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Assuming you choose to have a trader set up residence in Raven Rock, you can find an odd note in his inventory that you can buy for 1 gold. It seems to be an emotionally wrenching personal soliloquy of sorts, and hopefully later on today I'll be able to either post some screens of the text or write it out.

Has anyone here ever figured out the purpose of that note? My initial thought is that it might be another piece of parchment that adds flavour to the game, sort of like the note to Hriskar in the Seyda Neen census area.
But, why on earth would something like that end up in a trader's inventory of all places?
I'm thinking it is probably part of an abandoned quest or something. Thoughts?

I did some hunting around Google, but there doesn't seem to be anything out there.

I can't remember that note at all. Are you sure it's not from a mod?

Coot wrote:I can't remember that note at all. Are you sure it's not from a mod?

I am pretty certain it is not from a mod... I don't have any Solstheim mods installed, and this note has shown up in at least three of my games in different installations. Unless it is related to a mod I use all the time, like Sri's Alchemy.. but I just can't see what it would have to do with Sri's.

[url="http://my.opera.com/DragonWench/albums/show.dml?id=274735"]Here[/url] is a link to my screenshots of the note.
(just click on the thumbnails to read)

Hriskar's note was originally intended to form the basis of a quest, but that fell through...

I got annoyed with the whole note thing staying in the back of my head (sort of like a song that you can't exactly remember which keeps coming back anyway ). I therefore copied part of the text of the note and used it to Google. The only reference I could find was [url="http://til.gamingsource.net/mwbooks/"]here, in the Imperial Library.[/url] It doesn't explain anything. I guess it's either part of a quest that didn't get finished (like Greg. says) or one of the creators went on a poetic rampage.
There are more books and notes in the game that have no (apparent) purpose or goal, except to read and enjoy (or not). I guess the creators (or creators' spouses, or kids, or grandparents, etc.) just liked to come up with that stuff.

We could create a poll: what piece of in-game poetry or prose did you enjoy most? Or: which piece of in-game poetry or prose did you think was the most bombastic and/or pretentious?

The note from Coot's link, to save web hopping or trying to decipher the order of my uploaded images.

A Worn and Weathered Note

I am forever swimming around, amidst this ocean world we call home. My limbs grow weak and weary as my eyes drift skyward in defeat. I remember how warm the earth felt, as I lived and breathed next to her beating heart. I remember enough to keep searching through an ocean of tears, raised to astronomical depths. My dreams offer solace, where I return to distant, faded times. Through trees entwined with cool autumn air, my sorrow is lured by fragrant, bittersweet memories. I am at home as much as my world and consciousness allow. I remember falling into the most beautiful lake I've ever experienced. She swallowed me whole, like a droplet, and I was enraptured and enwombed within her bliss. The lonely windswept desert sky of my soul was filled by her luminous stars and warmed by her sunlit radiance. I gazed downward in awe and saw it all reflected in the shimmering ripples dancing and playing about the surface. It appeared to me as real as the very wonders it was reflecting. I stepped forward to prove to no one and everyone that they were, by belief. For an aching instant I was betwixt the two and the summation. Confusion befell me and I fell through, only to realize I hadn't entered the lake, I had left it. With all of my remaining life I howled at the heavens and collapsed, like a star on the shores of my youth, as my life's breath wandered away from the home it had harbored. I have been drowning on dry land ever since.

I lay there, coital, for heaven knows how long. I felt eons ebb and flow in the spans of seconds. I lived as intently as I could in those endless instants, as the boredom of -after- droned on and on. The fires of my heart grew dim and became only the faintest embers of the roaring blaze they had once been. My limbs, heavy with the weight of the world, protested. I felt the longing of this life which slowly began to ease the agony in my heart. As I was gradually nursed back to health, knowledge of record and history tried desperately to fill the yawning, nauseous chasm of my soul. I began to know the deadpan search for freedom and forgetfulness, and I released the hold on my life. Though it still lurched, pained, in front of me, I just stared back with tired, vacant eyes as if watching the most fascinating of nothing. My mind drifted, only to be slammed back reluctantly, repeatedly, and painfully by those I vaguely remember knowing, as if from a different life and age. I try, in vain, to forgive and forget myself as I paste on those plaster smiles and strain to look levelly. I remember. I forget. I forget again. I remember less. I am saddened at the thought that I have forgotten. I am not who I used to be. Though it pained me so, I was never so real as those lonely, lost times of my undoing. I am torn asunder at the thought of losing forever that, which has changed my life eternally, and that which I fear in the depths of my soul will never be again. That, which has gifted me with more pain than I have ever known in all of my lives or all of the lives that I know through my own.

Who am I to ask this of you?

@Coot,
I have read quite a few notes in the game, and this certainly qualifies as the most poetic and compelling for me. Not surprising given its angsty nature...

I have this feeling it is more likely to have been part of a forgotten quest... because of the location. A merchant's inventory just seems an odd place simply for adding flavour; had I found it in a cave or something, I would have wondered, but I don't think it would have struck me as quite so incongruous.

Anyway, thanks for finding the note, at least now I know it's not a mod.

Now.. thoughts on the meanings and/or symbols behind the note?
On the more obvious front, there's plenty of metaphor here...a sense of loss and severing... and a great deal of internal conflict.

Thanks for all the info...
The first time I found the note, I searched the area and talked to everyone around, even waded out in the water and expored a bit....finally put the note in a chest with other odd objects I've found throughout the game.

dragon wench wrote: Now.. thoughts on the meanings and/or symbols behind the note?
On the more obvious front, there's plenty of metaphor here...a sense of loss and severing... and a great deal of internal conflict.

Call me crazy, but somehow I got an idea that perhaps that could have been somekind of "last message" from last dwemer. Perhaps the writer (in-game) of that note was the one responsible of disappearing of dwemers, and was the only one surviving from it (excluding the one you can find in game though. That guy says that he returned only to notice that all his kin had disappeared). So maby the dwemer behind the note did cause the disappearance of his kin, and after that he/she found himself/herself lonely.

I'll give better explanation my thoughts when I'm back home, but in short that was my first impression of the note. Perhaps due that note player was meant to be able to try to reveal what happened to dwemers. Also, maybe the quest for that grew too big to be implemented to the game...