Hello, Sylvermynx! I know nothing of that jerboa, but the first picture portrays a structure very similar to a commemorative ritual sites common to my folk IRL. A circular floral tribute with candles placed at the sites of car accidents, disasters and anything horrific that took human lives. Though, an altar with a plate there tells me it could also be the very resting place of a deceased man - there should be some food and drinks placed there. Anyway, in ESO it could also be some kind of a daedric shrine. What is the place the obelisk is located at? Perhaps, we should check the surrounding area and read the history of that place to find answers.

The only tributes / memorials I know of are the bear in Cyrodiil, and a character up high in Rimmen.

Sometimes animals near crafting areas have names. Especially near writ hand-ins. Iirc there is a tiger in Evermore, for example.

No idea about the monolith - if it was a quest I’ve utterly forgotten it - but now want to know!!

I may try to dig through the quests for Reapers - but I really do think I've seen those elsewhere too....

You know, it could have been Fort Sphinxmoth. I'm out of game for today (got other stuff I have to do this afternoon), but I'll go back out there tomorrow to check for sure.

Interesting info Cygemai; and thanks for your input too Varana!

I went back today and got the real location:

Slightly southwest of Fort Sphinxmoth in Reaper's March; coords 72.69, 24.25 - near Little Ozur's camp.

Ok, so I traveled to the monolith. First, that was not a plate at all - it is some kind of painting on that cloth placed on the altar. The location of the monolith turned out to be too far away from the Fort Sphinxmoth's fortifications to use it as a landmark for artillery spotting, so the monolith is definitely not a defensive object used that way.

The monolith is located on some hills with the Ozur's camp located straight to the East of it and a road located beneath the hill - so it's not a wayshrine-like thing or a farewell structure built by a leaving legion. Ozur's camp contains no clue either. I talked to the locals, performed their quests at Fort Sphinxmoth, but none of them had anything to tell me about that monolith. Then I traveled to Fort Grimwatch, another Imperial fort of the same age, in order to find anything similar to that Sphinxmoth monolith, but to no success. The monolith seems to be unique and it's purpose is still unknown.

So, all we have today is a structure of Imperial origin built possibly sometime between 1E 2703 - 2E 430 in the wilderness among the hills with unknown purpose. Purhaps, we have to find some other such monoliths, if they exist, and try to find something equal to them all. Do you remember any of such monoliths somewhere else, Sylvermynx?

Antiquities.. Hmm.. Could that monolith be a dig site for some of the local antiquities? I'm not an archeologist, so I won't be able to check it.. Anyway, that monolith is not a location mentioned in the treasure maps too - I've just checked it. But here's another interesting thing I've found when I conducted the lore study of the monolith's location area. It might be the most logical and full explanation of this monolith I have found, Sylvermynx. Though, of course, it's aIl speculation since the devs do not give a straight answer as usual. As everything IRL too . Ok, it turns out to be a story of life of a bandit, a really fascinating one. My hat is off to the devs who wrote it that way, so I had to reconstruct it piece by piece, paying attention to everything. I'm sorry for a wall of text, but it is necessary in order to show the whole picture and the possible purpose of the monolith you found.

Below are the excerpts from A Looter's Paradise by the Silver-Haired Shadow with my commentaries to let you see the way of my thought -

1. "My auntie left me a shack on a hill south of the border" - The border is the river Strid, as we know it, and the monolith is located exactly on the top of a hill to the south of that border.
2. "Auntie—let's call her Auntie Alias, no point in telling you too much—was an Imperial Border Scout, part of the cohort stationed at Fort Sphinxmoth, in the hills between Elsweyr and northern Valenwood. In the late days of the Second Empire the job of the Border Scouts was to keep the quarrelsome locals in line so as not to interfere with trade" - The author's aunt was an Imperial and she was a scout. She is one of the reasons the monolith is built and built at the place we see it.
3. "Auntie liked the climate, so when she retired she bought this little plot, came down and put up her hut. It's bigger than it looks, by the way—goes way back into the hill, and you can bet auntie dug out a back door, just in case. By the time I got here, one dark night in Sun's Dusk, with the wound in my thigh leaking blood again after that wild ride on the stolen horse, the Border Scouts were long gone, and the Dawnmead Marches had returned to their natural state: just one law shy of anarchy. And that one law was the Law of Revenge." - From here we know, first, that the hut "went back into the hill" - just like the monolith is way too close to the hill's edge. If I understood it right. And, secondly, the hut was located in the Dawnmead region. Marches?.. Well, perhaps I'll have to check their traces once I'm there again.
4. "It was the Vinedusk Wood Elf tribe versus the Dakarn Khajiiti clan, and it was a near-continual war of cross-border raids and midnight murders. They took turns occupying the ruins of Fort Sphinxmoth, sending out bands to waylay merchant caravans, raid villages and towns, and pay off old scores. Neither side noticed me hiding in the old shack during daylight, and slipping from shadow to shadow around the Marches after dark. The place was a killing ground—I could hardly go five hundred paces without encountering a dead warrior, a half-empty cart, or a slain merchant" - So, the hut was the author's hiding point that saved him life and allowed to loot the dead. The monolith's location is indeed not that easy to notice. Moreover, there is indeed a broken emtpy cart just below the hill the monolith is located on.
5. "Ah, those were the good times. Too good to last, I suppose—eventually the Vinedusk bandits overreached and staged a raid on Arenthia itself, right about the time the Dakarn Cats tried to take over organized crime in Dune and the Thizzrini Arena. The respectable citizens on both sides of the border formed militias or hired mercenaries, swept the hills clean, and that was the end of brigandry in the Marches" - As it is stated in the book, the author witnessed the process, saw the trade coming back and left to Bravil to hire his own gang in order to return and perform raids. The hut could possibly be destroyed around this time when the local militias and mercs "swept the hills clean".

The book is written by "the Silver-Haired Shadow" who starts his book saying "You don't need to know my real name—not sure I remember it anymore, anyhow", but the fact that he names his gang Murkwater Gang (the name he actually seems to have changed from the Muckwater Bandits) at the end of his book makes it clear - "Silver-Haired Shadow" is Accalia. Can't remember his hair color, though.. Anyway, as he writes it in his book, he saw the opportunity in the area and left to Bravil to hire thugs and form a gang in order to raid the local caravans - exactly the thing Accalia did based on his notes and the words of Marcella. After forming a gang in Bravil, as we know it from Marcella Ammianus, the main quest giver there, he raided the Temple of Mara in that very city, stole the relics and fled back to Fort Sphinxmoth ruins. Now back to his book where he says that he began to reconstruct the Fort, it's defense systems while trying to sell the relics. By this time Marcella managed to form a squad of legionaries and come to the place in order to retrieve the relics, but lost her soldiers in the endeavor asking us to save both the relics and her men - the thing we actually do. According to the only lore existing regarding that area, the locations of the events participants and the location's very depiction, the only conclusion I see is that Accalia built that semi-monolith out of two blocks of another full-scale monolith (compare the hight of Accalia's monolith from your picture and the monolith from the furniture pack I gave the picture above) during his reconstruction of the Fort defenses in honor to his aunt - she was the only reason of his power and wealth. Why? Because, according to Accalia's personal notes (here, here, here and here), he was an honest man, well, as honest as a bandit could ever be. He constructed the monolith right on the place of his aunt's hut that saved him life and allowed to become richer. The hut could be supposedly destroyed by the mercs and militia who "swept the hills clean" while Accalia was away, but the fresh flowers and candles on the monument tell us he was very grateful to his aunt who left some money and her hut on that hill - the reason of all his further rise (and actually fall).

Thank you much, Sylvermynx ! When your Dunmer comes to that area and you might open up this thread again, please, remember that I've mentioned and referenced the crucial points only. I haven't mention things like my observations of the goblins inhabitting the area, I made no reference to why did I decide that the very chapel Accalia robbed was situated in Bravil - the very city the "Silver-Haired Shadow" hired his gang according to his book (well, Marcella did not mention her Temple of Mara was in Bravil, but her legionaries did: Veranus Macatus - "I don't suppose you're coming back to Bravil with us? I feel safer with you around"; Eliana Salvius - "We're going to camp here until everyone is rested, and then we'll return to Bravil and the chapel") and other such small details. I wrote only the crucial facts up there in order to show how the initial puzzle could be "broken apart" and scattered in various books, dialogues, environmental and character features, in order to make us rebuild the story, and I just tried to make that wall of text as small as possible.

I noticed this thing in TES III 18 years ago: it seems to me the devs initially write an absolutely ordinary story, but what makes it that great each time is the way they show it to us. Instead of telling the story entirely through a quest, a book or a dialogue, they scatter it's plot in numerous books, dialogues, character features, quests, game mechanics, furniture designs and descriptions, mounts (oh, those mounts!), many other simingly separate things and even landscape. So, instead of telling it straightly, they, let's say, place a column in the middle of nowhere and "go figure out what is" . And you begin to sort the things out in order to rebuild the picture they possibly broke apart and suddenly realize that the game you were playing is completely different from the one you thought it to be. In my study of the game I use the method of one of the XIX century literary critics, book reviewers - he said that every product of art (today it is also cinema, video games - whatever) contains three layers of sense: the one the author wanted to show and actually showed, the one he wanted to hide and thus showed it slightly, and the one he has never intended to show, but showed. He also said that every product of art, whatever genre it is, always bears the features of it's author - his mindset, the epoch the author lives in, it's problems, hopes, etc. It really works. This why I don't make that strict distinction between lore, game mechanics, commercial content, PvP and PvE - to me it's the whole object. So, all I had to do is just to run through the locations, gather all the information I could find and place it in an order allowing to see logic in it. Perhaps, the devs have already made or will make something that could break the picture I've shown in the previous post, but for now it is what they have actually depicted willingly or unwillingly - no matter . Thank you for reading, Sylvermynx! And sorry for taking your time, especially, if the approach and ideas I shared are not that interesting to read as they seem to me. You started an awesome thread having asked a very interesting question! All the thanks are to you!

There's another one in Glenumbra, just outside of Cambray Pass - coords 62.55x37.08. And getting in close to look at the wreath, it does look like the New Life Wreaths.

Is it the very same monolith of Imperial style with candles and flowers on it, @Sylvermynx?

Cygemai_Hlervu wrote: »

Is it the very same monolith of Imperial style with candles and flowers on it, @Sylvermynx?

Yes it is. Identical to the other one. And yes, I ran across the Auridon one today too!

So I wonder how many of them there really are.... And Cygemai, I actually prefer your version after the detective work!