Lore:Dragon Break

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"Do you mean, where were the Khajiit when the Dragon Broke? R'leyt tells you where: recording it. 'One thousand eight years,' you've heard it. You think the Cyro-Nordics came up with that all on their own. You humans are better thieves than even Rajhin! While you were fighting wars with phantoms and giving birth to your own fathers, it was the Mane that watched the ja-Kha'jay, because the moons were the only constant, and you didn't have the sugar to see it." — Where Were You ... Dragon Broke

A Dragon Break is a phenomenon where linear time is broken, and becomes non-linear. The Dragon refers to Akatosh, the God of Time. The Dragon Break challenges mortal comprehension, it is a re-alignment of time and space in response to an event which makes the normal continuity of reality impossible. Such intervals are often called a Middle Dawn, referring to the Dawn Era, of whose chaos the Dragon Break is a refrain.

Examples of Dragon Breaks are The Warp in the West (the apotheosis of Talos and Mannimarco), the moment the Tribunal tapped into the Heart of Lorkhan at Red Mountain (need the quote of Vivec's rapture here), and the first activation of the Brass God, Numidium.

A sect of the Alessian Order, the Maruhkati Selective, is also said to have caused a Dragon Break spanning one thousand and eight years from the 13th to the 23rd centuries in the First Era by attempting to exorcise elements of Elven Auriel from Imperial Akatosh. ^[1] This is the only Dragon Break that is a universally-known event. Yet this event's actual occurrence is disputed, most notably in Fal Droon's The Dragon Break Re-Examined. Droon attributes a combination of factors, including translational error by historians, a lack of decent archaeological records, and a bout of religious creativity in the Third Era, to the creation of a legend of a millennium of Alessian rule and paranormal events. He believes that no cosmic disruption took place at all, and that the "Dragon Break" story was invented centuries later to explain inconsistencies in the Encyclopedia Tamrielica. He cites "scholarly inertia," obsession with "eschatology" and fanatical "Numidiumism" in order to explain the perpetuation of the error. This explanation, which deals with Imperial accounts of the event, notably neglects to explain the records which a variety of cultures (in the case of the Dunmer, a major orthodox entity hostile to the Empire and its religious history), hold concerning the Middle Dawn.