Why do dragon breaks occur so specifically? It may simply be I haven't read enough on the basis of a Dragon break but if all possibilities happen at once why doesn't it occur more often?

All possibilities happening at once is an effect of the DB (and only one of them), not the cause. A DB occurs when Akatosh is forced to incorporate some previously unknown timeline, and is typically associated with someone becoming a god. For how hard it is to break time, DBs are actually pretty frequent.

Excepting the dawn era, they occur about once an era. While laws-of-physics-destroying events are pretty spectacular and you don't want them to occur, I'd compare their frequency to Mt. Vesuvius' eruption frequency.

Also, some DBs are high spectacle (the ending to Daggerfall), while others people may not even realize it or not grasp the amount of change done.

Is there a listing of all the Dragon breaks? Off the top of my head, We have the Talos DB, We have the Tribunal DB, the warp in the west DB, Would the end of oblvion be one as well? What about shivering isles?

Why would either of those break the dragon?

There's THE Dragon Break, when the Marukhati Selectives in the Second Era broke time for 1008 years in an attempt to purge Akatosh of merish influences.

That is why this forum is confusing, you guys talk about things, but there is no place to just get an answer for it. Above someone else said each time someone is made a god there is a dragonbreak, but you say nope that does not happen:)

And the whole Godhead and CHIM thing, it was 3 pages in the thread yesterday before someone even gave the simplest of definitions. You all need to be a little less cryptic:)

Actually, Lady N said

No one in this thread said that each time a mortal becomes a god there is dragonbreak. All that was said was that dragon breaks are typically associated with such things. There's a vast difference between your misreading and what could reasonably be inferred from Lady N's post.

Sorry about that, it's a natural result of any environment with specialized knowledge.

A dragon break just occurs when the structure of linear time (or the God associated with it) is broken. This has coincided with apotheosis in the past, but the two aren't necessarily linked.
In the case of the Tribunal, it was because their timelines were modified by their divinity to allow for them to have always existed as Gods while still having been the temporal mortals that became gods. Sort of a necessary logical paradox, in a way. The dragon break is the resolution of that paradox.

I don't think time was broken when Talos ascended, but I don't know enough to say.

Anyways, as for a list, the ones I'm aware of are the Marukhati Selective's dance on the tower, The apotheosis of the Tribunal (and the disappearance of the Dwemer? Not sure how Numidium relates to dragonbreaks), the Warp in the West, and maybe the Siege of Alinor and in the Halls of the Colossus at Rimmen when Tiber activated Numidium (again, not sure about Numidium).

Thanks:) I really didn't mean to sound snippy, I would love to participate more in this forum. Being someone who has played all the games(even Arena, battlespire, and redguard) and done a good deal of reading at UESP and the imperial library I have an interest in the story behind the games. But even with new posts you all seem to start in the middle of a topic, and there really is no resource that lets you catch up with the topic easily in most cases (I.e. the more esoteric concepts).

If people seem to start in the middle of a topic, it's largely because a lot of topics have been posted multiple times and have been talked half to death. As such, unless MK posts a new text, or someone is sharing their most recent nerdgasm of lorterpretation, a new thread asking about chim tends to become a resumption of old conversations. (Not to put him on the spot, but after a while it seemed that Crimson Paladin was having the same conversation over and over again with other forumites, for example)

I do understand that, but you also have to see it from my perspective. It can be a little confusing coming into a conversation as a person new to the Lore forum. That is unless you want them to read 100 pages of posts dating back to 2008.and even then a lot of what you guys talk about is no longer there because of pruning/forum changes.

Starting in the middle of a conversation about pseudo-magical Matrix-like concept of universal game existence is not an easy one to grasp the needed concepts behind without at least understanding the most base concept first. Maybe there should be a post made or something written to catch people up on topics of great discussion.

There's always http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1112211-how-to-become-a-lore-buff/ topic, which has a lot of the original texts about things like that under "Genesis" and "Metaphysics."

The Dragon Breaks, in chronological order:

1) ALMSIVI at Red Mountain. The ALMSIVI are made to have been gods forever ("and vivec the god who had never been had always been," or something like that), no visible effect on Nirn.
2) THE Dragonbreak, also known as the middle dawn. The Marukhathi Selectives dance on the tower in an attempt to eliminate Auriel from Akatosh, which is impossible since they are just different views of the same thing. Massive time-break, time returns to a nonlinear state, many timelines at once. Lasts 1008 years.
3) Halls of Colossus. Septim re-builds the Numidium, and activates it. No noticeable effect on time, though the geography around the halls is affected.
4) Warp in the West, aka the miracle of peace. Numidium is activated by 8 people at once, all possible outcomes happen - invented as an excuse to not have a canonical ending to Daggerfall. A whole day disappears from the timeline and the major powers of the Iliac reach peace.

And yes, I recommend the lore buff guide for an overview of all this stuff. You can also use TIL's search to look up "Dragonbreak" - sort it by books and you should have all the info you need.

How does the Siege of Alinor fit into this discussion, if at all? Time was certainly broken by the use of Numidium there, wasn't it?

Also, Lady N, is there any information or speculation on the dragonbreak at Rimmen other than that one mention in "Where were you when the Dragon Broke?"

Don't you mean Auriel, not Alduin?

Wouldn't Cyrodiil's Thieves Guild Hall also count? Since it didn't exist previously, but after Nocturnal's Curse was broken, it rewrote history.
"If Emer Dareloth had not stolen Nocturnal's Cowl, the Thieves Guild would never have fallen on such hard times. Because of the curse, he was unable to operate in the normal world of business and society. He could only act as the guild's figurehead. That has been undone. If you go to the Imperial City, you will find that the Thieves Guild has a guild hall on the site of the ruins of Dareloth." - Gray Fox

I'd say no. Once Nocturnal's curse was broken, Emer Dareloth, and his home and story returned to history, as well as that of every successive bearer of the cowl.

It wasn't an issue of time, but of memory. People recalled 'something' but not who/what/where/when/why.

Numidium was activated in Rimmen and then used against the Altmer to finish the siege. The events are the same.



That was creating a paradox of the curse's rules that just so happened to involve Time. It wasn't a paradox of Time that broke the curse.

Not to say all Dragon Breaks create Time paradoxes. But that the two are unrelated.

What is an interesting lesson from all that though is that from a nonlinear perspective, the CoC came first (maybe the Nerevarine came before him, but definitely not the Agent or EC) because every hero before him had a Thieves' Guild Hall to go to when it was established before the Guild-quests happened that the Guild as we formally know of it doesn't exist. Which we can then say that Akatosh can be changed without Breaking him and then headaches ensue for all.

Right, but what I guess what I mean is that the dragon break was more of a reactive event than a proactive one. A dragon break didn't cause the curse to be broken, but breaking the curse caused a dragon break.

The way I understood it, once Emer Dareloth stole the cowl and got cursed, no one could remember him so his operations with the guild became severely hampered, and the guild hall became unused and forgotten. Once the curse was broken via Corvus and the Elder Scroll, that was undone. It was now as if noone forgot Dareloth, so the guild had operated normally throughout all those years and the guild hall never fell into disuse. I remember the Gray Fox saying at one point, something along the lines of how breaking the curse had the power to "rewrite history" (I couldn't find the actual dialog where he says that in the CS, and I'm a bit too lazy to go back and play that part again). If it's true that history was rewritten, that would mean there was a dragon break.

Oops, that I do. Fixed.


There is no time paradox in the thieves guild quest. You are merely uncovering a past and by doing so reversing the curse. We must resist calling any event that happens to involve time or Akatosh a "dragon break. " All the ones listed are officially confirmed in texts.

I'll quote myself in a http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1105948-i-have-not-played-this-title-from-the-beginning/:

That's not entirely accurate. You do change history in the thieves guild quest or at least you are told you do which is what restores the thieves guild house.

We must be mindful that all official texts are interpretative and the suggestion that time altering events could be breaks is at least plausible.

My opinion however is that a dragon break only occurs when the dreamer needs to rationalise an otherwise inexplicable event or paradox.

To muddy the waters further, there is another explanation for what a Dragon Break is, which is that it isn't: at least http://www.imperial-library.info/content/oblivion-dragon-break-reexamined claims it was "invented in the late 3rd era, based on a scholarly error, fueled by obsession with eschatology and Numidiumism, and perpetuated by scholarly inertia."

True, this only accounts for one break, but it would imply that the others be viewed differently. If a break is the ideological construct of 'Lorkhan cults', who stands opposed, and why? I recall encountering this text in-game, but know nothing of 'Fal Droon'.

BTW: Can anyone explain what the reference to the Dwemer by the Khajiit in 'Where Were You When the Dragon Broke?' means? I've used the search function, but the results are overwhelming and not very helpful.

[edited, because I can't type]

That's a dig at the fact that you can't ever tell a dragon break except by examining the past. If you live through it, you're just going along minding your own business, get conquered by Sentinel, and then magically get conquered by Daggerfall. I mean, like most conflicting books, you have to choose for yourself what to believe, but chances are better that the people further removed from the event tend to get it wrong.

There seems to be much more content which implies the reality of the dragon breaks than not.
I see that book as a self-conscious dig at how Morrowind's lore is so different than the previous games'.