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Arc 8 Chapter CXIII: The War Of Apocrypha
🕑 Added 2025-04-10 00:35:15 +0000 UTC(General POV, Before Minthara fought Miraak)
Hermaeus Mora floated ominously above and within his forbidden realm of lost knowledge, an act that would warrant no special mention as he had been doing much the same for uncountable years already... if not for the small fact he was not currently shuffling through all the forbidden knowledge he hoarded alongside his menagerie of entrapped mortal souls.
Instead, the usually dread inducing Woodland Man was currently trying, and failing, to contain his apocalyptic rage as he battled no less than five of his fellow Daedra.
Even the pitiful mortal creature that had recently subsumed Sheogorath was throwing its armies at him!
Why, if the times were less troubled, he'd be fascinated by how the usual whacky madness of the residents of the Shivering Isles was so efficiently turned into a berserk rage resembling the most brainless of Malakath's favored puppets.
He supposed he would just have to capture as many as he could and study them once he had won.
And he would win.
There was no mistaking that fact.
He was absolute within his domain, nearly omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, and limited solely by the volume of his own energies and the attention he was willing to invest into his sprawling realm.
And he out of all paid the most attention.
This... pitiful little tantrum thrown at him by the alliance of fools was nothing more than an annoyance to be dealt with, a petty irritant meant to distract him from keeping his favored pet which grew less interesting by the minute.
One could only entertain themselves with attempts at escape so many times before they all turned dull after all.
No, that was but par for the course for him and his brethren. What well and truly infuriated the Keeper of Secrets was not that he was attacked, but that all of it, all of the energy expended and puppets sacrificed... Was on the whim of an accursed mortal.
Decades, and possibly centuries of work, all because a damned mortal asked.
Oh the mortal's star was certainly on the rise, and he may have proven himself an interesting opponent in a few kalpas, but right now that difference was negligible, and the fact his colleagues felt it fitting to aid the creature in fighting him offended him to his core.
He would snuff him out, and his allies would learn their lesson well.
But first he would have to actually win, no matter how inevitable his triumph would be.
His fellow Old One tittered in her usual manner as he proposed a truce and redoubled her attack on his realm, stopping him from simply skewering Akatosh's youngest child as she ascended to Miraak's home.
Armies of Seekers, Lurkers, and his most potent servants, the Unknowables, clashed with the combined puppets of the so called True Tribunal, the weakened hordes of Mehrunes Dagon barely even counting as a distraction, even if the Lord of Destruction's armies were the most damaging of all.
The fool's little assault on Nirn had cost him much, and his new whims even more.
What truly kept his attention was none of the four fools however, but the one who was meant to be the greatest fool of all.
Sheogorath, or the creature wearing his mantle, was throwing far too much power into this little contest for it to merely be a distracting incursion. Hermaeus took one one thousandth of his attention away from the battle and swiftly perused all the information he had on the fool, and the pieces swiftly began falling together.
The usurper of Jygallag's chains was ironically the same mortal who struck down Mehrunes' attempts to take Nirn... The same mortal whose descendant was currently blasting his pet Dragonborn to pieces both verbally and tonally.
Hermaeus could freely admit it, seeing the arrogant fool be brought down by mere words brought illogical amounts of enjoyment to him... Except the words the woman spoke revealed he was the target and not Miraak?!
Striking out with nearly all his power, Mora summoned more of his armies from their vaults and tomes to face the invaders and began rapidly scanning his entire domain, millions upon millions of chambers were combed through in less than a second as he checked every single speck of dust for signs of tampering.
A sudden thought occurred to him as he disbelievingly went to check on his most hidden of secrets but just then, Sheogorath redoubled its attack, forcing his attention back from the prison and onto the battlefield.
No one was foolish enough to free Ithelia even if they knew about her anyway, no matter how spiteful.
The great battle went on as millions fell and rose again, the edges of his realm burning even as he kept attention on the smaller conflict happening within its very heart. He saw Miraak attempt his foolish gambit and get punished for it.
And he knew his puppet would lose, and he would be without a stolen child to blackmail Akatosh with.
His eldrich mind made the calculations, and with ruthless efficiency he decided to sacrifice a portion of his realm in a protracted fighting retreat, throwing all of his attention to Miraak's little prison instead.
He would capture the child of Akatosh he did not yet own, and would use it as leverage to punish all who stood against him.
---
Minthara glared at the interrupting pile of glorified seafood above her, and before the thing could gloat and distract her she pulled even harder on her Amulet, suffusing the entire temple in red and gold as she telekinetically dragged Miraak's limp body away from another tentacle spear.
"That soul is mine." She growled at the literal eldrich deity above her "And not even you will take it from me."
"Arrogant... mortal." Hermaeus Mora growled back, his disgusting slurping drawl still present even in all his rage "Do you truly... think. You will... escape... From my grasp?"
"Escape?" She asked as she prepared her voice "Why ever would I need to escape from a corpse?"
Mora wasted no further time on banter and bathed the top of Miraak's temple in a sea of poison, acid, and ink, the latter surging to drown all living things it could reach, the magical attack swiftly joined by his body as he sought to crush the puppet thief with his sheer gargantuan weight.
But his foe would not be so easily cowed "SHUL TIID DOV RAH!" The Amulet of Kings dimmed as Minthara directly drew her Father's power into Apocrypha, the awesome power of the Chief Divine escaping the sacred artifact with a roar that radiated utter dominance, and just the slightest flicker of fatherly annoyance.
For all his wisdom and experience, Mora still found himself completely surprised by this illogical development, the sudden feeling of inevitable victory being snatched from him by pure idiocy stunning for entire seconds.
More than enough time for Minthara to face the now awakened Miraak, who looked up to her with naught but fear and terror in his eyes.
She did not hesitate for even a moment "RII VAAZ DU!"
The self proclaimed First Dragonborn had but an instant to scream as the wave of familiar black power struck his body and then his soul, turning his very existence into pathetic mush and dragging it out in an agonizing moment-turned-eternity before he was devoured without so much as a whimper.
Minthara felt her mind freeze as thousands upon thousands of years of experience scraped against her very soul, expanding it to the point that only her nature as Ascendant Dragonborn kept her from turning into an unholy amalgam of undigested soul matter.
Still, for all her robustness, the delay cost her as a furious Mora struck out once again, using his authority over his domain to banish the last of Akatosh's influence and leaving her without further protection from the Amulet of Kings.
Her coherence returned swiftly after that and she used her newfound power to drag time from Mora's grasp, her superior affinity allowing her just enough of a chance to make a plan and act on it.
She ignored the words slowly bubbling from Mora's uncountable mouths and faced her relative south.
Mora's many eyes blinked in confusion and then widened in realization.
A voice as potent as hers cared not for distance, and she was currently looking directly at the cataclysmic battle happening on the horizon.
"GOL" Minthara's entire body shuddered with power "HAH!" Mora's eyes glowed with destructive power, but it was already too late "SIL!"
The panicked Gardener of Men tried shifting the space between the shout and its target, twisting the very nature of Apocrypha hard enough that the realm would be forever changed from its previous splendor all in an effort to stop this terrible gambit.
All of it proved useless.
The shout struck Mora's legions with unerring precision, twisting nearly a quarter of all his puppet souls out of his grasp and turning them, however temporarily, into furious draconic versions of themselves.
In mere moments, his armies fell upon themselves, the butchery swiftly joined by the alliance of his enemies.
Minthara exhaled harshly, nearly doubling over even as she grinned up at the completely flabbergasted Old One.
A moment passed, and a screech that made even her ears bleed cut through Apocrypha's twisted hallways, every single one of Mora's eyes turning bloodshot as they all turned to face her with mind-scratching synchronicity.
"You" He gurgled with fury that went beyond Alduin's, all of his drawl finally gone as he uncaringly focused every single scrap of his power onto one location "You have undone millennia of work... AND FOR WHAT!?"
She barely managed to both stop time and use a whirlwind sprint to jump a good kilometer away as Miraak's temple was rent utterly asunder simply by the sound of Mora's rage.
"VILE SPAWN OF ANU!" She barely evaded another district sized chunk being blown to ash "I WILL HAVE YOUR SOUL! AND I WILL COMIT UPON YOU SUCH PAIN AND SUFFERING EVEN YOUR CUR OF A FATHER WILL REGRET BRINGING YOU TO THIS WORLD!"
She did not answer as she forced her recently expanded soul to save her once again, somehow managing to evade a tentacle of a similar size to the Imperial City's walls as it completely scraped a similarly sizeable library.
Her own counterattacks proved useless, all of her thu'um had to be reserved for evasion, and the strikes she did manage to land barely did any true damage to the unnatural creature currently trying to flatten her.
He was simply too damn big.
And terrifyingly fast now that she thought about it.
"Really should have stolen Blasphemy before this" She muttered as she cracked a smaller tentacle to pieces and evaded another thousand, grinning against the pain as she summoned her Sworn Blades alongside a torrent of biting winds to punish Mora's most recent flailing attack.
She swatted an eye that materialized next to her before it could cover her in deadly acid but a mouth that appeared just below her caught her in a scream that clawed at her mind, sending her flying up with bleeding ears.
Managing to drag her focus back together just in time, she created a levitation platform and used it as a spring board just as a bridge was about to slam itself into her.
She grinned to herself despite the pain and muttered "Hammers are better anyway." Before commanding the world to send her forward, right into Mora's flickering form as he went to reposition himself against her.
Dovakren slammed into the wall of flesh and then slammed again as she once more wrestled time under her control, her hammer never slowing as she took a chunk out of the Daedra and preempting all of his attempts at defense, even if they grew terrifyingly swift the deeper she managed to dig.
She felt her grip on time loosening and chose to make her retreat a memorable one "YOL TOR SHUUUUUUUL!" The goat of golden flame sunk into Mora's body as the slowly recharging Amulet of Kings pulsed with power, the trace of divinity she had unknowingly grasped doing permanent damage to her enemy even as she was launched out of the wound by its sheer pressure.
She nearly giggled as she saw Hermaeus Mora of all creatures flinch.
The Daedra took a moment to retreat, still commanding his numerous legions even as the vast majority of his focus was now on the mortal below him "Why?" He rasped/gurgled/screeched/whimpered/roared all at once "Why risk so much just to spite me? You know there will be no victory here, and that you will not escape. You are not so foolish as to think this little scratch will ever approach my true might."
The creature that was Hermaeus Mora was almost as confused as he was furious, even as he prepared some of his most well hidden powers to utterly remove the upstart below him "You will be struck down, tormented for an eternity and beyond, your dreams of a Tamriel reunited utterly removed, and all you love and cherish rent from the world to join you in suffering... Only so that you could weaken me but for a few centuries?"
"I ask of you again" Mora growled as the edges of Apocrypha itself began crackling with energy "Why?"
Minthara tilted her head at the creature floating above her, spat a glob of blood onto the stone floor, and shrugged "You looked at my elf funny."
For the first time in his considerable existence, Hermaeus Mora felt well and truly baffled at the answer he was given to a question. So utterly discombobulated was the blob of knowledge and appendages that he felt the uncontrollable urge to ask for confirmation...
Except at that moment, at the very center of the realm of Apocrypha, a tree of stone and crystal that should not have ever been seen again appeared, the figure of a shadowy giant standing in front of it, sword sheathed in grey flame held aloft and ready to strike.
It took Mora only the slightest fraction of a moment to realize what was about to happen as he turned all his attention to the prison and screamed in genuine panic "NoooooOOO!"
The giant cared not for his pleas, and swung down his blade.
And a new sun dawned in Apocrypha.
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SHUL TIID DOV RAH = Sun Time Dragon God
RII VAAZ DU = Essence Tear Devour
GOL HAH SIL = Earth Mind Soul
Comments
Hakkira
Thank you kindly for the chapter 😁
Seraphim
"You looked at my elf funny" fucking love her
