Brynjar's Compendium of the Six Walking Ways, part III: Tonal Manipulation and the Fusion of Souls

Note from the Author: one month later I realise I fucked up with the title, it should read "part III: Tonal Manipulation and the Fission of Souls" instead of "Fusion", the Fusion is the Sixth Walking Way, sorry for the confusion :P

Tonal Manipulation

>The third walking path explores hysteria without fear. The efforts of madmen are a society of itself, but only if they are written. The wise may substitute one law for another, even into incoherence, and still say he is working within a method. This is true of speech and extends to all scripture.

And now to the quote that me go all "HOOOOOOOOOLY SHIT":

>The Three Thieves of Morrowind could tell you where they were. So could the High King of Alinor, who was the one who broke it in the first place. There are others on this earth that could, too: Ysmir, Pelinal, Arnand the Fox or should I say Arctus? The Last Dwarf would talk, if they would let him. As for myself, I was here and there and here again, like the rest of the mortals during the Dragon Break. How do you think I learned my mystery? The Maruhkati Selectives showed us all the glories of the Dawn so that we might learn, simply: as above, so below.

So, what does it say? That Dragon Breaks are awesome. What else? People can do quite some shit during them. Like who? Mannimarco, the Three Thieves of Morrowind, Talos, Wulfharth, Mankar Camoran and Auriel the High King of Alinor.

What am I trying to say? Shaking the Dragon Just So does wonderful things to one's godhood. Why am I writing like this? No idea.

I'll start to make sense now, I hope. So, many say that the Numidium is the Third Walking Way, its use is almost always connected to some sort of ascension (the Tribunal's, Talos', Mannimarco's), but it seems weird to me that a mortal construct, albeit a very powerful one, would be a Walking Way. Rather, I like to think that it is the possibilities that Numidium offers that are the Third Way of Walking, and that the same Way can be walked in the absence of the golem.

When you speak of the Numidium, you speak of Tonal Architecture, and this is usually said to be the Third Walking Way as well. If you consider the Aurbis to be a big musical, Tonal Architecture is the manipulation of the little Tones that compose the greater piece. Though “Tonal Architecture” is something quite Dwemeri, and there seems to be more ways to perform the same manipulation, like the Thu'um, Kiai or Sword Singing (as /u/Mdnthrvst discussed here), so, for the sake of convenience, I decided to consider all of these different arts to be versions of the same Tonal Manipulation, which, all by different means, reach basically the same goal.

So, how can one apply this Manipulation to make one a god? Quite simple, actually. In concept that is.

You just change your Tones. Those little notes that define who you are and that say to the Aurbis that you are mortal, you change them so they start saying you are NOT mortal. That's what people usually say Mannimarco did with the Numidium: he used the Tonal Manipulation capabilities of the NO-machine to deny all the Tones that defined the King of Worms as a mortal. There's one "but" though, it caused a Dragon Break.

Another time this happened, when the Tribunal rewrote themselves, with the help of Numidium as well, there was also a Dragon Break. When else do you remember Dragon Breaks happening upon the Numidium's activation? If you answered the siege of Alinor, you're right. Tiber also seems to have done his alterations during that time. If you answered the Warp in the West, you're right as well, for the Underking might have done just the same, rejoining his long-lost heart and restoring the Talos Oversoul. And, since all of these cases have contradicting origin stories, I think it's safe to say they all did more or less the same thing, rewriting their stories.

And then there is that quote from Where Were You When the Dragon Broke, which, at first, seems to indicate that Mannimarco was quite high. But upon closer inspection, lists individuals either connected to Tonal Manipulation (the Three Thieves, Ysmir (both Wulfharth and Talos), Arctus, the Last Dwarf) or with Dragon Breaks (the High King, the Maruhkati), which, to me, indicates there is some connection between the two. True, Numidium causes Dragon Breaks, but one thing that is always consistent in its usages is that something is altered. The Dwemer, the story of the Tribunal and of Talos, the nature of Auriel and of Akatosh.

What I am trying to say is that, with an specific method or use of Tonal Manipulation, you can cause a Dragon Break - in other words, Shake the Dragon Just So - ranging from very small to very big, depending on how you do it, and, within that Dragon Break, certain barriers that define one's self and their Tones are lifted, making them particularly malleable and changeable, given that one knows how to properly do it. But why Dragon Breaks?[ Well, music is defined by its tempo, isn't it? Specially a mortal's one, and, if you can distance yourself from the quick pace of a mortal song, and approach the slower, apparently eternal pace of the Aurbis' song, you become as eternal as the Aurbis.] (Even if that connection is kind of muddled, it seems very apparent to me that there is a connection between Tones and Time, and consequentially between Tonal Manipulation and Dragon Breaks, and I might come back and expand upon this if anything comes to mind or if any of you might have awesome moments of illumination).

Back to the point of rewriting one's story, do you remember any other similar case not involving the Numidium? Mankar maybe? And what did he do to change his story? His Nymic.

With the Razor, Mankar cut off most of his self in order to become something greater, … and, while I have seen some posts and essays about Nymic Surgery, I have never seen it connected with either Tonal Manipulation in its various forms nor with the Third Walking Way. Now it seems to me that Nymic Surgery is but one of the various forms of manipulating Tones, for what is a Nymic if not a Tone, what is a name if not a sound?

And there's Wulfharth, the mythical recurring Nordic figure, who dies countless times and yet lives again, no matter what. I believe that the Shout he learnt from watching Shor brawling Alduin, What Happens When You Shake the Dragon Just So, not only causes a Dragon Break, but also allowed him to change his own nymic into the myth he later became.

As a side note, concerning Dwemer metal and its unique resistance to corrosion and dullness, and thanks to /u/Mdnthrvst for making me see this connection: Dwemer metal is the result of Tonal Manipulation of metallic ore, resulting in the famous Dwemer metal we all know, prized for resisting all effects of time, remaining as good for use thousands of years after it was crafted as in the day of its melting, and, what else does Tonal Manipulation can get you? Eternity. You see the connection? The art of crafting forever enduring metal is only some steps down from using Tones to make yourself eternal.

The Fission of Souls

>The sage who is not an anvil: a conventional sentence and nothing more. By which I mean dead, the fourth walking way.

>The Stormcrown mantled by way of the fourth: the steps of the dead. Mantling and incarnation are separate roads; do not mistake this. The latter is built from the cobbles of drawn-bone destiny. The former: walk like them until they must walk like you. This is the death children bring as the Sons of Hora.

This is what people usually call "Mantling", the most popular and well-known Walking Way, though I will just leave this link for the definition of what exactly is mantling and why it's not the same as the Fourth Walking Way according /u/MareloRyan.

I think the best way to start explaining this Walking Way would be to explain from where the term "mantling" supposedly came from:

> When the Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven in a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal. […] Then Elijah said to him, “Stay here; the Lord has sent me to the Jordan.”

>And he replied, “As surely as the Lord lives and as you live, I will not leave you.” So the two of them walked on.

>Fifty men from the company of the prophets went and stood at a distance, facing the place where Elijah and Elisha had stopped at the Jordan. 8 Elijah took his cloak, rolled it up and struck the water with it. The water divided to the right and to the left, and the two of them crossed over on dry ground.

>When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, “Tell me, what can I do for you before I am taken from you?”

>“Let me inherit a double portion of your spirit,” Elisha replied.

>“You have asked a difficult thing,” Elijah said, “yet if you see me when I am taken from you, it will be yours—otherwise, it will not.”

> As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind. Elisha saw this and cried out, “My father! My father! The chariots and horsemen of Israel!” And Elisha saw him no more. Then he took hold of his garment and tore it in two.

> Elisha then picked up Elijah’s cloak that had fallen from him and went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan. He took the cloak that had fallen from Elijah and struck the water with it. “Where now is the Lord, the God of Elijah?” he asked. When he struck the water, it divided to the right and to the left, and he crossed over.

> The company of the prophets from Jericho, who were watching, said, “The spirit of Elijah is resting on Elisha.”

>2 Kings 2, 1; 6-15.

So, to sum it up, in Elder Scrolls terms, Elisha walked in Elijah's footsteps (quite literally), emulating Elijah's manners, becoming his successor, and, when Elijah was no longer around to bear his own mantle, Elisha took it for himself, now doing the same things as Elijah did while he walked the Earth (as exampled here by the division of the waters, but also by other feats described later on in the Bible), symbolized by him wearing his former master's mantle (credits to /u/RottenDeadite - or /u/sha-3-512, whoever posted it first! - for this connection).

So, what does "walk like them until they must walk like you" mean? This is actually one of the topics I have seen being discussed the most around the ES lore community, so there are quite many different interpretations. The most common one is probably that you merge yourself with a deity by your actions, doing things so alike that deity that you end up becoming part of that deity, being absorbed into that entity or becoming that entity entirely because the Aurbis can no longer differentiate between the two.

That's the basics of it, and what is usually reiterated every time questions about Mantling pop up. There are some examples that might be good for understanding as well, namely Talos and the Champion of Cyrodiil.

Let's start with the one that generates the most discussion: The Champion and Sheogorath.

During the course of the Shivering Isles DLC main quest, Sheogorath tasks you with many tasks (another great wording, Bryn) that ultimately lead you to take over the role of Sheogorath in the Greymarch. It's important to notice that those tasks are connected to Sheogorath in some way, either they were done by him in previous ages, or they get the CoC (Champion of Cyrodiil) closer to the Daedric Prince of Madness, either through assimilation of who he is and what are the Shivering Isles or by making the CoC a tad bit more mad, thus making the CoC so similar to Sheogorath that they become as one. One thing to notice for a little later on is that the CoC effectively mantled Sheogorath when the Prince was absent, in the form of Jyggalag.

I'll leave Talos' case to be explained by the words of MareloRyan (who does a better case for summing it up than I could ever do):

>Lorkhan: United the Aedra and Earthbones into Mundus through treaty, trickery, and force. Died.

>Talos: United the provinces into the Empire through treaty, trickery, and force. Walked the steps of the dead.

That's a quite basic and general view of it, and there are more subtleties and all sort of weird-shit involving the Ninth Divine and his ascension to Lorkhan's spot, but this explanation is quite good in covering the basics. And again the point of the entity being "mantled" being absent in some way.

And in MareloRyan's thread about Mantling, which I linked in the beginning of this section, he makes quite a nice distinction between the Fourth Walking Way and Mantling (the name usually given to it): that Mantling is actually a broader concept, and the Fourth Walking Way, the Steps of the Dead, is one of the ways of taking a Mantle, he has some good argumentation there if you'd like to check out. And one of the aspects that calling this Way the Steps of the Dead is that the sphere which you are taking, the deity whose steps you're walking on has to be dead (or at least missing).

(I realize now that it's quite simple to explain the Fourth Walking Way, when I don't try to explain my weird head-canons, that is. And now it's time for me to explain my weird head-canons!)

And, with that distinction in mind, as well as the notion that the "mantled" being is either missing or dead, I came to think of what happens as this: when the original spirit leaves its station, be it Lorkhan being separated from his Divine Spark or Sheogorath being transformed into Jyggalag temporarily, leaving the position of Mad Prince vacant, it leaves an empty space in the Aurbic narrative, think of it like a gingerbread dough and then you cut a gingerbread man out and leave it like that, something's missing, right? And then you add new dough to cover up that space.

Now, this has some implications: first, the new dough will not match the first state, before the cutting, perfectly and you'll be able to tell that something has changed; second, the new gingerbread man shaped dough doesn't need to be exactly like the old one in the interior, as long as the shape remains the same, it will fit.

With that I'm trying to say that, different from MareloRyan's reasoning behind Talos keeping his sense of self after filling Lorkhan's hole (which he says that is because of CHIM), is that you don't become the entity you're emulating, you're not being merged into that other's entity self, because it's missing from the start of the process. Rather, you're making yourself fit the shape they left hollow, and your actions are what define that shape in the narrative perspective. You're picking their unfinished tale where they left it and continuing it.

What would this say about the CoC and Sheogorath then, since this is one of the topics that generate the most divided (and sometimes heated) discussions? I would say that, like Haskill and Arden-Sul, the CoC did become Sheogorath. The CoC stepped in Sheo's shoes and became the ruling king of the Shivering Isles in the absence of Sheogorath's AE where it should be, through the whole questline Sheogorath gives you, you're taking on the shape of the Mad Prince, so that when the time comes, you'll easily fill what Sheo left vacant. For a time, all those three were Sheogorath, they were continuing the story of the Prince of the Shivering Isles, but, whenever Jyggalag was turned back into Sheogorath, he resumed his role in his own tale, pushing the Hero out of his place, probably because his strength of will is superior to that of the mortals who substituted him. But, in the process, the mortal is turned into a Daedric Vestige, and his sense and comprehension of what happened are hindered, I think that the subject's AE is not destroyed, but it is displaced from its animus as Sheogorath takes his position back, and then reforms its body around chaotic creatia found in the Shivering Isles. Due to the conflict of two Wills claiming to be Sheogorath, this process is certainly stressful and traumatic, and seems to take away some parts of the Vestige as well as giving some new things and facets to Sheo, in the case of Sheogorath resuming his place, and it could happen that the original Sheogorath be unable to take the new one out of their station, becoming him a Vestige then, maybe.