My name is Jubal Loon Suul, of House Suul, whose name is known and heard throughout the Skating Bay and the Nine Times Nine Thrones. Our Lord is High Al-Majaroon, of House Jourun, whose city is the first city of the New North, where all who went under from landfall settled and made peace with the worm. When we were not 80 and one separate peoples but one, carrying the kibrels on our backs together, and cutting tunnels by the light and heat that all mare wore, with equal dust in every mouth. My family's name comes from the first child born in the Volosiod, Hayeko Dol Suul, and like him, we are salt merchants.
Our crest is the tusk of the Bat Tiger. Our bloodline is registered by Koda. The Digital say we come from another star, but so many have forgotten. I have not, from my lineage granted me audience with memory, and I have spoken with the wheels of low.
I have seen proof that any who come up during landfall season, when the winds die down enough above that all may make pilgrimage under the banner of Vek and Vek. Though many above have renounced memory, they too, remember. Koda is a story about Jourun's Suul of House Suul, salt merchants whose crest is the tusk of a Bat Tiger. One of the first images we get of our protagonist is as a young Dunmer holding aloft a red lamp, which is really just a squirming luminescent red grub at the end of a long pole.
In one of the sanctioned pilgrimage tunnels, beneath the surface. These with a close front of his, Lalo here. They wrap their faces and breathe their scarves, open a nearby hatch, and climb to the surface. Now seems like a good chance to mention that this is all taking place about 900 years into the fifth era.
It has been long since Nardin was destroyed and abandoned. And Jubal and his companion now look upon its decaying and burning corpse. Half of the planet is wreathed in flame, the other half is deeply broken. But beneath the surface of the planet can be seen immense clock works, spinning gears and pistons and wheels, a ghostly skeleton.
Leave you at now from the surface of their new home. Masser. The Red Moon. This.
Is Koda. The story starts in earnest as Jubal meets with his close friend, Hlalo here, to share with him some momentous news. The unthinkable has happened. Hi Alma Jourun has agreed to marry her daughter to Jubal, though she is their lord, and he comes from a family of salt merchants.
Jubal's friend is skeptical as one might imagine. Jubal explains that in order to secure the unity he must first hunt something that will prove his worth. The worms are no longer a threat it seems. So what is the next most noteworthy prey that Jubal can take down in order to win his love?
A new medium. Jubal in here travel to the marketplace. It is a sprawling multi-level market filled with merchants, thieves and other Dunmer. The market is one of Hlalo's more secretive outposts, off the books he recalls it.
All of a sudden, all of a Dunmer around go prostrate before the digitals. A ghostly hand points an accusatory finger at Jubal who walks toward it through the throng of people prostrating themselves. He beckons them to stand that there are no casts here in the marketplace and no need to bow before the digitals. He beckons them to stand, for he needs to buy a weapon.
And circled in a golden sun, floating in mid-air in the lotus position, appears in the back. There is a flame on his head, his body half blue, half golden. He says, maybe I can help. A story breaks for a moment because Jubal tells three stories about how Vivek became Vivek.
In the first story, Child Vivek, an omelexia on Sufassil, an indereal narrowbar find a heart-shaped rock and a cave that gives them powers. In the second, Soldier Narrowbar comes across Vivek and makes him a general for Dunmerry armies. In the third, Vivek, Elandro Sule, Omelexia, Sufassil, Molag Ball and the Earth ride waves of liquid video from tomorrow in down to the intellect of, otherwise known as Yagron and the Book on, who is in the process of buying another Numidium. Elandro Sule then witnesses the battle between the five super people and the Numidium.
He writes, Okay, so it was weird. But then, so was everything when you were Vivek's best buddy. In the forty-some odd years that I had known him, I couldn't tell you the number of different species of weird I've seen. You name it, and some villain had probably tried it, worn it, used it, eat it, subjected themselves or the whole world to it.
And Vivek always put the weirdness down. Always. Well, I remember seeing the newsreels of him over tearing stuff up in Atmorea when I was a little boy. Over at the Whirling School Theater.
They've shut it down now. Only had one screen. A big one. Bigger than God's face it seemed, but only one screen.
The multiplexes have taken those kinds of theaters over these days, looking at the pseudo of Sixth House fight and the annual minions of the intellect of Oli Entertainment, where everything was awash of media blitz and news bites and video game die all come to life. Well, I guess you can see where I'm going with this. Anyhow. I retire in two weeks, having been a staff photographer at the Tomorrow Wind Gazette for 27 years.
I still remember my first picture of Vivek, saving a natch of Zeppelin from crashing into the pneumatic tubes above Pulsplaza. It's not that hard to remember that image. It's still used in magazines whenever they do a new biopic of the big V. You've probably seen it.
Who has it? What's the word? Seminole. Yeah.
Seminole picture that one. You're going to win this fight. You're going to take it straight to the intellect of this big old robot and somehow punch everything back to normal. All mulexie will talk or crazy talk to whatever connection the bad guy has to our universe.
It'll all fall apart like strands. Everyone on-nerne won't have televisions for heads anymore. Maybe right before that, some trick of the intellect will seem to turn the tide like, I don't know, a whole corpus army of hiss will flood out of the sales phone, but the er will split himself into a cascade of different here and nows and take care of every one of them just as self-assale stabilizes the scene with a word in a language that doesn't even exist yet because he does stuff like that. They are our super people.
They all do stuff like that. The impossible. They take whatever weirdness that threatens our world, whatever the scale, and smack it back into shape by using whatever impossible means they have inside them. And you know why I'm so confident?
Because I can't imagine a world where their kind of impossible isn't. It's a confidence that, reflecting upon it now, Jubal seems to have himself. You see, Alandro Sule was a distant ancestor of Jubal. Then it was then, Jubal says, after Vivek and the whole gang had destroyed the Numidium, that time stopped making sense.
Back at the marketplace, Jubal takes notice of Vivek and they are together transported back to the tea room at Hausul. Jubal is perturbed at Vivek's blatant teleportation, worried that people will talk about their disappearance and they will think that he is cheating. After all, if Jubal is getting a God's help in his quest to destroy the Numidium, that's not really fair is it? They argue that eventually Vivek disappears again.
Jubal summons his servitor and tells it to send a message to hear, telling him to bring them. When we next see Jubal, he is surrounded by a group of Kajidi's sugar surgeons preparing to work. Here tells Jubal that she is not worth all the trouble he is going through to which he responds. Sure she is.
We all are. Kajidi's sugar surgeons perforate Jubal's back, neck spine and ears. And soon Jubal is slipping into intense sugar drug induced to she's stupor. He looks up, revealing Iris is made of the two moons.
And he tells the surgeons to cut them both off. The next we see our protagonist is at his bachelor party, on the eve of the day he must prove himself worthy of his bride. He is drunk at the corner club. He is here and a motley assortment of other guests.
Oh, and both of his hands have been cut off. The stumps of his arms wrapped in bandages. He speaks with Mora House, the wing to demigod Minotaur of Tamrielic legend. They talk briefly about how confusing everything is now that the timeline is broken.
That night he also speaks with a hist. He speaks with Amalexia and Akatosh, Talos and Kain. Everybody gets too drunk and eventually we find Jubal wandering the surface of the moon with Talos. Jubal has clothed himself in the surface with his breathers scar from all.
Talos, on the other hand. Has simply turned himself entirely to platinum. Look across, a dead Nern. Jubal reflects that they all used to live there.
And as they talk, Talos's sheen begins to grey and his helm begins to disappear. And when next Jubal looks at him, he has become a Lorkan. There is a great hole in his chest where his heart once was. The Lorkan calls Jubal a liar for saying that he doesn't understand why they were put on Nern to fight.
For anybody who has cut their hands off already understands the truth. Jubal calls it a night. He sits in the surface of the moon and begins to meditate while Lorkan draws circles around him in the lunar dirt. Soon the new medium is upon him.
Thanks for listening to the Elder Lord podcast. In our next episode we will finish up our examination of Koda.