The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec
TES III: Morrowind Edition
Game Version: 1.6.1820
Note: An archive of the original contents of the earliest versions of the complete text.
Sermon Four
The simulacrum of the netchiman’s wife who carried the egg of Vivec within it went back to looking for the lands of the Indoril. Along the journey many more spirits came to see it and offer instructions to its son-daughter, the future glorious invisible warrior-poet of Vvardenfell, Vivec.
A troupe of spirits called the Lobbyists for the Coincidence Guild appeared. Vivec understood the challenge immediately and said:
‘The popular notion of God kills happenstance.’
The head of the Lobbyists, whose name is forgotten, tried to defend the concept’s existence. He said, ‘Saying something at the same time can be magical.’
Vivec knew that to retain his divinity that he must make a strong argument against luck. He said:
‘Is not the sudden revelation of corresponding conditions and disparate elements that gel at the moment of the coincidence one of the prerequisites to being, in fact, coincidental? Synchronicity comes out of repeated coincidences at the lowest level. Further examination shows it is the utter power of the sheer number of coincidences that leads one to the idea that synchronicity is guided by something more than chance. Therefore, synchronicity ends up invalidating the concept of the coincidental, even though they are the symptomatic signs that bring it to the surface.’
Thus was coincidence destroyed in the land of the Velothi.
Then an Old Bone of the earth rose up before the simulacrum of the netchiman’s wife and said, ‘If you are to be born a ruling king of the world you must confuse it with new words. Set me into pondering.’
‘Very well,’ Vivec said, ‘Let me talk to you of the world, which I share with mystery and love. Who is her capital? Have you taken the scenic route of her cameo? I have– lightly, in secret, missing candles because they’re on the untrue side, and run my hand along the edge of a shadow made from one hundred and three divisions of warmth, and left no proof.’
At this the Old Bone folded unto itself twenty times until it became akin to milk, which Vivec drank, becoming a ruling king of the world.
Finally the Chancellor of Exactitude appeared, and he was perfect to look upon from every angle. Vivec understood the challenge immediately and said:
‘Certitude is for the puzzle-box logicians and girls of white glamour who harbor it on their own time. I am a letter written in uncertainty.’
The Chancellor bowed his head and smiled fifty different and perfect ways all at once. He pulled the astrolabe of the universe from his robe and broke it in half, handing both halves to the egg-image of Vivec.
Vivec laughed and said, ‘Yes, I know. The slave labor of the senses is as selfish as polar ice, and worsens when energies are spent on a life others regard as fortunate. To be a ruling king I will have to suffer much that cannot be suffered, and to weigh matters that no astrolabe or compass can measure.’
The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.