Perhaps it's like a reset button, or fractally creating new Mundus with new Ald and new Shor with each kalpa.

EDIT: And just because gods can die doesn't mean they can't come back. Shor's been without heart for some time now, yet shezzarines keep popping up all over the place. And I don't remember who mentioned it or where, but someone brought up the Dragon-Break causing nonlinearity of time for 1008-years as Aka breaking, dying, and going through the dreamsleeve.


That's Michael Kirkbride, one of the architects (if not the architect) of the shift in fundamental lore between Daggerfall and the rest of the series, creator of Vivec and the 36 lessons and the Monomyth and a lot more in Morrowind, writer of the Commentaries and a lot of the stuff from KOTN in Oblivion.

What you implied was they were two different beings, representing the same thing. I'm saying it's the same being with a personality disorder.

And, in this world, myth is reality.

Gonna paste my post from another thread, just to agree with Hellmouth :

The Yokudan god Sakatal is similar to Alduin. Sakatal is the god of everything, but he is hungry all the time, and being the god of everything, the only thing he can eat is himself, thus destroying the world and creating new ones in a cycle.
So you are stuck with a god who is going to destroy the world, but without whom the world would not exist in the first place.

Then it gets complicated.

The original Akatosh existed before the world, and with his formation time started, so the other spirits could take form, as the Aedra and Daedra. When the world, Mundus, was created, Akatosh and the other Aedra had to die to become part of it, separating them from the spirit realm of Aetherius, and being reborn in forms that could be influenced by mortals. In effect, and this isn't lore, just my attempt to explain it, the Akatosh of the Empire, and Alduin, are children, successors, or different states of the original Akatosh, and these different facets are altered in nature by the beliefs of mortals.

No one knows for sure why this mix-up exists, but here's the general consensus: Akatosh was added to the Divines artificially in order to prevent a religious war between enslaved people of Cyrodiil and the Nords during the liberation war in the first era. As such, Imperials have a very vague and skewed understanding of what he is and what role he played in the events that preceded that war. In Cyrodiil, he is believed to be the progenitor of the bloodline of emperors. In other places in Tamriel however, his image is completely different. The only theme consistent to him is that he is called the dragon-god of time. As such, some believe that time in the mortal realm exists only while he is bound to it. And according to Alduin's Wall in High Hrothgar, he is not at all pleased by this state of being bound, as it was done against his will in the first place. So now he wants to unbind himself from it by destroying it utterly, so that he may be free to roam Aetherius (TES's equivalent of heaven) eternally.

It's not so much artificially adding a mythic being, more as http://www.imperial-library.info/content/where-were-you-when-dragon-broke-complete-version. In that sense, the Imperials don't have a skewed understanding of Akatosh, because they made him that way. It's just that their Akatosh is far more Shor-ish by design than Auriel or Alduin.


But the point of destroying one kalpa is to create the next one. Forever departing from the dawn and returning to it.

Like I said, Akatosh is nearly a 180 from Alduin and Auriel, the original versions of the god of time.

So... let me guess... someone finally goofed up bad with tampering with him, so now he's going to eat the world because of that :facepalm: . When will those people learn not to play with matches...

EDIT: Just had a light-bulb :lightbulb: . Who else thinks that the objective of the main quest will be to change Alduin's aspect once again so that he no longer wants to do harm? Possibly undoing harm done by past tampering? Even of the Dragon Break itself maybe? :twirl:

Gotta say one thing though, Kirkbride sure has a wild imagination .

mabey...but id rather kill it...

Whoah! Hold the phone... major brainstorm...

"A staff or tower appeared before them. The secret masters danced on it until it writhed and trembled and spoke its protonymic.
The tower split into eight pieces and Time broke". In TES I: Arena, Jagar Tharn broke the Staff of Chaos into pieces in order to displace emperor Uriel Septim into an Oblivion realm. Coincidence that it shows up on Alduin's wall? I don't think so.

"You did it again with Big Walker, not once, but twice! Once at Rimmen, 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?". In TES II: Daggerfall the events developed around the brass golem Numidium, used by Tiber Septim before in his conquests. Tampering with it caused the Warp in the West, which is similar, if not identical in nature to the Dragon Break - it caused time to be non-linear.

"Get me, Cyrodiil? When will you wake up and realize what really happened to the Dwarves?". In TES III: Morrowind Lorkhan's heart was called "The Egg of Time" by the Dwemer, and their tampering with it displaced their entire race to an unknown realm, or even outside of time. And it's "destruction" by the Nerevarine was actually its release from the mortal plane.

"When the Moth priests attune the Scrolls to the timeless time their glyphs always disappear. The Amulet of Kings, however, with its oversoul of emperors, can speak of it at length.". The Amulet of Kings got shattered during the Oblivion crysis in TES IV, which was itself caused by the fact that there was noone to perform the ritual of lighting the Dragonfires, done by using that amulet.

Anybody else see a pattern? All of these events are pictured on Alduin's Wall and all of them, in one way or another, relate to tampering with time or something related to it. But there remains but one final event. "When the sons of Skyrim spill their own blood." So if I got the pattern correctly, Akatosh's aspect got altered by the actions done by the protagonists and other characters of the previous four chapters of ES. And in the fifth, during the civil war, someone finds yet another way to tamper with time that drops the final stone and changes Akatosh into an aspect that is something terryfying - Alduin, the World Eater. It is up to Dovahkiin to fix things so that this aspect goes away, and in order to do so he must learn how his predecessors did it the last time the time god was turned berserk. These predecessors are the three individuals pictured on Alduin's Wall. :spotted owl:

One must understand duality to understand TES gods. Akatosh, Alduin, and Auri-El are are different sides of the same being, and also different view points of different cultures.

It's a plausible pattern, but I hold an objection to this one. Staff of Chaos doesn't necessarily equate to the Tower that is being discussed in the "Dragon Broke." That tower is the I, as covered by http://www.imperial-library.info/content/tower, and I see nothing to connect it to Arena's somewhat arbitrary plot device.

The World-Eating will stop with Ysgramor's return. The complication is, Alduin is Ysgramor. The confrontation (also called enantiomorph) is a healing, or cleansing, ritual. From this, Dovahkiin may resurrect Ysgramor, healing the wound left by dead king Shor.

It's anologous to Luke Skywalker saving his father Anakin from the Emperor, but it's anologous to so many savior myths.



I hope we eat Alduin, or become eaten, ourselves. If Alduin were to eat the Dovahkiin, who is full on Dragon souls already, what might happen? A pretty damn big explosion? I don't know, maybe actually tearing Hrothgar to pieces...

Hm, according to this, time (Akatosh) is the first etada (pattern) conceived by Anu (Auriel) and not the rim of the Aurbis or Mundus.

Eps is right, I'm not sure where, but I'm positive somewhere it said that the events that protagonists did in the previous games are what set in motion Alduin's sudden urge to devour the world. I like the idea of changing Alduin's aspect back to Akatosh, it seems much more realistic than "Yeah I killed the dragon that's supposed to be an undefeatable god that can devour existance entirely".

But that's just me.

Anyway, as far as the whole "Alduin is a different side of Akatosh" thing, it's reminiscent of the Greek/Roman gods and how they were somewhat different to both in name and personality.