A Scholar's Guide to Nymphs                                     Vondham Barres                                                                                                                                                     )	   q  	  H
  /          A Scholar's Guide to  Nymphs       I grew up a scholar, an ascetic devoted to knowledge, with eyes that saw beauty in a fascinating passage in a dusty tome, love in the candle that allowed me to study on starless nights, passion in a well-reasoned argument of a long dead issue. I was a student who never graduated and was never expelled.   Though I am not defending myself, I should further define myself. I am not what you would call a prude. In fact, I can speak of subjects in a detached way that would make the most debauched strumpet in Skyhawk blush with discovered modesty. I wrote an essay the House of Dibella as a scholar should, analysing the cult of beauty and physical relations as one might study crop rotation or the digestive system of an orc. The acquaintances of mine who were inclined to wink and giggle I tolerated, but barely.   With all that said, the reader will understand that when I decided to study the language of the nymphs in order to study their character and culture, it was not a decision I made on account of prurience or lust. Scholars have historically neglected the nymph as a subject worthy of research, and this neglect I attribute to prejudice. The sages with whom I have spoken on the subject have eloquently and intelligently formed sentences which, boiled down, can be translated as: "Nymphs look like beautiful, naked women who skip along tra-la-la and like to have indisciminate sex. What could they have to say that would be of any interest?"   So here I was faced with the most daunting of projects -- to study and research a species unstudied is a potentially rewarding challenge. If the subject was unstudied because the scientific community had deemed it beneath interest, a potentially rewarding but decidedly frustrating challenge. If I spent months in serious study of their language and culture and additional time in their company, and discovered nothing more than that the common prejudice is correct, the term "laughing stock" would not do me justice.   So, excited and nervous for reasons unrelated to the notoriously promiscuous behavior of my subjects, I began my studies. I mastered the language, a melodious tongue that sounds like wild elf and faerie but share no vocabulary with them. I studied the lore, and found it to be on the whole, little more than pornography and crude conjecture.   I next had to find a nymph.   From my centralized location in the Imperial City, I found it easy to send word around to several wellknown temples and guilds devoted to study in all the provinces. Not all replies back were serious in nature, but one, from the School of Julianos in Sentinel helped me considerably. To Magister Oitos and his disciples, I here offer my sincere gratitude.   Nymphs are extremely shy creatures, no matter what the more obscene stories will tell you. No one who I've spoken with has had one seek him or her out. Thus to speak with a nymph requires energy and patience.   Out of courtesy for her privacy, I will not here give the location of the little grotto off the coast of Hammerfell where I found the nymph. It took three months of patient waiting, leaving presents where I knew the nymph would be, before the nymph stood still at my approach.   I remember I was carrying a bouquet of purple and white tetias, and she looked at them and then at me, and smiled. The effect of her smile was truly magical, I'm convinced. Her body was, of course, perfect; her face lovely and serene; her hair like silk flame. But until she smiled, she was beautiful in the abstract, a perfect statue by a master. The smile made her approachable and, thus, terrifying.   "For you," I said, attempting my first utterance of Nymph to a real nymph.   Her smile grew into a grin which became a giggle and then a laugh. The reader has doubtless heard of the silver laughter of the elves. The nymph's laugh is earthy and spontaneous, and very ... suggestive.   "And what do you want from me in return, mortal?" she asked.   "I am," There is no, I should say, known word in the Nymph language for scholar, "I am a man who likes to learn things. I want to learn things about you."   And I did.   Nymphs are the wisest, most wonderful creatures in Tamriel. My nymph, her name is Ayalea (a poor phonetic transcription of a word that sounds more like a light wind blowing through a small crack in a hollow chamber) and she knows more about the behavior and varieties of the deep woodland creatures than the greatest wood elf scholar I ever met. She taught me of flowers and ghosts and creatures too fast and timid to have ever been seen by man.   Ayalea taught me how to learn for the very first time. How to open my mind to all of the possibilities of life and how to use that knowledge, not just to hold in my cramped brain like a dragon's horde.   If you ever meet a nymph, speak to her.     *    *    *   Editor's note: the writer Vondham Barres is no longer a scholar at the Imperial University. He deposited this manuscript and disappeared from the civilized world. His current wherebouts are unknown.                 