Sanguine

Among the Sixteen, Sanguine is the one most likely to sit down at your table uninvited, pour himself the last of your Surilie Brothers vintage, and leave you three days later wondering whether the evening was a blessing or a catastrophe. His motto is anything in excess. His domain is not the polite indulgence of a noble's feast but the dark exhilaration that begins when the last candle gutters out and the rules of polite society dissolve like sugar in bloodwine - hedonistic revelry, wild orgies, passionate indulgences of darker natures, and every appetite that decent folk pretend not to have.

Mortals describe him as the least dangerous of the Daedric Princes - a comforting lie they tell themselves while accepting his cup. He manifests as a portly yet muscular figure with crimson skin, a horned and tusked head, and a grin that promises everything and warns of nothing. But unlike most Princes, Sanguine walks among mortals constantly - as "Sam Guevenne" nursing an ale in a Whiterun tavern, as "Samuel Gourone" juggling at the Jester's Festival, as "Samara Gautier" teaching old love-rites during Heart's Week, as a drunken beggar named "Otto" in The Reach. He collects disguises the way Hermaeus Mora collects secrets. He is likelier than any Prince to take an interest in your affairs, and that interest is never as harmless as the smile suggests.

Those who drink from his goblet are bound to the feast until he releases them - and he is in no hurry. Hours become days become years, and the wine never runs dry. His cultists use binding contracts to force entertainers into endless performances - an encore that lasts forever. Some mortals, desperate beyond reason, have taken their own lives to escape the party. Sanguine offers everything and asks nothing in return, which is, by every account in the Scarlet Archive, the most dangerous bargain in all of Oblivion.

The Myriad Realms of Revelry are not a single plane but a hundred thousand pocket-worlds stitched together by desire, each one shaped to satisfy a different appetite. A ballroom of crystalline chandeliers dissolves mid-waltz into a battlefield strewn with roses, which softens in turn into a garden of impossible flowers whose perfume makes the visitor forget they ever wanted to leave. No two visitors experience the same realm. No visitor experiences the same realm twice.

Sanguine exerts minimal control over his realms because control is precisely what he despises - the very concept offends him on a theological level. Each pocket-world reshapes itself to the deepest desires of whoever steps through its threshold, reading wants the visitor may not even know they harbour. The architecture is alive, the furniture has opinions, and the wine cellars descend further than the geology should permit. It is, by all accounts, magnificent. It is also a trap from which escape requires wanting to leave - and the Realms are very good at making certain you never do.

Aldmeri Dominion spies who infiltrated one of the Realms in 2E 582 made the mistake of drinking from Sanguine's goblet. It bound them to the party utterly - unable to leave, unable to stop dancing, unable even to remember why they had come. Daedra may turn violent toward mortal guests without warning; bouncers are Ogrim, and they do not check invitations on the way out. Lyranth the Foolkiller once dismissed Sanguine as weaker than most Princes. She may be right. But power and danger are different currencies, and in the Myriad Realms the exchange rate favours the host.

His faithful drink, dance, wear red lipstick, and mark each other's faces with rose-shaped patterns at candlelit gatherings. The cult has no hierarchy, no dogma, no priests. Its only rule is participation. Those seeking audience leave a bottle of Cyrodiilic Brandy at one of his shrines and wait. With practice, devoted followers claim, one can see the debauchery of Sanguine gleaming from the eyes of the truly faithful - a vermilion glow that never quite fades, even in daylight.

The Khajiit know him as Sangiin - the Blood Cat, the Blood God of the Second Litter, and more darkly, the God of Death and Secret Murder. His worship occurs in forbidden shrines hidden from the Cat's Eye of Magrus, woven deep into the Lunar Lattice of their theology, far darker and more primal than the version Imperial scholars prefer to discuss. The Hollowfang Clan worships Sangiin with blood sacrifices beneath the moons, their rituals a fusion of vampiric hunger and devotional ecstasy that blurs the line between predator and priest. Among the Ayleids of the Merethic and First Eras, he was venerated as the Blood-Made-Pleasure, and some kingdoms practised flesh-sculpting guided by his influence - rites conducted in rose-lit chambers that have not been opened since.

Heart's Day began as Sanguine's summoning day - 16th of Sun's Dawn, when the barrier between his Realms and Nirn grows thinnest. The newer religions scraped his name off, replaced blood toasts with flower petals, but the original stain never faded. Carnaval belongs to him still - an open celebration where revellers surrender mind, body, and spirit to the rhythm. The Bretons honour him at Saturalia whether they know it or not. Even Reman Cyrodiil kept Sanguine close, inviting the Prince to White-Gold Tower to help draft the Crendali Festivals - celebrations whose vulgarities grew so legendary they hindered Imperial expansion into Summerset for generations.

The Sanguine Rose is a staff shaped like a flower in perpetual bloom, and it summons a lesser Daedra that obeys no command - not the summoner's, not Sanguine's, not its own better judgment. Each summoning wilts a petal, and the Rose grows darker, heavier, more fragrant with each use. When the last petal drops, the staff crumbles to dust in the wielder's hand, and somewhere in the Myriad Realms a new bloom pushes through soil that has never seen sunlight. The cycle has no known beginning. Sanguine gifts each new Rose to a mortal champion of his choosing, and the choosing is never random.

The Death Dealer's Fete is a cursed signet ring of blackened silver, its setting a blood-red ruby that burns warm against the skin no matter the weather. The shank is barbed on the inside - not enough to wound, but enough to remind the wearer with every gesture that they are marked. Its enchantment invigorates the wearer during combat, believed by scholars to have been designed to prevent exhaustion during Sanguine's more rigorous entertainments. At night, those who wear it hear distant sounds bleeding through from the Myriad Realms: laughter and screaming in equal measure, sometimes indistinguishable from one another.

The Rod of Revels is a slender instrument of dark wood and Daedric silver that, when struck against the ground, transforms any location into a fragment of the Myriad Realms - walls dissolve into starlit canopies, floors become warm grass, and the air fills with music that no one is playing. And then there is Sanguine's Reserve: a vintage of impossible origin that, when poured over the lips of a corpse, allows the dead spirit to be commanded. Scarlet bottles of his perfume, Sanguine's Rose, are reputed to carry aphrodisiacal properties - though the Archive curators note that the distinction between "perfume" and "alchemical weapon" is, in this case, academic.

The Threads of the Webspinner are twenty-seven pieces of extravagant enchanted clothing and jewelry - amulets, belts, gloves, rings, shoes - each enhancing a single skill of its wearer, from blade-work to speechcraft to the arcane arts. Mephala commissioned them as a reward for her devoted followers within the Morag Tong and turned to Sanguine to craft the enchantments. The arrangement produced artifacts of extraordinary potency: two Princes collaborating is rare enough, but two Princes who both trade in secrets and indulgence is something else entirely. The Dark Brotherhood later stole the Threads, scattering them across Vvardenfell. By 3E 427, Mephala had drawn them back to Morrowind, and the Morag Tong Grandmaster Eno Hlaalu dispatched an assassin to recover every last piece - a hunt that ended with the execution of Severa Magia, the Brotherhood's Night Mother, at the ruins of Ald Sotha.

In the deepest chamber of Bastion Sanguinaris, past the Crimson Hall and below the archives, a rose-vaulted sanctum glows with the light of candles that never burn down. A brazier of Daedric incense still smoulders there - the Archive curators have found no explanation for why it has not gone out. This is Sanguine's shrine - not a place of kneeling and supplication, but a long table set for a feast that has no scheduled end. Clan Lar worships the Prince of Revelry by existing: by keeping the Hall open to wanderers and outcasts, by filling the table when it empties, by pouring bloodwine for anyone - mortal, vampire, or otherwise - who walks through the door and does not draw a weapon.

Whether Sanguine placed the Bastion in Valyria's path deliberately remains debated. The relationship is not subservience - it is mutual appreciation, a tacit understanding between a Prince who despises control and a clan that refuses to be controlled. Sanguine does not command. He invites. And Clan Lar, to their credit, has never mistaken the invitation for an obligation - which may be precisely why it has never been revoked.

Sanguine's fingerprints are smeared across the calendar of every culture that has ever known how to throw a party. In the First Era, King Hale the Pious used Sanguine's depravity as a benchmark against which to measure his political enemies - the comparison was not flattering to either side. During Reman Cyrodiil's reign, the Prince resided openly in White-Gold Tower, helping draft the infamous Crendali Festivals whose vulgarities scandalised Summerset for centuries. By 2E 53, a growing Sanguine cult had established footholds across the Imperial City. In 2E 582, he appeared at the Jester's Festival as "Samuel Gourone" and during Heart's Week as "Samara Gautier," teaching the old blood-rites that newer religions had buried: the crimson toast between lovers, the frog's kiss that seals a pact of honesty, the midnight dance that ends only when someone tells the truth.

In the Fourth Era, the Prince outdid himself. In 4E 176, the Sheathed Blades encountered him in The Reach, where he had taken the form of a stinking drunk named "Otto" - he demanded blood and fun in Windhelm before vanishing. By 4E 197, he was offering supplies to bewildered mercenaries near Kynesgrove as "Sam," insisting they try his signature snack. And in 4E 201, he challenged the Last Dragonborn to a drinking contest in a Whiterun tavern - a wager that, by all accounts, the Dragonborn lost catastrophically. The aftermath became bardic legend: a stolen goat found on a cliff it could not possibly have climbed, a temple in Markarth desecrated with an artistry that impressed even the priestesses, and an engagement to a hagraven that was, technically, still legally binding. The evening ended in one of the Myriad Realms, where Sanguine gifted the Dragonborn a freshly bloomed Rose and called it a quiet night.