"No," Eryka decided, shaking her head. "I want to eat my dumplings while they're still warm, or before they freeze solid, anyway. Besides, I've been the one doing most of the talking. How does your god work?"
"He doesn't," I replied. "Not for a very long time, anyhow, but that's not much of an explanation. Hmm. Mind you, I can't vouch for how true this is, but this is what I was taught… The Maker began by creating the Fade and populating it with spirits of various kinds, but since all they could do was copy what he made and sing his praises, he got bored with them. Then he created the world and its people, making them more imaginative. He also made them mortal, but since they also had immortal souls, he created the Golden City within the Fade to house them after they died. However, when he made a barrier between the original world and the new world, he didn't make a very good one. That's why we call it the Veil, not the Solid Brick Wall."
Eryka smiled appreciatively, and I went on. "The spirits from the Fade could see, hear and communicate with our world. Some of them grew jealous because, let's face it, our world was better than the Fade and the Maker found us more entertaining. They incited some people from our world, the Theodosian Magisters of Tevinter in ancient times, to worship the Old Gods. There were seven Old Gods then, and nobody seems to know exactly where they came from, or whether they existed before or after the Maker came into existence. The Chantry says they were false gods, and that the Maker imprisoned them in the earth as punishment for stealing his worshippers. The Old Gods didn't like being stuck in the earth, so they kept working at the Magisters to get them out."
"That can't have ended well," Eryka commented.
"It didn't. They taught the Magisters enough magic to storm the Golden City and challenge the Maker. Yet the very act of the Magisters setting foot in the City ruined the City, pissed off the Maker, changed the Magisters into twisted demonic wretches we call darkspawn, horrible creatures that live for nothing but to destroy and kill. They set off the first Blight when they dug up an Old God. The Old Gods turn into Archdemons in the form of dragons when they're dug up again, you see. When an Archdemon emerges, the land itself is cursed and tainted. Nothing lives there ever again."
"Wait a moment," Eryka said. "I remember…we had a Blight once in Morrowind. It was a very long time ago. Ash storms used to come off the Red Mountain, and if you got caught in one and breathed the ash, you got the Blight. It sometimes made people and animals attack each other, no matter how peaceful they were, and where it was worst, hardly anything grows even now. What does live there is…well, I've heard the plants and animals both have gone all funny."
"As I said before, this world is so much like the one I come from, it's like seeing it in a mirror. It looks the same at first glance, but when you try to read the details, it's all backward. So, where was I? Yes, the Magisters invaded and destroyed the Golden City, and so the Maker turned his face from all of us in anger. That was many ages ago, and since then, he's only stirred once, for Saint Andraste."
"Your god is definitely the kind of god who would take his toys and go home," Eryka said, wiping her fingers on the paper cone before wadding it up into a ball. "He sounds like a miserable excuse for a deity. I mean, when Azura—she's the Lady of Dawn and Dusk—got mad at the Dunmer for oathbreaking, she may have turned the whole clan grey, but she didn't turn her back on them."
"I fear it will take me some time to learn the names of all your gods and what they're in charge of," I said.
"I've got books back at home. I told you, I've been reading up on them of late. Anyhow, I guess it's my turn to talk about how the gods played conker." Leaning back against the carriage's wooden seat, she laced her fingers together, looked up toward the sky, and began.
"Once, long ago, there was not one world but many, so many that each god had a world of their own to shape as they liked. Not just the part we live on, but the sun, the moons, and the stars as well. They made the lands and the seas, filled them up with life, and finished by making creatures to worship them, creatures that could think and know themselves, each with their own tongues and ways—and powers. Akatosh filled his world with dragons, beginning with his Firstborn, Alduin, and the other gods filled their worlds with their own creations, including humans and elves and all the other races.
"Some of those gods were the Aedra, gods of order, and some of them were Daedra, gods of chaos. Now not all the gods of order were good, exactly. Cemeteries are orderly places, but you wouldn't want to live there. Not all the gods of chaos were evil, either. A litter of puppies is chaotic, but not evil.
"When they were done, they wanted to show the others what they had made and boast about how theirs was the best, but they fell to squabbling and the next thing you know, they were playing conkers with their worlds, only everybody lost. All their lovely worlds were destroyed, and nobody had anything left to play with."
"You make the gods sound like a bunch of huge unruly children," I observed, smiling in appreciation.
"That's on purpose. So with everybody sulking, the god Shor had this idea." Eryka sat forward and fixed her eyes on me, delivering her story with a dimpled smile.
"'What if we scrape together all the bits that are big enough and make a new world that will belong to everybody?' –Kind of like when you make stew by scraping all the leftovers for the week into one pot, add water and salt, then hope it won't taste too bad when it's done… Well, the gods were all so bored, they went along with it. It took a lot of their power to get the new world stuck together so it would stay, so broken were the pieces. It took so much power that Shor died and the others were greatly diminished.
"This new world was a mess, with countries from all the worlds wedged in against each other, and all the peoples of those worlds were frightened by what had happened. It seemed to them a cataclysm of an instant, but now the lands they had known all their lives were gone, and in their places, strange new ones full of even stranger people. Some of these people were feathered and some were furry and others were nearly naked. Some of them were dragons. After the first shock wore off, they pretty much all hated each other, and many still do today. And that is how Nirn came to be. Put together any which way by a, a—what's the word? A committee of oversized children out of all the leftover bits."
I grinned at the landscape, which was sharply inclining toward the vertical. We were climbing a mountain—how could a horse ever pull a carriage up a slope like this? "Is this the established theology of Skyrim?"
"No, this is just my summing matters up as I see them. But believe me, the more I see of Nirn and the more I learn about the gods, the more I'm convinced that I'm more right than a lot of scholars and philosophers out there." Eryka replied.
"And so you're thinking that the Maker, our Maker from my world, is the child who took his conkers and went home because the other children were picking on him?" I asked.
"There's always one in every group, isn't there?" she countered. "Anyhow, that's how he's been acting, hasn't he?"
"I think," I said, feeling my face stretch out in an even bigger grin which could no more be stopped than the tides, "I think… that's the best thing I've ever heard in my life."
I laughed as I hadn't in a year or more, I simply couldn't help it. Laughter, like yawning, is contagious, so Eryka began laughing with me, and that made it even better. How can I explain what a knot that untied in me? Laughter, true laughter, sends light into dark places. My dark places had been darker by far than the Deep Roads, but no longer. Let's say they were…half a shade lighter. It was a start.
A/N: This was not an auspicious week for writing or replying. However, I want to thank Ceg especially. The lore gets so complicated. And now we're going to get to see Solstheim in the Dragonborn DLC, yay! Yeah, that's Ingun Black-Briar she's referring to. Wouldn't you like to see her start her poisoning spree with her immediate family?