"What are the Many Paths? They call you the Mistress of the Untraveled Road. How can there be more than one road?"
Ithelia, Prince of Paths, leaned back in her chair, thinking. Her eyes closed. There was a long pause, long enough that Bethilda began to wonder if she found the question impertinent, or shallow. Or perhaps the answer was too complex for the mind of a mere mortal human to understand?
Ithelia opened her eyes again, and turned to the low table beside her seat. On it were a pencil and several sheets of paper. She picked up the pencil, and wrote for a moment, and then looked up.
"The Many Paths are the pencil and the paper. For you, nothing is written. There is only the potential to write. Taking action, writing, welds the Many Paths into a single causal nexus and inscribes it onto the present, where it becomes Past Action, part of the context, as soon as accomplished. An infinity of possibility, distilled down to a single point and left as one of the facts of the situation that will influence the next decision, and the next. The Many Paths become one, and the world is created by constant choice."
She raised the paper to show Bethilda what she had written.
Bethilda read it out, slowly. "Reality is condensed from the Many Paths by the action of free will on possibility." She nodded, slowly. "So every choice we make reduces the infinite to the singular."
Ithelia smiled. "Every choice you make. As a mortal human being, you have the freedom to choose. You can make the pencil inscribe anything that you please. Even something that comes into your mind from nowhere, a new thought, the inspiration of a moment. And in this choice, you create and affirm reality, one letter at a time, so to speak. Even if you erase the writing, break the pencil, burn the paper."
Bethilda nodded. She asked, "And what of you? Do you and your kind, the Daedric Princes, not do the same? Haven't Molag Bal and Mehrunes Dagon taken the pencil and written their own books?"
Ithelia shook her head. "No. I am Mistress of the Untraveled Path, but my path is laid out before me and I have no freedom to change it. A Daedric Prince cannot change, or grow. We simply are. The Untraveled Path, like the books written by other Princes, is not a choice but a destiny. It is dead reality, not the living focus that only mortals can bring, with their freedom to choose. And without this, the world is a mere collection of crystals, grown to predetermined patterns.
"I knew what I would write just now before I wrote it. It was my only path. And that is why I envy you."