Report to High Potentate Surtat-Fehri on Revelations Concerning the Dark Conspiracy

32 Year of Salvation, May the Season of Your Conquest Be Everlasting

Your majestic grace, beauty unceasing, the everlasting EarthScroll, we have recently uncovered evidence that has greatly elucidated the Accursed Scheme which our invasion has successfully prevented. While our previous dispatches have discussed towers and dead races, we now turn to matters more relevant to our kind.

It seems that the effort afoot had indeed hoped to undo this Earth, to unbind it from itself. That much has always been certain. But, as your grace, beauty unceasing, envisioned before we ever embarked on this conquest, the scheme’s final goals were much darker.

The combination of actors has always been uncertain. We don’t know whether they were in concert, or whether some coincidence of evil motives combined to reach the same outcome. Still, the inevitable outcome was always the same: the unbinding of the dragon.

We dare not even write, or think, such ill words. But the truth demands as much from us.

The evidence we’ve uncovered is such: divining tools from the dead races, and prophecies from those dying. It seems that these schemers possessed a vision of what would follow the, we dare not write it, unbinding. Thousands, no, endless worlds, possibilities. Memory, all of it wrong, all of it right. The end of time and at once its beginning.

What we know immediately, that they never knew, was the meaning of it all.

When the holy ancestors condescended to give their immortality away, so that they could create us – their offspring – they graced our people with the holy mandate. The mandate of heaven is our mantle. We know of the kalpic fault, the dead gods that play tricks on new worlds, the indifferent light beams who hate cause and consequence, and the great dragon which is torn asunder, but which tears asunder.

This was to be time of the tower. The wind maker’s rage overcame him, and the stone-hider was annihilated. Everything was in place. Is-and-Can-Be were to unite. And the dark schemers would have prevented that. As if a bucket would change a tide.

But these – they call themselves mer of all things – have never known the ways of the dov. They do not know that dov see the strands of all-time blowing as banners in the wind. Their desired immortality, their separation from is – this is nothing to the dov who see Kalpa to Kalpa curseblessed with that knowledge.

We have seen that these schemers have greatly injured the dragon. For, while we have stopped them now, they have succeeded in the not-now. When we encountered the first old one, that raggedy dragon, on the Northern Shore, its warm voice barely melting the snow, your word to stay our arms astounded. Was it not our mandate to banish the old ones from this Kalpa?

And yet, now we understand. These dragons are defeated, their immortality is only in the now, but they are unbound in the not-now. Their trans-kalpic virtue has waned.

As hatchlings, we are whispered to concerning the dragon threads. Stretching across time, these threads are unbreakable. Uncreated, never ending, never began. The threads, then, are pulled taught by the sundering of space. Change. Stasis. And the threads begin to sing. Vibrating, possessing an energy like unto the string of a harp. The song of the world.

The strings sing together, create a harmony. And this hatches an egg. A new dragon. No matter the timeline, no matter the age, each dragon is its own harmony. Each dragon is the same across time, though time is different to him. Even we, on occasion, in our shared memory, possess visions of past worlds within the harmonies of our ancestors.

And all these great harmonies together are the great dragon. The great harmony. When a dragon thread touches the great A Ka it is compelled to vibrate with it. And just as a mighty wave begins, the union of threads have their crest. And just as a wave crashes down into Oblivion, the threads dissemble. And always the stone-hider seeks to bind the threads, to sing out of the song a melody to sing into the song. He with his repetitions and machinations, his wheels and logics. And the wind lord drowns out his melody. Until this time, when his anger got the better of him. And now, the mandate of heaven. I dare not say it, but, your grace, beauty unceasing, the mandate has been weakened.

We have prevailed, we have preserved the dragon, the mandate persists. But the dragon is weakened, not in the now, but in the not-now.

What is it that has preserved us? What is it that these dying mer could not comprehend? Ah. They know nothing of dragons. They know nothing of the threads upon which vibrate the song of the world.

It is simple really, a thread can be bound or unbound, but it is forever.

In one timeline, a cat-man will rob a mer, and the potion he steals will turn out to poison him later. This will amount to nothing. In another, the Emperor of Tamriel will send an army to retrieve the same potion, thinking it gives him immortality. It will give him eternal undeath. It is always different, but there is always the potion that is the poison. And a thousand other threads like unto it.

As the monkey-folk say: anywhere there are cats, there is the liar.

And so, while your grace, beauty unceasing, shall continue your proud rule and we shall continue to pursue the mandate of heaven unto the final battle at that place the men here call Sovngarde, we admit to you that it will not mean in the end what we have always hoped it would. That is sadly the beginning and end of what we will ever say on the matter.

But, we take hope in the threads. What is real to us might not have consequences in the grand universal song, our dragon might break in the end as well. But each life, each small melody, each battle and conquest, each joy and even each pain, each chance meeting, every scheme, journey, insight, quest, and calculation are all eternal. Each its own thread that snakes back and forth across time, between, in, among, around timelines.

We exalt the beauty of Surtat-Fehri, and it is eternal, but perhaps another time, another dragon, We do so in the tongue of the snow-demon. Or from the bottom of the sea as a Dreugh. It is the same. We hope that this clarifies the matter, for We do not wish to write or think of it again.

—Hideku San-Savah vessel to the line of Kotoh