[This document has languished in the vaults of the Arcane University since late in the Third Era, when it was discovered in a hidden library deep in Castle Karstaag on Solstheim. It was lost during the raid of the Imperial City by the Aldmeri Dominion, but was recently rediscovered. Several prominent scholars and moth-priests have noted that this document, compared to other scraps of recovered Falmer literature and poetry, is more simplistic in style and themes-- most likely a version of their myth that they told to their children. The College of Whispers has offered a reward of 5,000 gold pieces to any adventurer who comes across a copy of the original myth in their travels.]


"In the beginning, there was Void- an endless sky filled with snow and fog, and spirits flew aimlessly for could not see themselves to know what they were nor freely soar in the expanse for they knew not which way to fly; and there was nothing in those days to denote the passage of hours. One spirit who was greater than the rest, Borhamu, grew weary of this blindness, and so shouted the clouds away, allowing the spirits for the first time to see themselves and each other, so that they might have some sense of their place in things.

Borhamu grew fatigued from this effort, though, for he was much larger than the other spirits and his wings carried scales rather than feathers. And he desired to rest, but in those days there was nowhere to land because such a thing had not yet been invented. So Borhamu went to the oldest and wisest of spirits, who called himself Magnus. Together, they devised a plan and called it Nirn, and approached the other spirits with it. They explained that the spirits who took part in their plan to make this place-other-than-sky would lose their wings in the process and be forced to stay on the ground forever, but that this sacrifice would make life easier for all, for all time.

And so a number of the spirits took it upon themselves to do this thing, and as they descended the sky beneath their feet froze like ice, until they found themselves unable to descend any further. This first place where the spirits landed was called Skyrim. The spirits-who-walk were not content to sit in one place, though, for they still had the hearts of birds. Most of them spread out over the eight corners of the new world, to see what they could make of it. Others, like Y’ffre, decided to make this new world even better for the other spirits, though it would require further diminishing, and buried themselves in the ice and snow so that their life’s blood would infuse the new world and inspire it to be more than it was. Sure enough, soon the ice began to crack and shift, and great mountains, forests, deserts and oceans emerged from the snow.

The spirits-who-walk were delighted by this, and began to settle down into their new homes and make lives for themselves in this new land called Tamriel. They married and had children, and these children were different than their parents, for they had never lived in the skies at all and heard only stories of it. Some of them looked at the spirits-who-fly and were bitter and envious, and could not understand why their parents would ever abandon that life. Other mortals were as happy as their parents in the new world, for they had never flown the skies and had no great desire to. The new mortal races of Tamriel took many names, but the dominant race by far was the Aldmer.

Borhamu and Magnus looked upon their creation and were well pleased. But they were exhausted, and could not be bothered to look after their work. They brought the two best spirits before them, a spirit-who-walks named Auriel, who had the heart of an eagle, and a spirit-who-flies named Kyne, who still had the body of a hawk. They charged them to protect the new creation and all the spirits, and pronounced them king and queen of the new world. That they might be able to commune with each other, Borhamu raised a mountain in the middle of Skyrim and named it the Throat of the World, where the spirits of the world would be able to make their voices heard to the spirits of the sky.

Auriel looked down from his throne then and saw that the mortals still living in Skyrim were discontent, for even then Skyrim was a harsh land and living there was no easy feat. When he saw that they had remained there to be closer to their king, he was moved by pity and called them up to the summit of Snow-Throat. He gave them many gifts to make their lives in Skyrim easier—he taught them the ways of archery, so that they might hunt, and painted their skin with ice, so that they could learn to ignore the cold. Kyne also took pity on them, and built for them them the Skyforge, so that they might properly arm themselves , and taught them the secrets of ivory-forging. They also gave these mortals a proper name—Falmer, which meant Snow-Folk. Armed with these gifts and a new sense of purpose, the Falmer spread across Skyrim and built a mighty empire within her borders.

For a while, there was peace and happiness in the new world, but this could not last. For there was another spirit, the lowest and meanest of them: a serpent named Shor. He looked with greed and envy upon Auriel and desired to rule for himself. So he traveled to the lands far north of Skyrim, where the worst and cruelest spirits had been sent, a land as cold and barren as the demons who lived there. He painted them a picture of Tamriel, a land where the wind brought life rather than freezing death, of warm sands, fertile valleys, and many spirits who had grown weak and docile living in this rich land, ripe for plunder. The demons roared their approval and made Shor their king, and so Shor returned to Skyrim, an army of ice-blooded Nords at his back. The chieftain of the Nords, a brutal warlord named Wulfharth, was the warchief of this expedition, for Shor was still a snake, and not much good for fighting.

They swept across Tamriel, through Skyrim and into the lush lands known as Cyrodiil, slaughtering all who crossed their path with stone-bladed axes and shooting down the spirits-who-fly with bone-tipped arrows. Auriel, seeing this destruction, called his retainers to him- chief among them the great knight Trinimac, who was one of the original spirits-who-walk, and the Falmer, who were his most loyal and devoted mortal champions. He also called the people known as Altmer to his side, but they were driven more by disgust for the Nords than loyalty to Auriel. The battle between the Mer and the Nords lasted many centuries, and seemed to have no hope of ending, until Shor and the demons shot Kyne out of the sky, and took her as their own. They beat her and did other, unspeakable, things to her, until she had forgotten who she was. Shor took advantage of her confusion, and told her she was his bride, for almost as much as he had coveted Auriel’s throne, Shor had coveted the love that Kyne had held for him.

Driven by sadness and anger, Trinimac and Auriel raided the Nord camps and managed to capture Shor and kill Wulfharth, as well as Tsun and Stuhn, Shor's protectors-- though Kyne remained with the Nords for she still believed herself to be their queen. Auriel told Shor that if he wished to rule, so be it, he could rule over hell and waste away with the spirits of his most depraved followers. Trinimac ripped out Shor’s heart then, and Auriel fixed it to an arrow and fired it into the sea, in the hopes that it might never be found. And so Shor became the king of the underworld, and to this day the most brutal warriors and cruelest warlords are sent there when they die, that the other spirits of the dead may not be troubled in their afterlife.

However, Auriel could see at this point that even without their king, the Nords were too numerous and too savage for the Mer to hope to defeat. The snow demons had won the war. And so he went back to where Borhamu and Magnus slumbered, and woke them up and told them what had transpired. Magnus looked out over Tamriel and saw it was so, and ripped out his eye in disgust and flung it away. Auriel climbed onto Borhamu’s back then, and the three departed Tamriel forever along with the remaining spirits-who-fly, tearing holes in the sky through which they might escape. Before they fled, though, Borhamu gave one final gift to the world: he shook his mane, and from it, a single diseased scale fell back down to Tamriel. This scale soon grew into a dragon, as dark and cruel as the Nords themselves, and with a similar hunger and drive for conquest. And so it is that Alduin eats the world each kalpa when the Nords have grown too powerful, so that their conquest of Tamriel might never be complete."