Of Tilion and Urwendi: the Making of the Moons

'Small planets, insofar as one infinite mass of infinite size can be smaller than another. Planets do have orbits, or at least lunar orbits are perceived to happen by mortals. Moons are regarded by various cultures as attendant spirits of their god planet, or minor gods, or foreign gods. The moons of Nirn are Massa and Seconda. Moons are not represented in the Dwarven Orrery.' — Cosmology, preserved on the Imperial Library

Table of Contents

A Note on Names

The two moons that wheel through the night sky of Nirn are known by many names, and no account of them can proceed honestly without first acknowledging this. The names used in this entry are the oldest attested. They are Tilion and Urwendi, the two Direnni lieutenants of Auri-El who, at the end of the War of the First World, ascended into the sky to take up the offices they still hold. When the Empire came to name them, in an age much later than this entry treats, the names became Massa and Seconda. The Khajiit, whose religion is most invested in them, call them by names without number, and assign to their phases a significance that the other peoples of Tamriel have never quite understood.

The tradition recounted here, which gives the moons the names Tilion and Urwendi, is preserved chiefly in the oldest Aldmeri and Direnni sources. It is not the only account of how the moons came to be. The most widely circulated rival account, the Lunar Lorkhan theory of the Temple Zero Society, holds that the moons are instead the sundered corpse of Lorkhan, cracked asunder at Convention when his heart was torn from him. That tradition will be addressed at the close of this entry. What follows is the older telling.

The Two Lieutenants

As recounted in "On the War of the First World", the Direnni clan were Auri-El's chief lieutenants in the closing years of the Dawn Era, outfitting his hosts and supplying his champions from their hoards of Dawn-era reagents. Among the Direnni of that era, two names are remembered above the rest, though the entry on the war had no cause to dwell on them.

Tilion was the archer of the clan, and the keeper of Auri-El's arrows. It was Tilion who stood at Auri-El's shoulder through the long retreat from fallen Altmora, and it was the arrows of his fletching that the Bow of Anu loosed in the turning of the war. At the closing of the fighting, when Auri-El loosed the arrow that carried Lorkhan's torn heart beyond the edge of the world, it was an arrow of Tilion's fletching.

Urwendi was the charioteer. She drove Auri-El's chariot in the field, and the chariot was drawn by a yoke of quasigriffs, creatures of the early Dawn whose likeness no later age has seen and whose kind survived in smaller numbers into the ages that followed. Urwendi alone among the Direnni could master them fully: the sources say the beasts answered to her voice as no animal has answered to any voice since. Where Auri-El's host moved, Urwendi's chariot moved at its head, and the light that the quasigriffs cast as they ran is said to have been the first illumination of the battlefield that was not either the sun of Magnus or the light of fire.

They were lovers, in the way that the Ehlnofey of the Dawn understood the word; which is to say that they had chosen each other across enough generations of the war that the choice had become indistinguishable from their natures. This detail matters, because what follows would not have been possible had they been separable.

The Offer at Convention

When the Convention was held at Ada-Mantia and the verdict against Lorkhan was passed, Auri-El addressed his surviving lieutenants. The war was over. The Aedra were preparing to withdraw from Mundus entirely, for their continued presence on Nirn had become a danger to the fabric of the world. But the withdrawal would leave Nirn in a troubling condition. Magnus was already gone, and the sun he had left behind was a wound: a one-way door through which magic bled from Aetherius into the world, but which offered the mortal plane nothing in the way of a witness, or a watcher, or a light that could be said to belong to Nirn itself.

Auri-El proposed, therefore, a different kind of ascension for any among his followers who were willing. They would not dissolve into the laws of the world, as the Earthbones had. They would not diminish into flesh, as the Ehlnofey proper had. They would take their places in the sky above Mundus as attendant spirits: companions to the mortal plane, visible to it, watchful over it, and (most importantly) capable of casting a light of their own devising rather than merely leaking the light of a realm they had abandoned.

Tilion and Urwendi accepted together. No sources record any deliberation between them on the matter. What the sources do record is that when they ascended, they took with them a small number of the quasigriffs: not the whole yoke that had drawn the chariot in the war, but those few beasts whose bond with Urwendi was closest and whose nature was found, on examination, to tolerate the passage. The remainder of the quasigriffs stayed on Nirn, where their lineage persisted, dwindled, and at last passed into rumour and then into silence.

Tilion took the larger body, which later ages would call Massa or Urwendi. Urwendi took the smaller, called Seconda or Tilion. The asymmetry is explained differently by different sources: some say Tilion was simply the more substantial spirit; others say he insisted on the greater burden because the greater burden was the one that would fall first, and he wished to fall before his beloved did.

The Light of the Moons

The moons of Nirn are not like the moons of other worlds, insofar as anything is known of other worlds. They are not merely reflectors of the sun's light. They emit a light of their own, a soft and silvered radiance in Urwendi's case and a warmer, redder light in Tilion's, and the combination is unlike anything cast by any other body in the heavens of Mundus.

The reason, in the tradition here presented, is that Tilion and Urwendi did not escape through a wound, as Magnus and the Magna Ge did when they fled to become the sun and stars. They were not leaking Aetherius into Nirn. They were, instead, shining Nirn back at itself. The light they cast was the light of their own remaining divinity, spent slowly over the ages, in the deliberate and measured way that a lantern is spent by a watchman on a long night.

This distinction matters for several practical consequences that later mages have observed. Moonlight on Nirn is not magically equivalent to sunlight. Spells that draw on magicka in its raw Aetherial form work best under the sun, because the sun is the gap through which such magicka flows. Spells that draw on the specific character of Mundus itself, such as enchantments tied to place, to lineage, to the bones of the world, work best under the moons, because the moons are of Mundus in a way the sun is not. The Argonians understood this long before the Altmer admitted it, and time their alchemy by lunar phase for exactly this reason.

The Siege of the Sky

What was not anticipated at Convention, and what the ascending pair could not have known, was that the offer Auri-El had made to his lieutenants had become known beyond the council. The forms Auri-El had used to summon the Aedra, and the architecture of Ada-Mantia itself, were observable to at least one spirit who had not been invited and who had taken a close and bitter interest in the proceedings. That spirit was the Daedric Prince Hermaeus Mora.

Mora's interest in Mundus has been, in every age, an interest in what is hidden within it. He is the Prince of Fate, of Memory, and of Forbidden Knowledge. He does not act through raw force. He acts by giving mortals access to things they were not meant to know, and by taking from them, in exchange, things they did not know they possessed. The reasons for Mora's interest in the ascension are not recorded in any source that this chronicler has been able to consult, and the reader is cautioned that any claim as to his motive belongs to speculation rather than to history. What is recorded is that he acted, and that the consequences of his action have outlasted his purpose.

The surviving human host of Lorkhan, by this point in the tale, had been scattered by the verdict of Convention and the breaking of their god. The northernmost remnants of that host had drifted back across the world to the old northern continent, which the elves had called Aldmeris before they lost it to Lorkhan's armies earlier in the war. The men who came to inhabit Aldmeris after the fighting had ended knew only the aldmer name of the rival kingdom, Altmora, and so that is what they later called the entire continent, which in time became Atmora. By that name the continent is still known, and the people who lived upon it are remembered as the Atmorans: the ancestors of those who would, many ages later, be called the Nords.

They were beaten, grieving, and leaderless. They had watched the elven host close the war against them, and they had watched the Aedra withdraw into silence in the months that followed. When two new lights began to rise into the sky above them, neither the sun they already knew nor any star they had learned to name, the Atmorans had no account of what the lights were. No voice of their own god remained to explain the matter. What they saw was an elven creation, visibly ascending from the territory the elves had held, rising into a position from which, it seemed to them, it could watch them and strike them at will. They took the lights for an unprecedented weapon, and they prepared to strike at it before it could strike at them.

It was at this moment that Hermaeus Mora came to them. He did not come as a conqueror, or as a god demanding worship. He came, as he always does, as a voice in the back of the skull, offering answers to questions the hearer had not yet learned to ask. He gave them star-maps in the form of a Black Book. He gave them the precise instant in the arc of the ascension at which the two bodies would be closest to the reach of arrows loosed from below. He gave them knowledge of materials: the woods that would carry a shaft far enough, the feathers that would hold a fletching steady at such a height, the runes that would permit an arrow to find a target it could not see. He asked in return, as he always asks, only for certain things to be given up. What those things were is not now known, and it is in the nature of the Prince of Memory that they cannot be known, because they were taken, and the men from whom they were taken could not afterward recall what they had lost.

The engagement that followed is called by the oldest sources the Siege of the Sky, though no siege in the ordinary sense was possible. The Atmorans built towers of black stone on the headlands of Atmora, each tower aligned to a point in the heavens that Mora had identified, and from the summit of each tower they loosed volleys of arrows fletched with the feathers of birds that Mora had taught them to catch. The arrows climbed higher than any arrow loosed by mortal hand had climbed before. Many of them found their mark.

Urwendi, whose chariot was the swifter of the two, reached the safe altitude first. Tilion held back to draw the Atmoran fire away from her. The pockmarks that a careful observer can still see upon the face of Massa, and which the Lunar Lorkhan theorists have taken as evidence of a sundered corpse, are in this older tradition the scars of that volley. Tilion did not fall. He completed his ascent wounded but whole, and he has carried the scars ever since.

The Atmorans, for their part, came down from their towers when the volleys were done, and they did not remember, afterwards, why they had built the towers, or what they had loosed the arrows at, or what they had given in exchange for the knowledge that had guided their hands. They only knew that something was missing, and that the missing thing could not be named. This wound, passed down through the generations, is one of the reasons that the Nords of later ages have always regarded the sky with a particular and unshakable suspicion.

The Lunar Lorkhan Account

No entry on the moons of Nirn would be complete without acknowledgement of the rival tradition, which is in many circles the dominant one. The Lunar Lorkhan theory, first systematised by the Temple Zero Society and preserved in works such as Fal Droon's The Lunar Lorkhan, holds that the moons of Nirn are not ascended Direnni at all, but the two halves of Lorkhan's sundered flesh-divinity. On this account, when Trinimac tore the Heart from Lorkhan's body at the close of Convention, the body itself split open, and its remains took up an orbit around the world that Lorkhan's trick had called into being. The pockmarks on Massa are, in this telling, not the wounds of the Siege of the Sky but the slow decay of a corpse that cannot finish dying. The "Cloven Duality" that the Psijics of Artaeum ascribe to the moons, the dichotomy of being and nothingness, of the body and its absence, is in this telling the very signature of Lorkhan's divided remains.

This chronicle does not pretend to resolve the dispute. Both accounts have their defenders. The Lunar Lorkhan theory has the merit of simplicity and of fitting cleanly into the broader mythic pattern of the Heart of the World, wherein Lorkhan's sacrifice is the cost of every thing that persists on Nirn. The Tilion-and-Urwendi account has the merit of explaining why the moons shine, which the corpse-theory does not explain at all. A corpse does not cast a light of its own.

The reader is invited to weigh them. This chronicler's own view, offered here without the usual Aldmeri impersonality, is that the two accounts may be less incompatible than they appear. It is not impossible that what ascended on the night of the Siege of the Sky was Tilion and Urwendi, and that what they ascended into was the already-existing shape left behind by Lorkhan's breaking, as a watchman might take up residence in a tower that someone else had built and died in. But this is speculation, and it is no part of either tradition as received, and the reader should treat it as the chronicler's conjecture only.

Auridon: the Cerulean Pilgrimage