In the years following the disappearance of the Wizard King, it was Orgo gro-mosh’s and my duty to train his final disciple: Mellid Aviorn. After scrapping a fine layer of rust off of his natural elven abilities, we found that he was perhaps one of the most powerful individuals ever to walk the face of Nirn. Orgo and I began his training immediately. We started him off simply schooling him in the intellectual weapons the Wizard king passed on to us, and the more we taught him the quicker he learned it. His appetite grew exponentially and his ability to process information was the stuff of legend. Had I not witnessed the young elf with my own eyes, I would be one of those skeptics unable to accept the extent of his comprehensive power. He picked apart details from every tome that even Orgo and I had missed in our instruction. Eventually, his hunger for knowledge and mental capacity became so great, that I would spend hours reading to him from the Oghma infinium , while three other wizards simultaneously read to him from spell tome after spell tome, and Aviorn himself, poured over the Wizard Kings vast written knowledge. Even with so much information being instilled in him at once, he walked out of the room each day with an even greater understanding of the material then I possessed.
By 4E 18, Aviorn’s knowledge far exceeded anything Orgo, or I had to offer, and the most we could contribute to his further education was resources to fuel his avid interest in chemistry and enchanting, while Aviorn himself spent copious amounts of time reading and re-reading the Wizard King’s works, searching for a hidden meaning that he believed would tell him his fate. Eventually Aviorn became consumed with chronology, and timing of spells and their effects. He spent days, and sometimes weeks at a time, casting the simplest spells over and over, just to comprehend the exact moments wherein a spell’s effect takes place, and then vanishes. He filled entire libraries with his timing of spells down to the nanosecond, and beyond. Whole books were filled with a single long string of numbers that represented a single moment so infinitesimal it could hardly be said to have occurred at all.
Finally in 4E 20, Aviorn came to Orgo and I, and stated that he now knew what the Wizard King had in store for him. He knew that his fate was to carry on the Wizard King’s legacy in secret, but to do so, he needed a weapon of such great power, that not a soul on Nirn could stand up to him. He then revealed what he had been so consumed with in the past two years. With a flutter of his eyelashes, a wink of his eye, and a twitch in his fingers, Aviorn showed us the power he spoke of. In fractions of a second, he layered spell after spell, each one’s effect decaying into the next; His magicka pool exponentially multiplying in depth. By timing the casting of the spells against his magicka recovery, he was casting without losing any energy, and the spells he cast made his power grow each second. By the time Orgo and I had blinked three times, Aviorn was filled with the kind of magicka energy that could be felt radiating off of the avatar of Akatosh in the final hours of the Oblivion Crisis.
Aviorn’s new found ability was the portal to unspeakable power. Using his magicka to augment his physical self, Aviorn ran across the whole of Cyrodil in less than a minute. With his powers of regeneration, he swam across lakes of lava in Vardenfell. He adapted all of the Wizard King’s most powerful spells, and made them even greater: sending bolts of lightening arching threw an army and picking out only ones of a certain race, or armor class, or using summoned creatures as satellites to throw magicka off of, and multiply already vast power tenfold, or completely restore his magicka pool.
However, mere power wasn’t enough for Aviorn. He envisioned a new court of the Wizard King. This one however would be conducted in secret, and never spoken of by the un-initiated. He devised a group called “The Arcane Fountain”. Originally this group consisted of me, Orgo, and Aviorn himself who decided to be known as “The Arcane Arbiter”. Though by 4E 25, his followers encompassed many hundreds across Tamriel, and included a new agent, who titled himself “The Imp Mage”. Lower ranking members were known as “Agents of the Fount” and The highest ranking members were called “Arcanists”. Aviorn hunted down all traces of his beginnings that had not already been wiped out by the Wizard King.
When not crusading to keep the organization secret, Aviorn directed agents of the fount to place themselves within every major mage organization in Tamriel, including the Psijics, the Synod, and even the College at Winterhold. It seemed even then that Aviorns ambition was less about creation, sculpting the future, then it was about flexing his god-like powers. Aviorn continued to infiltrate guild after guild, no longer satisfied with simply dominating the mage community, he set Agents of the fount to mingle with the fighters guild, and even the imperial council. He entered the field himself to check on the progress of his agents often, and even participated in undercover work. Aviorn occasionally played several different people within guilds at once, using his power to rocket from one city to the next, almost being in two places at once.
He drove wedges between factions, and sparked wars for his own amusement. In the year 4E 35, Orgo became very restless. He lost his respect for Aviorn and no longer supported him; however he was torn. His teachings as a mage told him to bide his time for an opportunity to strike Aviorn down, but Orgo was an old orc, and time was not on his side. Ultimately he decided to confront Aviorn outright, and demand he stop the destructive behavior. Orgo who had helped raise Aviorn thought that he could leverage him to his will, at least a little, but the verbal fight that followed between the two raged on for days. The sun rose and sank as they continued shouting in magickally enhanced voices that echoed through the walls of our mountain palace. They drug up every aspect of their own, and each others lives at the top of their lungs, and debated philosophy angrily, but in the end Orgo snapped, and wove a curse on Aviorn. Aviorn, who’s powers easily deflected the rage of Orgo was shocked, but not stunned. Aviorn didn’t even move his hands, and Orgo was wiped from existence with a furious fire bolt.
After the death of Orgo I fled from Aviorn. He had become an abomination, who achieved power, simply for the sake of using it. He had no plan, and no drive, only the lust to have an ever greater effect on the world around him. A hundred years passed as I watched him tear the world apart from the dark, pitting anything that would pick up a weapon against another creature. I was largely unaware of his grander schemes then, but by 4E 171 it became clear, that he had been developing the ultimate conflict. Although the Aldmeri Dominion was hungry for war, and their motives were sound, I believe the Elves would have trusted in the their longevity to wait out the crumbling empire rather than go to war against it, were it not for Aviorn who used his influence within organizations to stoke the flame of war.
I loved the Wizard King as a daughter would love a father, and it is my deep regret to have betrayed the secrets of his existence; however Aviorn and his secret organization is responsible for the Great War, and all death associated with it. His power is vast, but no mage is invincible, as my mentor said, there will always be a greater force. It is my hope that this text does not go forgotten, but is the rally call to other mages, to put down this evil before it swallows us all.
