The Foundation of Eglarest is the name given to the opening movement of the Age of Men: the escape of the enslaved Men from the deep city of Darkmoor, their contest for the surface country against the undead and the beast-folk who had filled the vacuum left by the First Impact, and their occupation and renaming of the ruined elven city of Sadril Mora, which became Eglarest, the first city of Men and in time the seat of the Empire. The event is reckoned at year 4E0 in the Imperial calendar, which the Empire begins at the moment of occupation, and the reckoning is not accidental: Men date the world from the day they entered it.

Of the Escape from Darkmoor

The deep city of Darkmoor, known in the tongue of the Dwemer as Avanchnzelf, was the city from which the machine that became the First Impact had torn its way to the surface. Of all the deep cities, Darkmoor was the most ruined in the aftermath of the vanishing: the machine's departure had shattered the mechanisms that governed its great doors, and the passages it had forced open when it broke free could not be sealed again. The Men of Avanchnzelf were the first to walk out, within days of the Dwemer's disappearance, while Men in other cities were still labouring against doors that would not move.

What they emerged into was not a welcoming country. The Oblivion Crisis had deposited its dead across the whole of the eastern seaboard, and the undead that remained after the closing of the gates were numerous and without direction, which made them no less dangerous. Argonian warbands, descended from those the eruption of Mount Ator had displaced from the south, had moved into the same country in the seasons since the disaster and held it as their own. The Men who climbed out of Darkmoor came up into a land already contested, and they were not permitted to cross it unmolested.

They crossed it anyway. The Men of the deep cities had lived their entire lives among the machines and weapons of the Dwemer, and when they left Avanchnzelf they did not leave empty-handed. They carried Dwemer arms and Dwemer armour and, in some accounts, Dwemer weapons whose operation they had learned through long proximity to their captors' work. A people that had spent a thousand years in bondage emerged from the ground armoured in the finest metal the age had produced, and neither the scattered dead nor the Argonian bands that stood in their path were equal to what they met. The march from Darkmoor to the eastern coast is the first military history of Men on Auridon, and it is not a history of retreat.

Of the First Dealings with the Dark Elves

Sadril Mora had been the seat of Almalexia and the administrative heart of Ascalon through the whole of the Merethic Era. By the time Men reached it, the city was abandoned. Its population had fled north in the days of the War of the Black Moon, and the years between had not brought them back. What the Men found when they entered was a city of empty streets and standing architecture, provisioned by no one, contested only by the same scattered undead they had already fought their way through. They occupied it, and they held it, and they waited to see what Ascalon would do but the response was silence.

Queen Barenziah, newly acclaimed by the dissenting cities in the aftermath of the Night of Cinders, sent no envoy, no army, and no demand. For years, the eastern city stood in Men's hands without a word from the elven realm that had built it. The Imperial tradition has always read this silence as contempt: the Dark Elves looked upon the emergence of Men from the deep and saw not a people but an inconvenience beneath acknowledgment, former slaves who had wandered into an abandoned building and would eventually be removed when more pressing matters were settled. The learned scholars of the Imperial Library see in the silence not contempt alone but its more revealing twin, which is assumption: the assumption that Men were not a political fact capable of requiring a response, that they could be reckoned with later.

Of Valen Balerios, King of Men

Valen Balerios, praised be the Crimson King three times Born and three times Dead, was not born to command. The sources of his early life are fragmentary, as the sources of the early Age of Men generally are, but the tradition is consistent that he was a man of the deep cities, born in Avanchnzelf, who had grown to adulthood in bondage and had never stood under an open sky until the day the Dwemer ceased to exist. What he was before that day is not recorded. What he became after it is the foundation of everything that Men on Auridon have built since.

He organised the escape. He directed the march. He chose Sadril Mora. These three acts are the ones the Imperial tradition identifies as the acts of a king, and the tradition is not wrong to do so: a different man in his position might have led the escape and lost the march, or won the march and dispersed at the city's gate, and the Age of Men would have begun differently or not at all. That it began as it did is the consequence of Balerios, and the scholars who have examined the early period most closely have not found a moment in it where a different hand would have produced the same result.

Eglarest, the name his men gave to the city they had taken, was declared a free city of Men at the moment of his occupation of it. The Imperial Library records it as the first political act of the Age of Men, and the scholars who compiled that record understood what they were doing: a people that had never held a city, never named a street, never governed themselves for a single day, stood in the ruins of an elven capital and declared it theirs, and the declaration was not boastful but simply accurate, because no one who might have said otherwise had thought to show up.