A Note on the Sources

The early life of Vivec is the most contested of any figure in the Daedric Era. The chronicler has been able to assemble two distinct traditions, each fully developed and each in apparent contradiction with the other, and the literature on how to reconcile them is older than most kingdoms.

The first is the mundane account, preserved chiefly in scattered Chimer biographies of the period and in the recollections that Vivec himself is said to have shared in private with Sotha Sil and with Almalexia. It treats Vivec as a Chimer of obscure birth who rose by merit and chance to the position from which the apotheosis became possible.

The second is the account preserved in the 36 Lessons of Vivec, the long mystical text that Vivec himself wrote, or dictated, or otherwise caused to come into being after his apotheosis. The Lessons treat his early life as a sequence of cosmic events involving Princes, Demiprinces, primordial spirits, and at least one transformation that no ordinary biology can accommodate. They are first-person, and they are by far the more famous of the two accounts.

This chronicle will give both, and it will not pretend to choose between them. A small concluding section will address the question of how, if at all, they can be reconciled.

The Mundane Account

In the mundane account, Vivec was born in the Chimer kingdom of Resdayn to a netchiman named Irdri and his wife Berahzic. A netchiman is a hunter of netches, the great floating beasts of the ash wastes, and the trade is among the most dangerous a Chimer can practise and among the least respected. The boy went into the trade with his father at an early age. He was eleven, the sources agree, when he first sang at the funeral of an ashkhan, and the singing was apparently of a quality that someone troubled to remember it.

The mundane Vivec did not remain a netchiman. He left his village young, by routes the sources do not preserve, and he made his way to the Chimer capital of Mournhold, where he lived for a time as what the Chimer of the period called a gutter-get: a homeless youth of no settled trade, surviving on whatever opportunities the city offered. It was in this period that he met Indoril Nerevar, then a young war-chief on the rise, and proclaimed, with the kind of confidence that a Chimer of fifteen and no possessions can afford, that he would shave his head and serve as Nerevar's guard with a netch longhook for his weapon.

What is striking about this story, and what argues for its substantial truth, is that Vivec did exactly that. He served Nerevar. He carried a netch longhook for many years before he carried any weapon more conventional. He shaved his head, and he kept it shaved for the rest of his mortal life. The promise of a gutter-get to a war-chief became the foundation of one of the central friendships of the Daedric Era.

It was during these early years of service to Nerevar that Vivec was at hand for the burning of Ald Sotha, and pulled the boy Sotha Sil from the wreckage. The mundane account does not embellish the rescue. Vivec happened to be near the town, by Nerevar's business or by his own, and he reached the survivor before any other mer did. He raised the boy thereafter, in the loose and improvised way a Chimer guard could raise a charge while still on duty, and the bond formed in those years held through every subsequent bond either of them would form.

By the time of the apotheosis, Vivec had risen from gutter-get to one of Nerevar's most trusted field commanders, and from field commander to a strategist whom Sotha Sil himself was prepared to teach. The proposal that the three of them go to the Red Tower was Vivec's. The mundane account holds that he was the one who first reasoned that the Heart of Lorkhan could be drawn from, and the one who persuaded the other two to come along. It is a remarkable career for a netchiman's son, and the more remarkable for being told entirely without recourse to spirits.

The Account in the 36 Lessons

The Lessons tell a different story.

In their account, Vivec was never strictly born. Ayem, who is Almalexia, came to a netchiman's wife in her village and told her that she carried within her an image of Vivec, who would be Ayem's brother and sister both. Ayem then threw the woman into the sea, where she was taken by the dreughs into castles of glass and coral. The dreughs gave her gills and other organs that the chronicler will not describe in detail, gave her their 'milk' and changed her sex sufficiently that she might give birth to the image as an egg rather than as a child. She remained beneath the water for some seven or eight months.

Seht, who is Sotha Sil, came to her there. He named himself the Clockwork King of the Three in One, confirmed that the egg she now carried was an egg of his brother-sister, and instructed her to nurture it until the coming of the Hortator, by which is meant Nerevar. He then raised her back to the surface and set her on the shore of what later ages would call Azura's Coast. She lay there a further seven or eight months, whispering to the egg the Codes of Mephala, the prophecies of Veloth, and the forbidden teachings of Trinimac.

The egg-Vivec was visited, in this period, by eight Daedra called the Barons-of-Move-Like-This and their leader, the Demiprince Fa-Nuit-Hen. They taught the egg motions and fighting styles, and at last the great secret of the Unmixed Conflict Path, which Vivec is said to have understood fully only after a prolonged hallucination upon Premeditated Modesty. Fa-Nuit-Hen also told the netchiman's wife the road by which she might find the Hortator, in the lands of House Indoril.

The journey that followed was likewise interrupted by spirits. The most consequential of these was the Daedric Prince Mephala, who came to the egg directly. The Lessons claim that Vivec, in this encounter, recognised Mephala as a previous form of himself, and that the egg and the Prince merged on the recognition, taking each other's secrets into a single entity. The Chimer Vivec who emerged from the egg, the Lessons hold, is not separate from Mephala but the same being in a different posture, and every act of his subsequent life proceeds from that fusion.

The journey was further interrupted by Dwemer, who killed the netchiman's wife and attempted to study the egg. They were unable to make sense of it, and Vivec, from within the egg, vexed them with what the Lessons call a rumination on love. The Dwemer eventually placed the egg inside a constructed simulacrum of the netchiman's wife, an animuncula in her shape, and sent the simulacrum on its way. The simulacrum failed and fell some distance from the lands of Indoril, where it and the egg were found by a passing merchant caravan. Nerevar happened to be travelling with the caravan at the time. Vivec placed a message in his head, partly metaphor and partly direct, that moved Nerevar to slay the caravan's captain and take command of the caravan himself. The caravan thus reorganised proceeded to the Indoril capital, where Ayem and Seht were waiting. Vivec at last emerged from the egg. The three were together, and Nerevar was named Hortator.

The chronicler will not pretend to summarise the Lessons more closely than this. They are a long text, written by their subject for purposes the chronicler does not understand, and a paraphrase of any single section produces nonsense by the time it reaches the next. The reader who wishes to take the Lessons seriously is referred to the text itself.

On the Reconciliation of the Two Accounts

The natural reading of these two accounts is that one of them is true and the other is false. The mundane account, on this reading, is the actual life of an unusually capable netchiman's son, and the Lessons are the post-apotheosis self-mythologising of a god who wished his origin to be more interesting than it had been. Most outsiders take this view. So, privately, do many Chimer.

A more interesting reading has been developed by certain scholars of the Tribunal Temple, and the chronicler raises it here without endorsement. The reading proposes that the apotheosis at the Red Tower was not merely an elevation in power but a working that affected time itself, and that a sufficient apotheosis can therefore propagate backward, rewriting the early life of the person who undergoes it. On this reading, both accounts are true.

The Apotheosis

Under the teachings of Sotha Sil, Vivec learned how to develop his magical powers. One day, during a training trip in the lands east of Resdayn, he felt the aura of the Heart at the foot of the Red Tower, and a seed was planted in his mind. He grew obsessed with an idea, and recognised he needed help. He needed the expertise of an older master of the magical arts, and he needed someone who could help him gain enough social traction to actually be allowed to approach the Heart, and to be seen as a hero for it. So he asked Sotha Sil and Almalexia to be his partners. And so the three travelled to the Red Tower together to perform a secret ritual that the chronicler will not attempt to describe, because no honest source describes them.

The three came down from the Tower as gods.

The Pomegranate Banquet

The first act of the Triumvirate as gods is recorded as the assault on Coldharbour. The Lessons hold that Molag Bal, the Prince of Domination, having heard of Vivec's poetry in the years before the apotheosis and become preoccupied with it in the way only a Prince can become preoccupied with a thing, sent for him after the apotheosis with an offer of marriage. And so Vivec went to Coldharbour and received Molag Bal there in a manner that surprised the Prince and that the chronicler will not attempt to summarise.

Vivec asked for a ceremony. Molag Bal caused pomegranates to spring all over Morrowind, and a group of Chimer mystics arrived as if by appointment to read the appropriate scriptures over the union. This event is what the Lessons call the Pomegranate Banquet.

Vivec then explained that he could not remain whole for the duration of the proceedings, as he had wisdom yet to impart to Nerevar, and that Molag Bal could have his head only for an hour. The Prince accepted these terms. Before Vivec's head departed, Vivec spoke two poems to the Lord of Domination, and the Prince taught him in return a single new word, CHIM, which the Lessons call the secret syllable of royalty.

The two then consummated the marriage. The Lessons describe a union of considerable duration: Vivec's body lay with Molag Bal for eighty-eight days, during which time the Prince filled Vivec's feet with Daedra blood. The location of the consummation, the Lessons add, was the place later known as Bal Ur, in Vvardenfell, said by Dunmer scholars to be the birthplace of Molag Bal himself, where Lorkhan had once tricked the Prince into becoming briefly mortal in a far older age.

Vivec's head, in the meantime, found its way to Nerevar's council and discussed at length the matters that had to be discussed. When the head returned to the body, after the eighty-eight days, Vivec found his body tenderly used. He pointed this out, and Molag Bal answered that his love had been accidentally shaped like a spear. Vivec bit new words onto the spear so it could do more than ruin. The Chimer, demons, and monsters who had been watching the proceedings imitated the biting upon their own spears, which caused the earth to crack and gave rise to a new race of biters whose nature was destruction.

Vivec, having learned a secret from the biting, named his own newly bitten spear Muatra, also called the Milk-Taker, whose touch would render any creature barren and reduce them to bone.

He then turned on Molag Bal. The Prince was thrown into the crack the biters had opened, and through it banished from Nirn. Vivec then hunted down the biters with Muatra, and destroyed them and their progeny, and the event was concluded.