The Night of Cinders is the name given to the events of a single night at Balmora in the closing year of the Merethic Era, at which the reign of the Tribunal over Ascalon was brought to an end. It is reckoned the close of the Merethic Era and the threshold of the Age of Men, and it is remembered by the Dunmer as the night their living gods were judged and cast down by their own people. The events of the night were the culmination of a civil war that had divided the realm for the better part of a year, and they cannot be understood apart from the murder that began that war.
The Murder of the Nerefin
The Sorcerer-Kings came out of the First Impact gravely weakened. The working by which they had raised the Nerefin against the threat of that disaster had required each of the three to surrender a great portion of their divine power into the mortal vessel, and the war the Nerefin then fought had consumed years. When it was over the Sorcerer-Kings were diminished to a degree that they found intolerable, and the means by which they chose to restore themselves was the murder of the vessel they had made.
The Nerefin was killed, and the power that had been set within the vessel was drawn back out of it into the three who had placed it there. The killing is remembered in the Dunmer tradition as a foul murder, and it is depicted in the surviving art of the realm in terms that admit no innocent reading: the three Sorcerer-Kings each taking part in the death of the one they had raised, by poison and by working, that they might take back what they had given. Whether the act was a sacrifice sanctioned by the doctrine or a betrayal dressed in the language of doctrine is the very question that divided the realm in two factions.
The faction that held to the Tribunal doctrine maintained that the Nerefin had been a vessel of the living gods, made by them out of their own substance, and that the gods had every right to recall what was theirs. The faction that rejected the doctrine held that the Sorcerer-Kings had murdered the saviour of the Dunmer, the Hortator, to preserve their own power, and that gods who would do such a thing were not gods worth the name. Within a year of the murder the disagreement had become open war between the cities of Ascalon.
The Trial of the Sorcerer-Kings
The civil war was settled at Balmora, where the dissenting faction had gained the upper hand and where the rule of the Tribunal had its centre. Having won the war, the dissenting faction brought their grievance against the Sorcerer-Kings Vivec, Almalexia, and Sotha Sil into the form of a trial.
The trial summoned Azura as a witness. Why a faction that had set itself against the rule of gods should have called a Daedric Prince is not recorded but the likeliest explanation draws on the age when the people who became the Dunmer were still Chimer and had not yet raised their own gods: Azura was among the Princes with whom the early Chimer had dealings, and she may have been called not as an object of worship but as a witness from before the Tribunal, able to speak to the nature of divine power and how the Sorcere-Kings wielded it. The summoning demanded as its catalyst an antler of King Dead Wolf-Deer. What Azura said is not preserved, but the judgment that followed leaves little doubt of its substance.
The judgment went against the Sorcerer-Kings. All three were stripped of the seat they had held since the founding of Ascalon and removed from the rule of the realm, and so it came to pass that the doctrine that had bound Ascalon together for the whole of the Merethic Era did not survive the verdict.
The Burning of Balmora
The night did not end with the judgment. The faithful of the Temple doctrine, who held that the deposition of the living gods was a blasphemy beyond bearing, would not accept the verdict of the dissenting cities, and in the disorder that followed the trial they set fire to a part of the city. Which cantons burned, and how much of the city was lost, the sources do not agree, but the burning was extensive enough to give the night the name it has kept. The faithful burned what they could not hold, and the smoke of Balmora's cantons stood over the bay as the Tribunal's reign ended beneath it.
What became of the three Sorcerer-Kings after the night is uncertain. They were not killed, for no account claims that they were, and the working that had drawn back the Nerefin's power had left them stronger than the realm could easily have destroyed even had it wished to. The settled scholarly opinion holds that all three withdrew from Auridon to Morrowind in the years that followed, and that they have remained there since.