alnahn’cina’shoreshik
Sermon Fourteen
ivec lay with Molag Bal for eighty days and eight, though headless.
²In that time, the Prince placed the warrior-poet’s feet back and filled them with the blood of Daedra.
³In this way Vivec’s giant-form remained forever harmless to good earth.
⁴The Pomegranate Banquet brought many spirits back from the dead so that the sons and daughters of the union had much to eat besides fruit.
⁵The Duke of Scamps came while the banquet was still underway, and Molag Bal looked on the seven pennants with anger. ⁶The King of Rape had become necessary and therefore troubled for the rest of time. ⁷His legions and Kh-Utta’s fell into open war, but the children of Molag Bal and Vivec were too elaborate in power and form.
⁸The Duke of Scamps therefore became a lesser thing, as did all his own children. ⁹Molag Bal said to them: ‘You are the sons of liars, dogs, and wolf-headed women.’ They have been useless to summon ever since.
¹⁰The holy one returned at last, Vehk, golden with wisdom. ¹¹His head found its body had been tenderly used. ¹²He mentioned this to Molag Bal, who told him that he should thank the Barons of Move Like This, ¹³‘For I have yet to learn how to refine my rapture. My love is accidentally shaped like a spear.’
¹⁴So Vivec, who had a grain of Ayem’s mercy, set about to teach Molag Bal in the ways of belly-magic. ¹⁵They took their spears out and compared them. Vivec bit new words onto the King of Rape’s so that it might give more than ruin to the uninitiated. ¹⁶This has since become a forbidden ritual, though people still practice it in secret.
¹⁷Here is why: The Velothi and demons and monsters that were watching all took out their own spears. ¹⁸There was much biting and the earth became wet. And this was the last laugh of Molag Bal:
¹⁹‘Watch as the earth shall crack, heavy with so much power, that should have been forever unalike!’
²⁰Then that stretch of badlands that had been the site of the marriage fragmented and threw fire. ²¹And a race that is no more but that was terrible at the time to behold came forth. ²²Born of the biters, that is all they did, and they ran amok across the lands of Veloth and even to the shores of Red Mountain.
²³But Vivec made of his spear a more terrible thing, from a secret he had bitten off from the King of Rape. ²⁴And so he sent Molag Bal tumbling into the crack of the biters and swore forever that he would not deem the King beautiful ever again.
²⁵Vivec wept as he slew all those around him with his terrible new spear. ²⁶He named it MUATRA, which is Milk Taker, and even the Chimeri mystics knew his fury. ²⁷Anyone struck by Vivec at this time turned barren and withered into bone shapes. ²⁸The path of bones became a sentence for the stars to read, and the heavens have never known children since. ²⁹Vivec hunted down the biters one by one, and all their progeny, and he killed them all by means of the Nine Apertures, and the wise still hide theirs from Muatra.
³⁰The ending of the words is ASV.