The Daedric Web: Hermaeus Mora's gift to his Seekers.

Deep in the abyss that is the Great Library of Apocrypha, there can be found a cult of Mora's followers with unparalleled access to the knowledge that their Demon Lord has acquired. It is said that a Seeker can open one of the many black books (often rendered as a confusing torrent of eldritch secrets to the layperson) and access a trove of celestial and esoteric knowledge, yet as I Morian Zenas have seen, the Seekers don't seem to be reading anything other than one book at time, but are somehow accessing greater stores of knowledge than one tome could presumably ever hold.

I can only conclude that each black book acts as a gateway to some kind of central 'brain' (a server is what I heard one of the Seekers call it) which could be some terrifying daedric construct or even the mind of Hermaeus Mora himself. Maybe the tendrils of his thought can reach into the Seekers' minds through the black books, or maybe they access the memory bound in the murky waters and various slime pools which dot Apocrypha's landscape. Yes, that must be it; the slime pools must act as a way to access some of the knowledge without a black book.

I posit that the Seekers are not originally Daedra such as Dremora, but are instead ghosts of former Mora cultists who have strayed into the path of these pools and have been taken by the tendrils. It is possible that the tendrils reach into their very souls and pervert the spirits' animus (not dissimilar to some theories on vampirism) infusing them with a portion of Apocrypha's knowledge and daedric creatia. Thus, they become Seekers to house the raw power of such forbidden knowledge, their bodies changed to survive the onslaught of esoterica. Furthermore, if a corporeal being attempts to use one of these slime pools, the tendrils will whip and slash wildly, preventing the intruder from accessing Mora's secrets, and I have even seen a tendril conjure a wall of acrid green flame in its struggle to protect its secrets.

You may ask, dear reader, how I know this since I am not dead (well, not yet) nor am I a Seeker. How then can I have access to this mysterious 'Web'? As I said, only the Seekers have access to esoterica, but who has access to the Seekers? I found through judicious and skillful use of Illusion magic and some conjured ghostweb, I was able to bind a Seeker and make it divulge its neonymic, with that in hand, I was then able to use the Seeker to access the slime pools directly, using my telepathy to recover the information stored in the Seeker's mind. I later found out that this process is known to the denizens of Apocrypha as 'hacking' (though when I asked why no one would tell me in any comprehensible terms).

But, of course, my actions have not gone unnoticed. Again, I have come up with a solution, a little trick I learned in the Iliac Bay when learning to erode the will of lesser summoned daedra. Once I had retrieved the knowledge I sought from the Seeker, I placed a complex Illusion spell on it which would make it follow implanted mental commands and suggestions which could lie dormant until needed. This was a common technique spymasters would employ for nobles in Highrock, often called the Cheval Troyen (Equus Troianus for all you Imperials) after the infamous horse which was given as a marriage-gift by the villainous Count Troye to a petty lord who had displeased him. The horse was riddled with diseases which soon infected the Lord's best mares, and some even said it was a creature sent by Peryite himself. In any case, the petty lord Ilias' reputation was ruined and his horses befouled.

For now, dear reader, although the secrets of this place are slowly being revealed to me, I dare not press my luck by 'streaming' this message too long. I am conjuring this note to the Mundus, and urge anyone who finds it to take it to my friend, Divayth Fyr or to my apprentice Seif-ij Hidja who will know what to do with it.

--Morian Zenas, Master Conjurer and Explorer of Diverse Waters