A Singular Convention

This is an attempt at a position paper regarding how I imagine space and time in the TES world. It has, necessarily, a healthy dollop of personal opinion because that's what position papers are. At the same time, I'm not making it up entirely as I go along and I hope to provide enough references to at least lend plausibility to my theories.

So by way of an overview, my points are as follows

• The default nature of time is non-linear.
• Everything possible happens at once. Literally.
• Subjective time was the only time
• The War Of Manifest Metaphors was unending ...
• ... because in the absence of linear, consensus time no-one could prove anything.
• Mundus was an attempt at creating an impartial, unimpeachable arbitrator
• The project failed (possibly sabotaged by Lorkhan) and was rescued by Akatosh
• Kalpas all start from the same moment - the Impossipoint of Convention.
• They all curve through higher dimensional space and end having looped back again to the Impossipoint.
• This leads the time-bound to assume that Convention repeats...
• ... but what they see are the same events occurring in a different order.

The Default Nature Of Time Is Non Linear

There is a fair amount of support for this. Vivec talks about the god place where "everything is always happening at once". Before The Ages Of Man introduces the Dawn Era timeline saying "The following are the most notable events of the Dawn Era, presented roughly in sequence as it must be understaoo [sic] by creatures of time such as ourselves." In describing the end of the Dawn Era it says "Elven history, finally linear, begins".

So, the burning question at this point is surely this: what does "non-linear" mean when applied to time? For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to assume that it means a state where there is no commonly shared "arrow of time". Everyone experiences their own narrative, but no two narratives have all the same events in the same order. Imagine watching a movie where everyone saw all the same frames, but no two people saw them in the same order. That's Untime. In fact, lacking a single arrow of time, it's possible that some of the audience saw a frame or a particular sequence of frames more than once. This leads to cycles like that described in Shor Son Of Shor.

Everything Possible Happens At Once.

Moreover, I am going to assert that in Untime, not only does everything happen at once, but everything possible happens at once. So we're not just taking a movie and showing everyone the frames in random order. We're talking about taking all the movies ever made and showing everyone a movie made of a random sampling of frames. The frames are generally spliced together so that they appear to form a narrative, but everyone gets a different story. In mathematical terms, you can think of Untime as a higher dimensional probability space where every point on the manifold maps onto a single possible configuration of space in a single moment of time. If that helps at all.

There is some support for this too, albeit somewhat circumstantial. The source material for the TES mythos (which is to say the games themselves) goes out of its way to present a world where multiple, mutually exclusive narratives can co-exist. We see this in the narratives of the games themselves where subsequent instalments take pains to try and avoid contradicting the events of any one play-through. We see it in the Sermons of Vivec, where we are presented with two narratives that lead to the moment where the Nerevarine meets Vivec: one where Vivec was always a god, and one where where he was born Mortal, managed to attain divinity and retroactively wrote himself into the Dawntime. And we see it in the concept of the Dragon Break where multiple threads of causality can run in parallel with the eventual outcome not necessarily following on from the pre-Break conditions.

So, as I hope I have shown, the concept of multiple possible events all happening in parallel is integral to the Lore. And, as such, I do not feel it is too far a stretch to assume that Untime follows this pattern; that this parallelism is the default nature of time and that the single threaded temporal existence that most of us experience is a local phenomenon caused by sequential time. Again, I claim no divine revelation here; feel free to disagree.

Subjective Time Was The Only Time

This more or less follows given the above. We know that the Dawntime was not in fact timeless. Aka was the first spirit to form. Necessarily, in so far as anything that happened "prior" to time would have occurred simultaneously with the start of time. Sequence is only possible inside time and before Aka time did not exist.

However, that means that afterwards, time did exist. It just wasn't linear and there was no consensus. So Subjective Time was the only time. And like subjective time in our world, that meant that time could stretch or zoom past. Or as in dreams, occasionally skip events entirely or jump from one point to another apparently entirely disconnected.

The War Of Manifest Metaphors

In The Lunar Lorkhan, Fal Droon has this to say about the events associated with Convention:

> I will not go into the varying accounts of what happened at Adamantine Tower, nor will I relate the War of Manifest Metaphors that rendered those stories unable to support most qualities of what is commonly known as "narrative."

While we don't know much about the War Of Manifest Metaphors, we can certainly attempt to draw some inferences. Imagine a world where if you were unable to say something like "what you lose on the roundabouts, you gain on the swings" without immediately seeing a children's' playground come into being with your money in stacks on the roundabout and swings, blowing away on the winds from the roundabout stacks and coming to rest on those on the swings.

That's a manifest metaphor for you.

Now suppose all ideas were like that. Again we have some support for the notion. Dragons, as the first born of time are arguably creatures of Dawntime that persisted into time. And the interesting thing about Dragons is that when they express a primal idea, it manifests. If a dragon wants fire it says "Yol". The concept becomes manifest when expressed.

Now suppose that was the default condition in the Dawntime. That every idea that could be expressed would immediately take on physical form. That, I submit, was the War of Manifest Metaphors, where any difference of opinion was exactly the same as waging war between two competing ideologies, and any disagreement was exactly the same as painful unending combat.

No One Could Prove Anything.

It was bad enough that a difference of opinion could cause physical pain. But the real problem was that no-one could ever settle any argument. No one experienced events in the same order, and even if they did there was nothing to stop a combatant from looping back on his own timeline and constructing a new history that supported his own theories. The war was vicious, bloody and unending. No one could tell their story. And in that context, that meant misery and bloodshed.

Mundus Was An Attempt At Creating An Impartial, Unimpeachable Arbitrator.

And that, I think, is how Lorkhan sold the Mundus project to the et'Ada. He said "let's set up a protected space where once an event happens, it stays happened, and then we can see who's right and who's wrong about some things". And of course, Lorkhan (by most accounts) had a hidden agenda and the Mundus he created with Magnus was not in the end fit for purpose. Magnus left in a huff and it was left to Akatosh[1] to sort it all out by nailing Mundus to the metaphorical floor with Ada-Mantia and then throwing Lorkan's heart to the far side of the world to anchor it at a second point.

And these two points began to spin sequential time, becoming the first Towers. And (since the Aurbis is music) the harmonics between them created other metaphysical towers which were formalised by differing Mer cultures and bound to physical manifestations.

And so (after a little metaphysical pushing and shoving) "elven history, finally linear, begins".

Kalpas All Start From That Same Moment Of Convention.

So, we have linear, sequential time instituted. And it seems widely accepted that this time forms a series of kalpas, the one following the other.

The interesting question here is this: which was the First Kalpa? Put another way, in Untime where all possible events happen simultaneously, all the time; which kalpa happened first?

Put like that, the answer seems obvious: ALL OF THEM!

This, if true, may shed light on one of the deeper mysteries of the Aurbis. Each tower has a Stone. More exactly it is the Foundation Stone of the Tower, often metaphorical/metaphysical in nature, as are the towers themselves. The Stone of Ada-Mantia is Stone Zero, also known as the "impossipoint". An impossible point. Why impossible? I think it is because this one point in space and time, uniquely in all the Aurbis exists not only in Untime, but also in Kalpic time. Which is to say it exists in every single Kalpa. So if you were gifted with the ability to steer your passage through the higher dimensions then you could stand at that point and enter any Kalpa you desired, or retreat back into Untime as Magnus and his friends did.

So Why Does Kalpic Time Appear Cyclic?

We have two competing perceptions of Kalpic time. One of them is the configuration often assumed in the literature, that Kalpas are sequential and follow one another in strict order. Against that, the idea that one kalpa might occur earlier than another goes completely against the idea of Untime as I understand the concept. Luckily, it may be possible to find a configuration which satisfies the requirements of Untime without contradicting established Lore.

Imagine the Impossipoint as a glowing ball of light. Imagine that glowing tubes of glass radiate away from it in a great circle, each tube representing the protected region of Kalpic Time where events may be written but not re-written. If we imagine it like that then necessarily, each kalpa will terminate far away from Convention and the other Kalpas.

But now, in your mind's eye, bend those glass tubes so that they loop back on themselves, like a glass-blower making an "O" for a neon sign. Inside the tube, the mortal inhabitants know no difference. Time progresses in an orderly manner as before. But in higher dimensional space the flow of time is curved such that the tubes of kalpic time both begin and end at the Impossipoint.

A Matter Of Temporal Perspective

Now, if a talented Mortal inside time can somehow peer back through history far enough, they may be able to dimly perceive the events of Convention and they think "this is how Time started". But then they peer through time in the other direction, and at the end of Time they see another moment of Convention. Not the same one because they are seeing events from a different angle.

The events of Untime line up differently and this appear to happen in a different sequence. Furthermore some actors may not be visible from this perspective, while others previous hidden may now be seen. And if his scrying is good enough, our observer may even see the start of a new Kalpa on the far side of convention.

Think of it like this: we are used to perceiving a world that has three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension. When we look back at Untime we see events that have, in effect, four spatial dimensions and zero temporal dimensions. And so to make sense of this, our time-accustomed minds interpret the fourth-dimensional placement as though it was a temporal sequence even though none is implicit in the arrangement. And when we view these events from a different angle, perspective makes the actors line up in a different order and so we interpret events as happening in a different sequence, even though the tableau remains the same as it always was.

And so our hypothetical savant assumes that time must be cyclical with Conventions happening again and again and kalpas occurring in a time-like sequence. He lacks the perspective to appreciate the true majesty of Kalpic Time.

In Summary:

I believe that the default state of Aurbic time is non-linear, with everything that possibly could happen all happening at once. I am suggesting that this is absolutely the literal truth, and not in any way metaphorical. Because of this no stories could ever be told and no argument ever be settled. And so we see Kalpic Time as a means to finally adjudicate some long standing and bloody disputes. In Kalpic Time things happen in sequence and that sequence is protected.

Linear time unwinds from the Towers and from Ada-Mantia in particular. Ada-Mantia's foundation is the Impossipoint, that sole point in space and time that exists in all Kalpas. All kalpas begin at the same moment of Convention, and curving back through higher dimensional space, they all end at that same moment too, with the result that the kalpas appear to mortal minds to form an ordered time-like sequence with Convention recurring over and over again.

Thank you to all those of you who made it this far. If you wish, you may now tell me how Wrong I am :)

[1] Or Aka, Auri-el, Auriel, Alkosh ... work with me here :)

[edit]

Expanded a little on the nature of temporal perspective and the same events around Convention appearing to happen differently when viewed from a different point in Time.