THE WAR OF THE SUN

When all the world rages in midnight and the moons unhang their selfish songs from a crescent smile. When the bones of the earth are bloodied with generations of false gods and scriven heroes. When melody is gone, when memory is gone, when the final tone is a saw-tooth buzzing in flesh and narrative is carried by worms crawling in bone dry mouths. Then shall the Starry Heart folk know their caravan and journey Above.

-- from Hecilcano's Prophecy of the Fifth Era, which never came to Tamriel

It is the year 4E798. The thirteen generations of Volkihar since the coming of Paradise have known war, feast, and famine. Our eldest has worn smooth the Ruby Throne for six hundred years, His red tendons shaping sounds of peace with the worm. The mer and men of Tamriel long ago succumbed to the feast. How could they not? The Red Emperor, King of Cyr and Her Satellite States, Gaius Volkihar, holds the Bow of Oaths in His left hand and the heart-blessed arrows in His right. This holy instrument was Auri-El's, once, and the elf-god's perversion of its purpose hid the Bow for millennia. The scribes of the Aundae, who have accreted history since the Second Empire, tell us this artifact hung the moons.

In 4E203, the Bow of Oaths was found in a riverbed outside Whiterun by a thin-blooded vampire, a feral of no particular sire or distinction. Skaebola Volkihar -- called the Left-Handed, for losing his sword arm to treachery in the last war of Men and replacing it with a ghost-arm, Gaius' bodyguard since those days -- destroyed this creature and so the bow was recovered and brought to its proper rest in House Volkihar, where its secrets were quickly unbound. The Red Emperor, then only a childe of Harkon and Bal, knew well the role this weapon would play in the liberation of our kind; the Tyranny of the Sun was an old song in the hall of Harkon.

After Harkon's assassination Gaius pled with the Daedra for their counsel, but the Lords of Misrule were silent. Tamriel was their plaything, not His, and they shared power only on their terms. The house bard, a Nord woman named Alisee who was among the oldest of the Volkihar cattle, played a lazy dirge in the hall one Midsummer evening when a geometric shape from beyond the known spaces unfolded itself from her chest. The Nord woman expired and crumpled to the ground, and the inexpressible spoke:

"WHAT DO COWARDS KNOW OF SERVING JUSTICE? OR FOOLS OF ADVANTAGE? A NEW STAR IS MADE, AND IT SPEAKS TRUTH TO FALSE ECONOMIES. BARTER WITH ME."

Its breath was red light and peering into its figure only led your eyes to its ever-molting border. In that final night, a bargain was struck. The remains of the bard were collected as fetishes or bottled in reliquaries. Many of these relics have been lost, but a few remain in the hands of powerful vampire lords who have pledged themselves to the line of dragons, Clan Volkihar.

On the 21st of Midsummer 4E203, when the sun rose over the surface of the waves outside Castle Volkihar, Gaius plunged an arrow into His heart's blood and shot the holy missile to blind the eye of the gods. The Volkihar dragonfire, or the Miracle of the Blood, was seen across Tamriel. The sky was clouded as if by ash and the sun was made into a ragged blank, a void from before time. Mortal men and elves who witnessed the sun's demise dessicated and fell to dust. The sun rose again the next morning, and every day since, as an open wound foretelling His dominion over the east.

Those mortals who remained took up arms across Tamriel, fighting the clanless vampire rabble who emerged from hill forts, lowland caves, and ruins from the days of the snakemen. Azura, who trades in proper fates (but wisely, only when her part is certain), whispered to our lord of His greatness and the victories to come. She made him a gift of blessed armor. The Red Emperor marshaled these rude forces and strode over His vanguard dressed in iron plate, thick as the lies of the gods and etched with paragraphs of his victories, His ashen flesh made whole by the bottomless hunger of the Shape That Spoke. Men and elves who stood against Him, fragile mortals of an empire in love with evil, woke suddenly in the next life with only a vague notion of having escaped much worse. The upstart Dawnguard disappeared from Riften like the setting moons: overnight. The famous deeds of the New Imperial Army are too many to list. Heroes such as Skaebola the Left-Handed, whose ghost-arm strangled heretics from Dawnstar to Leyawiin while he slept, or Hovia the Deaf, who slit the enchanted throat of Grilkin the archpriest at the Temple of the One while her comrades stood enamored of his lies, these are typical of the heroism of those days.

The War of the Sun lasted only two years. Thalmor Justiciars in Skyrim and Hammerfell were already strained by a bureaucratic Alinor that stretched itself thin across the empire. The imperial treasury had been depleted, and the most experienced troops had fallen in the civil war and dragon attacks in Skyrim. Chancellor Mathis, who was installed after Titus Mede II's assassination, was a true son of Nibenay; better suited to composing plays than commanding troops. The Imperial Province was defenseless, and Clan Volkihar walked into White-Gold Tower unopposed. Perhaps the only restless corner of Tamriel that remains to the present day are a swath of Hammerfell folk from Stros M'Kai to Hegathe and Sentinel, who continue to oppose His armies without adequate food or supplies. The mortals here fought mightily during the War of the Sun, and their cities never fell to the fanged hunger of His armies. The Red Emperor has declared they should remain unspoiled mortal cattle, a preserve of wild game for future generations. Cattle who stray from their guaranteed realms, however, are the subject of extravagant hunts put on by the nobility of Cyr. In these parts of Hammerfell during the earliest morning hours, or the twilight dusk, a vague blue light can be seen on the horizon under the oppressive sky - ghostly auras of colors now alien to the red heavens of Tamriel. The mortals here call it Morwha's Mercy, a memory of the blue sky that was.

In the northwestern part of Skyrim, at Castle Volkihar, stone images and altars were erected to the Shape That Spoke. Gaius and his coterie of childer, the first generation since the taking of the Imperial City, spoke with it at length through these idols after the war and called it RA-SEP. It unnerved all but the Emperor, and none but He trusted its words.

In the years that followed the War of the Sun, many things changed and many remained the same. The laws of the old empire were mostly left intact. The ruling class was largely the same as it ever was -- except for its new appetite. In 4E215, the Emperor decreed there should be a Cattle Guild for the mutual protection of mortals who serve the Volkihar and the noble bloodlines themselves. The nobles of Cyrodiil that had surrendered during the war were allowed to retain their land and titles in the Satellite States if they shared in the blood to prove their allegiance. The Imperial Province herself became the personal property of The Red Emperor Gaius Volkihar, who parceled it out to worthy supplicants. The guilds established during the heretical ages were useful, and the few guildhalls that stayed out of the fight kept their charters.

In many ways, Cyr became as it was in the days before Queen Alessia or during the reign of the Akaviri Potentates: free. Common cattle who paid the blood tax were allowed to own property, and criminals who incited rebellion were subject to inhuman torment. In 4E297 the Re-examined History of Cyrodiil was completed by White-Gold scholars, finding proof of the degeneracy of the races of Men especially in the heresy of Reman and the seventeen documented lies in the pedigree of the Septims. The elf folk were not spared. Thalmor were erased completely - there is very little left of them today besides the name. The mer of Tamriel, but especially the Altmer, were thoughtfully shuffled throughout the empire by influence of the Cattle Guild until their ears shrank to match their diminished hubris. The so-called Void Nights of a century prior, which some Khajiit of Anequina say foretold the disappearance of the sun (or the blessed arrival of Ra-Sep), have been debunked as kitten myth.

Under the new regime most of the old faiths were allowed, with appropriate revisions, but frowned upon as needless superstition that contradicts the glory of the Ruby Throne. All were allowed except the cult of Arkay, which was banned. This decree came from the Emperor immediately after accepting the surrender of Chancellor Mathis. Many suspect it was part of the compact He struck with Ra-Sep. Shrines of Arkay were defiled, and halls of the dead across Tamriel (except parts of Hammerfell) were desecrated and destroyed. Burial rituals, death magic, and the practice of necromancy are similarly outlawed. Cults of necromancers persist, however, and His Legions persecute them mercilessly. Rumors persist of a powerful necromancer in southern Skyrim, but no official scouting mission has confirmed this.

Skaebola the Left-Handed still stands besides his old sovereign. His ghost-arm grasps at heretics still, unstoppable as ever, but as Emperor Volkihar's safety comes first he has sworn to never sleep again. Such is the discipline of Ra-Sep's faithful. Glory to the Empire.