Mannimarco (Oblivion)

"Children, listen as the shadows cross your sleeping hutch, And the village sleeps away, streets emptied of the crowds, And the moons do balefully glare through the nightly clouds, And the graveyard's people rest, we hope, in eternal sleep, Listen and you'll hear the whispered tap of the footsteps creep, Then pray you'll never feel the Worm King's awful touch."

- Exerpt from, Mannimarco, King of Worms

Mannimarco, The King of Worms, is a monstrously powerful necromancer and lich, and the leader of the organisation known throughout Tamriel as the Order of the Black Worm, and, as such, he is the traditional enemy of the Mages' Guild. He was originally an Altmer and a Psijic, and a contemporary of Vanus Galerion, also a Psijic. At some point Mannimarco broke away from the Psijic order (as well as Galerion, who went on to found the Mages' Guild) to further practice his necromancy, and this is the point at which he actually first styled himself "The King of Worms." From Scourge Barrow, a large, well-fortified centre of operations in the Dragontail Mountains, he has cleverly played all the political games and powers for millennia. His influences have even reached back to the Summerset Isles, homelands of the Altmer. The Sload, slug-like creatures among whom necromancy is common practice, and who's domain is the Thrassian Coral Reef, worship him as a "God of Worms."

Biography
Mannimarco's influence has led him to be responsible for several notable happenings in Tamriel's history. He is one of seven people who have been in control of the Totem of Tiber Septim. According to ambiguous accounts, he used the Mantella which powers the Totem to ascend beyond the mortal realm and become a god. From the book "Arkay the Enemy", signed by a "KW" assumed to be the King of Worms, Mannimarco states "Once I was a lowly man such as yourselves. By my will I entered the ranks of the gods." However, Mannimarco's presence in Cyrodiil at the end of the Third Age argues circumstantially that things didn't happen quite that way. However it is also hypothesised that time fluctuations, such as the Warp of the West, allow every eventuality of a choice to happen at the same time, which would explain the existence of two versions of Mannimarco, one the King of Worms which did not come into posseion of the Mantella, and the other the Mannimarco that did receive the Mantella and became the deity that his "Order of the Black Worm" worships, the "Revenant Moon" or "God of Worms" mentioned in the book, "Necromancer's Moon."

Artifacts
Despite Mannimarco's great age, only a few artifacts have been identified by scholars as belonging to him. The most wide-spread is the Necromancer's Amulet. The Necromancer's Amulet was thought to be the last surviving artifact of Mannimarco, but the recent evidence has disproved that.

Another relatively common artifact is the Bloodworm Helm. It is said to be one of Mannimarco's most treasured possessions and it is made out of magically shaped bone.

Appearances

 * The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
 * The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion