ThornswoodFifty Years of a Free Skyrim
Being an account of the years since the Crown was settled, set down at Windhelm in the year 4E 252.
The War, and the end of it
By the close of 4E 202 the Legion held the road and nothing else. Solitude had been taken in the winter. General Tullius was dead. The Empire, with the Dominion at its throat and no strength left to spare for a province that had stopped paying, signed.
The terms were short. Skyrim would govern Skyrim. Imperial soldiers would leave by the first thaw. The Empire kept its claim on paper and nothing else.
Ulfric Stormcloak was crowned High King by the Moot at Windhelm in 4E 203. He was fifty-one. He would hold the crown for twenty-six years.
The Expulsion
The Thalmor did not leave when the Legion left. They had never been the Empire's, only its guests, and they saw no reason a change of flag should trouble them.
In 4E 209 the High King ordered them out. The holds call it the Expulsion. The embassy at Haafingar was emptied in a night. Every Justiciar in Skyrim was given until the new moon to be over a border, and those who were not were hunted.
The Aldmeri Dominion protested. It did not march. It was still bleeding from a war of its own, and Skyrim was no longer worth the cost of taking.
The Thalmor have been illegal in Skyrim for forty-three years, and some of them are still here.
The Sundered Years
The years after the Expulsion brought no peace, but nobody in Skyrim was strong enough to make war.
Justiciars who had not made the border went to ground. Some died in it. Some did not, and their grandchildren are still here, running gold and poison and worse under other names, through the holds and along the coast. They have no name for themselves. Other people call them the Remnant.
Most of them do not want Skyrim back. No Dominion order to retake it has reached them, and no Dominion fleet has been seen off the coast. Their cause has looked dead for forty years, and what they want now is coin, safety, and revenge on whoever is nearest.
As far as anyone can tell they answer to nobody any more, and that makes them the most dangerous people in Skyrim.
The White Harbour Accord
The Empire could not come back with soldiers, so it came back with trade.
By 4E 218 the harvests had failed twice, the eastern roads were shut, and Skyrim could not feed itself. Cyrodiil had grain. Skyrim had ore, timber, and a coastline the Dominion had not tried to blockade.
The talking took three years and one walkout. The Accord was signed at Dawnstar in 4E 221 and it is the reason there is an Imperial embassy in Solitude today.
The Accord is a trade, not an apology. Both sides got the thing they needed and neither got the thing they wanted. The Empire wanted the province. It got a warehouse. Skyrim wanted the Empire gone for good. It got grain.
The full text is kept at the Blue Palace and a copy hangs in every hold's longhouse, because the High King of the day wanted every Nord able to read exactly what had and had not been given away.
The Free Skyrim Trading Company
Article the Third left the Empire one house in Skyrim, and the East Empire Company was not it. In the spring of 4E 222 its factors at Solitude and Windhelm sold what they could carry and walked away from what they could not. The piers had never been theirs to sell. They went back to the holds that stood over them, as Article the First said every harbour would.
What was left on the docks was the work of getting a crate from one hold to another and being paid for it. The Free Skyrim Trading Company took it up. It rents the old warehouses from the Jarls, owns no pier and no ship, and hires both from whoever has them. It carries for anyone who pays, keeps its cut when a load arrives, and buys the things that leave Skyrim for good. The one warehouse the Empire kept is its embassy, and the Company does not rent it.
Nobody agrees who founded the Company or whose silver paid for its charter. The signs over the old doors still say East Empire in places, and the Company has not painted them over.
Now
Ulfric died in his bed in 4E 229.
The Moot sat for eleven days and did not choose his kin. It chose Eirik Ravensgard of the Rift, who had been a housecarl at nineteen and a Jarl's steward at thirty and who had made no enemies worth the name. He has held the crown for twenty-three years. He is neither loved nor hated.
The crown sits above the holds and below nothing. There is no Emperor over it. Each hold keeps its own Jarl, its own court, its own law within the High King's law, and its own opinion of everyone else's.
The roads are safer than they were, and still not safe. The mines are running. There is an embassy in Solitude flying a flag that used to fly over all of this. Its staff are polite, and few in Skyrim trust them.
The Remnant still keep their old orders, and nobody in Skyrim knows whether anyone is left to give them new ones.
Plenty of people alive today remember the war.
The White Harbour Accord
Agreed at Dawnstar, 4E 221, between the Kingdom of Skyrim and the Empire of Tamriel. In force.
The Accord is the reason there is an Imperial embassy in a country that threw the Empire out. It has nine articles. The First and the Fourth are the two argued over most in the taverns.
Article the First: On the Crown
The Empire of Tamriel recognises the Kingdom of Skyrim as sovereign, entire, and no part of the Empire.
The High King of Skyrim holds his crown of the Moot and of no other. No oath is owed to the Ruby Throne by any Jarl, thane, housecarl or free Nord.
The Empire makes no claim, present or future, to any hold, road, mine, or harbour within Skyrim's borders.
This is the article Skyrim won, and the one read aloud in the holds.
Article the Second: On Trade
The ports of Solitude, Dawnstar and Windhelm are open to Imperial shipping on the same terms as any other.
Skyrim ore, timber, fur, and salt pass into the Empire without tariff. Cyrodiilic grain, wine, paper and worked goods pass into Skyrim the same.
Neither party shall impose upon the other a duty it does not impose upon itself.
Article the Third: On the Embassy
The Empire may maintain one embassy within Skyrim, at Solitude, and no other house, fort, or station anywhere in the province.
The embassy may hold no more than twenty persons in service, of whom no more than six may bear arms, and those six within its walls only.
No Legion soldier may set foot in Skyrim under arms. The embassy guard are not Legion and are not to be called so.
Article the Fourth: On Law
An Imperial citizen standing on Skyrim's soil stands under Skyrim's law. The embassy is not a country. Its walls are a courtesy, not a border. A man who robs a shop in Solitude and runs through the embassy gate is a man who robbed a shop in Solitude, and the Ambassador will hand him out or answer for it.
A Nord standing inside the embassy stands under Imperial law, and is owed its protections in full. This has been tested, and it has held. A citizen of Skyrim who enters those doors to trade, to petition, or to complain cannot be held there, cannot be questioned without a witness of their own choosing, and cannot be tried for anything at all.
Neither party may reach into the other and take a person out of it. If the Empire wants a man, it asks the Jarl. If Skyrim wants a man out of the embassy, it asks the Ambassador. Both have said no before. Neither has yet made it a war.
Article the Fifth: On the Dominion
Both parties hold the Aldmeri Dominion an enemy.
Neither shall harbour, fund, employ, or carry a Justiciar or any agent of the Dominion, nor conceal one from the other.
Knowledge of Dominion agents shall be shared freely and without price. This clause has been honoured more faithfully than any other in the Accord.
Article the Sixth: On Talos
No man, woman, or child in Skyrim shall be questioned, fined, watched, or touched for the worship of Talos.
The Empire acknowledges that this worship is lawful in Skyrim and undertakes never to say otherwise within its borders.
What the Empire does inside its own borders is the Empire's business and is not Skyrim's to settle. This sentence took four months of the three years.
Article the Seventh: On the Roads
Imperial couriers and merchants travel Skyrim's roads under the King's peace, and are owed the same protection and the same penalty as any Nord.
Skyrim's merchants have the same in Cyrodiil.
Neither party shall arm, pay, or shelter bandits against the other. Both parties have broken this one.
Article the Eighth: On Ransom and Return
Prisoners of the war of 4E 201 to 202, living, were returned within one year of signing. This was done.
The bones of the Imperial dead may be reclaimed by their kin at any time without hindrance, toll, or question. The bones of Skyrim's dead in Cyrodiil the same.
Article the Ninth: On Ending
Either party may end this Accord by declaring so at Dawnstar, in person, before witnesses of both.
Everything in it stands for one year and one day after such a declaration, so that merchants may come home, families may cross, and neither side need begin a war by accident.
Signed by the hand of Ulfric, High King of Skyrim, and by the hand of the Imperial Legate at Dawnstar, in the two hundred and twenty-first year of the Fourth Era.
What this means if you are playing here
- You can play an Imperial. Citizens, merchants, embassy staff, the Ambassador's people. You are legal, you are watched, and you are one bad night away from being told to leave.
- You can play a Legion veteran. Somebody who served in the war about fifty years ago and settled here when the Legion left is a good character to play. You cannot play a serving Legion soldier: Article the Third keeps every one of them out of Skyrim under arms. The six who bear arms at the embassy are its own guard, not Legion, armed inside those walls and nowhere else. Walk out the gate carrying and you have broken the Accord, and the Ambassador will hand you over rather than answer for you.
- You can work for the Free Skyrim Trading Company. It hauls, buys and sells between the holds, out of the old East Empire warehouses. Its lead seat is given rather than chosen, like a Jarl's.
- You can play a Thalmor. You are a criminal. There is no embassy to run to and no immunity. Whether orders still come from home, and who sends them, is yours to play out. Article the Fifth means the Empire will hand you over as fast as a Nord will. Play it as what it is: a hunted thing with a long memory.
- You can play a Jarl or a steward. Those are positions, not characters, and they are given rather than chosen. A Jarl's seat is asked for on the Jarl application in Discord, which lists only the holds that have no Jarl, and nobody on staff may hold one. A hold's Jarl names its steward, its court and its guards.
- Arguing about the Accord in character is encouraged. Half of Skyrim thinks Article the Fourth gave away too much. The other half says thirty winters of Cyrodiilic grain were worth it.