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They were mortal, once.
Vivec is the one who remembers this best. When they are alone in their temples where the rafters drip with holiness, Almalexia takes to walking her fingers down the knobs of his spine. That border between ash and gold. Her lip curls where he cannot see. It pleases her that he maintains his right hand as its uncursed Chimner self; this is the hand of action, of meaning, of forward motion, the hand that has held the pen and the sword and the banner.
It displeases her that their past is more golden and untouched by fire than their fading present self. They are gods. There should be no end to what they can do, no shackles on their power and doors that are closed. The words that they have left behind, mortality and moral, are such near things.
Her husband would have minded. But her husband minded many things. Nerevar was a man of limits, and he rots in a mortal grave and his body is all given to the ash and unpreserved; and when Vivec kisses her she can taste the ink of all his written worship on those split-color lips.
There must be power in everything they do, for this is the way divinity works. To become immortal they must believe themselves immortal. Almalexia’s mouth opens under his, and when she laughs the waves thunder in her echo. When she rises to meet him, it is like a storm; when she pushes him down upon the temple floor there are cracks that spider in the stone beneath him in a map of a new nation. The breath that flows from one mouth to another is a wind, and the words on that wind are a prayer.
Later, she sits, quite still, as Vivec and Sotha Sil scribe the words into her skin. Black ink upon her arms, her hands, her belly. It is fitting. They are none of them mortal. They must not have wholly mortal bodies.
“What do they mean?” she asks.
“Power,” replies Sotha Sil; and Almalexia laughs aloud.
“I need no more power.”
“War,” he amends. “Madness. Borders. Betrayal. Wards against things you have no need for.” Her old friend’s voice is a slither of page over dry page, and there is a whine of gears in his throat. When he looks at her, blue light spills from his eyes. It is like Aetherius itself. It is like he has carved himself open and taken out the heart and replaced it with the secrets of the Dwemer so that a soul gem hangs between his ribs, pure and gleaming.
Sotha Sil is old, and he is constructing his way toward a thing that age can never touch. They all are. They simply do so in different ways.
Almalexia kisses his fine, clawed hand, and comes away with a bitter sheen of oil on her lips. She feels Vivec lift away her red hair and trace something there, a line of ink that echoes the line down the center of his own frame.
“What do they mean?” she asks.
“War and warding, wind and wheat.” He draws his fingers down. “Strictness for the mother of men with no faces. Polished shields. Sun and moon given to ash, stars set in the firmament like doorways within doorways. Secret waters run dry. All the ways that are shut. All the temples that are empty and echoing and torn down.”
Almalexia closes her eyes, and sees the truth of those empty temples upon the darkness therein.
She has no love for those who prophesy. It is a mortal business. There are words that gods like them have no need to speak.
“Poetry,” she murmurs.
“Yes,” says Vivec, “always.”
“Gag him,” Almalexia orders, smiling, and the ceiling trembles at the simplicity of her voice. She watches as Sotha Sil moves forward, unspeaking, and the spell he works upon the air becomes a weave to pull a cloth from. He tightens the cloth against Vivec’s teeth with ragged, delicate hands. Kisses him through it. Their mouths do not touch. And when they pull away, the weave of the gag is black with oil and black with ink and with all the things under their dominion.
The God of Poetry does not speak for the rest of the night. They do their speaking for him. When Sotha Sil diagrams his way over Vivec’s skin, language breaks. When she kneels it is not a kneeling, for none of them will do so again. Sotha Sil’s claws pierce Vivec’s skin, ash and gold both, and the blood smokes. Almalexia tongues it all away, and it tastes of the secrets shared between them. Heart’s blood. None of them make a sound. When one of them enters her, it is as rain flattening the fields, as the fields breaking open and delving under into new caverns. When she finally cries out, butterflies burst from under her tongue, and the air around them is gravid and glittering with all the colors of a thousand wings. She fills the rafters with their glory.
This is no mortal business. They have moved so far beyond.