On Cyrodilic Religion, Part the Second: The Alessian Order

Despite the fact that the brilliant pantheon of the Eight Divines constructed by Saint Alessia to satisfy the religious desires of her newly-freed Nedic peoples, the rebel Ayleid kings who had declared their loyalty to the Empire, and the armies of Nords who had assisted her in capturing the White-Gold Tower was appealing to all races, both man and elf, and captured the spirit of the Aldmeri and Nordic pantheons without having to make too much sacrifice on the behalf of either, its position as the dominant religion in Cyrodiil was not concrete. Only a couple of decades after the death of Empress Alessia in the Two Hundred Sixty-Sixth Year of the First Era, a mysterious prophet named Maruhk was gaining followers and power in the West.

Maruhk the Seer, also known as Maruhk the Liar to his enemies, was an Imga of Valenwood, a ape-like that is remarked for its cultural importance it places on Altmeri culture. The Imga are known shave themselves and powder their faces to resemble the Altmer, and, in some cases, cut their ears into points; they instantly recognizable in the endless green of Valenwood due to their brightly colored capes, and shining dueling swords. Unlike the rest of his simian brethren, Maruhk was not inspired by the elves, but by the men who had overthrown them and established themselves as the true heirs of Cyrodiil. According to legend, Maruhk spent a Century of Penance upon the Stonemeadows, as punishments for raping an Imga woman named Dulsa, in which he was blinded, his tongue swelled, and his pelt became mottled, and it was in this wretched state that Saint Alessia herself supposedly visited him. The Prophet-Most-Simian never shared the details of his conversation with Alessia, believing it to have been a private and divine matter that was intended for him and him alone. Maruhk supposedly wrote the Seventy-Seven Inflexible Doctrines in his own blood following the divine encounter, and he grew to believe that death itself was an illusion, and that willpower itself - in this case, Maruhk's drive to purge corruption from the world - could conquer the "Arkayn Cycle" itself. Whether or not any of this is true is completely unknown; the lifespan of an Imga is typically half of that of a man, meaning that it would be impossible for any Imga to spend an entire century in punishment. Most scholars today accept that these legends are nothing but exaggeration on behalf of Maruhk, which could have actually been inspired by his feelings of guilt about his rape of Dulsa, leading him to believe he was visited by Alessia and become determined to purge corruption from the world.

The earliest recorded actions of the Alessians were the sacking of many remaining Ayleid cities and temples in Cyrodiil, which earned the attention of the Nibenese lower-classes that still resented the Ayleids. Despite the public condemnation of the Alessians' actions by Imperial authorities, many of the Nibenese were the children, or grandchildren, of slaves, and some of the older ones had been slaves themselves; they grew to secretly support the actions of Maruhk, believing him to be a hero for destroying the old pillars of Ayleid society that had oppressed the Nedes for so long. Some of the Nibenese were alienated by Maruhk's primary religious message, which was that there was only one true God, however, the identity of this god is difficult to decipher; throughout Alessian history, this God has either been referred to as Saint Alessia herself, Akatosh, Maruhk, Pelinal Whitestrake, Morihaus, Shezarr, or combinations of any of the above, and many more people as well. Despite the fact that they were originally religiously opposed to Maruhk, many of the Nibenese began to worship his God in secret, abandoning the Eight Divines, and the Empire could feel this change in faith at its core. By the time the Alessians sailed down the northern rivers of Cyrodiil into Lake Rumare, and approached Cyrodiil City, many of the Nibenese were already faithful to the Order. It did not take long for the Alessians to overthrow the aristocracy of battlemages that had governed Nibenay in the name of the Empire, and instate the religion of the Alessian God in favor the Eight Divines. The Empire was formally under the control of the Alessians, and worship of the Eight Divines had been formally abolished in Cyrodiil, and this would remain so for the next two thousand years.

Life under the Alessians is often romanticized as a bleak period in Cyrodiil's history, when the Nibenese culture stagnated under the weight of the Alessian Doctrines, but this was not the case. Despite being monotheists, one important aspect of the Alessian canon was its flexibility, as depictions of the one true God were constantly changing, as was the list of approved saints and animal-gods for worship; the Alessians knew they could not abolish polytheism itself, and so legalized various cults in the Heartland that promoted ancestor-worship, as well as the worship of various animal-gods. While many idealize Alessian worship as a dreary affair, it was anything but; the Alessians believed in the necessity of suffering in order to achieve enlightenment, and so, began to create elaborate methods of torment that were only rivaled by the art-tortures of the Ayleids. The difference is that the men who were tortured did so voluntarily, and gleefully; rows of men smiled and gritted their teeth as they were whipped for their endless sins, and when a man emerged from being nearly drowned by an Alessian priest, he used his remaining air to bellow out a laugh, that he was redeeming himself in the eyes of God. Life was severely austere and severe, of course; prisons crumbled into dust during the days of the Order, because the Alessians preferred instant public execution to all other forms of punishment. Many forms of art and music were abolished by the Order, the punishment for creating being, typically, the removal of the fingers and tongue. It was not uncommon for a Cyrodiil to return home to find his home ransacked by the Order; concepts of privacy, beauty, and in some cases, money were outlawed, and many Cyrodiils failed to see the difference between the Ayleids and the Alessians - a comment so heretical that it would earn only the most painful, slow, and humiliating of deaths, one which is not properly recorded by Alessian scribes, but seems to have included the removal of the genitals, sculpting of the ear to form elven points, and forced starvation until the brink of death.

A great deal of the animal-cults established during the Alessian Empire remain prominent in Cyrodiil today. The most famous of these is the Cult of the Ancestor-Moth, a cult that worships the gypsy moth indigenous to Cyrodiil, believing it to contain the souls of their ancestors. Another such cult was the Cult of the Bull, which was a thinly disguised cult that worshiped bulls and the minotaurs of Cyrodiil, as they were believed to all have been descended from the man-bull Morihaus Breath-of-Kyne, the divine consort of Empress Alessia. One of the lesser known, but still popular, cults of the Alessian era was the Cult of the Dragon, which was primarily a thinly disguised Cult of Akatosh; the Cult of the Dragon did not worship the dovah of Skyrim, but instead, the Cyrodilic dragons, which were not intelligent beings, but simply flying reptilian animals, similar to the dragonlings of High Rock. Alongside the many animal cults were cults of ancestor-worship, which began to construct ancestral tombs in which the Nibenese could pray to the dead for assistance in life, which is still continued by some Alessian revivalists in the Current Era. The worship of animal-gods and ancestor-spirits continued for decades following the establishment of the Alessian hegemony, and while many of the Nibenese were accepting of the new religion, many more became troubled by it.

The multitude of animal-gods created many problems in Cyrodiil; as the influence of these animal-cults grew, the Alessians began to cater to their whims, beginning to legally forbid exploitation of these animals. This made animal husbandry nearly impossible in Cyrodiil, which was still a rather weak state at the time, leading to the rise of the rice crop as one of the dominant foods in Cyrodiil. There is a story of a Rice Cult that rose up in the fifth century of the First Era, and protested against the consumption of rice, but they were all destroyed by the Alessians, who knew that if the growing of rice was made illegal, Cyrodiil would starve. The multitude of banned animals lead to the adoption of vegetarianism by the majority of Nibenese though steaks and cuts of chicken were still traded in some places as secretly as skooma and moon-sugar are today. In order to survive without their animals, the Cyrodiils were forced into a life of trade, and they excelled at it, earning the Imperial City a reputation of being home to the most skilled merchants in Tamriel. Some of the cults earned their profits by creating and selling treasure-goods and esoteric artifacts, such as the ancestor-silks produced exclusively by the Cult of the Ancestor Moth, necklaces of dragon teeth produced by the Cult of the Dragon, and of real estate for the dead by the ancestor-cults who sold tombs within their massive mausoleums. Despite this rise of the merchant-culture of Nibenay, the Alessians forced the newly emerging merchant class to pay constant tithes to the order, proving that they retained their dominance.

While the Alessian Order grew in power in Nibenay, its bizarre customs of animal and ancestor-worship, as well as its promotion of monotheism, alienated the Cyrodiils who had begun to conquer the western jungles of the province, which had become known as Colovia. Its people, the Colovians, had traveled to the frontier with the Eight Divines guiding them, and their leaders were often Cyro-Nordic descendants of the Nords who had assisted Alessia in the overthrowing of the Ayleids. The Colovians were a staunchly practical people, who believed that the worship of the nameless Alessian god, as well as mundane spirits and animals, was heresy, and that the Alessians should not be tolerated in the west. The divide between the Alessians and the worshipers of the Eight Divines would come to create the cultural divide between the modern Nibenese and Colovian Cyrodiils. Despite the movement having begun in Colovia, the Colovians themselves soundly rejected the Alessian Doctrines, and in the Four Hundred Seventy-Eighth Year of the First Era, Rislav Larich, also known as Rislav the Righteous, King of Skingrad, defended the city of Skingrad from invading Imperial forces and established the Colovian Estates, a loose confederacy of other Western kingdoms that still held the Eight in high regard. Despite being unable to hold Colovia, the Alessians were able to expand their power into Skyrim temporarily through High King Borgas, but following his death in the Wild Hunt and the War of Succession that followed, the Alessians had to give up on Skyrim, especially after High King Wulfharth forbade the Doctrines as his first action once becoming king in the Four Hundred Eightieth Year of the First Era. They also found resistance in High Rock, where Clan Direnni, the governing elven clan of the region, had forbidden the Doctrines; the Alessians rode to war against the Direnni, with neither side gaining any real advantage, and it was ultimately the Breton people themselves who rose up, destroying the Direnni and ejecting the Alessians.

The Maruhkati Selectives was an elite sect of the Alessian Order, devoted most to the concept of unitarianism and singularity, and whose one true God was Akatosh, who had liberated humanity from the wicked Daedraphile Ayleids. They still believed that there remained an Aldmeri taint in the world, due to the worship of Auri-El, the Aldmeri equivalent of Akatosh; they believed that this worship tainted Time itself with elven influence, and that this was absolutely unacceptable. According to legend, the Selectives, in the Twelve Hundredth Year of the First Era, decided to channel the Aurbis and Time itself in order to expunge any and all Aldmeri taint from the Aurbis; this use of strange mythics resulted in the appearance of a Tower, which the secret masters of the Selectives began to dance on. At the conclusion of this dance, the Tower spoke its true name, its protonymic - "Tam! RUGH!" - and it shattered into eight pieces, along with Time itself, which became distinctly nonlinear. This time period became known as the Middle Dawn, which is remembered by all the cultures of Tamriel for the chaos and insanity of the age, which lasted one thousand and eight years, concluding in the Two Thousand Two Hundred Twenty-Eighth Year of the First Era. The Middle Dawn is remembered as an age of anguish and mystery, and many remember it differently; some believe that the gods were made mortal, some claim that wars occurred that nobody else remembers, and all of these sources constantly contradict each other. What occurred during the Middle Dawn is unknown and unknowable, but Time was eventually restored, with the Selectives having failed to remove Aldmeri influence from the Aurbis.

This failure and absolute chaos brought on by the Alessian Order alienated, horrified, and infuriated the other denizens of Tamriel, who began to utterly despise the Order, hoping that its destruction would soon occur - and occur soon it did. A scant century later, in the Two Thousand Three Hundred Twenty-First Year of the First Era, the War of Righteousness broke out in Nibenay. The exact cause of the War of Righteousness was unknown, but it was most likely a civil war between the Alessians jockeying for power and control of the Empire, and the various factions of idealists within the faith. In the span of the ten-year war, the Alessians who had once held the hearts and minds of most of Tamriel undid themselves, resulting in the collapse of their religion and the First Empire of Mankind, much to the delight of Tamriel, and especially the Colovians, who, while happy that the Eight Divines were beginning to gain traction in Nibenay again, could never tolerate unification with their Eastern brethren, for their culture had mutated into something so bizarre, arcane, and mercantile that it was unrecognizable and disturbing to the Westerners.

The Alessian Order rose up in the beginning of the First Era, and quickly established itself as not only the dominant power in Cyrodiil, but in Tamriel. It maintained control of the Imperial City for two thousand years, the longest-lasting known empire in history, and its policies codified the culture of Nibenay that persists to the Common Era. However, it was the pride and tyranny of the Order that was ultimately its own undoing, and in the Current Era, the one true Alessian God is nothing more than a historical antiquity. Following the collapse of the Order, the dominant faith of Cyrodiil would return to the Eight Divines, though, in the days to come, another empire in Cyrodiil would rise up to dominate Tamriel, and the Eight Divines would soon become the Nine. .