Malacath once had a son. Sheogorath tricked him into killing the poor boy. So Malacath gets his revenge on Sheogorath's son.
Apocrypha 2: Kind Revenge.
Malacath got his revenge on every single one of Sheogorath's children. Sometimes, the Orc God was responsible for their death, sometimes he merely made them unhappy, and other times he was an oppressive, omnipresent foe. When the waters of Oblivion stirred to indicate another of Sheogorath's children had been born, Malacath began to plot his next act of vengeance right away.
That the child, a boy for the first time in thousands of years, was on the mortal plane only made the God of Curses desire vengeance more. Sheogorath was so bold with his latest spawn that he left the boy unguarded by Daedra. It incensed Malacath enough to take on a mortal vessel to hunt the boy down and choke him to death in his cradle.
Time wasn't the same for mortals and Daedra. When Malacath found the boy in his mother's temple, years had passed. What he found stunned him with the sheer cruelty. Meridia and Sheogorath weren't always pleasant, but neither of them were cruel in their natures, so Malacath struggled to reconcile what he saw with how they'd treated previous children.
The boy, a Khajiit kitten, was left alone. Kept purposefully separate from the other children in his age group, in a completely different room. The walls of that room were bare, and there was nothing to entertain an infant to Malacath's knowledge. For an indefinite period of time, he watched the kitten through his mortal eyes. Sheogorath's son didn't cry often-not from toughness but because no one would listen. The kitten didn't smile at anyone or anything because his handlers refused to smile at him when he tried. They didn't speak to him, they only touched him to keep him alive and clean.
When a new caretaker came into the service of Meridia's temple he heard why this was so. Meridia had ordered that the kitten was to be touched as little as possible, spoken to as little as possible, and be allowed nothing of the world until she said otherwise. Malacath's Daedric nature let him see what she had meant to say: The child was holy and she didn't want him polluted with mortality too early. But as usual, she cocked it up.
Malacath let the child see him after a while. The kitten just glanced at him, then went back to staring blankly at the ceiling. Old Knocker couldn't help but respect the quietness with which the kitten bore his teeth emerging through his gums-hardly a whimper. It lit a disdainful fire in his belly that the reason behind it was that the child new already that nobody cared that he was in pain. Malacath was many things, but he wasn't cruel enough to suffer this.
He let his mortal vessel synch up with the Mundus, entered Meridia's temple under the guise of an impotent Orc who desired to adopt, and picked the child, whose name he learned was Mohamara, right away. The name on top of that treatment he'd witnessed was too much-he had the boy's name changed. No longer 'I love you', but 'love that heals'. Ornimara.
Malacath's vessel took Ornimara to Dushnikh-Yal, to a house next door to a family that was recently blessed with a strong daughter. There, he decided to get his revenge on Sheogorath by being a better father to the Mad God's son than the Mad God himself could ever be. The first step pursuant to that was to break the shell of indifference that had grown up around the boy.
It didn't take all that long, maybe a week at most. The babe was deathly quiet most of the time and unused to being played with, to being smiled at, or to prolonged physical contact. It was bizarre for little Ornimara that someone would put pain-reliever on his gums when new teeth broke through. But the shell broke down, and Malacath allowed the boy to cry as babies ought to cry. Old Knocker sat on the porch in a rocking chair, the picture of a powerful Orc broom-gang member, and held the kitten dressed in pink while he cried. He casually flipped the bird to Sheogorath's invisible eyes all the while.
The first time he was proud of the young man Ornimara had become was when the boy was twelve and suspended from school. That Yagraz girl from next door had also gotten suspended, so her father and Malacath's vessel got the two youngsters together to tell the story of what happened.
Ornimara was never going to be a powerfully built warrior like the Orcs of Dushnikh-Yal, but he wasn't scrawny either. The tojay youngster combined intelligence, gentleness, and an absolute willingness to get his hands dirty. This was evident in that both of the kids were covered in mud when they sat down side by side in front of their fathers.
"Yagraz saw a coin in a mud puddle," Ornimara said, unconcerned that he was missing a tooth Malacath was sure he had that morning. "But I found it first, and we fought over who got to keep it."
"I won!" Yagraz declared, with her muddy pigtails bouncing as she lept up to display the gold coin she rightfully had a claim to. Her father promptly plucked it from her hand. "Hey!"
"You get it back if you got a good reason for getting into fights at school," Yagraz's father said in a gravelly snarl. Malacath liked the Orc man, he was just the right amount of 'not-to-be-fucked-with' in the Orc God's opinion. "So talk."
"It better be worth the dentist trip you're gonna haveta make, short-stuff," Malacath's vessel threatened as he thrust out his tusks.
Ornimara launched into the story, completely unconcerned with his adopted father's threat. There had been a boy at school that the Khajiit liked, so he tried putting 'the moves' on him. Already Malacath knew the story was going to be ridiculous from the way Ornimara waggled his eyebrows and tried to purr when he said 'the moves'. The tsaesci youngster Ornimara had attempted to woo was receptive at first, but some Nord kids decided that since the two fancied boys they could be picked on without repercussions.
"...So I headbutted one guy, but the others grabbed my arms and I couldn't do that trick you told me to break out of an armbar hold because one of them started givin' me a wedgie-," Ornimara continued to explain when Yagraz's father cut him off.
"And let me guess, Yagraz came in to save you?"
Yagraz nodded emphatically, grinned, and flexed her biceps. "Running clotheslined a couple Nord punks to let 'em know I wanted to scrap."
Her father was not pleased. "Young lady, in this house we flying dragon kick, not running clothesline."
"Technically we're in Ornimara's house-ugh!" Yagraz's smartassery was ended by a snort from her father. "But I can get two people when I clothesline them!"
"We have traditions missy, and while you live in my house, you'll follow them. Also clotheslining people has a chance of doing brain damage and that's not fun."
Ornimara started flapping his hand in time with Yagraz's father's words, which earned him a cuff on the back of the head from Malacath's vessel.
"Short-stuff," Malacath growled. "Not hearing anything worth that dentist's visit yet."
The Khajiit, twelve years old and completely unafraid of his literal eons old father grinned and made finger-wands at him. "Well, long story short, I have a sleepover with a cute snake boy this Fredas."
Malacath's vessel crossed his arms and hid his eyes in shadow for a minute to make it seem like he was going to find the answer unacceptable. But Ornimara saw through his bullshit with ease and kept the finger-wands going. Old Knocker threw his head back, laughed, and got up to find the dentist's slate-number. "Alright, that's good enough for me."
Yagraz, meanwhile, found herself grounded because she refused to back down from her position on running clotheslining people.
The first time Malacath was afraid for his adopted son's life was when he had gone to Whiterun for groceries and suddenly found himself bombarded with prayers. Panicked voices, pleas for strength and protection, visions of people in white conical hats that bore Stendarr's mark approaching his faithful with blades, fire, and nooses. Out of all of them, he could pick up Ornimara's due to how ridiculously pink it was.
Groceries long forgotten, the God of Curses' vessel appeared in Dushnikh-Yal in time to watch a Vigilant of Stendarr throw a noose around his son's neck and yank him into a tree. Fortunately, the weak Man wasn't talented enough to break the cat's neck immediately.
Malacath's flavor of divine retribution was similar to Azura's, Meridia's, and Molag Bal's in that gratuitous violence was involved. By his divine will, the Vigilants found themselves lifted into the air and torn in half, their heads exploded from internal pressure, or set on fire to die screaming. All these horrible fates and more befell them as Old Knocker cut the fifteen-year-old cat, as small as he'd been at twelve, from the tree.
Those moments between Malacath cutting him down and the cat being able to breathe on his own were almost as bad as when Sheogorath had compelled Malacath to butcher his previous son.
The first time Malacath was at a loss for words with his son was the day that should have been a happy occasion. Ornimara had been brought up as one of Malacath's Children, but out of respect for Meridia's strength, he had agreed to the Meridian custom of arranged marriage. He had made a rotisserie chicken for the happy news of who would be the cat's husband, spent years learning to cook beforehand to do so, and tolerated the people who had neglected Ornimara in his house to that end.
Meridia informed him before the mortals were aware: She had declared none of his potential matches worthy of her son. That would have been unpleasant but tolerable. But then he and the boy's best friend, Yagraz, had to sit and listen to a withered crone of a woman list off to Ornimara every potential match he'd had and that they weren't suitable.
Malacath had done his best to teach the cat to be strong in body, but he freely admitted that he didn't know how to teach him to be strong in spirit. It pained him to watch the teenager's self-worth and confidence get visibly destroyed by that hag of a woman with each entry on her list.
Old Knocker began to notice a trend with Meridia's mortals. They took her orders, her declarations, or even her implications, and seemed to spin them into the most mean-spirited, hateful interpretation possible.
The matchmaker left off the meeting with Ornimara with a positively venomous line: "If you wish to still be considered past this, you should know the chances of an abusive match go up. Strongly consider a life of celibacy, for your sake. But I daresay that won't be a problem… who would willingly cavort with the likes of you?" Only the compact that instructed his faithful and Meridia's to watch out for each other kept him from murdering the hag then and there.
Neither Yagraz or Malacath's vessel could convince Ornimara to eat after that. And, as mentioned before, Malacath had no words to lessen his adopted son's pain. Yagraz, however, did.
"It's okay to cry about things like this, short-stuff."
For the first time in fifteen years, Malacath held the son of his enemy that had become his son while he bawled his eyes out. The only difference being that he flipped Meridia off while so doing.
Malacath spent twenty-one years on Nirn in his vessel and pretended to be a mortal himself for the sake of his revenge. He almost forgot his goal of revenge a couple times through the process of raising Ornimara, but it came back whenever Sheogorath would peek in. The Mad God seemed annoyed at worst by what Malacath had done, which didn't suit the God of Curses at all.
However, when the Dragon Broke and Sheogorath stole his son back through time, Malacath got his revenge with one sentence from Ornimara to Sheogorath himself.
"You may be my father, but you're not my Dad."
Revenge would never be so sweet again.