The Jagarran Heresy

The song of a Nightingale is loud and distinct, as piercing in its volume and singularity as the shrill howl of the hawk. No one of any ornithological knowledge, then, could mistake a nightingale for any other. So too, we thought, with that Nightingale of men and mer, the bard or battlemage called Jagar Tharn. The piercing cry of his rebellion, the mad ploy, could be mistaken for no other. Yet then, we came to find Tharn was not the bard Nightingale who stole the Staff of ᏳᏂᏘ and Chaos, not the Nightingale itself but the bird behind his voice. The question no others have asked, or perhaps no others have dared to consider, is what if this was not our only mistake. The Starling can mimic more than merely the Nightingale, from the killdeer to the red-diamond hawk. We know, in fact, Tharn mimicked the Emperor successfully for years, perhaps a decade, yet in our historiography, we persist in asking the wrong question: attempting to reconcile inconsistent dates, we ask when the Simulacrum ended when we ought to be asking if.

The recent discovery of a journal appearing to belong to the Eternal Champion of legend lays bare this oversight. At first, it seems like a simple fraud, a confused fiction in contravention of history; the denizens of Black Marsh are described like deformed dunmer, skeletal but humanoid, and they go by names from the Imperial tongue's distant past; the populace of Elseweyr look like men and refer to the cats we know as longdead ancestors. As it continues, however, the vision is much more insidious. The journal describes a land that bears no resemblance to the Tamriel we know, instead describing a nightmarish realm of endless expanses that connect to nowhere, where horrific beasts including some never heard of before or again arose from nothing not only in the dark ruins where the Staff of ᏳᏂᏘ and Chaos was held, but even in the towns and pastures of those endless expanses. The temples were empty of the Gods in whom we take solace and paid their worship to twisted perversions of their likenesses; the spinners prayed to a skittering beast wearing the name of the Lord of Madness. The great holds of our ancestors' legacy were reified as labyrinths of arbitrariness and mockery.

The deeper we go, the more the conclusion is clear; the Eternal Champion is not traveling through Tamriel at all. The real is not Dawn's Light, but night's twisted darkness, the horripolating Nightmare expanse of Quagmire. The very same realm we have come to accept as the prison of Uriel VII during Tharn's simulacrum. The scarlet gem that held Tharn's lifeforce was assumed, always, to be a ruby of Tharn's invention or discovery, but we've simply glossed over the most obvious answer; a red gem of untold power that holds souls and lives existed long before Tharn. If Tharn, in our world, was wearing the mantle of the Emperor, could not that figure whose soul wore Tharn's body in Vaermina's realm, whose life was held in a great red gem, have been Uriel himself?

Indeed, the historical pattern we've long ignored (or, rather, denied) is that the dissolution observed during the simulacrum did not abate with the restoration of Uriel to the throne. The skirmishes cited under Tharn's reign pale in comparison to the Warp in the West, after all. Is this because Uriel VII could not repair the damage Tharn had done, or because Tharn never stopped being emperor at all? Long rumored to have made a pact with Mehrunes Dagon, who came to invade Tamriel following the emperor's strangely calm acceptance, even precognition, of his death. Long considered to be a salvation of Tamriel, the Oblivion Crisis actually succeeded in identifying and wiping out the last heir of the Septim bloodline while he remained childless. If it relit the dragonfires, in doing so it only delayed, not prevented, Dagon's return by irrevocably ending the dragonborn Septim bloodline. And, indeed, the empire is corroding and rumors reach south of the Razor reforged in the North; of the Nightingale name resurgent; of a new dragonborn who consorts with daedra and neglects the Ruby Throne and defeats the world-eater, the former foe of Dagon. Are the hands behind these events, these decades unto centuries, the hands of fate, or are they the hands of Tharn, the Starling, pulling strings from behind the stage as the Tharns have since time immemorial?