30th of First Seed, 3e434

I would have continued yesterday had my Instructor's other apprentice not made yet another of her vain attempts on my life. Despite the poisoned wine I still had enough strength to dispatch her with a Psijic grasp, although she was quickly brought back by our Instructor, who scolded us both firmly and set us back to our studies. I shall have to wait for the poison to truly wear off—yet until then I have little strength, and all I can think to do to occupy myself is attempt to finish the story of how Svetlana and I reached our new home of Cyrodiil.

When we first entered these desert lands we felt as if we had reached the edge of the world itself. Often and long we wandered into the sands, but we never strayed too far from the edge of the forest where water ran and food grew plentifully. Discouraged from going east, we began to trail south.

One night, several days into this confused trek, Svetlana woke me with a wild look on her face. She had sensed three presences heading straight for us. I waited a moment, and when they grew closer, I became able to sense them as well, my Psijic senses being not as strong as hers. We hid ourselves in a patch of rocks but it was no use—they were Khajiit nomads, and had been able to smell us nearby for almost a day. We were at first frightened at their cat-like faces, furry bodies and intimidating demeanor, but their clan showed us great kindness. Their language was utterly foreign to us, but offerings of food and water and soft blankets needed no translation.

In the morning it was revealed that some of these nomads could speak a language we could at least partially understand—Tamrielic. We explained that we were unsure of how to cross the sands, and told of our destination, Cyrodiil. Their Clan Mother, a woman named Ra'tsashi, showed us the method their Mystics had learned to discover water hidden underneath the sand. Svetlana picked it up brilliantly—I would continue to make hopeless attempts at it until near the end of our stay in Elsweyr.

Ra'tsashi would not teach us the language of the Khajiit or let us mix much with the others of her clan but was pleased enough to care for us and teach us Tamrielic as long as we pledged ourselves to her service. We had little choice—we were indebted to her kin, and the knowledge she offered was invaluable for our trials ahead. She assured us it was not slavery we entered into, but merely a temporary contract that we would be released from after we had sufficiently paid back our debt. It was also Ra'tsashi that was the first outside Vizzafir to lay eyes on our cursed pendants and hear the truth of our exile, and she did not judge us.

In order to pay back our debt, Ra'tsashi had both Svetlana and I trained so that we could be useful to her needs. She tried us at several different errands and tasks. She came to have great faith in Svetlana's divination and rely on it for many clan decisions, and my ability to remain completely undetected if I so wished combined with my small size were my greatest assets to the Clan Mother. I had an eye for gems and gold and collected a good many for Ra'tsashi while my sister determined where our next fortune lay, and she gave us both a disciplined love and cared for us as if we were her own children. She also introduced us to a wonderful thing called Moon Sugar, letting us have small samples now and then when she was especially pleased with us. We both grew rather fond—these several years later I am still, a vial of Moon Sugar sits just on the far side of my cell of a room.

This idyll did not last too long for us. Somewhere near the end of Second Seed in Year 428, not much more than a year after we had joined with Ra'tsashi's clan, she declared our debt paid in full and took us as close as her clan would wander East, which left us in the sparse beginnings of a forest. We were warned in short words that lay before us, but it did not stop our hearts from swelling with joy when we stood on the banks of the Lower Niben for the first time—we had reached Cyrodiil.