Stone of Snow-Throat, Eye of Magnus and more

So, what is the Stone of Snow Tower, otherwise known as the Throat of the World? And what does it have to do with the Eye of Magnus? Here I try and explain!

Let's begin with simple geography. As everybody knows, Red Mountain in Morrowind and Ada-Mantia in High Rock are on a straight east-west line. But what is exactly halfway between these two Towers? Snow-Throat in Skyrim. Surely this is no coincidence!

Indeed, these three Towers were created by the three greatest of the Ada - Lorkhan's heart created Red Mountain, Ada-Mantia is Akatosh's spaceship and Snow-Throat is...

...What is between the highest comprehensible subgradients of Anu and Padomay, Anu representing stasis and Padomay change? Static-Change. Magic. Magnus.

Snow-Throat is Magnus' launching pad.

Nu-mantia tells us that Snow Tower is a mountain with it's peak "half there". Kirkbride says that its Stone is "the cave".

What is a cave, a tunnel in TES cosmology? Why would Snow-Throat's peak be "half there"? Because Snow-Throat's Stone is the Sun itself!

When Magnus bailed out of Lorkhan's scheme, becoming the Observer-Betrayer in the creation Enantiomorph, he was already "half there" because he was standing on the pinnacle of Snow-Throat. This action made Snow-Throat a Tower and the Sun, the legacy of Magnus' action, its Stone!

So long as the Sun still shines, Snow-Throat is still active.

But, you ask, doesn't every Main Quest end with a Tower's deactivation? Well, Skyrim is a game based on ending a pattern - on preventing Alduin from eating up the kalpa like he has so many times before. And so, in its Main Quest a pattern was ended. A Tower stood firm.

Now on to the Eye of Magnus.

When Magnus witnessed the Aka/Lorkhan enantiomorph, he was rendered half-blind. One eye is still trained on Nirn - it is the Sun, the source of magicka, and is where Magnus sends and retrieves back his Elder Scrolls, seeking to iteratively improve the blueprints for Nirn in his solar library of "stolen ideas".

So where did his other eye go?

It fell on Tamriel and landed near Snow-Throat, drawn there by the Magnic resonance of the Tower. When they were building Saarthal the Nords found it and, learning of its danger, sealed it away in their deepest crypts. The Falmer saw this as blasphemy and ravaged the city to try and recover it. Why?

The Falmer believed that they could ascend back to Aetherius. Their Ayleid cousins worshipped Magnus as a god of sight. The Falmer themselves had a great reverence for light - their most precious gems were called the "eyes of the Falmer" and they worshipped Auri-el, a sun god. Magnus was a part of their pantheon too.

Later it was discovered by the College of Winterhold and tampered with by Ancano. What was he trying to do with it? Simply draw off enough magicka and cast a mega-big Destruction spell? No.

Magnus' two eyes have a sympathetic connection, being parts of the same god. Magicka bleeding off from the Sun is drawn to Nirn by the Eye. All magicka on Nirn is there because the Eye attracts it. This is why the Dwemer observatory recognised the Eye as the largest magicka source it could find, drowning out all others - because the Eye of Magnus is the source of all magicka on Nirn.

What Ancano was trying to do was use the sympathy between the two eyes to draw Magnus back from Aetherius and into Mundus, which would destabilise it and revert it to the Dawn Era. He was literally trying to drag a god out of heaven and down to earth.

Of course, he needed the proper tools. The Staff and Eye are connected and resonate with each other - the Staff is to Magnus' Eye what Kagrenac's Tools were to Lorkhan's Heart. He sent an agent to Labyrinthian to retrieve the Staff, but he was killed by the LDB who used the Staff to foil Ancano's schemes, and Mundus carried on.