So alduin flies around skyrim resurrecting dragons, whose bones are of the earth. Any connection between these dragons (lesser aedra?) and the Earthbones? Could alduin be eating the world by unbinding its bones?

He could certainly try to unbind the Earth Bones, but I don't think dragons are the actual "Earth Bones", because those aren't just the physical lay of the land, the Earth Bones are actually the laws of physics (and metaphysics) that govern Nirn, and is made of up the aedra.

Destroying the towers (probably through coordinated dragon attacks) would help unbind the actual Earth Bones, however, which would potentially destroy the laws of physics, and put the aedra back into humanoid form where they would be somewhat easier to swallow than a whole planet.

The dragon war in general is confusing me at the moment. If dragons are immortal, how'd we kill them without a dragonborn to absorb their souls? Were the dragon burial pits just some sort of seal, to keep the not-quite-dead dragons quiet for a few eras?

I'm also hashing out the possibility of dragon war being a stylized, Norded up version of the creation of mundus, with shor leading the lesser spirits to imprison the dragons in mundus, or something like that. It's a bit of a stretch.

Just going through the game, it seems to me that random guards, giants, frost trolls, and occasional pack of especially viscous mudcrabs do a pretty good job cleaning up the dragons with or without my help. (Yes, I've honestly had dragons die to a mudcrab before.)

Of course, the stupid dragons tend to spend a lot of their time flying away from me and attacking the random wildlife until I eventually just give up on hunting them, and go back to doing whatever it was I was doing before the big dopes showed up, only to have apparently been completely forgotten by the dragon after a few minutes of circling.

I just occasionally happen to come back across a dragon that had gone off chasing a rabbit to find it lying dead next to the corpses of a dozen wolves, several mud crabs, a spriggan, three saber cats, a horse, a Stormcloak soldier, and an Imperial, with a couple of Imperials and local guards just chilling around the mound of slain beasts.

Hail, hail, the trash mobs come.

In all seriousness, the game is really schizophrenic regarding the dragon's immortality. Why Is dragonrend effective against dragons if they totally die all the time? Are they only biologically immortal? Would dragonrend have an effect on the Nerevarine? What about the tsaesci?

They only die when you're around, because you "absorb their souls" which prevents them from coming back. Sure, guards can kill a dragon, but it only stays dead if you're there when it dies.

Which brings us back to the dragon war.

The dragon war killed off all the dragons, but they were "Not Quite Dead Yet", because they had immortal souls and Alduin has access to resurrection spells, due to being the only guy bright enough to take the "Cleric" class in the early editions of the game world. Therefore, all the dragons had to wait around spamming "REZ PLZ!" until Alduin felt like it, because he was presumably getting ticked off at them continually going Leroy Jenkins at the humans (and the mudcrabs) and just getting killed again, when he was JUST about to charge up his Uber. So Alduin used his admin powers to banhammer the lot of them when they died (leaving only Paarthuunax, who was smart enough to not go KoS on every aggro mob when he was being denied a respawn point) until it was time for the special promotional event heralding the new kalpa expansion pack.

... Sorry, a perverse mood befell me.

:rofl:

So, following that line of thought, what would be the anologue for 'cast outside of time?'

I like it. A lot.

Rage quit?

and hey, with the whole "To dragons, fighting equals debate" thing going on, Lorkhan the trickster and Shor the warrior aren't very disparate ideas after all.

Loki the trickster
Thor the warrior

Too close for my liking. Go back to being original, Bethesda.

of course, Shor and Lorkhan are the same being. It's just two ways of looking at it.

I may have failed my Wikipedia Reading Class or something, but I'm pretty sure Loki and Thor aren't actually the same god.

Lorkhan and Shor are.

HA! But how does a dragon rage quit life if it's immortal...? :blink:

That's why they are always ranting and shouting (Thu'um)

He got temp-banned from the server, and when the ban was up, boom, right back to his old tricks.