You're gonna have to clarify for me on this.

edit: Unless you were just talking about the whole "Lorkhan dies for the existence of Mundus" bit. If it's something else, I need clarification.

Feeling like someone reaching [Z] (become God and in turn the entirety of [a] existence) has something to with the ending of a Kalpa. But I'm just rambling again.

I wrote this in one of those wierd moments of clarity/obscurity that are hard to pinpoint but I'll do my best. I think what I'm saying here is that the Lorkhan/Akatosh cycle heralds/causes the end of a kalpa. Through the apotheosis of Talos and/or Martin we see the unification of Lorkhan and Akatosh into a single Being (Talos=Lorkhan, Martin/Talos=Akatosh) thus abolishing the ending of the kalpa or "shedding of the skin". By "the serpent dies, Tamriel lives" I mean there will be no other world-skins as the impetus of shedding/devouring is done away with. Indeed, in the L/A unity perhaps Martin has become the Serpent - an especially interesting concept considering his background in Daedra worship (blood of Sithis) and devotion to Akatosh (blood of Anu/Sithis), and the shedding of his blood - union of Lorkhan/Akatosh/Daedra resulting in his becoming/mantling all three. Here the defeat of Dagon becomes a symbol for the cycle of birth and redeath inherent in the shedding of world-skins, and that that paradigm is no long applicable. Martin's apotheosis changes everything. Set free from the cycle (who can guess how many times it has happened) Mundus is free to live. The hunger of the Serpent is satiated.

Edit: Regarding the blood theme - if Martin's blood is united with the blood of Aedra and Daedra, is he then the unification of Anu and Sithis? Does Martin become not Akatosh, but Anu?

This is a forum fragment, to be taken in the same vein as the posts on the long-ago WWPD? thread. Meaning this is not necessarily true...but if it were, what does it mean?

[BEGIN FRAGMENT]

"And the awful fighting ended again.

"Kyne's shout brought our tribe back to the mountaintop of Hrothgar, and even our recent dead rode in on the wind of her breathing, for there had been no time to fashion a proper retreat. Their corpses fell among us as we landed and we looked on them in confusion, shaken as we were by this latest battle in the [untranslateable]. The chieftains of the other tribes still held their grudge against our own, Shor son of Shor; more, they had united finally to destroy us and used skin-magic to trick us into disarray.

"Shor was disgusted with the defeat, and disgusted more when reminded by Jhunal that our withdrawal had been wise, for we were outnumbered eight to one. Shor took on the form of the [untranslateable] then, which he used to better shape his displeasure, rather than to shout it aloud and risk more storm-death. His shield thanes, the brothers Stuhn and Tsun, bowed their heads, collecting the spears and swords and wine-knives Shor threw about the broken pillars of the easternmost sky-temple. The rest of us looked away and to our own, not even to acknowledge the thunderclap that signaled our Queen's arrival, who stepped in from the tunnel of her own breath last.

"Kyne had taken the head of Magnar, the jarl that betrayed the weakness of our spear-lines and fled the field. Shor shook his scaled mane. "That isn't Magnar," he said, "Magnar, I fear, fell at sunrise and became replaced by mirrors. The other chieftains are using our forms to lead us astray."

"And then Shor walked away from his War-Wife to enter the cave that led to the [untranslateable]. He needed to take counsel with his father yet again. "Our chieftain loses heart," Dibella said, Bed-Wife of Shor, hefting another body onto the corpse pile some of us were making, "And so goes to the speak to one that has none anymore. Mirrors, indeed, and in that I see no logic."

"Tsun took her by the hair, for he was angered by her words and heavy with lust. He was a berserker despite his high station, and beauty followed battle to his kind. "You weren't made for that kind of thinking," Stuhn said, dragging Dibella towards a whaleskin tent, "Jhunal was. And no one should be speaking to him now." Tsun eyed the Clever Man who had heard him. "Logic is dangerous in these days, in this place. To live in Skyrim is to change your mind ten times a day lest it freeze to death. And we can have none of that now."

"Kyne could have stopped all of this but did nothing but stare at the crowd of Nords around her. Stuhn and Tsun were shifting and it was still uncouth to prevent this kind of neighboring. She looked on Jhunal and did not know if he should be spoken to or not. Rules were changing. Even her handmaiden was gone, and that lack of attendance was a transgression, but Kyne knew Mara was no doubt making treaties with one of the other chieftains, and the Pact still allowed for Tear-Wives to do that. After her husband Shor had forgotten to kiss her, a tradition among the War-Married when they returned from the field together, Kyne kept her storms to herself and knew there was no true understanding until the [untranslateable] was lifted."

[END FRAGMENT]

?

?

I rather like that at first read - it feels like these are those who became the Gods of the Temples in Daggerfall before they became Gods ... so it has returned to Daggerfall and even preceeds it.

(edit:) Or all being cyclical the Gods are the future bleeding into / returning to the past.

On that basis the Hero could be one of those men / women who came to be the Gods - or choose their fate - or could even be Lorkhan ... (end edit)

Imagine that Odin, Thor and the Aesir were 'real' men and women - then that might be how they were.

Still needs a nudge in the direction of Norse though

First thing that came to my mind:
A d?j? vu. Just from the future and this one's not just a mind trick, but kicks you in the face.

"Holy mountain fart! They look like us, smell like us, fight like us, are like us and they're out to become us. Again."

So, Mara is out to get a better position that handmaiden of Kyne the next "instance"? Oh, wait, she already got. Now. Ehm...

Outnumbered Eight to One, Eight Phanteons of Elves against the Nords. Magnus fled or appeared to have. It's the war of the Dawn Era.

Shor son of Shor, goes to talk to his father (Shor) who lost his heart. Everything has already happened and the gods gave birth to themselves. But not just once, they did it eight times over.

Someone cracked a mirror?

7 years bad luck? Hmm - recreation of the world 7 times in 7 days - quite biblical that

So the wheel doesn't have a hub, it has an axle of kalpas stacked on top of each other, intermingling in sine waves, leading all the way to the center of the wheels turning in out heads to comprehend this.

Magnus on the Nord side died. The Magnus who fled was seen in mirrors and thus a different (but same) one, his elven counterpart. And Kyne killed a third one (yokudan version?). Which could be an explanation as to why Magnus is missing in the nordic pantheon. He got killed off before he could invent magic.
"Skin-magic to trick us" - they are fighting themselves without realizing it. And they're gonna keep fighting until some big dragon tells them to stop using quickload as that gets very confusing (you're not in single player now, dimwit!).

"Honey! I'm home!"
"Lovely! How was your weekend at the convention center?"
"Oh, it was brutal... We were discussing the merger with the off-shore company."
"Pardon? You're gonna murder Shor and company? Lovely!"

:rofl:

Reckon she did. Nice one.

[Nirn] is a giant hologram, in the sense that information concerning the whole is contained in each of its elements.... It is a three-dimensional dream and you can enter it as you would a dream. Everything depends on the existence of the ray of light bearing the objects. If it is interrupted, all the effects are dispersed, and reality along with it. You do indeed get the impression that [Nirn] is made up of a fantastic switching between similar elements, and that everything is only held together by a thread of light, a laser beam, scanning out [Nirn's] reality before our eyes. In [Nirn] the spectral does not refer to phantoms or to dancing ghosts, but to the spectrum into which light disperses.

Apologies to JB, but it seemed appropriate, and a good nerdy referential joke only a couple are going to get without googling.


I like this. It makes the gods seem terribly human (scaley manes and billowing bodies aside), what with that thick war-weariness.

There's a reference in there, I think, to the dreaming cave mentioned in Doors of Oblivion and 2920, "where it is said one can enter into the Daedric realms and return", but what's interesting is this is also where Shor goes to find his father. Also, the political and geographic boundaries are the same, and it's unclear when exactly it's set, in the past or future. I thought past first, and still think it, but the comments above made me doubt myself. Plus, there's still a Skyrim and Nords, which one would think an anachronism in the past. But all I can really get from it other than what's already been said is that it's the drama of a war amongst protean men shaping the myths of the following age.

With a little deductive reasoning, that text (paired with the hint at the beginning of this topic) would lead us to believe that the stories and myths from the Dawn Era are not stories about the beginning of this world/kalpa, but about the end of the previous world/kalpa.

Like Albides, I kind of dig the style too.

I also liked the vigor of MK's writing.

It looks as if what Albides summarized well as the "protean" beings are demigods compared to the mortals of Nirn's current era. Does this mean mortals are a step down from these heroes?

About High Hrothgar and the Nords being in Skyrim already before they came out of Atmora: they were either driven out by their defeat in the last Kalpa, or High Hrothgar isn't so much the world, as a world of it's own from where the Gods wage war in a larger space.

About the creation myths being the endings of the last world: They also started this one, didn't they?

That seems to be the running assumption, though it wasn't stated outright...

Makes sense. Read the Dark Tower series. Works kind of like Roland's quest in the respect that he does it all over again once he's comleted the journey, each time doing it a little different until he (hopefully) does it right.

Increment evolution.

Would that be like what the greedy man and dagon were doing by stealing pieces of the previous kalpas and working them into the new ones? Something gets carried over each time, so that the "new" thing in each kalpa really isn't new, it's just something that doesn't belong in this kalpa? Perhaps the identities of Lorkhan and Akatosh switch each kalpa so that it goes back and forth between mer and man? This is all very interesting even though I don't understand a thing. The implications that this forum fragment has are practically limitless.

So, even if this is all true: what, exactly, is the point? So we rename the Creation the Recreation and we realize that all existences are cyclical. How, at all, does this create a mindboggling new object of fascination and fetish for us? Especially since MK's been rambling about kalpas ever since Aldudagga, anyway.

And, no, I don't mean that to be conflictive, I just feel like I may be missing the epicness of the point here.

Or rather, what does it mean?

Don't think we're there yet.

Exactly why I don't know where to start thinking. It's something I have, yet haven't, already thought about.

:banghead:

Five is the number of the limits of this world. [shall we see the end which is really just a new beginning? fragments do not stay fragmented long]
The fifth song of King Wulfharth is sad. The survivors of the disaster came back under a red sky. [the first era mirrors the fourth and again we have a Year of Sun's Death]
Sermon Five is of the new god's discovery. [the Gods are we but greater, mantling the concepts from which the Wheel is built]
Sermon Five-teen tells of the Sharmat. [The opponent, the False-Dreamer, the Rebel, the mirror-vision who-is-I]
Sermon twenty-Five is of the City that is God, effortlessly trans-immortal, egg, image, man, god, city, state. [Does this indeed require explanation?]
Sermon thirty-Five is of Love. [Which certainly does not require explanation, for it is provided in the Letter]


just rambling on a perhaps hollow premise. though the sermon of Love does seem oddly applicable to the topic now.

Maybe it's like when you're programming and you accidentally screw up a loop and make it an infinite loop; although the loop goes on, theoretically, for infinity, it'll eventually eat away at the computer's memory and cause the program to crash.

MK's excerpt seems to show that earlier ages were populated with demigods and gods locked in a twilight struggle, but the current age is one of mortals -- it's as if each kalpa has weaker beings populating it, not stronger. The earlier kalpas seem to have had gods contending with each other, then later kalpas had demigod heroes and villains, and the current kalpa is one of only mortals.

Where can mortals go from here, when they're only flesh, and weak? Maybe to become immortal and non-material, I'm not sure.

Eh...I'm not really feelin' that one, sorry. I rather prefer http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?s=&showtopic=921446&view=findpost&p=13378798 about mortals becoming fundamental ideas or somesuch pseudo-allegorical nonsense.

Yeah.

I've wondered about kalpas for a long time, and haven't ever had answers concrete enough to do anything other than avoid any threads on the subject. I've never been entirely clear when exactly the kalpa turned, whether it's a symbolic turn of the age, in which new incarnations of the Shezzarine appears to shake up the foundations of society, reflecting some metaphysical turmoil on another plane (up where "our faces eat each other every age in amnesia" to paraphrase the Pelinal texts) or whether it's a literal eating of the age, a conflagration that changes everything. The Aldudaggas, like this new forum fragment, suggests that the places before the world-eating persist much as they do afterwards, but to what end?

So I've been biding my time, waiting for more explication on the subject, and hopefully, this looks to be it.