While he would miss the comforts it offered, Servius Cato was glad to leave the Imperial City behind. The troubles it had brought into his life far outweighed his desire to remain and the assassination of Titus Mede II proved to be the final nail in the coffin of his home. A scholar by nature normally finds respite from the world behind stone walls, but White Gold Tower looked more and more like a tombstone to him now and the walls that he once thought protected him were quickly becoming a cage. The cart trundled up the Silver Road towards Bruma, and would eventually go beyond into Skyrim, yet another province rife with unrest, crisis and war. It certainly didn't take a scholar to see that the Empire was crumbling - a once superior force had been crushed by the Dominion, were struggling to quell a rebellion of farmhand and ageing veterans and couldn't even protect their own Emperor. Cato was not surprised when the news of the Emperor's assassination arrived. Mede may have thought he was signing away the strength of his Empire to a force he had greatly underestimated, but he was also signing away his life.
Cato still worshipped Talos in secret, like many citizens of the Empire, despite the crushing boot of the Thalmor. Talos was the holy embodiment of the Empire and no threats against his life would ever convince him otherwise. To that end, he hoped to find refuge Whiterun. Jarl Balgruuf's neutral stance on the ongoing conflicts invited a man like himself - one opposed to the tyranny of the Aldmeri Dominion, yet supportive of what the Empire used to be at it's height. To him, one event stood out as the downfall of what could have been the Empire's ongoing Golden Age.
He saw the Septim Dynasty as more than a lineage of great rulers. Their reign had the support of the Gods themselves. Tiber Septim had risen from mortality into the heavens becoming a God himself, and Martin Septim became an Avatar of Akatosh to banish Mehrunes Dagon back to Oblivion. Martin's sacrifice may have saved the Empire from certain destruction, yet Cato couldn't help but feel that it also began it's fall. With no Emperor of the Dragonblood to sit on the Empire's throne, the Ruby Throne soon came to belong to the Warlord with the strongest sword-arm - a far cry from the rulers that came before him. Titus Mede was more than unfit to rule a stable Empire, and the Empire fell further into unrest under the rule of him and his successors.
Cato had little time to dwell on the past, however. The Empire was entering it's darkest hour, and another Mede ruling them would serve little purpose besides advancing the sands of time. To him, the Mede Dynasty was at an end, and a new one should take it's place.
Perhaps new is wrong, he thought as the cold winds from the Jerall Mountains carried snow down from their peaks. Now is not the time for a new line of false Emperors. He leafed thought the documents and reports from Skyrim. He was not worried by the Dragons that had arrived from nowhere, solely because of the one who was destroying them. He thought the Dragonblood had not died with Martin Septim. It raged on in the veins of someone else, someone who might be the one to rebuild the Empire from its ashes.
The Dragonborn.
Or, as Cato had scrawled on his notes, the Last Septim.
