#ruminations

And then I think about how the Hero of Kvatch mantled Sheogorath, the (arguably) youngest of the gods, the one who was inadvertently created by the others and fills in all the spaces between them, who makes life worth living through music and color, who allows and enables the mortal mind to expand past the limits placed upon it by all the others, the only one who believes in free will and is willing to destroy anything to preserve it. And how they had chance after chance to turn back, to give up, but set their feet and held their ground and took the reins of eternity to protect a world that wasn't even theirs.

I think about how Akatosh is a reflection of Anu on the surface of Nirn, and Sheogorath is the Sithis-shaped hole in the world, and I wonder if that's why it turned out like this. If the world was meant to end in the Oblivion Crisis, and the two of them together re-anchored the pillars that support reality by mantling the two mortal-compatible aspects thereof. I wonder if they saved the world in ways they didn't even understand at the time.

I wonder if they know that they're still working together, even now, even if they'll never see each other again. I wonder if they know they're still halves of a whole, a Chosen Two who will never be remembered for what they actually did, only for what they left behind. Martin will only ever be a name he didn't know was his own, Septim, and The Hero will never be anything but their first harrowing battle, Kvatch, losing their own name forever by becoming Sheogorath.