The Snake Who Burrowed out of the Egg and Became Real: An Argonian Culture Hero (Part I)

The story of Wakan-hsji, the snake who burrowed out of the egg and became real, begins long before he was born, and longer still before he had the name he has now. After their five elder brothers were martyred, the Storm Children of Sithis and Mor-wah wept memory into the world; the Crow sister wept for urbane Shezzar, the Hawk sister wept for valiant Shor, the Gale brother wept for clever Sep, the Lightning brother wept for the beastly Lorkhaj, but all wept for Lorkhan, the eldest, and so their tears ran together and converged at the hole their brothers' heart had torn between the void and the world. Their memories fell as rain, and the rain nourished the Root and reminded this Hist of the Womb of the Egg, the world before the world; the Crow's tears reminded them of cleverness and subterfuge, the Hawk's tears reminded them of valor and wisdom, the Gale's tears reminded them of swiftness and deceit, and the Lightning's tears reminded them of genius and madness. The Root drank all these memories, and the Hist turned the waters into Sap in which they could write their memories across the canvas of the world.

But the Tower People wanted what the Hist remembered to be forgotten and laid a curse upon the creatures of the world so that their bodies could not be written on by the Sap and their minds could not read the Archi-Writing of the Sap. So they forgot, and their skin became dry in Forgetting. When all seemed lost, the scaleskin of the swamp slid and slithered up the shores and said “We lived low enough so the Tower People wouldn't waste their gaze on us, and so we are free of their curse. We will drink of your Sap and read the Writing of the World.” So the scaleskin creatures became the People of the Root, and learned the names of Sithis, the Unmoved Mover, and Mor-wah, the woman who Moved his heart; and of their children, the Pentacle Sacrifice LKHAN and the four Storm Children who came after, now called Nocturnal, Kynareth, Boethiah, and Sheogorath.

But the Saxhleel were few, and the Tower grew over the rest of the world, so that its weight pressed down on the one land that would not relent, the Marsh, and tried to crush the will of its people, the one people that would not relent. It was in the time of Tower Madness, when the pressure finally took its toll, that Wakan-hsji, though then he was not known by that name, was born. The White-Gold soldiers marched from the West, where already Forgetting had dried the jungle to plains; from the north whose Forgetting was expedited by erasure, so that the land was like unto dust, came the slavers guided by the false gods. The crushing pressure was beginning to wring the moisture of memory out of the marsh, and the greedy tribes began to gaze about the tower with envy and lust, and then with admiration, for already they were beginning to Forget.

The Hist wrote to the Canons, who each remembered all there was to remember of one angle of truth, and told them to remember the lesson of LKHAN's sacrifice. When all five had written the lesson from their own angle of truth, they took the beginning of the five lessons (“As,” “Friend,” “A,” “Go,” and “But”) and wrote them into a new constellation of Jel that said “Go As A Friend But. . .” Then they took their five endings (“Equal,” “As,” “Them,” “Not,” and “To”) and wrote them into a new constellation, and it said “. . . Not As Equal To Them.” This was the lesson of staying hidden by keeping low that had saved the scaleskins from the Tower People's curse, and every Saxhleel knew this lesson from birth, but in seeing it written in the lessons of LKHAN's loss, they learned the true purpose of the lesson. This is why we remember, and why each memory matters, for it is through remembering and sharing memories that we learn.

So the Canons searched for one who could keep low, knowing from the Hist that this was the way to save them from Tower Madness, but their search seemed in vain; the Shadowscale were the best at keeping low, and they had become so skilled at hiding their skill shone even when they were hidden, and while men and mer cannot see skill, the Tower People would surely take note. Finally, when all seemed lost, they came upon the young Banta-rhe, as Wakan-hsji was then known, who could not decide his vocation in life and thus stood half-learned in all things but capable in none. “Young dilettante, you are the murkiest of our waters, and none in all the land shine so little as you,” the Canons said.

“Harsh,” said Banta-rhe boredly, “but probably fair.”

“You are the only one who can save our people from Tower Madness, for because you lack talent and drive, you can crawl below the gaze of the Tower People; and because you lack true ambition, the Tower People cannot tempt you.”

“Sounds about right,” said Banta-rhe.

“We can tell you no more than this: you must go along the ground, as the Snakes who Came Before, and with the Blood of Night, whose color is the Death of Day, you must paint yourself an invisible grey.”

“I might just use grey-grass dye,” Banta-rhe confessed, and the Canons saw that he was truly the one they sought.

So Banta-rhe painted himself grey with grey-grass dye, and became the first of the Xojaxhleel, the Grey People of the Root, and began to crawl along the ground. But he did not know what he was looking for, and for many months, he crawled as aimlessly as he had lived, until he happened upon the Hare, who had always been a friend to the children of Mor-wah. He offered the Hare some of the lettuce and Aegrotat he had picked on his journey in exchange for his wisdom. “So, Hare,” he said, while they shared some lettuce, “You know a lot about secrets. Where should I look to find the secret I seek?”

“Crawling low to the ground is enough to keep you from the sight of the Tower People,” said the Hare, “But you will never find secrets crawling along the surface. Secrets are buried things, and you must burrow and dive to find them. That is why I live in deep burrows instead of shallow scratches.” When they had smoked the Aegrotat, and finished the lettuce, the Hare departed to rob the library-gardens of the Dragons of the North and Banta-rhe came to face the fact that he would have to dig burrows to save his people. First he dug under the bogs of the Marsh itself, scouring one peat bog after another to see if the bogs held the secret for why the traitor tribes above were afflicted with Tower Madness. By now he had come a long way West, and though he had found nothing, he was at the line that marked the White Gold Towerlands, and suddenly he thought the Tower People probably kept their secrets close to their towers, so he crawled along the ground from the edge of the Marsh to the center of the Towerland of the Cyrod, until he came upon two dryskin guards just as he was about to dig in the shadow of the Tower there.

“Halt!” said one.

“Halt!” said the other.

“Halt!” said the first again. Seeing where this was going, Banta-rhe elected to halt.

“What is your business here?” the second dryskin demanded.

Banta-rhe may have had no skills, but he had much learning, and so he came up with an excuse for himself at once, remembering the history of the land he was in. “I'm a mining robot from the future, sent back in time to, uh, mine, I guess,” he explained, “I'm grey because I traveled back in time to before my silver was polished.”

The guards exchanged a long glance, and conferred amongst themselves for a moment. “None of that makes any sense,” said the first guard.

“But there is precedent,” The second guard rebutted “My cousin, up in Skyrim, said they had a mining robot from the future up there, but the Nords though it was a witch and buried it. Pelinal himself was a mechanical man who came from the future, remember. This sort of thing happens all the time. We recognized the word 'robot,' so we must have some conception of a kind of automaton distinct from the dwarven animunculi, and that conception must have come from somewhere,” he reasoned.

“But why send a mining robot back in time?” the first guard asked, “To mine what? Why not mine it in the present?”

“I am mining the present. Or I would be if you two would let me,” Banta-rhe interrupted.

“The present of the future, I mean,” the first guard clarified, and Banta-rhe shrugged his acquiescence. “Why not just have the robot mine then. Why would you need a robot to mine at all, for that matter?”

“Ah, I see what you mean,” the second guard said, “The level of industrial capability and localized control over the flow and arrow of time implied by sending an advanced automaton back in time would obviate many of the potential reasons for sending a robot back in time to mine something. I can accept that, and would moreover add that the creation of a conscious machine would further obviate any such needs when the implicit ability to create consciousness is considered in light of the ties between consciousness and the souls which power enchantments. However, none of those concerns can contradict the established fact that, however little it makes sense, there is precedent for this very occurrence.”

“And you,” said the first guard to Banta-rhe, presumably to distract from the fact that he was beginning to lose the argument. “What have you to say for yourself? What were you sent back to mine? Why send a robot back in time to mine it?”

“How should I know? None of this was my idea,” Banta-rhe said. “I just mine stuff.”

Seemingly satisfied with his ignorance, the guards turned back to each other. “So we must conceive of a circumstance in which the robot would be sent back despite all outward indications that this would not be the most efficient course,” the first summarized, “We must, in other words, contrive of the exact setting to make this moment possible.”

Seeing his opponent losing ground, the second guard seized the moment. “Ah, we need not fall back upon unlikely contrivances. There is a far more elegant explanation.”

“Should I still be halting?” asked Banta-rhe.

“If there is an 'elegant explanation,'” the first guard's voice dripped with sarcasm, “I would certainly like to hear it.”

Banta-rhe shrugged and began to dig in the shadow of the White Gold Tower.

“If we assume that time is somewhat stable — that though history may be rewritten, the re-writing itself must remain internally consistent — then we have our explanation,” the second crowed, “The very capabilities which allow the future to produce the mining robots it sends back in time are, in fact, the very result of the mining robots sent back in time. That is to say, the robots arrived in the future, from the past to which they were sent, with not only the materials for their own construction, but essentially as their own schematics. From the advanced workings of the mining robots, the people of the future reverse-engineered the various technologies which not just produced, but obviated the need for the mining robots, leaving them in the awkward position of having no real reason to send robots back in time to mine other than being unable to have invented any of the devices or magics which obviated that need without the example of the very robots they had made obsolete to expand upon.”

As the first guard was beginning to clumsily address the apparent aporia of a thing simultaneously establishing its own necessity and obsolescence, Banta-rhe had dug too deep to hear any more. Still, because he had not found what he was seeking, and because he feared they might raise their voices louder, he kept digging, until he had burrowed a hole through the world and come out somewhere else entirely.

But that's enough for tonight. Tomorrow we will learn how he sewed the seeds that would bring the Empires of Man to ruin, and how he came to dig his next burrow in the land of the dark elves.