Bold italics text = Dwemer mind-speak
Ex Machina, p.1
Man wasn't present for this presentation taking place on the Archimage's rooftop gazebo. No, not even the Archimage. It was beautiful day. No clouds. A majestic, magical view of Winterhold, the mountains, the distant statue of Azura, the even farther distant peak of Red Mountain and its steady plume of ashy smoke.
There were too many of them to fit comfortably inside the gazebo itself, but since it was a nice day, they could spread out and let the gazebo be the backdrop from which a presentation could be made.
Brother Salindil, no, Aldarch Salindil and his two assistants were in full formal dress as priests of Auri-El. Not Akatosh, Dragon of the Empire, but Auri-El, the father-god of Mer, God of Time, First Star of Aetherius. White and gold.
As for himself, he was dark elf Goth. Black leader vest over black silk shirt, black leather pants and boots. His Dawnguard style leather long coat, sans regular steel plates, was also dyed black. The only other color to his appearance was his brushed and oiled cinnamon hair, beard, and mustache, and his crimson eyes. Oh, and his belt buckle was a golden dwemer cog.
Yeah, the contrast was deliberate. A real "angels and demon" vibe. Winterhold was Purgatory. The Archimage's tower, the courtroom where life would be reviewed, decisions weighed, and afterwards, souls would either fly or fall.
It was a long way down from the tower. He really, truly hoped no one jumped.
Assisting the Aldarch was Urag, his robes nicely pressed for once. He was one of the few scholars in Tamriel that was fluent in the Falmer written language, and he'd quickly learned the basics of the spoken language from Gelebor. His role was during the Q&A after the presentation.
Gelebor would be speaking about the Falmer Vale. Curtis had never seen the moonstone armor of the Falmer Knight-Paladin and, fully armored, Gelebor impressed and scared him. He'd come to know the mer as courtly mannered and mild-humored. Well, of course, he'd seen Gelebor in battle mode against the degenerated Falmer, but all those other times Gelebor had fought in gold Altmer armor. Where had he been hiding this set? It wasn't in the unmodded vanilla Game he was familiar with. Cool armor. What intrigued him was the animal totem. A bat. Who'da thunk it?
The Aldarch started the event with a prayer in ancient Aldmer to Auri-El. The Falmer participated. Curtis and the Dwemer and the Orsimer stood in silent respect, but nothing else.
As the Aldarch concluded the prayers, a tiny owl landed on his shoulder. He looked at it. It hooted and fluttered over to sit on Curtis's head. Curtis sighed and decided to ignore the little feathered ornament. They'd all figure soon enough their new god's cutsey-assed humor. He refocused on watching the audience as Salindil began the history lesson.
Curtis deliberately planned that the Dwemer extinction and Red Mountain would be the first subject tackled. His reason, tell them who was dead first. After that shock, then hit them with the fucked up fate of those who lived.
The Dwemer, predictably, were furious that the actions of a single Dwemer clan on a distant island caused the extinction of their entire race across Nirn. They snarled curses over Dumac's name.
Curtis had to remind himself that these Dwemer had gone into their isolation bubble centuries before Kagrenac began pulling in talent from other Clans in his quest to build the perfect machine god. This was even before the war among the mainland clans over control of the Aetherium Forge. He let the curses slide. Worse was to come.
The Falmer looked troubled. They already saw and recognized the alarming signs. The Dwemer and Chimer had come together because of the threat of Man invading. Man coming from the areas of Tamriel that were Falmer lands, and in such numbers normally inconceivable to them — unless they, too, were dead?
But there stood Gelebor, and the Paladin's expression was terrifyingly impassive.
"Calm down!" Curtis said, low-voiced, forcefully, blasting that thought as hard as he could. He stood and paced to the front, drawing their eyes. He stood silently besides the Aldarch and glowered at the Dwemer. Look at me. Look at the Dunmer. Once Chimer. Gold to soot for betrayal. Eyes, red fire, for being the last standing.
Gather in the facts. Extrapolate. Anchor your lines. Firm up your grip. Prepare to Survive.
They stared back. They visibly calmed, preparing for the worst. Centuries of ingrained training necessary for underground dwellers who knew the threat of quakes, collapsing tunnels and caverns; who knew the calm and fortitude needed to dig out of the grave.
Satisfied, Curtis went back to his chair on the side. He turned his gaze to Salindil, but his focus was inward as he listened to himself breathing and concentrated on blocking out the voices beating against the window he was shutting.
Saarthal. The Saarthal ruins in the Game were the underground burial grounds. There had once been large ruins of an ancient Falmer town. Why the town had been abandoned by the Falmer wasn't known.
Atmoran refugees came to shore. The usual reason being that there was war going on in their homeland that they wanted no part of. Eventually, ships of refugees came and the Falmer granted permission for them to have the Saarthal area. The topside ruins disappeared as Man used the stones to build their homes.
Now came the warning that Man had a completely different version of events. They taught as popular history that the Falmer feared the Atmoran's aggressiveness and clearly superior breeding power. Doubtless, the Falmer were warned by the Ayleids to enforce harsh controls over the lower life-form's population growth as they did to the similar lower Man creatures that plagued the Mer of the heartland. And so the Falmer cowardly attacked one night with the goal of slaughtering every last Man at Saarthal.
Unfortunately, three got away — Ysgramor and his sons, Yngol and Ylgar.
One of the Falmer cried out something that brought a strong reaction from the other Falmer.
Gelebor, having come to stand beside Curtis's chair, translated, "The Heart of Divine Fusion. How could they have forgotten? It was buried underground after the Origin Tower collapsed so that its power could safely drain into Mundus. How did that come to be forgotten?"
Oh, Curtis could understand that. Saarthal had been a nuclear waste dump. The Eye of Magnus was a plutonium core, and the Staff of Magnus … Yada yada. Someone in the Falmer regime made the conscious decision that the best kept secret was one that was forgotten by the general populace. One of Dumac's memories had been a request by a mainland Dwemer queen for his advice in winning Falmer trust in order to gather more clues about a great power source they suspected the Falmer were hiding.
"They are saying Man should never have been allowed to set up their town there. Any other place but there. Someone had to have remembered."
"I'll be someone did. They just didn't tell troops that. Guess even the Falmer have sabre-rattling chicken-hawks that squawk patriotism while sending others to die in ignorance," Curtis hissed.
Gelebor shrugged. "Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do or die." Seeing Curtis's shocked expression, he said, "Isn't that true for every army that's ever been?"
Urag took over from Salindil. The Falmer clung to each other as the Orsimer summarized centuries of warfare. Atmorans dedicated generations to wiping out the Falmer. Their descendants, the Nords, used that experience to forge the first Empire of Man. They reached south and encouraged another emerging of Man to overthrow and slaughter their Ayleid masters.
He used the charts they had prepared, showing converging timelines of events. The growth of the Nord Empire, the religion surrounding Lorkhan, the renaming as Shor, and Man's belief that they were Shor's favored children. Cyrodiilic Man repurposing Auri-El as Akatosh, who suddenly extended his favor to Man as well. Indeed, most of the Aedra gods were suddenly welcoming of Man, according to the fusion doctrine created by the Alessians.
Moesring Pass on Solstheim, the fall of the Snow Prince, the official end of the Falmer race. But, logically, not the elimination of all Falmer. What had happened to the Falmer everywhere else? Surely they had fled south or east? The Aldarch revealed that those Falmer who had made it to Summerset were eventually absorbed into the population, as had those who gone south to the Ayleids, who in turn had fled into the lands of the Bosmeri. Anything else was rumors. Those who did not leave the north, the Dwemer allowed into their underground cities for a price.
Urag retreated to the back of the gazebo and picked up the basket that had been sitting on one of the stone benches lining the wall. He came back out and upended the basket. Mushrooms and other fungi tumbled out. The next display board Urag put up was that damnable inscription. "A researcher of Dwemer artifacts found this at the ruins of Bthar-zel. It was one of the entry points where Falmer were allowed to enter the Dwemer kingdoms."
The expressions of the Dwemer darkened as they read the text. They picked up the fungi and murmured. One of the Dwemer women got up, Curtis didn't like the stiff, jerky movements he was seeing. He likewise got up and intercepted her walk toward the low tower wall. Behind them Falmer moaned as a Dwemer explained what these fungi were, the blindness caused if ingested.
Du abak chal thu abazun nchur diabthar, nchul duanchard
Th'ur thuanchuth irknd, ur irkngth eftardn, thunch fahlz
Bthun abak dua mzual th'nchuan duarkng, chun fahlbthat thuanchardch anum ralz, th'eftar thachendraldch kagren thua vanchningth.
— We only request you partake of the symbol of our bond, the fruit of the stones. And, as your vision clouds, as the darkness sets in, fear not. Know only our mercy and the radiance of our affection, which unbinds your bones to the earth before, and sets your final path to the music of your new eternity. —
Curtis forcefully pulled up left balled fist and bent her arm around his right arm, locking it in place with his left hand. They went to the wall and she looked out towards the high mountains. She was shaking.
Extrapolate. The Aetherium wars. The ambition of the Vvardenfell Kagrenac. To fight the overwhelming number of Man, stronger weapons were needed. The Aetherium Wars left too many clans without enough magicka to combat the threat from the surface. Conservative methods would not do, therefore, the fastest build would have to be aggressively mined.
Extrapolate. The Falmer were desperate. The Dwemer needed cheap, disposable laborers.
"Evidence gathered from many ruins show that there were many underground wars between Falmer and Dwemer. Wars no one on the surface was aware of, other than random earthquakes.
"Those wars ended when the Dwemer were banished along with the Heart of Lorkhan. We do not know why the Chimer were spared as they were also present when the Heart lost its hold on this plane of existence. We can only speculate that because it was the Kagrenac of Vvardenfell that sought to bind the Heart, that Lorkhan chose to drag the entirety of the Dwemer race with him as revenge.
"Or, perhaps, it was because at that critical moment, when Lorkhan's power was sundered from this plane of existence, it was Dumac who died instead of Nerevar, and by his death Lorkhan took the lives of all Dwemer to quit this world so that he could not be summoned or bound again."
"What happened to us? Did our people recover from the poisons?"
"No," Urag answered. "The poisons were destroying the children. The Falmer forced themselves to adapt. By the time the Dwemer were gone, they had changed too much to return to the surface."
One of the Falmer men wailed in anguish. "I've been seeing them! I'd thought they were just twisted nightmares fostered by our time in Oblivion! No, no, no ..." He glared at the Dwemer. "How? How could you do this to us?"
The Aldarch and his fellow priests were quick to move among them, strong Calm spells were effortlessly cast with practiced skill.
She glared up at him. "Let me go."
"No," He thought back. "Not if you're going to jump."
Her eyes closed and she swayed. He pulled her close, offering his strength to lean against. "Endure. Work with me. We can dig our way out of this."
"We're the outdated remnants of a dead race. What use are we? We should just be done with it and die."
"Maybe. But do it as Dwemer. Pride may have been the our downfall. Fine. Then let it also be said the Dwemer chose to end with Pride. The Falmer will need our help to rise from the feral savages they've become. I have plans, but I'm only one engineer, and I admit I'm not the brightest lightbulb around. You know the saying about 'reinventing the wheel?' That's what I'm doing right now, reinventing. I need your help. I need the help of every Dwemer here.
"Hell's bells, woman. If anybody here has the right to jump, it's me."
The Dwemer crowded around him. Eavesdroppers. Curtis was almost blind from the pain in his head as their demands pounded his skull, and the ringing in his ears was drowning out all sound.
He wasn't aware the little beast on his head was screeching and furiously flapping its wings. It's little claws tore his scalp and blood was tricking down his face. "I was Kinlord Dumac Vvardenfell."
131_v3 06.14.2021