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The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec: Sermon Twenty-Five

The Scripture of the City:

'All cities are born of solid light. Such is my city, his city.

'But then the light subsides, revealing the bright and terrible angel of Veloth. He is in his pre-chimerical form, demonic VEHK, gaunt and pale and beautiful, skin stretched painfully thin on bird's bones, feathered serpents encircling his arms. His wings are spread out behind him, their red and yellow ends like razors in the sun. The wispy mass of his fire hair floats as if underwater, milky in the nimbus of light that crowns his head. His presence is undeniable, the awe too much to bear.

'This is God's city, different from others. Cities from foreign countries put their denizens to sleep and walk to the star-wounded East to pay homage to me. The capital of the northern men, crusty with eon's ice, bows before Vivec the city, me it together.

'Self-thought streets rush through tunnel blood. I have rebuilt myself. Hyper eyed signposts along my traffic arm, soon to be an inner sea. My body is crawling with all gathered to see me rising up like a monolithic instrument of pleasure. My spine is the main road to the city that I am. Countless transactions are taking place in veins and catwalks and the roaming, roaming, roaming, as they roam over and through and add to me. There are temples erected along the hollow of my skull and I will ever wear them as a crown. Walk across the lips of God.

'They add new doors to me and I become effortlessly trans-immortal with the comings and goings and the stride-heat of the market where I am traded for, yell of the children hear them play, scoffed at, amused, desired, paid for in native coin, new minted with my face on one side and my city-body on the other. I stare with each new window. Soon I am a million-eyed insect dreaming.

'Red-sparking war trumpets sound like cattle in the ribcage of shuffling transit. The heretics are destroyed on the plaza knees. I flood over into the hills, houses rising like a rash, and I never scratch. Cities are the antidotes to hunting.

'I raise lanterns to light my hollows, lend wax to the thousands the candlesticks that bear my name again and again, the name innumerable, shutting in, mantra and priest, god-city, filling every corner with the naming name, wheeled, circling, running river language giggling with footfalls mating, selling, stealing, searching, and worry not ye who walk with me. This is the flowering scheme of the Aurbis. This is the promise of the PSJJJ: egg, image, man, god, city, state. I serve and am served. I am made of wire and string and mortar and I accede my own precedent, world without am.'

The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.

The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec: Sermon Twenty-Six

Then Vivec left his architectural rapture and went back to the space that was not a space. From the Provisional House he looked into the middle world to find the fourth monster, called The Pocket Cabal.

The monster hid itself in the spell-lists of the great Chimeri wizards of the extreme east, where the Emperor Parasols grow wild. Vivec disguised himself as a simple traveler, but radiated a tenuous sense-fabric so that the wizards would seek him out. Of Muatra he made a simple walking dwarf.

Before long the invisible one was among the libraries of the east, feeding the essential words of The Pocket Cabal to his walking dwarf and then running when the magic would fail. After a year or two of this thievery, Muatra was sick to its stomach, and the walking dwarf exploded near the slave pens of a wizard's tower. The Pocket Cabal then slipped itself into the mouths of the slaves and hid again.

Vivec then watched as the slaves erupted into babble and breaking magic. They rattled their cages and sung out half-hymns that formed into forbidden and arcane knowledge. Litany fiends appeared and drank from the excess. Grabbers from the Adjacent Place came into the world sideways, the slave talking having disrupted the normal non-cardinal points.

So of course a giant bug appeared, with the greatest eastern wizard inside it. He could see past Vivec's disguise and knew of the warrior-poet's divinity but he thought himself so powerful that he talked harshly:

'See what you have wrought, silly Triune! Columns of nonsense and litany fiends! I cannot believe how reason or temperance can be made whole again due to your eating, eating, eating! Consort with more demons, why don't you?'

Vivec stabbed the wizard through his soul.

The giant bug harness fell on the slave cages and the slaves ran about free and reckless, too reckless more with pregnant words. Colors bent into the earth. Vivec created a dome-head demon to contain it all.

'The Pocket Cabal is therefore interred here forever. Let this be a cursed land where sorcery is broken and maligned.'

Then he picked up Muatra by the beard and left the ghostly hemisphere of the dome-head demon. On its boundaries, Vivec placed a warning and a song of entrance that contained errors in it. With mock bones of half-dead Muatra he created the tent poles of a fortress-theory and fatal languages were imprisoned for all time.

Seht appeared and looked on what his brother-sister had created. The Clockwork King said:

'Of the eight monsters, this is the most confusing. May I treasure it?'

Vivec gave Seht leave to do so, but told him never to release The Pocket Cabal into the middle world. He said:

'I have hidden secrets in my travels here and made a likeness of Muatra to ward against the unwise. Under this dome, the temporal myth is no longer man.'

The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.

The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec: Sermon Twenty-Seven

The Scripture of the Word, First:

'All language is based on meat. Do not let the sophists fool you.'

Second:

'The third walking path explores hysteria without fear. The efforts of madmen are a society of itself, but only if they are written. The wise may substitute one law for another, even into incoherence, and still say he is working within a method. This is true of speech and extends to all scripture.'

Third:

'Do not go to the realm of apology for absolution. Beyond articulation, there is no fault. The Adjacent Place, where the Grabbers live, is the illusion of the vocal or the middle realms of thought, by which I mean the constructed. This is how I stole the certainty of the Chancellor of Exactitude, perfect to look upon from every angle. When you come out of the vocal, you can never be certain.'

Fourth:

'The truest body of work is made up of silence: as in the silence that results from no reference. By the word I mean the dead.'

Fifth:

'The first meaning is always hidden.'

Sixth:

'The realm of apology is perfection and impossible to attack. Thus, the wise avoid it. Trinity in unity is the world and word of action: the third walking path.'

Seventh:

'The sage who suppresses his best aphorism: cut off his hands, for he is a thief.'

Eighth:

'The clothes of the broken map are worn only by fools and heretics. The map is an exit for laziness. It is the dusty tongue, which is to say the given chart that most take as a story that is complete. No word is true until it is eaten.'

The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.

The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec: Sermon Twenty-Eight

Then Vivec left Seht to look after the dome-head demon and went back to the space that was not a space. From the Provisional House he looked into the middle world to find the fifth monster, called The Ruddy Man.

When the dreughs ruled the world, the Daedroth Prince Molag Bal had been their chief. He took a different shape then, spiny and armored and made for the sea. Vivec, 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. It would not have been a monster if a Velothi child had not wanted to impress his village by wearing it.

The 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.

When Vivec found him near the boy's village, anon Gnisis, there was a violent clash of arms and an upheaval of the earth. Their 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.

After his victory, Vivec took the shell of The Ruddy Man to the dreughs that had modified his mother. The Queen of Dreughs, whose name is not easy to spell, was in a period of self-incubation. Her wardens took the gift from Vivec and promised to guard it from the surface world. This is the first account of dreughs being liars.

In ten years, The Ruddy Man appeared again, this time near Tear, worn by a wayward shaman who followed the House of Troubles. Instead of guarding it, the dreughs had imbued the living armor with mythic inflexibility. It molted soon after skill-draping the shaman and stretched his bones to the five corners.

When Vivec met the monster in battle again he saw the remains of three villages dripping from its feet. He took on his giant form and slew The Ruddy Man by way of the Symbolic Collage. Since 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. He told them:

'You may make of The Ruddy Man a philosopher's armor.'

The 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. They ran around the carapace and through each other, applying holy resin drawn from the carcasses of the now-useless numbers between twelve and thirteen. Golden straws were quickly stuck through the mythic epidermal so the sage could breathe. After 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. From the nail's tip flowed a searing liquid, filling the grooves of the ceremonial etchings. They bled out to form veined patterns about the sage-shell that theologians would decipher forever after.

The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.

The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec: Sermon Twenty-Nine

The Scripture of the Numbers:

1. The Dragon Break, or the Tower. 1
2. The Enantiomorph. 68
3. The Invisible Gate, ALMSIVI. 112
4. The Corners of House of Troubles. 242
5. The Corners of the World. 100
6. The Walking Ways. 266
7. The Sword at the Center. 39
8. The Wheel, or the Eight Givers. 484
9. The Missing. 11
10. The Tribes of the Altmer. 140
11. The Number of the Master. 102
12. The Heavens. 379
13. The Serpent. 36
14. The King's Cough. 32
15. The Redeeming Force. 110
16. The Acceptable Blasphemes. 12
17. The Hurling Disk. 283
18. The Egg, or Six Times the Wise.
19. The Provisional House. 258
20. The Lunar Lattice. 425
21. The Womb. 13
22. Unknown. 453
23. The Hollow Prophet. 54
24. The Star Wound. 44
25. The Emperor. 239
26. The Rogue Plane. 81
27. The Secret Fire. 120
28. The Drowned Lamp. 8
29. The Captive Sage. 217
30. The Scarab. 10
31. The Listening Frame. 473
32. The False Call. 7
33. The Anticipations. 234
34. The Lawless Grammar. 2
35. The Prison-Shirt. 191
36. The Hours. 364

'The presence of deaf witness, this is what the numbers are. They hang onto the Aurbis as the last nostalgia of their godhood. The effigies of numbers are their current applications; this is folly, as above. To be affixed to a symbol is too, too certain.'

The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.

The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec: Sermon Thirty

Then Vivec left the mystics of the Number Room and went back to the space that was not a space. From the Provisional House he looked into the middle world to find the sixth monster, called City-Face. He was vexed when he could not find it and went back to the Mourning Hold in secret anger, killing a mystic that asked about higher order.

Nerevar, the Hortator, witnessed this and said, 'Why do this, milord? The mystics look to you for guidance. They work to make your temple better stoned.'

Vivec said, 'No one knows what I am.'

The Hortator nodded and went back to his studies.

Here is how City-Face hid from his mother-father: it had been born named as Ha-Note, a bare urge of power, an esoteric wind nerve tuned to the frequency of huddled masses. It found root in villages and multiplied, finding in the minds of the settled a veiled astrology, the star charts of culture, and this resonance made its head swim. Ha-Note moved sideways into the Adjacent Place, growing and unbeknownst. Above the vocal, it trembled with new emotions, immortal ones, absorbing more than the thirty known to exist in the middle world. When Ha-Note became gravely homesick, the Grabbers took it.

A Grabber said, 'New emotions to the lonely occur only of madness. This thing is gone. It is ours now.'

Grabbers had never made a city of their own, and their glimpse of Vivec's, which shone with holiness through all the spheres, had taken their attention.

'Under this reason did the issue of Vehk slide into our realm, drawn by our coveting, hidden in loss. We shall build our tower-hope upon its face.'

Now many years had passed in Resdaynia, and the high priests of the Dwemer were building something alike as Vivec and alike as the new Ha-Note of the Grabbers. The Hortator was engaged with an army of theirs that had become too brave, talking foolish words, and Nerevar helped destroy them with the help of the orphan legion of Ayem. When he went to give trophy to Vivec, he saw his lord under attack by the City-Face. The monster was saying this:

'Here we are to replace your city, Vehk and Vehk. We are from the place of the more-than-known emotions, and our citizenry has died from it. Two things we came for, but can stay for only one. Either we ask you to correct our error of culture, or merely take yours by dint of force. The second is easiest, we think.'

Vivec sighed.

'You would replace my direction,' he said. 'I weary of this, though I wanted to kill you an age before. Resdaynia is fallen ill, and I have no time for one more imaginary analogy of an unknown incident. Here, take this.'

At which he touched the tower-hope of the City-Face and corrected the error of the Grabbers.

'And this.'

At which he stabbed the heart of the City-Face with the Ethos Knife, which is to say RKHT AI AE ALTADOON AI, the short blade of proper commerce.

The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.

The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec: Sermon Thirty-One

Many more years passed in Resdaynia, and the high priests of the Dwemer were almost ready to make war on the rulers of Veloth. The Hortator had become the husband of Ayem during this time, and the first saint of the Triune way. Vivec had tired of fighting his sons and daughters, and so took a respite from trying to find them.

The 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. He is hardly to be found anywhere in Veloth of late. The people grow dark because of it.'

And 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. She took the Hortator inside her and showed him where his master was.

ALMSIVI, 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. He began writing, again, in his Book of Hours. He had to put on his Water Face first. That way he could separate the bronze of the Old Temple from the blue of the New and write with happiness. Second, he had to take another feather from the Big Moon, further rendering it dead. That way he could write about mortals with truth. Third, 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. He 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. Afterwards, I dared to take on the sacred fire and realized there was no equilibrium with the ET'ADA. They were liars, lost roots, and the most I can do is to be an interpreter into the rational. Even 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. Only here can I doubt, in this book, written in water, broadened to include evil.

Then 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. Truth is like my husband: instructed to smash, filled with procedure and noise, hammering, weighty, heaviness made schematic, lessons learned only by a mace. Let those that hear me then be buffeted, and let some die in the ash from the striking. Let 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. I 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.

The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.

The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec: Sermon Thirty-Two

The Scripture of the Mace, First:

'The pleasure of annihilation is the pleasure of disappearing into the unreal. All those that would challenge the sleeping world will seek membership in this movement. I denounce the alienation of the Cloven Duality with a hammer.'

Second:

'Take from me the lessons as a punishment for being mortal. To be made of dirt is to be treated as such by your jailers. This is the key and the lock of the Daedra. Why do you think they escaped the compromise?'

Third:

'Velothi, your skin has become the pregnant darkness. My brooding has brought this on. Remember that Boethiah asked you to become the color of bruise. How else to show yourselves people of the exodus into the vital: pain?'

Fourth:

'The sage who is not an anvil: a conventional sentence and nothing more. By which I mean dead, the fourth walking way.'

Fifth:

'A proper comprehension of the virtues: stage-managed and to be murdered.'

Sixth:

'In the end, rejoice as a hostage released from drumming torment but that savors his wound. The drum breaks and you find it to be a nest of hornets, which is to say: your sleep is over.'

Seventh:

'The suspicious is spectacle and the lie is only a theoretical inspiration.'

Eighth:

'But then why, you ask, do the Daedra wish to meddle with the Aurbis? It is because they are the radical critique, essential as all martyrs. That some are more evil than others in not an illusion. Or rather, it is a necessary illusion.'

The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.

The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec: Sermon Thirty-Three

Then Vivec left the Litany Hall of the False Thinking Temple, where he had brooded for so long creating the scripture of the pounding light, and went back to the space that was not a space. From the Provisional House he looked into the middle world to find the seventh monster, called Lie Rock.

Lie Rock was born of Vivec's Second Aperture and was thrown out of the Pomegranate Banquet by a member of the Sweeps, another forgotten guild. The Sweep did not take it for the monster that it was and so he did not expect it to fly from his hand and into the heavens.

'I am born of golden wisdom and powers that should have forever been unalike! With this nature I am invited into the Hidden Heaven!'

By which he meant the Scaled Blanket, made of not-stars, whose number is thirteen. Lie Rock became full of foolishness, haggling with the Void Ghost who hides in the religions of all men. The Void Ghost said:

'Stay with me a full hundred years and I will give you a power that no divinity will dare disobey.'

But before the hundred years was up, Vivec was already looking for Lie Rock and found him.

'Stupid stone,' Vivec said. 'To hide in the Scaled Blanket is to make a mark on nothing. His bargains are only for ruling kings!'

So Vivec sent the Hortator to the heavens to shave Lie Rock asunder by the named axe. Nerevar made peace with the south-pole-star of thieving and the north-pole-star of warriors and the third-pole-star, which existed only in the ether, which was governed by the apprentice of Magnus the sun. They gave him leave to wander among their charges and gave him red sight by which to find Lie Rock in the Hidden Heaven.

By chance, Nerevar met the Void Ghost first, who told him that he was in the wrong place to which the Hortator said, 'Me or you?' and the Void Ghost said both. This sermon does not tell what else was said between these masters.

Lie Rock, however, used the confusion to launch his own attack on the city-god, Vivec. He was hastened by all three of the black guardians, who wanted him swiftly gone, though they meant no hostility to the lord of the middle air.

The citizenry of Vivec screamed as they saw a shooting star come down out of the sky hole like a toll-road of hell. But Vivec merely raised his hand and froze Lie Rock just above the city and then he pierced the monster with Muatra.

(The practice of piercing the Second Aperture is now forbidden.)

When Nerevar returned, he saw the frozen comet above his lord's city. He asked whether or not Vivec wanted it removed.

'I would have done so myself if I wanted, silly Hortator. I shall keep it there with its last intention intact, so that if the love of the people of this city for me ever disappear, so shall the power that holds back their destruction.'

Nerevar said, 'Love is under your will only.'

Vivec smiled and told the Hortator that he had become a Minister of Truth.

The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.

The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec: Sermon Thirty-Four

Then Vivec left the Ministry of Truth and went back to the space that was not a space. From the Provisional House he looked into the middle world to find the eighth and final and mightiest monster, called GULGA MOR JIL and more. The wise must look elsewhere for this string of power.

Vivec called to his side the Hortator and this was the first time that Nerevar had ever been to the Provisional House. He had the same vision that Vivec had so many years ago: that of the two-headed ruling king.

'Who is that?' he wondered.

Vivec said, 'The red jewel of conquest.'

Nerevar, perhaps because he was frightened, became vexed at his lord's answer. 'Why are you always so evasive?'

Vivec told the Hortator that to be otherwise was to betray his nature.

Together they moved into the middle world, to a village near where Vivec had been found by Ayem and Seht. The eighth monster was there, but he did not act much like a monster. He sat with his legs in the ocean and with a troubled look on his face. When he saw his mother-father, he asked why he should have to die and return to oblivion.

Vivec told the eighth monster that to be otherwise was to betray his nature. Since this did not seem to satisfy the monster and Vivec still had a touch of Ayem's mercy he said:

'The fire is mine: let it consume thee,
And make a secret door
At the altar of Padhome,
In the House of Boet-hi-Ah
Where we become safe
And looked after.'

The monster accepted Muatra with a peaceful look and his bones became the foundation for the City of the Dead, anon Narsis.

Nerevar put away his axe, which he had at the ready, and frowned.

'Why,' he said, 'did you ask me to come if you knew the eighth monster would give in so easily?'

Vivec looked at the Hortator for a long time.

Nerevar understood. 'Do not betray your nature. Answer as you will.'

Vivec said, 'I brought you here because I knew the mightiest of my issue would succumb to Muatra without argument, if only I gave him consolation first.'

Nerevar looked at Vivec for a long time.

Vivec understood. 'Say the words, Hortator.'

Nerevar said, 'Now I am the mightiest of your children.'

Let this sermon be consolation to those who read it that are destined to die.

The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.

The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec: Sermon Thirty-Five

The Scripture of Love:

'The formulas of proper Velothi magic continue in ancient tradition, but that virility is dead, by which I mean at least replaced. Truth owes its medicinal nature to the establishment of the myth of justice. Its curative properties it likewise owes to the concept of sacrifice. Princes, chiefs, and angels all subscribe to the same notion. This is a view primarily based on a prolific abolition of an implied profanity, seen in ceremonies, knife fighting, hunting, and the exploration of the poetic. On the ritual of occasions, which comes to us from the days of the cave glow, I can say nothing more than to loosen your equation of moods to lunar currency. Later, and by that I mean much, much later, my reign will be seen as an act of the highest love, which is a return from the astral destiny and the marriages between. By that I mean the catastrophes, which will come from all five corners. Subsequent are the revisions, differentiated between hope and the distraught, situations that are only required by the periodic death of the immutable. Cosmic time is repeated: I wrote of this in an earlier life. An imitation of submersion is love's premonition, its folly into the underworld, by which I mean the day you will read about outside of yourself in an age of gold. For on that day, which is a shadow of the sacrificial concept, all history is obliged to see me for what you are: in love with evil. To keep one's powers intact at such a stage is to allow for the existence of what can only be called a continual spirit. Make of your love a defense against the horizon. Pure existence is only granted to the holy, which comes in a myriad of forms, half of them frightening and the other half divided into equal parts purposeless and assured. Late is the lover that comes to this by any other walking way than the fifth, which is the number of the limit of this world. The lover is the highest country and a series of beliefs. He is the sacred city bereft of a double. The uncultivated land of monsters is the rule. This is clearly attested by ANU and his double, which love knows never really happened. Similarly, all the other symbols of absolute reality are ancient ideas ready for their graves, or at least the essence of such. This scripture is directly ordered by the codes of Mephala, the origin of sex and murder, defeated only by those who take up those ideas without my intervention. The religious elite is not a tendency or a correlation. They are dogma complemented by the influence of the untrustworthy sea and the governance of the stars, dominated at the center by the sword, which is nothing without a victim to cleave unto. This is the love of God and he would show you more: predatory but at the same time instrumental to the will of critical harvest, a scenario by which one becomes as he is, of male and female, the magic hermaphrodite. Mark the norms of violence and it barely registers, suspended as it is by treaties written between the original spirits. This should be seen as an opportunity, and in no way tedious, though some will give up for it is easier to kiss the lover than become one. The lower regions crawl with these souls, caves of shallow treasures, meeting in places to testify by way of extension, when love is only satisfied by a considerable (incalculable) effort.'

The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.

The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec: Sermon Thirty-Six

For these were the days of Resdaynia, when Chimer and Dwemer lived under the wise and benevolent rule of the AMLSIVI and their champion the Hortator, though the Dwemer had become foolish and challenged their masters.

Out of their fortresses they came with golden ballistae that walked and mighty atronachs and things that spat flame and things that made killing songs. Their king was Dumac Dwarf-Orc, but their high priest was Kagrenac the Blighter.

Under mountains and over them the war with the Dwemer was raged, and then came the northern men to help Kagrenac and they brought Ysmir again.

Leading the armies of the Chimer was the slave that would not perish, the Hortator Nerevar, who had traded his axe for the Ethos Knife. He slew Dumac at Red Mountain and saw the heart bone for the first time.

Men of brass destroyed the eleven gates of the Mourning Hold and behind them came the Dwemeri architects of tone. Ayem threw down her cloak and became the Face-Snaked Queen of the Three in One. Those that looked upon her were overcome by the meanings of the stars.

Under the sea, Seht stirred and brought the army he had been working on in the castles of glass and coral. Clockwork dreughs, mockeries of the Dwemeri war machines, rose up from the seas and took their counterparts back beneath, where they were swallowed forever by the sea.

Red Mountain exploded as the Hortator went too far inside, seeking the Sharmat.

Dwemeri high priest Kagrenac then revealed that which he had built in the image of Vivec. It was a walking star, which burnt the armies of the Triune and destroyed the heartland of Veloth, creating the Inner Sea.

Each of the aspects of the ALMSIVI then rose up together, combining as one, and showed the world the sixth path. Ayem took from the star its fire, Seht took from it its mystery, and Vehk took from it its feet, which had been constructed before the gift of Molag Bal and destroyed in the manner of truth: by a great hammering. When the soul of the Dwemer could walk no more, they were removed from this world.

Resdaynia was no more. It had been redeemed of all the iniquities of the foolish. The ALMSIVI drew nets from the Beginning Place and captured the ash of Red Mountain, which they knew was the Blight of the Dwemer and that would serve only to infect the whole of the middle world, and ate it. ALTADOON DUNMERI!

The beginning of the words is ALMSIVI. I give you this as Vivec.

I watch. I wonder. I build. I tear down.

Am I a god? A surely as any are. Gods have forever to measure their words. Mortals only moments to hear them.

Is the Lord Vivec a god? As surely as I am. Vivec is a poet. Trust not the words of a poet, as he is born to seduce. Yet for poetry to sieze the heart, it must ring with the chimes of truth.

Is the Lady Almalexia a god? As surely as is Lord Vivec. Almalexia is a warrior. Beware the warrior, as her steel may not distinguish friend from foe. But in a true hand, a sharp blade may carve history.

Again you ask, am I a god?

I am Sotha Sil. I am the Mage. I am the Clockmaker.

You ask where my Clockwork City is? Some say in the swamps of Black Marsh. Others claim it is deep in the ground beneath Ebonheart. I have even heard it told that my city is contained within a jar on the Lady Almalexia's mantle. These are all true, and false. My city is where I live, and I live in my city. Its location is unimportant, as I am its only citizen.

The Dwemer were the Dwemer. The Chimer were the Chimer. Now the Dwemer are gone and the Chimer are changed. Azura's words weigh heavy, but we have discussed the words of gods already, have we not?

I am Sotha Sil. I watch. I wonder. I build. I tear down.

i dont know you

Does anyone ELSE have anything to say about these sermons?

I guess you are all beyond saving. gonk

I don't know what to think. I either like it as a hillarious work of fiction that should be taken as a joke philosophical ideal and should be played along with, or if I should gasp in shock and amazement at the truth which has for so long been shielded from my undeserving eyes.