We Just Figured Out This Skyrim Mystery

hey how's it going guys it's Nate here and welcome to another Skyrim investigative video if you've been watching my channel for a while you know one of the concepts unmown the elder scrolls as laura is the mystery concerning the eye of magnus and exactly what the objects purpose and backstory are in case you're unfamiliar shortly after the player has become a student at the college of winterhold you'll be invited on a field trip to explore the ruins of the oldest-known nord settlement in all of skyrim possibly the oldest human settlement in Tamriel period while here one thing leads to another and your class accidentally finds their way into a secret previously undiscovered chamber where this big blue sphere can be found floating on a stage of sorts obviously a very intrigued to discover something like this in mankind's most ancient city professors at the college quickly launch an investigation and conclude that the Orbis channeling unfathomable amounts of magical power they nicknamed it the eye of Magnus after the ancient god of magic and decide to take possession of it for further research the remainder of this guild storyline is all about trying to figure out what this eye of Magnus really is and later on stopping a rogue Thalmor agent from using it to conquer the world or something eventually a mysterious group of teleporters calling themselves the Civic order just takes the eye away from the College outright citing your irresponsibility and that's how their entire quest line ends notably though despite all of our work we're never told what the heck the eye actually is nor what its origins are and why it was being held in mankind's first settlement on the continent so in today's video it's those questions we're going to set out to answer we're gonna run through everything we know about the object's history and then go through a couple very interesting connections it seems to have with other games in the Elder Scrolls franchise connections I don't think anyone else is made and there's a particular set of revelations I think you'll love in the end well we may not 100% settle everything we're gonna come pretty close and I think you'll be happy with where we leave anyway without any further ado let's do further now I've already provided a relatively general overview of the I in the College of Winterhold storyline and we'll hop back to that in a bit but first let me explain the history of the location we find it in and why that makes the orbit such a tremendous deal you see it's located deep within sarthe all perhaps the first Nord colony in all of Skyrim and definitely the first one we know of Nords of course are not natives to Tamriel despite what Ulfric might claim their homeland where their race really emerged is the continent of atmora a landmass across the northern sea of ghosts that's never been mapped well it was once habitable since the first era it's evidently gotten so cold no life is able to survive there some time thousands of years ago in the maratha era the Nords began sailing down and establishing small settlements in modern-day skyrim as mentioned the first of these was where we find the eye sarthe all which would become the largest and most prosperous city of them all as this migration was underway though skyrim was already being lived in by a different race of people the snow elves or Fulmer who had their own cities of society and government initially relations between these two colliding peoples were shockingly good the Alps were seemingly cool with Nords moving in which was very nice of them given how this stuff usually works out on earth and before long trade was running abundant but then something must have changed this is where our history gets a little fuzzy some books claim the snow elves started to grow resentful of their new human neighbors all argue there was no breakdown of relations at all but nonetheless what we do know is that one night a snow Elvin army creeped up on the city of Tsar Thal and launched an all-out attack the Nord defenders were totally unprepared and allegedly almost every single one of the city's inhabitants was put to the sword this night would come to be known as the night of Tears again accounts differ some authors argue the Elven attack was an obvious result of jealousy and fear of the humans who are growing too strong but then some books allege their motives were more mysterious and complicated than that the Imperial report on Tsar Thal which was written by an imperial researcher of thousands of years after these events happened points out that there's really no evidence of deteriorating relations or jealousy between either society and the writer notes that the way the elves attacks are Thal was weird saying quote after reviewing the evidence my inclination is to suggest that not only did the elves know the apparent layout of the city but that their assault was based on a specific directive and perhaps a singular goal end quote another book on the matter conveniently called night of Tears is even more damning it contains the following paragraph quote the Nords found something when they built their city buried deep in the ground they attempted to keep it buried but the elves learned of it and coveted it for themselves thus they assaulted south all their goal not to drive the Nords out but to secure this power for themselves end quote hmm I wonder what this object could have been now of course the former attack on the city would ultimately backfire horrendously as the town's leader a Nord named yeast Gomorrah and a few of his sons did manage to escape in fact they were among the only survivors how lucky together they sailed back to atmora where they told tales of the horrific water and quickly formed an army of the most powerful warriors they could find with this army you scream war and his boys then came back to Skyrim and boy did they open up a can of whoop-ass on the elves not only was every former army quickly defeated but then the nord started burning all of their cities destroying all of their temples and hunting down every single elf they could get their hands on men women children elder all of them would pay I got kind of dark well in a few short years thus ysgramor had effectively driven the foamer into extinction and mankind became the sole remaining master of Skyrim okay so cool story Nate but what exactly did it have to do with the eye of Magnus again well the clear implication is that its presence in Southall is what really led the elves to attack it in the first place and spark the whole conflict to begin with the thing is even this revelation leaves us with a lot of questions like what was the I doing in Southall remember one book suggests that Nords dug it up and found it for themselves but why was it buried there and how can we be sure that's what really happened furthermore why did the elves what did so badly what were their plans or what were they afraid of remember we don't even know how powerful the AI is anyway so the possibilities are endless already let's just pause the video right here well not actually pod you know what I mean so the night of tears and the human / snow elf war we just talked about seem to be merely one of two major historical conflicts the orb was involved in that took place before the events of skyrim the problem is in order to understand the other one it's important we're all on the same page regarding how Skyrim's college of winterhold Equestria quick we're going to summarize that storyline point out everything that's important and then we'll move on to talk about the other historical event / war that can the eye I promise it'll be worth it here we go shortly after we discover the orb and the college takes it in the university will start to be visited by a strange group of high elf mages claiming to be members of something called the siddik order these men will come off as mere gracious visitors at first and can be spotted having pleasant conversations with professors though we soon learn they've been asking to speak with us specifically eventually when we do talk with one the dude will freeze time for everyone but you and him and privately explain what's going on he's clear that he means no harm and that the Civic's are the good guys but warns that by finding the eye of Magnus we in the college have set in motion a horrible chain of events that we have to be prepared to deal with the elf is very vague in details refusing to elaborate on anything but specifically warns us to keep an eye on a Kanoa the Thalmor is representative to the college with that final word of wisdom he disappears throughout the remainder of the story these sick people will frequently appear to the dovakin envisions an offeror foggy yet helpful and foreshadowing advice okay so right off the bat a good question worth asking is what is the siddik order obviously they're connected to the eye so this is something to investigate well Skyrim doesn't really tell us about them but thankfully previous Elder Scrolls games and especially the Elder Scrolls online have a bit more lore on these people the sick order is perhaps the oldest known magical guild in all of Tamriel but we don't know when exactly it was founded we do know their first recorded mention in history was way back in the early first era they're also apparently based out of an island called artyom that's usually been located in the summerset isles but more on their home in a second in eso we learn that they're actually the original founders or first practitioners of mysticism a school of magic that centers on the very manipulation of the physical world itself and they are very very secretive what we do know is that on occasion members of the Civic order have been known to advise various political rulers across Tamriel such as kings and emperors and in very very rare instances they'll directly intervene to prevent a war or something horrific like a de jure invasion as they did in the ESO but when they're not active oftentimes the entire guild will just disappear every now and again not only will they vanish but their island artyom will also go with them and just be deleted oftentimes they'll be absent for hundreds or thousands of years in a row only to return briefly in order to help solve a major problem or something presumably what's really happening is that the Civic's are just moving themselves and their island to another plane of existence beyond the mortal realm maybe they're going somewhere in oblivion or something like that but we're not actually too sure how it works now funnily enough according to every single book we can find on the subject no one has heard from the six nor their Island since the Year 110 of the third era around five hundred and twenty years prior to the events of Skyrim so their intervention during the eye of Magnus debacle is extremely notable it's their first appearance in half a millennium they don't do this very often obviously they must be worried okay well back to the College's quest line so following our warnings by the Civic's and everything the professors will begin an extensive campaign of research on the eye reviewing every single book and tablet they can to try to learn anything really soon they discover evidence of a staff that can possibly exert some degree of control over the eye and send us on a short series of quests to go locate it ultimately set staff is tracked down to broom genera an ancient nord city that once served as the original capital of skyrim after each grim wars conquest when we go down there we'll find the staff in the hands of more okay a legendary dragon priest who will be very unfriendly we'll have to defeat the creature in battle and take the staff from his corpse let's actually stop right here again and to talk a bit more about Mauro Kai and the labyrinth Ian I promise we're almost done with the colleges story anyway the fact that the staff of Magnus is here at another ancient Nord ruin while the I itself was all the way at south all indicate that the Nords of old may have known a bit more about the object than we think not only did they discover slash somehow acquire the eye of Magnus but they also found a staff that could influence it sort all and room genera are admittedly cities that seem to have been populated at different times however remember the first was a Nord colony that ended up suffering total destruction by the elves in the maratha era and was never resettled Bruijn or on the other hand was built after the Nords conquered skyrim an active is an early capital so why did they bring the staff here exactly hmm we'll get back to that for now let's finish up running through the college's story after the staff has been recovered upon our return to the College we'll find it in total chaos apparently a Cano that Thalmor elf the Sizzix warned us about made his move and barricaded himself in the building the I was being stored in him and is now trying to harness its energy for his own evil ambitions he's already killed that numerous professors and students who got in his way we're not really sure what econo his grand plan actually is and we never do learn he may have been trying to harness the eyes power to benefit the Thalmor as a whole or he may have been acting independently and just wanted to use the AI to help him take over the world by himself or something like that either way we need to stop him what will ensue is a relatively unique boss fight you see by the time we get to the elf Akana is already basically invincible and getting stronger by the second so we can't just cut him down normally instead well first need to use that staff we just found to weaken the AI which will cause econo to lose his invincibility and then we can fight em once we finally slain this devious elf those digit guys will immediately reappear and congratulate the player on saving Skyrim before explaining that they're just gonna take the I of Magnus away from us and watch over it themselves because clearly it's too dangerous and with that they vanished with the orbit and the college's quest line is effectively completed now I'm just gonna be honest and say I've always hated this ending and thought it was a terrible conclusion to the story we're never told that how and cano was leveraging the eyes power were not even told how the staff is able to influence the AI it's just an objective marker and we're never told why the Sizzix didn't just take the orb away sooner seriously if they can just make it disappear whatever why allow us to suffer so much needless death and trauma come on des des well thankfully I can assure you that the story doesn't end here and the Elder Scrolls online which would release three years after Skyrim would make a few interesting revelations about the eye of Magnus most notably that the device was probably or most likely behind an aqua very invasion of Tamriel for those of you who don't know Tamriel is just one of a couple major continents on this planet we've already talked about another called atmora but then there's another called a kuvira that set to be across the far eastern seas and home to numerous alien like civilizations and monsters we know very little about this place it's never been mapped and evidently the ocean that separates akavir in Tamriel is so massive and treacherous few people have ever made the journey nevertheless despite this great distance in the Year 572 of the second era roughly a thousand years before the events of Skyrim and akaviri army crossed that sea and invaded Tamra Ella in fact they invaded Skyrim specifically little is known about these invaders most of our sources refer to the attackers as the kemal or snow demons and allegedly they were something other than human or elf a race no one had ever seen even stranger while the events of the Kemal invasion are pretty well documented meaning we know where it began what battles were fought etc the exact reason the Kemal were invading is one of the elderscrolls universe's biggest mysteries as the snow demons never bothered to send out an voice with peace terms and the way their army moved just didn't make sense at all apparently the Kemal started by surprising the city of Windhelm with a massive fleet and quickly captured and burned it to the ground before proceeding to gain control of most of northern skyrim and destroy numerous other nordic towns in the process within a few months the snow demons had conquered like half of the province and the Nords were just so unprepared for what was essentially an alien invasion to them they could never mount an effective resistance and many humans started to fear their entire country would soon fall but then when all hope was lost the snow demon army just packed up and moved in its entirety to more Windom where they started attacking the dark elves instead it what why would they do that why almost conquer all of Skyrim and then just decide to essentially give back all of the territory you took and start another war at the same time if that sounds like a really silly strategic decision that's because it was as soon as the occupier army stopped marching in more wind to lay siege to a fortress they were defeated by a massive joint army of dark elves argonians and Nords who had all teamed up to save their continent in the end pretty much every snow demon was killed though a few managed to flee back to some ships and presumably sail home to akavir and that's how the whole conflict ended the people of Tamriel would spend hundreds of years afterwards trying to figure out why exactly they were subjected to such trauma and every book on the subject points out that the occupier motives still to this day are unknown we could spend the next 10 to 15 minutes going over various community theories and ideas behind what really happened but thankfully as you might be able to guess we don't need to do that because the Elder Scrolls online seems to have revealed what their true objective actually was you see the Kamal were never interested in trying to conquer all of Skyrim or slay all of the Nords or anything ah they were looking for something ESO introduced a new book titled the second akaviri invasion which was another historical account of the Kamal's invasion of skyrim specifically written from the perspective of someone who's trying to prepare the province just in case they're invaded again in this book the author states that during the snow demons original invasion of Skyrim a few of the creatures were actually captured and well I'll just quote it for you few akaviri knew any Tamriel ik and most died under interrogation one report stated that the kamal king was seeking someone or something called the ordained receptacle but this could easily be a bungled translation and the quote this explains their behavior the snow demons were never trying to conquer Tamriel or anything like that they were really searching for something that's why they were so quick to abandon all the territory they gained in northern skyrim and why they moved so quickly into morrowind and many suspect that ordained receptacle very well might really have been the eye of Magnus this would explain why the kamal began their invasion in northern skyrim rather than anywhere else on the continent that's where the eye is but wait a minute ordained receptacle ordained of course means holy or super special and a receptacle is a container basically the qumola were searching for something called the holy container that doesn't fit the eye of Magnus's description not a container is it well as many of you know the Elder Scrolls online has recently beginning a number of new updates and one of these updates introduced a new system called antiquities basically antiquities is a mechanic that allows players to dig at a number of newly designated sites across Tamriel when you start digging at these places a new minigame will appear and assuming you do everything right in the minigame you'll ultimately be able to dig up a certain item or artifact with a lot of Elder Scrolls history behind it you can choose just to collect these items or place them in your home as furnishing objects one of these items that we could dig up at a site in elsewhere is something called the cat's eye prism and just take a look at it already we can identify some major similarities to the eye of magnus visually speaking it too is a big blue orb flanked by numerous rings there's no way this was a coincidence clearly the cat's eye prism was modeled after the eye of Magnus not only that but after the player is dug up the cat's eye prism will be able to go through numerous new codex entries on it and one of them was written by an archaeologist it reads quote the prism seems too dark for meteoric glass this metallic banding is curious too it's almost like they were trying to keep something contained in the sphere seers might have used it as a scrying stone it follows given the magress connection curious end quote signed gabriella Piniella so researchers believe this object which looks quite a lot like the eye of Magnus was at one point in time being used to contain something maybe the eye of Magnus is a container - after all and maybe it really was that ordained receptacle the kemal were after as well oh yeah and here's the kicker how we know this isn't a coincidence after all the term cat's eye is actually one of the many Kashi nicknames for the god Magnus so we can actually call the cat's eye prism from ESO the Magnus prism yeah they're definitely related and what the Elder Scrolls online seems to be implying is that there are probably more of these sphere like containers spread across the world the cat's eye prism and the eye of Magnus may just only be two of them that we found if what we found underneath Sarthe all really was a container though after all what was it containing then though what was supposed to be inside of it that was of such great significance well I'm just gonna be honest and tell you straight up we don't know and this video isn't capable of answering that question there are any references allusions indications or even clues of what could have been inside beyond the fact that it must have been of great magical power that all said there is a one tiny elderscrolls related story that may just answer the question but brace yourselves it's a little weird enter Michael Kirkbride he's a former Bethesda Game Studios lead writer who contributed extensively to the elder scrolls as lore in the earlier days of Kirkbride officially left the company after the release of morrowind in 2002 though following his departure he decided to keep writing elder scrolls related stories and tales to publish online note that technically everything Kirkbride wrote after leaving bethesda is just fanfiction and should not be taken as canon though given the fact that he was a lead writer who is responsible for so much of the world's history his perspective is definitely worth paying attention to with in late 2011 Kirkbride published detail on his website called tin moon and while a very complicated tale if you choose to believe what this still says is true and is canon it pretty much souls the entire eye of Magnus mystery outright and explains everything it's long though so here's a short summary Kim moon begins in the ninth era of the Elder Scrolls universe remember Skyrim takes place in the fourth so this is set thousands of years in the future it focuses on a sentient asteroid mining robot yes we have the technology for that by now named Kim moon whom thanks to a massive explosion caused for reasons I won't get into it is sent back in space and time all the way back to Skyrim during the mirifique era just as the Nords were beginning to colonize the area Kirkbride points out that the robot was initially very confused and distraught though over the next following years it began to adjust to its new life and before long even learned how to communicate with the native Fullmer and Nords in the region the natives as you might imagine were very impressed by a robot from the future and Kim moon was even welcomed as an advisor to a few local rulers at some point though for complex reasons I'm not really qualified to get into it Kim moon was inadvertently involved in the death of one of yeast gram ores closest friends who was also a giant enraged yeast grimore and many of his Nord followers captured the robot and sealed it away in a container deep beneath Sarthe all there you go that is Kirk brides explanation behind the eye of Magnus it was originally a container built to house a futuristic robot from the 9th era Kirkbride doesn't mention the snow elfin attack on Sarthe all he only states that after a few hundred years a kin moon was able to escape her imprisonment after which she fled the seer adele became a queen and lived happily ever after though it's possible that maybe the elves were attacking because they knew the robot was trapped there and were trying to free her as a matter of fact one of the things pointed out very early on in the story is that King moon is capable of releasing distress signals that can be heard all across Tamriel perhaps the bot was sending those signals to the snow elves begging for help and heck maybe it was even sending those signals to the kemal who invaded Skyrim well we don't because remember well the story is incredibly fascinating it's still not technically canon Kirkbride did not work at Bethesda when he published this so we have to take it with a grain of salt nonetheless it's quite literally the only possible theory we have it's literally the only one that exists at the moment so until the Thesz de introduces more lore that says otherwise I'm just gonna choose to believe that the eye of Magnus really is a container that was meant to harbor a robot from the future as ridiculous as it sounds and this is where we are going to end today's video thanks so much for watching everybody what do you think is going on here do you two also believe that the eye of Magnus is really an over glorified robot box or maybe do you believe something else leave a comment down below as always like ratings are very much appreciated again thanks for stopping by and I hope to catch you all in my next video peace out everyone [Music]

Channel: TheEpicNate315

Views: 1,254,632

Rating: 4.8936539 out of 5

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Id: wJGUWbDip_A

Length: 30min 13sec (1813 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 24 2020