Midday 28 First Seed - Azura

I leave the pass at Kavas Rim behind me, closing in on what is nominally Morrowind but not quite yet. Still the tiniest official edge of Cyrodiil until I hit Checkpoint B and Fort Shrikemoth. I should say what's left of Morrowind. What's instead of Morrowind.

I've seen the barrier wall many times since it appeared. We've just collectively agreed to call it a wall because it's hard to think of a living thing so vast. It's the flank of some giant serpent beast, impossibly high, its length running along the old border for leagues on end. Encircling everything within.

A trillion scales in the sunlight. A drop in your stomach when you see it breathe. Just past a small valley, Fort Shrikemoth sits jutted up against the flesh. It feels like such an unlikely place to start something this crucial.

If Ostarand didn't want me to get here so early, he shouldn't have stamped my passpapers with so many candlewax versions of Approved. The Elder Council is allergic to efficiency, which made appointing Ostarand as the Crossing's Field-Marshall seem like an anomaly. Ostarand was Legion. Decisive, quick, the kind of soldier that won Mede the throne. I think Ostarand suffers the Elder Council because he needs the Survey to get a win. I haven't asked him why yet. Not my business.

"The absence of bureaucratic excess gives them anxiety," he said, folding the papers into a red billfold embossed with the Imperial Diamond. He frowned at it before tossing it over. He knew it looked like cheap gift shop garbage too. "Anyway, this'll get you through the mountains if we get separated. We won't."

I was supposed to meet the rest of the Crossing team at Fort Scinia before heading out together. I didn't. I thought maybe I could get a reading of her out past Shrikemoth before it got too loud with people. The dead speak more the more the living stay quiet.

Meeting the sole surviving warden of Checkpoint B, I knew I'd made a mistake.