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 half-breed.
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. They look for all the world like just one more floating tree.
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. Us 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. Even while Galenus' wealth lasted, we lived in the apartments above his commercial headquarters on the waterfront. With a benefactor worth three millions, I still lived on the fill, not the bedrock.
So snap out of it, Naleva, and realize that even if this boat gets caught up in the current and swirls around like a Falinesti horn top, you'll see only the most unrealistically flattering view of home. You don't live anywhere near those towers. The people that do are swirling powdered tiger claw into their century-old Skingrad, reading your file and signing lives away into exile. And remember, you might have left the city soon anyways, had they not charged you with the sacred duty of returning as soon as possible, just to spite them.
But I said this leg of the journey was the worst. That's because the minders knew that I was still on home turf and were paranoid about escape. I swear the manacles got tighter every mile, and so did the feeling of being uprooted. The road to central Morrowind, of course, goes straight past Cheydinhal. It climbs up away from the humid lakeshore and rice plantations, along the ridge that overlooks the Nibenay Basin's mangroves and swollen rivers. From there, it's a steep ascent and sharp hook through the gap they renamed Septim's Gate Pass. It's a victorious name, meant to wash away the memory of all the blood it cost Reman the Last to batter his way through.
These were not fortuitous circumstances for revisiting the highlands where I was born. To be perfectly honest with my gentle readers, getting a last glimpse of all those places I imagined I remembered convinced me of the tragic nature of my situation. I wasn't right in the head. I may have been weepy.
Rest assured that subsequent years have provided perspective. Those wooded hills I mourned over then are nothing more than the campgrounds where an eccentric millionaire practiced his bizarre ideas of public service with a gaggle of roving orphans, deflowering an awkward half-Dunmer along the way. As for the city, the prominence of garbage in my description should speak volumes. Cyrodiil was a lifetime ago.
