The Tower and the Towers.

The Wheel is the Aurbis. The rim of the wheel is Aetherius - "solid change, otherwise known as magic". The spokes of the wheel are the "gifts of the Aedra". We can look at these as being the Gift Limbs, the parts of the Aedra they cut off to make Mundus, or we can look at the spokes as the plane(t)s. They're all the same thing at a certain level of abstraction, after all. The spokes are a way of channeling change and magic down to Mundus in well defined and regulated ways.

So if the Spokes of the Wheel connect Mundus to Aetherius, where are the spokes in Tamriel? The obvious candidate is (of course) the Towers. We can imagine the Towers as the places where the spokes connect to Munus. That's why they are the source of so much power, that's why mythopoeia and mantling invariably involves a tower. These are exit points from Mundus and you can use them to access divinity directly.

So then: if each tower is the access point for an aedric realm, then we can associate the towers directly with the Aedra, right? Ada-Mantia corresponds to Akatosh, Red Mountain to Lorkhan ... and here we run into difficulties. If we count Lorkhan as having a tower, then we need nine of them, and there are only eight spokes. And yet given that Lorkhan's heart is the First Stone and foundation of the Red Tower it seems odd that he should not have one.

Here's a little known fact for you: Did you know that the spokes don't just connect to Mundus? The go right through and out the far side. That way one spoke connects the hub to the rim at two points. How do we know this? Well, there are 16 voids between the spokes, collectively forming Oblivion. Now if there are eight spokes on a wheel, there are only eight spaces between them. Draw it out, you'll see that I'm right. But if the spoke goes right through, then it appears as if there are 16 spokes from hub to rim and you get sixteen gaps between them.

Of course, if Mundus is a circle, that means that somewhere inside Mundus is a place where all those spoke intersect. Metaphysically speaking, anyway. Anyone want to bet that's where they built White Gold? And if there is a place where all the Spokes converge, any tower built there won't connect to a spoke: it'll connect to an Axle. So we'd have one Spoke/Tower running perpendicular to all the others, and that fits Lorkhan's brief as Space to Akatosh's time and the time based processes represented by the other Aedra.

The other reason why the Spokes as Towers idea makes sense, is chim. You look at the wheel sideways on and one of those spokes is going to run from top to bottom as you look at it. So one of the towers will be The Tower in this case. In fact you can interpret this as meaning that all of the Towers are one Tower when looked at from the right perspective.

And when you climb up the tower, you get to Aetherius and more magic then you know what to do with. Hence the sigil CHIM's denotations of starlight (which comes from Aetherius) and "High Splendour" because you have to climb to the top to get it. It's even possible that this is all chim is: the key to the Towers so you can start climbing all those steps. (Of course, the Dwemer when they built theirs, they gave it legs and tried to turn it into an express freight elevator, but then look how that worked out for them...)

Anyway, I was going to talk some more about CHIM here, but I've rambled on long enough, so I'll save that for another time. As ever, just some odd stuff that's been chasing around in my head. I hope it's not too badly disjointed.