Saxhleel - Argonian
"The narrow reed you call real cannot hold the Hist's truth, Rootmender. Real. Illusion. Dream. Waking. These are the words that keep our bellies to the mud. We are safe there, yes. But we cannot see very far."Hailing from the impenetrable swamp province of Black Marsh, the Saxhleel people, more commonly known as Argonians, are an alien and reclusive species known for their cold cunning, amphibious prowess, and unmatched resistance to disease. They are thought to be descended from a species of common reptiles which can still be found in Argonia today. They credit their forms, their intellects, and their very souls to the ancient Hist trees, which they believe are a living network of conscious beings from before time.
The Hist
In a time before time, a destructive war raged across the cosmos over the creation of a mortal realm. Although they were neutral in this war, the battle passed over the Realm of the Hist and sundered it, forcing some of the trees to take root on Nirn for protection. The Hist trees saw this new world, and knew it would be squandered by these short-sighted beings. They felt the blood of the dead filling the soil, the immortal souls of the spirits who had died for this world, trapped in the earth. The Hist took pity on poor Nirn, and the Ehlnofey souls now bound to it. They took some of the plane's simple creatures, the Ancestor Lizards, gave them purposeful shape, and gifted these bodies to the fallen Ehlnofey so that they might have another chance to get things right. These became the Saxhleel, the "People of the Root" who tend to the Hist trees which guide their lives and recycle their souls. They shape the Saxhleel people through their Hist Sap, and speak to them through secret methods, teaching and protecting them. The Hist are ancient beings in the shape of trees, which adapt their form to their environment. In Black Marsh, they take appear as massive, bulging mangroves with crimson or azure flowers in the spring. Although there are few outside of the region, their roots stretch throughout Nirn, interlinked in a single overarching consciousness, which has shepherded the Saxhleel since the Time before Time. Another myth, commonly believed in the Alessian Empire is that Argonians themselves were part Hist, and that the Hist are in turn, the form that the most ancient and wise of the Argonians took. In those days, very little was known about Black Marsh, and it is likely most scholars, with only second-hand accounts of the Hist, through steep language barriers, interpreted the Hist as a form of Spriggan, a common nature spirit made of wood in humanoid shape. This account surprisingly was given archeological credence by later explorers, who discovered ancient stone carvings of beings with traits of both Hist Trees and Saxhleel. Although, these may not be literal depictions.Stone-Nest
Rising out of the mangroves throughout Black Marsh are long-neglected Xanmeers, stone pyramids constructed during the early Merethic Era. These temples were the hearts of stone cities, which the ancient Saxhleel built in a vain attempt to create a lasting monument in the world to their fleeting lives. The Argonians of old made Sithis the central figure in their spiritual lives. The embodiment of entropy and death, Sithis the Destroyer had to be placated through worship and ritual sacrifice, else He would let all they had built turn to dust. This was a time of incredible prosperity for Black Marsh. This era is known by scholars as the Stone-Nest Period, when Saxhleel civilization was divided into city-states led by priest-kings called Nisswo, or Nothing-Speaker. The city-states of the region were adapt at metalworking, their territories expanded northward into the region of Resdayn, now home to the Dark Elves. They traded widely, adapting some of the magical and technological techniques of both the Ayleid civilization and the Dwemer. They used Vakka Stones to power elaborate stone mechanisms, used for every purpose from decimating one's enemies to changing the weather, based on the dwemer principle of Tonal Architecture.Duskfall
An unknown calamity befell the Stone Nest civilization in the late Merethic Era. The Hist foretold a time of great change, which was highly resisted by the Nisswo. What exactly happened was unknown, but it is evident that the civilization underwent a gradual decline. In conjunction with this decline, the saxhleel lost the ability to commune with the Hist. The stone cities became abandoned, and soon all but the magically reinforced xanmeers had sunk beneath the swamp. Over the following centuries, Saxhleel tribes had found new, more subtle ways of communing with the Hist. Although they were isolated from one another by the swamps, the unified voice of the Hist brought the tribes together in their spirituality. Sithis remained the central celestial figure, but instead of being feared as a bringer of death and decay, He was loved as a bringer of necessary change. Argonians embraced death as a necessary part of the cycle of rebirth, and no longer relied on stone monuments to give them an illusion of permanence. In post-Duskfall Argonia, buildings are made of mud, clay, straw, or wood, and are intended to return to the swamp when their dwellers no longer have use of it. Some of the surviving xanmeers have been converted into neutral meeting grounds between the tribes and as hatcheries for their eggs, although most are simply abandoned, allowing Black Marsh to slowly reclaim their stone.Invaders
The late Merethic and early First Eras brought the Saxhleel people in repeated conflict with outside cultures. A civil war known as the Narfinsel Schism led to a splinter group of Ayleids to emigrate from Cyrodiil and settle wherever they could find high groundBarsaebicFenlordsSilyanornShadowfen Alessian EmpireHouse Indoril of the Chimer. At the climax of this conflict, the entire city seemed to collapse under its own weight, and the entire population, including its Hist, vanished in a single night. In time, the Barsaebic states eventually collapsed after centuries of increasing isolation, leaving behind half sunken ruins throughout the northern and south-western regions of Black Marsh. Silyanorn would be built over by Argonian, Imperial, and Dunmeri settlers over the following millennia, becoming the city of Stormhold today. In the south, during the early First Era, piracy became a constant threat to the coastal tribes. The early empire employed privateers to bolster its navy. In 1E 1019, Empress Hestra reformed the Imperial Navy, doing away with the Privateers the Empire had employed since the days of Empress Alessia and making it an official branch of the Legion. This led thousands of privateers to turn to piracy. The most infamous of all was an Argonian known only as Red Bramman, who united the nascent pirates and led them into a secret, safe waterway in Black Marsh, where they set up numerous pirate hideouts. Most notably were the neutral port which became Soulrest, and Blackrose, a xanmeer ruin that Red Bramman claimed for his own. From these hidden ports, the southern coast of Tamriel was ravaged for over a decade, until an informant led Hestra's Navy up the Red River. In a matter of days, The trapped pirates had their fleets destroyed, their free cities occupied by the Legion, and their captains executed. In exchange for clemency, the survivors in the last holdout of Blackrose eventually presented the head of Captain Bramman. However, Hestra was not merciful that day, and the Legion slaughtered the remaining pirates, and the free cities would become permanent Imperial colonies. The infamous Blackrose Prison was later built as deep into the swamp as the Legion dared to go, where the brutal conditions for imperial prisons was preferable to certain death should they escape into the wild.Blackwater
The Alessian Empire was never able to venture far beyond their colonies along the Red River. The rampant diseases, predators, and natural hazards of the swampland were insurmountable on their own, but made impossible when the entire region was flush with opaque waterways in which Argonian gorilla fighters could attack from any direction at any moment. The First Empire counted their limited access to ancient trade-routes to be worth the effort of maintaining its meager territories. The later Reman Empire, however, saw all of Tamriel as theirs by divine right of the Dragonborn Emperors. Emperor Reman II, upon ascending to the throne, initiated the Blackwater War, twenty year campaign against the gorilla forces of the Saxhleel. After a generation of conflict, the Argonians inexplicably stopped fighting one day, returning to their villages as if nothing had happened. The Legion was able to quickly overtake what little of the province they could logistically occupy, primarily in the north and western regions. Reman declared their gains the Imperial Province of Black Marsh in 1E 2837. Reman, and two generations of his successors would spend the rest of their lives unsuccessfully trying to conquer Morrowind, until Reman III was assassinated at the hands of the Morag Tong, ending the dynasty and the First Era. While the Reman Empire persisted under the Akaviri Potentates, the turmoil in its first year allowed Black Marsh to secede without bloodshed. In the middle Second Era, long after the remnants of the Reman Empire fell apart, eastern Tamriel was invaded by forces from Akavir, a mysterious continent far to the east. Forces of the Kamal the "Snow Demons" of Akavir landed in Windhelm where they sacked the city in search of an artifact translating to the "Ordained Receptacle". The Kamal did not find their receptacle in Skyrim, and decided to travel back East into Morrowind in their search. The Nords of Eastern Skyrim, under Jorunn Skald-King whose mother and sister were killed in Windhelm, pursued their assailants into the territory of their ancient enemies, the Dunmer. The Kamal found themselves routed, trapped between the forces of Jorunn from Skyrim, and Almalexia from Morrowind. The Kamal made their stand at the Battle of Vivec's Antlers, a glowing forest of coral near the city of Ebonheart. The battle raged for hours, with the nearly immortal snow-demons tirelessly defending their position while they awaited the return of their ships for evacuation. Just when the Nordic front was about to give, the Tamrielic fighters were reinforced by a coalition of Free Argonians. With this, the three factions were able to crush the invaders. For the first time in history, Nords, Dunmer, and Saxheel had united in purpose, and formed a friendship which would define an era. In 2E 572 this alliance was formalized and given new purpose. The kingdom of Eastern Skyrim, a union of several Saxhleel tribes of the north, and the Great Houses of Morrowind, excepting House Telvvanni, became The Ebonheart Pact, and set its sights on the Ruby Throne, and the formation of a new Empire. The dream of the Ebonheart Pact went unfulfilled. Its designs on the throne of Cyrodiil were disrupted by the Planemeld, a catastrophic event in which the Daedric Prince Molag Bal attempted to merge Tamriel with His own. Coincidentally, two other alliances, the Daggerfall Covenant and the Aldmeri Dominion, had also been created to lay claim to the Heartland. This led to the protracted Three Banners War. While the alliances came together to defeat Molag Bal, their war ultimately led to nothing. After a decade at war, the three banners signed an armistice, turning inward to prolong their failing alliances. To its credit, the Ebonheart Pact outlasted the others by decades. Jorunn's grandson Stahl Peacemaker married the Monarch of Solitude, re-uniting the two kingdoms of Skyrim after centuries. As a concession of this alliance, the unified Skyrim withdrew from the Ebonheart Pact on peaceful terms. Without the Nords acting as a check on the balance of power, House Dres of Morrowind resumed its practice of raiding Black Marsh for Argonian slaves. In response, the northern tribes dissolved the Pact, and called upon reinforcements from the deep swamps of the central province. Tribes, never seen by outsiders in history, emerged to enact retribution on their betrayers. Dunmer were ejected from Shadowfen, or worse. Tiber Septim, founding emperor of the Third Empire of Men came to rule Cyrodiil, and would be the first to conquer all of Tamriel at the end of the Second Era. His conquest of Black Marsh was much the same as Reman II's, though he was more successful. His Legion took port cities across the coast, and retook the western and northern colonies of old. While the majority of the central swamp could not be touched, the Empire had effective control of its borders, and declared for the first time, the entire region in the name of the Emperor. The Third Era brought many Saxhleel beyond the reach of the Hist. In search of opportunity and protection from the continued Dunmeri slave-raids, "Argonians" began to spread throughout Tamriel, becoming a common sight in docks and shipyards, with some even becoming assimilated into the middle and upper classes in certain more tolerant parts of the world. Discrimination under the Septim dynasty was common, but not as systematically enforced as it was against Khajiit. Imperial governors rule the colonies in Black Marsh, advised by members of the Archein tribe, who are despised by most common Saxhleel. In 3E 430, after the death or disappearance of each member of the Tribunal, the living gods of the Dunmer, King Hlaalu Helseth finally outlawed slavery in Morrowind. After the civil war that followed, the Archein nobles were quick to make public peace with Morrowind, forgoing demands of reparations in exchange for safe repatriation of their former slaves.The Fourth Era
One foggy morning in the month of Sun's Dawn, in the year 3E 433, Argonians across the Empire awoke to a sensation alien to them, yet somehow familiar. Argonians born outside the sap-filled pools of Saxhleel nurseries have no connection to the Hist. Yet, on this morning, each and every Argonian on Nirn felt the roots miles beneath their feet call out to them. It called them home. Then, as quickly as it began, it faded away. At first, this message was felt once a day, then once a week, then once a month. It pulsed beneath them, tugging at something primal in their hearts, warning of some imminent danger if they do not make pilgrimage to their roots. Roughly ten thousand of the diaspora returned to their ancestral home over the following months. Many more, tragically, did not, distrusting this vague instinct to uproot their lives without explanation, or were simply unable to afford the journey. On the 27th of Last Seed, six months later, the Emperor and his sons were assassinated by a daedric cult, setting off an invasion by the forces of Mehrunes Dagon. Gates appeared across all of Tamriel, and bloodthirsty daedra poured out to destroy everything in sight. This Oblivion Crisis, catastrophic to the rest of the known world, was quickly averted in Black Marsh. A nationalist faction known as the An-Xileel, who have long preached for a return to a pre-Duskfall Argonia, and the purging of foreign influences, claimed to have been warned of the oncoming Crisis by the Hist. They had convinced the Hist to call back their lost egg-siblings and prepare their people for war. The An-Xileel handed out vials of modified hist sap, which would strengthen and enrage any who drank it, making them able to survive the fires of the Dagon's Deadlands. Whenever an oblivion gate opened up in Black Marsh, untrained civilians would push back the horde, and pour into the gate, quickly overtaking one stronghold after another with such ferocity that Dagon's right-hand Imago Storm aborted their operations in the province. Black Marsh waited out the remainder of the crisis awaiting an attack which never came, while the rest of the world burned. Dagon's invasion was finally thwarted, resulting in a new, unbreakable Firmament stopping all incursions from Oblivion. Six months into this new Fourth Era, a small kingdom in Elsweyr seceded from the Empire. Although retribution was swift and deadly, the atrocities of the Legion were so great that Potentate Ocato surrendered out of shame. By the end of that year, a representative of the An-Xileel arrived in the Imperial City. This agent presented the Elder Council with the signet rings of each of the Imperial Governors of Black Marsh, along with the tails of their Archein advisors. Without a word, the agent left. Although the Empire never formally recognized their secession, the Argonian Union had unofficially been founded.Accession
Beyond the Oblivion Crisis, Morrowind was further decimated by the eruption of Red Mountain. Less than a year later, the An-Xileel government launched an invasion of the north, justified as retribution for millennia of slavery, and to take back land which belonged to their ancestors during the Stone-Nest period. Shock troops made their way upriver, flanking settlements throughout Dres territory, and taking them in the night. An-Xileel tactics proved brutal and efficient, sparing no one in their advancement. After four days House Redoran and Indoril were able to mount a defense. After two agonizing months, Morrowind was finaly able to halt the Saxhleel advancement and hold the line. From there, the war has been at a standstill. Although still officially a province of the Empire, the Legion had retreated fully from the east, and is instead focusing on building up its border defenses, protecting the Empire both from the future ambitions of Argonia, and from the thousands of Dunmeri refugees, as Cyrodiil grows increasingly xenophobic. Prisoners of war are taken to Stormhold Prison, once an infamous Imperial operation, where prisoners are forced to mine through ancient Ayleid debris in search of crystals which restore health and magicka to feed the war effort. Rumor has it that they have a new Warden, who has grown increasingly obsessed with the secrets of old Silyanorn.Naming Traditions
Feminine names
Ahaht, Akish, Banalz, Beekatan, Eutei, Gilm, Gish, Hul, Kasa, Milah, Nakuma, Neesha, Nuralg, Nush, Okur, Onasha, Shatalg, Tasha, Wusha, Ah-Meesei, Am-Ra, An-Deesei, Chanil-Lee, Cheesh-Meeus, Deesh-Meeus, El-Lurasha, Ereel-Lei, Gih-Ja, Jeed-Ei, Kal-Ma, Keel-Raniur, Meeh-Mei, Meen-Sa
Masculine names
Asum, Bunish, Busheeus, Chalureel, Chiwish, Chulz, Chuna, Haran, Hathei, Heedul, Huleeya, Huzei, Inee, Itan, Meer, Milos, Neetinei, Okaw, Peeradeeh, Rasha, Reemukeeus, Reesa, Seewul, Skeetul, Tanan, Teegla, Tul, Ukawei, Ula, Utadeek, Weeltul, Weer, An-Zaw, Bun-Teemeeta, Dan-Ru, Effe-Tei, Eleedal-Lei
Other names
Argonians sometimes give Imperialized names to foreigners. These names are borrowed from old Nibenese names, recognizable to modern Imperials:
Male
Alexandros, Caligian, Heracles, Julian, Pilate, TibidesFemale
Aphena, Artemis, Pereterra, TyrianaFamily
Androdes, Augussar, Cades, Calus, Caelus, Caemean, Galdes, Maglus, Nides, Nimean, Perodorus, Theodes, Tibercles, Xerdes, XemesTranslated Names
Bathed-in-Steel, Bites-Four-Stars, Croon-Tail, Dives-From-Below, Drawing-Flame, Furl-Of-Fresh-Leaves, Gash-Tail, Hates-Your-Faces, Pale-Eyes, Right-Foot-Rock, River-Gills, Scale-SongMajor organizations
Shadowscales - Saxhleel born in the month of Second Seed, under star sign of The Shadow are chosen by Sithis as agents of change. Shadowscales are raised from birth to be assassins. At the age of 13, all Shadowscales are sent to a hidden facility in Archon to be formally trained. While the Dark Brotherhood guild of assassins has a presence only in the Imperial colonies in Black Marsh, the two organizations work closely together, and share the same core Tenets. Shadowscales are guaranteed membership in the Brotherhood when they travel abroad.
The Clutch of Nisswo - The clergy of Sithis. Although far from the priest-kings of the pre-duskfall era, Nisswo continue to hold an important part in Saxhleel culture. They operate outside of the organization of tribes. A saxhleel simply knows when they are chosen by the Dread-Father. They will make pilgrimage to one of the ancient xanmeer temples, becoming Voh-Vastei, an apprentice to a previous Nisswo, spending years in isolation in the ruins of their predecessors folly. When their apprentice is ready, a Nisswo will hand them a ceremonial dagger. They become fully fledged when they stab their master through the heart as an offering to Sithis. Once fully inducted, the Nisswo will travel from tribe to tribe, offering each community the opportunity to learn from their unique interpretations of the faith.
An-Xileel - Founded as the gorilla resistance in Imperial-occupied parts of Argonia during the Blackwater War. For them, the war never ended, and have spent centuries enacting petty acts of sabotage, organized violence, and assassinations. At the end of the Third Era, their unofficial leader, Vulsid Shei, spent twenty years locked up in Blackrose Prison, but escaped in the only mass breakout in the prison's history, just months before the Oblivion Crisis.
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