says the young seer, in almost a whisper, her fingers catching on her signet ring as she turns back the page. She peers past the book and the grass and the mists' many faces to see all the marsh's flowers cut open, in shreds.
"Where is Shor?" she says again, louder, as hands that she cannot feel grip her as her eyes instead fix on how the wooden floorboards are being torn apart by gates of thorns that leap from the abyss and whose jaws spill open with fury and flame and smoke and laughing daedra with jagged, cut-up smiles.
"Where is Shor?" she cries out, as the dragons roar, and her mother rides breakneak speed to Solitude to seek a priest who will three days hence call her a prophet, her aunts crowd around as she twists and shivers while her grandfather seizes her shoulders tight, Idgrod, Idgrod, come back to me, please. The rains fall outside, light and constant. It is the 21st day of the Last Seed of the hundred and sixty-fifth year of the fourth era. A damp morning.
---
“Where is Shor?”
says the restless priest, his voice full of fear and trembling. The streets turn their eyes away. They have learned not to listen.
“Did we forsake him? Do we remember what he sacrificed for us? Do we remember what we sought as we tore Tamriel apart, tongues sharp as knives, and marched across the lands in the first place? Do we even remember what we once held so dear, what is now missing?”
This city is thick with snow and walls thicker too, chipped only by the long names of dead kings, unmoved, untouched. Histories and decrees line the way to the Hall of Talos, where the faithful and prosperous citizens of Windhelm line up for service. A silver plaque above ancient doors calls him the God of Men.
”Where is Shor? the priest cries out, as he grasps for the air like it holds meaning, for what else is there to cling to? Their eyes avert him. “Oh, his name rests so easily on our lips, but do we hold him in our breath, in our lungs, in our wicked hearts? I do not know of this light-adorned, glittering hero you speak of when you utter his name! My god, my Shor, is deeper and dark: he is that which beats at the root of all things. I ask you again: Where is Shor?”
And so the words pour forth, for he has nothing else to give, this man who has only rags and rages, and as eyes and ears and hands all close to him, and none stay behind.
– except two. It is when the streets have emptied that they slink out of the slum, quick and quiet as foxes. They’re slight things. Worse still, they’re children. Two dunmer children, in better quality rags than his yet still deeply begraggled-looking, with the youngest always in a huff, like the snow has soaked through her boots, no matter how much fur and padding she tries to stuff into them. The oldest, the boy, he can’t be more than fourteen. They hold his eye without blinking.
The priest gestures for them to come over, quick, and stop hiding in those damned shadows. The strangeness of those big, bug-eyed, and very elven stares of theirs has long faded, and he pulls out what’s left of a now-hard loaf of bread, divides it into three equal chunks. One for each street rat.
“To the heart of all things,” he says softly, before they eat.
---
"Where is Shor?"
says the girl, her eyes brimming with too much searching for her own good. She's a nord, but a curious sort that the old wives that like to tisk and tut and gossip scornfully about: a nord who keeps her nose in books long enough that her watcher idly wonders whether she could trick her one fair day by snapping it shut. Still, she's not bad, as grubs go, especially one raised in a library, knowing more of her father's private collection of old maps and miscellanea and her various elven caretakers than those of her own kind.
The watcher, one of their number, unfolds their arms and draws breath ready for a sigh. “You could start by explaining what you mean, child.”
“Look,” says the girl, putting the book straight in her face before anyone can say 'no', sticking a finger at a far-too-delicate diagram for children’s hands. “There's Akatosh and there's Kynareth and there's Stendarr, and then Mara and Dibella, of course, and then Zenithar and Arkay and Julianos. Eight,” she says, “I know, I know it's a wheel. You don't need to tell me. I already know. But -- this doesn't match our temple. There's this empty plinth. So there has to be someone missing.”
The watcher keeps their expression tight. “And you think that someone missing is Shor?”
“Yes,” says the girl, softly. “It has to be. It's always 'Shor's bones' this or 'Shor's bones' that. But why his bones? And where is the rest of him? Why is it never Shor's head or Shor's flesh or Shor's earlobes?”
“Earlobes,” says the watcher, without the slightest crack of an expression.
“And then there's the sailors, too,” continues the girl, and she's speaking in a hurry now, as if she's got to get the words out now or else they'll never be said. “Since they always swear by his name – and Kyne's – Kyne's tits! they say, all the time, in fact –”
“Why are you so sure the missing one is Shor and not Kyne, then?” says the watcher, who elects against saying enough! as the matron taught her, (for nothing is enough for the insatiable curiosity of a girl), making instead a mental note not to relay this conversation to her employer.
“Because Kyne is Kynareth, obviously.” The girl frowns, a severe thing, and scrunches her eyebrows together. “Come on Aurilenye, even you know that. It has to be Shor.”
The watcher supposes she should be thankful she does not gave to explain the White-Gold concordiat to an eleven year old child. She leans forward, but not before she lets loose that weary sigh.
“Suppose he is missing, child. Where do you think he has gone?"
The girl looks thoughtfully at her shoes.
“I don't really know,” she says, not lifting her head. “I had wondered if he'd be under the sea - like a shipwreck. They say most dead and forgotten things end up there.” She looks distant, troubled almost, for a quick moment. As if the idea of a god being swallowed by the ocean is really quite unsettling her. “I'm still trying to figure that bit out though. Why would Shor be in the water?”
The watcher lets loose that long-held sigh. “Perhaps,” says the watcher, letting that long-held sigh rest, heavy, “he got lost on the journey from Atmora.”
The girl's eyes widen. “Yes. Yes," she says, nodding, a grin taking seed. "Maybe he's the singer who draws the sailors beneath the sea. Yes... or, maybe, he became a drowned pirate!” And she spins around, grinning. Yes!
"Those sailors have stuffed your head full of tales and nonsense," says the watcher, with a snort.
But not even the fiercest of lectures about the watcher’s time in conscripted service to the Dominion Navy in the year of 182 could stop the girl from laughing. Of course, the watcher could have strung some gruelling tale about her long days on the decks with too much heat, too much water, too much sweat, palms sore in search of the sea-snakes of Pyandonea, pirates of a long lost land that vanished an era or more before that broke ships, broke men, and left only skeletons behind – but really, it’d be a shame to break the young pup. Pirates were still things of dreams to her. The girl circles the library laughing and dreaming, her head full of tangled snakes.
---
"Where is Shor?"
says the old soldier, under a furious sky. She says it like it is a piece of bile lodged in her throat. It snaps out of her mouth, lost in the screaming wind, but she keeps on marching. Four days, she’d been hiking through these wild mountains, on the edge of the Reach. Heat and exhaustion spike up her legs, as they push up through juniper pines, up past misty crags, up to above the torrents of hail and frost and rain, where neat borders can’t be drawn without cutting mountains in half.
“Where is Shor?” she says again, dry and quiet.
But the sky does not answer. Instead, she waits by the mountain's edge for another pair of ears, another pair of lips. Behind, is the trudge of well-worn boots. A grizzled butch with proud tusks, in the rough hides of an outlaw walks steadily up the mountainside. Her old captain, and her constant accompaniment. The old soldier waits for nothing but her captain – her captain, who knows exactly whose calves will still be burning come the next dawn.
“Lost,” he says, at last. “Not worth searching for, Rosariah.”
The old soldier, Rosariah, keeps her face a blank, but her fingers crease around the fastening of her gauntlet. It is a quiet excuse for a scowl that was once a hidden detail in the corner of a frame, crammed next to thirty-six uniforms, all buttoned properly. Two pairs of boots. Worn, and worn out. A small gesture becomes stark when there are only two.
“I don’t trust a snake that isn’t dead. Turn your back and he’ll have devoured half the world.” She scoffs, then. “Sakatal eat your heart out, it’s already been feasted on.”
“The world still turns, Rosariah,” says her old captain, but there’s a twitch of amusement in his voice, now. “And so we still walk. Why all this fuss about Shor, really?”
There is a moment of stillness. The wind seems to abet, for the sharpest of moments.
“All I have heard. About this Shor,” Rosariah continues, her hands still tugging at her gauntlet, “About this champion of the Nords. The hero of men. Has been complete bluster.” She glances out to her old captain, searching his face for an answer. “In all our travels, from west to east to back again, I have seen no temples to their Shor. Nor have I seen any priests, nor fasts, nor feasts, nor prayers nor meditations. No scripture, no liturgy. No celebration nor mourning. Nothing but an empty name on empty lips for an empty god. Pah!” She spits. “The Reachfolk have more time for him. We needn’t have wasted our time shivering in the cold.”
“And you would rather tussle with the Reachfolk?” says her captain, his features clouding. “Who’ve sworn on their blood to protect their hard-earned hearth and homes here?”
“I’d rather not be in these wretched lands at all. Why are we not at home? There’s still a fight to be had.”
Her captain, at this, frowns ever so slightly. “Rosariah, would you have ever forgiven yourself had you failed to reach the checkpoint? If there had been comrades of ours, still–”
“There’s no if. The Thalmor killed them all. They are corpses.”
The words snap, and bristle. There is no legion, there are no legionnaires, no proud insignia nor gilded titles. No Praefect Rosariah Adiya al-Karra de Beaumont of Wayrest nor Tribune Moragesh gra-Yargul. No resistance fighters, no pockets of ex-legionnaires and Dragontail orcs and Alik’ir warriors and displaced bretons, sworn to bleed for an independence that was still taking shape, An Alliance For A Free Hammerfell, whatever that meant. There is nothing else to shield them. There is only the wind, and it roars.
Her old captain steps closer. And slowly, almost gently, his hands touch her shoulders and hold her with a softness that is hard, after all the times they’ve drawn a blade, kept it keen, kept it fierce, to think that either of them could have retained.
“I cannot speak for all your life, but in all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never been a woman of religious fervour,” he tells her, softly. “Speak clearly about what is bothering you.”
Tenderness feels barren. Rosariah wishes she could howl. Instead, she crumples into Moragesh's shoulder.
“Talos. All those damned shrines to Talos.”
And she begins to laugh, throwing her head back and cackling, as she holds on tight, holds on dear, and tries to keep the last measure of her composure.
“I'd thought – Morag, I'd heard that the people if Skyrim were going to finally break from the Empire. And – you know me – I'd really wanted to believe it. Yet at every corner, tucked beneath every sleeve, hidden in chants and songs, is that man. In all those statues, the face of the Emperor. In every place I look, in every side to turn to, there is the Empire again, mocking me. I cannot escape it.
“And.. it... it feels insurmountable. To stand against that, sometimes. Sometimes it feels simply impossible, to keep do what we are doing. And I feel heavy. I don't know why I am still standing. All this grief.”
“Rosariah,” says Moragesh, and it is gentle the way he speaks. A softness they’d only discovered by throwing away their uniforms and titles and polished steel boots. “I’m here for you. I’m here to carry this with you.”
And they stand on the fierce crags of the Reach, overlooking the world, wrapped in each other and the weight of their sadness, until the wind begins to soften into a breeze.
---
The journey up and through the Velothi mountains is wordless.
But the guide does not mind the quiet. For all their autumnal years leading pilgrims and refugees both up across these slopes, they still savour the opportunity to meditate their surroundings, the sharp peaks and the ashen snows, to think on the pattern and shape of the steep and treacherous paths that had been carved into the face of the mountains, that they have still come to know like the veins that run beneath their skin. The paths that snake along the mountain-side are bordered by a crumbling history, and in their contemplation they cannot help but catch the remnants of cities cut into stone – all bone, beyond rot, something that been ripped from their foundations long ago, torn asunder, by men who wielded tongues like thundering gods. Storms had raged, here, once. And they spoke of voices that brought down mountains. They sung of howls that spread festering plagues. They spun tales, telling of their whispers, which soft as they were, still ripped through the earth like it was delicate spiderwebs, tearing asunder a careful tapestry of livelihoods, leaving only torn silk and dead insects.
(It's all songs now, a sheet of distant music, symbols that have lost signification and are dead ink, (but sight of broken stone sometimes makes their hands still (and twist, and long for the shape of a spear, or something solid (for it would be better than emptiness, better than vacant fingers, better than the hole the world carved into them (a blade’s edge is something that one can at least grasp—
But all is quiet now.
The guide listens to the sky and considers a life that has stretched longer than empires. It is easy, when one carries so much history under one’s skin, to mourn the old Velothi strongholds, and easy to let those ashes drift: their descendents have shown themselves resilient, versatile, and despite everything, still herald the prophet for whom these mountains were named. They perhaps had no right to feel a burst of pride bloom thinking of their people: they counted among their number, now, after all, and no longer hovered above them. The sentiment blossoms still, in the ashen soil, regardless of whether it is right.
What is stranger, and far more uncomfortable, is to think on the twisted brass and forgotten tones that lays buried beneath the snow and the rubble. How little these ruins, these twists of empty metal, silent, and cold, seem to resemble those impenetrable fortresses, the towering brass-steel gates that rose further than the imagination, with all their pistons clanking and steam howling and all that noise.
(And how quiet, and daunting, those vaulted corridors nested within felt, with that thrum less than an echo).
To think a twist of discomfort, a knot of dread, would take root in even the quietest of conversations with their stiff-lipped architects. How strange, looking upon what remained of them here. There was little left but a forest of scrap and broken things.
(Had the guide never seen how keen they kept their blades, the dead-bronze in their eyes, their many-limbed twisted-things unworldly and profane they unleashed to tear through the skies and rip open the soils on the day Red Mountain trembled, they might have almost thought it a pity. As it was, they did not like to think of it, at all.)
It was in the midst of this thought, in the mists of long ago, that one of two travellers stops.
“Kagrenac was born here,” they say, softly. Their tone speaks of reverence, faded. The tone sounds of a rusted mourning, black-blooded and bitter. “Here. There was a city, before.”
They are the stranger of the two: both unfamiliar and bizarre. They are cloaked in a thick mantle, the colour long faded, that trails to the top of their boots, but between the edges of heavy fabric one can glimpse an odd angle, a strange glint, of what looks like a suit of mismatched metal armour, wrong times, wrong periods, wrong histories soldered together, a patchwork of replacements and remnants, walking. The guide had wondered if there was anything but a shadow underneath it. (A shadow, a spectre, a haunting thing that wears a crossbow large enough to spear through a dragon’s heart, steady on their back.)
“Ysmir,” they say, turning to their companion, the familiar of the two. “You razed this place to the ground.” And their voice is still terribly soft.
Their companion is a tower of a man. A nord whose wild hair and beard have been crafted from flaking ash. His eyes lock with the strange-one – and as he nods, slowly, pieces of him drift in the wind.
He turns then to the guide, and it is like the touch of winter, to look at him.
"Where is Shor?"
says Ysmir Wulfharth,
and the ground does not quake and the earth does not shrivel and the mountains do not shrink and the seas do not sizzle and the guide, wide-eyed, cannot believe they stand still, still standing, until they remember: the heart that is a drum to which all things dance, it is gone.
“He is crumbling,” says Vivec. “His shrine here is long gone.”
hm.......i’ve been thinking about pelinal, and one of his many sobriquets, “pelinal the third.” some say it’s either bc he’s a “god guiser,” a.k.a. a shezarrine, the third to be exact, or bc he was the third of alessia’s visions. i wanted to examine that first theory a bit closer.
so......we really know precious little about the timeline here, of the late merethic and early first era. i was thinking, “oh, maybe the first two ‘shezarrines’ were the historical shor and then wulfharth.” which could work....and maybe if hans the fox/harrald hairy breeks weren’t just early names for wulfharth or pelinal, you could not have to kinda awkwardly include shor as a shezarrine.
but then i remembered about wulfharth’s deaths. he’s by far the shezarrine we know most about, and we know he’s died three times:
1) during his fight with orkey, ending wulfharth the first,
2) at the battle of red mountain, ending wulfharth the second, and
3) hjalti’s betrayal, presumably ending wulfharth the third when his soul is freed from the mantella
the point i’m building up to is that maybe shezarrines are inherently resistant to death, like lorkhan was. and with each death, they become stronger and more divine, and perhaps on their third life they become truly godlike.
wulfharth became the grey wind, storm of kyne in his third life, and later the underking as well before his capture in the mantella. pelinal “the third” was exceptionally powerful and brutal, and was called whitestrake bc of his left hand, which was “made of a killing light,” and of course somehow presumably survived having his head removed, demonstrating a resistance to death.
i don’t think we know enough about other canon npc shezarrines, like zurin or hjalti, or the other one-off merethic shezarrines. although i think a case could be made that hjalti and zurin also fulfill this idea. zurin died bc of the mantella and was resistant to death, becoming the new underking, wulfharth presumably died upon having his soul captured, and hjalti/tiber died presumably of natural causes in 3e38. what if, along with the interference of the numidium during the warp in the west, those three deaths added up to the divine shezarrine incarnation of an amalgamation of those three - what we know as talos?
i’m probably a ways off with all of this, but i think it’s interesting.
Mauloch had gathered his best warriors for raiding Windhelm. By reports from his scouts he knew that this was a night of holiday, with people drunk and celebrating in the streets praying to whatever heathen gods the Northmen revered. The raid would be simple: charge through the open gates, slaughter, burn, and loot. Windhelm’s bounty would become Mauloch’s people’s. There would be no suffering or want this winter.
His scouts were right: it was a parade. A military parade.
His warriors would not rout. Neither their nor Mauloch’s pride would allow it. And so they were slain by the guards and soldiers of the city.
The smoldering ash of Mauloch’s spirit sparked with the death of each of his men, until he was alone, surrounded by Northmen, shouting in their cold arctic tongue. Then it was an inferno, and the men who dared charge him were mutilated by Vosh Rakh.
It seemed he had slaughtered hundreds when the entire city was shaken by a clap of thunder shaped like a word: “OBLAAN.”
The sound froze the fighters in their tracks, including Mauloch. His eyes searched for the origin, finding it at the top of the stairs to the palace.
“I will handle this one,” boomed the man, his voice rattled the bricks of the plaza. He cloaked in furred regalia and topped with a jagged crown of horn and bone. In his hand was an ebony straight-sword, long and vicious, but in his throat was a dragon, unforgiving and powerful.
Mauloch did not know this man-king. By appearances there was no reason to fear him. But in that Voice, Mauloch remembered, and his heart shivered with doubt.
“Who are you?”
“I am High King of Skyrim, Ysmir Wulfharth of Atmora.” The Nord warriors made way for his approach, and knelt in deference.
He steeled his resolve and clenched his fists on Vosh Rakh’s handle. “That crown will belong to me,” he shouted, trying (and failing) to match his challenger’s presence.
“This crown,” spake the king, quiet and then loud, “belongs to no one.”
Ysmir seemed too old to be so fast. He spoke in cut-stroke and throat-throw, a poetry that penetrated the entire world. Mauloch struggled to match with parries and hold his ground.
But for all his might, today marked Mauloch’s second defeat in combat since he was born. Ysmir disarmed him with a shout, and held him at sword-point. Mauloch paused for a moment, paralyzed with a fear he refused to remember. Then he jumped away from Ysmir, towards one of the Northmen, and wrested an axe from him with the crack of bone.
Ysmir smiled faintly. To Mauloch it seemed the apparition of something long dead. But in an instant he was disarmed again and laid out on his back by a powerful word.
Gasping for air, searching for an opportunity to strike, to retaliate, to retreat, anything, Mauloch cried, “What are you?”
Like an echo of creation the king became larger than his body, filling the clear sky with cloud and thunder, wind whipping the walls, helmets from soldiers, hair from faces. A proclamation that felt like an accusation roared into Mauloch, pressing him into the stone relentlessly, refusing his rising.
“I am Wulfharth of Atmora, Dragon of the North, Shor’s Tongue, Breath of Kyne - and the High King of Skyrim. You will not return here. BO NOL VUS.”
With the last word, Mauloch was pressed into himself, and all was blackness.
- - - - -
In the beginning there was nothing, a complete numbness that the mind was barely aware of. Then there was falling, deep into something, something not-there but always-there. The mind fell into it, buffeted by whirling thoughts and concepts and fears and desires, all fleeting, just like the mind.
The mind was afraid and so it grasped the first fear it could: emptiness. To satisfy this fear it opened widely, an expansion of space to corners unknown and infinite. In the emptiness it found an infinity, and so it knew there was something there.
The mind tried to open its eyes to look for the something that was there. To open eyes, it needed eyes. To open eyes, it needed eyelids. To open eyes, it needed eye sockets. To open eyes, it needed a head. To open eyes, it needed a face. To open eyes ..... This continued until the memory of a form became a form. Then ..... To open eyes, it needed something to see.
The emptiness was now less empty, containing two things: a remembered form that could perceive forms, and a vast sea of grey. Light and dark were forced apart and at the edge was the ash that remained. The mind felt heat (pain?) in the soles (souls?) of the form (body?) that it had remembered (made?).
The heat brought questions (answers?), and the questions wanted (needed?). So the mind focused on the heat, on the parenthetical. The heat was pain. The mind was soul. The form was body. The remembering created. The questions needed answers.
The next question: Which question should I answer first? The question after that: “I”?
“Mauloch,” the mouth of the body of the mind said. With this sound, the emptiness left with a smile, content that the mind could accomplish the rest.
- - - - -
Mauloch found himself in a pit of ash floating in the void. No, not the void. This was Oblivion. How did he find himself here? He couldn’t remember. He thought very hard.
There was a storm. There was cold stone pressing brick-shapes into his back. There was immense pressure, and the pressure was shaped like words, and the words were ...
“Breath of Kyne?” That was what Lorkhan liked to call his wife. Had Kynareth brought him here? No. Her name was only invoked.
More words floated to him through the sea of grey. “Shor’s Tongue?” Shor ... That was what Kynareth called Lorkhan. Had Lorkhan done this to him? Had Mauloch finally found him, and been judged for his betrayal?
Mauloch could not remember more. The cold, the stone, the storm, the name ... Shor. Shor. Shor. Lorkhan ... a face. A man, draped in fur, crowned in bone, using stolen words wreathed in scales. A new shape for a dead man. A dead man who’d finally had his revenge.
Revenge. Mauloch’s mind remembered in turn the face of every orc who had died there for him. His eyes blinded white with wrath. He had to get back. He had to destroy those Nords who had destroyed his men.
He marched through the ash, seeking an exit, a portal, something to free him from this place. Long he searched and found nothing but more smoke and soot. He cursed and swore and beat his chest. Then for a while he sat paralyzed, defeated, hopeless.
- - - - -
His anger and despair wore him to sleep. He dreamt of a palace, elegant and resplendent, pure and untainted. He wandered its halls, not recognizing them but not unfamiliar.
As if by design he made his way into an open courtyard, a garden blooming with life. Noble trees stood guard over verdant grass separating plots of radiant blossoms of every shape and color. Pride swelled in his chest. But it was accompanied by longing and regret.
The longing pulled him towards one flower, a golden rose. When he reached out to touch it, the regret turned it black. It crumbled under his fingers.
Instead of falling, the ash jumped onto his hand, spreading its heat across his skin, climbing his arm to his chest and enveloping his entire body. He was captured in a burning stasis. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out, and the ash came in, choking him and filling his soul.
He was a smoldering grey statue, paralyzed, forced to watch as the palace caught fire and spread, scorching the ceilings and torching the walls, charring everything black like hands, pulling something grey from something timeless, and changing it forever.
- - - - -
When Mauloch awoke, he was standing in a garden he did not recognize. Its trees and flowers were haunting, but held no meaning to him.
The garden was contained within walls of bright steel and dark iron. Mauloch examined his hands. They were burnt black, smoldering with residual heat. His entire body was like the remains at the bottom of a forge.
He left the garden and took a moment to explore the rest of the structure. It was a vast stronghold, punctured by colossal towers and littered with impervious fortresses. But everywhere there was extra space, room for expansion and improvement. The smoke and soot that choked the air throughout seemed to dance in the suggestion of shape, ideas for growth. At his whim the smoke became stone, the soot became steel.
He looked behind him in one of the open courtyards. Rising from the ash in the distance was a tall thing, taller than everything else. It was a backbone, a tower that held this place together. He knew it would be a beacon for the lost, for his people. They would start coming soon.
So Mauloch made ready for those to come. He filled the fields with spacious barracks and brutal palaces, filled racks with weapons and carved arenas into ash. They would need things to do, to always keep ready for battle.
As the Ashen Forge grew, so did the Ashpit. It began to glow dimly in Oblivion, stretching its arms like a net. The mind expanded beyond the body, beyond the plane, and stepped into a new place in the Aurbis.
So, if we assume the Hjalti - Ysmir - Zurin trinity is Hjati the Thief, Ysmr the Warrior and Zurin the mage, what was each member of the Tribunal’s role in their trinity?
Almalexia the Warrior, Vivec the Thief and Sotha Sil the Mage maybe?
