With the second season in The Elder Scrolls Online, some old content is returning to the base game, including the favorite city of editor Sophia Weiß from November 9, 2026. She is incredibly looking forward to diving back into the lore of one vanished Skyrim race.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is, just like its province, huge and partially explorable in the MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online. On November 9, my favorite city from Skyrim finally comes to the base game of ESO: Markarth. The westernmost city of the province lies in the mountains bordering High Rock. But Markarth is not just any random capital of a principality:
The current
city of Markarth was not built by the residents of Skyrim themselves, but crafted into the well-preserved ruins of an ancient Dwemer fortress. When exactly the Dwemer originally settled into the rock is unknown. For the Dwemer are one of the great mysteries of the Elder Scrolls universe.
The people simply disappeared without a trace – as if they got snapped away by Thanos from the Marvel universe. In Markarth, a hint of this lost civilization seems to linger. That’s why I love the city so much and have spent many hours searching every Dwemer ruin for new information about their fate.
What remains are just ruins
Whoever roams in Skyrim – whether in single-player or MMORPG – will sooner or later discover one of the underground Dwemer fortresses. These are abandoned dungeons carved into stone by a people that vanished in the 8th century of the First Era from the collective memory of the world.
The Dwemer, also called the Dwarves
of Tamriel (even though they were of normal stature), are said to have shared a common ancestor with the elves. They built their realms into the mountains and the underground of Skyrim. Unlike the other races, they relied less on magic and industrialized to a certain extent.
Their ruins are still populated by mechanical constructs today, and much of their rudimentary technology still works during the time of the last Dragonborn. This makes exploration quite dangerous – for the player but also for the blind elven folk of the Falmer, who also live underground. However, one can find good loot here, like Dwemer armors and weapons.
In The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, the so-called last Dwemer can be encountered. Yagrum Bagarn was a craftsman, architect, and engineer. Due to an illness, he can only move forward with a spider-like walker. Dwemer ghosts also appear in the same game, which is why we know that they had a normal stature.
But even though the Dwemer appear in the game, it is never quite clear why he even is the last of his kind and what happened to the rest of his people.
I myself, and likely a considerable portion of the Elder Scrolls players, want to know what happened to the Dwemer. They disappeared overnight in the middle of the First Era. With all their belongings, men, and mice. As if they had collectively decided to sneak away at night.
The annoying thing is that there is no official, confirmed explanation for this. But there are theories.
Snapped away by gods or tasted the forbidden fruit?
The Dwemer were pronounced atheists. They did not believe in the gods of Tamriel and completely rejected any worship of gods. The dwarf Kagrenac attempted to build a machine god as part of the Counter-creation
initiative. For this, he wanted to use the heart of the deceased god Lorkhan.
The Chimer, ancestors of the elven Dunmer, caught wind of the plan and prevented this heresy in the battle at Red Mountain. The Dwemer failed, and shortly after, the entire people seemed to be swallowed by the earth.
So what happened? We do not know for sure, verified and confirmed. But it probably has something to do with the Counter-creation initiative. On Reddit, a user summarizes it as [The Dwemer[ fucked around and found out with the heart of a dead god
.
The gods of Tamriel and the planet Nirn are real, that is certain. They are existing entities that can intervene in the events of the world. If playing with the heart of a dead god did not cause the extinction of the people, then perhaps a living colleague of the deceased Lorkhan could have done the Thanos for the Dwemer.
The last Dwemer, Yagrum Bagarn, also explains the disappearance of his people in Morrowind as a consequence of the experiments with the heart of Lorkhan. His people were sent to another plane of existence. Yagrum does not know where exactly.
Another theory goes very meta: The Dwemer wanted to become gods.
In this theory, life on Nirn is described as a dream. To be a god, one must be both dreaming and awake at the same time. One woke up from an amazing dream and went back to sleep, to dream some more and controll said dream. However, the Dwemer simply woke up (via Reddit).
This theory is based on the statements of Michael Kirkbride. The former author, producer, and artist of The Elder Scrolls explained that a sleeping deity dreams the entire universe. To be a god in this universe, one must be aware that one is acting in a dream.
A variation of this theory is also explained on Reddit: the Dwemer recognized the existence of the dreaming god and the truth that Nirn is just a dream. But as an intellectual people that does not believe in gods and wants to act and think rationally, they also understood that they technically do not exist. And thus they ceased to exist.
The next big chunk of Elder Scrolls lore will probably only come with The Elder Scrolls VI. However, this game will not be released in the foreseeable future. I do not expect it before 2028, and that is, I believe, quite optimistic. 2030 feels more realistic to me. And even then, it is not certain whether we will learn much new about the Dwemer. But hope dies last!
In the meantime, I will stretch the time with other games. Perhaps this winter I will go for another Skyrim run with modern graphics. Or alternatively, I could also venture back into The Elder Scrolls Online and search for new insights in the multiplayer Markarth starting in November. You can read everything about the new season around Skyrim here: Elder Scrolls Online now gifts you “Skyrim” and 2 dungeons
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