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

When he had burrowed out of the world, though of course not yet out of the Egg of the World, Banta-rhe found himself in a land of fire and sulphuric stone, copiously reminiscent of the rantings of Nulfaga, who imagined a fiery land below a lost paradise though neither existed in or out of our world, for her Sacred Madness let remember a place beyond the Shell of the Egg of the World. Though he could not remember these rantings, for they had not yet been ranted, Banta-Rhe was Saxhleel, and could remember the things which were in and out of our world, all the realms of men and mer and Aedra and Daedra, and knew none were to be like this, but also knew he had not burrowed through the shell of the egg of the world. So he did not need to remember Lightning-struck Nulfaga to learn that the land he was in was a grave cosmic error, a place which was wrong even as it moved and writhed and breathed.

Its endless expanse of flames bored Banta-rhe to tears, and his tears of boredom were as adamant armor against the flames even as his weary sighs extinguished the flames in his path. As the smoke cleared, Banta-rhe came face-to-face with an angry giant, whose four arms smashed anything attempting to rise above the flames. He had come upon Mehrunes Dagon, bent-but-unbeaten brother of Mor-wah, and because he was Saxhleel could remember Dagon's shape before he was bent. Dagon clasped his four fists into twin hammers and turned to smash the small figure the flames couldn't seem to swallow. “Wait,” cried Banta-rhe, “I am Saxhleel, and we have not Forgotten, like all the others, how you loved to leap. Let me live, for I know a thing or two about jumping I could teach you.” Banta-rhe was being modest, for he knew as many as three, perhaps four, things about jumping, but it was to no avail.

“NO! Jumping is the dumbest thing!” Mehrunes Dagon tantrumed, and Banta-rhe not only saw why Sheogorath said he was not often invited to parties, but also that even Dagon himself had Forgotten he was the Leaper King inside his Towerskin. “Argonians aren't grey, idiot!” he added.

“I'm only grey from the ashes of all these fires,” said Banta-rhe, “Put some of your sulphur-stone in the Western Bogs and see for yourself.”

“Will there be fire and flame?” Mehrunes Dagon inquired, intrigued.

“Sure,” said Banta-rhe, “Both fire and flame. Which are different things.”

“Then I will see for myself,” Dagon roared, hurling sulphur-stone up the way Banta-rhe had come, and Banta-rhe saw his life would be spared for a few moments more, and sought to take advantage of this to see it spared indefinitely.

“So, I gather you aren't really into jumping,” he said, cautiously, “But you seem like to fire pretty well.”

“And Flame!” said Dagon.

“And flame,” agreed Banta-rhe. “Which is a different thing. What else do you like?”

“Are you to be my Jester, little Argonian?” asked Mehrunes Dagon.

“How do you feel about Jesters?” asked Banta-rhe.

“I hate them!” howled Dagon.

“In that case, I'm not your jester,” said Banta-rhe. “Maybe your butler?”

“I hate butlers less,” Mehrunes Dagon conceded, and so Banta-rhe became the butler to Mehrunes Dagon. “As my butler, you must help me with the tedious parts of my work,” ordered Dagon, “First, you must help me with getting into the world”

“Pft, that's easy. My friend the Hare can keep low with the best of them, out of sight of the Tower People, and he can show others the secret holes he knows or that we Saxhleel remember. I'll offer him some lettuce and Aegrotat in exchange for sharing the ritual to bring you into the world.”

“This one is harder,” whined Dagon, “Once I get into the world, I always get so caught up in destroying and destroying that I forget exactly what I'm supposed to destroy, and often destroy the wrong things, so by the time I have to come home, I've hardly gotten anything done.”

“That is why your butler is a Saxhleel, sir,” bowed Banta-rhe, “For our great gift is remembering. I remember exactly what you are to destroy, and can teach you to remember it, too.” Banta-rhe did not really remember which parts Dagon was supposed to destroy, for none but Alduin knew this for it to be remembered, but he had an idea. “The key is in your own name, Mehrunes Dagon,” he explained. “If you rearrange the letters, as the Canons teach us as a way of remembering what is hidden because the Tower People want us to Forget, your name spells Me Shun Dragon.”

“Wouldn't there be an extra 'E'?” asked Mehrunes Dagon in a sudden burst of insight. “Mee Shun Dragon?”

“These things don't matter,” Banta-rhe said with a wave of his hand, “I learned that from Baka Gosh, the Yokudan version of Tosh'Raka and god of 'Whatever, Close Enough'.” This seemed to appease Dagon, so Banta-rhe continued. “The Dragon is the Empire of Man, and the Tower People told you to shun it to trick you, so that each time you get into the world, you destroy the wrong thing. So you must remember not to shun the Dragon, and to destroy the Empire of Man.”

“That was simpler than I thought,” mused Mehrunes Dagon. “Well, I suppose we'll just keep smashing things around here until I next get into the world.”

“As great as that sounds, sir,” Banta-rhe butlered, “I have to go to tell Hare to spread the word on how to let you into the world.”

“Oh, of course. It's a shame you'll miss all the smashing, butler,” Mehrunes Dagon said wistfully, for he had come to like his little butler over these past few minutes. Feeling bad for his trick, Banta-rhe decided to fix Dagon's realm, and so as he burrowed back out, he kicked all the dirt over the flames, until all that was left of the fires was molten rivers running between the mounds of dust, so that Dagon would have something to smash until he was finally let into the world again.

As he burrowed back into the lands of the Marsh, he saw Dagon had indeed hurled sulphur-stone into the Western Marsh, and all between the Towerlands of Cyrod and the heart of the marsh was a great conflagration. All Saxhleel touched by the flames turned as grey as Banta-rhe as the ashes stuck to their wet skin that the flames could not burn, but the traitor tribes and the armies of men, dry-skinned with Forgetting, were not bored but burnt by the flames. “Well,” said Banta-rhe over his shoulder, “That was a freebie.” But he still had not found the source of the Tower Madness, and so he turned to the next closest tower, the Red Mountain to the North, and again he crawled along the ground so the Tower People could not see him.

After a while of crawling, Banta-rhe came to a high hill, and thought to himself, even if he crawled along the hill, he would hardly be keeping low. Since he was going to have to burrow anyway, he figured he may as well start now, and so he burrowed horizontally into the hill. In its center, there was a chamber in the shape of an egg, much larger than could have fit inside the hill, and the egg was jeweled exquisitely with beams of brass studded in sapphire and arches of argent adamantine studded with turquoise and emeralds, and through all of them rivers of ebony, glistening grey and glittered with glowing green glass. Inside the egg was all manner of dryskin furniture, but arranged as though each item had lost its connection to its function, and was pure ornament that signified nothing. Banta-rhe had not seen this yet, however, for he was struggling to burrow through a stream of ebony, which would not relent to the claws of a Saxhleel who was not yet the Snake Who Burrowed out of the Egg of the World and Became Real. Finally, there came a sound like the slithering of the moon and the ebony slid from before Banta-rhe and he came tumbling through it into the room. “Are you fully satisfied? You've very nearly woken him,” said a small elf, gesturing with his scepter of gleaming golden brass to a bigger elf in a heap upon the floor. “Are you what the Chimer have become, or are you merely stained grey with the Blood of Night?”

“It was just grey-grass dye, but who knows, now,” said Banta-rhe, trying to no avail to dust off the new layer of grey. “I'm a saxhleel. And Mehrunes Dagon's butler,” he said, because all the gems made him feel like he should sound important.

“I was once Dumac Dwarf-king, but now I am all that Dwarves were and Dwemer were not, and all of Dumac that was Dwarf and was not Dwemer,” the once-great king lamented, pausing every few words to club the grey elf back into unconsciousness.

“Oh. Nice egg,” said Banta-rhe.

“All the cosmos is one, much like this. Our orreries tried to make a science of what was art. I see that now. O, what folly, Saxhleel. What magnificent folly!”

“Sounds like folly, all right,” Banta-rhe nodded, not really knowing what else to say. Banta-rhe was growing uncomfortable, and would rather not have had anything more to do with the Dwarven specter, but at his mention of his people's folly, realized the fallen king might know something of Tower Madness, so he bit his lip and forced himself to stay. “Who's that,” he said, pointing to the puddle of grey-skinned elf on the floor, just to make conversation.

“In life he was called Voryn Dagoth, but when he touched the Heart, he was corrupted by Sharmat and became something else, Dagoth Ur, as he is called. A foul creature of hatred and blighting ash, a totalizing whim to all-absorption which has left his mortal mind mad, irrevocably mad.”

“Explains the furniture,” said Banta-rhe.

“You are wise, grey Saxhleel, and I see why the mighty Mehrunes trusts you as his valet,” conceded what was once Dumac. “Would that I had one like you, so that I may have some reprieve from my endless penance. To expiate our hubris, which brought such a creature as this into this world even as it took the whole of my people from it, I must serve forever as the guardian of Dagoth Ur, that he not rise to wreak his terrible vengeance upon the tribunal and the ones who were once Chimer.”

“I have a cousin,” said Banta-rhe. who had decided he could learn nothing useful about Tower Madness from this sad sack, but whose interest was renewed when he heard about terrible vengeance being wrought upon the dunmer. “Who could come to straighten the shambles of your furniture. Not for free, of course, but if you could part with the jewels around the room, I'm sure he could help.”

“I am a sorrowful specter, with no need for jewels, who wants only to finally die in peace,” moped the former Dwemer king. “And perhaps a few meager moments of rest in-between.”

“Then it's settled,” said Banta-rhe, “In exchange for the jewels of the Egg, he will straighten your furniture, though it may take a thousand years, and when it's all straightened, he will take your scepter and provide you a reprieve, with a chair you can actually sit in, no less,” said Banta-rhe. For he knew his cousin, who was a fool, would not move the furniture quietly, and Dagoth Ur would be awakened by the great scraping of chairs, and when his cousin took the scepter from Dumac's specter, he would not return the vengeful demon to rest, and Dagoth Ur would bring doom to the dunmer who enslaved the Saxhleel. “I still have a lot of burrowing to do, but I'll send my cousin over as soon as I return to the Marsh,” said Banta-rhei, as he used the Dwarf-king's trick to burrow through the ebony on the other side.

The rest of his journey to Red Mountain was uneventful, for all the other hills were empty, or else small enough he could simply crawl atop them and still keep low. When he reached the mountain, he burrowed through the side again, both because he needed to keep low and because there was already a hole at the top, and going through extant holes was different from digging, and he imagined the Hare would tell him there was little to be found in already-dug holes. Because he was so bored with fire from Mehrunes Dagon's lands, the magma washed over him like gentle rain, and he thought he would reach the center of the mountain, where he would begin to dig down, unscathed. When he arrived in chamber at the center of the mountain, though, he saw three figures before him, each facing a beating heart in the center of the center. Though he kept as low as he could, they seemed to notice his presence at once.

“Halt!” said the bi-chromatic bald one.

“Halt!” said the face-snaked one.

“Halt!” said the weird-looking one.

“Oh no, not this again,” muttered Banta-rhe, “and with three this time.”

But that's enough for tonight. Tomorrow, we will learn how Banta-rhe convinced the Dunmer's charlatan gods to let him burrow under Red Mountain, and how he went from there to the backwards Land of Lyg, where water creatures behaved as dryskins, and how he earned the Saxhleel the enmity of the Ruddy Man, but evaded a curse with cleverness.