Tales from the Ancestral Tomb: A Look Back

Is there any series more beloved by youth and hated by edifiers than Twin Nix Press' "Tales From The Ancestral Tomb"? I contend that no Dunmer can claim to have had a childhood until one has thumbed nervously through a dog-eared, secondhand copy (obtained no doubt from a older relative who took delight in corrupting the next generation), while keeping a nervous eye out for an instructor ready to pounce on any student caught wasting their time with "filth".

That aura of the forbidden just made us want them more of course. I had amassed an entire box full of them by the time I was twelve. I rarely had the money to buy them, mind you, but through that mysterious economy of barter which links all children in Tamriel I managed to trade my books often enough to eventually work my way through (at the time) all 53.

I will not argue that they were great literature. By the time I was in my teens they largely ceased to scare me anymore. My collection, in the time honored tradition of older cousins, slowly made its way into younger hands.

But I cannot condemn them either. They sparked my love of the written word, and without them I may never have moved onto more challenging works like "Last Year of the First Era". And so I would like to look back today on my favorite of the "Tales": Sleep Well, St.Olms.

Let's not sell it short, the inside-cover art is terrifying. A grotestque man in rags leers over the bed of a sleeping child. His eyes bulge out like a toad's, and his neck is stretched too far for a living mer, yet not so long as to be comical. The short, almost violent pen strokes give the whole picture an angry energy.

The story opens up with a shrine to Vaermina being discovered in the merchant's section of St.Olms Canton. An angry mob drags the owner out of his house amidst his cries that he hadn't harmed anyone. They haul him to the edge of the tier and tie a rope to a post. As they slip the noose around his neck they ask him for his last words.

> "My lady, grant me vengeance on these fools! LET ME HURT THEM IN WAYS THEY WILL BEG FOR DEATH!"

They throw him over the edge. His body is left to dangle over the canal-level tier for several days before being cut down and dumped in the bay.

I must interject that I am failing to convey just how well written and paced this story is. The quality of writing in "Tales" was all over the place due to a constantly changing team of writers (all credited anonymously, although Dreden Hlaalu did later admit to having written a handful in his early career) but this was one of the standouts.

Soon after the hanging, a member of the mob is woken at night by a scream. She rushes to her child's room, only to find her thrashing and gasping for air, still asleep. The mother manages to shake her awake. The sobbing child says she saw "a man with bulging eyes and a long neck" who was chasing her in "another Vivec". When she reached the edge of the canal the water suddenly turned into a mass of ants, which the child was terrified of. Laughing, the man picked her up and threw her into the "water". She felt the ants pouring down her throat when her mother woke her up.

Night after night the story repeats. Parents walk in on their children crying and thrashing in their dreams. The "lucky" ones are woken up in time and relay stories of a disfigured man who forces them through their worst nightmares. A young boy terrified of small spaces is trapped in a coffin that shrinks a little more each time he cries or calls out for his mother. A girl obsessed with archery is turned into a "living bow", her intestines pulled out as a drawstring and her spine as an arrow. The unlucky ones tell no stories; their hearts stop in sheer panic from whatever unknowable nightmares they were lead through.

When I was a child I used to wish that these accounts had included pictures. Now that I'm a bit older I can see they are far more effective without.

The story ends with the first girl and a mother of one of the other children going to the shrine of Vaermina (the house had yet to be "cleansed" by the temple). The mother is knocked out by a strange fog emanating from the shrine and quickly killed by the man (dubbed "Stretchy" by the characters) in a frankly horrifying dream sequence wherein he agrees to "return her child to her" by shoving the child's corpse back inside her, rupturing her insides.

The girl manages to fight off the vapors and falls before the shrine, pleading with the Prince that she and the other children had done nothing to deserve this. Vaermina herself appears and agrees that the while this has been amusing, she is not a prince of injustice. Stretchy appears in anger and demands the blood he was promised.

Vaermina agrees to this as well and issues the girl an ultimatum. People cannot fear what they do not know; if she will spread the story of Stretchy to others, creating fresh victims, her and the remaining children will be spared.

The story then shifts into first person.

> Numb to all feeling I made my way to the desk in my room. I pulled out my notebook and began to write out an account of all the horrors that had befallen us. An account I sent off to a publisher of second-rate schlock. An account you now hold in your hands. > > Forgive me.

I didn't sleep for two days.

Some would argue that this is why such books should be kept out of the hands of children. I would say the exact opposite. True I was scared out of my mind of an overly-creative dream-maniac, but after a few nights of deep sleep I found that fading. When I read the story again a week later I wasn't nearly as frightened. In fact I remember laughing at a few of the more creative deaths. These stories taught me a valuable lesson: fear can be overcome, even laughed at, and that that the world is always a little bit less scary afterwards.