Adventurer's, Hark!, an elder scroll series fanfic

**ADVENTURERS, HARK!**

Take up your courage, your spells and your steel.
Leave your homes' comforts and luxuries.
Your fame and your fortunes beg to be made real
Through plundering crumbling old treasuries.

How far will you fare till your valor wanes
Before nameless dangers and heresies?
Your wits and your strength may break under their strain
While greed twists best friends into nemeses.

*Hark now, adventurers, delve into those depths!
Carve out great legends to survive your own deaths!
Seek out the cold graves of troves real and fake!
It's well worth the risk for the glory at stake!*

Scour the humblest of deserted homes
From dark and dank cellars to musty lofts
And through ruined priories' libraries of tomes
Plus sundries in their haunted undercrofts.

Or search along Tamriel's loneliest coasts
For shipwrecks which still might hide merchandise
And all other crannies of which this land boasts,
From Elsweyr's warm sands up through Skyrim's ice.

Might you prefer nature's homespun spools
Of caves no less tangled than forest roots,
Drowned in dark waters and magma pools,
With secrets concealed deep in their chutes?

Or maybe the tombs of those long laid to rest,
Those heroes and kings of antiquity,
Whose men keep their posts at their leaders' behest
To punish graverobbers' iniquity?

Cut into Cyrodiil's tumbledown forts,
Still ripe with dread threats and old mysteries,
Ending fell denizens to loot the courts
Of fighting folks' red and gray histories.

Or stalk the white halls of the Heartland High Elves,
Where magical treasures still fill their vaults.
Stay vigilant lest you should perish yourselves
In devilish traps or undead assaults.

Jaunt dauntlessly through the bronze gauntlets of
The Dwarves' underground cities and citadels,
Extorting their scores so adored up above
From steam-powered beasts and ash-infidels.

Or seek ancient strongholds built by Dunmer hands
Whose masters and hosts, though now long deceased,
Wrought altars and corridors in which black bands
Of evil's ill children hold bloody feasts.

Go brave the fanged halls and soul-shriveling palls
Of Morrowind's crimson and crooked shrines,
Purloining cursed spoils from Daedra and thralls
Whose worship enkindles their dark designs.

If magic you've mastered, pierce through the realms' veils
To slay fiendish monsters and mythic lords,
Then pray your strength outlasts such grueling travails
And bears you back home with their treasure hoards!

Then, once you've ate well of the fruits of your toils,
Your legacies forged and your coffers lined,
You'll drink and dance till you shed your mortal coils
And those who tell tales tell yours in kind!

*It's well worth the risk for the glory at stake!*