arca’shoreshik
Sermon Five
inally the simulacrum of the netchiman’s wife became unstable.
²The Dwemer in their haste had built it shoddily and the ashes of Red Mountain slowed its golden tendons.
³Before long it fell on its knees beside the road to the lands of the Indoril and pitched over, to be discovered eighty days later by a merchant caravan on its way to the capital of Veloth, anon Almalexia.
⁴Vivec had not been among his people all the days of his pre-life so he stayed silent and let the Chimer in the caravan think that the simulacrum was broken and empty.
⁵A Chimeri warrior, who was protecting the caravan, said, ‘Look here how the Dwemer try to fool us as ever, crafting our likenesses out of their flesh-metals. ⁶We should take this to the capital and show our mother Ayem. She will want to see this new strategy of our enemies.’
⁷But the merchant captain said, ‘I doubt that we shall be paid well for the effort. ⁸We can make more money if we stop at Noormoc and sell it to the Red Wives of Dagon, who pay well for the wonders made by the Deep Folk.’
⁹But another Chimer, who was wise in the ways of prophecy, looked on the simulacrum with disquietude. ¹⁰‘Was I not hired on to help you seek the best of fortunes? I say you should listen to your warrior, then, and take this thing to Ayem, ¹¹for though manufactured by our enemies there is something in it that will become sacred, or has been already.’
¹²The merchant captain took pause then and looked on the simulacrum of the netchiman’s wife ¹³and, though he heeded always the advice of his seers, could do no more than think of the profits to be made at Noormoc. ¹⁴He thought mainly of the Red Wives’ form of recompense, which was four-cornered and good wounded, a belly-magic known nowhere else under the moons. ¹⁵His lust made him deny Ayem his mother. ¹⁶He gave order to change course for Noormoc.
¹⁷Before the caravan could get underway again, the Chimeri warrior who had counseled a passage to the capital threw his money to the merchant captain ¹⁸and said, ‘I will pay you thus for the simulacrum and warn you: war is coming with the shaggy men of the north ¹⁹and I will not have my mother Ayem at uneven odds with one enemy while tending to another.’
²⁰‘Nerevar,’ the merchant captain said, ‘this is not enough. I am Triune in my own way, but I follow the road of my body and demand more.’
²¹Then Vivec could not remain silent anymore and said into Nerevar’s head these words:
‘You can hear the words, so run away
²²Come, Hortator, unfold into a clear unknown,
Stay quiet until you’ve slept in the yesterday,
And say no elegies for the melting stone’
²³So Nerevar slew the merchant captain and took the caravan for his own.
²⁴The ending of the words is ASV.