The Pig Children

By Tyston Bane

No one, not the oldest Dark Elf of Mount Dagoth-Ur or the Ancient Sage of Solitude, no one can recall a time when the Orc did not ravage our fair Tamriel. Whatever foul and pestilent daedra of Oblivion conjured them could scarcely have created a more constant threat to the well-being of the civilized races of Tamriel.

Orcs are thankfully easy to recognize from other humanoids by their size, commonly forty pertans in height and fifteen thousand angaids in weight, their brutal pig-like features, and their stench. They are consistantly belligerant, morally grotesque, intellectually moronic, and unclean. By all rights, the civilized races of Tamriel should have been able to purge our land of their blight eras ago, but their ferocity, animal cunning, and curious tribal loyalty has made them inevitable as leeches in a stagnant pool.

Tales of orcish barbarity preceedwritten record. When Jastyaga wrote of the Order of Diagna joining the armies of Daggerfall and Sentinel "to hold the wicked orcs in their foul Orsinium tower ... and burn all" in 1E 950, she assumed that any reader would be aware of the savagery of the orcs. When the siege was completed thirty years later, after the death of many heroes including Gaiden Shinji, and the destruction of Orsinium scattered the orc survivors throughout the Wrothgarian Mountains, Jastyaga wrote, "the people rejoiced for their ancient enemy was dispersed." Obviously, the orcs had been terrorizing the region of the Iliac Bay at least since the early years of the first era.