The Evolution of the Aurbis

I've had some thoughts buzzing around for a while now about how Anu the Amaranth transformed into the full Aurbis, populated by myriad spirits and realms, and recent discussions have brought them to mind yet again, so I figure it's a good time to set forth my own views in a more comprehensive way (as always, as a part of my general model of how things work), even if only to get my own thoughts straight.

I am well aware that the events of creation are a bit of a gray area in the lore, without a lot of general consensus. I am only stating my interpretation, the way that I like to see it. Feel free to comment and share differing views, but don't expect to win me over. This is basically aesthetic preference and worldbuilding dressed up as theory! So, that in mind, I start at:

The Beginning

Ald-Anu has left his prior existence within another Dream, another universe. He floats in the Dreamsleeve, deprived of all else, with no body, no senses, and becomes an existence unto himself, a naked spirit supported against the roiling, infinite white noise by immutable Will. He has fled into this state out of grief, and rage, and a desire to escape. He no longer wants to feel, or exist. In his old existence, he once underwent the process of I AM AND I ARE ALL WE, which starts with the enacting of Love and ends in the achievement of Will. Now, he wants to reverse this, and he once again undertakes I AM AND I ARE ALL WE: He takes himself as a Tower, and reaches in, and pulls out the Wheel of a new reality.

Ald-Anu is dead, forevermore. An Amaranth, an immortal flower, grows from his corpse, a new and permanent universe where there once was a spirit, another island in the infinite sea of the Dreamsleeve.

First Brush, then Second

When Ald-Anu left his prior existence behind, he took with him Memory, a set of ideas and images built up by the totality of events in that universe, some of which were more important to Ald-Anu than others.

Once Ald-Anu dies and the Amaranth grows from his corpse, those Memories form a loose framework along which the growth is guided, and which the growth consumes and repurposes. Some events are taken up as magic principles, stripped of their former context and distilled into axioms. One of these is the principle of enantiomorph, the trinity plot. But the most primal is an emergent duality: IS and IS NOT, which future denizens will name Anu and Padomay and to which they will mistakenly attribute deeds, and desires, and personalities. The reality is that IS and IS NOT are merely forces, which collapse into each other, opposed and yet interdependent, a Wheel that spins on and on as a joined whole.

From this first brush of IS and IS NOT, two more forces emerge, more complicated than their progenitors. Primarily IS, with a dash of IS NOT (or is it the other way around?): Stasis. Primarily IS NOT, with a dash of IS (or is it, too, the other way around?): Change. Mortals and et'Ada will later name Stasis and Change as Anuiel, the soul of Anu, and Sithis, the soul of Padomay.

The forces of Stasis and Change, too, collapse into each other, opposed and yet interdependent, joined together as a Wheel within a Wheel, the Aurbis. The Aurbis fills the Amaranth; its borders become the borders of the whole universe, and outside of the Aurbis there is only the Dreamsleeve, and other Dreams.

Aurbis

In the whirling of the Aurbis, the remainder of Ald-Anu's Memories are fully consumed and transformed into the Tones, the innumerable Concept-Notes: Fire, Time, Order, Ice, Thunder, Metal, Love, and on and on... These Tones interact with each other and reflect and refract endlessly, an infinite web of raw information.

As the Tones react, two phenomena begin to emerge: Spirits and magicka.

Spirits are conscious stories, or songs, composed of incredibly complicated arrangements of Tones. They can manipulate Tones, some with particular specialties, or particular potency. These are the AE, the selves, the identities. They come to be known as the et'Ada, the Original Spirits.

Magicka, too, is a construct of Tones, and it is raw possibility, substance, and power. It comes in multiple forms, as creatia or magicka of various flavors, but fundamentally it is all magicka, and it is quite pliant to the desires of spirits. The spirits are infinite in number, and magicka infinite in scope. The spirits run amok in the magicka, "shap[ing] and destroy[ing] each other and destroy[ing] each other's creations."

(By the way, a curious thing happens now and again: The mixture of Stasis and Change that makes up the whole Aurbis is not as quiet or stable as that of its bases, IS and IS NOT. From time to time, self-described "jots of intellect and will" pop into existence throughout the Aurbis, claiming to personify Stasis and Change. Mortals and et'Ada alike are prone to misunderstanding this phenomenon; they attribute full personality to Stasis and Change, and give them the names Anuiel and Sithis, as mentioned before. But, in truth, these ephemera are not fully conscious spirits, but rather something between spirits and forces, temporary and spontaneous perturbations in the fabric of the Aurbis, expressed in the web of Tones. These fluctuations inevitably collapse to their more stable states of balance.)

Time and Space

In the telling of this story so far, there has been a measure of sleight of hand. While causality exists at this point, and certain events depend on certain other events, there is not actually a unifying principle of linear time at work. Time is yet another Tone, or set of Tones, rather than an essential aspect of the whole Aurbis. There comes to be, among the et'Ada, a spirit who understands the power of Time, and incorporates Time into himself to such a degree that he becomes dominated by it. This spirit is the original Time Dragon, sometimes named Aka, and he bends the Time within himself such that he crystallizes his own being into an incredibly resilient form, which comes to be known as immortality. This method spreads among the et'Ada, who incorporate Time into themselves to varying degrees. Some of them become dragons just as Aka does, and follow him as a leader, but most are content to return to running amok in the magicka, in their immortal forms. (The dragons and those who think like them become known as "Anuic" due to their obsession with Time and its association with immortality and Stasis; this is a flexible political grouping, rather than a strict metaphysical distinction.)

There is yet another sleight of hand at work in this telling. While the Aurbis exists, and there are beings and magicka "within" it, space itself has not yet become an organized framework. Like Time, Space is but a Tone, rather than an intrinsic aspect of the whole Aurbis. There are some spirits who become interested in the borders of the Aurbis, and thereby recognize and popularize the notion of "outside" versus "inside," the Tone of Space, as particularly potent. Space, just like Time, becomes a powerful tool in the hands of the et'Ada, and they learn to carve out infinite spaces within the magicka, realms in which to create and shape and distinguish themselves. Some of these realms congeal into a grand collective space known as Oblivion, while others remain separate, with infinite oceans of magicka between and around them. A distinction thus arises, between spaces like Oblivion, and Aetherius, the collective of magicka outside of such spaces.

Within such spaces, magicka is collected and shaped by some spirits into objects known as plane(t)s, whole worlds which, while finite in individual scope, are infinite in both number and variety across Oblivion and other spaces. Access to magicka, which is power and substance and possibility itself, becomes a hoarded commodity among the et'Ada who live in such spaces. They learn to manipulate Space in such a way that they can maintain holes, stars, through which Aetherial magicka pours in, and the size of a spirit's star becomes a proxy for its magickal power. And many spirits, including both the creators of plane(t)s and their followers, begin to manifest bodies of magicka, and take up residence in their plane(t)s. (Spirits who become obsessed with creating, changing, destroying, and shaping plane(t)s and other things, who delight in the liberties of Space, become known as Padomaic; this, too, is a political grouping, rather than a metaphysical distinction.)

(Among all spirits, the Tones of Time and Space become commonplace tools, even if they might favor one over the other. This commonality gives rise among the uninformed to an illusion that they are universal, but, where they exist as dominant frameworks, it is because those frameworks have been designed and implemented by spirits. These frameworks are under no obligation to align with each other.)

New Arrivals, and the Formation of Mundus

While the Memories of Ald-Anu have by now been consumed and transformed into the whirling Aurbis, its magicka, its magic principles, its spaces, and its denizens, the Dream from which Ald-Anu escaped has not yet exhausted its influence on the reality he became. Denizens of that Dream travel across the Dreamsleeve, converting themselves into spirits of the Aurbis, and these alien spirits come to be known as the Ehlnofey and the Hist. They look for new homes in the myriad realms and plane(t)s of the Aurbis.

One of the et'Ada, a spirit very much obsessed with creation and Space, whose name is later given as Lorkhan, Shor, Sheor, etc., has an idea. He has seen the borders of the Aurbis, and regarded the Dreamsleeve beyond, and has long thought about might be out there, across the roiling noise. And he has also thought much about the nature of being, about what he is and is not, and about radical ways in which a spirit might transform itself, and perhaps even leave the Aurbis entirely. The arrival and testimony of the Ehlnofey and the Hist solidify his suspicions about what lies outside, and provide an opportunity. He approaches many spirits of the Aurbis, including the Ehlnofey and the Hist, about this grand experiment, which he calls Mundus. Some reject him; they have their realms and their concerns, and see no reason to abandon them for Lorkhan's flights of fancy. But others are brought into the fold, including multiple powerful spirits and their followers, and the Ehlnofey, and some of the Hist. Each has their intended role in the experiment, with the Ehlnofey and the Hist as central subjects, and the participating et'Ada as major and minor factors.

Accounts differ as to whether Lorkhan tricks these spirits, or forces them to cooperate, or convinces them that it is the best course. Some have even come to the notion that they collude against him in a grand conspiracy. But what is most consistently attested, leaving aside each party's motivations, is this:

One of the most powerful and intelligent spirits involved in this endeavor, Magnus, a true master of magicka, draws up plans with Lorkhan for the framework of Mundus. Once these plans are complete, the multitudes of collaborators gather in Oblivion and enact the formation of Mundus. As they do so, the framework begins to exact its true price upon them, stripping them of their full agency and leaving them tied to and manipulated by the mechanisms of Mundus, rather than the other way around. Most begin to be incorporated into Mundus itself, while the Ehlnofey and Hist are stripped of definition by it, forced to become constantly shifting creatures of indeterminate nature, remembered by a few cultures as the mythic Ooze, in which spirits could not know their own shapes and names.

As the framework of Time in Mundus is yet to be fully realized, many events happen all at once, in a primordial chaos of intertwining causality later known as the Dawn Era. Some of the most powerful spirits become splintered into aspects by the machinery of Mundus, and these splinters, led by prominent aspects of Aka, wage a war against Lorkhan and those loyal to him. Lorkhan and Magnus, and Magnus' followers, understand how to avoid this splintering, but Magnus betrays Lorkhan. Magnus and his followers eject themselves from Mundus, and tear open holes throughout Oblivion to escape into Aetherius, leaving behind notions of Space and creation, to run amok in the magicka once more. (These holes appear as spheres dotted throughout the multidimensional space of Oblivion, at various distances from Mundus. The largest of them is torn by Magnus himself, and is the sun, while the rest are the stars in the night sky.) Aka's war ends in Lorkhan's defeat; Lorkhan is separated from his star, and Mundus incorporates it as part of Nirn, its central plane(t). Lorkhan's AE, despite its immortal resilience, is successfully killed and ejected from Mundus, becoming the Void Ghost (who later capitalizes on this unique position). This conflict comes to be known as the War of Manifest Metaphors, in which ideologies were wielded as weapons by armies of shifting Ehlnofey and their shattered, unstable leaders.

Linear time begins on Mundus, in the form of many branching, parallel timelines known as kalpas. The Ehlnofey and the Hist are subjected by Mundus to mortality, given finite lives; this is a core feature of the experimental design, stripping away the complacency of power and resilience in order to motivate transcendence. Further, in most kalpas, they are given constant names and shapes by powerful spirits such as Y'ffre, Azura, and Hircine, resolving the Ooze into a concrete ecology (albeit one that can be locally reversed with some effort). The Ehlnofey spread across Nirn, reproducing, and over time become most of the life forms of Nirn, plant, animal, and sapient mortals alike. Within at least one kalpa, those who followed the Time Dragon in the wars of the Dawn become the Aldmer, who later splinter into the various elven cultures, while those who followed Lorkhan wander about, and eventually become the various human cultures. The Hist of this kalpa settle in the swamps of one continent, and begin their own experiments, including the formation of the Saxhleel and other Argonians from non-sapient Ehlnofex life (they also have cousins elsewhere in the Aurbis, who conduct similar experiments).

The shattered and now fully-incorporated et'Ada become known to sapient mortals of this kalpa as the Eight Aedra (or "ancestors," whose old plane(t)s orbit Nirn, containing their old stars) and the Earthbones (the laws of nature and physics). The Aedric aspects, and the climates of Nirn, are influenced by a force of Mundus called mythopoeia, consisting of mortal cultural beliefs. Normally, this is a small effect, diffuse. But some mortal cultures begin erecting Towers in imitation of Adamantia. These Towers are structures of symbolic magic representing their cultural identities, and they amplify the effects of mythopoeia many times over. The varying beliefs of each culture in possession of a Tower carve a diverse array of aspects from the material of the Aedra. Often these aspects resemble the original Eight, but they are not limited to this. (Just as an aside, symbolic magic is one of the few things that can be applied regardless of which Dream you are in; it is raw information manipulation, and every single Dream is a construct of information, with the Dreamsleeve being the unstructured infonoise between them. The design of Mundus heavily incorporates symbolic magic, in the form of things like continents and kalpas and water and Dreams. This is no accident; the experiment of Mundus specifically concerns encouraging transcendence and the mastery of symbolic magic.)

Yet more et'Ada (the non-Ehlnofex followers of the Eight, or Lorkhan, or Magnus), though not incorporated into Mundus as the Aedra and the Earthbones are, make new homes and find their own places within the emerging Mundane ecosystem: Dragons, spriggans, the fey, and so on.

The spirits who followed Magnus into Aetherius are called the Magna Ge, and they maintain the stars through which they exited Oblivion, like windows, perhaps out of survivor's guilt or fascination or whatever else; Magnus himself sends the Elder Scrolls to record the happenings of Mundus.

Those denizens of Oblivion who refused to participate in Mundus in the first place are called Daedra ("not our ancestors"), and the degree to which they take an interest in Mundane affairs is down to their personal whims.

And So...

Thus is the current state of the Aurbis as it floats on in the Dreamsleeve: A vast, endless universe, containing infinitely many bubbles of Space which are surrounded by the magicka of Aetherius. The largest such bubble is Oblivion, and in one small corner of the vast infinity and variety of Oblivion sits Mundus: Nirn, orbited by the plane(t)s of the Eight, with the sundered corpse of Lorkhan as its moons, the windows of Magnus and the Ge pouring Aetherial light onto a surface teeming with the full diversity of mortal life and spirits and gods.