Author's Extremely Long Note on the Lore of Dremora

Warning: Lore fans only! All others will probably be bored stiff and should proceed down to Chapter 1. If you wonder why I said something that seems odd about Dremora or daedra, come back and read this part again.

I've encountered a couple of questions about the Dremora lore established in previous Tales from Cyrodiil stories, so here I'm going to stipulate what is demonstrable from Oblivion lore and what I'm making up. My normal approach is that I don't contradict lore if I'm aware of it, but I feel free to make things up that I feel fill in gaps in Oblivion lore. Similarly, if lore contradicts itself or lore contradicts gameplay (as it does on, say, Mephala's gender), I will pick whichever answer makes sense to me.

Explicit in Game and Lore:

-Sercen is a real ruin located east of the Imperial City in the game; I've exaggerated its geographic distance from that locale, but then I've never been quite sure of the "real" scale intended by the map of Cyrodiil. I'll be relatively true to its floor plan as well.

-Dremora, like other lesser daedric races, are not permanently killed in the way that races of Nirn are. Rather, a Dremora who is killed is separated from his/her body and cast into outer darkness, from which he/she must make a way back "through the voidstreams" in the "full order of time." Source: The ingame book The Book of Daedra.

-Daedra describe themselves as having kin and clan bonds, although they also say "we are not born." Source: Spirit of the Daedra.

-Dremora do seem to have their own language, but the only excerpts from it are in their words for themselves (Kyn in plural, meaning people, and kynaz in singular) and the names of their ranks. It sounds vaguely ancient Hebrew or Assyrian, so when making up words from it I try to stick to that.

-Summoning of daedra entails a telepathic contact between summoner and summoned. I assume this to be true also of those Dremora who summon other daedra in combat. Source: The Doors of Oblivion.

-It is possible to travel between Nirn and the planes of Oblivion without gates using a sort of teleportation, if the practitioner is sufficiently powerful. Source: The Doors of Oblivion.

-Daedra in general and Dremora in particular do feel pain, fear, and some variation on loyalty, another thing they have in common with men/mer/beasts. Source: Spirit of the Daedra.

The final rule of lore regarding all daedra and specifically Dremora, however, comes from Varieties of Daedra, another ingame book: "There is little chance of our ever understanding the various orders of Daedra and their relationships to the Daedra Lords and their dominions. …In one place and time they are seen to be this, and in another place and time they are seen to be the opposite, and in another place and time they are seen to be both this and that, in completely contradictory terms. …In short, what is to be known is little, and what is to be trusted is nothing."

Reasonably Deduced But Not Explicitly Stated:

-Dremora have two genders. Source: The Oblivion Construction Set, in which an entire rank of markynaz archers is female. Easy to miss without mods, since the Daedric female armor is not very feminine and you may never see them with it off (it is often not removable from bodies in the game). Confirmed by the UESPWiki, which is an internet resource but is generally considered credible on Elder Scrolls lore.

-These females normally look much like male Dremora as far as facial features; see previous. They do not have lesser status within their culture, as the rank of markynaz is that of a Lord of Lords and member of the Markyn, Dagon's council of lords (see Varieties of Daedra). Not known how this council structure relates to internecine conflict between Dremora.

-Dremora are capable of some sort of sexual behavior. Source: in Morrowind in the Temple quests, a Dremora rather graphically threatens to rape the player. Dremora in Oblivion also have all the physical apparatus that other races have and wear underclothing to cover it in the unmodded game.

-Dremora require some sort of sustenance, although this is probably cannibalistic as far as humans caught in their plane is concerned (see Spirit of the Daedra, "your flesh is sweet"). In game there is no food or places to prepare it in Oblivion, flesh or otherwise, but there are fountains of blood. This is why I've made Dremora in my stories blood drinkers.

-Most Dremora do not sleep. There are no beds in the plane of Dagon, only benches for sitting that are too small to lie on.

-There is some internal conflict between Dremora in Dagon's realm, but how that's arranged is not explicitly stated. I've made up some of this.

-The Dremora soul is some sort of kin to that of man, mer and beast – that is, they have "black souls" that cannot be captured by white soul gems. For nature of souls see Souls, Black and White.)

-Various dialogue in Morrowind and Oblivion describes Dremora as both cunning and honorable, but says little else about their nature; the book Varieties of Daedra describes some of their rank structure, but this is military rather than cultural. Higher-ranked Dremora have longer horns in the CS, but this is not addressed in print that I've found.

-Dremora have full command of at least two languages, their own and Cyrodilic, and probably more. Where they learned the latter is not stated, but it can be supposed it was probably from summoners or those who have found themselves trapped in Dagon's plane.

Completely Made Up By Me:

-The lore of Sleepers. They are not a part of the default game and there is nothing in Oblivion to suggest their existence.

-Dremora names. I've generally used Biblical Hebrew or Babylonian names to match with the sound of their language.

-Any other Dremora words besides rank names, Kyn and kynaz.

-The idea that Dremora who die in Nirn without having been summoned cannot find their way back to their home plane. Again, this is not eliminated by the default game because the eschatology of Dremora is not addressed except in writing. Here I'm sticking to what I've already stated in Tales from Cyrodiil: The Cold Light of Day and A Second Cold Light with reference to the character LoAmai. The game does suggest that daedra in general require some point of focus in order to reestablish a physical presence, though that is mostly stated in the lore of Aureal and Mazken in the Shivering Isles expansion.

-Specific points of Dremora culture and emotional makeup. Spirit of the Daedra says they are capable of fear and confusion, but love or attachment is never mentioned and logically might not be just like human/mer/beast concepts of ditto.

-The idea that Dremoras are born rather than created. Where they come from is always nebulous ingame, although this does contradict the statement "we are not born" in Spirit of the Daedra. Kin bonds without genetic relationship make no sense without somewhat more explanation than is ever given in that or any other ingame text.

-The specific lore of the Tales from Cyrodiil miniverse, which I've established in previous stories in this series and will try to keep consistent; thus, the Hero of Kvatch is not an omnipotent superbeing, but rather a stubby tailless Khajiit (see TFC: Luckless), she has performed mostly just the main quest, and other quests have been either performed by other people or not performed at all.

-The fall of the Citadel of Natural Disaster, as suggested by LoAmai in TFC: The Cold Light of Day. As usual, most TFC characters and situations are connected to each other in one way or another.

Thank you for your patience, and on with the show.

Chapter One

His name was Ebel-Merodach, and his was not a high caste from the very beginning.

This is not to say a Dremora begins as a kynval, or a kynreeve, or the Lord of a citadel. Most do not. And, while perpetual reincarnation makes it impossible for any higher-ranked individual to be truly removed from the scene, loss of a life generally means loss of one or more ranks. This is the order of things, and most Kyn do not question it – or rather, it does not occur to them to do so. Chaos, upheaval, and change are the norm and the constant in the realm of Mehrunes Dagon, that land of smoke and volcanic burning.

But this particular kynaz had taken notice of some things.

He had been a churl for a long time before a lethal disagreement with his immediate superior had raised him to the rank of caitiff. And he was a thinking kynaz, not a wild and undisciplined creature like some of his fellows. Merodach did not fail to observe that the longer one remained in a particular incarnation, the more powerful one grew. And the faster one rose in rank, the more vulnerable one was likely to be to, for example, lethal disagreements. He therefore considered that it well behooved him to make good and sure he had taken enough souls to keep his own in his current body before he sought any further advancement. Otherwise, at nearly twenty-five hundred souls, he ought to have been a kynval by now.

Sometimes the kynreeve who was his current superior officer annoyed him, but he kept that wisely to himself. He had watched any number of plots against that selfsame officer foiled, not by lack of planning, but by underestimation of the officer's power to defend himself. And so instead he spoke his mind when he thought it necessary, accepted a harsher discipline than was sometimes his due, and bided his time.

This was how Ebel-Merodach came to be among one of the first raiding parties to enter the Citadel of Natural disaster after the closing of the great gates into Nirn. He was, in point of fact, being punished for an open statement of his opinion of some decision of the kynreeve's. The kynmarcher of his own citadel was aware that most of Natural Disaster's citizens had been lost at the closing. Less certain was exactly how many survivors did remain.

This particular kynaz was tasked with being part of that reconnaissance, under the command of a kynval whom he disliked (although he had so far managed to keep this kynval unaware of the fact). Thus it was that he entered the dark and bloodied entry hall, with its central pool of lava, at the center of a pack of one or two other caitiffs and several churls.

"Go on, cowards," snarled the kynval from behind them. One or two of the churls growled back. All of them moved forward. The pool lay nearly dark and entirely quiescent, only the faintest gleam of fiery yellow crossing its surface. The Citadel's sigil stone was gone. That much clearly was true.

Merodach looked carefully upward before he moved nearer to it. The great central shaft of the Citadel's main tower went up for a long way, and its many balconies and railings were ideal places from which to drop things on the unwary. Particularly if there are few survivors here, and those remaining have too few churls left to freely spend them.

The others were dispersing around him, the churls streaming into the two branching hallways as the lack of resistance emboldened them.

But it would be difficult to aim anything without it falling into the lava, Ebel-Merodach thought. If there are spellcasters among the survivors, it would be to their advantage to wait until we reach the balconies and fire down the spiral when we are nearer. It is what I would do, were I a filthy krynvelhat myself. He snorted at this thought and turned toward a doorway with his mace in his hand. The enchantment gleamed green on its flanges, a slick and poisonous sheen against the dark metal.

He knew how to deal with krynvelhat. Oh, yes.

Merodach wore full Dremora armor like most of his fellows, and it was far inferior to the tempered daedric steel that higher castes were permitted to wear. But another advantage to the longevity of his current incarnation was that he had had enough time to work at enchanting the armor as well. It was the only magic he had ever bothered to learn, beyond the most rudimentary healing, and even that had not come easily. Some kyn were born to be casters, like his current kynval. Ebel-Merodach was not among them.

So when he came around a corner of the ascending ramp and it opened into a room full of freshly dead churls, one krynvelhat, and one very angry Xivilai with a giant axe, he knew exactly what to do.

He ducked. The mage moved faster than her summoned, and the reflex to throw a spell at a suddenly-glimpsed enemy was nearly universal. It was also slower than Merodach's carefully-planned evasion. He spun easily to one side, lunged forward and low, and slammed the mace into the side of the mage's knee. She howled as she staggered, tried to throw another spell, but this one was less powerful and his armor absorbed the shock charge easily. The Xivilai came after him, but it had to navigate around the hobbled mage. The mace's poison was already doing its work. The krynvelhat crumpled onto her good leg, then onto her side, and then the Xivilai roared with rage as it dissolved into nothing.

Merodach spat on her corpse on his way past. Incompetent. No doubt she was the only kynval left in the citadel. His initial guess had been wrong. Anyone remotely clever must not have been left behind in the final assault on Nirn.

His leisurely search from that point on confirmed this guess. He killed creatures that had wandered into the citadel, an atronach of flame and a scamp, but most of the remaining enemies were dead before he reached them.

It was far up the spiral that he found the cage. His present kynval eventually found him there, back in a back passage off the hall that most kyn would call the Sigillum Sanguinis. Ebel-Merodach turned at the sound of footsteps, then lowered his weapon as he recognized Belteshazzar in his black robe.

"What have you found?" demanded the kynval. He had short horns for his rank, shorter in fact than Merodach's, and he hated intensely to have his attention drawn to that fact. He wore his hair braided tightly back to make the stubs seem longer. They gleamed in the dim red light.

"Hail, kynval," said Merodach. "The cage is enchanted and I cannot be sure what is inside."

"You have eyes in your head, caitiff," snapped Belteshazzar. He stalked up to the cage and inspected the bars briefly, then looked at what lay inside it. "She is kyn. So much is obvious."

Merodach did not reply. So much was obvious, and yet… Something was wrong. The creature lay on her back with limbs carelessly outflung, as if she had been shot dead on the spot, but she was plainly breathing. Her anatomy and her tattered robe made that clear at once. Her skin was barely mottled at all, and such a dark purple that it was almost black. Merodach thought she had the ugliest body he had ever seen on a member of his own race. Male or female, kyn were not soft. This thing had not enough fat or muscle on her to feed one hungry scamp, and there were little flaccid lumps on her chest, as if it she were an unusually skinny specimen of one of the races of Nirn.

If that wasn't bizarre enough, even with her head lying flopped to one side he could see that her horns were backwards. They must have been ten inches long, but they curled back on either side of her oval face. The one he could fully see made a tight curlicue around her left ear.

The expression of her face bothered him more than all the rest. It was utterly blank, not slack like a corpse's but firm in its expression of perfect unemotion. This is not an expression common to the kyn.

"There must be a reason why she is caged," Merodach said.

"Even your limited intellect has proceeded so far," said Belteshazzar. "She is some sort of freak, that much is clear. The Lord must have wished to keep her from the meddling of the curious."

"Ours will not," Merodach said. "She is disgusting."

"What do you know about it?" Belteshazzar said. "I think perhaps I will keep her myself." He smiled thinly. It was not quite a leer. "I have a use for her."

"As you will, kynval," Merodach said, stifling his own revulsion. "Your orders?"

"Continue to secure the Citadel and report back to the kynreeve," said Belteshazzar with a dismissive wave. "I will have the cage empty and ready for whatever use it is desired within the hour."

"Yes," Merodach said, and turned to leave. Behind him, he heard Belteshazzar carefully lift the bar on the cage door, and walked faster to avoid hearing anything else. Such a thing was not entirely unheard of, but it would generally be prisoners from other planes who were the victims. Merodach accepted that this was at least not prohibited. If he thought it a perversion, he kept those comments to himself. Whatever was wrong with the kynaz in the cage, she was probably not diseased enough to harm Belteshazzar in any way that would draw blame down on Merodach.

He gave it little further thought for some time. The Citadel was cleared of its few remaining inhabitants, and the churls and caitiffs gorged themselves on the blood from its fountains and its fresher corpses. Merodach took some as his fair share, but kept his wits about him. The kynaz in the cage had not been ordinary. It was possible other things in this place were other than ordinary as well.

Nothing of the kind seemed to surface. Eventually the message was sent and a reply received, and then others of the clan moved in to occupy the Citadel according to their ranks and their current standing with the kynreeve. It was not until Merodach attempted to seek out his kynval for a report that he encountered anything wrong.

The cage was indeed empty, and several higher-caste mages were inspecting it. He did not disturb them. Instead, he stopped a passing caitiff whom he knew.

"Hail, Mishael," he said. "Where is Belteshazzar?"

"Hail, Ebel-Merodach," said Mishael. He was neither as tall nor as solidly built as Merodach, but then, Mishael was a swordsman. They two were of a similar complexion, dark brown with amber mottlings like many others of their clan. Unlike Merodach, Mishael had pale amber hair as well. "I have not seen our worthless slime of a kynval. The last I heard he was playing with his new toy."

Merodach gave vent to a disgusted snarl. "You mean that thing he found in the cage."

"Even so," acknowledged Mishael. "I suspect he is in the Corridors of Dark Salvation. There are many smaller chambers there."

"I will seek him there," said Merodach.

"I will seek you there later, for I have a question," Mishael said. Merodach nodded acknowledgement and went on down the ramp as Mishael continued in the opposite direction.

Eventually Merodach came to the pointed yellow doorway into the Corridors. It had been left open. He frowned at that and stepped carefully inside. Another spiraling ramp led up toward the main rooms of this portion of the Citadel.

He went up the ramp slowly. Partly this was because he did not want to see Belteshazzar at what he was no doubt doing, and partly because a sense of foreboding was growing on him. Partway up the ramp the scent of kyn blood, sharp and fresh, struck his nostrils. He drew his mace immediately. No slight wound nor any spillage from a fountain could produce that scent of pain and urgency. It would drive most churls mad with bloodlust, and some caitiffs as well. Merodach merely growled deep in his throat and continued his careful ascent.

The pattern of construction is similar in most of the citadels of the plane of Dagon, so he was not surprised when the corridor slanted steeply in front of him. He edged upward carefully. A very thin trickle of blood ran past him down the hall, following the channel in the center of the floor. The door into a larger room became visible as his head passed the threshold of the door on the steep slope.

What he saw might have been Belteshazzar. It might have been anyone. There were not enough recognizable parts to tell. The body of a kynaz had been torn to sodden shreds and thrown about the room, blood splashed up the walls as high as Merodach's head in one or two places. There was a fountain of blood and a fountain of mana in the center of the square chamber. Behind them, something stood half-obscured by the shadows of the columns that upheld the ceiling.

It moved as Merodach came up the ramp. A long and scaly snout emerged into the dim blue light from the mana fountain, and then he stared into the slit-pupiled eye of a daedroth.