Disclaimer: I do not own Oblivion, it belongs to the Daedra
Warnings: Possible spoiler for Sheogorath's quest in Oblivion and in Morrowind, I suppose
Fall of Madness
Sheogorath had fallen twice. He had been worshiped by the Dunmer, the dark elves of Morrowind. He had been one of the four corners of the house of troubles along with three of his Daedric brothers. He had been solicitous and contemplative.
A mortal who chose to approach him demonstrated sufficient madness but their mere presence. Only the mad would seek out the Daedra Prince of Madness. He would give them quests in order to make them understand. He would try and whet their appetite for madness and test the boundaries of their own patience for his domain.
The Dunmer had always seen him as a patient tester. He probed the cracks in their minds and tried to draw out their illusions. It was not easy. The Dunmer had also understood that madness as a facet of the soul, a thread in the tapestry of the corporeal world. They understood that sometimes madness was a mercy for those who would be tortured by their own sanity. His weapon, given to chosen adventurers was a spear named for just such an understanding.
However even this representation still divorced him from his true nature. He was not a representation of the madness of the mind or the threads of madness that underlaid the corporeal world. No, his madness was the madness of Oblivion. Oblivion was not some mortal-conceived hell. It was the purest chaos that could be shaped by a thought or an idea. It was the pristine ice field burning in the heat of emotion. It was the softest fur that cut like blades. It was contradiction, paradox and impossibility, constantly reinventing itself. Of course this is why he had been leashed by the Dunmer as a certain representation of the sentient mind. If anything could compare to Oblivion, then what happened between a creature's ears came close.
So he had been seduced by the offering of belief and worship. Worship made you strong. It gave you power and form. But the form it gave you was in turn imposed by belief. The cage of Dunmer belief was tolerable. He had been diminished and fixed into the corporeal world, but he still held his subtlety and the nuances of well constructed insanity.
His second fall was different. The Imperials did not understand the place of madness. For them, madness was random craziness. For them, madness was silly and petulant or jovial. Depth of understanding was lost. Even the other races that came to him were influenced by these notions of Imperial madness. His form and his actions were shaped by belief. That was the essence of the problem. He was forced into an image of what they believed him to be. The Imperials thought him loopy, loony and silly. His quests and followers began to reflect this.
From the solemn tester he had been forced into random craziness. From the embodiment of the fragile mind he had become an odd trickster second only to Sanguine in sheer silliness.
An irony was that he still thought in ways harking back to his time in Morrowind and even back to before his first fall. Yet he could not speak his thoughts. He could not make them understand. He tried to explain the true nature of madness, but he could only speak of clouds and lettuces. He tried to explain the bitter mercy or the underlying chaos of existence and the fine protections that sentient beings had constructed between themselves and irrevocable insanity. All he could utter was how bored he felt and how amusing a rain of burning dogs would be. He tried to explain the wonderfully horrible and terribly fantastic realm of Oblivion but no words would come.
The final irony was that as the frustration built, as his cage of Imperial belief constricted around him and bound his words and actions, something began to unravel. Even a Daedra Prince finds it hard to sustain two mindsets simultaneously. In the ultimate tension between thinking and being something has to snap. The final irony is that the Daedra prince of Madness becomes a mad Daedra Prince. But perhaps this is a mercy, bitter as it may be. Sheogorath giggled.