"J79, Entry One..To whom it may concern; I know not why or how you've laid your hands on my recollections. These were written by me and for me, about times and events I've little choice but to keep recorded. Many more still have been completed, scattered across my library and private quarters.This particular journal is my latest at the time of this note, recollecting the events that led to the whole mess that came afterwards. I avoided those early days like the plague for most of my years, but completionism compels me to register the start to this candid tale.Read on, if you'd like, for I can do little to dissuade you. But I ask that you keep this private, at least while I still live, for I wouldn't bear to face the consequences of everything I've seen, said and done at this point in my life.If you seek to invade my privacy in the chronological order of events, you'll find a "guide" of sorts at the last page of this Journal. If not, read them at whatever order you prefer - or, if you'd like to be particularly nice, don't read them at all.As an addendum, to Ardalwen and Hjor. I shan't attempt to convince you to leave these alone, for I know you too well. But, if nothing else, I plead that you wait until you've finished reading all of my recollections before passing judgement unto me, and please keep in mind that those were different times.J. H. Larenthar."

Death was not, as I had feared all of my life it would be, a painful experience.

It is frightening, yes, and the ever-encroaching inevitability that is your end feasts upon what little consciousness you have during your last moments like a beast would upon your heart. The waiting - the knowing that there's nothing to be done but to wait - is agonizing.

But physical pain fades very early-on. For that, at least, I was thankful.

You know, they say that when you die, your life flashes before your eyes. That's not exactly true; there's no 'magical flashback's to everything you've done and did, no visual recollection. But there are some moments spent in remembrance, moments spent in the sullen but fond recollection of all you've achieved.

For me, it was my childhood. I was, after all, fairly young still; there wasn't much in the way of experience for my delusional mind to fall back to. So I remembered my mother and father, both gone beyond their times; calling for me, sometimes with smiles and sometimes with scowls. I saw childhood friends, playing around on school grounds while we delighted ourselves over our acts of petty rebellion, like cutting class or throwing toilet paper out the window. I also remembered a lot of my time by myself - Hours upon hours playing games, most of all Skyrim. It was fun to reminisce, especially since that was exactly the game I'd been playing a few hours before what would come to spell my unfortunate demise.

Still, it was…

There was much I would have liked to have achieved in life before my time came. Explored space through calculations, unraveled the ways of the world around me, that kind of thing. I'd always wanted to be a scientist, after all. Hell, it would've been pretty nice to have lived long enough to get to university. Dying as a high school senior is kind of pitiful.

Yes, pitiful. I pitied myself, during those last moments. So many dreams, so little time. It was a little pathetic, and with what little strength I had left, I imagined what the headlines would say in the morning. Maybe I'd get some protests or something.

But at least it didn't hurt.

So, with a knife on my ribs and my blood on the floor, I breathed heavily against the concrete until even that became impossible.

And thus died Jason Hyde, aged 17, having achieved nothing and accomplished even less than that. "His memory lives on", my gravestone would say, but not for much longer.

And that was how the void claimed me, and everything was over.

Except, of course, things couldn't be as simple, lest no journals would have been written and no tales would be recounted. Death, as those less fortunate or more adventurous amongst us will certainly say, is not necessarily the end where external influences are involved. And, more often than not, we lack the ability or the foresight to know when such influences are present in the first place. I speak not of Sovngarde or Aetherium, for those were not within my realm's sphere of influence. Our dead suffer a different fate, though I am to this day uncertain on whether oblivion - as in nothingness - awaits all of us or only those who lack Faith. It mattered little, of course - In a second, life left my eyes and I, alongside all I'd ever been, was gone, and that was that.

But it wasn't over.

Instead, I "woke up" from inexistence.

In actuality, that is a gross understatement of what I experienced at that moment. But I lack the words to describe what being torn from Limbo feels like, and to even attempt to recount it makes my head feel like it's about to burst open. "Waking up", but more - Instead of being asleep, you simply weren't anything. And then, at the will and force of something else, your very essence is forced back together, crossing and tearing time and space in an unholy pathway towards reunion, and suddenly consciousness and the state of being both return to you in the most excruciatingly agonizing feeling one could spiritually go through.

What matters is that I was once again conscious, though most certainly not alive. I had a body, but it was ethereal in nature, no more resilient than a gust of wind or a spark of flames. It was energy given form, string of the universe bound together by thought, essence and an alien power. No physical eyes, yet capable of sight. No physical body, yet present and able to move, fight, breathe.

It's a jarring experience, to say the least, and thus did I fall to my knees almost immediately after being breathed back into being. There was no impact of my knees against the marble floor, but they stopped as they reached it anyway, and I was able to kneel as if about to puke something from my inexistent stomach.

It took me around 10 minutes to catch my metaphorical breath and be psychologically able to function. Whether that effect is purely psychological or possessed roots in the sudden introduction of Magicka to something that, until that point, was unexposed to it in any capacity is still something I ponder upon. Nonetheless, I rose from my unfortunate position and looked around nervously.

I was met with what looked like an endless expansion of white marble on a sky of pure blue, not a single cloud in sight or building within my reach. Instead, there appeared to be nothing there, as if I'd been condemned to an eternity of nothingness without being granted the blessing of inexistence to go with it.

The thought was, to put it lightly, mildly disturbing. But after having spent a while in silence, I unconsciously knew that screaming out loud to something would accomplish little. I wasn't alone in that weird realm, I knew, but whatever it was seemed content to watch me for the time being.

Instead of allowing myself to despair over the seemingly hopeless eternity ahead of my, I called upon what little courage I had stored up and began my… "journey", so to speak. That is to say, of course, that I picked a random direction and decided to walk in it until I either found something or couldn't bear it anymore.

I fear I can't tell how long I spent walking. By the gods, it seemed as if I had spent years in that path of mine, accompanied by nothing but my silent and juvenile musings and the sound of my steps against the marble floor beneath them. For all I know, my memories ring true and I did spend years there, walking and making up stories to keep myself occupied. It's impossible to tell, for time and space both operate under different, more subjective, rules when the planes are concerned. Even I functioned differently, I think, for there was a numbness to everything I did that I've yet to summon in life. My thoughts were my own, yet anything but natural - a detachedness of sorts seemed to lurk within my mind, one I'd always wished to possess but never quite managed to emulate.

It matters little. A scholar I might be, but if I never get the chance to experience that again it'll be too early. I pray my Soul is either protected, destroyed or claimed before it can land on his realm once again. Limbo would be a small price to pay if the alternative is to experience that once more in my life.

Eventually, of course, something became visible, just over the horizon. A spire of sorts, though I was so far away from the object it was impossible to truly tell. It marked the distances like a pillar of light in a sea of black, and my attention went to it like a moth's would to a flame. Onwards I walked, then, to meet that beacon of curiosity in an endless sea of marble.

As I approached, the object became clearer to my ethereal eyes, and even now it is a sight I remember. A single crystal, tall and strong, emerging from the ground and touching the skies above it. Easily as tall as any skyscraper in my native cities, the Spire stood silent and still in an infinity of colourless plains, unchanging and untouched by any imperfections. It was symmetrical, with perfectly aligned sizes and an entrance of sorts in the side that pointed in my direction.

It was such an impossible sight that my eyes widened and I stopped for a second to gaze upon it in reverent silence. Never in my admittedly mundane life had I ever seen such a beautiful and strange sight, so unlike the monolithic constructions of steel and concrete that littered the streets of my hometown and the cities I'd ventured in my short lifespan. It felt natural, yet unnatural. Fabricated, yet there from the start.

Above all else, it felt orderly, organized, logical. It made no sense, and yet to gaze upon it assured me that it was logic taken to an extreme, as if that solitary monolith of crystal was everything my faith in science had ever stood for. It was captivatingly frightening, but within that realm even fright lost its meaning, and thus did I approach the object until I was close enough to lay my hands on it.

The palm of my hand - slightly transparent and with a blue hue to it like the rest of my body - touched it's cold surface softly, and I marveled at it's texture. A closer examination revealed it consisted of a near infinite number of little triangles with triangles on them - Fractals, if I remembered correctly. Each part of the whole was equal to the whole itself, and that same pattern repeated indefinitely and granted stability to that impossibility of a structure.

But I hadn't the time to admire it, and thus did I shake my head and enter the Spire through the pentagonal entrance, roughly two meters in both height and width. The insides of the massive structure were of a darker shade of gray, more metallic in nature than the marble of the floor or the crystal of the structure's outside. A spiralling marble staircase circled around the entirety of the monolith, leading to what I assumed were a multitude of upper floors - the ceiling wasn't that tall where I was standing, certainly not as tall as the skyscraper-like crystal itself.

After looking around the empty place for a while, I approached the staircase and began my ascension. Each step made a slow clicking noise against the step I was in, repetitive and unending yet not necessarily irritating. There was a certain comfort to it, a peace to the orderly and predictable nature of that small journey I was undertaking.

As expected, there were many floors to the spire itself, each of them as empty as the first one. Not even once did I catch sight of anything interesting, and so not even once did I stop walking, keeping my eyes on the staircase under my feet. 10 floors passed in an instant, and then 20, and then 40, and so it goes. By memory alone, I was approaching the 110th floor before the staircase stopped and I finally reached my final destination.

In construction, it wasn't any different from any of the other floors, though the ceiling had both a taper and a point to it. However, this particular floor was different from the rest; bookcases of some sort covered each and every wall, each easily 10m tall. They were mostly filled with books, but some had entire shelves left empty or with only a book or two.

In the center of the room was a table with two chairs around it, constructed out of the same strange marble that this world seemed to favour so greatly. Nothing was over the table's surface and nobody was seated on any of the chairs, but regardless of that, I felt as if it's intentions were clear where I was concerned.

I took a seat and waited in silence, eyes focused on the many bookshelves around me and hands over the table's surface, left palm laid over the back of my right hand. The chair in front of me remained empty, unused and unclaimed.

A bubble of anxiousness formed in my gut. Maybe I'd guessed wrong, maybe I wasn't supposed to take a seat. Or, if I were to be pessimistic, maybe my feeling of being watched was just that; a feeling, unrelated to the reality at hand.

"Alright", I finally muttered, looking around once again. My voice echoed aimlessly for a second or two, adding weight to the already tense situation I was in. "I'm, uh, here. Waiting."

Nothing. Nothing but silence; a deafening, cacophonous silence. You don't realize how noisy the world is until you've experience the complete absence of sound. Lest for my own breathing, absolutely nothing else made a sound. It was maddening, an unrealistic experience that gripped my chest with a cold feeling.

"Uh. Hello?", I tried once again. Nothing.

That was bad. I rose from my spot slowly, dragging the chair against the floor a tad harder than necessary in order to produce some sounds. Even that, however, drew no response from the world around me; it remained white, empty, hollow.

But this particular room wasn't empty, not like the rest of them. There was something else to be looked into, after all, in the form of the many bookshelves that surrounded me; each tempting me with the visions of whatever knowledge this place possessed. Though there was certainly space for many more times within those walls, to say there was a shortage of books within the shelves would be to grossly overemphasize that; they numbered in the hundreds still, and I'd have a hard time reaching some because of the sheer size of each bookshelf.

In the end, I chose to leave things up to fate and grabbed the first book on the bookshelf directly to my right - it was a large tome, thrice as big as normal books, but I found I could still handle it. It's cover was of marble, unsurprisingly, but the pages seemed to be made of paper like any other book. Holding the large time against my chest, I walked back to the table in the center of the room and laid it down with as much care as I could before opening it.

The first page was mostly blank, with only some centralized runes in the middle in a style I felt somewhat familiar with; they resembled the Daedric Runes I'd sometimes laid eyes upon whilst playing Skyrim or Oblivion; I could clearly see two instances of the symbol usually associated with Conjuration in a single word alone. Why the book's author would opt to write in a fictitious demon Language from a game eluded me at the time, but I remembered reading somewhere that Daedric corresponded to English when each symbol was translated. Alas, that was as far as my memory would aid me, and I certainly lacked the resources to try and translate it.

Disgruntled, I turned the page with all the care I could muster, unwilling to risk the wrath of whomever the owner of such a library was, and found myself pleasantly surprised to see a dramatic decrease in Daedric symbols. Instead, the page was chock full of numbers, as if one big, incomprehensibly complicated Algebraic Equation of sorts. What few runes I saw seemed to be applied on places where, in my world, letters would have been used - A's or X's, answers to be found. That was a bit more comfortable to work with, but it told me little.

Flipping through the pages revealed little more than more and more parts to that unholy calculation, and I was unwilling to try my hand at solving it at that time. Instead, I opted for pushing the book aside gently and grabbing another, only to find the same kind of numerical inscriptions lying within.

That, too, was unfortunate. Though I had always been good at mathematics, my ability to even attempt to solve equations that occupied entire books was little different than a toddler's would to do the same.

So, perhaps it was time to return to my first idea and try to figure out what each runic symbol meant.

I returned to the first book I had opened, gazing again at the runic inscriptions and comparing them to those of the second book, but quickly gave up on that avenue. All I could determine was that the Conjuration-like symbol, the gate with a dot beneath it, was almost certainly a vowel; I suspected A or O, but with no way to make sure and not even the slightest clue of what each title spoke of, the possibilities were almost literally endless.

I rose with a sigh to grab some more books; if nothing else, these feeble attempts to decrypt a language with little more than a jackhammer would be time-consuming enough to perhaps give me the time I needed to figure out what to do. With four more books laid out in the table, I focused only on the first page of each book, where the "title" was spelled out in Daedric Runes. Finally, I took a seat once again, eyes drifting between books in an attempt to figure out possible words for each inscription.

"To decipher an alphabet by comparison alone would take you months, if not years, to accomplish."

My eyes were attracted immediately to the source of the deep, mechanical voice that echoed within that hallowed place. And thus I met gazes with a large humanoid who had taken a seat in front of me. To call him a "man" would be to lie, for the figure seemed more machinelike than anything else. It bore similarities to a man in a silver suit of medieval armor, with large pauldrons upon each shoulder and a strange helm that reached his neck, with a single silver line going down the exact middle of the man's face. That face, too, was of silver, unmoving and unchanging, with eyes as black as the void itself. The helm had three spikes emerging from it, one in the middle and one to each side, slightly tilted.

I call him a "he", but perhaps "it" would be more appropriate, for the figure was as far from a mortal man as a lion is from an atom. It spoke of Order, of Power and Law, of times unending long since passed, and for a second all words left my mouth as I watched with awe that self-contradictory figure of godly presence.

My mind caught up to me soon afterwards, and I found my mouth moving before the words could be pondered upon.

"Holy shit. You're him. From Oblivion."

My words, shocked as they might have been, gave him no mirth or joyful enjoyment. Instead, a stern nod was my response, brief and careful, as if a gear turning slowly.

"Correct. I am Jyggalag, Prince of Order, and you are familiar with me from the entertainment device aptly titled The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. And you are Jason Hyde, child of Earth, aged 17."

"How do you even - Right. Stupid question."

The Prince offered me no answers, and I took a second to inhale, despite logically knowing I didn't need Oxygen to function anymore, considering I was, you know, dead. I took a second to think of what to say next.

"Right. Uh. How?"

Out came a stupid, though perhaps understandable, question from my inexperienced tongue. The Prince of Order stood completely still, not a twitch or shiver in his imposing frame even as his voice once again was used.

"You question my existence and reach upon what you view as the 'Real World', correct?"

Though it was framed as a question, it was anything but. A statement wouldn't quite frame it, for Jyggalag spoke as if narrating essential laws of the universe. No answer was needed, no confirmation required; subjectivity was an impossibility.

I nodded anyway, of course, silly human I am. Too shocked to say anything else, as my words had been taken from my mouth before I spoke then, I opted to simply allow him to proceed.

And thus he did just that.

"All worlds exist in some capacity. Some, like yours, operate by themselves, isolated from outside influence. Others, like Mundus and those around it, are by essence connected to the Void and contain many realms. Though one from mine cannot normally intrude upon yours, upon death that grasp is diminished. When you died, I was able to rob your world of your essence and bring it here, to a universe you had only come into contact within fantasy and where death doesn't end in Limbo."

If you are unfamiliar with the aptly named Multiverse Theory, allow me to shed some light on the subject.

The most popular interpretation of such a theory outside of the scientific community dictates that there are an infinite number of universes, all of them parallel to our own, where an equally infinite number of differences can be found. For every decision or chance occurrence that happens in one way in our universe, countless numbers of universes would exist within this 'multiverse' where things happened differently.

Perhaps it was a smaller difference, like something else being said during a conversation. Or perhaps the sun decided to suddenly explode and the earth is swallowed whole by the scolding flames of a supernova.

The catch is understanding that this isn't limited to "decisions", but to chance occurrences. For every way a detail is interpreted or something naturally happened, an infinite number of differences could have been. Life could have developed in an infinity of different ways. Matter could have been spread throughout the bubble universe in infinite different patterns. And so it goes.

Within the community proper, it's widely regarded as a tad more complicated than that. Though it is mostly agreed upon that there might be a Multiverse to be explored, the "split multiverse", as I like to call the theory I elaborated upon, isn't exactly popular. Instead, most physicists believe that these universes are all part of one same "existence", all of them existing within an infinite space but separated by the edges of each of their creations. As an example, our own has yet to truly stop expanding, and it might never truly stop doing so. But, scientifically, to believe that there's a universe out there where Tolkien's writings are all fact is nothing short of ludicrous.

Well, at least it would be, had reality not decided to slap me in the face by merit of Jyggalag himself standing a few feet away from me.

"I… see."

I didn't, of course. But shock has a special touch in making one's mouth run faster than their brains, and my own was busy pondering upon every ramification of what had been revealed to me.

Even accepting that his world, and others like his, were indeed true as according to the first theory, one question left unanswered remained.

"But why take me here? And how did you even know I would, you know, die?"

I received an answer almost immediately.

"I had long since predicted that, on this particular date in time, the fabric of space within your own reality would be slightly bent by an inherent flaw in creation. It would only last for a second before reality fixed itself, but it is enough time for one of my station to exert ourselves upon your realm to a certain extent. I arrived at the conclusion that one from your world would make a better candidate for what I had planned than one from Mundus, and thus I waited until I had the opportunity to take a soul from your world. Yours happened to be the best suited amongst all of those who perished at the brief moment I had access to, and thus you were chosen."

"But you only had access to my world for a single second, right? And if, on average, 2 people die per second on Earth, that means that the odds of both of your choices being unsuitable are dramatically high. Wait, even disregarding that, what you say about the fabric of reality fixing itself makes no sense. Reality isn't coherent enough to operate like that."

Jyggalag seemed both mildly irritated and pleased by my questions and general trivia, though it was hard to tell with his all the silver he had going on in his color palette.

"The laws of physics operate differently when two different universes collide, moreso when they both operate under different essentials. It is a night incomprehensible subject for a mortal mind of your own, but to assume there's no logic to it is irrational. Though your own feeble brain cannot comprehend such intricacies, I can, and these laws of inter-relative physics are one of many things I have put into formulae and categorized, and one of the many things I would have lost. I had more than enough time during that second to choose an apt soul, though not as much as I would have liked."

His words were sufficient to remind me of one simple detail: Though I could look at him just fine, Jyggalag was almost lovecraftian in nature, operating in ways and under laws I was quite literally incapable of ever comprehending. His mind and choices were made in manners as different from a mortal's own as the sun was from the moon, if not more.

On the other hand, there was much to acquire from the Prince of Order.

"And… what would you ask of me? You wouldn't have gone through the effort of peeking into a different universe or risked something to unpredictability had you not a task you needed completed or something, right?"

He nodded once.

"You are correct. During the last Greymarch, two hundred years ago, I was able to free myself from the curse that transformed me into that gibbering fool Sheogorath by merit of mantling a Hero - One you know well."

And I did. The Hero of Kvatch, and his subsequent transformation into Sheogorath during the events of the Shivering Isles DLC, was one of the most discussed topics in the game's gameboards. The Shivering Isles expansion was widely regarded as one of the best ever, and that ending was just as mind-blowing as everything else we got to explore.

Jyggalag continued after a moment of silence.

"Unfortunately, that same Greymarch cost me much in the way of resources. What few Knights of Order I had have now been lost, and I lack a true Plane of Oblivion to call my own. This empty void is all that I have, and my once extensive library on every secret in the known universe has been reduced to this - a single floor's worth. My Chamberlain, Dyus, works under my order to restore the knowledge we once possessed, but with my influence so diminished even that seems beyond me. Without worship, without followers, I cannot truly start my quest for Order anew. Perfect productivity means nothing when I am limited to one man alone. And that is where you come in."

I gawked at that, torn from my musings about all he was revealing. Certainly he didn't think that I alone would be enough to compensate for the loss of all his Knights?

"What on Earth can I do?"

"Your world is one that operates in an orderly fashion, regardless of your kind's erratic tendencies, and you are one who has thirsted for knowledge and logic above all else. I need a Champion within Nirn, one who shall spread the name of Jyggalag once again, and I have chosen you to do so in my name. You, who value logic above all else, will represent me across Tamriel and grow into a state worthy of my name so that mortals shall join my Knights."

That was almost absurd, and yet it made perfect sense. He picked a mortal from an organized plane, like mine, who valued logic and science, like me, and who would have time to grow accustomed to a new world, like one as young as I am. Subjectivity removed from the equation, it was the best possible bet for him to make if in need of influence over Nirn and Tamriel.

However, I sure as hell wasn't brave enough to be an adventurer, and I was beginning to think he didn't consider that.

"Listen, I'm flattered you chose me, but I don't think you really understand who I am. There's no way in hell I'd survive a week in Tamriel! Hell, I -"

I was abruptly interrupted.

"You fail to understand your circumstances, mortal. There's no choice to be made for you. I am not offering you an option between servitude and nothingness."

That was actually something I failed to consider.

There wasn't anything else in store for me. I was terrified of being an adventurer and dying early again, sure, but returning to oblivion - my oblivion, mind you, not Mundus' weird planes of Oblivion with a capital "O" - was absolutely worse than that.

Then again, I didn't have a choice anyway, so that fear was for naught.

"I… will I be granted anything? I'm, uh, a regular human, y'know. No Magicka, no boons, no nothing."

"You will be properly prepared, as your shift into the world of Nirn will give unto you a state of being like that of one who was born within it. In time, I will concede upon you boons so you might better represent me. For now… Farewell, Jason of Earth. We will meet again soon."

He snapped his fingers, and the world turned black.