Game story · Tamriel

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

An agent of the Emperor enters the Iliac Bay to investigate a dead king and a missing letter, then becomes central to a struggle over the Numidium.

1996Third EraCanon status: Variable endings

What happens in the game

Regional rulers, guilds and supernatural powers seek control of the Mantella, the key to activating the giant Numidium. The agent's alliances determine who can claim that power.

Its incompatible endings are reconciled in later lore by the Warp in the West, a Dragon Break in which several mutually exclusive outcomes become historically true.

The story, step by step

  1. The emperor's two requests

    Uriel sends his agent to the Iliac Bay to investigate King Lysandus's haunting and recover a politically dangerous letter. These tasks draw the player into the rival courts of Daggerfall, Wayrest and Sentinel.

  2. The Mantella

    The Numidium, a brass colossus once used by Tiber Septim, can be reactivated only through the Mantella. Royal houses, the Underking, the Blades and supernatural powers compete to control a device capable of remaking regional sovereignty.

  3. The Warp in the West

    The player's chosen recipient should produce one ending, yet later history records several contradictory victories. The Dragon Break makes these outcomes simultaneously real and transforms player choice into an in-world rupture of linear time.

What the story is really about

Power exceeds its intended owner

No claimant can use Numidium without changing the balance for everyone. Technology, divinity and state power become inseparable.

Contradiction as history

Instead of selecting one canonical ending, later lore preserves incompatibility and makes unstable time part of the setting's metaphysics.

How it ends

The Numidium is activated and the political map of the Iliac Bay is transformed; later history preserves multiple outcomes through the Warp in the West.

What changes afterward

  • It establishes unreliable and simultaneous history as part of Elder Scrolls canon.
  • Its factions and metaphysics shape how later games treat player choice.

How it connects forward

Morrowind continues the Third Era with a prophecy whose truth is also contested by politics and religion.

Places in this game

Sources:

← Back to the universe