A thin road pierces the jungle, a wild thorn pierces the heel, fresh tracts lead to Marbruk, fresh tracts break old wheels. The city grows, fruit-like and virgin, sprouted overnight, taking root miraculously in darkest jungle that extends, tree upon tree in monotonous green, well beyond measured imagination and on into more primeval realms of the mind. I see Marbruk in its name’s shape, its peaks and eaves the pointed Altmer roofs, false thorns o’er the Valenwood bramble. An impossible feat, to build a city, timefast and delicate, so hastily amongst such rough and roiling vegetation. Impossible until one remembers there’s wood elves here can talk a fiction into fact, high elves here can sing a house up from poetry, Kajiit here can sell a tree its own acorns in autumn. Impossible is a foreign thought in Dominion lands. Outside the frontier gates the jungle’s din wrestles more cosmopolitan sounds from the air, to drag them off, no doubt, to some root-nestled den for devouring. Low huntsman’s horns moan glories to Hircine, pierced by the calls of mating multitudes from crust to canopy. In the distance the sound of a horavor colony shedding hive, cutting its deadly march across the jungle floor is accompanied by the rude songs of bough-hid Imga. Antlered beasts and antlered mer stalk about the buttress roots of tallest trees, strangler figs hang from branches above. Of strangest note here is the Bosmer’s “Rite of Theft. Those antlered folk steal from each other and demand a boon commensurate in worth, ransoming, in good sport, each others goods. My hands’ work pariah-make me but here I’m respected. I could live in Marbruk if not for the fear that jungle breeds in me, fear of the hunt, fear of the feast to come.
