When Wulfharth is blasted to ash by the Greybeards, he’s given an obscure warning whose last words seem to be much more important than its first, at least as far as our usual anolyses consider it: “Remember the color of betrayal, King Wulfharth.” We remember the betrayal, of course, as Tiber Septim’s reenactment of Enantiomorph, and think the matter finished. And for King Wulfharth, it is indeed finished. But consider the other half of the message: Betrayal has a color. And in the text of The Arcturian Heresy, we aren’t explicitly told what that color is.

But there is a fairly obvious guess. The symbol of the Empire that Tiber founded is the Red Diamond. As this is the most prominent symbol of the Empire, one can only guess that it was a color that surrounded Wulfharth in his last moments in Rimmen. It would have flown from every battlement, and flowed from the wound in his briast. Red is the most obvious answer.

And it was not the first red betrayal that Wulfharth had come across—for how else was he to have made sense of the Greybeards’ warning if he had not encountered it before? As they said, “Remember the color of betrayal.” One of the first things one notes about Wulfharth’s past is that his most famous battle was fought at Red Mountain, where the Dwemer (who in a sense betrayed the purpose of Creation) used the power of Lorkhan’s Heart (ripped from his briast by the betrayal of Trinimac and Akatosh) to create Numidium, and where the Tribunal betrayed Nerevar in the Red Moment. Wulfharth was, however tangentially, connected to all of these things; he must have had some understanding of them, even if it was not enough to prevent his own downfall under similar circumstances.

Thus, when one reads of the Red Moment, the color red does not denote the blood spilt—not directly, anyway. It denotes the betrayal inherent in the act, a color that remains the same throughout history (or at least, Wulfharth’s history). When one sees the color red in a text, this is likely the symbolic take-away that the author hopes to put forward: This was treachery of some sort, with divine powers the likely gain.

So what, then, do we have to say for the Red Year? The name seems derived from the name of the mountain that caused it, but if that which is red is caused by treachery, then there is another idea inherent in the disaster: Someone is indeed at fault for it. Prior to thinking along these lines, I simply thought that the Red Year was the inevitable result of several coincidences that spiraled out of everyone’s control. Vivec tied his power to the same source that powered his enemy, and then used a meteorite as a proof of that power as well as a subtle threat to continue worshiping him—and by the time he realized his mistake, there was no turning back. Azura sought to end the worship of false gods by destroying one outright and severing the others from their source of power, but her plans were formed before Vivec’s show of strength ensured that the loss of his powers would be catastrophic. Dagoth Ur, of course, certainly had no intention of bringing about the Red Year through the release of the Heart; the Heart’s loss destroyed him long before it destroyed Morrowind’s Third Era civilization. And the Nerevarine fulfilled the prophecies of other actors while trying to make his or her own way in the world, never really understanding where he or she stood in the cosmic scale of things. None of these actors, at (my) first glance, all in some ways shared the blame for the disaster, but never really deserved the level of vitriol that’s been poured out over (some of) their heads.

But now I have to wonder if the devs are trying to tell us something here. In TES, we know that “what’s in a name” is actually quite a lot, in many cases. And if red is indeed the color of betrayal, then the Red Year is something more than it at first appears. Somewhere in this mess, it appears that someone set someone else up; this disaster is a side-effect of a betrayal that we may or may not already know about. Is it simply a continuation of the Red Moment that saw Nerevar dead and the Tribunal rise as gods? Or is it that Azura has “betrayed” the Dunmer, or even simply the Tribunal who claimed to be her successors, by encouraging the loss of their divinity and powers? Or is it something else, something that we might not yet be aware of? (Or is it something in those damned books that I’ve never read?)

(As an aside, consider again the Red Diamond. While the dragon sigil is a reminder of the importance of Akatosh in all things Cyrodiilic, the Diamond itself is a representation of the Chim-el Adabal, the Amulet of Kings. If red is indeed the color of betrayal, does this symbol take on a more sinister meaning? Is the Red Diamond colored by a gift of Dragon’s blood, or is this another hint of divine betrayal? Perhaps Mankar is right to suggest that Akatosh is a usurper, not only at Convention but also at Alessia’s deathbed? Or is that betrayal one and the same?)

[I admit to being influenced by the flourishing threads crucifying Azura, Vivec, or both, that have popped up in recent weeks as one of many trains of thought that led to this theory. I am also fairly certain that some of what I’ve said is basic knowledge to most of you lore-masters, so I apologize in advance for wasting your time.]