So, Mer, most prominently Altmer, think that they were et'Ada, right? I keep coming across people saying that the Thalmor are aiming to destroy the Towers to become et'Ada again by unraveling creation. I find lore on the Towers, but nothing on Thalmor wanting to destroy them. Where does this come from?

Sorry if I'm incorrect on the et'Ada stuff. I'm busy with exams at the moment. I was never brilliant with lore, but now I'm also rusty with it. Not only that, but I know very little on the Dawn Era and the creation. All I know here is that I have never read anything where Thalmor and the Towers coincide other than on forums.

To kill Man is to reach Heaven, from where we came before the Doom Drum's iniquity. When we accomplish this, we can escape the mockery and long shame of the Material Prison.

To achieve this goal, we must:

1) Erase the Upstart Talos from the mythic. His presence fortifies the Wheel of the Convention, and binds our souls to this plane.

2) Remove Man not just from the world, but from the Pattern of Possibility, so that the very idea of them can be forgotten and thereby never again repeated.

3) With Talos and the Sons of Talos removed, the Dragon will become ours to unbind. The world of mortals will be over. The Dragon will uncoil his hold on the stagnancy of linear time and move as Free Serpent again, moving through the Aether without measure or burden, spilling time along the innumerable roads we once travelled. And with that we will regain the mantle of the imperishable spirit.

All mortals are descended from the Aedra; the Mer, however, and the Altmer especially, have collectively done their absolute best to remain "pure," as similar to the original et'Ada as possible. The Thalmor are an extremist political group who, having taken power, now desire to completely erase the world so that mortals were never formed in the first place, meaning that the Aedra would never have sacrificed themselves and would therefore never have been split into the many Earthbones and mortals. Whether or not the Towers are a part of the Thalmor's plan is actually a matter of debate, at least as far as I know. I figure that they probably have something to do with it, but what part exactly the Towers hold in the Thalmor's plan is unknown (of course, the Thalmor's plan as a whole is unknown, so that's not a surprise; we know only the end goal, and only have a few hints about how the Thalmor mean to achieve it).

We know what the Thalmor want thanks to a couple of posts from MK that have been archived on TIL. http://www.imperial-library.info/content/forum-archives-michael-kirkbride is a rather random collection of posts which includes, second from the top, "What appears to be an Altmeri commentary on Talos" (EDIT: this text is quoted above by Dovahsebrom). Then there's the "http://www.imperial-library.info/content/dominion-prism-textract" (which I can't actually focus on enough to read--but hey, better that than going blind because I focused too much, I suppose). I seem to remember other Thalmor-related posts floating around TIL somewhere, too, but I can't find them now. They might have been reorganized since I last visited.