Azura as Heir to Auri-El
The Altmer are the people of the mer that deviated the least from the Aldmers in customs and appearance, if not for a slight diminishment in average height. The Altmer remained, in their own estimation, what the Aldmer of Aldmeris had been: scholars, builders, keepers of the old forms. They were also, and this is the point that matters for this entry, the people most visibly bereft. The withdrawal of the Aedra had taken from them the gods they had worshipped openly, and the Siege of the Sky had wounded the two lieutenants of Auri-El they still had reason to look to. They were the inheritors of the Dawn, and the Dawn had left them with very little that could still be prayed to.
It is into this absence that Azura came. Her sphere, the oldest sources agree, is dusk and dawn, the moon and the star, the in-between hours and the lights that keep them. After the Siege of the Sky, those lights were wounded things, and the Altmer understood them as such. Azura presented herself as their protector. She offered to watch the moons that the Atmorans had struck, and to keep the orbits that Auri-El's lieutenants had ascended into, and to hold for the Altmer the watch that Auri-El himself had laid down when he withdrew from Mundus.
Whether Azura's interest in the moons was ever as disinterested as her first address suggested is a question the Altmer theologians do not ordinarily press. Her own domain, as any scholar of the Princes will note, touches the moons more nearly than that of any other Prince. To guard the moons of Mundus is also to extend her influence over the hours she already rules, and the bargain, if it is a bargain, is one from which she stood to gain considerably. The Altmer are aware of this but they have chosen not to regard it as an objection because Azura is one of the few Daedra who maintains the appearance of being "good" by mortal standards, and reportedly feels more concern for the well-being of her mortal subjects than other Daedric Princes. It is said she wants their love above all else, and for her worshippers to love themselves; it pains her when they do not. This attitude lead to an extremely devoted following. She is also one of the few Princes who constantly maintains a female image, and is perceived accordingly.
The Azura's Star
Of all the artifacts associated with Azura, the one best known to scholars and most relevant to the history of the Daedric Era is the Azura's Star, sometimes called the Twilight Star. It is a soul gem: a crystalline vessel capable of holding the essence of a living creature at the moment of its death, trapping it within the stone for later use by a mage or an enchanter. Ordinary soul gems, of the kind quarried from the deep earth or grown in alchemical vats, are consumed in the act of being used, but not this one, Azura's Star is reusable. A soul trapped within it can be expended for some purpose, and the Star itself remains, ready to be filled again at the next death its bearer finds occasion to claim. The first Altmer who received it from Azura understood immediately that they had been given something of inestimable value, and the Star has remained among the most prized of all Daedric artifacts ever since.
The importance of the Star to the history that follows is not that the artifact itself was used in any famous working, but that its existence demonstrated something the Altmer, and presently other peoples, would build upon. The teaching she passed to her Altmer, in the long quiet centuries of her early residence among them, was the groundwork of the refined soul-magic that would, in later ages, displace the older and cruder soul-arts entirely.
The Sack of Gil-Var-Delle
Gil-Var-Delle was a Bosmer settlement in the deep forests of Valenwood. It was a town of no particular strategic weight, notable chiefly for the age of the graht-oak around which it had been grown and for the quality of the singers it had produced. What makes it matter to the history of the Daedric Era is not what it was but what was done to it.
On a single night, Molag Bal, the Prince of Sufference and Rape, The Harvester of Souls, appeared over Gil-Var-Delle in a red mist and consumed it. The sources agree on the shape of the event and on very little else. There was no battle, for there was nothing a Bosmer village could have done against a Prince who had come in person. There was no reported survivors. The graht-oak itself was left as a charred husk, and the souls of every inhabitant, down to the infants and the beasts the Bosmer kept as companions rather than food, were taken into Coldharbour, Molag Bal's realm, to serve him there in whatever capacity he chose.
Why Molag Bal acted is a question that has never been settled. The oldest Bosmer accounts hold that he was summoned by Dro'Zel of Senchal, and that he lost control of him almost immediately. Other sources hold that Molag Bal came uninvited, and that the Sack of Gil-Var-Delle was a test of the mortal defences of the young world at a point when the architecture of the Daedric Era was still settling into its final shape. The question is not idle, because the distinction determines whether Gil-Var-Delle was the act of a Prince bound by the ordinary restrictions on Princely intervention in mortal affairs, or the act of a Prince who had found a way to set those restrictions aside. Either reading is troubling.
Hircine's position was the sharpest. Valenwood was his bargain and Gil-Var-Delle had been his town. The Green Pact had promised the Bosmer the protection of the Forest in exchange for the conduct it required of them, and the Forest had manifestly failed to protect them against an assault from Oblivion. And so Hircine went looking for allies.
The First Tribunal
The day after the Sack, or at least what the mortals perceived as the next day, Hircine, Azura and Mehrunes dagon formed an alliance called, in the older sources, simply the Tribunal. Later ages, after the Chimer sorcerer-kings founded the alliance they named the New Tribunal, took to calling the earlier body the First Tribunal or the Old Tribunal to distinguish the two. The terms of the pact were never made public. It is unknown whether it was Hircine to ask directly to the two Princes for help primising something of great value for them, or if they offered their support in fear of a successive assault on their own spheres of influence, for a Prince who had devoured Gil-Var-Delle without warning and without apparent cost might as easily have chosen a settlement of Altmer or of Dwemer for his next attention. It is possible, in the manner of most Princely dealings, that the terms were stranger than any of these guesses and that the three Princes agreed for reasons none of their mortal followers would have been able to recognise as reasons at all. The chronicler does not pretend to know.
What is known is that the three Princes bound themselves to the common defence of the three mer peoples who had taken them as patrons, and that they bound themselves further to support one another's projects on Nirn by whatever means each judged fit. One consequence of the pact is worth noting, because its effects outlasted the alliance and shaped the remainder of the Daedric Era. Azura, in the course of the long collaboration, shared with the Dwemer the teaching that had produced Azura's Star. The Dwemer of the early Daedric Era had animated their constructs with the fossilized hearts of dead gods, a method that required a great deal of research for every major work and that therefore set a natural ceiling on how many such works could be made. Following Azura's teachings, the Dwemer learned to substitute soul gems for such hearts, and the later and more numerous generations of their animunculi were powered by soul-vessels rather than by divine remains. The substitution was not a simple exchange of one power source for another. It allowed the Dwemer to scale their craft in a way the older method had not permitted, and the great subterranean cities of the late Daedric and Merethic Eras, with their thousands of centurions and spheres and spiders, could not have been built without it.
A Note on the Rarity of Princely Alliances
The First Tribunal is an unusual object of study for reasons that have nothing to do with its particular members or its particular pact. The Daedric Princes do not, as a rule, cooperate. Their domains are distinct and often openly hostile to one another, and the ordinary mode of relation between any two Princes is competition, sabotage, or outright war by mortal proxy. Alliances between three Princes lasting longer than a single working are nearly unheard of in any age, and alliances between three Princes lasting long enough to shape the political architecture of an entire era are, so far as this chronicler has been able to determine, without parallel.
It is for this reason that the First Tribunal has attracted more scholarly attention than the comparatively modest scale of its public deeds might otherwise warrant. The pact is studied less for what it did than for the fact that it held at all. What combination of threat, interest, and Princely temperament was sufficient to keep three such beings aligned for the better part of twenty thousand years is a question every generation of historians has attempted to answer, and every generation has answered differently. The reader is encouraged to take up the question on their own terms, and to be suspicious of any account that offers a tidy resolution.