The Rise of a War-Chief
Nerevar was born in Resdayn, the Chimer region from which his Tribunal title, the Saint of Resdayn, would later be drawn. His parentage is not preserved, and the house of his birth, if he had one of any standing, is not preserved either. The sources are unanimous that he came up obscure and rose by the field.
He was a war-chief of the early Chimer kingdom while still a young mer, with a record that drew the notice of older commanders before it drew the notice of any noble house. The reputation was earned on the eastern and southern frontiers in the small wars the Chimer fought against the peoples already settled in Morrowind. By the time he met Almalexia, he was a war-chief of growing reputation but obscure birth.
His shield-Companion was Alandro Sul, who fought at his side from the early frontier campaigns to the end of his life. Alandro Sul was the immortal son of Azura by a Chimer mother, and the inheritance from his Princely parent was substantial: he did not age, he did not tire as ordinary mer tire, and the wounds that should have ended him did not. He had refused the inheritance in the only sense that mattered to him, which was to say that he refused the worship his mother might otherwise have expected of her son, and he served Nerevar instead. The proximity of an immortal of Azura's blood to a mortal war-chief over the span of decades is not, in this chronicler's view, a thing without consequence. Whether Nerevar's unequaled talents on the battlefield should be credited to native ability or to the company he kept is a question the sources do not settle.
Alandro Sul gave Nerevar a ring of dwemer making, called Moon-and-Star by which the bearer might be known and could not be impersonated: any hand other than Nerevar's that closed upon the ring would be killed by it. The title Moon-and-Star passed from the ring to the man, and Nerevar bore both ring and title for the rest of his life.
The Marriage to Indoril
Almalexia was a daughter of House Indoril, the highest of the Chimer houses, and the marriage was politically advantageous to both. He brought military reputation to a house that had no proper army of its own. She brought the standing of a ruling line whose claim to Mournhold, the capital, and to the kingdom of Veloth was uncontested.
Through the marriage Nerevar took the name Indoril and the kingship that the house held by inheritance. He was Indoril Nerevar from this point onward, and the kingdom that Almalexia would shortly rename Morrowind was ruled by them as a pair: she from Mournhold, he from the field.
Vivec and Sotha Sil
Two relationships shaped Nerevar's command beyond the marriage, and both predated his elevation to the kingship.
The first was with Vivec. The two met in Mournhold when Vivec was fifteen, a gutter-get of no settled trade, and Nerevar was a young war-chief on the rise. Vivec proposed that he would shave his head and serve as Nerevar's guard with a netch longhook for his weapon, and he then did exactly that. Vivec carried the longhook for many years before he carried any weapon more conventional, kept his head shaved for the rest of his mortal life, and rose under Nerevar's command from guard to field commander. The friendship outlasted the apprenticeship, and Vivec was at Nerevar's side for the remainder of his life.
The second was with Sotha Sil. Nerevar came to him for the refinement of a tactical instinct he already possessed, and Sotha Sil taught him in the period before the Nedic Wars. The same teacher took Vivec on as a student in the same years, and the three were a working unit before any of them had attained the standing they would hold by the end of their lives.
It was Vivec who later coined the title by which Nerevar is now best known. Hortator is the office of a war-leader chosen by acclamation rather than by inheritance, raised by his people to a charge that exceeds the ordinary authority of a king. The Lessons assign the title a cosmological weight as well: the Hortator is the mortal counterpart and necessary opposite of the Sharmat, the false dreamer, and the two recur across the ages in the same antagonism. Nerevar held the office in both senses, by Chimer practice and by the framework Vivec built for him.
The Lessons foretold that Nerevar would return. The prophecies treat the Hortator and the Sharmat as offices that recur across the ages rather than positions occupied once and then closed, and they assign to the Merethic Era two reincarnations of Nerevar himself: first the Nerevarine, and after the Nerevarine the Nerefin. The Sharmat of the same age, against whom both reincarnations would be raised, will be identified as a single figure: the Lich-King.
"The ruling king will remove me, his maker. This is the way of all children. His greatest enemy is the Sharmat, who is the false dreamer. You or he is the shingle, Hortator. Beware the wrong walking path. Beware the crime of benevolence. Behold him by his words."
The Nedic Wars
The greatest war of the marriage was fought against the Nedes, the early human peoples pushing eastward into Morrowind from the western and northern frontiers. Almalexia secured the alliance with the Dwemer and coordinated the war from Mournhold. Nerevar took the field at the head of the Chimer host.
To mark the alliance, Dumac Dwarfking presented a pair of Dwemer blades to the royal couple as wedding-gifts. Nerevar received Trueflame, a longsword whose enchantment burned with the heat of the deep forges. Almalexia received Hopesfire, its twin. The blades were the high accomplishment of Dwemer smithcraft of the period, and Trueflame remained at Nerevar's side from the alliance to the end of his life.
The combined Chimer-Dwemer host repelled the Nedes from the borders of Morrowind in a series of campaigns over the following years. The eastern reaches of the kingdom were safe from human pressure for a span of years, and Nerevar emerged from the war as the established field commander of the Chimer.
The Saint of Resdayn
The closing year of the Elven Wars found the Chimer host pressed back across most of the ground it had earlier won and the encirclement of northern Auridon underway. It was at this point that Vivec proposed the working that the later Tribunal liturgy calls the Saint's Bargain.
The three Sorcerer-Kings would each surrender a portion of their divine power, drawn from the Heart, and concentrate it by a ritual of Vivec's design into a single mortal vessel. The vessel chosen was Nerevar. The choice was unanimous. He accepted knowing what it would cost him: the concentration of that much divine power into a mortal frame would corrupt his body past any healing the three could later offer, and he would not survive the working by long.
The ritual was performed at Tanzelwil, an ancient Aldmer site on Auridon that the Chimer had taken as their forward sanctuary. What emerged from it is what the Tribunal liturgy calls the Saint of Resdayn, the Heavenly Champion.
The First Tribunal judged that the working had raised the stakes past the threshold at which mortal proxies could settle the matter, and the three Princes manifested on Tamriel in person. Mehrunes Dagon, Hircine, and Azura took the field as avatars in flesh, and the closing phase of the war became a direct contest between them and Nerevar. He fought them in a series of engagements across the southern reaches of Tamriel that the geography of the continent could not absorb. The land between Summerset and the rest of Tamriel was sundered by the powers exchanged in those battles, and what had been a peninsula became an archipelago.
The battles culminated at Mount Ator. Nerevar drove Hircine from the field first, Mehrunes Dagon second, and Azura last. Before her banishment, Azura worked one final transformation upon the Chimer host she had been raised to slaughter. She cursed them. Their golden skin was burnt to ash, their eyes lit red as embers, and they became the Dunmer.
Nerevar came down from the summit alive but spent past any recovery. With the last of his strength he raised from the waters off the eastern coast the island of Alqualonde, made his way to it alone, and there laid himself down to die. The Tribunal Temple has maintained, from that day to the present, that Alqualonde is sacred ground and that the Hortator's rest is not to be disturbed. One artifact of his legacy outlasted the body. The Daedric Mask of Terror, fashioned for him in the closing years of his life, depicts the harsher face of the Hortator: not the war-chief of Mournhold or the husband of Almalexia, but the Padomaic champion who broke the avatars of three Princes at Mount Ator. The Mask is held in the Tribunal Temple's keeping, and is shown only on the occasions the Temple judges fit.
