Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-26177830-20150401044533/@comment-121511-20150404214613

Sothas wrote: The turning of the kalpas does affect what's outside of Mundus. It has to, otherwise they aedra/daedra would not switch places. Now, Aedra are always Aedra and Daedra are always Daedra as kalpas reset at Convention which is after everyone made their choice on where they stand on creation. (of course this is true until something specific changes that such as monkey dancing or Alduin curse for example), but the fundamentals of the Aurbis change. Peryite, for example, is suppose to change places with Akatosh in the next Kalpa. What exactly this means isn't entirely clear though. Could it mean that he becomes chief over the Aedra. Unlikely. He is Akatosh's shadow, so it's possible he is the bound Dragon and time is more diseased and rotting. (Inturpret that how you will). There's also the possibility of some other kalpa having Meridia take Kyne's place. They're practically the same anyway. An Aurbis with Meridia as chief over life would be more of a Tapestry than a Musical. The possibilities go on.

Et'ada can be killed, but their death isn't like mortal death. Lorkhan is the example here. However, Alduin can't do anything about the Aedra because they use the Walkabout which allows them to travers outside the Aurbis while Alduin is om nomming everything. In other words, they take a hike through the Dreamsleeve while the kalpa is turning.

Alduin is trans-calpic because the Nords are. Or more specifically, they probably are. There was a piece written a couple months ago on r/teslore about it. It's one of the more awesome and quite believable theories I've seen in a while.

I think Alduin's claim as First Born come from monkey dancing. The Selectives altered the Dragon with dawn magic and screwed everything up, changed things, and in the end we have a very very Manish Aka aspect who took the place of Auri-El as the first Dragon. My thought is that Alduin was "next" to come out of the Aka shattering.

There is significant disagreement as to whether On Boethiah's Summoning Day is valid or not in its insistence that the Aedra and Daedra switch places. If Kalpas do indeed reset to Creation or Convention as is the (no pun intended) conventional wisdom, then they cannot, as, as you note, the roles of the Aedra and Daedra were defined by that point. It more or less depends on how you interpret the validity of the text, which could simply be well-written Apocrypha. And of course, it is the only text mentioning a shuffling of roles, and it could simply be wrong: the unreliable narrator is ever unreliable.

As for Alduin, really all we have to go on are theories. References to "Alduin"'s presence in past Kalpas may be explained by the fact that Nordic storytellers are never completely truthful (and indeed, anything regarding past Kalpas is simply a half-remembered memory). We do not know of whether Nords exist in every Kalpa, but from what we do know of past Kalpas, it seems highly unlikely: as Alduin's existence is tied to the existence of the Nords, it seems more likely that there is a different World Eater for each Kalpa, who is born, eats the world, dies, and is reborn from a different culture in the new Kalpa.

As for et'Ada, I meant more that they cannot be killed in the traditional sense: "death" lacks finality for them, and indeed Lorkhan continues to affect changes on the Mundus millenia after his Heart was torn out. That said, I'm fairly certain that Daedra (and possibly Ge) cannot be killed, as they simply re-coalesce in their realms.