The Red Year , Vol . I Content . Foreword When I originally decided to write this accounting of the Red Year , I elected to travel across Morrowind and speak to the Dunmer people themselves . I sought first - hand accounts and personal views about the cataclysmic event . I felt that if I simply did the research in the library stacks at the College of Winterhold , I wasn ' t really telling the tale that needed to be told . What struck me as I moved from city to city , town to town , camp to camp is that all of the Dunmer I met shared an incredible bond of sheer courage and unshakable faith . So what began as a chronicle of one of the worst events in the history of Morrowind , became something altogether different , the celebration of a people who can never be defeated . Drallin Vess Tear " The ground . . . it just turned into mush . There was almost no warning . I mean , we were what . . . perhaps a mile from the nearest swamps ? It was like the swamp suddenly swallowed up half of the city . " I asked him to describe what happened from the beginning . " I owned a farm just outside the Tear of time . We were planting the next season ' s crops and getting ready to store what we had harvested . Everything was going well until the Red Mountain exploded . Almost immediately , the ground rumbled and shook . Cracks started forming everywhere and then the water just started seeping through . It was awful . In a matter of hours , I was knee - deep in swamp water running for my life . Where I was running , I had no idea . At first I ran towards the city itself , but it looked like the walls were cracking . All around me , people were desperately trying to save their livestock and their families from the rising water . Just when the ground shaking finally died down , and I had a moment to think , there was a horrible cracking noise . I ' ll never forget it , because I knew what it was before I looked . The entire southern wall of Tear collapsed , sending guards tumbling into the swamp . I heard people screaming as they were covered by the rubble and forced down into the water . Forgetting my own problems , I looked over at my fellow farmers who were all staring at the carnage unfolding before us . Suddenly , we all just forgot our own problems and ran to help . There must have been hundreds of the poorer folks who lived outside the walls helping the richer ones who lived in the city . Never saw anything like that . I think we must have saved hundreds more that day . " Neria Relethyl Gnisis Neria was badly burned by the eruption , and had trouble speaking to me . She is currently convalescing at the Temple of Azura in Blacklight even after all these years . I ' ve tried to record her story to the best of my ability . " It was such a terrible thing . . . the fire . It burned everything in its path . It flattened trees , turned our huts into splinters and knocked over towers like they were made from parchment . It all happened in an instant . A rumbling sound , then a massive wall of flame . . . it was so high it blocked out the sun . I thought that the world itself had split apart . It passed over the water and turned it to steam . . . vaporized everything it touched . When it finally hit us , I was blown off of my feet . . . didn ' t even have time to run away or seek shelter . I ended up in the riverbed next to the town , which kept some of the flames off of me . All around . . . could smell the charred stench of death . There were Dunmer that were burned alive and some never saw it coming . I lay in that riverbed for two days before the healers found me . When I could finally stand , Gnisis was gone . There wasn ' t a thing left . . . it ' s as though it was wiped from the face of Tamriel . "