Elder Scrolls’ Weirdest Prophet

0:10 Introduction Throughout the many millennia of Tamriel’s history,

0:13 many forms of religion have risen and fallen,

0:16 as different cultures in different times cultivate different relationships

0:19 with the eternal Aedra of Aetherius and the infinite Daedra of Oblivion.

0:24 One thing that Man, Mer and Beastfolk have in common, however,

0:27 is that their faiths are almost always polytheistic,

0:30 featuring the worship of many Gods or primordial spirits.

0:34 This might seem an obvious development in a high fantasy

0:37 universe where many Gods have been demonstratively proven to exist.

0:40 However, there was a time when it was not.

0:44 Throughout much of the First Era, a time set thousands of years before

0:48 the events of the mainline Elder Scrolls Games,

0:50 there existed a fanatic monotheistic cult

0:53 which spread like wildfire across Tamriel,

0:56 professed that there was only one true god on Nirn,

0:59 and his worship must be enforced through violence.

1:01 That alone might be surprising enough, if not for the fact that the founding

1:06 prophet of this cult was… a talking monkey.

1:09 A talking monkey who led a theocratic coup

1:12 upon the most powerful human empire on Tamriel, orchestrated a genocide,

1:16 and created a movement that shattered the very concept of time itself.

1:21 Welcome to our video on the story of Marukh and the Alessian Order.

1:27 Rise of the Alessian Empire Before we get into the story

1:28 of how a talking monkey reshaped the land of Dawn’s Beauty,

1:31 we must first paint the picture of the world he was born into.

1:36 Over 7,000 years before the events of Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim,

1:39 the continent of Tamriel was dominated by the Elves,

1:42 known in their own tongues as the Mer.

1:45 The most powerful of these Elvish polities was the Empire of the Ayleids,

1:49 or Heartland High Elves.

1:51 An offshoot of the Altmer of the Summerset Isles,

1:54 the Ayleids presided over a magically sophisticated civilization

1:57 in what is now the province of Cyrodiil.

2:00 As Elven civilization flourished,

2:02 a culturally diverse tapestry of early mannish tribes known collectively

2:06 as the Nedes were also pollinating themselves across the Tamrielic heartland.

2:11 The question of whether it was Men or Mer who

2:14 first arrived on Tamriel is a matter of intense debate,

2:17 but the result of their first contact was not.

2:20 The Ayleids enslaved the prehistoric men of Tamriel,

2:23 and subjugated them to unimaginable cruelty.

2:26 Unlike their Altmer cousins,

2:28 many Ayleid factions spurned the worship of their Aedra ancestors

2:31 and instead turned to the worship of the perfidious Daedra.

2:34 These deities exalted the virtues of decadent cruelty,

2:38 and their Ayleid worshippers indulged their wicked

2:41 gods by subjecting their slaves to horrific fates,

2:44 torturing them in gory rituals such

2:47 as ‘gut-gardening’ and ‘flesh sculpting.’ Under Ayleid rule,

2:51 the Nedes of Cyrodiil languished in their flesh pits,

2:54 treated as less than cattle.

2:55 Yet as the founding of the Camoran Dynasty in the forests

2:59 of Valenwood marked year zero of recorded Tamrielic history,

3:02 the balance of power between Man and Mer

3:05 would begin to shift forever in Man’s favour.

3:08 Some time in the early First Era,

3:10 a Nedic woman prayed on the sacred hill of Sancre Tor.

3:13 There, she received a vision from Akatosh, the King of the Dragons.

3:17 The chief of the Divines imbued her with the blood of Dragons,

3:21 and gifted her the magically-enchanted Amulet of Kings.

3:24 The slave who received this vision was named Alessia,

3:27 and now charged by divine blessing,

3:30 she became a queen, leading a massive slave uprising against Ayleid rule.

3:35 This slave uprising, which history now remembers as the Alessian Revolt,

3:38 is one of the most mythologized events in Tamrielic history.

3:41 So much so that trying to scry the historical

3:44 truth of it from the legends is functionally impossible.

3:48 And indeed, the legends are truly fantastical.

3:51 Some stories claim that one of Alessia’s mightiest generals was

3:55 a giant winged bull who also happened to be her lover,

3:58 for whom she bore a child named Belharza, the first Minotaur.

4:02 Other stories claim that Alessia’s slave armies

4:05 were carried to victory by a certain immortal, time-traveling, homicidal,

4:09 genocidal cyborg whose relentless slaughter of Ayleid

4:11 armies and champions has made him one of the most infamously iconic characters

4:16 in the zeitgeist of the Elder Scrolls lore community.

4:20 On top of her slave armies, Alessia had many other allies.

4:23 One of these was the First Empire of the Nords.

4:26 Perhaps ironically, Alessias’ second key ally were the Elves themselves.

4:31 The Ayleids had not been a unified society,

4:33 being divided among those who worshiped

4:35 the Daedra and those who worshiped the Aedra.

4:38 The Aedra-worshiping Ayleids had long conflicted with their Daedra-worshiping,

4:42 and sided with Alessia against their fellow Heartland High Elves.

4:45 With the help of her demigod champions and her Nordic and Aedric Ayleid allies,

4:50 Alessia prevailed, breaking the power of the Ayleid Empire.

4:54 The slave queen died in 266,

4:56 but she left behind a Cyrodilic heartland now ruled by its former slave caste,

5:02 a state known as the Alessian Empire, or the First Empire of Man.

5:06 The Imga It is at this critical junction of the story that we will take a brief

5:11 interlude away from the blood-soaked ancient battlefields of Cyrodiil

5:14 and pan southwest to the forests of Valenwood.

5:17 Valenwood is primarily known as the home of the Bosmer, or Wood Elves,

5:21 but is home to many other sapient races as well, chief among them the Imga.

5:26 The Imga are a race of intelligent,

5:28 talking monkeys who thrive in the forests of Valenwood alongside the Wood Elves,

5:32 where they can quickly climb through the tall trees with relative ease.

5:36 According to the first edition of the Pocket Guide to the Empire,

5:40 the Imga “see the High Elves as their masters, and as a portrait of an ideal,

5:45 civilized society.” Idolizing the Altmer of Summerset

5:48 for their high culture and sophistication,

5:50 the Great Apes “go to desperate measures to emulate the High Elves,

5:54 wearing capes, practicing with the dueling sword,

5:57 and attempting to speak with perfect

5:59 enunciation and courtly manners despite their gravelly,

6:01 baritone voices.” As the Imga have yet

6:04 to appear in a mainline Elder Scrolls game,

6:07 what little information exists about them portrays

6:09 them as a race of unserious comic-relief monkeys.

6:13 And yet, the legacy of the main Imga of today’s

6:16 story left upon the land of Tamriel was anything but funny.

6:19 Origins of Marukh Some time after the founding of the First Empire of Man,

6:22 there lived an Imga named Marukh.

6:24 It is safe to assume he was probably born

6:27 and raised in Valenwood like the majority of his species,

6:30 but the details of his personal life survive only in very fragmented sources.

6:34 At some point in his life,

6:36 Marukh was said to have received a sacred vision from spirit of Alessia,

6:40 subjecting him to a spiritual awakening which an ancient

6:43 source titled the Illusion of Death describes as such:

6:47 “...and his sight was seared,

6:48 and his tongue was swollen, and his pelt was mottled,

6:51 and his left thumb pointed ever at the stars of the Tower.

6:55 And ever did the shade of Al-Esh speak to him,

6:58 serrated words that rasped his concept-organ

7:00 and brought him to wisdom through affliction.” No,

7:03 the narrator did not just have a stroke.

7:06 Like much of Tamriel’s ancient lore,

7:07 Marukh’s vision is wreathed in layers upon layers of esoterica

7:10 which we do not have the time to fully unpack here.

7:14 The main takeaway here is that, allegedly,

7:16 the spirit of Alessia revealed to Marukh the existence of one true God.

7:20 Armed with a new religious purpose,

7:22 Marukh travelled to Cyrodiil to reveal this divine

7:25 truth to the men of the Empire.

7:28 Furnished with unfathomable charisma and zeal,

7:30 the mad monkey prophet quickly attracted

7:32 a huge following within the Tamrielic heartland.

7:35 His band of disciples were soon organized into the Alessian Order,

7:38 so named for the divine Empress who had revealed her truths to the monkey.

7:43 Within a generation, the Alessian Order had infiltrated all of its

7:47 highest offices of the First Empire of Man,

7:49 becoming more influential than the Emperors and Empresses themselves.

7:52 By the third century of the First Era,

7:55 an ape from the jungle had completely transformed the most powerful

7:59 human nation on Tamriel into a religious theocracy moulded in his image.

8:05 Beliefs of the Alessian Order During the immediate

8:06 generations after the fall of the Ayleid Empire,

8:08 the land of Cyrodiil remained a very diverse place,

8:11 inhabited not only by the many Nedic tribes,

8:14 but also by the Cyro-Nords and the Aedra-worshipping

8:16 Ayleids who had fought as allies alongside Alessia.

8:18 During her reign as Empress,

8:20 Alessia had embarked on a policy of cultural integration,

8:22 promoting a new pantheon of Eight Divines for all her subjects to worship,

8:27 an amalgamation of Nedic, Nordic and Elven deities,

8:30 placed together into a single roster to create common religious

8:34 ground between the men and elves of First Era Cyrod.

8:37 One has to imagine, then,

8:39 that Alessia would surely have disapproved as the Monkey

8:42 prophet rejected her Eight Divines and forcefully

8:44 imposed the worship of his one God upon

8:47 the citizens of the Empire she had created.

8:50 The exact nature of the monotheistic deity created

8:53 by the Marukh and the Alessian Order is,

8:55 again, wreathed in a lot of esoterica we cannot get into.

8:59 Essentially, however, they believed that the only true deity was Akatosh,

9:03 the dragon god of time.

9:05 The Order rejected the notion that Akatosh was the king

9:08 of a pantheon of other gods of both mannish and merrish origin,

9:11 instead insisting upon the belief that there was only Akatosh,

9:15 and all other gods were merely a reflection of his aspects.

9:18 The worship of this one true god of time

9:21 was dictated by the Seventy Seven Inflexible Doctrines,

9:25 a codex of religious laws supposedly passed to Marukh by the spirit of Alessia.

9:30 Most of these doctrines have been lost to time, but in their jist, they enforced

9:35 the strict monotheism of Akatosh’ unitary essense,

9:38 forbade “traffick with daemons,” and upheld a judicial

9:41 philosophy in which “all are guilty until they

9:44 have proven themselves innocent,” which is still

9:46 the guiding system of the modern Tamrielic legal system.

9:50 Unlike the rest of his mer-idolizing species,

9:53 Marukh despised elfkind to his simian core,

9:57 and despite being founded by an alien monkey,

9:59 the Alessian Order he created took the shape of a human

10:02 supremacist organization devoted to purging Elven culture from Tamriel.

10:07 The primary victims of this xenophobia were the remaining Ayleids in Cyrodiil.

10:11 By the third century of the first era,

10:14 the Alessian Order was fully embarked on a policy of ethnic cleansing,

10:18 riling up the poor human masses

10:20 to sack Ayleid temples and terrorize Ayleid cities.

10:23 The only Ayleids who remained in Cyrodiil

10:26 at this time were those who had fought alongside Alessia,

10:29 but this did not prevent the fanatic followers

10:31 of the monkey from slaughtering the Heartland High Elves without remorse.

10:36 By the 5th century of the First Era,

10:38 nearly every Ayleid Lordship in Cyrodiil had been abolished,

10:41 with the populations within them either fleeing to the safety

10:44 of Mer-ruled lands in High Rock and Valenwood.

10:47 The last Ayleid Kingdom, Nenelata, fell in the First Era 482.

10:52 Distinct Ayleid communities would endure among the Wood Elves

10:55 of Valenwood and High Elves of High Rock for some time,

10:58 before being assimilated by those populations in the ensuing generations,

11:02 heralding the eventual extinction of the race.

11:05 Another major victim of the Alessian Order’s purges were the Minotaurs.

11:09 Once a proud, intelligent warrior-race who, like the Aedric Ayleids,

11:14 had fought alongside Alessia for human freedom,

11:16 the followers of the monkey denigrated them

11:19 as monsters little better than ogres and trolls.

11:22 Consequently, the Minotaurs were driven beyond the fringes of civilization,

11:26 where they remain today in the forgotten caves and valleys of Cyrodiil,

11:30 enduring on as degenerated, primitive versions of their past glory.

11:34 Wars of the Alessian Order In addition

11:36 to the violent purges he orchestrated within Cyrodiil,

11:38 Marukh was also responsible for igniting several bloody

11:42 wars which tore other regions of Tamriel asunder.

11:46 As the prophet-most-simian’s anti-elven teachings spread,

11:49 relations between Cyrodiil and the Wood

11:51 Elven Kingdom of Valenwood understandably worsened.

11:54 With the two polities on the brink of war,

11:57 the Monkey prophet received an unexpected ally in King Borgas of Skyrim.

12:01 The Nords of Skyrim were up there

12:03 with the Alessian Order as Tamriel’s number one elf-haters,

12:06 but they had an ancient culture and religion of their own.

12:10 Borgas, however, abandoned his ancestors’ gods and commanded the people

12:13 of Skyrim to adopt the monkey man’s unitary deity.

12:16 In First Era 369, The Nord King traveled

12:20 to Cyrodiil to urge a joint war upon the Bosmer.

12:24 The Wood Elf response to this existential threat was swift and vicious.

12:28 Since the dawn age, the Bosmer possessed an innate ability

12:31 to transform en masse into a tidal horde of feral,

12:35 eldritch forest monsters that stampede out from their homeland,

12:38 devour all in their path, and when left with no surviving targets,

12:42 turn upon themselves in a "cannibalistic orgy".

12:45 The Bosmer had only invoked the Wild Hunt when absolutely necessary,

12:49 and did so to thwart the genocidal ambitions of the Alessian Order.

12:53 So it was that, as a consequence of throwing his lot in with the monkey prophet,

12:58 the Chieftain of all the Nords was swallowed up by a mass of pulsating,

13:03 cannibalistic skin changers.

13:05 The death of King Borgas marked the end of the Alessian Order’s rapid rise,

13:09 and it was probably around this time that Marukh expired as well.

13:13 Thereafter, leadership of the Alessian Order was taken up by a succession

13:17 of Arch-Prelates who would preside over

13:19 the theocracy’s slow and agonizing decline.

13:21 The next century saw the Alessians handed two more fat Ls.

13:25 In the western half of Cyrodiil, a region known as Colovia,

13:29 a warlord by the name of Rislav of Skingrad rose in revolt,

13:33 rejecting the one-God of the Alessian Order and defeating

13:36 the forces of the Alessian Empire in battle,

13:39 freeing much of Colovia from Marukhist tyranny.

13:42 Other polities in conflict with the Alessians

13:44 at that point included the Nords of Skyrim,

13:47 who wished to undo Borgas’ to restore their old gods,

13:50 and the Direnni, a powerful High Elven clan

13:53 ruling over much of what is now High Rock.

13:56 Inspired by the Colovians’ victory,

13:58 Patriarch Ryain of the Direnni and King Hoag Merkiller

14:00 of Skyrim formed an alliance against the Alessian Order.

14:03 Indeed, the obnoxious religious tyranny of the Alessians

14:06 must have been really bad if

14:09 they compelled a Nord named Merkiller to ally with a High Elf against them.

14:14 In any case, the Direnni and Nords dealt the Alessian Empire

14:17 a crushing defeat at the Battle of Glenumbra Moors in First Era 482,

14:21 assisted by an army of Ayleid exiles,

14:23 taking revenge on the Alessians for driving them out of their homeland.

14:27 Thereafter, the influence of the First Empire of Man and its Alessian

14:31 Order puppetmasters was more or less

14:33 contained to the Nibenay region of Cyrodiil.

14:35 The Middle Break Yet even after its military defeats,

14:39 the Alessian Order was not finished with being

14:42 disruptive to everyone and everything in Tamriel.

14:45 Within the mortal realm of Mundus,

14:47 most Aedra of Aetherius are worshipped in different ways by different cultures,

14:51 and thus manifest in different ways with different faces.

14:54 One of the most prominent examples of this was

14:57 the deity the Alessian Order claimed to worship.

15:00 To mankind, Akatosh was the king of dragons and god of linear time,

15:05 but to the elves, he was Auri-el, their first king and greatest ancestor.

15:09 This belief was completely and utterly anathema

15:12 to the zealots of the Alessian Order, and soon,

15:15 there emerged a subgroup within the theocracy known as the Marukhati

15:19 Selective who sought to purge Akatosh of his elven influences.

15:23 Named for their late monkey prophet, they were said to have performed

15:26 a profane ritual which channeled very aurbis itself,

15:29 the cosmic chaos of the universe,

15:31 in an attempt to rewrite the nature of the God of Time.

15:35 A staff or tower, or one represented within the other, appeared before them.

15:40 The secret masters danced upon it until it writhed and trembled.

15:44 The tower split into eight pieces and Time broke, becoming nonlinear.

15:49 This phenomenon was known as a ‘Dragon Break’,

15:52 and would happen several more times throughout Tamrielic history,

15:55 but it was the followers of the Monkey

15:58 Prophet who broke time for the first, well, time.

16:01 This crazy, kaleidoscopic time bubble lasted for what

16:05 modern Tamrielic scholars estimate to be around 1,000 years,

16:08 from the First Era 1200 to 2208.

16:11 Historical accounts of those who lived during this time,

16:15 or rather times, plural, are scant, incomprehensible and self contradicting.

16:20 Some Cyrodiilic accounts from the souls of the emperors in the Amulet

16:25 of Kings describe how Cyrodiil became an empire across the stars,

16:28 while others describe it becoming an egg.

16:31 Khajiit accounts recorded kittens giving birth to their own fathers.

16:35 In short, the whole thing was a complete fever dream.

16:38 Conclusion The reign of the Alessian Order was

16:40 said to have endured for over 2,000 years,

16:43 but considering that about 1,000 of those years

16:46 took place within an abstract non-linear time bubble thingy,

16:49 their tenure as the dominant power

16:52 in Cyrodiil was probably shorter in actuality.

16:54 When the chronological wound caused by the Marakhati’s

16:57 finally healed and time became linear again,

17:00 the days of the monkey prophet’s monotheistic cult were numbered.

17:03 The order finally came to an end in First Era 2321,

17:08 with the outbreak of the War of Righteousness,

17:10 a conflict in which the various Colovian and Breton Kingdoms

17:13 of Western Cyrodiil and High Rock brought an end to the monotheistic

17:17 theocracy with the help of rebellious Nibeneans in Eastern Cyrodiil

17:21 who had grown tired of the Order’s excesses and cruelties.

17:24 With the collapse of the Alessian Order came also the collapse of the First

17:28 Empire of Man whose desiccated corpse it had been puppeteering for centuries.

17:33 An Emperor baring Akatosh’ Amulet of Kings would not again

17:37 rule from Cyrodiil until the rise of Reman 500 years later.

17:40 More importantly, the faith of the One God was abolished,

17:44 and worship of the Eight Divines was restored.

17:47 While the religion of the monkey prophet

17:49 has long since been consigned to history,

17:51 his legacy on the history of Cyrodiil was not.

17:54 If not for the Great Ape, then The Elder Scrolls IV:

17:57 Oblivion might have been a very different game.

18:00 The Ayleid cities the player explores might

18:02 have been living societies rather than derelict ruins,

18:05 and the Minotaur encountered in the overworld may have been

18:09 the players’ friends and allies rather than faceless monsters to cut down.

18:13 It is true that the history of Tamriel is one of constant metaphysical turmoil,

18:17 but the First Era reign of the Alessian Order in particular

18:21 was a period of history where no one was monkeying around.

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