Couple of screenshots - things I have questions about.

Sylvermynx

First, anyone know what this is? This was in Reapers, but I've seen them a couple of other places too:



And then this one, a jerboa called Rogue in Vivec - what's the deal?

Aliyavana

I heard bottom is a tribute but idk to who. Only confirmed tribute is semaj https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Resting_Semaj

Enemy-of-Coldharbour

Top one is part of a quest in Reapers March (I believe ).

Sylvermynx

Interesting! Thank you both, @Aliyavana and @Enemy-of-Coldharbour - I had heard about the Semaj one, and there's a few others around, one in Auridon, one in Glenumbra and - hmm. I know I've seen another one but can't remember where right now.... OH! In Vvardenfell, out toward Azura's Shrine.

Aigym_Hlervu

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.

Sylvermynx

Hi Cygemai! It's in Reapers March, near one of the bandit camps, I think between Dawnmead Ruin Camp and Thizzrini Arena.

Hallothiel

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!!

Varana

The monolith looks like a religious shrine. Like Cygemai wrote, they're sometimes placed at the location of accidents, as a remembrance to people dying there, or the involved people set it up to thank God because they survived.
A similar thing are wayside crosses in some regions, like

- often but not necessarily at a crossroads or along a path.

Sylvermynx

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

Aigym_Hlervu

Ok, what I have found is that the design of the monolith is definitely Imperial - the design of those lines on your picture is the same depicted on the Imperial Statue, both Monolith and Obelisk:


As I've said it earlier, since there are those floral tribute, candles and a plate placed on it, I suppose it is a commemorative site, and since it is of the Imperial design it should have been built relatively recently. I mean, it's not some ancient structure of unknown origin. I can't see those ruins in details on the background - is it Fort Sphinxmoth? According to the book The Fort Sphinxmoth Ruins by Calantius of Skingrad - "The Reman Empire built this fortress into the side of a mountain so as to have an impregnable base, from whence columns of Legionnaires could be sent out to patrol the borders", "It is said that the Legionnaires outfitted their fortress with many traps of cunning and clever design, to defend themselves should the walls ever be breached" and "Fort Sphinxmoth was abandoned by the Legions after the fall of the Second Empire".

I suppose the monolith was built either in 1E 2703 - 1E 2840 (after the foundation of the Reman Empire and it's conquest of Elsweyr, but before the Reman II war against Morrowind) or some time after 2E 430 (152 years ago), after the fall of the Second Empire when an Imperial Legion stationed there abandoned the keep. The reason to build that monolith in the first case could have been to create a landmark for the keep's defensive trebuchets artillery spotting, in the latter - to commemorate the end of the Imperial official presence in the region. The floral tribute, candles, the fort on the background and an area having nothing common with a cemetery or a trace of a massive battle makes me think that way. Anyway, now I have to know the exact location of the monolith, to travel there and to look at it myself (since I've never been in that area), in order to say anything else or to correct anything I was wrong on here.

Sylvermynx

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!

Master_Fluff

That obelisk in Reapers March has not been in the game for very long. 1 or possibly 2 years at most.

LadyNalcarya

That's pretty interesting. I wonder if Imperial obelisks might be somehow related to the next years chapter...

Sylvermynx

ulrik.igerupb16_ESO wrote: »

That obelisk in Reapers March has not been in the game for very long. 1 or possibly 2 years at most.

Really. Thanks for the info!

LadyNalcarya wrote: »

That's pretty interesting. I wonder if Imperial obelisks might be somehow related to the next years chapter...

Food for thought....

Sylvermynx

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.

Aigym_Hlervu

So, it is Sphinxmoth, indeed.. Got it, thanks! I'll try to go there tomorrow and see what I can find.

Aigym_Hlervu

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?

Sylvermynx

Hello @Cygemai_Hlervu! Thanks for the info. I do think I have seen a couple more of them not in Reaper's (in fact.... I kind of think one was in Coldharbour - in the southern areas, as the character I was on did not have the north areas unlocked). But.... I'm old, so I can't actually think where else right now.

I will make a concerted effort to find them, mostly because this sort of thing is SO intriguing - and because I'm a sucker for exploring. Once I've found something interesting, you can bet I'm going to go find more....

Might be a while, as I'm leveling Antiquities right now (WAY more fun than crafting writs - or combat!) but I can look for the others I think I remember while I'm mutzing with Antiquities, right?

Aigym_Hlervu

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).

Sylvermynx

Oh my gosh Cygemai! That's extremely interesting, and wow you are good at plumbing bits of lore! That makes a lot of sense - and it may be that I'm totally wrong about having seen similar monoliths elsewhere. If I ever do run across another one I'll certainly let you know!

I've never done the quest there at Ft Sphinxmoth - my mains are all Redguards and DC quests are the ones I tend to stick to. I've got a level 47 Dunmer who, once she hits 50 plus the CP my main has accrued, will start on Cadwell's quests, and when she's in AD quests I'll have her do that one for fun since you've delved so thoroughly into it!

Thank you so much, my friend. I really appreciate you digging around so much on that!

Aigym_Hlervu

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!

Sylvermynx

Cygemai, I have enjoyed reading every bit of this (and so many of your other lore-centric not to mention lore-dissecting posts!) - you make sense out of the "nonsense" and certainly your posts are fully worth reading for me. I may not be a Dunmer-centric player, but Sera was my first character, and while NBs have been pretty hard to play for me (due to high ping, not to mention the horrible nerfs since I started playing) I am still invested in her. I will be glad when I get her to 50 so we can do some stuff together. All that lovely CP my warden has accumulated will help a lot there.

Hmm. Makes me want to write some fanfic again.... I'm still writing in Skyrim/TES V - maybe it's time to branch out a bit!

You are one of my favorite people on this forum. Thank you for being you, and for contributing to my enjoyment of this game.

Thevampirenight

Well, I can answer the question about the one shrine,

its tied into the New Life festival. They are doing a new Imperial quest for the New Life. So that might explain why that Shrine is suddenly there. I won't spoil the quest or anything other to say that its connected to it.

Sylvermynx

Thevampirenight wrote: »

Well, I can answer the question about the one shrine,

its tied into the New Life festival. They are doing a new Imperial quest for the New Life. So that might explain why that Shrine is suddenly there. I won't spoil the quest or anything other to say that its connected to it.

Oh, very interesting!

Sylvermynx

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.

Aigym_Hlervu

Well, that means my explanation was wrong, @Thevampirenight was right and the devs' lore writing team's imagination was poor and downtrodden not to see such an opportunity to write a good story . Shame upon us all except Thevamp .

Aigym_Hlervu

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

SanguineMyBrother

There's a monolith exactly like that one with wreath and candles in Auridon. It's on a big slab of rock on the beach west of the public dungeon, Toothmaul Gully.

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!

RemanCyrodiil_I

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Ehym

@Cygemai_Hlervu I found your story dissection very interesting, even if it was not the case for this monument, so thank you for posting.