I had replayed KOTN, I know he and his minions are trying to systematically kill the priests of the divines. But what is he really trying to accomplish? How can he kill the mortal gods if they're already long gone? (I'm assuming KOTN takes place after the Oblivion crisis in canon). Or am I assuming too much and that he is just going to kill the mortals of Mundus and take over the world, etc. etc.

The runes that the Aurorans wrote said "By the eternal power of Umaril, the mortal gods shall be cast down". So it looks like he's out for revenge. We don't know much else about any other possible motives.

It's gods who create people and people who create gods.

It's why the gods of the Nords look like Nords but are almost equivalent too the gods of the Alter. It's why Jezus ishttp://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=3079 in Africa.

Thehttp://www.imperial-library.info/obbooks/songofpelinal.shtml details some of the history between Pelinal and Umaril. Basically he's back to avenge his lost empire and kills the gods that set Pelinal loose on him.

His mission can be interpreted in one of two ways, in my opinion.

The first is that he somehow is capable of confronting and fighting the Divines themselves, and in his own mind he is confident he can actually destroy them.
This seems unlikely to me since he is killed by Pelinal, and then killed twice by the new Divine Crusader. If he can't best the champion of the gods in combat it seems dubious he could defeat the gods themselves.

The other, more likely explanation is that old Umaril was being a bit poetic in his wording. In order to stamp out a religion, one need only destroy its followers and preachers. In theory, this would greatly weaken the infrastructure of the faith and perhaps the powers of the gods themselves, making them more vulnerable to attack (if belief in a god makes them more powerful, as was suggested otherwise in lore, specifically in reference to the Dunmer Tribunal although the rules may be different for Aedra.)

In weakening or eliminating the infrastructure of the Imperial Church, the mortal gods would effectively be "cast down" with or without even having to fight their physical forms or spirits. (In theory they don't even have physical forms anymore anyway, having sacrificed those in the creation of Mundus.)

Ahh, well that makes sense. Thanks for the responses everyone. I remember the Prophet saying something about the wheel breaking, so would the actual or metaphorical removal of the spokes of the wheel send Tamriel back into the Dawn Era? (Which is what MC was trying to do in the first place)

http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=758104&hl=

It seemed to me that he was pissed off and just out for revenge. He hated the Cyrodiils and their religion, so he showed up to slaughter a bunch of them.

Judging by exactly what he was attacking, he simply wanted to destroy the religion of the Nine Divines. As stated by Hairdo Galosh Jam, it is unlikely he could "cast down" the Aedra themselves. He just wanted to use his army of Aurorans to take over the Heartland again.

Yes, he wants to destroy the Nine divine religion. To get a better understanding of what he was doing, consider how it relates to this: http://www.imperial-library.info/obscure_text/complete_dragonbroke.shtml

I swear, there's a multi-temporal, mythical conflict going on here.

If he underminds the gods by killing there priests ppl will start to lose faith in them forceing them 2 come down 2 challenge Umarill then get killed or thts wot i think. but he cnt kill lord dagon bliviongate:

Umaril didn't want the Daedras to come down but the Nine Divines.

I believe all Umaril had to do to "cast down the mortal gods" was simply to sew strife among their clergy by attacking them, thus weakening their link with the mortal world, then seize the White-Gold Tower. It was originally the Ayleid "Tower of Ancestors". What is the elven word for Ancestor? Aedra, right? Think about it. If the spokes are taken out of the wheel, and the hub changes ownership, it's a simple matter of making new spokes, in order to balance the thing back out. the powerful totemic magic of the tower itself would probably egg-ify Cyrodil up again until new spokes are established. After all, Umaril was supposedly the offspring of a previous Time-God. Maybe he wants to be the new one. Ascend just like Auri-El did. I'd wager that he could wear the Amulet of Kings, if need be, as well. Not only was it an Ayleid artifact, but Umaril was both past-king and present-rebel. Just as Mankar descended from another line of kings, Umaril descended from another line of et'ada and kings. IMHO, the amulet belongs to him by rights. (Assuming it's still around at the time that the KOTN quests are done. It might be broken already during your game.) I don't think the AoK was his goal, though. That's Mankar's thing. Umaril is from the culture in which the amulet has its origins. If he needed to, he probably knew how to replace the thing. I dunno. As the last surviving Ayleid, he took all the answers to his grave.

If he wanted to supplant Tiber, it would be a simple matter of mantling. Tiber unified Tamriel (mantling Lorkhan during the creation of the world, when the "worlds of creation" were combined). The first step, however, would be the reclamation of his former kingdom. I think the stuff on the chapel floor was his long-term goal.

Do we know for certain that Umaril was the Last Ayleid?

I would like to think his plan was deeper, but I think what we got in game was pretty much it. At least the lore we got on Pelinal was cool :shrug:

In culture, yes. Umaril was a member of the Ayleid empire. Even if more "Wild Elves" exist, they wouldn't be Ayleid in culture. The time of the Ayleids was too long ago for their culture to actually persists.

Umaril's plan was to stamp his feet, wave his arms, and say "grr". Like most fantasy villains, his emotional age was about 13.

Whereas Pelinal's emptional age is -457i

TBH, I didn't quite pay attention half way through the KotN quest-line. Toward the end, I just wanted to finish it. Don't remember why.. Quite possibly I had to use the bathroom. If I am busy with something, and I suddenly have to take a bio-break, yeah, I'll hold on as long as I can. Stupid, I know.

But it seems to be like what many state, imo.

He was the last of the last of the last of the Ayleid Sorcerer Kings, and the last "cultural/ideological" Ayleid.

Many Ayleid bloodlines probably exist to this day in Tamriel, having long fled the Heartland and assimilated into various other cultures. There are probably many Bretons, Altmer, Bosmer, and even Dunmer around with Ayleid blood, and there may be scattered tribes of "wild elves" operating on the fringes of society.

But there's more than blood to a nationality. There are customs, social norms, art, language, religion, architecture etc. The Ayleid culture no longer exists, although bits and pieces were borrowed for the Empire of Man.

In that regard, Umaril was the very last Ayleid. Not only that, but one of the Sorcerer Kings. Their champion in fact. Something more and at the same time perhaps less than other Ayleids, this one was. Half Ayleid, half Divine, and infused with Daedric life force and gods know how many countless souls of human slaves through his obscene necromantic sorceries. He was the last carrier of the Ayleid Ideology, that of Elvish racial superiority, of enslavement of humans, of the particular Ayleid religions, which seemed to combine Daedric and Aedric influences. In that regard the Ayleids died with him at long last, although for all intents and purposes that culture died out a long time before he made his brief return.

It's interesting to note the parallel between the Dwemer, the Ayleids, the Falmer, and other "lost races of Elves." All or most of these races occupy a similar cultural/mythical space in their respective continents/cultures. The Dwemer and the Ayleids seemed to both practice perverse or wicked sorceries with dubious goals of apotheosis, and both are now vanished although through different means. Both also occupied a Tower. I wouldn't be surprised if the full true story of the Falmer is delved into and they perhaps had a similar fate, if indeed the next game is set in Skyrim. I'd expect to see Falmler ruins, Falmer artifacts and perhaps even a "last living Falmer", if the trend continues. Perhaps those similarities are intentional and serve an illustration about cycles and myth-echoes in the Elder Scrolls.

My understanding of the "gods" of TES (the Aedra ones at least) is that they .. ARE but to ACT they need a "funnel". CoC being a nice example. In other words saying that Umaril cannot defeat the gods is like saying that he can't defeat a pillar of stone. Of course he can, but if the gods get a champion which adds a bit of that AM NOT to the mix it becomes so much more interesting

In other words, I don't think there are any gods anymore per-se Only their echoes created by mortals.

Oh there are still gods, if only because the term "gods" gets attached to so many different powerful Eternals in the ES Universe. The Divines themselves obviously still exist in some form, as we experienced firsthand in the KOTN questline. Their powers and presence were felt at times, even though no physical embodiments were witnessed.

My question is why would an Ayleid want to destroy a Pantheon of gods, many of whom were essentially Elven in origin? What does Umaril the Unfeathered have against Auriel, for instance? Granted, in life he was a devout follower of Meridia the Daedra but Auriel was presumably an important deity at some stage in the past for Ayleids, and for Umaril to want to attack Akatosh, the Imperial version of this deity, seems a bit dubious.

Perhaps his goal was to destroy what he perceived lesser mockeries of the Elven pantheon? Or to remove the Mannish elements? Remember the Alessian priests who manipulated time and danced on the gods to remove their less favorable parts (or something.) Maybe that's what he was planning to do, to take White Gold Tower and use some obscure sorceries contained within that perhaps only Ayleids are fully aware of to actually alter the Pantheon to its Elvish origins. It actually makes a lot of sense to me that he would be intimately acquainted with the various abilities of the Tower, since he was a Sorcerer King who actually resided there. Perhaps these beings had some ability to draw power from this Lexicon in the same way the Tribunal and Dwarves attempted to use the Red Tower to further their own agendas. Perhaps the Sorcerer Kings were the Ayleid version of Tonal Architects or Ash Vampires - priests who siphoned power from a Nexus. Perhaps this could explain Shezzar's sudden disappearance during the initial Human uprising, and could explain where the Sorcerer Kings got the power to drive back and enslave Men in the first place? Just a random idea I had. No real basis in in-game Lore except what's between the lines, as perceived by the notion of myth-echo and "the interconnectedness of all things" as Dirk Gently put it.

(Compared to the ugly, menacing, barely literate stompy golden thing represented in the game, that seems unlikely. The Devs probably meant him to actually just wanna literally kill the Gods, kinda like they wanted to portray Oblivion like Biblical Hell. Just dumbing down the lore. But as I've demonstrated with a little stretching of the imagination it's possible to picture scenarios in which Umaril could assault the gods in a more or less lore-accurate way. )

Umaril bound his lifeforce to Meridia's plane. That is the kind of tampering with divine magic that the Aedra seem to dislike. Elf or not, that's probably why they gave Pelinal the tools/blessings to blast Umaril into Oblivion. Chilling out in The Colored Rooms for a few thousand years only made him bitter.

He wanted to destroy the Aedra because they had almost killed him in the past, and they were still a threat to him. Maybe if he had succeeded, he would have gone on to destroy the human races, but revenge seemed to be his primary motivation.

Hairdo: Umaril was a bonafide Dadera worshiper. As in, not a typical Ayleid. He didn't care about the Aedra at all.

I wonder if his Daedric connections could be part of the reason why there were Ayleids fighting alongside the humans when they besieged White Gold Tower.

Hey that other post of yours was really good and made a ton of sense considering the mercurial nature of divinities. However Umaril couldn't have been the last Aylied nor even last King. Firstly, Pelial was torn apart by Umaril's Aylied cohorts after he killed Umaril. Secondly, as was shown in the "Collector Quest" finale, there were many Aylied kingdoms and possibly many "last" Aylied kings.

He was the last King of the Ayleids. There wasn't a chance for an Ayleid identity after losing their capitol and king, so the others just ran petty city-states.


I'm sure you could find a couple fools like that, but we get the impression despite the shared heritage, the Ayleids weren't a proudly happily united people.