Acquisition
Bards College in Solitude, sold by a book salesman named Rennare.
Notes
- Requires Kaidan 2, as well as Legacy of the Dragonborn - Followers Patch.
Contents
Ghost Stories of Tamriel:
The Shadow Man
by
Galatea Olivier
There once lived a poet, who one day found herself uninspired and unable to write. She decided to travel to her old family homestead, hoping the change of scene would inspire her, and allow the ink to flow freely from her quill once more. It was a lonely home, shut up and abandoned for many years - the poet herself had not visited there since childhood. Regardless, she stoked its fires and settled in for her first night.
In the depth of that night, however, as she slept curled up in her old bed, something cold coiled around her ankle, grasping, tugging her awake. She woke with a start and sat upright, unable to comprehend what she saw. At the end of her bed loomed a figure, an outline, a silhouette of a man made of shadows. The poet couldn’t know if it was a trick of the light, or a true apparition, or even an intruder. Her heart thumped audibly as she stared at him and he stared back.
"...Who are you?"
He vanished the instant the words were whispered, and the woman shuddered and hugged her blankets closer, forcing herself to believe the figure had only been a relic of a dream she must have been having. Laying back, it was dawn before sleep claimed her again.
The terrible memory remained fresh in her mind, somehow beautiful in its grotesque horror, and with no other means of catharsis, the poet began to write. Words flowed freely from quill to parchment, inspired, enchanting, and frightening.
The next night, the figure seemed to creep from the deep shadows of the room… it began to be a vision in the daytime, a fleeting image in the corner of the poet’s eye. It brought with it a sense of foreboding, draining warmth and joy from the room and leaving in it’s wake a sickening inspiration. The poet wrote; she crafted verses as never before, till soon she waited for the shadow man to appear with as much anticipation as she did dread.
On a moonless night, he began to whisper… fleeting words, then gradually full conversation, words of menace, and hate, and cruelty. Words of hopelessness, loneliness, and pain. Words of terrible inspiration. The poet despised her dark muse, she ached to be free of it and began to feel its darkness etching into her own mind. The shadow man clung to her like her own shadow, his cold grip on her very insides…
Soon there were no words left for her to write to relieve the heavy pain of the shadow man’s presence. She could feel him in her blood, could feel the darkness in every vein of her body. The pressure and misery and chaos built inside and desperately the poet took the sharp edge of her quill to her veins, cutting them open and watching the black ichor run free. Another cut, another, another… the pressure began to dissipate with the pain, taking consciousness with it… until she at last lay dead in a pool of ink.