Kotal Khan never learned what tore open the sky above Outworld that day, only that he rose alone, in warm mud belonging to no kingdom he knew.
Out of habit more than choice, he did what he's done every morning since he took the crown: he opened his palm and let the blood fall onto the ground, an offering meant for a sun that, that day, had no idea it was being called on.
It wasn't the sun that answered, but the roots.
The Hist tree, which has drunk the blood the Argonians of Murkmire offer it for centuries, recognized in that foreign gesture a language it had never heard before, yet understood perfectly.
The hunters who found Kotal kneeling in the mud, palm still open, saw no invader, only a man paying a debt no one had asked him for, rare enough to earn him a seat by the fire instead of a blade in the back.
He still has no name for this new god that drank his blood in the sun's place.
But he keeps opening his palm every morning, and Murkmire keeps letting him stay.