A Guide to the Reach

> Written by Anonymous.

This text is written by an anonymous author. It details the adventures and knowledge gathered on the region known as the Reach. The author describes the Skyrim Hold, known commonly as the Reach but explains in further detail how the 'Reach' encompasses a region much larger than south-eastern Skyrim. The author describes a sister-faction known as the Witchmen affiliated with the better known Forsworn. The text also serves as a warning for any adventurers and merchants looking to exploit the Reach for its wonders.

Many of Tamriel’s inhabitants have only heard of the Reach by conjecture, rumour and hearsay. Those in Skyrim however know it to be the region claimed and inhabited by the native Breton populace the Forsworn. This area they perceive to know is limited to the corner of Skyrim. The Reach however, also borders alongside the territories of Hammerfell, High Rock and the Orc city-state, Orsinium. Markarth, the surface dwarven city populated by a collective of Nords, native Breton Forsworn, and Orcs sits right in the center of the Reach, yet sovereign to Skyrim. It is known as the ‘safest city in the reach’. A truth considering what lies beyond those walls, if anyone has ever ventured into Markarth they would tell you otherwise, as I will, take the wrong turn or fall in debt with the wrong person that unfortunate wretch, gods forbid will end up in Cidhna Mine or in the Halls of the Dead. But let me tell you of what lies beyond Skyrim, beyond the Reach that we all know.

The Reach does not simply expand northwards just short of Solitude or eastwards short of Rorikstead and the golden plains of Whiterun. It expands eastwards into High Rock and along the border of Hammerfell. The true Reach is a region the size of at least 3 holds in Skyrim alone, enough to be a province on its own rather than what the Nords consider the Reach, just a hold, it extends far further east into High Rock. Had Ulfric Stormcloak and his men not oust the Forsworn from Markarth, King Madanach may have certainly focused his efforts into uniting with the Witchmen tribes in High Rock where the largest part of the Reach is known to stand. A kingdom of twisted hills and contorted flora would have risen from the shadows of those jagged cliffs causing no less of suffering, crisis and trouble for all mainland Tamriel. I do not justify the blood spilt in Markarth, but a much worse evil would have plagued the land had not for Ulfric Stormcloak’s intervention.

These Witchmen are cousins of the Forsworn, only they overshadow the Forsworn in everything the Forsworn dabbles in. From dealings with witches and hagravens, and committing acts of barbarism, to coveting with Daedra, and terrorising those who do not stand beside them. The Witchmen commit these acts tenfold with true cruelty, ungodly, and with clear Daedric manner that would rival the depravity and senseless evil of the Daedra. To put in perspective, the Forsworn possess a morality to their modus operandi, the Witchmen do not. If the Forsworn are madmen then the Witchmen are methodical terrorists that get a kick out of cruelty. They kill, maim, torture and rape with impunity, they find curiosity and gratification from such methods, where killing to the Forsworn is what they love and celebrate, the Witchmen find too simple, too quick, too painless. Hate does not drive the Witchmen as it does the Forsworn, it is too human. They simply act and terror follows with the tortured, lifeless vessels that they leave in their quake.

The lordships of High Rock have settled in that area but not without resistance to those who claim that region as their own. These settlements have slowly degraded into dilapidation, Arnima once Raven Spring, the seat turned rotten for a rotten lord, The Divide, the silent bridge-town, Evermore the Breton sanctuary that stands high against the purgatory of the Reach. The only place that’s truly safe in the Reach, forget Markarth if you make it to Evermore and High Rock keep going and do not turn back.

On one account written by a legate stationed at the Imperial Fort west of Arnima that I had the pleasure of staying in, an imperial patrol was detached to a village north of their base of operations, what they discovered were the bodies of the villagers driven into stakes protruding from the groin outwards into the mouth or shoulder. According to witness accounts from legionnaires, some villagers were still breathing and very much conscious even under the circumstances they had been tortured. The women were desecrated, stripped bare and maimed, the children placed in fire pits and buried alive, hands clawing out from the ground.

I was shocked such cruelty existed in this corner of Tamriel, already shaken by the state of affairs in the Reach itself, some of the legionnaires I spoke to preferred returning to Skyrim then remaining in that godforsaken place. I don’t blame them, between the crazed Orsinium Sons, the Witchmen Tribes and Lord Mortifayne of Arnima, I should have remained in Cyrodiil, some things are best left a mystery.

The Reach is no place for the faint-hearted, no matter how well travelled one is, or how much suffering one has witnessed in this cruel and mysteriously beautiful land. It is a decrepit place for those that have no choice but to live meagrely off such a barren wasteland. The Nords often talk haughtily of their braving of the cold, but for the simple peoples of the reach often caught between the corruption of the Lords men, the cruelty of the Witchmen tribes and the barbarity of the Orsinium sons, the cold does not come from the snow or ice it comes from the empty soulless gaze of the murdering monsters that wander this land. Only the villagers of the Reach know when they see imminent death stare back towards them.