentlessly, and I lost all sense of direction. I could no longer tell whether or not I was even on the road to Skyrim. I pushed myself forward until the snow became waist deep. I felt the ground beneath me give way. In a rush, I fell through the snow like a barrel over a waterfall and came crashing to rocky cavern floor underneath.
To my amazement, I could see clearly in the cave. Gems, unlike any I've seen, held fast to the obsidian walls and shone brightly. A milk-drinker would have feared the sight before me. Glistening spider webs lined the walls. The skeletal remains of a lone deceased explorer littered the floor, his boney jaw separated as though he died in agony. But my focus, and my pleasure, was the realization that the dead man had come into this cave well prepared. Relatively little rust lined the steel helmet, cuirass, and gauntlets. Very little remained of his leather boots, however. Most importantly I was able to salvage a beautifully crafted silver battleaxe. It's broad, gleaming blades were still sharp – certainly an upgrade from the double-bit woodsman's ax I'd been lugging around since that fateful night that began this journey.
The fit was a little tight, but I managed to strap on this new gear. But this provided little relief from the dire situation I found myself in. All around me was a menacing cave. The way out, if there was one, was not obvious. As I searched the large cavern, I could hear an eerie skittering sound in the distance. I moved toward the source of the fast tapping and found what appeared to be an opening covered by some thick webbing. I used a couple of rocks to clear a path. The webs were strong and required a few swings of my ax to clear enough for me to move through. But what I was moving into, I could only guess.
The skittering sound grew stronger and seemed to multiply. I began to suspect these sounds belonged to large spiders. I had only heard stories of the great and terrifying ice spiders that hid in caves in Skyrim. Nothing could have prepared me for that first sight. The horrible beast came on me fast. Fortunately I already had my battleaxe in hand and I lodged the silver blade into the spider's fangs, nearly severing its head. Another spider quickly followed and thrust itself towards me with its front legs swinging. Like topping trees, I separated the stems and then with an alternating overhead swing, planted a fatal blow to the top of the ice spider's abdomen, its foul smelling guts splattering across the cave walls.
I continued to move cautiously through the tunnel, but the rest of the journey proved uneventful. I was expecting a series of labyrinthine caves but the path to the surface was fairly straight forward. I could not be sure, but this cave did not appear natural and in some distant past probably served some man-made purpose.
As I approached the bright sun peering through the opening, or in my case, exit, I suddenly realized what seeing those ice spiders really meant. I was now in Skyrim. But somehow and for some reason, I knew this was only the beginning...
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