Hi there, Journal. This is Steve. Probably. I’m still a Khajiit. And as I’ve already said, I’m not quite dead. By all rights I should be. This is at least the second time that I seem to have cheated death. Three if you count the time that dragon stopped my execution. This most recent time, however, there was no mistaken what had happened. I saw firsthand when Kematu skewered me like I was shrimp and roasted vegetables. It was almost an out-of-body experience, in fact, as I saw myself collapse to the ground, dead, in what I can only call a slow motion, if that makes any sense.
And then, after things went black, I had found myself where Lydia and I had started at the mouth of the cave, as if the previous half hour hadn’t happened. Lydia gave no indication that anything had happened, and from the sound of it, neither had the bandits. Only I was aware of what had transpired. And it was all too fresh in my memory to pass it off as a “premonition,” which I had so desperately willed myself to believe when dealing with the Khajiit skooma dealer near Falkreath.
I sat outside the cave entrance, a few feet away from where Lydia had killed the outside guard. He was still dead, and the helmet I knocked to the ground was still knocked to the ground, so all of that happened. As best I could tell, time had “rewound” about half an hour or so. I’m not sure why so far back; when I had the run-in with the murderous skooma fiend, I think that had only been five minutes, if that, giving it a much more deja vu feeling. I would know for sure when I went back into the cave, if I was able to predict things, assuming they all played out the same as before.
The brisk plains air cleared my head a bit and calmed me down, allowing me to write all of it down in my journal, while Lydia stood nearby, oblivious and uncaring as to why I seemed to suddenly decide journaling was more important than investigating the cave. If she only knew. But I couldn’t tell her. Not only because she wouldn’t believe me, and think me mad, but also I still had that weird condition that prevented me from stating the obvious to people. Just one of the many peculiar maladies I seemed to have contracted since my imprisonment at the Skyrim border. If – I mean, when I got back to Elsweyr, I would have to ask my parents if they knew anything about some distant relative who’d gotten it on with a dragon. At least, that’s my understanding of the whole “Dragonborn” thing, assuming there’s even anything to that. I wasn’t entirely convinced. Maybe the dragon had just “picked” me at Helgen. It had done some weird shouty thing at me, and the sky had gotten weird, so maybe that was the moment at which I got sucked into this madness. I was just an innocent bystander, who… okay, maybe not innocent, but still a bystander, who was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Or the right place at the right time, depending on how you looked at it.
I grabbed a nearby piece of cheese off a barrel and munched upon it solemnly. Perhaps – and here I was just shooting in the dark, as it were – the gods had seen fit to meddle with my life, and these life-saving blackouts was part of that? I did not know. I still wished to speak with some highly knowledgeable magic user about all of it. Perhaps a visit to that college in Winterhold would be worthwhile. Though the name sounded a bit chilly. Winterhold. Brrr, just saying it made my fur stand on end.
I took a deep breath. Okay, I could figure this out later. Might as well make the most of my shock and denial, and see if we could breeze our way back into the waterfall area of the cave. I apologize for the shortness of this entry; I just had to get my bearings before going back in. Not every entry needs to be epic in size, after all. I suspect the next one will be more interesting. Besides, this entry alone is still longer than nearly half the books I’ve seen in Skyrim so far. Like that Missive from Tullius. Did he really need to use a bound book for that message? It seemed really excessive, like he was flaunting his bookbinder access. Anyway, until next time.
- Steve The Less-Mortal-Than-One-Might-Assume
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