#morrowing

The air was hot and thick with ash, a warm breeze blowing bits of debris into his eyes and nose. Before him stretched the ash wastes - endless, lifeless. Towering before him, dominating the landscape, was the Red Mountain, billowing plumes of smoke. He squinted, looking around, trying to remember what he was doing - why he was here.

Off in the distance ahead of him he saw a figure, walking away from him. Was that the person he’d seen? Had he seen anyone at all? Teldryn took a tentative step forward. The ash was hot beneath his feet. He stumbled forward into a jog, running in the direction of the figure, who remained just out of reach, walking along at a calm pace. The Red Mountain seemed to loom impossibly bigger in front of him, curling forward, blocking the sky. He could see trails of lava rolling down his sides, like white hot veins. Like blood. He was bleeding.

He?

The figure wasn’t getting any closer, even as Teldryn broke into a sprint, pushing himself harder, faster, muscles protesting and lungs burning against the hot smoke and ash. He wanted to call out, but he was afraid to hear his own voice. The Mountain rumbled, a fresh expulsion of molten lava rocketing skywards followed by thick plumes of smoke. So much smoke. He had to make sure Llunela and Ryne were alright. He pushed forward, ducking his head against the smog, shielding his eyes from the heat. Rivers of lava were closing in around him on either side, scorching his legs. The figure was just up ahead; he was closer. Teldryn opened his mouth to call to him only to stumble, pitching forward, too fast to stop himself. Lava rushed up to meet him and he watched with horror as his hands sunk into the molten liquid, his skin melting from his bones.

It didn’t hurt.

Teldryn could only watch as the lava sluggishly engulfed what was left of his arms, his feet, his knees, his thighs. He looked up to see that the figure had turned to watch, still too far away to see clearly. Teldryn closed his eyes as the lava reached his chest. He felt his skin sloughing off his body numbly. The heat was intense, blistering, and he should have been terrified or screaming or at least fighting, but instead he felt overcome with an odd sense of calm. It was familiar. He felt the lava consume his face, pushing into his mouth, filling him.

He opened his eyes.

The heat and ash were gone, vanished. He was sitting upright, legs crossed, as if he were sitting in meditation. The room was black, wall-less, it dimensions stretching endlessly around him. Was it a room? There was a door, so it must be a room.

It was a perfect triangle, standing alone in the center without any support to hold it up. Slowly, Teldryn got to his feet and approached it, one foot in front of the other, careful, precise. His feet felt wet, but the floor was dry. The floor was hot. Steam rose from where he stepped, hissing like snakes. The door was just ahead. There was someone on the other side, also approaching him. He held out his hand and the figure did the same. Lightly, they made contact, fingertips brushing.

It was himself.

It was a mirror.

“Who are you?” they asked in unison.  

“Look,” a voice behind him said.

Teldryn felt every hair on the back of his neck slowly rise, the sensation trickling down his spine and into the soles of his feet. He slowly turned around. A face, two-toned, so very close to his own. A man hovering off the ground, sitting cross-legged in the air. The light jingling of jewelry, bangles hitting one another, like small bells, like a secret ritual. Eyes - so dark and so ancient that he felt a primitive terror rip through his body like a lightning strike. Half golden; half gray. The man smiled. White teeth. Feral. Loving. He reached out with slender fingers, cool to the touch against Teldryn’s burning skin, turning him back around to face the door. Those lovely hands slid across his shoulders, up his neck, across his face, through his hair. He felt his eyes flutter closed, a soft moan escaping his lips. It was terrifying; it was ecstasy.

“Look,” Vivec said into his ear. Teldryn’s eyes snapped open. He looked. His head was guided, cradled between Vivec’s hands, turned sideways, the door tilting, teetering on the edge, about to fall, about to shatter. He only saw himself.

“Wake up.”

Teldryn gasped awake, sitting bolt upright in bed. Aerik startled into consciousness next to him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, panicked hands reaching out in the dark to grab Teldryn’s shoulders. Teldryn was shaking slightly as he looked around the room. Everything seemed to be normal. Then again, so had everything in his dream. It felt so real… To his frustration, on top of being utterly disturbed, he also had an erection.

“Perfect,” he mumbled, rubbing his hands vigorously across his ears. The hearthfire from the great room still cast dim light through their open doorway, though this time it was accompanied by the soft murmur of other voices. His eyes drifted to his copy of the sermons that still sat innocently on the bedside table.

“Tel?” Aerik tried again, sitting up fully beside him, running a warm hand across his back. Teldryn’s mind wandered back to the very real feeling of Vivec’s cool, long fingers against his skin, his lips moving against the shell of his ear. He shuddered, ashamed and aroused. Aerik placed a kiss on his back, pulling gently on his shoulder to get him to lie down.

So as a lot of you know, council-era Voryn Dagoth was much different from Dagoth Ur. Voryn was a pragmatic, caring and quiet mer with this inexplicable warm energy about him. He was a good person, he never tried to take sides in the council and always sought a route with the least deaths. He was also deeply, deeply in love with Nerevar.

So if you told someone he would eventually be a mad nationalist hell-bent on turning the populace into flute-faced horrors, I don’t think anyone would believe you and I personally don’t blame you.

We need to start well before the battle of red mountain and the events of the Heart Chamber. We need to understand that the heart of lorkhan could very easily corrupt people, twist them- whether it be due to a weak will, a strong vice, or… Something else. Going off another theory-- that every shezzarine seems to have an accompanying Dragonborn (Alessia & Pelinal, Hjalti & Zurin), it stands to reason that with two shezzarines-- Nerevar and Wulfharth --There were two Dragonborn individuals-- Who most likely seem to be Almalexia and, you guessed it, Voryn.

There’s a pretty high chance that the un-diluted, prolonged exposure to Lorkhan’s Heart was all kinds of havoc for Voryn’s mind. It tends to throw your qualities and traits way off-proportion, exacerbating insecurities and anxieties, making very deep wishes or ideals rush to the forefront, loud and impossible to ignore. Throw in the idea that as a dragon-blooded mer, all of this came in even more off-kilter as it should have been. He started thinking in dimensions and scales that were impossible to translate. Remember that ALMSIVI had each other to ‘load-bear’ the burden of divinity. Voryn didn’t.

So… Now we have Voryn, left alone in the heart chamber with Lorkhan whispering sweet, insane nothings into his ear. Before Nerevar even returned, the heart was already making it hard for him to think clearly and rationally. All his small, normally rationally-coped-with insecurities were being thrown way out of proportion. His anxieties were suddenly amplified, and they echoed in the silence. What if they just planned to leave him there, what if this was a trap or a plant? What if Nerevar planned to use the tools anyways?

He clearly wasn’t quite well by the time he told Nerevar he wouldn't give the tools back over. He probably looked to be on the verge of, or even between, paranoid breakdowns or panic attacks. Both of them worried the other had had a sudden change of heart, that they had hidden intentions, that they planned to betray the other now.

Neither of them wanted to fight the other for it. They loved each other. Dearly. It started half-hearted, warning jabs and desperate pleas to stop, to give up. The more emotional it got, the more heated the fight grew, without either realizing it. And the stronger Lorkhan’s grip got on Voryn’s head. And before he had even realized what he was doing, Voryn accidentally dealt to Nerevar a likely-mortal wound.

Of course, the trauma response is just about instant. He just killed his love. His Nerevar. His Hortator. He drops the tools in horror and falls back, seeming to succumb- What was probably more of a mix of exhaustion and a mental-breakdown-induced collapse of 'what the hell have I done'. Neht manages to take the tools away from him, and retreat a short ways, where he's found by ALMSIVI. Soon thereafter, he bled out in their solemn company.

“But Asher,” you cry, “Dagoth Ur says that Nerevar betrayed Voryn, not the other way around!”

Thanks for noticing! Trauma, however, is a funny thing. Sometimes when an event is too much to handle, we block out the memory entirely. And other times, our brain changes the details, purposely alters what it is we remember, just because the truth is too much to process. It’s a reaction of “No-- This can’t be what happened. It must have been like this.” So it’s quite likely that after coming to, Voryn’s horrified, Lorkhan-laced mind came up with an idea that certainly, Nerevar had attacked him instead. That’s what that horrible ache in his heart was, the inexplicable distraught tear that went deeper than any of his wounds. That’s why he’d blacked out.