The Aurbical Tapestry: A Conceptual Metaphysical Framework
Hi all,
I'm back (woo grad school), and today I'd like to share with you how I frame the underlying background of the Aurbis. It’s less mathematical than my previous posts, but I hope that means it’s also a little more accessible to our community.
I will present the basic idea first, then provide a few details that provide good evidence to me that this is a solid structure to work with. More importantly, this framework makes it easier to grok how the relation between the continents and time works, and why so many Aurbical mechanisms work as they do. Before continuing, I'd like to point out that everything stated here is still compatible with all the previously established ideas of the Towers as Music Broadcasters, Dragon Breaks via Path Integrals, Space-Time = AkaLorkh/Lorkhatosh, Waves, etc. Additionally, I’ve been told that /u/MareloRyan touched upon one of the basic aspects of my viewpoint (with the Towers being Stories) while I was AFK with this post. As a result, I won't go into the Story aspects so much, as /u/MareloRyan's posts are quite thorough.
The sections below are organized into the introductory Big Picture, then the Basic Structure of the framework, followed by a small treatise on Imperfections: Tears, Punctures, Strains, and Stresses. The final section rounds off with assorted Consequences & Conjectures of the structure.
Without further ado, let's begin!
The Big Picture
The Wheel draws the Thread of the Fabric to pull the Pattern that is the Tapestry of the Aurbis. In other words, the Aurbis is a story told by a constantly-woven, cyclic tapestry, an exposé of the Dreamer's thoughts and neural circuitry.
Basic Structure
AkaLorkh is Spacetime, a manifold (both in the mathematical definition and the colloquial sense of multifaceted), a high-dimensional sheet of fabric composed of infinitesimal lines that we can identify as threads in the fabric. In principle, we perceive each unbroken thread as one entire history of a single particle within Creation. In other words, every possible particle in every possible timeline has a thread within this fabric. A specific bundle of these threads might represent the entire history of Nirn within a timeline. If you'd like, you can think of it as loom-weaving: the warp threads can represent Time, the weft threads can represent Space. Areas with no individual threads are areas in which space and time are both on equal footing and mixed, since every direction is a valid time direction. The higher-dimensional nature of our tapestry is inherent on Nirn as lines of latitude and longitude represent (un)times. Theoretically, all the kalpas are stitched through this same tapestry; traveling from one to the next is an issue of how well-connected the tapestry is (and how far your canoe can take you).
Imperfections: Tears, Punctures, Strains, and Stresses
Convention, the impossipoint, is the spot from which each thread begins, and it paradoxically does not exist on this tapestry. This is not really an an issue with this framework: just because Convention does not exist in the fabric, that does not mean it can’t be deduced from the convergence of the threads in the fabric…in fact, we can perceive the varied creation myths as implied from the ripples and bends in the fabric as seen from every timeline as one converges these threads back to this puncture in our many-fold.
In a sense, each kalpa is a section of the tapestry that folds back into the impossipoint at its beginning and end. This high-dimensional structure can be mathematically studied under the theory of foliations and leaves. Physically, this can be interpreted as a standing wave, with Convention acting as both the beginning and ending node via its impossipoint. Mythic echoes are a direct consequence of the fact that the entire tapestry is made of the same threads, all tied together at the inception.
Loose threads are a symptom of modified causality (or acausality); Jills can repair these loose threads by tying them on to something else within the tapestry. In terms of more quaint imagery, we can think of the Seamstress-Jills as applying patches to a story being woven (or already woven). The fabric can become frayed or worn after many revisits by the Jills, potentially creating another puncture, break, or rip in the tapestry. This clarifies why there are so many combined entities and mistaken identities; mantling can be thought of as bringing your thread closer to a similar bundle, or perhaps even getting tied in with the original bundle. It also offers a natural explanation for the question, "Why are Dragon Breaks the fix of choice?" as that question becomes “How do I put all these threads back together as seamlessly as possible?” This operation would then be the direct consequence of the Jill’s quantum path integration.
Furthermore, threads coming from the same source or ending in the same sink must be similar, leading to the phenomena of mythic echoes...for example: re-enactments of Convention, Shezzarines as Lorkhanic shards, the consistent events between differing accounts of Red Mountain (Dwemer disappearing, Anumidium being activated, etc), TalOS...powerful enough entities can pull their own threads, change their origins, or even fray their own strings, collapse their underlying threads into others. Talos coming from Atmora once he became mythically important or Vehk's multiple origin stories are the most prominent examples of these phenomena.
Lastly, mythopoeia can be framed quite naturally here as nonlinear material sound waves propagating along the tapestry, propagated by tension and elastic forces. Taking advantage of mythopoeic forces amounts to manipulating the resonant frequencies of the story's tapestry and the material properties of the underlying fabric.
Consequences & Conjectures
Ancestor moth silk holds a unique position in this framework since it is either essentially the fabric of the tapestry, or possibly a “mythic echo” thereof. In a sense, it would be a meta echo, a situation in which the fabric can spawn itself.
Going up Dream gradients can be thought of as winding enough threads into your own whilst still maintaing your identity. Going down can be thought of working in the opposite manner.
Since we know longitude and latitude are intimately tied up with Nirnian spacetime, it is pretty reasonable to think of the roles of warp and weft threads slowly varying as one moves across its surface. So moving towards Atmora, towards frozen (Anuic?) time, implies a decrease in the amount of warp threads; moving south would lead to more unstable (Padhomaic?) time, in which most of the threads are in fact, warp threads. The notions of Akavir being far in the future and Lyg being in the past (so far in the past that it’s “reflected”) can also be framed in the same way.
Taking the analogy of mythopoeia as tension one step further, we can tie this back in with General Relativity via the stress-energy tensor, the material source term for gravity, which essentially encodes all sources of mass-energy in your system. We can think of strongly mythic characters in the story tending to bend or wrap threads around themselves, just as mass would deform spacetime in our universe.
The mathematical theory of braids should feature prominently in this setup, but I don’t know enough about it overall to make meaningful statements or draw useful analogies to the Aurbis. Perhaps someone out there has insight about this?
Combining the above with the notion of Towers as Stories, we are lead to the conclusion that the Ayleids were exceedingly cunning with their construction of White-Gold. Consider this: 1) they built the Tower to echo the shape of the Aurbis, 2) they placed that same Tower in the isolated central island of Cyrod, and 3) Cyrod is the Heartland, the central region of Tamriel. This triple-layered, metamythic construction indicates to me that they used White-Gold to shift the Wheel weaving the Pattern to themselves, to the center of Dawn’s Beauty. Like Convention, it became a focal point that drew in nearby threads and collected creatia, yet unlike Convention, it was a definite part of the Pattern, and not a gaping hole in its structure. It became a possipoint within a possipoint, and thus, opened all of Nirn to mortal manipulation.
Taking the above point as fact, the motivation for Akavir’s aggressive stance towards Tamriel becomes painfully obvious: for how else can the future progress if the story is centered on the present? The Wheel could not thread a Pattern around Akavir when it is almost completely focused on Tamriel. In fact, you can take this a step further: Pelinal was Akavir’s first invading force. The Red-Diamond Knight was Akavir’s (Tosh-Raka’s?) Terminator gambit, an attempt to sunder White-Gold as a Tower, which also explains his single-minded hatred for all elves. In fact, you could probably argue that Tosh Raka has been orchestrating (heh, Towers) a lot of the events on Tamriel as a way to insure his own birth, as a convoluted version of a self-consistent, time-traveling loop. But being a Spacetime God has its perks, I guess.
Huge thanks to my RL TES buddy /u/beatleian for lots of discussions over the past few years as well...a lot of his feedback has been implemented in the above exposition.
Please, fire away with questions, rants, or hypotheses below!