Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-26140153-20150223233143/@comment-69.123.217.197-20150224212608

A bit too tired to come up with a cohesive paragraph, so my thoughts will be in bullet form.


 * Nothing "lives" in Atmora anymore, as Atmora is frozen. Not frozen in the conventional sense, but frozen in time: time does not flow there, and has come to a grinding halt. Those who would become the Nords and Giants left it before this happened (old Atmorans were very large in size and stature: Nords lost their size, Giants lost their intellect, but both have the same roots).


 * Dragons are not animals or sentient creatures in the way men, mer, and beastfolk are, but Aedric spirits: they are fragments of the shattered Time Dragon Aka/Aka-Tusk, larger shards comprising major aspects (Auriel, Alduin, Akatosh), smaller shards comprising the more traditional dov. They are of two sorts, "males" who help Alduin with eating each Kalpa, and "females" (also called Jills) who heal time-wounds and conduct damage control after Dragon Breaks. Quotation marks as they do not reproduce and do not die, and have existed for as long as Aka has been fractured.


 * It is in the nature of "male" dragons (and by extension Dragonborn) to dominate: the will to power is in their blood, and Paarthurnax quite flatly states this. He (the Last Dragonborn as well, for that matter) feels the urge to dominate his peers as it is coded in his nature, but overcomes it through force of will. Evidently even a major aspect of the Time Dragon suffers from this urge (possibly others do as well), as the Last Dragonborn's entire purpose revolves around the fact that Alduin forsakes his role as World Eater in order to play King over mortals. It is likely that this deep urge comes from Aka's screaming of "I am" against Lorkhan's "I am not", which feeds into the insistent and perhaps subconscious need for dragons to assert their existence in a very Boethiahic manner at the expense of others ("I am alive because that one is dead. I exist because I have the will to do so").