"Journal of a Sand-Man" - Collected by Professor Cedrus Biencel

The following text was obtained by Cedrus Biencel, Professor of the School of Conjuration at the College of Winterhold during a historic foray into Apocrypha. Professor Biencel maintains that the text was given to him by a tall, ebon-skinned humanoid that possessed a number of eyes and spoke "with a lilting cadence, as if he was softly singing the words."

It was a long walk to Leyawiin, but I managed. Highwaymen were thick along the roads, as if they thought anyone this far south had something worth robbing. Sees-Many-Sounds was waiting on me when I arrived; the Watch said that he'd been standing there for weeks, accepting food and drink but never speaking a word. He guided me through the city to a small, run-down wooden shack with a bar over the door. He knocked thrice, and the bar fell to the ground.

Inside, he sat upon a small cushion of animal hides and began to speak. At first, I couldn't understand what he was saying - he was speaking far too quickly - but he gradually slowed his pace until he was comprehensible.

"Intar," he said to me. "The sands are speaking again." I realized that he'd been repeating himself over and over again, and I inquired as to what he meant.

"The sands are speaking again," he insisted. "They're whispering on the wind."

I asked him if he'd been drinking, and he simply looked at me with an expression that I will never forget. He looked haunted, hunted, and resigned to some foul fate. He switched to Jel, and with my poor comprehension of the Argonian tongue, I did my best to keep up.

"I hear the sands speaking in the sky," he said. "They're dancing up the Steps to an unborn Tower."

"What do you mean?" I queried, and he repeated himself. He paused for a few long moments, staring at the ground as if it was going to attack him.

"They're seeking something. A thing. A Thing. They are tired of being dunes and dust."

I covertly checked (what I assumed to be) his home for skooma or evidence of its presence, and found nothing. I began to truly pay attention; this is where I began to write. He made several statements after that for nigh on an hour, then simply laid down. I assumed he was sleeping, but I neglected to realize that I couldn't hear his breath until I had already finished copying his words. They are as follows.

"The Sands... sands are climbing the Steps. They want to be a Tower."

"They can't. They will not. What can sand do, anyway? It's sand. How can Sand be a Tower? Sand cannot be a tower; sand cannot be anything but sand."

"Sand is dust and dust is wind and wind is sand and Sand is Dust and Dust is Wind and Wind is... a Tower?"

After attending Sees-Many-Sounds' funeral (which was, outrageously, not held in Black Marsh or anywhere near a Hist Tree) I took a detour on my return to Anvil and visited the Khajiiti city of Rimmen, intending to ask a priest of Ja-Kha'jay whether Sees-Many-Sounds' ravings had any significance.

I found the city empty. The only evidence that anyone had ever inhabited it were the buildings themselves, and the trinkets the Khajiiti left behind.

This is a small headcanon that I have that takes a look at Elsweyr's lack of a canonical Tower. I see Elsweyr's deserts, creatures, and the Lunar Lattice as very closely intertwined; the Sands that Sees-Many-Sounds was hearing were "dancing up the Steps to an unborn Tower," implying that they were either ascending into the heavens (which would imply that the Tower of Elsweyr was the Lunar Lattice) or leaving something behind to ascend into a higher state of being (implying that the Sands were the lost Khajiiti of Rimmen). Either conclusion, or any others you care to draw, are perfectly valid. This wasn't supposed to make sense, and it doesn't. It just kind of came out.

EDIT: The emptiness of Rimmen is also a reference to the text of Where Were You When the Dragon Broke?. See R'leyt-harhr's account. Here is the link.