Early Life and Apprenticeship

Numilus was born in Lindon, the city upon which Kortirion was built, in the second millenia of the Merethic Era to a family of minor standing whose name has not been preserved. He came of age in the period when the exchange of research between Lindon and Tel-Aruhn was the chief intellectual traffic of the southern realm, and in his early adulthood he was sent north as part of that exchange to study under Sotha Sil directly.

How long he remained at Tel-Aruhn is not known, nor is the substance of what was taught to him. The records of the Sorcerer-King's apprentices were never kept publicly, and Numilus himself in later life spoke of the period only in passing. What is known is that when he returned to Ulumbra he carried with him a working understanding of the engines that drove the mechanical constructions of Sotha Sil's workshops, and that he set about adapting that understanding to a problem the Tribunal had no interest in: the crossing of the sundered seas.

The Engines and the Western Expeditions

Numilus' innovation was to apply the engine model of the Clockwork constructions to the propulsion of ships. The vessels he built at Lindon did not depend on sail or oar alone, and they could hold a course against the unsettled currents of the western sea in a way that the older Aldmeri ships could not. The technical details have not survived in any form that later shipwrights could reconstruct, and Auridian sailing in the ages after his death reverted to the sail.

He led a series of expeditions westward from Lindon in attempt to reach the Summerset mainland. Each voyage carried a chronicler among the crew, and the accounts they produced were deposited in the Lindon archives during Numilus' lifetime. The archives were not destroyed when the city was taken by humans and refounded as Kortirion, and the records are believed to remain somewhere in the city to this day, though no modern scholar has produced them.

From what is preserved in later citation, the crews recorded encounters with sea monsters of several kinds, and at least one account describes Maormer serpent-riders sighted from a distance and not engaged. On one expedition Numilus himself claimed to have had the cliffs of Summerset in sight before weather drove him back.

He never made landfall on the mainland. No expedition of his returned with proof of crossing, and the question of whether any of his ships ever actually closed the distance was one that the chroniclers of Ulumbra debated for the rest of the realm's existence without resolution. Nevertheless his engines gave the Altmer of Auridon their first credible hope of reaching their severed kin, and he was acclaimed as a hero in Ulumbra during his lifetime.

Death and Legacy

Numilus died at sea in the course of his final expedition. His ship was caught in a storm west of Lindon and capsized, and neither the vessel nor its crew were recovered.

His reputation outlived him. He is credited in the surviving Ulumbran chronicles as the founder of Auridian shipbuilding and navigation, and the title has carried into the modern era, though most of what he actually built has not. Topal, the Altmer explorer who reached the moon Seconda by airship of his own design and who afterwards led the Altmer of Auridon back to Summerset, named Numilus as his inspiration and spiritual mentor.

Among modern human sailors of the Auridian coast a legend of Numilus is still kept. According to this tradition, any ship that attempts to sail north or south past the coastlines occupied by Lordran settlements will be visited by Numilus as a sea spirit, who will haunt the vessel until it turns back to safer waters. Sailors who suffer accidents at sea commonly attribute them to him. The chronicler notes the tradition without comment on its substance.