Wayrest, Jewel of the Bay                                       Sathyr Longleat                                                                                                                                                    )	    +    A	  
      Wayrest,  Jewel  of the  Bay             Wayrest is one of the most glorious cities of western Tamriel: sparkling in her contemporary beauty, lustrous by her past. She is prized above all cities in High Rock -- no other city has contributed, and continues to contribute so much to the culture of the Bretons. The spirits of her genius children continue to haunt the streets; you can see them in the gabled roofs, grand boulevards, aromatic marketplaces. The people of Wayrest have an instictive appreciation of their past, but are not obsessed by it, as the people of Daggerfall seem to be. One feels that one is in a modern city when one visits Wayrest, but there is a magic in the air that could only come from thirty-two centuries of civilization.       It is difficult for historians to declare a certain date for the foundation of Wayrest. A settlement of some variety had been existence where the Bjoulsae River feeds the Iliac Bay possibly since the 800th year of the First Era. The traders and fishermen of Wayrest were surrounded by hostile parties: the orc capitol Orsinium had grown like a poison weed to the north, and the Akaviri pirates and raiders crowded the islands to the west. There is no mystery to Wayrest's name. After the fighting most travellers had to endure passing through the eastern end of the Iliac Bay, the little fishing village on the Bjoulsae was a welcome rest.        Nowhere in the much vaunted censuses of the Skyrim Occupation is Wayrest mentioned. In the Annals of Daggerfall, King Joile's letter to Gaiden Shinji of the Order of Diagna contains the following reference: "The orcs have been much plaguing the Wayresters and impeding traffic to the heart of the land." The date given for the letter was 1E 948.        Wayrest only truly bloomed after the razing of Orsinium in 1E 980. The hard-working traders and merchants were instrumental in forming the Masconian Trade Way and thus reducing the pirate activity on the Bay. At this time, Wayrest occupied both banks of the Bjoulsae. A successful mercantile family, the Gardners, built a walled palace on the High Rock side of the river and, over time, allowed banks and other businesses within its walls. It was a Gardner, Farangel, who was proclaimed king when Wayrest accepted ambassadors from the Camorian Empire, and was granted the right to call itself a kingdom in the 1100th year of the 1st Era.        Although Wayrest became a kingdom under the command of one family, the merchants continued to wield incredible power. Many economists have alleged that Wayrest's eternal wealth, despite all her hardships, comes from this rare relationship between the merchants and the crown. The Gardner Dynasty fell, followed by the Cumberland Dynasty, which was followed by the Horley Dynasty, and finally, in the Third Era, the Septim Dynasty. No citizen of another kingdom of comparable age can, with one hand, name all the families who have ever ruled. Never has a king of Wayrest been deposed by revolution or assassination. Except for those of the Septim family, every king of Wayrest can trace his line back to a merchant prince of Wayrest. The merchants and king respect one another, and this relationship strengthens both.        One need only walk down the great boulevard of Wayrest to see physical proof of this unique alliance. Going north to south, Wayrest Boulevard suddenly divides, one half going west and the other going east. Both halfs end in identical squares: one at Castle Wayrest, the original palace of Aphren Gardner, and the other at Cumberland Square, where the oldest and wealthiest marketplace in Wayrest. The message here is clear: the king and the merchants are joined and equal.        Wayrest has survived blights, droughts, plagues, piracy, invasions, and war with good humor and practicality. In 1E 2702, the entire population of the city was forced to move into the walled estate of the Gardners as protection against the pirates, Akaviri raiders, and Thrassian plague. A less resourceful community would have withered, but the Wayresters have survived to enrich Tamriel generation after generation.       