What Sithis Is Not

I hunt witches, and I have done so since my tree-day. Witches are cruel and petty and stupid. So many witches think they know communion with what Sithis is. Hah! I teach them communion with Sithis as I slake my bow's thirst for witch-blood.

Sithis is not powerful.

All blood goes down to Sithis, after time or when time is cut short. We the living are powerful, and we are the strength of Sithis when we make an end of things and beings. When we spend our strength to cause an end, we are hands of Sithis.

This I cannot emphasize enough. Our hungers are Sithis. Our thirsts are Sithis. When the drunkard in the inn falls insensate, stinking breath and shallow breath, he draws near to Sithis. All who work for their own mortal ends are slaves of Sithis, because all will end.

Sithis is not clever.

Sithis does not need to be clever. There are no avenues to escape forever from Sithis. There are no plots from Sithis, though failure of plots is like Sithis. There are no lies from Sithis, though confusion is like Sithis.

How much do you know? It is a drop in the ocean of things you know not, and this is like Sithis, especially. As you see the grave approaching, you will lose thoughts and memories of better days, and this is Sithis knocking on your door. Confusion and forgetting are more of Sithis than lies, for who can say what was forgotten?

Sithis is not malevolent.

I do not mean Sithis is kind, or generous. Sithis does not care whether you live or die. It is your futile caring for anything inevitably to be lost that is of Sithis. Better to know it is lost while you still have it than to cling as it slips from your desperate, clutching grasp.

Were there an opposite of Sithis in qualities, it would be glorious and worthy of praise. Some say the Nine are each opposites of the many qualities of Sithis. Were they to oppose him, they would be as in his grasp as the daedra, who feed because of their masters' bidding and their own hungers, whose masters know their broken tools and lurch back toward the life of Arena to fill their bellies before their turn in the trough.

I found a lair, once, with an altar to Sithis in the lowest cavern. Statues of dirt reaching out to the embrace of Sithis, spikes and spines ready to snatch and impale, a statue macabre with skulls piled around. I took the skulls and buried them. I offered the statues and the idol itself to Sithis by making them not. Sithis, are you the patron power behind lost Passwall? Even if it wasn't yours, you took it through forgettings.

Some say we of the Tree worship Sithis. Could you worship your stomach's emptiness? Could you worship the space between your fingers? We simply know that Sithis is not, and we wonder how you can see the world without seeing nothing.