On the Opening of the Daedric Era

With the Aedra withdrawn from Mundus after Convention and the first two Towers raised, the mortal world passed into a long quiet. It did not last. The Aldmer, descendants of the surviving Ehlnofey under Auri-El's banner, had been a single people through the closing of the Dawn. In the ages that followed Convention they ceased to be one, and the splintering of the Aldmer into the several mer races is the opening event of what later scholars would call the Daedric Era.

The cause was not a single cause. Some mer drifted apart by geography, settling the different regions of the young world and adapting, over many generations, to what those regions demanded of them. Others broke with their kin over matters of faith, for the question of how the withdrawn Aedra were to be honoured, and whether the Daedric Princes were fit objects of worship at all, was the first great dispute of the age. Others still were changed by the direct intervention of the Princes themselves, who in the absence of the Aedra found the mortal races newly available to their attention.

This entry treats the earliest of these splits. The later ones, and the founding of the alliance that named itself the First Tribunal, are the subject of the entry that follows.

The Maormer of Pyandonea

The oldest of the splinters regards the Maormer, the sea elves of Pyandonea, and is noted here only because any account of the mer peoples that did not mention them would be incomplete.

In the oldest Aldmeri tapestries preserved at the Crystal Tower, the story is given of a noble named Orgnum, a phenomenally wealthy Aldmer nobleman who used his finances to launch a rebellion against the Direnni Hegemony. He and his followers were defeated and banished, and the place of their banishment was hidden from Aldmeris by a standing wall of mist. The banished called their new home Pyandonea, the Veil of Mist, and the Veil held so well that Orgnum's people never troubled their former kin again in the homeland.

The Veil did not, however, reach to Summerset. When the Aldmer departed Aldmeris and settled the Summerset Isles, the Maormer found them again, and the old enmity resumed on a new sea. The history of Maormer raids on Summerset is not the business of this entry. What matters here is that any adventurer brave (or fool) enough to attempt to cross the seas around Summerset should be prepared to fight off one of the oldest lineages of the Aldmer descendants.

The Dwemer Rejection of the Gods

The Dwemer, whose name in old Aldmeris means "deep folk" or "deep elves", had always been a people apart within Aldmeri society. They were the natural philosophers of the Aldmer, the ones who preferred the study of matter and mechanism to the old pieties, and they had been tolerated, if not always welcomed, through the long centuries in which the Aedra were openly worshipped. What the Aedra's withdrawal from Mundus did was not to create their dissent but to sharpen it into something the other Aldmer could no longer stomach.

For the Dwemer read the withdrawal as a betrayal. Auri-El and the rest of the Aedra had asked the Aldmer to endure Lorkhan's trick, to remain in Mundus as its diminished keepers, and then at the first opportunity after Convention they had themselves abandoned the very world they had bound their children to. The Dwemer concluded, and said openly, that a god who had fled his own creation was not owed worship by the creatures he had left behind. Only the Daedric Princes, who had refused Lorkhan's trick and preserved their full essence in Oblivion, retained power enough to be worth a mortal's attention.

This did not, for the Dwemer, mean that the Princes were to be worshipped. On the contrary, the lesson of the Aedra's betrayal was that the et'Ada as a class were not to be trusted. What the Princes were worth was study, and in some cases negotiation. One attends to a powerful spirit the way one attends to a storm or a predator. One learns its habits, one calculates what it wants, and one bargains with it where a bargain can be had. One does not kneel to it. The distinction mattered greatly to the Dwemer, and it mattered not at all to the other Aldmer, who heard only the part where their kin had declared the old gods unworthy.

The response was outrage, but no single authority remained to act on it. The Dwemer had already begun to withdraw from the Aldmeri homeland, gathering their people and their knowledge and moving east, and then downward. They established the first of their underground freeholds in the years that followed, and from that point forward the Dwemer were a subterranean people by preference and not by exile. They continued to walk the surface when it suited them, and they built great works in the open air where their engineering required it, but the centre of their civilisation was below ground from that moment on.

The Fall of Trinimac

The Dwemer withdrew from the Aldmeri homeland, gathering their people and their knowledge and moving east, and then downward. They established the first of their underground freeholds in the years that followed, and from that point forward the Dwemer were a subterranean people by preference and not by exile. But the Dwemer did not depart the Aldmeri homeland unopposed.

The strongest of the opposition came from Trinimac, who had been Auri-El's greatest champion at the closing of the Dawn, the one whose hand was said to have torn Lorkhan's heart from his body at Convention. Trinimac had remained among the Aldmer as a kind of warrior-saint, a diminished spirit in the shape of a great mer, honoured by a considerable following of his own. When the Dwemer made their public rejection of the gods and began their exodus, Trinimac read the act as the gravest heresy the surviving Aldmer had yet produced, and he rode out at the head of his host to stop it.

The Dwemer had anticipated opposition but not opposition of this magnitude. Trinimac's host was large, its champion was a surviving spirit of the old war, and its cause, to the other Aldmer, was self-evidently righteous. Against such a force the Dwemer, a people of engineers and philosophers who had not yet developed the military tradition they would later be known for, could muster only a partial and improvised defence. The sources agree that the Dwemer were losing, and losing badly, by the time the intervention came.

The intervention of Mehrunes Dagon's

Dagon, the Prince of Ambition and the unmaking of settled orders, had watched the Dwemer split from the Aldmer with an interest that the sources do not fully explain. Whatever his reasons, he chose to act. He appeared on the field between the two hosts in the form of a great beast, seized Trinimac bodily, ate him, passed him through his own foulness, and then defecated him upon Trinimac's followers. The followers, standing in the scattered dung of what had been their champion, were changed by the contact. Their skin greened, their tusks grew, and their proportions altered until they were no longer recognisable as the mer they had been. What remained of Trinimac himself departed the field as a new and lesser spirit, bitter and misshapen, who came in later ages to be called Malacath by his own people and at times Mauloch by others.

The transformed followers took the name Orsimer, "Pariah Folk" in old Aldmeris, and it is the name they have kept. To men they are the Orcs, and the human tongue has no word for what their origin was.

A Deal With the Devil

The Dwemer, watching the unmaking of Trinimac and his host, drew the conclusions that were available to them.

Here was a Prince who had appeared without being summoned, who had saved them from annihilation at the hands of a spirit of the old order, and who had done so with a violence and a contempt for sacred form that the Aedra would never have permitted themselves. Here was a power who treated the pieties of the Dawn as obstacles rather than as facts. The Dwemer had already decided that the Princes were to be studied and bargained with rather than worshipped. In Dagon they had found a Prince with whom a bargain need not be struck, because he had struck one without waiting to be asked.

The Dwemer did not build temples to Dagon. They raised no altars, they spoke no prayers at all. What they did instead was more interesting and more durable. They listened.

What Dagon taught them, over the long centuries of the Daedric Era, was the art of control. The Aedra asserted their control over Mundus by diminishing themselves, the Dwemer, Dagon instructed, need do no such thing. A sufficiently clever mortal could impose its will upon matter directly, rather than pleading with the Earthbones to permit it. A sufficiently clever mortal could bend the patterns of raw substance, the metals of the deep earth and the principles that held them together, and could make of them instruments that obeyed without being asked. A sufficiently clever mortal could, in time, extend the same principle to other mortals: could subject lesser peoples to the will of a greater, and call the subjection not tyranny but order.

From this instruction descended the three great works for which the Dwemer are remembered. The first was their mastery of metallurgy, by which they learned to treat the ores of the deep earth not as gifts to be coaxed but as materials to be commanded, yielding alloys and structures that no surface smith of the Aldmer could match. The second was their animunculi, the mechanical servants, the brass spiders and dwarven centurions and all sorts of constructs of metal that moved and acted to obey their masters. The third, which would unfold only in the fullness of the later era, was their doctrine of dominion over lesser peoples: the conviction that the Dwemer, having mastered matter itself, were justified in extending the same mastery to those mortal races who had not.