Argonians, Hist, Water, Memory

‘Lo everyone. IceFireWarden here, just chilling. Haven’t posted something on my favorite race in a while (three guesses on what my four favorite races in the Elder Scrolls are. Ready? Go), but it’s been for a good reason.

I think I’ve finally cracked the reason why the Hist – and consequently the Argonians – don’t comprehend time.

OY. YAMWTSDFT ^Oh ^Yeah. ^You ^All ^Might ^Want ^To ^Sit ^Down ^For ^This.

Memory and Water, Magicka and Sunlight

In The Elder Scrolls Online, it is revealed that when a mortal dies their memories are transformed into water. Lately, this idea has caused many of us here on /r/teslore to begin to look at things differently in the lore. For example, Hermaeus Mora being related to the tides makes more sense as he is the Daedric Prince of both Knowledge and Memory. Sotha Sil is also tied to the sea, and his child is Memory. The sea consists of memories;

On the other hand, we have known for quite sometime that the sun and the stars are the sources of magic on Mundus, as raw magicka seeps through the holes Magnus and the Magne Ge left behind as they traveled into Aetherius. Thus, sunlight and starlight is actually magicka that shines on Nirn during the daylight and nighttime hours.

I know that most of you – if not all – already know this stuff, but it’s important for what I’m explaining and so I wanted to lay it out.

The Hist

The Hist. The Trees of Black Marsh. The Creatures that fought the Jills with mathematics in the Ninth Era. The Invaders of Anu’s Dream. In c0da, Jubal flatly states that pretty much no one knows exactly what the hell they are. They’re the most mysterious beings that exist in the Aurbis, and we know practically nothing about them. The few things that we do know about them make them even more enigmatic in our eyes.

One of the things we know about them is that they seem to dislike time. They themselves seem unperturbed and unaffected by it, and they will fight the Jills sometime the future. The Saxhleel language known as Jel is thought to be derived from them. But why do they dislike time? Well, why should they care about it when they have access to all periods of time?

Black Marsh is constantly saturated with water, with memory. The seawater turns into vapor and either become or are absorbed into the clouds. Through the condensation, they fall back to the ground as rain and absorbed into the soil. Through both sunlight and water plants are able to grow and prosper. This of course, includes trees.

Why believe in time when you can literally absorb the memories of multiple people from multiple times into your roots?

The Hist are – in purest essence – magical, biological Harddrives that store memories instead of data. Magicka, through sunlight, gets absorbed into their trunks. They absorb said memories through their roots and into their system, where they can read and process them to their own accord without delay.

This paragraph from the in-game book Myths and Legends of the Hist adds this:

>Rumors abound that the Hist tree is the main form of worship among the scaled peoples of these dark swales. Others have hypothesized that the trees are apperceptive, with a deep knowledge and unfathomable secrets from the times before all the races of Man and Mer. Loose translations of recently uncovered Dunmeri texts seem to indicate a ritual among the Argonians, although this may be legend rather than fact.

Of course, the Hist were insanely powerful beings in the first place – I mean, they were either dreamt into the Dream by Anu himself or found their own way in. But the Hist being described as apperceptive is very interesting. Apperception is a mental process in which a person makes sense of an idea by assimilating it to the body of ideas he or she already possesses.

So how long have the Hist been assimilating memories into themselves? These passages from the Annotated Anuad:

>On the world of Nirn, all was chaos. The only survivors of the twelve worlds of Creation were the Ehlnofey and the Hist. The Ehlnofey are the ancestors of Mer and Men. The Hist are the trees of Argonia. Nirn originally was all land, with interspersed seas, but no oceans. > >Eventually, the wandering Ehlnofey found the hidden land of Old Ehlnofey, and were amazed and joyful to find their kin living amid the splendor of ages past. The wandering Ehlnofey expected to be welcomed into the peaceful realm, but the Old Ehlnofey looked on them as degenerates, fallen from their former glory. For whatever reason, war broke out, and raged across the whole of Nirn. The Old Ehlnofey retained their ancient power and knowledge, but the Wanderers were more numerous, and toughened by their long struggle to survive on Nirn. This war reshaped the face of Nirn, sinking much of the land beneath new oceans, and leaving the lands as we know them (Tamriel, Akavir, Atmora, and Yokuda). > >The Hist were bystanders in the Ehlnofey war, but most of their realm was destroyed as the war passed over it. A small corner of it survived to become Black Marsh in Tamriel, but most of their realm was sunk beneath the sea.

In the Dawn Era, there was no such thing as time. Thus, why would there a lot of memory where? Therefore, Nirn was mostly land with only some water scattered here and there. But when the Ehlnofey Wars happened as time began to solidify, the memories of the deceased became the water that began to cover the planet. The original seas and oceans? Dead memories of Ehlnofey that fell in the war. The first memories the Hist hid inside their trunks were that of the proto-men and proto-mer. Them some ancient memories, now aren’t they?

The Argonians

Now, let’s talk about the Argonians. The Saxhleel were created by the Hist to be their mortal caretakers, bioengineering them from simple reptiles and amphibians and transforming them into sentient and sapient beastfolk with black souls.

From The Infernal City:

>“It was generally believed that Argonians had been given their souls by the Hist, and when one died one's soul returned to them, to be incarnated once more. [To Glim,] that seemed reasonable enough, at least under ordinary circumstances. In the deepest parts of his dreams or profound thinking were images, scents, tastes that the part of him that was sentient could not remember experiencing.”

From this, we can infer that Argonians are able to feel the residue experiences that they had in their pass lives before reincarnation. But if the Hist are harddrives of unlimited space full of memories, what if these experiences go even deeper? What if these residue memories aren’t from past lives of the specific Argonian him or herself, but from past lives of other mortals altogether?

If the Hist are harddrives of memory, think of Argonians as storage disks with a few files that someone forgot to delete off of them. The Saxhleel can only hold one ‘set’ of memories at any give time, but at the same time they can kind of remember the experiences of the other memories that theirs coexisted within the Hist.

When Argonians touch a Hist tree, they are able to receive visions as described in TIC:

>“Everything else around him faded and become waterish, blurred, but as he laid his webbed hand on the rough surface, the colors sharpened and focused. He stood here, no longer seeing the crumbling, rotted Imperial warehouses, but instead a city of monstrous stone ziggurats and statues pushing up to the sky, a place of glory and madness. He felt it tremor around him, smelled anise and burning cinnamon, and heard chanting in antique tongues. His heart thumped oddly as he watched the two moons heave themselves through the low mist of smoke and fog that rolled through the streets, and the waters surged beneath them, around them, beyond the sky.”

The fact that the world became watery as the vision is happening makes me believe that the Glim, who is touching the Hist, is being shown one of the memories flowing through its roots. Oh, and let’s not forget the experience Glim goes through as he is being reborn in an Um-Hist body:

>“[Glim] swam in black water, probing through the rotting leaves, lifting his eyes now and then above the surface to search the shallows and shore for movement. Larger things in the depths of the swamp couldn’t reach him here, amidst the twisting cypress roots; here the danger usually came from land. > >Something in the mud moved, and he snapped at it with webbed paws and lifted a feathery-gilled wriggler into view. He ate it happily and searched for more, but in a short time his belly was full and he felt like basking. He swam lazily back to the gathering hole. > >The old ones had already claimed the choicest perches, so he crawled onto a log already crowded with his siblings and wriggled down among them until he felt the rough bark against his belly. When his brothers and sisters gave up their sleepy, halfhearted complaints at his added company, he felt the sun on his skin and began to dream his life; swimming, basking, killing, avoiding death, the sun and moons, all mystery, all terrifying, all beautiful. Each day the same day, each year the same year. > >Until the root came, and the taste of sap. Some changes were slow, others came quickly, and he—they—flowed together, found the stream of time. His old body wasn’t forgotten, but it changed, became more like things the root remembered from otherwhere; his hind legs lengthened and his spine stood up. Small thoughts in his head put out branches, and those branched also, until what had before been warmth, light, shadow, movement, fear, contentment, anger, and lust became categories instead of simple facts. The world was the same, but it seemed more, bigger, stranger than ever. > >Death followed life and life death, but it all flowed through the root, each life different, each the same. Until that, too, ended, and the root was ripped away, and he was alone. The gathering place was empty except for him—no elders, no siblings. He swam in black water, forgetting everything. Losing his form, melting away. > >But in that dissolution, the illusion was also dissolved. He was many, and he was one. He sang, a plaintive tune, a remembrance, a prayer. All of his voices took it up, trembling it out through every branch and root, through heart and blood and bone.”

This entire sequence has undertones of memory and magicka melding together, along with giving us a deep insight into what a (technically) dead Argonian experiences. The first few paragraphs seem to reference Glim and Argonians as a whole during their primitive stage before they become fully developed, simple thinking and not worrying about the ‘bigger picture’. The next paragraphs however reference what happens when Argonian drinks Hist sap; they’re ‘downloading’ memories and magic into their bodies and undergoing a serious mental and physical change. The last paragraphs talk about Argonian death, and how memories become water but are absorbed into the Hist.

The Argonians being unable to comprehend time? They can actually, but they have to personally undergo mental conditioning to add the concept of time into their psych. See, the Argonians were literally born from a swirl of timeless memories and souls contained within their Great Trees. In ancient times, the reptiles and amphibians that would become the Argonians licked the sap secreted from the Hist. In other words, they licked magic and memories combined into liquid form. Not only did they receive sentience and physical growth because of this, but they also became linked to the Hist in both mind and soul.

If we add the above statement with this quote from The Infernal City we can begin to wrap up this post:

>The Hist “are sentient trees, and we [Glim, speaking on behalf of the Argonians] are—connected to them. They are many and they are one, all attached at the root, and we, too, are joined to that root. Some say we were created by the Hist, to see for them the world where they cannot walk. They can call us or send us away. When we are named, we take of the sap of the Hist, and we are changed—sometimes a little, sometimes very much. ...

The Hist did create the Argonians to see for them the world where they cannot walk, but not simply to interact with it. The Saxhleel are literally Memory-Gatherers; everything they do, everything they experience becomes memories which upon death flow back into the Hist for them read to their pleasure. The Hist are the most knowledgeable beings on Tamriel, because they have access to all knowledge that ever has been. Hell, they do this better than Hermaeus Mora. No wonder why they’re so powerful.

Heh. Remember this quote from the book The Argonian Account:

>"Everything in Tamriel flows down to Black Marsh."

It’s absolutely correct. But not in the way the average Tamrielian believes.

Well, I’m finished. Hope you all enjoyed this. You all deserve an Ovaltine for reading. Got to peace out now. Message of the Day: Don’t steal internet from people who might find such an act rude and worthy of a buttkicking.

>“All knowledge comes from the Great Root. Nothing else matters.”