Many Faced: Wulfharth

who is Wulfharth:  Wulfharth is the madness, might, ambition, and glory of man, ripped from its soul and left an ashen ghost.  He is not Shezzarine, he is Ysmir (or more precisely, an iteration of it)- the bellowing bearded dragon, the essence that accompanies the reincarnating soul of Shezarr, the soul of human endeavor.  In life Wulfharth was the successor of Hoag, who drove the Direnni and Temple of the One from Skyrim, and brought back the nordic gods- though likely in a rewritten manor, though we may never truly know their true proto-forms between animal totemism and personification.  He was potentially Talosian, 'born of Atmora', though both due to the events of his life and the state of the world such a thing was not fulfilled.  However in death he was still great, and through shezzarine nature and adoration of the nords he became a sort Nirnada like many other heroes, himself attached most to the greater soul of Shor.  Where he became fated to his state was when he was summoned by Dagoth before Red Mountain, riding in from Sovngarde in glory.  This would be his downfall.  The battle went wretched, and the Soul of Shor was deviated for the purposes of the Almsivi, shattering his nature and wresting his soul from his form.  Left a soulless husk before Vivec, he sputtered in disbelief for but a moment, before Vivec spoke some old elven words and blasted him into ash, which blew away on the winds of a burning Resdayn and carried him back into the mountains of Skyrim, god-blasted essence without a soul, lost and barely conscious.

It wouldn't be until the invasion of the Akaviri where both Jorunn and Almalexia simultaneously called upon him that soulless ashes cohesed into his form once again, and once more he became Ysmir without Shezarr bound to the name of Wulfharth.  Dissipating upon victory, this essence still was once more tied together, and so this essence of Ysmir, in crazed, angry, and frightened mindlessness, waited and searched for its soul.  This was the first iteration of Underking as we know of him.  He would lie waiting for his soul for 281 years, appearing in 2E853 when he heard the Greybeards give the shout of Ysmir.  First he thought they were calling him, but they dismiss him after telling him they call for King Cuhlec.  So his spirit waits on the mountain for Cuhlec, and soon finds him.  He is bound to Cuhlec, as Cuhlec is the shezzarine soul to which Ysmir is a pair; and though Cuhlec already has his own Ysmirine aspect, this new one joins it as the Ash-King.  Becoming of him, the ash-ghost's face becomes that of its lord, and the two are near indistinguishable.  Cuhlec, 'Tiber', and Ash journey back to Hrothgar before heading home, with victorious news that Cuhlec is fated to restore unity to Tamriel and end the deleterious fighting.  With his allies he marches southward, overthrowing the invasive influences of Nordic and Breton forces that held grasp on Chorrol and Sancre Tor (where he met the Breton Chevalier Renald, who sought to support 'the coming king').  With two forces of Ysmir, they simultaneously lay waste to their enemies and rally the survivors to their cause, crushing barony after barony in their way and only growing in forces.  When they reach the imperial city it is an easy victory.

The night of victory, everything changes.  It was never Cuhlec to whom Wulfharth's Ysmirine essence was attracted, but Tiber.  Tiber was Shezzarine and Ysmir himself.  Tiber was now the leader, with the death of poor Cuhlecain.  This is wrong and Wulfharth knows it, but he cannot identify how.  As Nirnada his awareness of such things is greater than the standard mortal, but it is not enough for him to know more than that there is something dire that his Shezzar has changed, something world shaking.  He feels betrayed and upset by this, but has nothing to act upon.

Tiber mostly rules as an administrator, and his wit lends a powerful hand to subterfuge, intrigue, and grand stewardship.  Instead for war he sends his Ash-Ghost in his place, instructed to act as him and with the name of Talos, the name of prophecy many nordic witnesses called Tiber since Hroldan.  Colovia, Nibenay, Skyrim, and finally High Rock fall to Ysmir and are organized into empire by the machine of propaganda and administration that is Tiber and Zurin, jarldom by jarldom and fief by fief and petty kingdom by petty kingdom.  Eventually the great nation of Hammerfell is Tiber's only human peer, and Wulfharth in its ever mad fury desires complete invasion; specifically, it has a rambling want to meet its parallel in combat, the Hoon Ding, but Tiber lets him know that's a fucking stupid idea.  It'd be better to conquer Hammerfell on terms it itself gives in to, both to avoid Hoon Ding and to imitate Reman's amicable conquest of the land, a feat that would legitimize his rule further.  Tiber supports a side in civil war, and it doesn't go completely smoothly, but that's a tale that doesn't involve Wulfharth.

Finally there are only elven lands, and while Tiber enroaches with border conflicts Ysmir urges with a gnashing of teeth that he do more, both in his raging urge to fight elven ways, and in a loathing disdain for the ALMSIVI which blasted him to ash.  Tiber is hesitant and slow in this, and in this hesitation Vivec finds window to meet with Tiber, bestowing him lessons and gifts for him to find his own use for and coming to agreements.  A sort of friendship is made, armistice is declared, and Morrowind joins empire peaceably with special permissions upon it.  Wulfharth withdraws in fury, finding its Shezarr to be inadequate and on the side of the demons.  Tiber stagnates and pursues the use of the gifts, desperate for a way to reclaim momentum.

He finds what he needs to do as construction of his gift finishes.

Tiber calls Ysmir back to fold, promising it that he has come around, and will slaughter ALMSIVI and UR alike.  Wulfharth comes back.  Wulfharth is restrained by guards.  Zurin has only been told that they will capture Shezzarine soul; he tries to use a soulgem, and there is nothing to gather from the ash that is Wulfharth.  Zurin has been misled.  Wulfharth shouts and blasts the heart from Zurin's chest; he does not realize what he has set in motion.  Tiber is the king.  Wulfharth is a tool, here the king's spear.  Zurin's efforts and plans for kingdom are rewarded by the heart being ripped from his very form.  The razor comes free, and names are cut.  Zurin is skinned from his malleable snake soul, and all this extraneous mass, this Wulfharth, are carved from the Ysmir, which is harvested.  The razor commits its violent surgery, and in the end the heart begins to beat, fueled by fascimile Shezzarine soul, placed into the Mantella, fueling in place of Lorkhan's soul.  The king, his spear, the executed, it is not perfect but danced at the base of a tower and guided with Hjalti's knife it is enough for the world.  An impossible moment's name is uttered in simulacrum, and the moment is inherited; and around this new name fusion of souls occurs, like in red moment so long ago, woven by razor into oversoul, an oversoul of convention and of Nirn.

Hjalti learned much from Vivec, much which built around his own conceptions of identities and nymics, from which has born an understanding: identities are illusions, shaped and shifted by our impression of them and warped by myth and time, essences and aspects of a collective thinking, constant attempts by the world to identify the shape of itself, always failing but very much accepting the concluded results.  The true nymic of the world identifying itself is I, here synonymous with WE, but as the world accepts it's false conclusion, so is valid the more narrow understanding.  One who accepts the truth relinquishes their name and becomes nothing.  One who persists in their conclusion lives as all others.  The one who knows and accepts both this truth of oneness with all and persists in their conclusions, can bear both names at once and know their shape, and can carve the world with razor most truly.

Talos is here, and he was always here, all the way back to when he left Atmora and served Cuhlec, and shouted mightily at Hrol'Dan.

Just as convention had one who fled as a blasted thing, so does this too.  What remains on the cutting room floor with the razor's end coalesces.  The blasted husk of Zurin, crawling for the safety of the skeletal remains of Ysmir, where it finds the emptiness of yet another, becoming their own opposite parallel to the oversoul, UNDERKING, the tortured essence of Ysmir Kingmaker, anon Zurin, anon Wulfharth, anon the nothing of ZED.