Pocket Guide to the Empire, Third Edition: Arena Supermundus

Pocket Guide to the Empire, Third Edition

Author: Imperial Geographic Society

Content
he aim of the Guide is to describe the Empire of Tamriel as it stands today, but we must at least briefly put it in context, by describing what lies beyond us. As vast as Tamriel is, we are only but one small part of the greater world of Nirn. It is a physical place, but a spiritual one as well, comprising what teachers of mysticism call the Mundus or, more delightfully, the Gray Maybe.

As Cyrodiil is the center point of Tamriel, taking the best of what surrounds her, so Mundus is the center of the spiritual world, blending the darkness of Oblivion with the searing light of Aetherius. It is sometime called the Arena here, for forces are eternally at struggle. Wealth and subjugation, love and loss, life and death and undeath, inviolate laws of nature, and conversely, magickal means of breaking those laws. There are some who even speak of good and evil, but these concepts are subjective and not spiritual. Still, they suggest one more of the many struggles in the Arena of Mundus.

Imperial scribes of the original Guide ignored this totality for multitudinous reasons, mostly borne from the shifting political and racial landscape of the time, and the exertions of moving mankind to the center stage of all things. Or perhaps it was a simple lack of knowledge. Precursor to Tiber's time of conquest were the dark and cumulative losses of four centuries of Interregnum. In any case, a fair-weather handwaving of the worlds beyond was preferable to an attempt at even a layman's introduction to the grandeur of high domain.

And while the Morihatha Edition tried valiantly to rectify a little of this in its opening pages, it is at the request of the current regime, which has experienced firsthand the peril and wonder of the Supermundus, that its citizenry be gifted with more than a casual glance of the mystic realms beyond our shores.

Source: The Imperial Library