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The Six Forbidden Sword Techniques to Pierce the Vault of Heaven

Reader, in your hands is a sacred text of the ancient Cespari shehai school. In these pages the worthy will find Truth, while intruders, invaders, and infidels will have their memories and hearts carved out by the goddess-saint Leki herself. Remember this oath if you continue, for it is true even if you do not yet believe.

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As the Ra of the Cespar School know, the last world-piece that the Second Serpent sends to each kalpa is the whispered promise of freedom. On each new skin he tells only a single forbidden shehai swing, and most peoples forget it soon after — giving in to decadence and returning to a brief, terminable ignorance. But we ansei have much longer memories than the elves, oni, and beasts of Yokuda, so now we exist and they do not.

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I. THE EPHEMERAL FEINT

To sing a story of your sword To aim for your foe within the tale You tell the world the battle has already passed And Heaven will remember that you struck him down.

“Sing new memories, move the serpent.”

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II. THE PANKRATO

To cut the large you must cut the small To join the divided you must cleave the indivisible You will slay the left-handed with your left hand And break the earth to break into Heaven.

“As below, so above.”

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III. THE HEL HUNHI

To end mortals with song is crude To carve your own song of mortality is subtle You must free yourself of Tu’whacca’s Shores And reach for true Heaven instead.

“Spare the prisoners, cut the prison.”

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IV. THE MAKE WAY

To charge through all foes that move against you To slice a bloody trail into earth and Heaven You need only follow the blade of the one before you And swing like the HoonDing, who did it first.

“First he, now me.”

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V. THE HENKA STEP

To learn the serpent’s hunger is all that’s ahead To remember his doomed prey is all that’s behind You must stand steady a hair’s breadth from danger And step sideways past Heaven’s void to a new dawn.

“Understand, and I can move.”

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VI. THE NITEN-ICHI CLASH

To find union in conflict To know your opponent beneath his skin You will become one soul with the trade of your blows And breach Heaven under your combined might.

“Not I and I, but I.”

​

Some schools claim there are more than six shehai techniques — the Saintsport school says eight, Swordsage Orioc teaches one-thousand-and-eight, the Hegathe school reasons there are countless as Sep invents a new one for each new skin. However these are all lies or worse, a corruption of memory. Do not trust the false swings for they are not ones of apotheosis, but of oblivion.

These are the truths taken from the mouth of the Second Serpent.

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A Map of the Imperial Lunar Provinces during the Mede Dynasty: 1st Edition

Cartographer's Note: During the Empire's hardships of the last few centuries, many imperial provinces had to be left in the lurch at times of great crisis. The Imperial Legion and bureaucracy suddenly found itself woefully overextended, which shook many of the provincials' faith in the system and ultimately led to the political situation of today.

Nowhere is this more true than the former Imperial Lunar Provinces. Up until Morihatha Septim's reign as empress, Tatterdemalion, Lleswer, and Chirpotera (and likely even more lost to our records) were member-states of the Empire just like any terrestrial province, with their own representatives in the Imperial City and their own detachment of the Imperial Legion guarding their citizens. However, with the repeated crises at the end of the 3rd Era, first the legionnaires were recalled back to the homefront and then connection was lost all together.

Now with allies in short-supply, it seems prudent to reconnect with the lost provinces. Lleswer is still connected to Elsweyr via the Mane and sugar trade, and so is unlikely to have much sympathy, but the status and standing of the other states is still unknown. If the currently ceremonial New Void Navy and Imperial Mananauts could be restored in full capacity, reconnecting with the provinces could be strategically valuable for our future bargaining position against the Dominion.

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Unfortunately, our historical records are quite limited on the specifics of the Imperial Lunar Provinces, since even during the height of the Second Empire the details of void-travel were largely kept under wraps due to the negative cultural connection between Oblivion and Daedra. To construct this map I mainly had to rely on a good telescope, with some reconstructed fragments of the Pocket Guide to the Empire, Morihatha Edition and interviewing a former ambassador from Yneslea who still resides here in the City to fill in the blanks.

With so few extant sources, this should absolutely not be taken as the definitive authority on the current state of Secunda. Rather, this is the Arcane University's current best understanding of the situation. As soon as other texts emerge or if the proper strings can be pulled to organize an expedition through Elsweyr's nirnstrand, a second edition will be prepared.

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His Majesty's most humble servant, Helvia Varra Imperial City Arcane University, Department of Cartography and Imperial Topology 11th of Sun's Dusk, 4E177

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A Farmer’s Guide to Retaking the Heartlands

Or, How to Eradicate the Creeping Menace of the So-Called “Septim’s Bane” from the Nibenay Valley.

In the name of EMPEROR TITUS MEDE II, Praetor Helveni Aur Comitia of Interior Affairs 4E183

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Over the past few years, many Cyrodilic citizens on the banks of Lake Rumare and across the Nibenay Valley have reported increasingly tenacious and invasive weeds springing up across the area. These have been particularly disruptive to farmers, with one tobacco farmer reporting he went to sleep one night with his fields looking perfectly normal and woke up the next thinking he’d been transported to Valenwood.

Some of the more superstitious and impressionable citizens have started to call the phenomenon “Septim’s Bane” or (heretically) “The Curse of T██s,” saying that the old dynasty or even the false former ninth divine is somehow revoking the blessing from the land and letting it return to its primordial pre-imperial state. Others of an even more fanciful bent — the so-called Taneth school after their heterodox founder — claim the White-Gold Tower itself is no longer acknowledging the rule of the glorious Mede dynasty and changing the very land to reflect that. Some local legends even hold that the phenomenon is much older, dating back almost to the Oblivion Crisis and attribute it to the death of Martin Septim and the loss of the Amulet of Kings. Obviously all such explanations are blatant heresy and are no longer tolerated after Imperial Decree 82.10.IV. Instead, the best minds of the Imperial City Arcane University are working to find the true cause which will be announced as soon as it’s determined.

In the meantime, remain calm. If you find your property affected by Septim’s Bane, here are practical ways to fight back against the invasive botanical hoard and reclaim your land:

Cyrod Palm — The cyrod palm is a wide canopied tree that can grow 30-40 feet in a night, topping out at nearly a thousand feet tall. While a single one isn’t too disastrous to a field of crops, they tend to spread rapidly if left alone which will churn up the ground with roots and blot out the sun with a dense canopy. Unfortunately the trunks are pliable and fibrous enough to resist all blades outside the sharpest Akaviri dai-katanas. Instead, burn or freeze the roots daily to slowly wither the palm over the course of a few weeks.

Spell-scrolls designed specifically for combating cyrod palms have have been distributed throughout the area and are available at your local municipia decurio building.

Elfweed — Elfweed is the thick green-gold vine that adheres and ultimately envelopes any stone, wood, or earthen surface it encounters, parasitizing any living plant life nearby. While elfweed seems to appear near cyrod palms, don’t under any circumstances try to find the end of the long vines. Nobody has ever seen the base of one and following the stem will only lead you to more places encased in elfweed that appeared to be perfectly fine just a moment before. Even if you manage to hack through the almost impervious structure, you’ll just find yourself with two elfweed vines, now entwined and symbiotically feeding off each other. Instead douse the vine in rat poison and allow its parasitic nature to work against it. If no rat poison is available, strong salt water or distilled spirits will also wilt the vine.

Pigweed — Pigweed is a waist-high flowering underbrush that pops up especially on hill tops and other high places. Pigweed lacks the extreme resilience of the other aspects of Septim’s Bane, but don’t let this apparent fragility deceive you. The tiny cluster flowers of each are filled with thousands of spore-seeds ready to be released to the winds at the slightest provocation. One farmer reported yanking up a handful of stalks on the edge of his land one day and waking early the next to find it growing so densely across his farm that he couldn’t even leave his front door. Imperial thaumaturgists had to float him out just so he could escape his cabin. If you find some, don’t disturb it — just make a generous offering to Kynereth and pray she takes care of them.

Salaiche’s Tears — The weed Salaiche’s Tears is a persistent, low-hanging mist that douses a localized area in constant rainfall. While many farmers initially rejoice at the water for their crops, within days the drowning plants succumb to rootrot or mold. There’s no known consistent way to dispel Salaiche’s Tears once it starts, but the I.C.A.U. has made breakthroughs in adapting a Nord thu’um into a powered-up, easily disseminated scroll for the purpose. Early tests are promising, and the pesticide-scrolls should start mass-production as soon as the college figures out how to keep an untrained user’s throat from being ripped out in the process.

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A Transcription of the Late 1st Era Tele-Memetic Artifact “M.N. Captain Nero’s Adventures through Oblivi-Space!!, Vol. 17”

Transcriptor’s Note: One of the great pitfalls of modern academia’s myopic fascination with relics from great tombs and Ayleid ruins is that it tends to find a lot of incandescent crystals glowing every color of the rainbow that ironically shed virtually no light on how people of the past actually lived. While my colleagues at the I.C.A.U. were busy announcing what Dwemer outpost they’re going to spend the entire yearly budget (and probably a few graduate student souls) exploring, I just happened to look into my sweet neighbor Dynatia Geelteus’s request about a small cache of old artifacts workers found while excavating to expand her shop’s basement.

Who would have guessed that while we scrape the bottom of the barrel to plunder every single crypt for the last few legendary maces of +10 stamina damage, the real cultural treasures have been here all along, moldering beneath the ground of our city that’s been continuously inhabited by man and mer for at least 5,000 years. But by all means, don’t take my grant proposals.

—

This artifact appears to be a piece of entertainment or propganda of an unknown format. The physical object is two smooth translucent disks that can freely rotate around a single axis, apparently intersecting in physical space but able to pass through each other freely. Each disk individually is covered in Remen-era proto-Cyrodiilic text which this researcher is not fluent in. Nonetheless, when focusing not on the individual disks but instead the system as a whole, one is somehow able to pick out and resolve the competing overlapping fragments into clear meaning and even full color images.

Since this style of pictorial dissemination has been lost to time, this scholar will merely have to transcribe the language and events into mundane text for publication. Originally an artist was commissioned to recreate the images for closer inspection, but for some reason this style of tele-memetic transmission resists such replication. The images flee from the mind like fragments of an interrupted dream the moment a brush touches canvas. Until further investigation, it is unclear whether this is due to the metaphysics of observing a message through conflicting constituent aspects or if it’s some type of copy protection.

Humbly and respectfully, Ashei Tigonus Sr. Professor of Tamrielic History Imperial City Arcane University, 4E194

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Transcription: “M.N. Captain Nero’s Adventures through Oblivi-Space!!, Vol. 17”

[A tall dark structure lies suspended high above the twin planets Zenithar and Mara. Three figures drift towards it, all decked out in full mundane-simulacrum frames of imperial mothsilk1 — a near-necessity for all but the most tenacious mortals in the interplanar stretches of oblivion. The wingcloaks of the suits flap slowly, propelling them forward and giving off gentle fuchsia pulses with each beat. In the background behind the three figures is an enormous moth imperator. The behemoth floats lackadaisically in the void, sunning the hanging gardens in its wings and the silver cathedral built into its back with the rays of distant Magnus.

Four title cards: “FIRST MATE YAL BOETH,” “CENTURION CLAI DUNLAIN,” and “BURGLAR XEIRSAAR” appear on the silhouetted figures. “THE N.V.N. MYRRHMIDON” names the far-off moth.]

YAL — “Remember: this warp-spire has been allegedly abandoned, but that just means there are no Alinori soldiers in there. These empty things have a tendency to accumulate all sorts of riff-raff, fugitives, and Khajiit before the last sunbird is even out of sight.”

XEIRSAAR — “I once found a grounded Akaviri cloud litter on the fourth ring of Kynareth. It was a tiny thing, no bigger than a large hut. And yet, when my egg-brother cracked open the hatch no less than six kaoc Khajiit shot out and scattered to the winds.

[Clai laughs as the party reaches the surface of the spire. Xeirsaar pulls out a small set of tools and gets to work on removing a silver plate from the surface while the others wait.]

XEIRSAAR — “I tried to grab one but they were the small quick ones that seem to squirm out of your reach before you’ve even considered moving your arm. We got the last laugh though. All the original Akaviri artifacts had been stripped away, but inside the Khajiit left behind a 10,000 drake cache of moon sugar — ahh, here we go.”

[The armored plate pops out of place and Xeirsaar spins it like a discus out into the void. Clai draws her catalyst staff and drops into the exposed hole. After a few seconds the others slide in after her.

The party emerges from the ground of a huge cylindrical colony with livable space wrapped around the spinning inner surface. The habitat environment looks it was plucked right out of the Alinor countryside — well-trimmed gardens filled with fountains and flowering trees blanket the gently rolling hills, soaring prismatic palaces shimmering in the artificial noon-light dot the landscape, birds flit to and fro among the trees and wheel through the expansive central sky. The crew removes their bulbous M.-S.F. helmets.]

CLAI, letting out a slow whistle — “Woah. Nice place. And the Dominion abandoned it? Why in Mundus would they do that?”

YAL — “Uhh, I know the high elves have strange architecture, but I’m pretty sure that one wasn’t built that way.”

[Yal points to one of the palaces behind the crew which is significantly shorter than the others. Rather than coming to an elegant peak, the blunted top is ragged and gashed, with chunks of shattered crystal and steel strewn all around the yard. Several trees on the surrounding hills appear to have been wrenched up by their roots and more deep gashes can be seen in the gardens themselves.

All at once birds from the surrounding area all take flight at once and stream away from the ruined mansion as a low hum begins to emanate from it.]

CLAI — “That’s probably not a good sign.”

??? — “MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE MYRRHMIDON…”

[Two title cards: “CAPTAIN NERO” and “CHIEF CARTOGRAPHER GAILIEL.” Gailiel is lying on her back in the glass-roofed observatory when Nero swings open the door and strides in. The top of the panel shows the canopy of brilliant stars speckled across the void of oblivion.]

NERO — “Hey Gail. Looking for something?”

GAILIEL — “There are 1,007 other known Magna-Ge tears out there. Who knows how many have their own system? Their own planets?”

NERO — “Surely only the Star of Magnus is great enough to sustain worlds. Our manometer measures the minor tears’ power at a thousandth of a thousandth of a thousandth as strong. They’re tiny compared to the sun.”

GAILIEL, breathlessly — “I’ve been thinking about this ⁠— that might merely be a matter of perspective. The Bosmer of my old homeland worship Y’ffre chief among all gods, while you Alessians relegate her to barely a footnote as merely one of the Earth-Bones. Perhaps the inhabitants of a sub-planet of Thief-IV have done the same with Magnus, and venerate their own king tear of the Magna-Ge instead.”

NERO — “That’s an interesting hypothesis, so where’s your proof?”

GAILIEL, exasperated — “Well surely that’s what explorers like us are for. Until we try, who would know?”

[Gailiel stands up and looks at Nero for the first time.]

GAILIEL — “Sorry. That’s why I’ve been so frustrated with our orders to set back for Tatterdemalion. I just want to push forward, not retrace paths that a dozen mananauts have tread before.”

[Nero smirks mischievously and pulls a two-disk tele-memetic device out of his pocket.]

NERO — “Oh these orders? The ones I read conspicuously aloud to everyone in front of that ‘merchant’ sunbird on Dibella?”

[Gailiel catches on and grins back in return while Nero crushes the disks with one hand.]

NERO — “Oh don’t worry, as soon as the exploration team gets back I have a much more interesting destination in mind…”

??? — “WILL YAL’S AWAY PARTY ESCAPE THE DANGER? TUNE IN NEXT VOLUME TO SEE THE INTREPID CREW OF THE MYRRHMIDON’S NEXT GRAND ADVENTURE!”

??? — “Bonus section: On this volume of ‘Meet the Crew!!’”

[Title card: “CHIEF META-ENTOMOLOGIST OCTAVIA OCTA’VO”

A young Cyrodiilic woman stands confidently, holding a butterfly net leaning across her shoulders with one hand and presenting a sealed glass jar with a silver-green moth inside with the other.]

??? — “Octavia is in charge of tending to the needs of ALTRRUHN, the moth imperator that serves as the foundation of the Myrrhmidon2. While the species doesn’t require mundane food or drink, its wings need to be continuously checked for voidmites or the dreaded silk shalks that have brought down multiple N.V.N. mothships.

When the crew makes landfall, Octavia keeps the Myrrhmidon in an chronoglass — a jar blown by the famed Glass-shouters Guild of Windhelm. The Nords say that Kyne’s breath fills the glass so uniformly that not even Akatosh has room to get in. Storing the Myrrhmidon inside will keep ALTRRUHN in near-perfect unaging stasis — important since moth imperators are hard to find, even harder to train, and don’t tend to live a particularly long time.”

??? — “THAT’S ALL THIS WEEK. CHECK BACK IN VOL. 18 TO MEET HELMSMAN ZYKLOHS!”

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Transcription endnotes: 1 To see a rare surviving M.-S. frame from the era in person, contact Professor Hlov Gateri at the Imperial City Arcane University who regularly displays one from his private collection in his office. He’d love to talk to anyone who’s interested about the Remen-era New Void Navy.

2 The Elder Council Public Archives keep records of every known moth imperator of the first, second, and early third eras and ALTRRUHN is not on the list. The existence of other places, events, and individuals listed in the text is harder to ascertain, since many of those records are still held in confidence by the Royal Imperial Mananauts and are never disclosed publicly.