Nibennium [Nerevarine's Notes]

The first leg of the journey was the worst. They took me down to Rummy without further explanation and we boarded a gondola. I was manacled to the gunwale, facing forward with my hand dangling outboard. We pulled a ways out from Polefel and lake eels started streaming around under the keel. They cut circles in the water beneath my fingers, a hairsbreadth from the surface, hoping for a quick peck of elf.

It takes us ten minutes to get clear of City Isle's halo of waterborne filth, out to the divide where the radial current cools the lake and diverts the polluted cloud southwards. The air smells different immediately, and it hits me that I'm leaving. I jerk backwards, iron cutting at my right wrist. The boat sways, the guards frown, and the eels disintegrate into purple Rumare. Still can't see over my shoulder. The city I haven't left in years is a light-colored haze in my peripheral vision. I can hope that we yaw to the left at some point, or I can just picture it.

There're those pearly towers I never looked up at it, whose foundations I never chanced upon, and the big one in the middle. The city beneath, distant cousin to some species of white tropical moss, riding heavily on too-few islands, the gaps between them sewn shut by the cobwebs of a hundred bridges. It lets out smoke all the time, because it's always someone's feast day or hour of offering, if not just an outlandishly scheduled meal. The pall spreads out over the water, and so does the city, always sinking pilings in more and more of the lake, every month another Polefel built on stilts. The voracity for space and material overpowers all the intentions of the lake, creating unnatural currents that draw in vast clots of floating timber. The rafts of tomorrow's houses have their own shepherds, Argonians that stand rigid and motionless on the logs.

The stone city sits aloof from all that, built on bedrock shot through with two thousand years of Welkynd moonlight. That's the city that they call Imperial, as opposed to Cyrodiil's city. We CiCi's belong to a place that is less occupied with absorbing the wealth of Tamriel and the magicka of the cosmos than in trading pestilence with the waters of the Niben.

-Excerpt from the Nerevarine's Notes