You will die by a thousand cuts unseen, for I am Vehk and Vehk, Dread Father and Night Mother, Mephala reborn, sex-death of language and lord of the middle air – Vivec!

…And then Vivec withdrew into the hidden places and found the darkest mothers of the Morag Tong, taking them all to wife and filling them with undusted loyalty that tasted of summer salt. They became as black queens, screaming live with a hundred murderous sons, a thousand murderous arms, and a hundred thousand murderous hands, one vast moving event of thrusting-kill-laughter in alleys, palaces, workshops, cities and secret halls. Their movements among the holdings of the Ra’athim were as rippled endings, heaving between times, with all fates leading to swallowed knives, murder as moaning, God’s holy rape-erasure of wet death.

The King of Assassins presented to Vivec the Treasure Wood Sword.

Thus concludes, mostly, the 22nd Sermon of Vivec.

Thus is also the basic underlying foundation of the argument outlined in the title of this post. That Mephala remains as she always was: patron of the Foresters’ Guild, a sad and forgotten Velothi relic.

Why would she assume the mantle of Sithis just to recreate the same organization she already has? For too long, the prevailing consensus regarding the Brotherhood’s divine patronage has been guided by a simplistic, conservative line of reasoning - the god of one assassin’s guild is also the god of the other’s.

Think for a moment of the Dark Brotherhood’s foundation. A splinter of the Morag Tong, a recreation of it; more violent, passionate, famous, depraved, and grandiloquent than its forebear.

Now read the Sermon 22 excerpt again. “…one vast moving event of thrusting-kill-laughter in alleys, palaces, workshops, cities and secret halls.” That doesn’t describe the Morag Tong, but it does describe a very different group of assassins. Vivec didn’t usurp Mephala’s place as patron of the Foresters’ Guild of Morrowind. He supplanted it with his own, better realisation. The Dark Brotherhood.

Why? Well, it’s right there in the Sermon: to earn the Treasure Wood Sword from the King of Assassins. This was his immediate goal, and its fulfillment created the Brotherhood. Note, however, that he never destroys the sword. Unlike all the other Children of the Pomegranate Banquet, its fate is left unclear.

A blade, gifted by the King of Assassins? Well, well. Doesn’t that sound familiar.

It is telling that the organization is ruled jointly by a Mother and a Father. A Cyrodiilic corpse and a nebulous Void-spirit, according to Brotherhood orthodoxy. Vivec, whose motherhood brought into the world the Treasure Wood Sword, and whose fatherhood brought into the world the “hundred murderous sons” (Brothers, it is duly noted), embodies this duality far better than the flimsy official line. He known as Vehk is the Dread Father and she known as Vehk is the Night Mother.

There is one dangling loose end yet to be severed in all this. The choice of Sithis, which really has always been the true problem. Of course, it’s possible that Vivec was simply hedging, hiding his identity as a Dunmeri god so as not to stifle a more multicultural Brotherhood. But there is a better reason.

Vivec admires Sithis. It gets the most glowingly positive description of any entity in the Sermons. Apart from the Sermons, Vivec anonymously pens a book describing it as the creator of the world. If anyone loves Sithis to the point of enshrining it as the most feared and respected concept in Tamriel, even (especially!) with a lie, it’s Vivec.