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[inyokuda]

[[Tucked between the next pages of the journal you find a crude ink drawing, labeled “Nautilus pipe - smoked by our captain each day at dawn.” Its paper is not like the journal’s, it was clearly put there later.]] 

[inyokuda]

[[You open the topmost book, a journal bound in dark, worn leather. After a few blank pages, it reads:]]

I often fear that I was born too late. There’s no real mystery left for us on Tamriel -- the ruins have been looted, their ancient inhabitants killed off or subsumed, their artifacts sold, and the very stones of their constructions repurposed into the local farmer’s dwelling. I sat through years of lectures on the Nedics, the Ayleids, the Falmer, all without learning all there is to know. We’ve uncovered all their wonders, and for those few that still remain I do not care. Where did the Dwemer go? It doesn't matter, they are not coming back. 

I turned then, in my junior year at Gwylim, towards my mother’s people. We Redguard are proud, ancient, unbending peoples, and even when our blood joins with that of others, as it has in me, we do not forget the continent from which we came. The elves have their mythical Aldmeris and the Nords their frozen hellscapes of Atmora, but we, we have Yokuda! A continent not lost or doomed, nor one forgotten. A broken, continent, sure, but broken at our hand! What power my ancestors must have wielded to do such damage... and what conviction they must have had against their enemies that such a deed would be allowed. 

I studied all I could of them, spent my summers at digs in Cespar and Old Hegathe, learned to read and write the ancient Yoku tongues in all four dialects present at the conquest. I spoke to more recent immigrants, to captains and sailors who make the journey to the west to bring us jade and lapis, to master scholars. I even attempted (unsuccessfully), to converse with the ghost of an Ansei said to haunt the ruins near Sentinel. 

But now! My grant from university has finally come through, financed in part by the High Queen herself. I finally have the resources to travel to Yokuda and study it first hand. I cannot wait to see the ruins of their fabled cities, to talk to their modern people, so many years removed from ours. To study the craters and gashes said to mark the continent like pox scars. To eat their food and look upon their strange skies. To sleep where my mothers people slept, so many hundreds of years ago.