The Buried Worm

Reman Karoodil is now widely acknowledged to have receded from public life and left most matters of governance to Morgiah in the wake of the stillbirth. He came to love the woman who had given him a chance to mend the crippling wound of his son's premature death, and his elation when he discovered she was with child was so great that his despair at the loss of that child was even more complete than at the loss of his first son. Once private journals that have now become the domain of history record the distance, even emptiness in his eyes when he gazed upon his later heirs. In each increasingly rare public appearance, he appeared weaker and weaker, his voice and body growing thinner and more ragged in a dismal harmony. The change we could not see was grimmer still; behind the closed doors of Firsthold's palace, Reman Karoodil was slipping from grief into madness, from madness into something deeper and darker.

At first, he was searching for the King of Worms, convinced something of Mannimarco remained in Tamriel after the Warp in the West. He emptied as much of the treasury as slipped through Morgiah's fingers on diviners and mundane spies; he forged rumors of a Necromancer plot against the emperor in an attempt to involve the Blades in his search. When at last he saw no more stones to turn, no more shadowed corners at which to frantically claw, his obsessions turned to the strange rumors he'd heard in his search. He began devouring metaphysical texts that had never before interested him, consulting Psijic monks for days without rest, importing Telvanni wizards and Temple mystics from his wife's native land, even rumored agents of the Underking and renegade Talosites from persecuted sects.

The public face of this, of course, was that Karoodil had distracted himself from his grief by putting all of his mind to the question of the Dwemer's disappearance, and even after his recovery become fascinated with the field. Because the reputations of posterity had not set in and even in Sumerset few were educated enough to know of Tamriel's most distinguished experts on the subject, contemporary accounts thought nothing of his rapid dismissal of Baladas Demnevari in comparison to the days he spend in uninterrupted discourse with a refugee dissident priest. Even so, the parade of figures seemingly unrelated to the Dwemer was noticed, but the vapidity of courtly gossip is such that most histories whisper at the mystics being a parade of Morgiah's lovers. In short, nothing of the truth was known.

I come into this story much later, in the waning years of the Mages Guild, when I was a young apprentice of unparalleled erudition but no great magical skill. I could master theories so advanced full wizards could not even convincingly fake having read them in their entirety, but I fumbled even the simplest cantrips. After performing a great deal of research ostensibly as lessons but, in fact, to teach my betters, I received my first real duty of note: to be certain that Mannimarco was truly slain, once and for all, at the end of the Third Era, and the scourge of the Necromancers forever behind us. Of course, it was a triviality to discover that that scourge will never be eradicated so long as even the name of Mannimarco or his art remains, but what proved more intriguing was my investigation of Mannimarco's death.

At first I thought the matter would prove equally trivial. Though lichdom complicates matters somewhat, there is ultimately an extent to which, as the saying goes, "dead is dead." I first discovered Karoodil's search for Mannimarco in an effort to be thorough in my own; though he hadn't been rumored destroyed, Mannimarco had disappeared for some time after the Warp in the West and it seemed prudent to examine where potential searches of that time went wrong. In my youthful arrogance, I assumed something had gone wrong; in fact, I discovered the opposite, much to my chagrin. With the wealth and influence at his disposal, Karoodil's search was more thorough than mine or even the entire guild's could ever hope to be. As far as any mortal being was capable of discerning, Mannimarco really was gone. I put Karoodil largely out of my mind and focused on the next question; if he truly had been gone, how had Mannimarco come back.

The earliest records of his return, predictably, were scholarly observations from various noteworthy institutions. What was stranger even than the unsurprised tone of each record was that they seemed to be written as though chronicling the end of something more than a new beginning. Another scholar might have let this slip by, or written it off as a curiosity of a particular academic style, but my one pride is on the discernment of my research, so I will gladly boast that I clung to the thread others would let pass through their fingers. I listed names exhaustively, I tracked down citations and past works, and I realized that my youthful arrogance had again led me astray; the first to notice Mannimarco's return were not just any scholars — they were all scholars employed by Karoodil. They found Mannimarco and expected him because they knew to be looking; the end they hinted at was the end of what must have been an interminability of anticipation and dread.

It was then that I began the painstaking labor of poring over each edition, each copy of a host of metaphysical texts to hunt down smeared scribbles of marginalia, losing track of day and night for longer and longer each time, circling ever closer to the horrible truth I knew I would find. Karoodil had never cared about the Dwemer, their existence or their disappearance. He'd studied them only to study the tribunal, then studied prophecies of the Nerevarine, then obscure threads of Talosite cults. I hardly noticed how bony my fingers had become, how sickly sallow the gold of my skin had turned, until my shaking finger traced a faded underlining that confirmed my most terrible suspicions. The word Karoodil had underlined, the word I feared he'd found, was mantling. When he could not find The King of Worms, Karoodil took the only course he could think of; he became the King of Worms.

The lich buried beneath Cyrodiil was not born with the name Mannimarco, any more than that was the name my parents gave me. The title, of course, is always taken; no king is born wearing his crown. Mannimarco has ascended and Mannimarco was killed, but he is not gone and he is not dead save for that the King of Worms is always already dead. Mannimarco was the Buried Worm, and the worm has crawled up through the soil again to take its crown. The King of Worms is dead, long live the King of Worms.