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True power, Niamh writes in a precise, neat script, is having power and knowing when not to use it.
Her cloak is made of Morrowind blight moth silk, light and very warm. The cold here, in her rooms high in the College of Winterhold, is brutal. It bites straight through Niamh as if she is not quite solid or real. She draws her cloak tighter around herself as she pauses for thought.
There are stahlrim weapons on the walls, and a set of Morag Tong armor on a stand in the corner, and her robes are Telvanni and the bone pins that are her only concession to keeping her hair in place and looking presentable are Skaal. Her relics from Solstheim are all over the little room. Her relics from all of her travels are everywhere. There are soul gems on the floor. The staff gathering dust in the corner is the Skull of Corruption. The rusted mace on the chest is that of Molag Bal. The room is a mess of clutter.
There are no books on the shelves.
There are no books on the shelves, except for books that bleed black and a heavy tome bound in human skin.
Niamh dips her quill in the ink and continues.
It is said, she writes, that the essential difference between Aedra and Daedra is that the former can create and the latter cannot. Daedra, it is said, can only destroy; this is one of the main tenants of the theory that the Aedra are “good” and the Daedra “evil.” Upon closer inspection, this premise is curiously fragile, for the same theorists also put forth that the Aedra and their created world are essentially unchanging while the Daedra and their realms are in constant flux. Might it be more accurate to say that the Aedra create externally to compensate for the stagnancy of their internal selves, while the Daedra’s creations are the constant recreation and reinvention of self?
What, then, do we do with deities like Sithis who is at once Chaos and Creator? (This is the subject of several further theses).
What do we do with the so-called Daedra who do not change?
I am thinking of Hermaeus Mora, who (excepting certain Nordic myths) always appears in a few set forms.
I am thinking of His realm of Apocrypha, where the wild fires of change and chaos would be catastrophic, where all knowledge is jealousy kept and locked away in stasis for all eternity.
*****
The first time she meets him, he takes her to her knees.
The ground of Apocrypha is soft. Her hands sink into the damp soil, and in a moment of clarity as the lightning skitters down her spine she can see that each grain of dust upon her fingers is a tiny rune or letter or sign; that her hands are coated in the dust of forgotten languages. It will be difficult, when she awakes, to wash this dust from her hands.
Niamh bites her lip and doesn’t cry out as the lightning burns though muscle and bone.
“Who are you?” Miraak demands. He steps up before her. His robes are filthy with slime. He doesn’t seem quite real, quite solid, and Niamh can’t tell if this is because she is too much in the realm of Nirn or if he is too much in the realm of Apocrypha where only ideas are solid.
“Dragonborn,” she gasps.
“I see that.” He mutters her name under her breath, though she has not given it. “I sent my servants to kill you,” he says. “That you have survived…”
He could kill her now, easily. She is sick with that expectation.
He doesn’t.
*****
Hermaeus Mora is, perhaps, unique among the Daedric Princes, Niamh writes. We can confidently say that He is stronger than the rest of them. He is the greatest of them. Consider that even the legendary Champion of Cyrodiil could not meet with Him until they had paid their dues to all of the other Daedric Princes and come into their full power.
Hermaeus Mora is a jealous deity, she writes. He does not manipulate like His sister-brother, Mephala, who twists the silken threads of fate. He catalogues and hoards. There is a dragonish element about Him.
*****
She loves the Black Books.
Neloth warns her that they will drive her mad; but Neloth has been mad for decades, if he was ever sane, and his perspective is warped. Niamh has played servant to Sheogorath and walked in His realm of madness. Apocrypha is not madness. Apocrypha is a library, greater than anything she has ever dreamed of. She can pluck knowledge from the very walls. There is knowledge worked into the air, the floor, the sky. There are deep pools of knowledge, and knowledge coiled upon itself, and everything she could ever wish to know is here.
Niamh spends her days in Solstheim in tombs and ruins and ash-swept plains, mace in hand and magic singing all around her. The battles she fights are just like any other battles. Required. Ordinary. There is a quest here, and a world to be saved, and dozens of people who have heard of her and her blood and her voice and who need her to be a hero for them, and she plays the part well enough. It is what is expected. It is nothing new.
At night, she curls up in bed (in Raven Rock, in Thirsk, in the Skaal village, in Tel Mithryn where the walls hum and breathe), and she reads.
How she reads.
She pulls The Doors of Oblivion off Neloth’s shelves one evening, a break for reading in the midst of the reading, and laughs when it falls open to a certain page. “I feel like I am home now,” says the character of the elder mage, as he walks between the endless shelves of Apocrypha. “I must learn more!”
*****
It is said that dragons and dragonborn are essentially power-hungry; that their master passion is to overcome and destroy. Having spoken with Miraak, the First Dragonborn, I can confidently say that this opinion has not changed for thousands of years. Dragons, in the mind of all people across all times, are very Daedric in their desires.
(If this is uniformly true, it raises unpleasant questions about the Greybeards’ vaunted passivity and Paarthurnax in his so-called peaceful meditation upon the Throat of the World. Again, this is the subject of another thesis).
As the so-called Last Dragonborn, I wish to amend the accepted theory a little.
I do not believe that the master passion of all dragons and their kin is to overcome.
I believe that it is to possess.
This is where the similarities to Hermaeus Mora, the Unchanging Daedra, begin to become clear.
*****
Miraak is always just ahead of her. Niamh isn’t quite sure why she can sense him all through Apocrypha. It might be because of their shared dragon blood; it might be because she knows the power of words and titles in a place like this, and when he called them the First Dragonborn and the Last Dragonborn it spun a silken thread of fate between them a strong as any chain.
(“Fate is a weaving,” Niamh mutters to herself, as she takes notes on blight moths and ancestor moths and Elder Scrolls from a book that is as large as a shield. “Mephala spins it and plucks and re-makes it. Her brother hangs in upon the wall and knows the backside of the weave.” It makes more sense than it should).
Miraak is here, in Apocrypha. Always. Niamh isn’t sure if she’s chasing him or chasing the secrets that he knows, the Words of Power that he can manifest as armor over his skin.
She wants to stop him. She wants to speak to him as well. She wants to learn.
The second time they meet, he takes her to her knees, and the Words of Power hum around his glove and against her skin as he grabs her chin in his hand and makes her look at him. “Why are you still here?” he snaps. “The souls of every creature on this island are mine. Solstheim is mine. I have more power than you can dream of in your little mortal mind, and my master is stronger than you can imagine. Leave. There is nothing you can do.”
His voice twists on master, ugly, and Niamh smirks up at him despite the lingering pain of his lightning searing at her nerves.
“You’re his puppet, then?” she challenges. “His slave?”
Miraak strikes her across the face, and his half-real dragonscale gauntlets tear open her skin. The blood soaks into the ground and fills it with the knowledge of her.
“His servant,” he snaps. “But not for long.”
Niamh smiles.
The sky rumbles, tilts, pages swirling in the air and then falling to the floor in new patterns. Something stirs in the deep. Apocrypha is a realm of secrets; but there are no secrets from the master of Apocrypha, and Miraak shoves her down and turns to go with shoulders tight from fear.
*****
Dragons and Daedra both are possessive, vain, jealous, guarded, desiring to have mastery over all things. However, they do not particularly desire to do anything with this mastery. They desire knowledge and power for their own sake. They are creatures of patience and gathering.
They make fierce masters, poor servants, and exceptionally poor slaves.
*****
She finds herself on her knees, again, but before Miraak can speak she poses a question of her own.
“Why haven’t you killed me?” she gasps. “It would be easy. You tried once before.”
Miraak growls, dragonish and low. “I no longer wish to.”
“Why?” Niamh levers herself off her hands. Stands. Eyes him across a distance that is no greater or less than the reach of her mace or his magic. If either of them wished to kill the other, now, they would at least have a very good shot at it. “I will stop you. I’ve freed your thralls. I’m winding my way toward the Summit of this realm where you stand in your full power. Your plan to escape back to the mortal world and escape Him is unraveling, Miraak, and you’re letting me do it.”
“Of course I am.”
*****
If Hermaus Mora’s sister-brother is the one who twists and unravels the threads of fate, Niamh writes, He is the one who preserves them and stitches them back together.
Consider: there can be no true void in the world. The void that is the breaking of Akatosh shakes existence to its very core. Consider that in unmaking Talos, the Thalmor seek to erase the paper-thin world that is our existence and re-write time into a shape of their choosing wherein the mer never sundered from the divine and there is no possibility of mankind. To unbalance Mundus is to shatter it.
Consider that Akatosh is perfectly counterbalanced by his brother-son-aspect Alduin. Sheogorath cannot exist without Jyggalag. Consider that when the Tribunal fell, the Reclamations smoothly stepped into the emptiness they left behind.
We live on a set of scales, and the forward and back of the tapestry have equal say in our fates. One thing cannot vanish without another thing rising to take its place.
This is true Mantling.
*****
The dragon crashes to earth in front of her – and he is there, standing, sunlight glancing off the half-imagined spikes of his summoned armor. Niamh gets shakily to her feet. Her muscles scream, and her mace has fallen from her hands, and she is drained of all her magic and the world is swimming before her, slightly tilted – this must be a hallucination, this has to be a hallucination. Miraak cannot manifest in the waking world. Not yet. Hermaeus Mora will not allow him.
“No,” he agrees (because they have spoken in the Realm of Knowledge and so he knows her and all her thoughts), “I cannot. Not until I have grown in power and found an equal power to take my place.”
He doesn’t look real. Niamh can see trees and stones behind him, through his armor and through his impassive mask. He is all the shifting light of sunlight on water, colors only, no solid lines. He’s not really here. He is too much in the realm of Apocrypha. She is still too much in the realm of Nirn.
The flesh of the dead dragon withers away, and it soul siphons off and flows down the plain toward the First Dragonborn and away from the Last. Miraak consumes it whole. Niamh tries to tell herself that she’s only imagining the way his form seems to resolve itself and become a shade more real.
She tries to tell herself that she’s only imagining the void in her chest where this dragon’s soul is supposed to sit, the way she feels so very empty.
Miraak is laughing at her. “You are nothing,” he says, and she feels the words catch and tear and ring true in that hollowness in her chest.
“I can see through you,” Niamh challenges. “If I’m nothing, what does that make you?”
He laughs aloud. “Equal,” he announces. Crows it to the air, with the certainty of someone who’s plans are roaring toward completion. Before she can move, shout, ask, learn, he vanishes. Back to Apocrypha.
Niamh is so very tired. Her armor is battered and smeared with soot, there’s ash in her red hair, some of her hair has frizzled short, there’s blood soaking into her clothes under her armor and it hurts to move, to breathe, to be. It will hurt, even, to summon the Restoration magic she needs to heal herself. She should drag herself to the nearest town, fall into bed, recover and sleep a dreamless sleep. She should allow herself to be human.
Her hands shake, a bit, as she pulls the Black Book from her pack, and she throws it open as if its words are air and she is drowning.
*****
Hermaeus Mora is a jealous and stubborn being. Of all the Daedra, He is perhaps the most likely to resist change. His nature is to gather all things toward him and give only grudgingly in return (for the knowledge that He gives is only a lure that entices His followers back into His realm and sway). If one wishes to leave His service, therefore, one must be willing to provide an equal or greater replacement.
*****
She runs through miles upon miles of shelves that grow more real with every step.
It’s hard to keep moving. She wants nothing more than to stop and read. There are such books here. There are such things she could learn. She has all of time and eternity at her fingertips. With the words that are written here she could resurrect the Dwemer, topple the Thalmor, twist the magic twining around White-Gold Spire and bring her beloved Empire to a golden age, crumble Red Mountain, reduce Alduin to a mere speck and a nothing, gain power in a way that the Tribunal never dreamed and become a Tenth Divine. She can break the Dragon and the World and re-shape them to her whim. She could do all these things, and can – if only she could tear herself away from the books and the need to learn more and more and more.
There is an emptiness in her chest where the souls of so many dragons and the knowledge of so many secrets is supposed to sit, and in gathering those souls to him Miraak has tethered her to him like a fish on a line.
She runs. He is always just ahead of her. She climbs higher.
“You are nothing,” Miraak calls, standing on the other side of a bottomless pit. The tentacles of the master of this place rise and writhe around him. They do not harm him, because he belongs here; they lunge toward Niamh, because this is a test, because there is knowledge of her to be gained from her failure or her success. Miraak watches her evade them, impassively. “When you discovered you were dragonborn, what did you do?”
“I researched,” Niamh shouts. “I went straight to the College of Winterhold and I learned everything I could about what it meant –”
“And you did nothing.”
“I studied. I learned.”
She catches a tentacle with lightning, burns it with fire, watches it break apart and shatter into dust. Each grain of dust is a word. She can pull sentences from the air, entire languages, such secrets.
“You are no true dragon,” Miraak sneers. “You have hoarded your power and done nothing. Alduin lives because you research ways to defeat him and do not act upon your knowledge. I am the one who should be a god in the world of Nirn. You will be a better prisoner here than I could ever be.”
*****
I have been criticized for my lack of action against Alduin, Niamh writes, as the tower shakes with the thrum of dragon wings outside. But the only way to defeat an enemy is to know him.
The only way to accomplish anything is to first know precisely what you are doing.
Alduin is eternal. He can wait. My research is never done. I see no problems with stasis, lack of action, hoarding of knowledge. I am working toward a goal that has no end in sight, because the day that time ends is the day the Dragon’s back breaks again and all we love is thrown down in a tempest of unknowing; I am in no hurry to reach that eternal day.
To return to my original point:
It is essential to understand that Miraak’s failure, as Dragonborn, was twofold. His first failure was a failure of scope. He wished to raise himself to a tyrant and minor god among men. If he had taken full advantage of the secrets available to him during his eons spent in Apocrypha, he would have realized that he could have become so much more.
His second failure was a failure of understanding. Miraak’s underlying desire was rulership. This is not the purpose of a dragon, nor the purpose of a true servant of Hermaeus Mora. He was an unfit vessel. He could never have reached his full potential.
*****
The eyes of Hermaeus Mora are uncountable – one great, dark eye nested in a sea of smaller ones, an endless abyss of them. Niamh stands upon the Summit of Apocrypha and is transfixed by His manifold gaze.
He sees her.
“My Lord,” Miraak calls, with the smallest of bows toward this wretched abyss in the sky, “I have brought you a new servant.”
“I see,” says Hermaeus Mora. “You desire to leave this place. If she desires to learn, it is an agreeable exchange.”
“If?” Miraak echoes, incredulous. “If?”
He sees her, thousands upon thousands of eyes, sees through her as if she is not solid or real. Under the scrutiny of that gaze, Niamh falls to her knees. Her hands sink into the soft soil. She licks her lips.
“My Lord,” she says. “We’ve spoken before. You gave me your Oghma Infinitum.”
“As Vaermina gave you her Skull, and Sanguine his Rose, and Mephala my sister-brother her Blade, and Molag Bal the Mace that you wield, and Azura the Star that nestles close to your heart. And many others of my kin besides. You have championed Aedra and Daedra alike, but you are not known to them. What is it you want?”
She nods at Miraak, who is looking more solid by the minute as her own hands fade and sink deeper into the wretched earth. “To stop him.”
“No.”
Apocrypha is a realm of secrets, but there are no secrets from the master of Apocrypha.
Niamh begins to scream.
*****
It is said that Hermaeus Mora is the one who holds the Paper to Light, who guards the truth of all things, who sees more clearly than all other creatures in Mundus or beyond it.
To be seen by Him is to be known by Him.
To be known by Him is to be fixed forever in His grasp, unchanging, ink upon the eternal page of our existence. The Elder Scrolls speak of fixed points and beings that have no fate. True stasis in the shifting fabric of time. To be a servant of Hermaeus Mora is to be such a being.
I wish to make it clear that this is not servitude or slavery. In truth, this is the highest aspiration that a seeker of true power can reach. For there is nothing without exchange, and so to be known by Hermaeus Mora is to know Him in turn. To know Hermaeus Mora is, in addition, to know all things that could and have and will ever be.
To be a true servant of Hermaeus Mora is to have power over the Elder Scrolls themselves. Not to use them. Not to rule. Not to destroy. To possess and to do nothing is the greatest power of all.
Miraak could never dream of such a glory.
*****
He sees her.
Tentacles burst from the water, from the earth between her fingers. She is transfixed like an insect in a collection, and the Daedra’s gaze is a spyglass focusing on the sun.
There are no secrets here.
There are times that Niamh has run through Apocrypha with both arms outstretched, fingers just skating over the spines of books on either side of the halls. Laughing. As each title brushes under her fingers, she knows it. Everything she touches can be hers. This, with the fingers of Hermaeus Mora licking over her skin, is the same.
She screams until one and then many of them take her mouth and she can scream no more. It’s not because it hurts. It’s like being flayed open.
Hermaeus Mora is in her mouth, down her throat; he is coiled between her splayed fingers and splayed limbs and down between her legs, he tongues each knob of her spine, he peels away her skin and reaches between her ribs. There is knowledge, here, inside the marrow of her bones, the hollow of her lungs, her blood. She’s not sure if it’s her skull that cracks, or her mind.
He’s inside all the corners of that, too.
She cries out with the wonder of it.
It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t hurt. He takes her apart, and she does not die. He puts her back together, and she does not die. She can see, out of the corner of her eye, that Miraak is standing off to the side and watching with his arms crossed; she can’t see behind his mask, but the Daedra is inside her mind and things like sight aren’t important. She is a better servant of Hermaeus Mora than Miraak could ever be, and he knows this, and the triumph and contempt upon his face are as plain to her as if he wears no mask at all.
It doesn’t stop.
Even when it does, it doesn’t stop.
She’s on her knees when He releases her, panting, and she’s not sure if what she’s breathing is air or ink or blood. It doesn’t matter. The ground beneath her is at once terribly false and terribly solid, and it doesn’t matter. She is acutely aware that the soil beneath her fingers belongs to just a sliver of a single paper-thin plane of Oblivion, but it doesn’t matter, because in this plane she can study all the world.
She doesn’t need to look up at the Daedra in the sky to see that He is pleased.
“Sheogorath will ask for you in time,” he says. “But for now you are mine, I think.”
A tear slides down her cheek; but Niamh doesn’t get to understand why, because a stray tentacle licks it from her skin and takes the truth of that tear before she does.
“And?” says Miraak, impatient. Faintly sneering. They have both almost forgotten that he is there. “Is she suitable? Is it a fair exchange?”
“She is.”
Miraak squares his shoulders. “I am free, then,” he announces. “Take Your new servant. You have no more need of me.”
“Likewise,” Hermaeus Mora murmurs.
Niamh can feel it when the tentacle spears through the First Dragonborn’s heart. She is the tentacle. She is the heart. She is the pages that spatter with his blood. She can know everything.
*****
I do not believe that Miraak was always such a disappointment to Him. Somewhere in the stacks of Apocrypha, there exists a tome written in his blood and brains and bound with his hair and skin. It explains all the truth of him. He was a lover of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, once; elsewise he would never have sought the Daedra of Knowledge out.
I must learn where and why he strayed. I must not repeat his mistakes.
I have explained before how, in naming us the First and the Last of the Dragonborn, Miraak bound the two of us. I doubt he realized what this did. There is much he did not realize. In making himself a stranger to Apocrypha, he forgot that the realm would no longer love him.
There can be no void in the world. The First Dragonborn’s death has tipped the scale, and I must exist both as myself and as the place that he once filled, the scion of Hermaeus Mora that he wished me to be.
If I could choose one realm – but you tell me. Which holds the sweeter secrets? The world of dragons devouring the sky, where my tongue can only speak one language and crudely shout another? Or the world where I can touch a mote of dust in the library air and hold an entire language at my fingertips? How can you blame me for rising to this?
The scratching of the quill stops.
Niamh huddles back in her chair and draws her cloak tighter around herself. It is cold, high in the College of Winterhold, with no one left to come and visit her. The College has been abandoned for dozens or thousands of years.
There are relics of the waking world all around her little room, and dragon wings beating the air outside, but Niamh cares for none of them. There are no books upon the walls. She can see past the walls to all the books she will ever need.
Her cloak is warm. Still, she shivers. The cold winter air passes through her. So does the firelight. She is not quite solid, not quite real. The words of Apocrypha are inked into her fingertips, her bones, the freckles on her skin, the air she breathes. She is a paper held to light, words shining through forward and back, all her secrets illuminated and writ upon His pages.