The Elder Scrolls Online: Necrom puts us into the service of Hermaeus Mora, the Daedric Prince of Knowledge and Memory, as he tries to avert the unravelling of fate itself. We shoulder the burden of forging a fragile peace among a pantheon of scornful egotists to prevent them from unearthing Mora’s darkest secret, a sliver of knowledge he has vowed to never reveal. If it came to light, war among the gods would break out.
Warning, spoilers for The Elder Scrolls Online: Necrom expansion.
As far as Necrom is concerned, only a few mortals and one Daedric underling discover the truth—there’s a secret Prince, one Hermaeus Mora erased all memory of. Her name is Ithelia, the Prince of Paths, The Mistress of the Untraveled Road, The Fate-Changed, and ironically, The Unseen.
Even the other Princes no longer know of her existence, and we manage to stop the knowledge of her from returning. However, Necrom ends with an ominous undertone. Some of us do remember her now, and all it takes is a few mistrusted allies for the word to spread. Daedric Princes are fueled by worship like any other god, and knowledge of Ithelia could finally bring her back. And with her, ESO might break free from the main series. She is the Fate-Changed, after all.
Since it launched in 2014, ESO has been scorned by a subset of fans who study the lore in meticulous detail. Like any prequel, they found inconsistencies with the world and story, like Cyrodiil not being the vast jungle it was described as in books. ESO fans tried to justify it with ideas like Talos wiping the jungles from not only his time, but the past and future as well. The real answer is much simpler—Bethesda likely wanted to bring back some Oblivion nostalgia, and having a jungle the size of a continent in a PvP zone in an MMO would no doubt be incredibly taxing.
These fans swore off a game entirely because of inconsistencies with obscure lore in books, but there is some credence to ESO feeling like an awkward puzzle piece that doesn’t always fit. It’s set during a period we originally knew very little about, with the ‘canon’ explanation for all its major events going unmentioned in future TES games being that there was a history blackout, leaving most knowledge of the time erased. That’s why Skyrim doesn’t acknowledge dragons tormenting Elsweyr two eras prior, or why Oblivion doesn’t mention that several Daedric Princes tried to break into Nirn only one era prior—you’d think it would crop up. It’s hard to handwave with the idea of a blackout because ESO is filled to the brim with scholars and factions dedicated to documenting lore, as well as characters who are still alive and seen in Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim.
That’s where Ithelia comes in. We stop two other Daedric Princes from finding out about her, but we let her former servant Torvesard go away with the knowledge of her existence. And we tell our ally, Leramil the Wise. It’s hardly the best-kept secret anymore, and could easily spread in the gap between expansions, paving the way for her return. The obvious path to take now is for us to stop her in her tracks and restore the status quo, erasing the memory of her all over again to ensure she never returns, explaining why nobody mentions her in the main TES games. But that’s boring. The next expansion should have her succeed in her return, and in doing so, completely rewrite fate, paving the way for a timeline in which the Daedric pantheon is restored and the future uncertain. And a timeline where ESO doesn’t need awkward explanations to fit.
This could lead to a couple of things. Future ESO expansions would be completely free to tell whatever story they wanted without the shackles of being a prequel; in this world, Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim don’t have to happen. At least not exactly how they did—Alduin is still due to return, after all. The other possibility is that the long fan-requested ESO 2 could have its own time jump to show us how different the world would be with Ithelia’s return. It could have widespread ramifications only limited by a writer’s imagination. Perhaps in this future, Talos never united the Empire under one banner, and so the Thalmor (currently the Aldmeri Alliance) took centre stage. Maybe the alliances last beyond the Three Banner War and we see that reflected in the relationships between continents. The Akaviri might invade again and successfully conquer a more divided Tamriel—the possibilities are endless.
ESO suffers the same problem as all prequels—a future set in stone, leaving little wiggle room. But with a Daedric Prince whose title literally means to change fate, Bethesda has created a way to completely lift those restrictions, telling its own story.