Ataraxia - Tales from the mountain's edge

"My boyfriend made me play Skyrim with him this year and I never though a video game could inspire me like this. So, this story is a thanks to the amazing storytellers who brought this deeply thoughtful game and story to life."

-Maren Koenigs

They say as long as the Northern Lights shine and cover the skies with their shivering curtains of nacreous colours, that you’re never alone. Because there is something else out here in the frozen wilderness that is alive. But we, the people from the North, born and raised among the glaciers, we know that our privileged

wonder was never an accident by nature, it was something purposefully unleashed. And that’s why I come here, to the mountains edge, the place where earth and sky

part ways, to glimpse through the seal’s smidge into their world. It’s the only place where I can see them, the Ascians, the ones without a shadow, the aurora dragons.

The Northern folk has witnessed their astral presence for over a thousand years now, some even remember the time before the skies were sealed and dragons casted their shadows over the earth. And then, there are those who even hunted them. For a reason unknown, dragons fell from the skies and the brotherhood of the pale knife found them. Skinned their heavy armor of their bodies to free the skeleton. You see, when a dragon decides to give up his earthly life for that above the clouds and flies through the seal for the first time, all of his wounds and sicknesses are healed. And those healing powers are preserved inside his bones from this moment on. Dragon bones of the Ascians can cure any illness apart from those who already looked death into the eye. And that’s why they hunt them and I am one of them, a Bone Magician. But I don’t share my people’s hunger for killing and the art they can draw from this ghastly act. But gladly I don’t have to. A dragon hasn’t fallen from the sky in over a hundred years and yet, my people still teach and believe in the old lore, waiting for the day when a dragon will fall again.

I remember when my father took me up to the mountain’s edge for the first time, I was just a child that was barely able to walk straight at the time, but I will never forget that moment when I saw a dragon spread his wings over the sky for the first time. It was like he controlled the air not the other way around, as if the wind and

clouds had bent their wills towards his. From that moment on, I knew I wanted to learn our lore, so they would teach me every tale and every saga about the Ascians. Dragons by nature are air bound and as I grew up, I felt that I was too. I never envied their powers and what a deadly and imperious threat their pure name meant to most people. All I envied was their freedom, to live a life without a compass, finding your own north. How often did I fantasized as a kid, what if I had been born a dragon?

But it was made clear to me by my father that those childish fantasies had no place in this world. This world always seemed to restrain me to her earthy grounds. Sometimes, when I walked home from the woods and felt my legs losing touch with my body as they were barely able to step through the thick snow, I thought the earth tried to swallow me whole. But then, I stare up to the sky again and am unable to deny that my dreams are real, they only have their home some place far away.

They’re all around us, carefully hidden behind natures secret veil. And deep down we’ve always known that there’s someone behind that mask. There’s Glaucous, the morning fog, I can feel him in my veins every morning when I look up to the horizon

before the sun lays her warm blanket over the new fallen snow. He’s one of the elder, one of the nine dragons who created the seal that separates their world from ours now. And Calido, the moon’s shadow. He’s a descendant of Orison, the first eclipse,

another of the nine elders. Not much is known about the rest of the elder and there is one in particular that my father refuses to tell me about. He darkened when I asked him about Gavnith but not in a mysterious way, in a frightful way like I've never seen him before. As for the rest, dragons have been seeking shelter and redemption above the sealed skies for the last hundred years and gave up their shadows for a peaceful kingdom

above the clouds. What most people don’t even know is, that Ascians not only gave up their shadow, they also have to give up their fire in order to enter. Now dragons are born in the skies as the rest of their kind has been rotted out down here. And we, the people of the North, share our home with the last dragons on this earth.

So, you see, for us the movements of the Northern Lights are not a purely random phenomenon. We know it's their wings swirling up the cold air and when we look up to the luminous colour play of the aurora, we know it’s their scale’s reflecting onto the dark sky. When I sit here on the same mountain edge underneath the seal’s smidge like I did years ago, starring up into the same night sky and its fulgent light show, my eyes fix themselves onto their cosmos and I feel miles away from my real life. Those old stories kept me dreaming and the shimmering silhouettes of the aurora kept me believing that Ataraxia, the kingdom of the Ascians, hasn’t earned its title of a myth yet. And I can read it inside the dark night, that I’ve only scratched the

surface to their world.