Marsus Tullius' Missing Hides
In the loftiest chambers of the fungid tower Tel Uvirith sat its principal, the Dunmer sorcerer Ilyzoth, sublimely ruminant in the meditative catatonia achievable by only the most unaffected Telvanni wizard-lords. Servants unseen and familiars likewise slithered room to room, preparing the tower for their master's morning regimen, unawares to his supraliminal perceptions scrutinizing every facet of their actions, physical and subtler; for Ilyzoth's senses had now, in his meditative state, expanded beyond the perimeter of the tower and, with small effort, threatened to encircle all the ashen land betwixt Mzanchend and Nchuleftingth. Then, on the strings of the magical instruments by which he achieved this feat danced a different finger; for high in the tourmaline welkin of Molag Amur, the winds sang a portent ensanguined.
Lesser magi would maladroitly seek to divine the nature of this omen, if they could perceive its fine titillations, by means of geomancy or sortilege (or even the myriad High Elfin haruspicies if the conjurer were learned in archaic magics); but Ilyzoth, though studied in all these practices since his youth, had matured beyond the puerility, inutility, and flawed epistemics of fortune telling. Even so, through the experiential absoluteness of his current extrasensory state, Ilyzoth felt the lackadaisical plodding of human feet on the seldom trodden road to his tower, and consequently grasped their connotated nature. With some annoyance, the wizard returned his senses to their proper bodily centers, that he may fully inhabit his carnal form for the trying trivialities that too often fell to his station as a master of House Telvanni.
Ilyzoth reshaped his breathing patterns to the rigid biological norm—markedly different from the bizarre, arhythmic huffing it had become during autohypnosis. After any number of smaller operations too marginal to be mentioned, the wizard was himself again, and he finally deigned to drop out of the trance. Haply 'waking' on his unslept bed, Ilyzoth rose to his feet (which were shod in daedra silk and seldom used). Whispering some baleful and esoteric word, the wizard levitated an inch in the air and hovered, as a custom he'd adopted some years before and had been wont to perform just as long.
In a saturnine stupor, Ilyzoth lazily flew to the pod he'd designated his library and study, wherein he stored and studied his cherished rubrics and tomes on Dwemer metaphysics and the magic that followed its application. In a half-filled journal, he penned a logorrheic entry in a clumsy hand, then followed it with a laconic corollary to aid in research. All Telvanni wizards possessed the intellectual proclivities needed to attain the most piercing heights of magic, but in few were those traits so concentrated to produce the single minded, aspergic genius of Ilyzoth; and like those few, outcast peers, the wizard Ilyzoth focused his gifts on the study of the mythical Dwemer. But he had to remind himself that, unfortunately, even these high and lofty pursuits were interrupted and degraded by the banal intervention of indigent peasants and serfs, such as the human now inexorably heading for Tel Uvirith.
Coming to grips with this harsh and degrading notion, Ilyzoth concluded the morning's writings and levitated down to the lower levels of the tower.
Tel Uvirith's small staff of Dunmer servants, though isolated among the volcanic wastes of Molag Amur, seldom faced the abuse suffered by the attendants of other Telvanni wizards, and thus felt themselves fortunate to serve Ilyzoth. As it seemed to them, he'd inherited the genius and aloof, disinterested (if socially distant) temperament of his many times great-uncle Divayth Fyr, to whom he'd been apprenticed as a young mage, and with whom he still regularly corresponded on matters of magic and the Dwemer, among smaller affairs. Consequently, they treated Master Ilyzoth's whims seriously, and waited on him with geniality and obeisance.
When Hlendrisa Seleth, enchantress and majordomo to Ilyzoth, saw the mer himself hover down into the tower's antechamber and lounge, she silently motioned toward the carven table where he normally breakfasted, arrayed with the same comestibles he englutted every morning; a small assortment of sweetbreads cut from cliffracers and guar, spiced bread and two glasses; one of guar milk and the other of some herbal tonic, the recipe for which Ilyzoth found in an obscure dwarven text. This modest repast was usually punctuated with a single muffin.
Though his fragile constitution had been disturbed by the revelation of the encroaching human, Ilyzoth still sat down to the meal, waving Hlendrisa away. On an average day, after finishing breakfast, Ilyzoth would again repair to one of his private rooms on the upper floor and practice the lute as he'd cogitate on the morning's reading. But Ilyzoth reckoned the interloper would arrive at Tel Uvirith shortly after breakfast, and this relaxation would be broken if attempted. Then, sure enough, Farena gingerly stepped into the lounge just as the wizard finished the last of his lonely muffin.
"A traveler has arrived at the tower; human," quietly inveighed Ilyzoth in an almost monotone cant, just as Farena opened her mouth to relay the same information.
"Yes, Master Ilyzoth," she replied after a short, pregnant pause. To Farena, the sorcerer surely seemed omnipotent.
Ilyzoth nodded his head, glancing at Farena only for a moment with hypnotic, piercing eyes. He stood up, and waved her aside; levitating through the declining hallway to the foyer after she complied. Arriving at the massive, sculpted wood door that led to the ashen wasteland without, Ilyzoth continued through, the door opening unbidden to its master. The wizard wouldn't suffer the humiliation of allowing an outlander to soil his tower with its presence.
Floating into the sanguine blast of wind that whipped the terrain of Molag Amur, Ilyzoth saw a man and some ungulate beast of burden stood in craven awe of a Dwemer golem the wizard had rebuilt. Seeing a Dunmer sorcerer slowly flying toward him must have alerted the fellow, for Ilyzoth saw him leap a pace backward in fear, before regaining his composure and shouting a polite greeting over the wind.
Ilyzoth considered himself well versed in ethnography and phylogeny, even that of the humans, and saw upon closer inspection that this fellow, swart and slender, was himself an Imperial—a people for whom the sorcerer held the same modicum of belligerence most Telvanni, if not most Dunmer, had for the Imperial conquerors—but the Telvanni, at least, also entertained a grudging respect for their martial and political prowess. As far as the type itself concerned Ilyzoth, he saw the Imperials to be small, tight-jointed and swarthy, but lacking in the salubrity this might afford other peoples thanks to the decadence inherit in Imperial society—which necessarily reflected a sickness of the Imperial psyche.
"Hail, Master Telvanni! Thank you for hearing my request, and with the graciousness to greet me yourself, at your door!" bayed the man, quite a few yards away from the door, and with unnecessary volume as the wind had died down by the last word.
Ilyzoth astutely recognized this Imperial as being habited in the goodly raiment of the Cyrodiilic merchant class, and ornamented with such gauds that it would be perfectly at home haunting the white, gilt streets of the Capital's palatial district. Reconciling this with the various imported goods hauled by his pack animal, Ilyzoth lightened his comportment, feeling that this Imperial (while an unwelcome disturbance) was at least helping the province's economy. Though, admittedly, Ilyzoth didn't really care about the economy.
"My name is Ilyzoth, a Wizard of House Telvanni," began the magician, and the Imperial stood opposite him looked distraught upon realizing he hadn't introduced himself first, and bowed at the waist in proscynesis before the sorcerer. "And master of this tower, Tel Uvirith. Let us dispense with formalities and speak anent your purposes in coming here, to my House's seat of power in Molag Amur anon," spake the wizard, hastily and looking to resolve whatever problem had arisen. He'd like to have suspected the Imperial's catamite had fallen in a lava flow and the man had come seeking recompense.
"Yes, milord, I agree wholeheartedly," said the man, straightening himself to eye the hovering wizard. He continued, "Marsus Tullius is my name, and I am a trader come from Cyrodiil with my father, Stentus Tullius—who's invested in a guar hide harvesting operation that peradventure passes through this region. I had collected these hides on an unrelated trade mission, to deliver them to my father in Tel Aruhn, and soon found myself beset upon by bandits. Strangely, though, they took only the guar hides."
"Your father's men had no doubt been pillaging the herds of the Erabenimsun Ashlanders, Marsus Tullius, who whilom and heretofore allowed merchants to travel unmolested through these parts," the wizard perorated, and Marsus assumed a horrified expression, thinking himself guilty of larceny or smuggling, before Ilyzoth elucidated, "But such is the wont of the bellicose and asinine Erabenimsun, who could not be swayed from violence even by the shadow of a Telvanni mushroom tower falling over their feculent encampment. This was inevitable."
Marsus thought to reply, but any further discussion was cut short by Ilyzoth flying off in the direction of the Ashlanders' camp.
Through the sulfurous air and passed the belching fumaroles and blackened, cracked terrain of Molag Amur, the wizard flew toward the Erabenimsun's settlement. Though reclusive and impersonal, Ilyzoth was by no means boring or humorless, and in his youth was often dispatched by his uncle and master to many ruins (Dwemer, Daedric and Velothi alike) where he encountered and combatted a variegated assortment and monsters and malefactors. Though he'd matured beyond the juvenile cruelties that all young Telvanni retainers entertained, reifying his will through violence left an indelible mark on the sorcerer, and he'd sometimes look back fondly on those halcyon days as he strummed his lute in the noontime.
Ilyzoth was approaching the entrance to the encampment, now, and the watchmen had fetched the tribe's wise woman upon seeing him levitating toward them. When Ilyzoth was younger and still possessed of the urge to travel, he once took it upon himself to walk Morrowind to discover and record bizarre and alien magical practices among smaller cults and faiths, and this took him to various Ashlander tribes where he learned something of their culture (viewing it with equal parts curiosity and disgust). He found, to his relieved disappointment, that even the Ashlanders greatest shaman, caparisoned in their primitive runic shrouds and decorated profusely with periapts and fetishes, could rouse themselves to no greater magical feats than shallow trances and cravenly intoned malisons.
The Erabenimsun wise woman seemed to typify this notion Ilyzoth held, and her appearance dredged up those unpleasant memories. There she stood at the gates, at the fore of her rancid kith and kin—costumed in netch leather and boiled chitin, accoutered with blades of steel and shields of bone and shoon of begrimed canvas.
"Sorcerer!" she greets Ilyzoth, with an insincere grin and trembling hands. In the rasping, sibilitory intonations common to her folk, she says with mock reverence, "You grace our humble camp with your pres-"
"Your thieves have pilfered aught from a trader, and I've come to right the wrong," vociferated the wizard, with a purposeful cadance. Before the old woman could reply, another Ashlander pushed to the front of the tribe, this one bedecked in the armor of an Ashkhan.
"I am Ulath-Pal, Ashkhan of the Erabenimsun, wizard. Tell me why you have disturbed my tribe," he announced (to the chagrin of the wise woman, if her worried expression were any indicator).
"I will reiterate: thieves from your tribe have stolen guar hides from an Imperial trader traveling this region. You will remit these hides to my custody, or I will discipline you, and take them," spake the wizard. Ulath-Pal guffawed.
"This uppity n'wah!" the Ashkhan said, turning to his tribe, few of whom seemed as amused. "The human and his warband have been poaching hides from our herd, wizard! In taking the trader's hides, we were only taking what was ours already."
"You have offended me, Ashlander," said Ilyzoth, quietly, and a tense pause followed before he continued. "If that were the case, you should have come to me—the acting magistrate of this region. But, in all your wisdom, you instead broke Imperial law by predating on a privileged, permitted merchant; a violation of justice we would not have allowed in Morrowind even before the implementation of the conqueror's law."
"The Ashlanders never asked to be beholden to your laws, wizard, imperial or otherwise!" the Ashkhan yawped, defiantly.
"'Ashlanders'? We're all Dunmer to the Empire, varlet; and you've assailed one of their own," harangued Ilyzoth, raising his hands. "You acted in your own interests, paying no heed to the good of our people as a whole—so now I will act in my own interest, and pay no heed to the good of your people. Surrender the hides or die."
"Hairan! Tinti!" the wise woman yowled at the tribe, and two young warriors darted to a yurt in the back of the camp, before Ulath-Pal struck the wise woman and screamed his disapproval. Then the Ashkhan drew his sword.
"No! No longer will my people defer to oppressors and slavemasters like this Telvanni s'wit!" cried the Ashkhan, attempting to rally his warriors. "Are we going to lay down and die like the grazela-" he railed, before being cut short by a crushing, constricting pain in his chest. Looking back at the wizard, he found himself levitating up to his altitude.
"Perhaps the fetid effluvium of all your guar's ordure has stupefied you, 'Ashkhan,' or it may be that you were born an idiot, I don't know," conjectured Ilyzoth, to his own entertainment and no one else's. "But your impoliteness has offended me, and I tire of your tribe's insufferable stink." With a complex but deftly performed gesticulation, Ilyzoth incanted a single word and Ulath-Pal's entire body conflagrated. The Ashkhan hovered there in the air, flailing and screaming blasphemies and orisons to every daedra whose name he could pronounce through the searing pain, but to no avail. His tribe stood there for a moment, cowering in abject horror as their leader was immolated before them, the flame illuminating their dirty faces and the wise woman's collapsed form.
Shortly after the tribe scattered, the two warriors who fled returned bearing armfuls of rolled guar hides, genuflecting and offering them to the wizard as their Ashkhan still hovered in the air, burning. With a flick of the wrist, the hides floated up to Ilyzoth, and he cast a glare at the two Ashlanders, who prostrated themselves entirely and hid their faces from the wizard.
Now more bored than satisfied, Ilyzoth turned and began the flight back to Tel Uvirith, hearing the Ashkhan in his death throes above the small camp he once ruled. Even once the Ashlander died, the wizard knew, Ulath-Pal's corpse would still hang in the air until it had burned to naught but cinders and ash.
Returning to his tower, Ilyzoth saw Marsus Tullius still stood by the golem, now admiring it and scrutinizing its mechanical workings. Levitating up the path to Tel Uvirith, the wizard held out a hand and the hides flew to Marsus, who was taken by surprise.
"Oh! Thank you, Master Telvanni! I'll pack these onto my horse and be off at once," Marsus elatedly plucked the hides from the air, and Ilyzoth nodded at the man and waved him away.
Finally back inside the tower and reacclimating to the familiar, welcome vibrations of the enormous crystals therein, Ilyzoth directed Farena to take the take Marsus an earthenware jug of water as a parting gift. After this last trifling gesture, the wizard could happily account himself finished with the human he'd sensed only two hours ago, and he levitated upwards, to the highest chambers of Tel Uvirith, that he might pluck a few harmonious chords on his lute.