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Spiros and the Mananauts

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BOOK I

THE NIBEN RUN

Ten thousand Ancestor Moths from the Temple of the One. Already lost in the fluttering mass that cloaked The City, they weave up and spiralwards caught instantly in a blanket of deafening wings. Six Million Ancestor Moths in all of Cyrodiil, all converging on the lightening rod in Tamriel's heart. As a mundane moth is drawn to the flame in the darkness, the Ancestor Moth cannot resist the flicker of portents; they feast on the dead not for their flesh, but for their history, those surviving dregs of creatia, from which they produce their Soul-Silk. No single Moth in all of Tamriel can resist this night; the ancient, barred doors to their hallowed Temple had been blasted asunder by a swarm of them, the bodies of the Moth-Priests carried away or else ripped to shreds by the eclipse of moths.

All around White-Gold Tower they flew. Aimless, crashing, swarms of huge black clouds surrounding the once-proud spire, lost and blind, guided only by one thing, the event horizon that was shattering, the ruby-impossipoint: White Gold was Falling. Down below, the horrible mass of insect-wings was only visible, when it was heeded, by the embers that littered the air, and the light thrown by the roaring, arching flames. In the lower arm of one of the whipping, giant tendrils of the black swarm that coiled madly around White-Gold Tower, a single Ancestor Moth, caught by destiny, a gust of wind of the rude bumping of a fellow lepidoptera as lost as it was, failed to beat a single wing for a moment, then another, and found itself falling out from the slipstream of the eclipse above. The beacon that had drawn them all in, from Cheydinhal and beyond, to the crumbling monolith at the centre of creation, it lost sight of, and by brilliance or negligence, it twisted itself in the night air and fell a little, weaving through the upward gusts of heat that the burning buildings threw to the sky. It ducked and weaved down Past Green Emperor Way, where the bush-formed Emperors of Ald Cyrod all screamed in scorching death as the birds there gathered blistered and combusted. Down through the marble archways, the moth passed between two warring factions, battlemages and Imperial Guards drawn up against Colovians in Legion-dress, all gleaming steel, magic and arrows flung alike: death sowed artlessly and caught everywhere. Up, up flew the moth, pushed skyward by the rising heat, as a circle of flame encircled Green Emperor Way, soon to trap the soldiers there fighting and sizzle their flesh, leaving them screeching to die like the birds that already surrounded them.

The Temple District, a slum for the last two years, was now the same Inferno as the Elven Garden, the Market District: all anonymous, fiery slaughter the same to the Ancestor Moth. It rode those streams of hot air until tumbling, free-falling downwards it fell into the Talos Plaza, and made a circle of the statue of Akatosh there, from which the bodies of seven Elder Councillors hung by their necks, naked and limbless. No, that wasn't it. Away around the corner, doors barred to the high-class brothel, half-clothed women leaping from the fifth story windows, lovers to generals and kings, some making it to the open arms opposite, others to shatter their bones on the carriage, broken-wheeled and up-sided, of the Count of Anvil below. He was lost now, disguised, in a crowd of peasants that crushed against each-other, babies and mothers wailing the same tones. When the moth passed over them, it heard their song, and the imprint the hopeless music made on its wings it would wear for the rest of it's life. The heat swelled again, as a tavern erupted in blistering flames, killing another dozen. The moth ducked down under a bridge littered with dead bodies trampled over, and fluttered between the oars of desperate gondoliers, their vessels rocking too dangerously from side to side, weighed down with too many families. As one capsized the moth swerved away, catching only a droplet, pulled down momentarily by the unwelcome weight but saved inches away from the warm water, and the drowning fate that had taken as many Cyrodiils as the fire this night.

A little higher now it flew, under bridges, where battles raged still, soldiers in identical uniforms killing those in front of them, rallying cries to Chorrol, to Skingrad, to Colovia and Bravil all intermixed as to make them meaningless. The city meant to slaughter itself tonight, and every force within its many walls fought toward this single purpose. And then the moth rose, to meet the three long and arched walkways that connected the city proper to the docklands. One bridge collasped, either by magic or by crowd-weight, victims still splashing in the flotsam another charred in the remnants of a wildfire that had already made its way across and set alight the first warehouses of the Waterfront District, the third bridge was the battlefield to a novel conflict: one army refugees, thinking the boats of the waterfront the only possible escape now all the bridges crossing the Rumare had collapsed, the other combatants trying to build a barricade to prevent the spread of any more fire to the Waterfront, gangs holding wagons above their heads and throwing them in giant heap in the centre of the bridge, while children tried to crawl through, and advlts up over.

Only half the warehouses were alight, and sailors still battled these flames, where on the other islands all hope had been lost. The Moth fluttered through an alley where men leant out of window sills threw buckets of water across to the building aflame on the other side, the moth felt its way blocked by a shipwrights where a vessel had been lost to the flames before ever leaving berth, and fluttered instead through the broken glass of a window, into a tavern that was emptied except by a rabble of drunks, gurgling and cackling, spread over the bar, downing the ale from the barrel as the ceiling above crackled and began to give away. Out the door, into the open air, sparks and embers still followed the moth over to the lakefront, but up and twirling it went through the wharfs, passing through the riggings of one ship, and then another, boats whose crews had perished already, or who had already sprang a leak, and were sinking majestically as they sat in the harbour.

A single ship, half-rigged, at the very end of the pier. Four masts, proud, wide sails glimmering in the fire glow, the amaranthine of Soul-Silk. Low-slung, slim, her deck ill-kept but the sweep of her hull curved like a salutation to Dibella; she seemed to be in motion even while still moored. The Saint Alessia was still moored to the Waterfront. On deck a crew of fifty, clambering, climbing, swearing. The moth wove past them all, to the helm, where a man in a purple captain's jacket wrapped his fingers on the ship's ebony wheel with growing impatience. The moth landed on Count Spiros' shoulder, and began to crawl up his neck. Spiros batted it away, and the insect fluttered around him three times, before landing again on the right pocket of his jacket. Agitated, Spiros flicked the moth away once more with his hand, and stamped down from the quarterdeck, to swear some more at his crew, still yet to reach full compliment, still yet to unmoor The Saint Alessia, while above them lethal sparks and embers floated ever nearer, catching alight ships that had made it further adrift than his already. He tried not to look up at the dreadful scene, White Gold Tower drowned in a shifting tempest of Ancestor Moths, and tried to focus on the bare facts of the matter: the waterfront is on fire, and my ship isn't ready to set sail.