The Conditions of the Late Daedric Era
By the final centuries of the Daedric Era, the Chimer of Veloth had ceased to be a small splinter of the Altmer and returned to Summerset having grown in numbers and in wealth, a rival civilisation in their own right. The kingdom that Almalexia had renamed Morrowind had absorbed the gains of the Nedic Wars, the resolution of the House Wars had given it a stable political architecture, and the alliance with the Dwemer had given it access to their unmatched engineering.
Within Auridon, which was the eastern region of Summerset, the question of the Chimer divided the population sharply. To one part of Altmer society, the Triumvirate were heretics whose apotheosis had been a theft, whose rejection of Azura was an insult to the patron of the Altmer line, and whose growing presence on the region threatened to displace, in time, the proper inheritors of the Dawn. To another part, almost as numerous and considerably louder in the cities, the three Sorcerer-Kings were proof that mortals need not remain the dependents of the Princes forever. The teachings the Triumvirate sent north through their missionaries were teachings of mercy, of healing, of craft, and of the dignity of a mer who had answered to no Prince in nearly a thousand years. To Altmer who had grown weary of the long arrangement of the First Tribunal, the Chimer doctrine offered something that the older order had stopped offering long before: a future in which a mer might choose her own gods, or none.
The Veiled Heritance
It is in this context that the Veiled Heritance emerged. It was, in its earliest form, a small society of Altmer nobles who held that the racial purity of the Altmer was the foundation of every other thing the Altmer had ever valued, and that the spread of Chimer doctrine within Summerset was the mechanism by which that purity would be lost. The society took its name from the practice of meeting beneath veils, both literal and figurative: its membership was secret, its councils were held in private, and its public face for many decades was nothing more than a handful of pamphlets circulated in the markets of Alinor.
The society's founder is not known. Its first effective leader, however, was High Kinlady Estre of Alinor, wife of Prince Naemon, heir to the throne of the Summerset crown. Estre was a noblewoman of considerable learning and greater ambition, and she brought to the Heritance the resources of one of the wealthiest houses on the island and the political cover of a marriage that placed her two steps from the crown itself. Under her leadership the society grew from a discussion circle into an organisation with chapters in every major Altmer city, with sympathetic officers in the royal guard, and with funds enough to commission private armies in the countryside where the crown's reach was thin.
Estre's strategic judgement was that the Triumvirate could not be opposed openly. The three Sorcerer-Kings were too popular among the Altmer commoners, too well-defended by their own miracles, and too tightly bound to one another for an open declaration of war to succeed. The Heritance would have to act in secret, against a single target, and in a manner that left no Altmer crown visibly responsible for the act. The target Estre chose was Almalexia.
The Attempt at Vulkhel Guard
The choice of Almalexia was deliberate. Sotha Sil had withdrawn into the Clockwork City and was for practical purposes unreachable by mortal means. Vivec was unpredictable in his movements and was rumoured to be capable of feats that the Heritance's spies could not measure. Almalexia, by contrast, kept a public schedule. She gave addresses, she attended consecrations, she received petitioners, and her itinerary was a matter of record in every city she passed through. To strike her was difficult but not impossible.
Over several months, agents of the Heritance secured positions within Almalexia's own court but these agents did not act, and were not asked to act, until the moment the operation required them. They simply remained in place, attended to their duties competently, and waited.
When the moment came, they made alterations to a forthcoming speech of Almalexia's. The address had originally been scheduled for one of the Chimer settlements in the south of Auridon, where the Tribunal Temple's authority was firm and where the security arrangements were correspondingly heavy. The altered schedule moved the address to Vulkhel Guard, a coastal town in the far south of the region whose population was mixed and whose security was the responsibility of an Altmer ruler.
Almalexia arrived at Vulkhel Guard on the appointed day. The strike came in its closing minutes, when the assembled crowd had been drawn forward to receive the queen's blessing. The Heritance's assassins were Altmer of considerable skill, equipped with weapons enchanted at considerable expense to penetrate the protections a Sorcerer-King could be expected to carry on her person but the attempt failed miserably. Almalexia is a god, and the limits of what a god can absorb were apparently not known by the Heritance. By nightfall, Almalexia knew that the strike had originated in Alinor and that High Kinlady Estre was its author.
The Bargain at Welenkin Cove
Estre fled Alinor and went instead to Welenkin Cove, a sacred place to the First Tribunal since the founding of that alliance. But Estre did not petition the Old Tribunal collectively, she petitioned only one of them, and she did so in a manner that the other two were not meant to learn of. She summoned Valkynaz Seris, one of the strongest champions of Mehrunes Dagon, and she offered him her soul in exchange for the use of his host. The bargain was struck without Dagon's knowledge and entirely without the knowledge of Azura, to whom Estre owed worship as an Altmer and whose authority within the Tribunal would have made the bargain impossible had Azura been consulted.
Why Seris accepted, and why he accepted without first informing his master, is a question the chronicler cannot resolve, but it is not unreasonable to consider that the Prince of Ambition's servants do not lack ambitions of their own. Whatever his reasoning, the bargain held. Estre's soul was promised to Seris; Seris's host was promised to Estre. The Heritance, which had been the political faction of a noblewoman, was now the mortal foothold of a Daedric army.
The Heritance's host marched north out of Welenkin Cove in the early weeks following the bargain. Its core was the Daedric force of Valkynaz Seris, but it was screened and supplemented by Altmer levies that the Heritance had been quietly raising for years and that could now be deployed without further pretence. The march was rapid. The Heritance had timed it to reach the southern Chimer cities before the Triumvirate could organise a coordinated response.
The march was met by Nerevar. The Hortator of the Chimer had been at the southern frontier on other business when news of the Vulkhel Guard attempt reached him, and he had not waited for orders to begin moving. By the time the Heritance's host crossed into Chimer territory, Nerevar's forces were already in position to receive it.
The engagement was brief and decisive. Nerevar's command of Chimer infantry was the highest expression of the discipline Sotha Sil had taught the Chimer war-chiefs over the previous centuries, and his personal use of the spear had not been equalled by any mer then living. The Daedric core of the Heritance host was not a force such formations were unprepared for: the Chimer had fought Daedra in the sack of Coldharbour, and the doctrine of fighting them had been refined in the centuries since. Valkynaz Seris was driven from the field. The Altmer levies that had marched with him were broken or captured. Estre escaped with a remnant back into Alinor territory in the center of Summerset, but the strategic initiative she had hoped to seize had passed out of her hands within a single battle.
It would have ended there, or close to there, but for what the engagement had revealed. The Daedra of Mehrunes Dagon had fought in open battle, on Nirn, on the side of an Altmer noblewoman, against the armies of the Triumvirate. The fact could not be hidden, and soon it reached Azura.
The Forming of the Golden Covenant
What followed was the act that the chronicler has the greatest difficulty explaining, because no parallel for it exists in any prior age. Azura, on receiving confirmation that Dagon's forces were directly engaged in mortal warfare against the Triumvirate, judged that the matter could no longer be left to mortal proxies. The Chimer had broken with the First Tribunal at the founding of the Triumvirate and had thereby placed themselves outside the protection that pact afforded. Their existence as a rival civilisation had been tolerable so long as they remained a Chimer matter. With Dagon's host now openly committed against them, the conflict had become a matter the Princes themselves were obliged to resolve.
Azura summoned the other two Princes of the First Tribunal and what was said at the summit is not recorded, only what emerged from it. For the first time since its foundation, the mortal followings of the three Princes of the First Tribunal were ordered to act as a single host. The alliance so formed took the name Golden Covenant, after the gold of Auridon's coats of arms, and under that banner the Altmer of Summerset, the Bosmer of Valenwood, and the Dwemer of every freehold whose patron was Mehrunes Dagon were assembled into a single coordinated army for the duration of the war.
The most immediate consequence of the Covenant was the rupture of the Chimer-Dwemer alliance that Almalexia and Dumac Dwarfking had built during the Nedic wars. The Dwemer did not break the alliance lightly. Their relationship with Dagon cannot be explained as easily as for the other peoples of the First Tribunal. They did not worship him as a god and were not bound by any oath to obey him. On the other hand, Dumac's relationship with Almalexia and Nerevar was close, as he was the one that merried them after the Nedic Wars. The exact reasons why he decided which side to take in the war is not known to the chronicler. The Dwemer joined the Covenant and the Chimer were left to face it alone.
"So it was settled. The Chimer army marched at night, and swarmed into the Dwemer camp. They were relying on Chimarvamidium to lead the first wave, but it malfunctioned and began attacking the Chimer's own troops. Added to that, the Dwemer were fully armored, well-rested, and eager for battle. The surprise was turned, and most of the high-ranking Chimer, including Karenithil Barif the Beast, were captured.
Though they were too proud to ask, Sthovin explained to them that he had been warned of their attack by a Calling by one of his men.
"What man of yours is in our camp?" sneered Barif.
Chimarvamidium, standing erect by the side of the captured, removed its head. Within its metal body was Jnaggo, the armorer.
"A Dwemer child of eight can create a golem," he explained. "But only a truly great warrior and armorer can pretend to be one."
— Marobar Sul, Ancient Tales of the Dwemer, Part VI: Chimarvamidium
The Elven Wars
The conflict that followed is today called The Elven Wars but it was just called The Great War by the Mer that took part in it, since what is today considered a complex of several campaigns over the span of multiple centuries, from the point of view of the long-lived elves was just a single military action. The wars were a struggle of power and cunning in roughly equal measure, and the brutality of the fighting was such that the southern reaches of Tamriel still bear the scars of it
The Chimer were outnumbered for the entire duration of the war, and would have been overwhelmed within the first decade of it had they been forced to rely on numbers alone. They learned to depend on several different tacticts to balance the arithmetics. One of the most influential factors was the spy network that Almalexia had been building since her queenship at Mournhold in Morrowind, which by the opening of the wars had reached into every Altmer court on Summerset and into a fair number of Bosmer and Dwemer councils besides. On the other side of the ledger was the work being done in Morrowind itself. The conflict was fought almost entirely on the southwestern side of the continent, and the Chimer settlements on the island of Vvardenfell were far enough from the front to operate without serious interruption. Under Sotha Sil's Apostles direction, the Vvardenfell foundries fabricated war-automatons in numbers and of a sophistication that the Chimer had never previously commanded.
A single working from the middle years of the war deserves separate mention, because it altered the strategic shape of the conflict in a way no battle had. At one point during the war, both moons disappeared from the night sky, in what came to be called the Void Nights. They were absent for two full years, and their absence was felt across every culture that had taken them as guides. The cause was not understood at the time and is not entirely understood now, but the moons were restored by a working of Vivec's devising, and it was Vivec who received the credit. The credit mattered most among the Khajiit, whose entire civilisation is ordered around the phases of the moons and whose furstocks are determined at birth by them. To the Khajiit, the restoration of the moons was a debt of the highest order, and they entered the war on the Chimer side to repay it. The Khajiit host was directed against the Bosmer of the Covenant, with whom they had old quarrels of their own, and the engagements between the two were among the most savage of the entire conflict.
The Ritual at Tanzelwil and the Battle of Mount Ator
By the closing year of the war, the Covenant had pressed the Chimer host back across most of the ground it had earlier won, and the encirclement of northern Auridon had begun. 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 at the cost of leaving the Triumvirate substantially diminished for the duration of the working. The surrendered power would be concentrated, by a ritual of Vivec's design, into a single mortal vessel, who would for the duration of the working be made approximately three times as powerful as any one of the three. The vessel would not be a god. He would be a temporary instrument, capable of being directed against an enemy that the three could not defeat collectively.
The vessel chosen was Nerevar. The choice was unanimous and willing on his part. He had been Almalexia's husband since before the apotheosis, Sotha Sil's student since the campaigns against the Nedes, and Vivec's brother-in-arms for longer than the Triumvirate itself had existed. Nerevar accepted the burden 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. He accepted regardless.
The ritual was performed at Tanzelwil, an ancient Aldmer site on Auridon that the Chimer had taken as their forward sanctuary during the war. What emerged from it is what the Tribunal liturgy calls the Saint of Resdayn, from the name of the region of provenience of Nerevar, or the Heavenly Champion, the savior of the Chimer.
With the Saint of Resdayn in the field, the war intensified beyond anything that had preceded it. The Princes of the First Tribunal, judging that the working at Tanzelwil had raised the stakes past the threshold at which mortal proxies could be left to settle the matter, manifested on Tamriel in person. Mehrunes Dagon, Hircine, and Azura took the field at the head of their hosts as avatars in flesh, and the war became, in its closing phase, a direct contest between the three Princes and the single mortal who had been raised to face them.
Nerevar fought the Avatars in a series of engagements across the southern reaches of Tamriel. The geography of the continent could not absorb the scale of the fighting. The land between Summerset and the rest of Tamriel was sundered by the powers exchanged in those battles; the seas rushed in where the land had been; what had been a peninsula became an archipelago, and what had been Auridon's connection to the mainland became open water. The currents of the surrounding seas were thrown into a chaos that has never settled, much as they were in the closing phase of the War of the First World. Navigation between the continents has been nearly impossible from that day to this, and the world beyond Auridon and the Summerset Isles has been silent for the surface mer ever since. Two exceptions are worth noting. The Altmer explorer Topal the Pilot crossed the oceans by airship in the late Merethic Era and eventually lead the Altmer out of Auridon, and the Dwemer rebuilt their underground connections to the mainland in the centuries after the war. Their relations with the other mer peoples, however, had soured past any easy repair, and the surface mer of Auridon drew no benefit from the Dwemer routes. With the Siege of M'zulft, even the Dwemer lost their access to the mainland, and the silence became complete.
The battles culminated at Mount Ator, also called Mount Ador in some sources, where the three Princes met Nerevar together for the final engagement. Hircine was driven from the field first, and Mehrunes Dagon second. Azura was last, and before her banishment from the engagement was complete, she 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 were lit red as embers, and the change passed through every Chimer then living and through every Chimer who would be born thereafter. They became the Dunmer, the dark elves, and they have been the Dunmer ever since.
No Prince ever truly dies, and the banishment of the three from the field of Mount Ator did not end them as beings. What it did end was the First Tribunal as a working alliance, and the Daedric Era as the period in which that alliance had ordered the political life of the mortal world. The Covenant collapsed. The Altmer host withdrew toward what was now the Summerset Isles, save for a few settlements in southern Auridon. The Bosmer dissolved into the forests they had come from. The Dwemer returned to their freeholds without their patron and would not again act in concert with any other mer people for the remainder of their existence.
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.
The Daedric Era ended on the slopes of Mount Ator, and the Merethic Era began.