Dirge of Decay.
Prelude.
Witness now, with a new eye,
The recording of a history:
A chronicle of rot and decay,
Writ through the heart of a people,
So decadent…
Witness these souls walking astride,
Hand in hand, guided,
By life's gray flux.
Descending…
Late Merethic Era
The sky tore open like the maw of a voracious demon, a rent bleeding malicious tendrils of darkness and greed. The opening liberated the universal cries of souls in timeless suffering.
A majestic winged creature soared into the mortal realm, the land trembling as the monstrous creature raked at the air with its mighty wing-span. Power bled in ripples from the web of its wings. By the incandescence of the portal scales shimmered to reveal the creature's black finish.
The dirge of a tortured world echoed across the many lands of Nirn, reducing all forms of life to a frightened stillness. The rent mended of its own accord, momentarily obscuring the surrounding atmosphere.
The creature's sight scoured a plateau as it crested an adjoining crag, and dove to perch amidst a ring of unmoving black figures, all bowed in a crude welcoming ceremony.
Talons scraped a coordinated landing along the surface of the glacier as the creature settled at the center of the circumscription of priests, all spaced twenty feet apart.
The blizzard howled on all sides, the sudden severity heralded by the presence of the winged deity. The mountain appeared to have been devoured by a white abyss, torn asunder by the draconic behemoth, and filled with the bleak, cold emptiness that came in its dreadful wake.
The creature's eyes permeated the blizzard like two newly born stars dotting the firmament, unmet by the hooded figures, their heads lowered in grave veneration.
Nine and one, you stand mortal acolytes. The dragon's telepathic voice resonated like grinding boulders in the minds of the priests. Humanity's defiance awaits abatement, reinstatement of dominion is imminent. To those who stand before now: fealty demands mortality, inverse. Exchange.
Objects flared into existence in front of each of the ten figures, masks of varying material all displaying expressions of deadpan gravity.
Relinquish their souls and bare the immortal veils. Divine bestowment. Revere eternal, restless eternal, inverse. Exchange.
Their hoods were thrown back and they lifted their heads to regard their respective masks in perfect synchronization. All were mortal men, and none of youth.
Hevnoraak: heed not mortal affliction. The priest directly before the draconic deity abruptly suffered the baring of his mask, as it shot towards his head and immediately began sealing to his skin. An ethereal doppelganger was then leeched from the priest's physical being, as his soul was sucked into the gaping maw of the deity.
Raghot: heed not mortal capacity. The second mask sealed to the priest standing abreast of the first and his soul too, was annexed.
Nahkriin: heed not obscurity of living material.
Morokei: heed not arcane capacity.
Otar: heed not elemental decadence.
Volsung: heed not atmosphere's threshold.
Vokun: heed not the limitations of quantum mutability.
Krosis: heed not the convolution of alchemy.
Khonariik: bind all other, become the convergent.
Finally, it regarded the last. One is nameless, one shall remain, for the portal has no side, and a portal it is. The binding completed.
Intellect abides in a death horizon. The deity spread its wings high above and exulted its power, conjuring a cosmic distortion in the substance of reality proximate to the area. Eight sentinels to the draconic scripta, one of convergence, one of portal. The masked priests were sucked into nothing, vanishing with a violent wrench.
The deity was now perched alone. It expanded its awareness deep into Nirn's crust, searching. Further, it drove its senses until it found what it quested for. Awaken children. The mountain trembled, barely containing the aroused devastation within. The deity vanished with a conflagrated burst.
Tremors devastated the landscape, and the fierce vibrations were more reminiscent of a stampede than to a volcanic eruption. It started with a spurt that sent magma oozing down its side, and then the mountain erupted in an explosion of ruinous force that sent an upsurge of lustrous fire high into the atmosphere.
Magma sprayed amidst a rising pillar of smoke. Pyroclastic debris rained burning death upon the mountain's hinterland. Ash and smoke rose and curled to form a massive mushroom cloud, further spreading to envelope the land, blotting out the sky.
From the ashen darkness appeared thousands of glowing eyes, piercing the smoke like stars permeating a storm cloud. The creatures crawled over the ridge of the ravaged mountain like thousands of agitated ants.
Thus began the Dragon War.