In Pedo Impedimenta
or
In Soil Stymied
Prologue
Jon Urfe was a man entangled. If the spark of a normal man's life is a thread woven through time, Jon's life was a series of snarls so snagged and twisted around the lives of others as to make it nearly impossible to tell where his life ended and theirs began; one tangle after another, knots upon webs upon snags on and on through time's watery warp, flailing and twitching and rattling the straightlaced throng of mortality with his every move - and inseparably subject to their manipulations, as well. A string of invisible knots in the fabric of normal mortal history, was Jon's life, and without rival when it came to indissolubility. The first, tightest, and most simplistic of all of Jon's knots had been tied early, by a single stumble in a single field in a single piercing moment - and in this way Jon went on, stumbling through his life and tangling himself ever more tightly in knots of ever more complex and bewildering associations. There he is in the market of sordid Bravil, just a single snarl yet to mar the line of his history, and then - slam! his face hits the ground of fate once more as a down-on-his-luck Khajiit warlock wraps the eleven-year-old Jon's head in Ta'agra, the language of his people, and the boy's mind is made the eternal slave of linguistics; pow! at twelve he has bought his first book - a decrepit primer to the language of the Altmer - and twines the written word through the auburn curls atop his skull; bam! once more the ground, for three months later an acolyte of the Synod has tripped him into the splintered paving stones of the Imperial City for making 'corrections above his station,' and the sympathetic priest-mage looking on has taught him an arcane chant to stitch the lips of adversaries; boom! and, sixteen, his stumbling, amateur spellwork has wrapped his parents' farm in a mangle of docile but vigorously mating tree-serpents, and there is the emissary of the College of Whispers to untie his aetherial knots and to bundle the prodigy off for a proper education in the College's main Cynosure.
Again and again, knot after knot, Jon tangled himself ever deeper in the world. There he is in the College's archives, stumbling into myths of creation, being tied up in Lorkhans and Auriels, Sithises and Anus, Shors and Alduins, and falling quite helplessly through the doors of who-is-who, and quite nearly strangling himself in questions of identity; there he is in the studies of his professors, wrapped up in hero worship and advanced conceptual flow theory; there he is in the beds of his female peers (and at least one of his professors), quite functionally immobilized in downy limbs and the tangles of silky soft locks. There was no such word as 'untie,' for Jon; the only way to get him out of one thing was to bind him up more tightly in something else - the primary instrument in such an endeavor being, naturally, the same insatiable curiousity and desire to understand that he was so wont to profess and that would one day lead to his qualification for and subsequent appointment to the position of Specialist in Poly-Spectral Comprehension Techniques and Phenomena, and to all the rights, benefits, amenities, and liabilities that that post implies. For knowledge is a pursuit with an End, for those few who think they pursue it and are correct in the belief, while understanding is an endeavor of eternal internal unfolding by its very unattainability.
But for all that - all our entangled man's irrepressible bumbling and stumbling along through his life, all his uncanny skill with language and sometimes unnerving psychosympathy - to Tamriel at large, his was not such an extraordinary life. So he had been born to parents whose experience of magic was limited, in essence, to the thrill they felt between their toes as they walked the neatly tilled rows of tidy corn or bronzing wheat in Cyrodiil's sweltering summers - it was a tumultuous time in Tamriel (although, in truth, what time is not, in the Arena?) and there was plenty of movement through the social stratosphere, and plenty of educated sorcerers like Urfe, whose parents had as muddied an understanding of the concept of reading as they did of the nature of creation; it was no cause for shame. To his colleagues in the starry halls of the Miscarcand Cynosure, Urfe was just one more quirky wizard among many; just the bumbling arcane linguistics professor who had a finger in everyone's research, a toe in the businesses of half the province's travelling merchants and mendicant thespians, and his warm, embracing arms in the lives of everyone he met; just the hopeless sap always fell for the scams of the Imperial City's con men and mer - though the Eight knew that a man like that should be able to tell when he was being swindled. He was the voice of the College in those years, as well; the Whisper incarnate. He was the one sent on outreach to the intellectual establishments of other provinces, to ply his polylingual tongue in soft sibilance toward the establishment of mutually beneficial relationships with the College; he it was who padded through the stacks of the College of Winterhold's Arcaneum, quoting pig-verse to the librarian and quietly pilfering that other College's only copy of the Five Hundred Hull-Histories; he it was that tracked down the elusive University of Gwylim from its puzzle bound antiquity sphere and wooed away its youngest scion; he it was that befriended the Khalm'e'Khakh of Elsweyr, the migratory mirage school of the Khajiit; he it was that braved the wastes of Morrowind in pursuit of the rumored remnants of the legendary mushroom mages - but there he found only ash, ash and the sloughed skins of nematodes unprecedented in their bulk. And wherever he went, he went with the native flavor on his tongue, weaving the people's own national sound through their ears.
He was not the only Whisperer the College possessed, of course - indeed, he made none of his expeditions unassisted - but he was among the most skilled. And so it was that when the Aldmeri Dominion approached the College of Whispers with a proposal for academic intercourse with one of Alinor's most respected intellectual institutions, Jon Urfe was not immediately dispatched to the island of the elves. At peace the Empire and the Dominion were, but the war that had divided them was yet fresh in the minds of all; the College would not risk one of their best among the sheer-nosed Altmer until it was at least reasonably certain that out-and-out torture and interrogation of ambassadors was outside of the Thalmor's - the ruling body's - immediate inclinations. Only once it had been well established that the isle Alinor was safe -for the skilled and conscientious of invited guests - was Jon allowed to tangle himself up in the project, to fret and stew and fantasize over the trials and wonders he would experience as one of the privileged few humans ever to see the fabled Altmeri homeland with his own eyes, to obsess over elven Declensions and the intricacies of Aldmeris' Infinitives, over Participles and Pronouns and Genetives and all the other jewels of linguistic technicality in his hoard of comprehension spectra, and to mist his eyes with the beauty of the words that would win yet another people to him and open their hearts to his understanding. He would delve to depths of the elven psyche hitherto untraversed by man; he would elucidate the inner workings of High Elven magic and lay them at the feet of the Emperor; he would reconcile the races and bind the Aldmeri Dominion to the Empire in inextricable profundity. It would be his crowning achievement, his most glorious challenge yet. And he would succeed. For it was this for which he had been born.
No surprise, then, that the Jon Urfe that left the city of Alinor's parallel-spiraling spires, the Jon Urfe who had months of elven arrogance and condescending indifference and more than enough rebuttals to stick in his craw was not the open, dewey-eyed, broad-grinned fellow he had been before his arrival, not the Jon Urfe of forgiveness and boundless understanding compassion for the fallacies of mortals he had been through all the rest of his travels. No - this was a Jon Urfe who sat the sea-silk sling seat of the Thalmor's low-slung carriage shell with an attitude of epitomous disdain worthy of the best of his acquaintances in thespianry. This was the Jon Urfe who had stood silently erect in the dark stoop of an Alinorian doorway, black portmanteau dangling from his thick fingers, as the dark conveyance had slunk up in its leopard slick way behind its quartet of cat-nimble grey geldings out of the refractional labyrinth of the city, the Jon Urfe who had sneered as the vehicle slid to a stop before him. This was the Jon Urfe who had nodded with the coldest of brevities up at the amused Thalmor clerk the vehicle vomited from its smooth side before stepping past that straight-robed elf and into the dark shallowness of his vessel. This was the stone-jawed Jon Urfe who crossed his arms and pulled his emerald silk robes tight across his stout chest, staring rigidly out through the narrow window strips that pierced carriage's long sides like gills. And this was the Jon Urfe whose mind hummed away as the thousand bedazzling hues of the city sped past them beyond the grey veil of the screen, clicking and ticking out his next report to the Assemblage of Provincial Oversight hundreds of miles and an ocean away, safe and secure from the rudely humbling superiority of the Altmer in the dimly glowing halls of their College.
But first, its precedent.