Incident at Rimmen
From the many mysteries surrounding 'Where were you when the dragon broke' one passage always stood out for me -
"You did it again with Big Walker, not once, but twice! Once at Rimmen, which we'll never learn to live with."
In the old in-character interviews on the Imperial Library site there are a couple from before Morrowind was published - this is a part of Skeleton Man’s interview:
dro'Mhakij, "Prophet of Rajhin," a Khajiit sugar addict outside of Yul's shop:
Jodenjone! Don' let Marshee lie to you about Big Walker. The Blades took It from here, sure, but they din' take It back to Cyrodiil and rebuild the thing. Talos, he "annexed" a swath of our bounty-land in Ana'quinal and cleared the Khajiiti out by force. There's where he built the Hall of Colossus - a mighty name for a secret testing warehouse - and that's where Big Walker was born. And that's why that part of our Elsweyr is still poisoned glow-rock, where no cats go. Ach, for the lunacy of you Wayward Folk!"
Just in case you were wondering, Rimmen is a town in Elsweyr, and that appears to be where this 'secret testing warehouse' was constructed. This is what the Pocket Guide to the Empire has to say about Rimmen:
Rimmen
"Though ostensibly its own kingdom, Rimmen still pays tribute to the Mane of Elsweyr, from whose realm it seceded in CE812 during the Interregnum. Earlier, Akaviri refugees had fled persecution when the warlord Attrebus briefly aspired to the Imperial Throne. Attrebus, though he lasted no longer than most of the pretender kings of that period, thought he might rid Cyrodiil of the foreigners who had ruled it for the first half of the Common Era, and he drove the Akaviris past the Empire's borders into Elsweyr. The khajiit granted them asylum in the hills and steppes of northwestern Elsweyr, where they dwelt in relative seclusion until remnants of the Dir-Kamal resurfaced in Cyrodiil, seizing the Throne from Attrebus' successors. The Rimmen (literally, the "Rim Men," as the khajiit called them) joined their brothers to try to rebuild the Empire. This effort was doomed to failure, but not before the khajiit attempted to reclaim their lands in a series of bloody border wars. Currently, since the ascension of Tiber Septim, the hapless Rimmen have once again submitted to the protection of the Mane, with a renewed tribute paying for the Cat Lord's guarantee of their independence, a truly weak reed upon which to lean."
Rimmen is therefore the land in Elsweyr that is next to Cyrodiil, which would presumably be exactly the territory that Tiber Septim would have 'annexed' to build Numidium. The Halls of the Collosus mentioned as the constrcution site for Tiber Spetim's Numidium are in fact a dungeon in TES 1: Arena, however the map shows them as being far to the south of Rimmen; this creates a problem in associating the construction of an anumidi at the Halls of Collosus with an event that took place in Rimmen far to the north.
The argument hinged on the location of an area known as Ana'quinal – however, it can be proved where this is, and that is indeed close to Rimmen.
From The Pocket Guide to the Empire:
Elsweyr
“Until relatively recently, the nearly constant insurrection and tribal warfare among the catmen rarely troubled the stage of history. In CE309, however, Keirgo of Anequina and Eshita of Pellitine combined their long-feuding kingdoms to create Elsweyr, sparking a great class struggle that briefly threatened to draw in outside intervention. Power shifted from two separate kingdoms, each with its own central government and allied tribes, to a nobility besieged by those tribes, who felt that both their ruling classes had betrayed them.”
”Geographically, Elsweyr is a harsh area of badlands and dry plains. Only near the southern reaches does the soil turn fertile, and the whole of this region is covered in jungle and rainforests, with sugarcane groves clustering against the two main river basins. The old kingdom of Anequina is its northern section, and has historically offered no threat to either the early Cyro-Nords or the later Cyrodiliic Empires.”
So clearly Anequina was the northern region of Elsweyr where Rimmen was located, but is this the same place as Ana’quinal??
Once again from The Pocket Guide:
“Before long the cities of former Anequina were under constant attack. Keirgo petitioned the Empire for help, but it had just lost its own ruler, Potentate Versidue-Shaie, and was in similar disarray. When the old capital, Ne Quin-al, fell to the rebels, it seemed Elsweyr would soon burst under the weight of its own union.”
The capital of Anequina was a place called Ne Quin-al, and it is not a far leap from there to Ana'quinal, as they are both pronounced in the same way. Whats more, at least four hundred years pass between the publishing of the Pocket Guide and the interview with dro'Mhakij, more than enough time for the name to change to a more Imperial friendly one.
Rimmen in located along the northern border of Elsweyr, it being named thus from its inhabitants, literally the 'Rim men'. The Halls of Collosus as shown on the Arena map are in the south of Elsweyr, but if they were constructed in Anequina then they must be in the northern part of the province. I hope that this has proved that there is a connection between the events at Rimmen and the construction of Numidium at the Halls of Collosus.
-- Phil
Additional proof was provided by Nigedo:
I was checking out the official site for TESA: Redguard, when I came across another interesting reference to the region of Anaquina.
It is found in the character background of S'rathra, the Khajiit crime boss of Cyrus, and I thought I would add it here for completeness;
"Today S'rathra is suave and urbane, a rich and powerful Khajiit in a world of Men - far from the young suthay-raht that used to run with the violent nomad cats of the Ne-Quin'al plains.
After being lamed at the massacre of Stoop Low, he left Anaquina to keep from bringing shame to his tribe, eventually ending up in the far more cosmopolitan Pellitine to the south."
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