cahnahn’alna’shoreshik
Sermon Thirty-One
any more years passed in Resdaynia, and the high priests of the Dwemer were almost ready to make war on the rulers of Veloth.
²The Hortator had become the husband of Ayem during this time, and the first saint of the Triune way.
³Vivec had tired of fighting his sons and daughters, and so took a respite from trying to find them.
⁴The Hortator said to his wife, ‘Where is Vivec, my teacher? I love him still, though he grows cold. His lamentations, if I may call them that, have changed the skin of the whole country. ⁵He is hardly to be found anywhere in Veloth of late. The people grow dark because of it.’
⁶And Ayem took mercy on her troubled husband and told him that the sword of the Triune had been fighting minor monsters stirred up by the Dwemer as they worked on their brass siege machines. ⁷She took the Hortator inside her and showed him where his master was.
⁸ASV, or at least that aspect that chose to be Vivec, sat in the Litany Hall of the False Thinking Temple after his battle with the Flute-and-Pipe Ogres of the West Gash. ⁹He began writing, again, in his Book of Hours. He had to put on his Water Face first. ¹⁰That way he could separate the bronze of the Old Temple from the blue of the New and write with happiness. ¹¹Second, he had to take another feather from the Big Moon, further rendering it dead. That way he could write about mortals with truth. ¹²Third, he recalled the Pomegranate Banquet, where he was forced to marry to Molag Bal with wet scriptures to cement his likeness as Mephala and write with black hands. ¹³He wrote:
The last time I heard his voice, showing the slightest sign of impatience, I learned to control myself and submit to the will of others. ¹⁴Afterwards, I dared to take on the sacred fire and realized there was no equilibrium with the ET’ADA. ¹⁵They were liars, lost roots, and the most I can do is to be an interpreter into the rational. ¹⁶Even that fails the needs of the people. I sit on the mercy seat and pass judgment, the waking state, and the phase aspect of the innate urge. ¹⁷Only here can I doubt, in this book, written in water, broadened to include evil.
¹⁸Then Vivec threw his ink on this passage to cover it up (for the lay reader) and wrote instead:
Find me in the blackened paper, unarmored, in final scenery. ¹⁹Truth is like my husband: instructed to smash, filled with procedure and noise, hammering, weighty, heaviness made schematic, lessons learned only by a mace. ²⁰Let those that hear me then be buffeted, and let some die in the ash from the striking. ²¹Let those that find him find him murdered by illumination, pummeled like a traitorous house, because, if an hour is golden, then immortal I am a secret code. ²²I am the partaker of the Doom Drum, chosen of all those that dwell in the middle world to wear this crown, which reverberates with truth, and I am the mangling messiah.
²³The ending of the words is ASV.