Mundus and Aetherius

- By Valeres Bandian
It has already been noted by many great scholars and historians that there have been fewer and fewer great mages in Mundus as time has gone on; even at the time of the 4th Era and the Empire, it was noted that there had been no mages with any shadow of the skill of Shalidor or the many Dragon Priests for thousands of years. Those mages who had come close had often only done so with the help of Daedric Princes - Mankar Camoran, for example, who was helped by Mehrunes Dagon before the Oblivion Crisis of 3E 433. However, the majority of these articles either gave no explanation, only passing by the subject briefly, or only rudimentary explanations, blaming it on the widespread fear of the population or on the dissolution of the Mages Guild in 4E 178. Unable to find an explanation, I decided to research this myself.

Upon deciding to research this, I began by heading to the Imperial Library. For those who do not know, the Imperial Library holds most of the surviving texts from before the collapse of the Empire in 4E 1735 (or 0.pr), as well as many other, more recent, texts. The texts are in the process of being digitally recorded and translated, but many remain in their original form. I compiled a collection of books on magic throughout the past. In particular I was interested in the difficulty of spells in the past. Here I learnt that as time has gone on, while it is hard to tell fact from fiction with many of the older works, magic appears to have got harder to cast and perform. This has been noted before by Soni Dark-Eyes, who says in “Great Reckonings,” that this is because “in the First Era, and before, it was rare to find a mage who did not already have a great natural talent, while in the later Eras, it was far easier to become a mage without that  inbuilt talent.” This statement would explain why the mages of the 3rd and 4th Eras were less powerful, but since the development of gunpowder and the advancement of other weapons and technology, it is once again the situation that, for the most part, only those with a natural talent become mages, yet the mages appear to continue to find it harder.

No; this was not because of who was becoming mages, I decided. This was something to do with the source of magicka - Aetherius.