A Note on the Name
The conflict treated in this entry is known by several names, none of them wholly satisfactory. The scholarly convention, widespread among Imperial historians, is to call it the Ehlnofex Wars, after the tongue the enemies of men are said to have shared. Among common folk of a certain learning, the same conflict is more often called the the War of the First World, to distinguish it from all later conflicts between Men and Mer, of which there will be many.
What follows is not one war but two, fought in overlapping theatres by overlapping hosts, and at last resolved by a single act of divine judgement. The reader is asked to hold the two threads together, for it is only in their interweaving that the shape of the war becomes clear.
The Four Peoples of the Ehlnofey
As described in "Of Mundus and Mortality: the Shaping of Nirn", the surviving spirits of Mundus endured in two ways: some dissolved into the laws of the world and became the Earthbones, and others bound themselves to flesh and lived on through descendants. This second kind, the Ehlnofey in the narrower sense, inhabited Aldmeris, a mythical continent. In the oldest texts it is called the Isle of Aldmeris or the Island of Start, though in the beginning it almost certaintly was not an island at all, and it is remembered as a place of impossible beauty, where nature and engineering intertwined until they became a single thing. Translations of tapestries preserved in the Crystal Tower describe it as a synphony of plant and animal life in perfect harmony with the Old Ehlnofey themselves: an endless city, each generation laying its streets atop the last with the oldest trees on the planet acting as the pillars of the cities. The reader is warned that no elf now living has seen Aldmeris with their own eyes, and that much of what is said of it may be the ornament of long remembrance rather than the shape of the place itself.
But the Ehlnofey did not all share a single fate on the young Nirn. Some of the Ehlnofey remained with Auri-El and inherited his leadership and his project. They are sometimes called the Auri-Ehlnofey in the older texts, though the usage has fallen out of fashion, and more often simply the Aldmer, the elder folk. In the northern region of the Isle of Aldmeris they built Altmora, raised under Auri-El's leadership in the first full flowering of their power.
Another group decided instead to build their own kingdom whose original name is now lost to History and is commonly referenced to by the scholars simply as Old Ehlnofey, like their civilization. They had not followed Auri-El, and their kingdom was not founded under his banner. They were, in their own eyes, the truest and oldest of the Ehlnofey, for they alone had preserved the ancient forms intact within their walls.
The rest of the Ehlnofey, the largest group by far, had none of these advantages. Scattered across the shattered map of Nirn, they wandered for generations, contending with a world that had not yet settled into the shape it would one day hold. They knew hunger, and weather, and the predation of elder things still loose in the world. By the time their long wandering brought them to the borders of Aldmeris, they were many, they were hardened, and they were much reduced from whatever divinity their ancestors had carried. These are the Wandering Ehlnofey, and from them will descend the first of the Men.
A fourth lineage, sometimes acknowledged and sometimes denied by scholars, consists of those Ehlnofey whose descent belongs cleanly to neither father. From these ambiguous ancestors descend the beastfolk: the Khajiit, the Argonians, and others whose origins defy easy categorisation. Their histories, and the cosmological questions they raise, will be treated separately.
The Direnni Clan of Atmora
The Direnni began as merchants. Even in the first generations of Auri-El's following, they set themselves apart by their interest in exchange: of goods, of knowledge, of spirits and substances alike. They were wealthy when wealth was still a new idea, and their hoards were not measured in coin (for coin had not been invented) but in the rarer stuff of the Dawn Era, the reagents and residues left over from the unmaking of the prior time, where physical matter was more unstable and prone to change. It was the Direnni, more than any other clan, who first understood that these residues could be combined, transformed, and put to practical use. From their early work on these substances descend the disciplines that later ages would call alchemy and conjuration: the one the art of binding essence to matter, the other the art of calling across the veils that Convention would soon fix in place. Moreover, they invented the prototypes of the first golems, from which the Dwemer will design their droids in the Meretic Era.
When the wars came, the Direnni became Auri-El's chief lieutenants. Their wealth outfitted his hosts, their knowledge of reagents armed his champions, and their mastery of calling brought to his standard forces what no merely terrestrial army could have mustered. It is for this reason that, when Auri-El at last planted his spike of Ada-Mantia at the site of Convention, the tower came to be known by a second name: the Direnni Tower. The clan did not raise it, but they kept it, and their banner flew from it in the long years of the Dawn's closing.
The later history of the Direnni belongs to other entries. It is enough to note here that the clan's arc is the arc of the elven project itself, carried down from the Dawn into the ages of recorded history. No other elven line can claim so direct an inheritance from the war, and no other line has done more with the inheritance it carries.
The Direnni and the Druids of Galen
One consequence of the Direnni's role in the war deserves mention here, though its full unfolding belongs to a later age.
In the closing years of the Dawn, after the Convention had been held but before the Aedra had wholly withdrawn, a portion of the defeated host of Lorkhan settled in the lands near the western holdings of the Direnni. These were the Nedic Druids of Galen, a people who had been among the gentler and more contemplative of Lorkhan's following, and who had no further taste for war. The Direnni, who had always been merchants before they had been soldiers, saw no reason to refuse them. A long peace settled between the two peoples, and from their intermingling, over many generations, arose the race that later ages would call the Bretons: a people half mer and half man, who carry the learning of the Direnni and the piety of the Druids together in their blood.
It is for this reason that the Bretons, alone among the races of men, have always had a native gift for magic. The gift is not borrowed and not taught. It is inherited, and its inheritance begins here, in the first peace of the Dawn.
When the Wars Began
The oldest sources place the outbreak of the Ehlnofex Wars at roughly twenty thousand years after the beginning of linear time and about thirty thousand years before present day. The figure should be treated with caution. Time itself was highly unstable in that age, and the binding Auri-El had laid upon it was neither complete nor uniform in its reach. Events in one region might unfold at a pace wholly unlike events in another, and the calendar of the Dawn, to the extent there was one, was kept differently by every people that kept it at all. Twenty thousand years is therefore best read as a gesture toward a great span rather than a measured count, and the reader should not be surprised to find sources that place the same events five thousand years earlier, or ten thousand years later, with equal confidence.
The First Front of the Ehlnofex Wars: Aldmer Against Lorkhan
The older front of the war was fought between Auri-El's host and the host of Lorkhan, and it is this fighting that most sources have in mind when they speak of the Ehlnofex Wars without qualification, since it's the front where men have fought, even if it's the front that left the lesser impact on Nirn.
Auri-El, who had led the spirits of the Aldmer through their diminishment and founded the kingdom of Altmora, now took the field at the head of his people. Lorkhan, who had shaped the Wandering Ehlnofey most heavily and named the weakest of them Men, led the host that stood against him. The war between them was the founding war between the two lineages of mortal Nirn: the elves who looked back on a lost divinity and sought to preserve what remained of it, and the men who looked forward and sought to make of their limitation a new kind of power.
The fighting went ill for the elves at first. Altmora, the northern kingdom, fell to the armies of Lorkhan, and Auri-El was forced to withdraw south and east with what remained of his host. Lorkhan pursued. For a long time the outcome of the war seemed settled against the Aldmer, and it is from this period that the oldest elven laments derive: songs of the shining trees of Aldmeris, of the high towers where the dead were interred, of a homeland that would never be walked again.
It was at this extremity that Auri-El is said to have appealed to Anu himself, and to have received in answer the Bow and Shield by which he would at last turn the tide. Another artifact of this period, the Flask of Lillandril, is said to date from the same appeal, and to have passed through Direnni hands before taking its place among the treasures of the Aldmer. It is rumored to be a magical flask that absorbs and reflects magic of all kinds. Its anti-magic property also prevents mages from detecting its location.
With the Bow and Shield, Auri-El rallied his forces and avoided a total extermination. Retreating south and east, his host at last reached the borders of Aldmeris, where the second and stranger front of the war was about to open.
The Second Front: the Falling Out at Old Ehlnofey
When Auri-El's retreating host arrived at the borders of Old Ehlnofey, they expected welcome. They were the children of the same kindred as the Old Ehlnofey who ruled within, and they brought with them the urgency of Lorkhan's pursuit. They believed the kinship and the urgency together would be enough. They were mistaken.
The Old Ehlnofey did not see the Aldmer of Auri-El as equals. To them, centuries within the walls of their kingdom had preserved a form of mer-dom that the outside world had long since lost, and Auri-El's followers were, in their eyes, only a slightly less fallen version of the Wandering Ehlnofey they had been hearing rumours of for generations. The sources do not agree on who struck the first blow between the two elven hosts. What is agreed is that no blow could have been the last, once the first was struck. The Old Ehlnofey were the smaller of the two elven peoples at the time the wars broke out, but they retained the strongest memory of their divine inheritance and the clearest line of succession from the spirits of the Dawn.
This second front was not, strictly, a separate war. It was the same war given a second theatre. Lorkhan's armies were not far behind Auri-El's retreat, and when the Aldmer and the Old Ehlnofey fell on one another at the borders of Aldmeris, Lorkhan's host arrived to find the enemy already dividing itself. For a time the war became a tangled three-way thing, with the Aldmer pressed on one side by the Wandering host and on the other by their own kin within the walls.
It did not last. What finally reconciled the two elven peoples was the recognition, on the part of the Old Ehlnofey, that Aldmeris itself would fall if the quarrel continued. Auri-El was received, reluctantly, into their counsel. The walls were held. The landscapes around the kingdom, however, were not so fortunate: the sources describe whole regions unmade in the fighting, mountains flattened, seas opened, and the shape of Nirn itself rewritten into something nearer the map that mortals now know.
By the time the second front closed, the elven peoples had become one people, and the war against Lorkhan had become total.
The Convention
The war was ended by a council rather than a battle. As the Aedra saw the destruction this conflict had brought on the creations made by their very own essence, Auri-El and Lorkhan agreed to take part in a council where they would be judged by the other remaining et'Ada.
Auri-El, in his aspect as the avatar of time, returned to Nirn from his own planet and summoned all the Aedra to a single meeting, to be held at a fixed point of the world and to last outside the ordinary flow of time itself. The site he chose was one of the joint-points where the Earthbones meet and the flesh of Nirn is hung upon its frame. At this site he planted the spike that would become the first of the Towers, called Ada-Mantia or, in later and more familiar usage, the Direnni Tower or Adamantine Tower, and within it the first of the Stones, called the the Zero Stone.
The Convention did two things.
First, the spike of Ada-Mantia imposed a definite architecture upon reality in its vicinity. Until that moment, the laws that governed Mundus had been provisional: the architect-gods, being young, had held every power at every amendment at every ordering, which had made them mighty but also unable to settle into any single shape within the world they had made. The Zero Stone fixed them. It gave the Earthbones their story within the long unfolding of time, and it bound the architect-gods to the consequences of the architecture they had chosen. What had been fluid became law. What had been provisional became permanent.
Second, the Convention passed judgement on Lorkhan. He was found guilty of the trick by which the Aedra had been drawn into Mundus, and the sentence was the tearing of his heart from his body. The sources differ on the hand that did it: most name Trinimac, Auri-El's greatest champion, though some claim Lorkhan spat the heart out himself rather than give his enemies the satisfaction. The Heart, once taken, proved impossible to destroy, for its bond to Mundus had become absolute since he was who had given the most in its creation, and nothing of Mundus could unmake it. Auri-El fastened it instead to an arrow from his Bow, and fired it beyond the reach of any aspect of the world. Where it fell, the second Tower rose, the Red Tower, with the Heart itself as its First Stone.
With the removal of the Heart, the last full divine presence was withdrawn from Mundus, as the Divines where no longer needed now that the world was stable without them. This allowed Mundus a special kind of divinity, which is called "NIRN", the "consequence of variable fate", as Moth Priest Nu-Hatta put it in "Nu-Mantia Intercept".
After the Convention
With Lorkhan cast out and Ada-Mantia planted, the Aedra chose to withdraw from mortal affairs. Their continued presence on Nirn had been, by the end of the war, a danger to the world and to the fabric of existence itself. They left the terrestrial sphere, as one source has it, "in their excess, for its own good". What they left behind was a world governed by the laws they had fixed at Convention, overseen by the Towers they had raised, and populated by the descendants of the spirits who had been too diminished to leave.
The Dawn Era did not end at a single stroke, and scholars have long debated the moment of its proper close. Some hold that it ended with the withdrawal of the Aedra. Others hold that it ended only later, when the last of the mythic artifacts passed out of common use. The position taken in this chronicle is that the Dawn ended with the Convention itself: for it was at Convention that history became binding, and from that moment forward every act on Nirn had consequences that could neither be unmade nor unremembered.
Of the two lineages, the elves had won the war and lost the homeland. Altmora was gone. Aldmeris, as the Old Ehlnofey had known it, would pass into memory within a few generations more. What remained to them was Old Ehlnofey, now called Tamriel, and the long work of rebuilding a civilisation upon broken ground. The Direnni took up their keeping of the Direnni Tower, and began the slow peace with the Druids of Galen out of which the Bretons would come. The men, for their part, had lost their god and gained the world. They would scatter, and they would endure, and they would carry the disposition their father had given them into every age that followed: to make of limitation a new kind of power.
The wars that would come out of this arrangement are the subject of the next several entries.