5E 724

Warning, hypothetical non-canon experiment ahead. This is a first part and the next one should make the story more clear. :)

572.

It was a splash of digits in the same canned font as the food and soap labels. The number, above eye level, was visible all the way from gray-pasture if ash was light enough.

Edrin Sul had switched striders in gray-pasture two and a half hours ago. At that time the number had been 57. The rock’s shape was obscured at that distance, 57 carved in the sky. When Sul heard the sober ring of quarter chimes, he would shield his face from the headwind and feign desultory focus on the numerals: the of the 5, the 7’s neck, the tiny ant men scrambling about the scaffold.

Now the chime was singing for the tenth time, and the 2 was complete. Sul restlessly shifted foot-to-foot and tried to predict the exact second at which the crowd would move another inch. Without visible end in either direction, the line unfurled beyond the bridge and halfway to the strider port. Sul could barely outline Vivec’s gate save the iconic braziers blazing for Ash Night. The 572 was incongruously clear. Sul squinted at the developing fourth digit. Paint, no more, no less, he affirmed to himself.

Another inch. Sul’s thoughts were writhing in convolution. But the line of Dunmer was straight, an austere single-file. Even the children were too somber to step out of line.

Another inch, and Sul’s idle measurements twisted into poetics. We’re moving towards the heart of the Asciles, Vehk city, he remarked to himself. A vein. This technique is called meta-something. Not metaphysics. Little cells of blood, we are. I’m a toxin. But not harmful toxin yet, so they’ll let me through.

Sul found it difficult to follow one thought for long, especially with boredom. Unless the Temple says ‘drick alphabet is harm. Not if it stays in the head only—Ayem, Bedt, Cess, Doht…

Sul hated the time for moving so slowly. He reminded himself that thoughts were gifts, but stayed adamant in the belief that life was easier without.

The torment lasted for thousands of inches, until the thirteenth quarter chime. Sul was an arm’s length from the gate when the sound pierced his ear canals. It was coming from inside the nearest Vivec statue. The statue was tall, though not so faced with the ones in Endless Day Plaza. The stonework was too close for Sul to comprehend a figure. It was a monolith, distorted by brassy Temple aesthetics, into something suggestive of the Chimer form. To touch it was to touch coarse lime. For Sul, rock became god at a great distance. But he had seen leagues of ruby eyes widening in servile adoration, even from inches away.

Ash began to accumulate in spirals. From the moonlet, charcoal men were descending by rope ladder, in compliance to the recent Aleration Act. Look up, look up, the talking mechanism in Vivec's foot seemed to command. Sul gnashed his teeth together and beheld.

It was a splash of digits on Baar Dau, decreed in lurid blue:

5724—the date.