daskhora’shoreshik
Sermon Eight
nd presently Nerevar and Vivec were within sight of the capital and the Four Corners of the House of Troubles knew that it was not time to contest them.
²The caravan musicians made a great song of entrance and the eleven gates of the Mourning Hold were thrown wide.
³Ayem was accompanied by her husband-state, a flickering image that was channeled to her ever-changing female need. ⁴Around her were the Shouts, a guild now forgotten, who carried with them the whims of the people, for the Velothi then were still mostly good at heart. ⁵The Shouts were the counselors of Ayem and the country, though they sometimes quarreled and needed Seht to wring them into usefulness. ⁶Ayem approached Nerevar, who was by now adorned in the flags of House Indoril. ⁷He gifted her with the simulacrum of the netchiman’s wife and the egg of Vivec inside.
⁸Ayem said to Nerevar, ‘Seht who is Azura has revealed that war is come and that the Hortator that shall deliver us will approach with a solution walking at his side.’
⁹Nerevar said, ‘I have traveled out of my way to warn you of the deceit of our enemies, the Dwemer, but I have learned much on the journey and have changed my mind. ¹⁰This netchiman’s wife you see at my side is a sword and a symbol and there is prophecy inside. ¹¹It tells me that, like it, we must for a while be like he is and, as a people, cloaked in our former enemies, and to use their machines without shame.’
¹²At which Vivec spoke aloud, ‘Boethiah-who-is-you wore the skin of Trinimac to cleanse the faults of Veloth, my Queen, and so it should be again. This is the walking way of the glorious.’
¹³Seht appeared out of a cloud of iron vapor and his minions made of their blood a chair. ¹⁴He sat beside Ayem and looked on the rebirth of mastery.
¹⁵Vivec said to them, his Triune:
‘My rituals and ordeals and all the rhymes within,
Use no other motive than the revelation of my skin.’
¹⁶Ayem said, ‘AYEM AE SEHTI AE VEHK. We are delivered and made whole, the diamond of the Black Hands is uncovered.’
¹⁷Seht said, ‘Wherever so he treads, there is invisible scripture.’
To which the Shouts were silent in sudden reading.
¹⁸Vivec then reached out from the egg all his limbs and features, merging with the simulacrum of his mother, gilled and blended in all the arts of the star-wounded East, under water and in fire and in metal and in ash, six times the wise, ¹⁹and he became the union of male and female, the magic hermaphrodite, the martial axiom, the sex-death of language and unique in all the middle world.
²⁰He said, ‘Let us now guide the hands of the Hortator in war and its aftermath. For we go different, and in thunder. This is our destiny.’
²¹The ending of the words is ASV.