You can't see it from the West, and you're not supposed to go to the East before it falls, storywise, so even if you don't see anything surrounding the island from the East, it's hard to say whether it actually has a meaning story/lorewise or whether they just didn't construct it in game because no player is supposed to ever see it anyway.

Storywise, there's a passage to East Solstice obscured by the Wall in a certain mine, for example - if you go there after the Wall has fallen, you'll see there's not actually any passage but just a cave wall behind the Writhing Wall effect. They didn't make more of that location because you're just never meant to go there again after the fall of the Wall, so normally, you'd never see that there's actually nothing behind it.

Maybe the fearsome is blocking access
(Source: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Morlia#Tidewash_Stranded )

I assume the Worm Cult must have done something to block off access from the sea, whether that's the wall extending all the way around or other defenses, because sailing around the wall is the obvious solution - so much so that it's unrealistic to think they wouldn't have considered it. If they were that stupid they wouldn't be a credible threat.

It would be helpful if there was something in-game to tell us though, just to answer the question. All it would need is a ship captain somewhere on Western Solstice saying "we tried to sail to the eastern side of the island and the wall goes all the way around/we got lost in magical fog/a kraken attacked/we thought we were going straight ahead but somehow got turned around/whatever they want the reason to be".

Actually it goes across the sea to Canada, continues west and ends up in Nome, Alaska outside a Free stand up comedy venue.

katanagirl1 wrote: »

I thought the island was prone to terrible storms or something like that, so sailing was not an option. I can’t remember where I would have seen that, though.

The background lore that we get about the island and what we actually see doesn't match at all. The whole "terrible storm" thing was also used as an explanation for why no one knew about the island - because seafarers would avoid that area because of the storms and the dangers related to them. Still, we not only never see a storm there, but the island is populated with all of Tamriel's different cultures and several of those people (meant to be natives, not people who arrived there shortly ago with the Fellowship) even have dialogue about having been to mainland Tamriel or having friends there...

Same problem with writing on the East, by the way: We've been told that no one knows how the East looks like because no one has been there for 30 or 40 years or so, but in the West we do talk to a few Argonians who tell us they're from the other side and they regularly crossed the mountain passes (before the Wall appeared) to go to Sunport for trading. And the same way we also meet people in the East who say they're from the West (but as that has only been on PTS so far, I don't want to get into details... It's all horribly inconsistent.

Or wait, I actually can write it in spoiler tags (also, it has actually already been mentioned in one of the latest news articles, so for people who read those it's not actually a spoiler anymore anyway):

Why did they build the wall? They built the wall to keep them free.

Jokes aside, I made a similar discussion in the Lore sub-forum. https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/684355/does-the-writhing-wall-wrap-around-the-eastern-island#latest

Yeah, this entire zone was just a whole “idc about the lore, now go get distracted by Darien’s abs and don’t question it.”

I don’t even know why Solstice was used in the first place. That island does not and has never existed on any maps or lore before this year, and “oh, it was completely forgotten about by 3E” is a bit hard to believe when it’s hosting all alliance armies like Stirk has several times.

(Also can we question the logic of using Stirk as a staging ground when it’s so far from Solstice in the first place? Wouldn’t using Lilmoth as a staging ground be more reasonable due to being much closer?)

I would have used a different area from the beginning. Cespar and Herne are islands in the Abecean that exist but don’t have much lore, and that’d even fit better with the Corelanyas leaving from Hammerfell. They’d then be able to have an Altmer-Redguard aesthetic, with Redguards being rather lore-starved. And then they could just surround one of the islands with the wall to make it clear that you can’t just sail around it, it’s much closer to Stirk so a Stirk staging ground makes more sense, and since Mannimarco was killed at Sancre Tor, it’s even closer to that.

But this year has shown that lore and consistency are not their primary focus. Or seemingly any focus for that matter.

tomofhyrule wrote: »

But this year has shown that lore and consistency are not their primary focus. Or seemingly any focus for that matter.

Add to that that the whole story feels meaningless somehow. But I'll keep my trap shut now - spoilers, and all that.

katanagirl1 wrote: »

Yeah I know. I was thinking that the other side of the island had the rough storms, or maybe it’s like the Na Pali coast in Kauai that is too rugged even today to have any development there, just steep cliffs right at the sea.

Sadly, no. Although I enjoyed looking at pictures of Na Pali now, so thanks for that!