The nature of sin is a strange topic in a world where the foresters of Mephala walk openly in the streets of their cities and the tenets of Boethiah are spoken of with utmost admiration. Voryn Dagoth is in motion again, moving from scene to scene as he avoids the call of Memory. It is vastly more preferable than standing still, when even the earth beneath your feet might shift into an uncertain shape. He dreams, or comes across a riverbank where Almalexia and Nerevar are working together to build a tiny city out of clay with their hands. Nerevar gathers the clay while Almalexia shapes and marks it with detail, but Nerevar is a fast learner and a hard worker, and soon he is designing whole sections of his own with greater efficiency than before.
He watches as Almalexia frowns, and finally ceases her actions altogether. Nerevar reaches out to her in entreaty, but she turns to leave without a shadow of a doubt on her face, her feet taking her heavenward and beyond.
Voryn is eager to avoid another confrontation with Nerevar and so he follows in her footsteps, but the path beneath him twists and he dissolves into yet another moment, another instant where a womer with red hair is being carried in a palanquin. The earth before her is riddled with cracks, as hard and as sharp as glass. She descends from her seat of honour and removes an object that could be either a sword or a needle. She stabs it into her skin, unpicking herself sinew by sinew until all that is left of her is her magic weaving her into the tapestry of her land.
He blood waters the parched soil, leaking pools and rivulets for her followers to quench their thirst. They drink until they are bloated with it, their eyes glowing crimson with vitality, burying themselves in the ashen soil of her body as they mark their skins with her glory.
"Mother Morrowind, Mother Morrowind!" they cry repeatedly in delirium as the land itself laughs in response.
Almalexia possesses both the splendour of the stars and the bounty of the earth. And Voryn is furious, because what is this if it is not greed and sacrilege?
(Hypocrite)
...
The value of a wounded Dragon is protean when all the possibilities can be permuted by the Mnemoli. He walked through a maelstrom of snow and found himself here, on the other side of the mirror where even the lowliest of demons might obtain paradise. Paradise is a war that trickles on in cycles and cycles, pushing and yielding without conclusion. He saw the gap in their lines the instant he fell through his reflection, the Hortator struggling on with no one beside him. And he took his place, because how could he do any less with such an invitation?
The battle has not gone well for them today, though they have yet to lose the war. Vivec had unleashed fire and a legion of monstrous children upon them; a many-armed thing shaped like an old ideal. Voryn Dagoth's armour weighs heavily upon his shoulders and his long sweep of dark hair is matted with sweat and grime, but he does not complain, because it could be worse and they were still paying the price for Vivec's actions. Their warriors litter the battlefield along with the bodies of his kin, half-bitten into strange explosions of gore.
Voryn wanders the battlefield, offering healing when salvation can be accepted and condolences when it cannot. Odros has lost both his arms, and Endus lays groaning, caught halfway between dissolution and being. He cauterizes the wounds of the first, and brings mercy to the other. Both will be renewed with the dawn.
Nerevar is here, as he has always been. The fight has not been kind to him either, and his armour is rent and battered, though the flame of his sword still burns true. The ever-faithful Alandro Sul is supporting him, wordless and quiet as ever even as exhaustion clouds his brow. Voryn approaches him and begins to mutter the incantation for a healing spell, but Nerevar shakes his head and raises his hand to stop him.
"Thank you, but there will be time for that later," He says wearily, leaning heavily onto Sul.
They light pyres to return their dead to the ash. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, people and country mingled together into an interminable exchange. There is no time to inter them in the proper Velothi fashion, which seems both strange and ironic to Voryn, but then again, there is little need for that either when everything cycles back into the war. The fortresses that Voryn cannot remember building offer them shelter from the elements. Voryn doesn't know if they ever had names either, but Gilvoth swears that they once did and that House Dagoth had named them at the beginning of it all.
There is warm water for a bath and a warm bed, and Voryn would have gladly sunk into either, but he restrains himself as he always does to direct his attention to more important matters. He tends to Nerevar's wounds, sponging the dirt and blood away with clean linens as gently as he can. Nerevar still flinches once or twice, but neither of them gives comment to it. This is Voryn's favourite time, the time when there is no strength to think, to speak, nothing for them to do but simply be. They sit together, left hand clasped in right, heads leaning against each other, taking comfort in the presence and warmth of the other.
It begins as it always does: with a kiss. Each kiss is always new, and each kiss is the always the first. He marks a path in breath and touch, counts seconds in hoarse cries of pleasure, and timelessness in their mutual embrace, of each lingering moment of tenderness that clouds the air.
"How long have we been fighting against the Three?" Nerevar murmurs, twining a lock of Voryn's hair in his fingers.
"I don't know," Voryn whispers in reply. "Time is fluid here."
Nerevar is silent, but then he buries his face in Voryn's chest and weeps openly, concerned with neither masculinity nor propriety.
"In another moment, I murdered you without hesitation. I am so tired of killing my friends for both love and vengeance."
He runs his hand down Nerevar's back, aching as always in sympathetic misery. "What are we?" He murmurs, clasping his lover close to him. The salt of Nerevar's tears sting his wounds and scratches, but he pays it no mind.
Nerevar's sobs soon subside, and his breath calms.
"I am supposed to be dead," He says dreamily. "I was a child again, playing in the courtyards of House Mora. A womer in a blue dress came to take me away. But I refused, because I knew that my friends needed me."
Voryn's heart skips a beat. "I'm alive. I need you. So..."
"I am proud of all of us," Nerevar interrupts suddenly. "What we have here is sacred."
"Sacred...?"
"This is a primordial time, a mythical time created in mimicry of the Dawn when the Aedra walked the earth. And we have learned to live in it, to reshape ourselves to each instant of it."
"What does that make us then?"
"Gods. Monsters. Gods and monsters."
"Will there..." Voryn hesitates. "Will it end well for all of us? Will it even come to an end?"
"I don't know. But I am so very, very tired."
"I wish..." Voryn begins, his restraint falling away to reveal a desperate yearning. "I wish I had not used the Tools, but I wish that I had them now, to gain the power to satisfy all of my desires. Then you can I could both be happy, and maybe we could forget everything that had happened before. I wish that I had stayed loyal to you, but I wish that I had enough power to make all of my dreams come true. If we are gods, then there should be a way for us all..."
"Perhaps there is a way," Nerevar replies. "But if there isn't, then we shall just have to make one."
...
Change comes for them in a blaze of fire and screaming iron, on a red morning when they had assembled yet again for another cycle of war with the ALMSIVI. For the first time in his life, Voryn's courage truly fails, before the sight of this vivid vermillion eye that reduces them all to specks of gleaming dust. He can only watch as it coils around them, serpentine-terror and destruction that grinds their troops to dust, their brothers to ash, people to less than meat and bone. It raises a heavy paw with needlepoint fingers, bearing down upon him, but Nerevar seizes his arm, half-carrying, half-dragging him away from the scaled beast that hunts them.
Chronocule to chronocule, and on and on, through scenes of love and war they run, always one bare step ahead of the unsympathetic feminine force that reaches out to return each disparate spark to the flame. Two becomes three, three becomes four, and more and more until suddenly they find that they are here, again, at the Red Mountain and they are all together with their friends, even Dumac and Alandro Sul.
"Did you –"
"I saw it –"
"It hates us, it wants –"
They gabble over and over in hushed whispers, faces pale with fear, their quarrels forgotten in the face of a greater threat.
The sky splits and the eye of the demon appears once more, scales grinding and screeching against each other, clicking madly with each movement. It is almost enough to make him feel strangely mortal, as he has not felt for a very long time. He sneaks a sideways glance to the others, noting their clenched fists and defiant eyes, and he knows that they can sense it too; this fragility that once defined so much of their existence.
It is Nerevar who makes the first move, who raises his sword, the Trueflame, over his head and charges forth with a war cry that shakes the earth. His denial is pitifully small, but it breaks the spell of fear that has been cast over them. Suddenly it is like an old memory again, of old wars against the Hoary Men, of rival khans, of dissenting Houses and it is no longer new and terrifying. There is no strategy here, only a dance that echoes the arts of Mephala, cold murder fuelled by the drive for self-preservation.
The beast rears its head and lashes out at them. Voryn hurls handful after handful of magic at it, always mindful of its needlepoint fingers and spiked tail. It heaves itself up and crashes down upon them in waves of force, and once, it almost crushes Vivec, clicking out a mocking chant as it does so. Netchiman's son, catamite, mortal soldier and nothing more. But Vivec dodges, nimble as ever, and slashes at the paw with Muatra, leaving a smoking wound in place of scales. It screams and turns its attentions to Dumac, but Dumac parries it with his hammer, as unyielding as ever, laughing as he swings his weapon.
"Not yet, not in this loop of time, although my sweet Nerevar and I have killed each other a thousand times over and stayed our hands a thousand times more!"
It is that eye that almost serves as his undoing. It fixates upon him, violent, gleaming, and iridescent, a spiralling nebula of madness and anger that accuses him over and over. You are dead. Dead, dead, dead. There is no place for you here. This is not your time. This battle is over. He dies a thousand deaths over and over beneath that gaze, one for each bubble of time that has split off from the whole.
It is the sight of Nerevar rushing forth to save him once again to give him the strength to scream the Sharmat's denial into its face. He reaches deep into himself and splinters, dividing into a thousand homunculi that crawls over the beast like a relentless army of ants, biting and harassing it without pause. I am the world and I will not be defied. He blinks, and there they truly are, Vivec in giant-form with his head aflame, Sotha Sil with his enhanced self, Almalexia with her mask of war and Nerevar, a shifting shape haloed in victory.
A thousand cuts and a thousand bursts of magic follow each of their actions. They are gods and they will not lose to Time. Nerevar makes the final slice in the throat of the beast, and Almalexia comes forward, treading upon the back of the writhing monster. Voryn doesn't know if she has grown in size or if the monster has shrunk, but her feet are crushing it into dust with every step.
"Don't you understand?" Almalexia cries out, endlessly triumphant. "Only we can decide what really happened at the Red Mountain."
And then they are all laughing together, hysterical with victory, riding the wave that comes after an escape. And there are tears that follow and confessions, and embraces that are shared to confirm the knowledge that yes, there is still love despite all that has happened. And it is Sotha Sil that regains his sense of calm first, as it should be for the oldest and wisest of them all.
"We have defeated the Jill-servant of the Dragon, but there will be others who will continue to harass us until this has been resolved."
His words sober the atmosphere almost instantly. Nerevar cocks his head and looks at his old teacher.
"What does it matter? We will not lose to such creatures."
Sotha Sil shakes his head, "It is more complicated than that, and nothing of benefit will happen if time does not return to its linear form. We will lose ourselves again in this traumatic existence."
"What do you propose that we do?" Nerevar asks.
"The turning of the kalpa," Almalexia interjects, her body tense with the weight of her prescience. "When the order of the new world is decided and things are set in stone for an age."
"Yes," Sotha Sil nods. "This is a false Dawn, but we must end it properly, and we must end it on our own terms."
"With the old things, whose names are now only numbers," Vivec says quietly.
"But how?" Nerevar asks. "They are dead."
"Can a god truly die?"
"It doesn't matter," Voryn speaks up. "We will find their closest substitutes."
"Substitutes...?"
"My lord, Hortator, Nerevar, friend, companion and lover," Voryn says, his voice quivering slightly on the last word. "It began in death, blood and betrayal, and it must end that way. I have seen the shape of things to come, I know how it can end well for us, and I ask your permission to leave and muster an army to fight against you, to gather your old foes, the Hoary Men and send them against you."
"Against me? But –"
"I must." He interrupts. "Grant me that at least. If I had not used the Tools... but that is not important now. I was the first to betray you, and so let me be the last. Let me be the first to pave the way for you to walk."
Nerevar's brow creases into a frown, and he opens his mouth to protest. But Voryn looks at him, as silent and certain as he has ever been.
"Please,"
Nerevar relents and pulls him into an embrace. He places a kiss on Voryn's forehead, one kiss to serve as a ration for all of eternity, and Voryn can feel it burning even though there is no fire.
"Go forth, Dagoth Ur," Nerevar says formally. "And do what you must."
...
He dresses himself in red because tempters must always be beautiful, and he has always looked his best in red. He wears a golden mask because oracles must be grand and inscrutable, and the more the gold blinds them, the less likely they are to see through his lies. He raises his hands and suddenly the Tools are in them, and he gifts them formally to Nerevar with only the slightest hesitation.
"It is your turn to wield them now."
Nerevar accepts them willingly; glad to share in their sin. He passes Sunder to Dumac, to better arm his champion against the coming battle, but he keeps Keening for himself, striking it experimentally against the rim of a shield where it echoes with a sound like the shadow of the moons.
"How will you achieve this?" Nerevar asks.
"As we have achieved everything thus far," Voryn smiles grimly. "With deceit."
...
Titanomachia to end all wars, as should be expected from a group of companions who walked as though grandeur was their right. They stretched the displacement of time around the Mountain and Morrowind, and drew the Nords and even the Orcs into their struggle. Dagoth Ur shields himself against the howling, lacerating winds. Kyne has roused herself even though the Time is not yet right, and Boethiah has come forth in a pillar of flame to greet her, two interpretations of an ideology to meet in battle for the first time. And Lorkhan is here, beyond all expectation, here to grace their ascendance.
Lorkhan has his Heart again, and Dumac meets him in battle, gleaming with the strength of Trinimac, but Dagoth Ur defeats him and he falls. Vivec blasts him away, but he can still see, he can still watch as the events pour forth like an unstoppable tide, and he watches as Nerevar wrests Lorkhan's Heart away from him, fulfilling Dumac's role for him, and he knows that it is over, and he marks the despair on the faces of Wulfharth and all those who knew where they really were as the Blue Shift dissipates from the sky and Time returns to its normal linear form.
And Dagoth Ur sits at a crossroads. At his left-hand side is the path of the Sharmat, where success grants ambition and selfish desire, for he is not without greed and he lied (only a little) when he said that he was doing this to serve Nerevar. At his right is the path of Voryn, where loss grants respite and repentance, for he is not without guilt and he lies when he says that he wants to have everything only for his benefit. Each path brings its own victory and it is Nerevar who will determine which will come after, for he is Dagoth Ur, first among traitors and first to pave the way for the Hortator.
...
Notes: Finally done! Thank you for reading. This drove me completely nuts while I was writing it.
