ascahn’daskhora’shoreshik
Sermon Twenty-Eight
hen Vivec left Seht to look after the dome-head demon and went back to the space that was not a space.
²From the Provisional House he looked into the middle world to find the fifth monster, called The Ruddy Man.
³When the dreughs ruled the world, the Daedroth Prince Molag Bal had been their chief. ⁴He took a different shape then, spiny and armored and made for the sea. ⁵Vivec, in giving birth to the many spawn of his marriage, had dropped an old image of Molag Bal into the world: a dead carapace of memory. ⁶It would not have been a monster if a Velothi child had not wanted to impress his village by wearing it.
⁷The Ruddy Man, of the eight monsters, was the least complicated. He made those who wore him into mighty killers and nothing more. He existed in the physical. Only geography makes him special.
⁸When Vivec found him near the boy’s village, anon Gnisis, there was a violent clash of arms and an upheaval of the earth. ⁹Their battle created the West Gash. Wanderers that still go there hear still the sounds of it: sword across the crust, the grunt of God, the snapping of his monster child’s splintered legs.
¹⁰After his victory, Vivec took the shell of The Ruddy Man to the dreughs that had modified his mother. ¹¹The Queen of Dreughs, whose name is not easy to spell, was in a period of self-incubation. ¹²Her wardens took the gift from Vivec and promised to guard it from the surface world. This is the first account of dreughs being liars.
¹³In ten years, The Ruddy Man appeared again, this time near Tear, worn by a wayward shaman who followed the House of Troubles. ¹⁴Instead of guarding it, the dreughs had imbued the living armor with mythic inflexibility. ¹⁵It molted soon after skill-draping the shaman and stretched his bones to the five corners.
¹⁶When Vivec met the monster in battle again he saw the remains of three villages dripping from its feet. ¹⁷He took on his giant form and slew The Ruddy Man by way of the Symbolic Collage. ¹⁸Since he no longer trusted the Altmer of the sea, Vivec gave the carapace of the monster to the devout and loyal mystics of the Number Room. ¹⁹He told them:
‘You may make of The Ruddy Man a philosopher’s armor.’
²⁰The mystics began by wrapping one of their sages in the shells, a series of flourishes by two supra numerates, one hormonally tall and the other just under his arms. ²¹They ran around the carapace and through each other, applying holy resin drawn from the carcasses of the now-useless numbers between twelve and thirteen. ²²Golden straws were quickly stuck through the mythic epidermal so the sage could breathe. ²³After the ceremonial etchings were drawn into hardening resin, long lists of dead names and equations whose solutions were to be found in the mouth of the Chimer inside, there came the illuminations, inscribed by the bright, terrible fingernail of Vivec. ²⁴From the nail’s tip flowed a searing liquid, filling the grooves of the ceremonial etchings. ²⁵They bled out to form veined patterns about the sage-shell that theologians would decipher forever after.
²⁶The ending of the words is ASV.