The House of Indoril

Almalexia was born into the highest of the Chimer houses. House Indoril, which claimed descent from Veloth's own line, ruled the city of Mournhold and from Mournhold the broader kingdom that the Chimer of the period called Veloth in honour of their founder. The house had produced kings without interruption since the founding of the kingdom, and it would produce one more in the person of Nerevar, who was Almalexia's husband. But Almalexia herself was Indoril before she was queen, and her standing as a daughter of the ruling house was the foundation upon which everything she built was raised.

She studied healing as a young noblewoman, and she practised it. She sponsored temples in Mournhold were she would cure many patients. The reputation she built in those years was the reputation of a healer-princess, accessible to commoners in a way the rest of her house was not, and prepared to soil her hands with the small cures that her station did not require her to attend to. By the time she met Nerevar, she was loved by the city in a way that mattered politically as well as personally.

The Queen of Mournhold

Almalexia married Nerevar early in her career, before either of them had achieved the standing they would hold by the time of the apotheosis. The marriage was politically advantageous to both: Nerevar was a war-chief of growing reputation but obscure birth, and Almalexia was a daughter of Indoril whose house did not have a proper army at the time, and so the kingdom prospered.

It was during this period that she renamed the land that had been called Veloth since the prophet's pilgrimage to Morrowind, the name it has carried ever since. The change was justified at the time as a recognition that the kingdom had outgrown its founder, and that a name acknowledging the people rather than the prophet would better suit a Chimer who had become a nation.

Two domestic projects of her queenship are worth noting.

The first was the resolution of the House Wars. The Chimer of the early kingdom had carried with them, out of Summerset, a tangle of competing noble houses whose feuds had survived the migration intact. By the early years of Almalexia's queenship there were at least eleven such houses with serious claims to power, and the kingdom was visibly fraying under the weight of their disputes. Almalexia, by a campaign of negotiation, marriage, threat, and on at least three occasions outright assassination, reduced the eleven to five. The five so confirmed, Indoril, Redoran, Hlaalu, Telvanni, and Dres, became the Great Houses of Morrowind, and the political structure she fixed at this time has held with very little alteration through every age since. The houses she eliminated are no longer remembered.

The second project was the institution that Almalexia herself called the House of Mothers, and that everyone outside the institution called the Orphanage. It was housed in a wing of the Indoril palace and it took in the children of the kingdom's poor, the orphans of its wars, and on certain occasions the inconvenient offspring of its nobility. What it did with them is harder to summarise. The children were fed, taught, and cared for. The graduates of the Orphanage went on to fill positions of confidence throughout the kingdom, particularly in the queen's personal retinue, and the loyalty of those graduates to Almalexia personally was infamously unconditional.

The Dwemer Alliance and the Nedic Wars

The greatest external threat of Almalexia's queenship came from the west. The early human peoples called the Nedes, ancestors of the later Nords and of every other human lineage that would matter in subsequent ages, had begun in this period to push eastward in increasing numbers, and their raids on the western and northern frontiers of Morrowind grew over a span of years from a nuisance into a war that the kingdom could not afford to lose alone.

Almalexia's response was to seek an ally where no Chimer monarch had previously thought to look. She opened negotiations with the Dwemer, who had been the Chimer's adversaries for almost the whole of the Daedric Era and who had no obvious reason to come to Morrowind's defence. The negotiations were conducted personally between Almalexia and the Dwemer king Dumac Dwarfking, and they concluded in a formal alliance against the Nedic threat.

To mark the alliance, Dumac presented a pair of Dwemer blades to the royal couple as wedding-gifts, late but, the king said, no less binding for the lateness. Nerevar received Trueflame, a longsword whose enchantment burned with the heat of the deep forges. Almalexia received Hopesfire, its twin, which carried an enchantment of lightning rather than fire and which is said to have shone with a blue light whenever drawn in earnest. The blades were the high accomplishment of Dwemer smithcraft of the period, and they remained with the Triumvirate long after the alliance that produced them had dissolved.

The combined Chimer-Dwemer host repelled the Nedes from the borders of Morrowind in a series of campaigns over the following years. Nerevar took the field at the head of the Chimer; Almalexia coordinated the alliance from Mournhold and personally negotiated the resupply arrangements that kept the Dwemer engineers in the field through the winter campaigns. By the close of the wars, the Nedic incursions had been broken, and the eastern reaches of Morrowind were safe from human pressure for a span of years that the chronicler will not commit to a number.

The alliance did not survive the peace. The reasons it dissolved are the subject of the Elven Wars.

The Apotheosis

The proposal that Almalexia, Vivec and go to the Red Tower was Vivec's, and the working that drew upon the Heart was Sotha Sil's, but the agreement of Almalexia was not a small thing, and what she contributed to the apotheosis was different in kind from what either of the others contributed: she made the project bearable to its participants, and she made it presentable to its subjects, therefore creating the foundations upon which ALMSIVI would build their doctrine.