Skyrim's Strangest Ruin, Explained (Kind of)

hey how's it going guys it's Nate here and welcome back to another Elder Scrolls investigative video now I don't think I'd be breaking any ground by saying Skyrim is a game which features a lot of varying locations their cities caves of iowans even godly dimensions beyond the primary mortal around luma however one of the locations that is always particularly stuck out to me is the Dwarven ruin of keg Ren's Ella located right on Skyrim's eastern border with more wind in the below the mountains tigrin Zell is a place you may have never even visited as it's not featured in any of the games quests nor even mentioned in dialogue in many ways it's almost like a filler dungeon although those who have actually ventured there can attest it's in reality an incredibly strange place that offers a few shall we say unique quirks that make it stand out and when we access the broader context of the Elder Scrolls as lore it becomes obvious that your grand cell is likely more important than its place in Skyrim suggests and could even help us get a bit closer to figuring out why the dwarves vanished in the first place in previous list videos I've briefly touched upon Karin's L before but time restraints forced me to skip over some stuff and there's been some interesting discoveries which complicate things even further definitely worth diving into so in today's video I'd like to explain everything that we know to be going on to analyze all of what makes sky Krenzel so weird and from there look into other sources like what we know from previous Elder Scrolls games as Willis Chiron zone game files hopefully connect many of the dots we're not going to quite answer every question we have but we will offer the most encompassing picture possible and propose some fun theories anyway without any further ado let's do further and figure out what the heck is going on with keg Ren's Ella and how it might be related to the disappearance of the Dwemer let's begin by quickly running through the area as mentioned this location isn't featured in any quests so the only way to come across it is if you just happen to be wandering around the eastern edges of Skyrim's map nonetheless here it is just lying on a cliff in the snow-capped mountains inside though things start to get interesting you see tigrin cells initial interior features nothing but a large room with the weird glowing orb atop a pillar in its center with some dead bandits around it when the orb is approached and interacted with a cage will immediately draw upon the player and all of the sudden the object will take flight and start hovering around us in circles almost like it's examining the dovakin eventually the ball of light will go away but the floor beneath us will flip over into a subterranean tunnel that will start following through this is in fact the largest possible fall offered in the entire game and it leads us to safely land in a large pond within a massive dome like cave take a look around the place we've fallen into is humongous and could easily fit fifty maybe a hundred thousand gallons worth of volume heck if I didn't know any better I'd assume that maybe the dwarves were using this place for water storage or something anyway let's just pause our journey right here because there are some important things I want to point out and elaborate that device the orb and whatnot it's unlike anything in any other ruin and seemed to be a security mechanism of sorts that was looking for something about us and trying to decide if we should be dropped down the yorba must have subjected those nearby dead bandits to the same test however rather than let them down it martyred them to death for some reason why maybe we were allowed through because of our Dragonborn nature but why would the dwarves have cared about that furthermore and this is even more alarming in my opinion the tunnel we fall down is lined in various areas with giant non-human bones huh what beasts did these belong to and how are they here this is only made weirder by the fact that if we decide to open up our local map in the bottom of the cave will find painted into said map various images of enlarged animal bones here they are again oh my now bear in mind sky rose local maps were all hand drawn by the gangs artists so these were intentionally sketched in and no other ruined maps have similar features a CAG Rennes L is the only place said bones appear so between the local map ended the remains we find within the tunnel I think it's fair to say Bethesda is clearly hinting at some ancient creature of sorts having been yer at some point in time but more on that later for now let's just hurry up and finish exploring the dungeon because frankly were almost done after we've landed in the cave all there's left to do is swim to the shore and start navigating your way through a claustrophobic yet short tunnel along the way the Dragonborn will be ambushed by various foamer assailants who have taken up residence here and don't like trespassers note that as we progress through this tunnel we can occasionally hear a very loud rumbling noise and I'm not exactly sure what it is it very well could just be noises being made by the foam or as they navigate through rocks and push them down to jump down and attack us or it could be something darker or unsure nonetheless the tunnel will eventually lead us into a secret entrance into Stoney Creek cave a large cave that's actually inhabited by bandits all we need to do now is fight through the bandits progress through the cave and we'll finally make it out into the outside world and thus your big rental experience is over that's the entirety of the dungeon okay so what was going on what were the dwarves doing here why set up that secret device what were those bones supposed to represent and what that was the rumbling sound well let's start by talking about the bones because already we can draw some interesting conclusions by just looking at the game files according to Sky Arms Creation Kit the various enlarged bones we see across the tunnel we fall through or in reality just enlarged mammoth abdominal skeletons that Bethesda up scaled the size of by about three times so is that what the does that was trying to communicate Lizabeth ESDA suggesting there were giant mammoths buried beneath this ruin at some point in time well maybe but I wouldn't bank on it it's very likely that the Thesz de didn't mean to actually represent that and they were simply using the mammoth abdominal bones and changing them up a little bit to represent an entirely different creature I think this is especially likely given the fact we don't find any mammoth skulls here either you would think if there really were mammoths buried beneath keg renzo we would find their skulls too so if not giant mammoths what were these things well one theory we've discussed before is that the bones could have belonged to snow whales snow whales for those of you don't knowa are allegedly a now seemingly extinct species of flying whale that once dominated the skies of northern skyrim however were hunted to extinction by Nords sometime thousands of years ago in the maratha era whether or not snow whales definitely existed is still a question that's being debated by the community as they're only briefly mentioned in like one or two questionable books and some fanfiction written by a former bethesda writer that's not considered canon but hey maybe it was snow whale remains that we found down here heck given the gigantic dome and nature of the cave maybe the dwarves were keeping a bunch of flying whales here and farming or breeding them for some purpose there's certainly more than enough space for flying it's a hilarious theory that I would really love to be true the only problem here is that Bethesda already has a whale skeleton model and texture that they've used in another place in sovngarde there's a gigantic whale bone bridge that links the whole of valor to the rest of the realm if the developers were really trying to represent whale bones in Karen's ella why not have just used that mesh in texture and downscaled it as necessary it doesn't add up and maybe what we're looking at just really belonged to some extinct creature that were not meant to know anyway similarly I also decided to search up the orbit in sky arms creation kit and see what we could find and frankly there's not much apparently its name in the files is or B which is kinda cute and it's actually using the model and texture for a healing spell effect but beyond that there was no information of note alright so so far we've elaborated on K grands Elle's mysteries and explained some vague but unlikely possibilities though we've got no closer to actually answering any of the questions and have no concrete answers for what the dwarves were really doing down here remember earlier in this video I promised this place could be of extreme importance possibly with the connection to the very disappearance of the dwarves in the first place when are we gonna get to that stuff well let's start to talk about cadrin Szell's name and what it means cabrón zell like all dwarven ruins is a dwarven name and while we have a far from perfect understanding of the Dwemer language we can't translate a good bit we know the term gsella means a city or a land of when used as a suffix kind of like the Greek word Poli so Karin's L means the land or city of kagrenac adren mean there are two really big possibilities that I want to dive into and they're both very significant the first is that cadrin means music so this would be music city I'll get into why we think Karen might be music in a second here but first I want to explain why such a name would be such a major deal you see the dwarves didn't think of music in the same way we humans do it in the modern world the Dwemer thought of music and sound not as a source of entertainment but as a mechanism to manipulate the very fabric of reality itself we call this concept tonal manipulation total manipulation is how the Dwemer achieved virtually everything they're known for today it's what's behind their greatest scientific advancements their machines their factories their weapons and armor were all made possible not by magic in fact the dwarves were actually philosophically disgusted by normal magic but by leveraging sound and music to do their bidding so by naming a place K grands L Music City they were clearly attaching a special significance to this location that no other place was bestowed perhaps Karin's L was a center of Dwemer total research in studying or a place where they conducted various experiments now the reason we believe Keigwin does indeed translate to music is thanks to a tablet players can find in more cars in the capital of the reach there's an old man named Cal cel mo who's paid by the yarl to do nothing but study dwarven society and in Cal Selma's Laboratory he has an ancient Dwemer tablet with a dwarven paragraph sketch didn't do it for a while players had no idea what this tablet said as it was all written in dwarven however a Bethesda Game Studios writer later translated it and offered it online I'd read the whole translation to you but it's like really long essentially the tablet tells the tale of the dwarves accepting the foamer in any way in the author's translation every time the word Catron is brought up he uses the word music which indicates that is the translation now it's not perfect this is only one instance of the term being used and we don't know what grammatical influences might have on its meaning but it seems relatively solid now the other possibility is that Carens l wasn't named after music but instead after an ancient dwarven scientist named kagrenac and this is really the city of kagrenac in case you're not familiar kagrenac is probably the most or in the very least one of the top two most important dwarves ever and he is largely considered responsible for the disappearance of the Dwemer in the first place the story goes that kagrenac was perhaps the greatest master of tonal manipulation in the world he was the best at it and just prior to the disappearance of the Dwemer kagrenac was working on constructing an interesting device a massive robot called the new midium the new medium was so incredibly powerful kagrenac thought himself not of building a robot but an entire new god and this entire device would be powered with an ancient artifact known as the heart of lorkhan this was a rock found buried deep beneath the Red Mountain that was believed to have incredibly powerful properties like this very well could have been the most powerful thing in the world and it's what kagrenac wanted to use in the new midium unfortunately for kagrenac the Kaymer or the precursors to the Dark Elves as well as the Nords found out about his plans and demanded he stop he refused and thus the Dwemer had to go to war with most of their neighbors during this conflict kagrenac was working tirelessly on the new midium trying to finish the project however in the middle of the conflict specifically at a battle that was occurring at the red mountain all of the sudden the dwarves just disappeared at once and that was it it's generally accepted that kagrenac must have did something possibly by accident that was responsible for the disappearance of the Dwemer it was all his fault we of course still don't know what where they went or what happened to them but kagrenac is the culprit most suspect in fact during the events of the college of winterhold questline in skyrim we meet a professor named Arnie L who we can help recover some of the tools kagrenac was using to work on the heart of lorkhan and the new midium and Arnie L very much believes the theory I just mentioned that he was responsible for the Dwemer disappearance so maybe KAG Rennes L was kagrenac City maybe this is where the man lived or this was the man's laboratory or maybe this is where he was storing the new midium itself despite the extensive amount of lore we know about him there's also a surprising amount of information we don't know about kagrenac namely which dwarf in City he lived in were unsure if it was in more wind in Skyrim in the below thee mountains the game doesn't specify well none of the games specify we additionally don't know where the new midium was stored according to legend sometime after the Dwarven disappearance the new medium was located somewhere by the leaders of morrowind who kept it for themselves until time herceptin demanded he give it to them which they did and then he was the device to conquer the rest of the world notably though it wasn't powered by the heart of lorkhan at this time so it wasn't quite as powerful as it could have been could it be that was Karen's elves real purpose this was kagrenac city where he was storing his great godlike weapon this notion would explain why the cave is so large and why such unique security system was used but it still wouldn't answer the question of what those bones were or why we were allowed to pass the security check I mean we are Dragonborn but the Dwemer wouldn't have cared about that would they have the way of the voice or our ability to dragon shout is actually considered a type of tonal magic think about it we're manipulating conditions in the world through sound rather than normal magic maybe the orb sensed our recognition of total magic to some degree and thought that was acceptable sadly due to just the sheer lack of the content and evidence within the CAG rensil dungeon we can't really be sure whether this place was named Music City or the city of kagrenac is unclear and either remains a strong possibility furthermore with so many undefined variables it's difficult to assess what exactly was going on though if those names hold up it must have been something important whatever this place was truly used for a gigantic flying whale farm kagrenac personal house or a center of tonal studying well only the dwarves knew and the dwarves are all gone and thus this is where we are going to wrap up today's video thanks so much for stopping by everybody what do you think was going on here do you find these theories acceptable or do you have something on your own leave a comment down below as always like ratings are very much appreciated again thanks for watching and hope to catch you all in my next video peace out everyone

Channel: TheEpicNate315

Views: 853,016

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Id: x55IdCBIAJ4

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020