The Dragon and the Tree

Hello everyone ! This is my first attempt at fan-fiction, although I already discussed lore and proposed theories on the official Elder Scrolls Lore forum under the username of Verbose.

I posted this short text last week on that forum, and reworked it a bit. I somehow realized that this subreddit was more and more the best place to discuss lore, so I decided to post it here too. I think it should be reworked again, but I am not sure I will have the time to do so. This is also my very first Reddit post (Do we also recieve fishy sticks here?), so I hope I won't commit too many formatting mistakes.

 

##The Dragon and the Tree

###A comparative study of the Zul and the Jel

###By Einarth the Tongue, Archimagister of the College of the Voice in Markarth

 

 

In order to sharpen and reinforce the vocal arsenal of His Red Legions, as well as to ensure, should a new Knahaten spread, that the Argonia would not be immune to our weapons, His Most Discerning Majesty the Emperor Tiber Septim commissioned some leading experts in linguistic engineering to study the notoriously abstruse Jel. Due to the immense difficulty of navigating through the venomous swamps of Argonia, this study is progressing very slowly.

 

Fortunately, we can benefit from previous attempts at this linguistic exploration. The voracious Akaviri ophidian vampires, driven by their insatiable hunger for words, sent the Dragonguard to Tamriel to gather Draconic morphems, the digestion of which would lay the foundations for the Kiai. It is thus no wonder that they would try to devour the Jel. We found reports of such an attempt conducted under Sidri-Ashak the Waymaker. To which extent these attempts proved successful is unclear, but the first reports don't seem encourageing. Most of the Potentate's agents, licking the Hists with their bifid tongues in an attempt to assimilate their language, became Saxhleel themselves and ceased to serve their leader faithfully. Some are even said to be transformed into a new type of snake-tree: they were rooted, scales turned into bark, shedding was made impossible and their exuviae would accumulate concentrically year after year.

 

Though our works on the matter are far from ended, we can nonetheless present here a preliminary draft of our first conclusions.

 

 

Time is the cement of events. It is both the tapestry on which events are painted and the substance of the relations between events. Events form stories, so Time is a Tale. Therefore, the shape of language is the shape of Time itself. That is why the thu'um can shake the course of time: because it is a statement made of pure Zul, the language of Akatosh, the Dragon of Time.

 

The Zul is a linear language, or if one prefers, a sequential one. Semantic atoms can be assembled in a line, and the linguistic bound, or if one prefers, the articulation between words, is binary. The most elementary statements are made of three words, which is the linguistic realization of the concepts of past, present, and future.

 

While these concepts seem completely trivial to us, it is not true to all. Those who have met the lizards of the Black Marsh know that they struggle to grasp them, and that they usually achieve it only through fluvial metaphor. Sons of Kyne who tried to argue with the Wamasus usually only met lethal misunderstanding, and even the Argonian campaigns led by the Akaviri Dragonguard turned into miscarriages.

 

The difference in the percieved notion of time originates in (or spawned?) a difference in the shape of language. That most Saxhleel pantheons don't seem to feature any Dragon god, doesn't mean that they are deprived of any deity of Time. They seem indeed to rever a Tree of Time, and the Jel seems to derive from a "True Jel", which is the language of those species of Hists who are attuned to that Time deity. According to the Akaviri reports, documented texts in Jel might have been found in stone reliefs of Murkmire which were previously thought as works of abstract art, whose undulating lines and intricate angular arabesques seemed to seek no more purpose than aesthetics. An expedition was sent in Murkmire to find such reliefs, their work is still ongoing but has already proved successful. The Jel being mathematically intricate, help from followers of Jhunal was requested, and to them were sent reproductions of the reliefs which were already found.

 

Analysis of the fragments reveals that a major difference between the Jel and the Zul resides in the mode of articulations of semantic atoms, which isn't unique anymore, nor necessarily binary. Here is a simplified description of an elementary statement in written Jel. The statement occupies a portion, called statement area, of the surface on which the tale is displayed. The statement area is enclosed in a boundary, which is in most cases a circle, but not all the times. Whether the variations in shapes are poetic licence or meaningful nuances remains to be determined. Within the statement area are arranged a number of geometric shapes called placeholders, most of which (yet not all) are disks. A number of lines then connect either the edge of a placeholder to the boundary or the edges of two placeholders. This set of lines is collectively called the link and they form the crux of the linguistic joint in Jel. The lines composing the link are sometimes represented as snakes, sometimes as ropes, sometimes as lianas. Or as blank curves. All these shapes seem to be poetic license. The true meaning of the link originates from its essential shape. Every link describes the nature of a predicate or a logical relation; two links describe the same logical relation if they have the same shape, that is if they can be transknotted into one another, no mater the nature of their constitutive strands. The statement is then completed by encasing semantic atoms within the placeholders, in the form of ideograms. Composite statements are realized by embedding subordinate statements within placeholders, the edge of which then becomes the boundary of the subordinate statement.

For example, a simple three-placeholdered link might translate as A exerts B on C. By placing the ideogram of water on A, the one of crumbling-pressure on B, the one of the riverbank on C, one gets roughly a statement for "the river erodes its bank". Another link might read as "X took part in Y" By placing the previous statement in X, and an ideogram for "collapse" in Y, one gets, roughly : "Fluvial erosion is responsible for the collapse".

Algebraically, the linguistic bound in Zul is monoidal, while the linguistic bound in Jel is operadic. To make it even more complex, additional lines can link placeholders within a statement area to placeholders whithin subordinate statements or within statements made outside of their own statement areas.

 

This could very well explain the Saxhleel's strange conception of Time. They see their entire life as a moment. Their struggle to picture past, present and future might consist in restricting their thought and representations to the first order linguistic morphisms.

To put it in a simpler form, let's imagine we are reading the account of a Nord hero's life written in Zul on some memorial Wall. We start reading at the beginning of the line of Draconic characters, and finish at the other end of this string of characters. Birth, sequence of events, death. Now try to read some Argonian tale written in Jel. There is no canonical starting point nor endpoint. There is no privileged reading direction. Neither from left to right, nor from top to bottom, neither inwards, nor outwards. To understand the tale, one must grasp all the relations between its elementary ideograms and/or subordinate statements. One must follow every link of this multi-layered language. Some links express causal relations. Some express teleological ones. It is very possible that the Saxhleel would consider still existent through causal interaction some states of being that we, people of the Dragon, consider as past. Similarly, states of being we would dub future would be considered as already manifesting themselves teleologically by the Saxhleel. In other words, the Hist is already in the Spore, the Spore is still in the Hist. The life of any being is seen as an inextricably nonlinearizable whole.

 

The entangled structure of the Jel is in fact strikingly reminiscent of the shapes of some Hists. The entwined links resemble the circonvoluted branchings of some trees native to the Black Marsh. The similarity is so puzzling that the most dareful among the Jhunalites comissioned to work on the reliefs put forward the hypothesis that the trees actually tell Histories in Jel, the branch nodes being the placeholders and the branching acting as links. It is probably not coincidental that the Tree of Time seem to be vaguely related to the Bosmeri God Y'ffre the Storyteller, who is a God of Forests.

This would also shed new light on some cryptic antediluviant texts written by Altmoran followers of Herma-Mora, according to which each tree is a tale. If it is true, then a forest can be a library, and the freezing Atmora, where the Demon of Knowledge used to roam, might be somehow related to Apocrypha.

 

 

We now get to the crux of the work, that is the possible thu'umatic applications of the structures discovered within the Jel.

 

A first application one could think of is that the Jel allows in a surprisingly simple way to form parallel statements. A feat that has so far been only accomplished in Zul by Bhag the Two-Tongued, who was long suspected of Marukhatism, although never convicted. Work on Jel-derived two-layered Thu'um is still in progress.

 

It is unknown whether there naturally exists such a thing as an equivalent of the Thu'um in True Jel. The Hists probably know the answer, but they haven't spoken of it. However, considering how easily the Jel can create parallel tales, one could speculate that such a Thu'um, if it exists, would have powerful reality-merging properties. Applications would obviously include Dragon Break creation, exploitation and mending. Reviews of apparently related works of the famed Azra Nightwielder were started, but considering how sensitive and dangerous the matter is, all investigations on the topic have been delegated to another commission led by the imperial warmage Hjalti from the Reach, whose loyalty to His Most Discerning Majesty the Emperor Tiber Septim is proven beyond any doubt.

 

Also, the presence of teleological syntagma in Jel might be a clue that a hypothetic Thu'um in Jel would be able to interfer with the notion of Fate, which is far from being fully understood, even by our most talented scholars.

 

One last remark, but one of importance. The linguistic and religious divergence between the Zul-speakers and the Jel-speakers might lead to contention.

It should be noted that such conflicts possibly already happened in the past. The fights between Ysgramor and Herma-Mora on the freezing Atmora might be examples, if the connection between the Prince of Fate and the Tree of Time turns out to be more than a mere hypothesis. Numerous Nordic fables also hint at attempts of "The Old Woodland Man" to subvert followers of the Dragon and drive them to apostasy.

Another occurence of such a conflict might have been found, although the only mention of it that could be found lied in a highly questionable source, namely the delirious writings of a Jhunalite who succumbed to Sheogorath. If anything this mad priest wrote could include the slightest bit of truth, then there exist a corpus of myths internal to the Realm of the Mad God, according to which a deity of Fate (Would it be a local equivalent to Herma-Mora?) had a library that was burnt to ashes by a Champion of Akatosh at the very birth of the Shivering Isles. That the only remnant of this library is a sentient tree (a Hist growing in Oblivion?), called the Tree of Shades, is perhaps more than a troubling coincidence.

Should a linguistic or ideological war happen (again?) between followers of Akatosh and worshippers of the Tree of Time, we might be vulnerable due to the subtle, multi-layered complexity of the Jel. We recommand that we prepare very well to such an eventuality. Ressource should be allocated to further research and gathering of documentation on possible past occurences of Draco-Dendritic conflicts. Furthermore, we must learn how to make from the Zul's simplicity a strength, rather than a weakness.

 

This text is linked to the concepts of Shadow Magic and to the Hist-Jillian wars mentioned in KINMUNE. It is, mainly, an attempt to explain the weaponized 16th-dimensional mathematics used by the Hist against the female Dragons as a Hist equivalent of the draconic thu'um.