Hello everybody, it's another episode of the Elder Lore podcast. We are just putting the finishing touches on our second season. This is our eighth episode in that run. We've got two more episodes before we start our third season.
And for today's episode, we're going to talk about the Dragon Break. And this concept of the Dragon Break is at once both pervasive and elusive. To describe it sometimes requires breaking the fourth wall, but that's nothing we haven't done before, specifically in our previous episode about Kim and some of the more metaphysical aspects of Elder Scrolls Lore, we can't have those discussions without breaking the fourth wall. But to simplify it, a Dragon Break is a temporal phenomenon that involves a splitting of the natural timeline which results in branching parallel realities where the same events occur differently or maybe even not at all.
At the end of the Dragon Break, the timeline usually reconnects, making all possibilities and outcomes truth, though some of them may contradict each other. When Bethesda was developing their second Elder Scrolls game, Daggerfall, they were faced with an interesting kind of problem. They wanted the players to have a number of different choices which would result in multiple achievable endings. Rather than make the decision to choose one of these endings and recognize it as being the quote unquote canon ending, Bethesda canonized all the endings and made them all truth using this literary tool known as the Dragon Break.
However, this Dragon Break, the one that occurs at the end of the events of Daggerfall, is not the only or even the first Dragon Break that has ever occurred in the Elder Scrolls universe. We're going to examine them in our episode today in more or less chronological order. It does also need to be said that not all Dragon Breaks result in a splitting of the timeline. Some involve, as we'll see with our first Dragon Break, a simple folding or manipulation of the timeline in ways that one might describe as unnatural.
The period of time that passes inside of a Dragon Break is referred to as a middle dawn. This gives us a unique insight into the behavior of time during one of these Dragon Breaks, because the name in and of itself is a reference back to the dawn era before we had our first era started in Tamriel, during which time had no linear flow and behaved much in the way it does during a Dragon Break. That's why it's called a middle dawn. It is thought that these Dragon Breaks are caused when mortals try to meddle in the affairs of the gods, most specifically Akotash, who, if we remember correctly, is the Guardian of time.
So before we get into it and before I start talking about our first chronological Dragon Break, I do need to say that this first one that we're going to talk about does come to light during the events of the main quest in the game Skyrim. So if you have not played through the main quest, then some things I'm about to talk about may spoil some surprises for you. That being said, chronologically, the first Dragon Break occurred when three Nordic heroes used an Elder Scroll in addition to the voice to create a localized Dragon Break at the top of the mountain known as the Throat of the World. During the Marathic Era when the Nords were rebelling against the tyranny of the Dragons and their Dragon Priests, these three heroes, which we find out are named Gormlath Golden Hilt, Hakon I and Feldir the Old, expel Alduin from their time and send him hurtling forward into the future.
When Alduin emerges at the throat of the world during the fourth era during the events of the game Skyrim, thousands upon thousands of years later, it has only been an instant by his reckoning. Conceivably, it is the use of the Elder Scroll by these three mortals that causes the break and time itself is kind of fractured and folded in on itself. You get a glimpse of this event as you're playing through the main quest, suffice to say that in the last few moments of their desperate battle against Alduin the world either greatest of all dragons, these three heroes realize that they will not be able to defeat him without using the Elder Scroll. And although I could be mistaken about this, I believe they are aware that they are not actually killing Alduin, rather that they are solving the problem temporarily until it can be solved for good later on.
As we can see, this particular dragon break does not involve a branching of the timeline into separate concurrent realities, but it rather indicates a singular tear in space-time that sends Alduin forward into the future. The longest and most famous dragon break comes during the first era. It is perpetrated by the Marokadi selective, which is a secretive sect under the Alesian Empire. Maruk De Sier was a prominent figure in these times.
He claimed to have had a vision of Alessia herself, which prompted him on this long strange journey which would end up with him in the history books. He was a theologian and a politician, and in fact he believed that those two were one and the same. And he also was a law giver. It is a matter of a little bit of dispute as to what race Maruk was.
However, I believe that if we look closely at the topic, we can make inferences. We can assume that he is not a collovian human, because if he was, it wouldn't be noteworthy that he was opposed to Elginwoo. It somehow seems more likely that he is an elf himself, perhaps an Aldmer. It seems much more fitting that the doctrines of the Aldmer would be denounced by one of their own.
However, he is sometimes referred to as the Great Primate and sometimes as the Monkey Prophet. And it is for these reasons that most people believe that Maruk was in fact an Imga, believe it or not. But Maruk, who will remember, are a kind of simian race that lived in Valinwood who revere the Altmer. Again, it's not necessarily proven that Maruk was an Imga.
But I think it's fair to say that there's a pretty good possibility that he is. So then the question becomes, how does an Imga come to oppose the ideas of the elves that they so vehemently worshipped? Well, supposedly, as I said a little bit earlier, Saint Alessia herself appears to him in a vision and makes him question the viability of Elvin rule. And he subsequently makes it a life goal of his to change things for the better.
At one point, this involves Maruk trying to exercise the Elvin influence from the Alessian Pantheon. And it's described in a book which is titled The Dragon Break. I'm going to read a section from it now. Quote, A fanatical sect of the Alessian order, the Marukadi selective becomes frustrated by ancient Altmeri traditions still present within the theological system of the eight divines.
Specifically, they hated any admission that Akotosh, the supreme spirit, was indisputably also Arielle, the Elvin High God. Newly invented rituals were utilized to disprove this theory to no avail. Finally, the secret masters of the Marukadi selective channeled the Arabis itself to mythically remove those aspects of the Dragon God they disapproved of. A staff or tower appeared before them.
The secret masters danced on it until it writhed and trembled and spoke its protonemic. The tower split into eight pieces and time broke. The non-linearity of the dawn era had returned. Tamriel slept through the disaster which lasted one thousand and eight years, until the pieces of the tower came to rest on the mortal plane.
So we talked about the tower in our episode about Kim. But to paraphrase it, for those of you who have not listened to that episode yet, the tower is, at its core, a representation of everything. The universe has been described as a wheel. This wheel has eight spokes, one for each of the divines.
The space in between each spoke, number 16, represents the Daedric Lords. Turn the wheel on its side and it becomes a tower. Find the secret of the tower and you will know Kim. So if we look at these together now, this quote from the book, The Dragon Break and this explanation of what the tower is, we can see that the priests of the Marukadi selective are being figuratively described as dancing upon this tower and splitting it into pieces.
They are figuratively describing the Dragon Break. It's also important to note that the existence of this Dragon Break is disputed by the historian Phall Droom. He has written a book called The Dragon Break Reexamined which reports that it's all really one big misunderstanding. He says that the Dragon Break is really just an error on behalf of the authors of the Encyclopedia Tamrielica which was being written at the beginning of the third era.
Documents and primary sources from the first era were scattered and fragmentary and sometimes even contradictory and the vast libraries of the elves were not open to men for study at the time. So Phall Droom writes this book and he ends it with this quote. Today modern archeology and paleonumerology have confirmed what my own research in Alesian dating first suggested that the Dragon Break was invented in the late third era based on a scholarly error fueled by obsession with eschatology and numidiumism and perpetuated by scholarly inertia. The one thing that his theory does not explain however is how we have different accounts of life during the Dragon Break during that middle dawn.
Even from nations who at the time had no ties to the Empire. For example if you read through the book Where Were You When The Dragon Broke you will know that it features points of view of many different cultures on the phenomenon of this Dragon Break. And what we're going to look at specifically is what the Khajiit have to say. And they write quote.
Do you mean where were the Khajiit when the Dragon broke? I'll tell you where we were recording it. One thousand and eight years you all heard it. You probably believe that the Cyrro Nordics came up with that all on their own.
You humans are better thieves than even Rajin. While you were fighting wars with phantoms and giving birth to your own fathers it was the main that watched the Jha Kajay because the moons were the only constant and you didn't have the sugar to see it. We'll give you credit. You broke al-Kash something fierce.
And that's not easy. Just don't think you solved what you accomplished by it or can ever solve it. You did it again with Big Walker, not once but twice. Once at Riman which we'll never learn to live with.
And the second time it was in Daggerfall. Or was it Sentinel? Or was it Wayrest? Or was it in all three places at once?
End quote. So there is a lot going on in here in this Khajiit description of what's going on during the Dragon Break. If you listen to our episodes about the theology and the culture of the Khajiit, there might be some things in this quote that you don't understand. Specifically what the main is, what the Jha Kajay is.
And you might not have realized that he does refer to moon sugar in his passage when he says the moons were the only constant and you didn't have the sugar to see it. So if you're curious as to what this all means, go ahead and listen to our episode about elsewhere because it will explain a lot of that. But getting back to it, what is this new mediumism that Druun is writing about? What connection does it have to this big walker that Khajiit talked about?
What does it have to do with the Dragon Break? Well, quite a lot actually. One dragon break that we hear a lot about is the warp in the west, also known as the miracle of peace. And these are the events of Dragorfall that we have been talking about this whole episode.
In four of the six possible endings, the new medium is activated. In the other two, the Mantella, which is the name of the Soul Gem that powers the new medium, is activated. So in all of these endings, we have either the new medium or the Soul Gem that powers the new medium being activated. Any of these could be construed as mortals interfering in the affairs of the gods.
This is the first new medium, mind you, the same one that was involved in the disappearance of the Dwemer. So while this new medium is being used and re-powered up, not with the Heart of Lorton anymore, but rather with this Mantella, the mortals are trying to involve themselves in the affairs of the gods. And this brings us back to this refrain of what it is that actually causes the time itself to kind of split or otherwise tear. But let's get back to the Dwemer for a second.
So a mere few hundred years after Maruch, we have the Dwemer trying to activate the new medium at the Battle of Red Mountain. It is theorized that this causes a dragon break akin to the one that sends an Alduin forward in time, sending all of the Dwemer on some separate timeline that has yet to join up with ours. Let's rejoin for a second what the Kijidi were saying about the dragon break, which I didn't actually quote in full before. We'll see when the Kijidi referred to the big walker, we know that they are talking about the new medium.
So the quote goes this, the full quote. You did it again with big walker, not once, but twice. Once at Riman, which we'll never learn to live with. The second time it was in Daggerfall, or was it Sentinel, or was it Wayrest, or was it in all three places at once.
Get me, Seridil? When will you wake up and realize what really happened to the dwarves? End quote. Now, as far as the Temrielic timeline goes, this was written relatively recently, and it refers to the reactivation of the new medium by Kijver Septim in the town of Riman, which is in Elswear, which supposedly heralded a dragon break that ended in the start of the third era, and also meant an end to Elswear independence as they were soon folded into the Empire afterwards.
It also refers to all of the distinct possibilities of the ending of Daggerfall taking place soon after, where, somehow, the provinces of Daggerfall, or the cities, I should say, of Daggerfall, Sentinel, Wayrest, and Orsynium all get the totem and use it to activate the new medium, and apparently, at the same time, albeit on separate timelines. So it seems that the dragon break has, in fact, quite a connection with the new medium, but why would this be? Let's remember that the original plan for the new medium was to be a god for the godless Dwemer. They value reason and logic above all else, and where the token sacrilegious atheists in the eyes of many of the other Temriela graces.
They built this god in secret, and tried to use Lorcan's heart as a Soul Gem to power it, and I would say, beyond the shadow of the doubt, that this qualifies as the Dwemer meddling in the affairs of the gods. And all of this seems to lend credence to the idea that the Dwemer somehow created a dragon break which would only affect themselves. Perhaps they, like Alduin in the Marathic Era, are flying forward in time, but of course, a number of other possibilities are equally as likely. Remember, during a dragon break, time does not flow in a linear fashion.
It could be suck in time, it could be moving backward in time, it could also be jumping around at random. This, of course, this is all speculation. There are a number of other possibilities as to what became of the Dwemer. This is just one of them.
Will we ever know what actually happened to the Dwemer? I'm not sure. And I'm not really sure that I want to know either because the possibilities and the fun of discussing the possibilities is so much better than just knowing what the answer is and having the discussion happened. So if you have any opinions on what you think happened to the Dwemer or anything else that we talked about in this episode, hit up the blog.
Let me know about it. Let everybody else know about it. Comment. Keep sending me suggestions.
I'm always in need of suggestions and most importantly, continue listening. So I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope you tune in for another episode. Peace.