On the Main Myths of Creation
On the question of how Mundus came to be, the traditions diverge sharply, and even the two oldest Aldmeri accounts cannot be fully reconciled.
The first, preserved most completely in the ancient Aldmeri text Heart of the World, holds that Mundus was made. The et'Ada, persuaded by Lorkhan, poured themselves into the raw stuff of creation and built a world where none had existed before. In this telling, the architecture of the mortal plane is the architecture of their sacrifice: Mundus is coextensive with the Aedra who gave themselves to it, and its very existence is their diminishment made concrete.
The second, preserved in the Annotated Anuad, holds that Mundus was found. The cosmos had already been shattered in a prior calamity, and Mundus was one splinter of that wound: a dead world at the centre of a ruined geometry, into which the et'Ada later committed themselves. The Aedra did not build Mundus so much as they made it live.
The Heart of the World
The fullest surviving statement of the first tradition is the Aldmeri text known as Heart of the World. It is a myth of deception and consequence, and it frames the creation of Mundus not as an accident or a discovery but as the successful execution of a deliberate trick.
In this telling, the et'Ada, finding the formlessness of the Aurbis intolerable, ask for a schedule, a procedure, something by which they might endure long enough to enjoy themselves. In answer, Auri-El bleeds through the Aurbis as a new force: time. With time, the aspects of the Aurbis can name themselves, know themselves, and persist. They take names like Magnus, Mara, Xen, and many others. Among them is Lorkhan, who is described in this account as "more of a limit than a nature, so he could never last long anywhere." Lorkhan moves through every aspect of Aurbis and plants an idea. The idea is that there should be a place where even the aspects of aspects might self-reflect, a soul for the Aurbis itself: a Mundus, a mortal world. Many of the et'Ada agree. Auri-El, offered kingship of the new world, agrees as well. Together they pour themselves into the making of Mundus, and in so doing become its Aedra.
"But this was a trick. As Lorkhan knew, this world contained more limitations than not and was therefore hardly a thing of Anu at all. Mundus was the House of Sithis." — Heart of the World, author unknown
This is the pivot on which the ancient texts diverge. According to the Heart of the World, the new world is not a thing of Anu at all, because it is made of limitation far more than of essence. It is the House of Sithis: a place where everything must end, where nothing may hold its form for long, where the price of persistence is continual diminishment. Lorkhan, the limit that can never last anywhere, has persuaded the unlimited to bind themselves to limit, and has done so by promising them a kingdom.
The consequences unfold swiftly. As the et'Ada's aspects begin to die off within Mundus, each must choose some means of continuing. Magnus sees the trap and escapes back to Aetherius, tearing the hole that becomes the sun; this is why, in the Aldmeri account, there are no true limitations to magic, for the way out that Magnus cut remains open. Y'ffre and others of his kind transform themselves into the Ehlnofey, the Earthbones, dissolving into the laws of the world so that the whole world might not perish with them. Still others, too weakened to dissolve and unable to flee, endure the only way left to them: they marry, and they make children, and they live on through descendants whose divinity grows thinner with each generation. These are the ancestors of the Aldmer, whom Auri-El continues to lead. From the old Aldmer, the Altmer people will come to be. They are called the High Elves and are the race from which all elven descendants will derive from during the Daedric Age.
Meanwhile Lorkhan gathers the very weakest of the surviving souls, the ones most reduced by the trap he himself sprung, and names them Men. In this account, Men are not a parallel creation but a consequence of the creation's failure: they are made from the leavings, and they bring Sithis into every quarter of the world, because Sithis is the substance they are nearest to.
What follows is the subject of the next entry in this chronicle: Auri-El's appeal to Anu, the granting of the Bow and Shield, the loss of Altmora, and at last Trinimac's tearing of Lorkhan's heart from his body. See "The War of the First World" for the full account.
The Shattering and the Twelve Worlds
The Anuad tradition begins not with Lorkhan's proposal but with a much older wound. When Anu and Padomay first beheld one another across the Void, their meeting produced Nir, the first manifestation of possibility and personalization of Nirn. Nir favoured Anu, and Padomay, in jealousy, struck her down. Anu's answering blow shattered Padomay's body into twelve fragments, each of which became a world.
These twelve worlds are not metaphors. They are the planets and planes that mortals still see wheeling through the night sky. Only one of them, the central and most fragile, became the home of mortal life. The other eleven remained as silent companions, some visible, some hidden, each a splinter of the same primordial fracture.
This shattering is sometimes attributed directly to Sithis, the spirit of limitation who arose from Padomay's essence. In that telling, the division of the Aurbis into twelve is not the wound that birthed creation but the act of creation itself: the first true limitation imposed on the boundless, and therefore the first thing that could properly be called a cosmos rather than mere undifferentiated possibility.
In this account, the work of the Aedra is different from what the Heart of the World describes. They did not build Mundus from nothing. They committed themselves to a splinter that was already there, imposed order upon it, and made of a dead fragment a living world. Their sacrifice is no less real for being a sacrifice of inhabitation rather than construction: to bind oneself to a ruined shard of a murdered god is arguably a heavier price than to pour oneself into a fresh creation.
The Anuad tradition has one further consequence that the Heart of the World cannot accommodate. The Anuad hold that the Ehlnofey themselves are not fallen et'Ada at all, but fragments of the original world, Sithis, liberated from its shattering. According to this account, the Ehlnofey or Earthbones take their name from being literally the bones of Sithis. Under this reading, the Ehlnofey are older than Mundus, and their arrival on Nirn is what first seeded the splinter with the possibility of mortal life.
The Sacrifice of the Aedra and Beginning of the Dawn Era
Both myths of creation, and many other minor ones, agree that the Aedra who took part in Lorkhan's plan paid a terrible price. To fashion a place where change and permanence could coexist, they poured their divine essence into the raw stuff of creation, and in doing so were forever bound to the thing they had made. They did not create Mundus from nothing: they became Mundus, or at least the scaffolding upon which it rests.
As the spirits on the newly formed Nirn began to die off, the et'Ada were forced into one of four fates. Some, called Magna Ge, followed Magnus and tore themselves free and fled back to Aetherius. Some clung to what power they could and became the greater Aedra, diminished but still recognisable as gods, this is the case of The Divines. Some dissolved wholly into the world and became the natural laws that hold it together. And some other, the weakest and most stubborn, endured by binding themselves to flesh: they married, they bore children, and they lived on through their descendants. These last two lineages are called Ehlnofey.
The greater Aedra retained more of their identity, though not their full power. As a last grand act of mastery over the matter of creation itself, Auri-El ascended as the binder of time, giving Mundus the linear flow of past, present, and future that mortals would one day call history. Before Auri-El's sacrifice, time on Mundus is said to have been non-linear, folded, or entirely absent. Thus began the Dawn Era.
The Architecture of the Aurbis
However Mundus came to be, its place within the Aurbis is agreed upon by every tradition. It is not a flat or singular place, but a nested structure of realms, each defined by its distance from the primordial forces of Anu and Padomay.
At the outermost layer lies Aetherius, the infinite realm of pure magical essence. It is the domain most closely aligned with Anu, a plane of stasis, light, and unending potential. The et'Ada who refused both Lorkhan's plan and Oblivion eventually dispersed into Aetherius, where their essences became indistinguishable from the light itself.
Surrounding the mortal plane is Oblivion, the churning middle realm claimed by the Daedra. It is not one place but many: a theoretically infinite number of pocket realms, each shaped by the will of a Daedric Prince. Oblivion is the expression of Padomay's principle, a realm where change is absolute and form is only as stable as its ruler wishes it to be.
At the very center of this arrangement lies Mundus, the mortal plane, and within it the world of Nirn. Mundus is the convergence point of Anu and Padomay, a place where stasis and change are held in tense equilibrium. It is the only realm where true mortality exists, because it is the only realm where time, birth, and death all flow together.
"Magic comes to Tamriel from Aetherius, the magical plane or realm, through the sun and stars, which are actually holes in the fabric of Oblivion, which lies between Aetherius and Mundus." — Magic from the Sky, by Irlav Jarol
The Flight of Magnus
AS explained above, not all the Aedra accepted their diminishment with grace. As Lorkhan's trick became apparent, some of the architects tried to flee. Foremost among them was Magnus, the head architect himself, who had designed much of Mundus but refused to be buried within it.
Magnus tore a hole in the fabric of Oblivion and fled back toward Aetherius. The wound he left behind did not close. It remains as the sun: it is at the same time a burning sphere and an aperture, a gap in the veil of Oblivion through which the raw magic of Aetherius pours continuously into the mortal world.
The lesser spirits who followed Magnus in his flight, called the Magna Ge or Star Orphans, made smaller tears of their own as they escaped. These are the stars, the scattered pinpricks of Aetherial light visible on any clear night. Every point of light in the sky of Nirn is therefore a wound, a place where creation was not quite finished, and through which magic bleeds into the world.
This is why Magnus is regarded as the origin of all arcane power. He is not present in the sun so much as the latter is the shape of his absence, and every mage who draws upon magicka draws, in some small measure, through the hole he left behind.
"When Magnus left, there was a tearing, and the first of the et'Ada to die was a Magna Ge, who was ripped asunder at the threshold. Some say this is why the stars shine: each is a wound, and each wound remembers." — The Monomyth, author unknown
The Ehlnofey: First of the Mortals
The Ehlnofey are the spirits already introduced twice in this entry: once in the Anuad tradition, where they are named as the bones of Sithis, and again in the Heart of the World, where they appear as diminished et'Ada who stayed behind after the creation of Mundus. This section does not resolve that older disagreement. It takes up a different problem, one that arises regardless of which origin one accepts: the nature of what the Ehlnofey became, and the distinction often drawn, but rarely understood, between Earthbones and Ehlnofey.
The first thing to say is that in the original Aldmeris, there is no distinction. Ehlnofey simply means "Earth Bones". When the Aldmer spoke of the Ehlnofey, they meant every lesser spirit who had stayed with the world, in whatever form that staying had taken.
The distinction now drawn between "Earthbones" and "Ehlnofey" is a modern one, and it is largely the work of Imperial and Breton scholars seeking to make sense of a body of mythic material that did not originally require sense to be made of it. It is a useful distinction, and this entry will adopt it, but the reader should understand that it is a scholarly convenience, not a native truth.
Under the modern convention, Earthbones names those spirits who gave themselves wholly to Mundus and dissolved into its laws. Y'ffre is most often cited as the first and exemplar: the spirit who, seeing that the world could not hold without rules, became the rules. From this sacrifice arose the fixed order of nature — the turning of seasons, the inheritance of form from parent to child, the very possibility of a story having a beginning and an end. The Earthbones, so defined, are not worshipped in the ordinary sense. One does not petition the law of gravity. But their sacrifice underwrites every other sacrifice that follows.
Ehlnofey in the narrower modern sense names those diminished spirits who did not fully dissolve, but instead took on mortal-like form, binding themselves to flesh and continuing their existence through lineage rather than through law. They are the ancestors of all mortal life on Nirn, and it is from them that the first peoples will descend in the section that follows.
The two categories are real enough for the purposes of narration. But they describe two degrees of the same act, not two different kinds of being. The spirit who becomes a law and the spirit who becomes a lineage have both chosen the same thing: to stay with the world and pay the price of staying. That the one paid it by dissolving and the other by enduring is a difference of method, not of nature. This is why the Aldmer used a single word for both, and why that older usage is worth keeping in mind even as one adopts the modern terminology. The Earthbones and the Ehlnofey are the same kindred, parted only by how completely each of them gave themselves away.