A Last Lecture on Sithis

Arlowe Acilius awoke in his quarters, having slept very little. His rest had been plagued by the usual nightmares, his students rebelling in the middle of a sermon, hooded figures breaking into his room at night, and his deceased wife rising from the grave. It had been a few years since Arlowe had gotten any proper sleep, not since he became the Professor of Metaphysics at the Arcane University. He tired of giving the same few lectures to different groups of equally faceless apprentices, and never feeling any sense of accomplishment. He was once able to occupy himself during the night with his studies, but the library had recently run out of fresh material for him. Without any chance to partake in the words of others, he was forced to write his own.

Arlowe approached the podium, and took a moment to observe the congregation before him. A fair amount of apprentices had showed up, eager to learn, quills and ears at the ready. Arlowe sighed, and stroked his grizzly beard. How much longer would he have to suffer this dreary existence?

“Today, apprentices, I would like to cover a topic we have hardly touched on. I wish to enlighten you on a subject of a darker tone than usual. Today I wish to discuss Sithis.”

The apprentices responded with mixed emotions. Some were eager to stray into something new, some were uncomfortable with the morbid idea, and others were dismissive. Sithis is just The Void, is he not, what could there be to learn about nothing?

“As we all know, Sithis is synonymous with The Void. Sithis is no god, no, Sithis is one level past any tangible god. We all know of Anu and Padomay, yes? The first primordial forces that shaped existence. We have also learned of Aka and Lorkhan, who were born as time and space, realizations of Anu and Padomay. In between them lies another sub-gradient, the souls of the original two, Anui-El and Sithis. As per usual, these two serve as direct opposites, these being everything and nothing. Sithis is nothing itself, the infinite emptiness too absurd for our perceptions. Within Sithis is nothing, but we, as mere mortals, cannot comprehend true nothing. We are too far removed from Sithis to understand, I believe the Ada can understand it, but not us. Try and imagine nothing. What do you see? An infinite blackness, I assume. But that is not nothing, it is still an image of blackness. You cannot imagine nothing, our minds are too simple. Sithis, as we’ve said, cannot be directly perceived, but the result of it can. Some claim that Sithis was the first, which is a believable idea, for what can come before everything but nothing? And the only thing that can come before nothing is nothing. Nothing gave way for everything, where stasis and change could fuel time and space, and all of the Aurbis could function. In the Dawn, we know there was no time, so Sithis came from Padomay, but also emerged at the same time. Perhaps Sithis really is the start of the house. However, what that damned league of assassins is wrong about is the nature of their ‘Dread Father’”.

A rather rebellious youth, Antoine Marienne, interrupted. “And just what do you mean by that? Sithis is a god like any other.”

“And that is where you too are wrong. Sithis is a force, Lorkhan is the first being with identity. Remember that the precious ‘Night Mother’ is widely regarded as an aspect of Mephala. The way I see it, the assassins are just being manipulated by the Webspinner, and the Daedroth needed a being to scapegoat, one that does not have a voice of its own. The Sithis of the Dark Brotherhood is hardly the Sithis of the Aurbis, it is merely a fabrication. Sithis is a void in which nothing can ever be, and nothing will ever be, not the shepard for some band of heathens. But, enough about nothing, open your books to chapter 12, section 35: On the Nature of Trans-Kalpic Transportation…”

Arlowe sat at his desk and wrote and wrote. If he had nothing left to read, he would leave others with new material. He had become fixated on Sithis. How can nothing be? Wouldn’t the fact that the nothing is there mean that it is something? Sithis is an identity, and an identity is something. How do we even know this nothing exists?

There was a knock at the door.

And it was the last sound he ever heard.