Astronomy in the College of Winterhold, 4E200

29 Sun’s Height, 4E200

I am called Oden. I am a son of a blacksmith, a Nord born in a modest but proud family in a village in Eastmarch. For the last three years I have worked for the Archmage of the College of Winterhold. Today is my last day working for the College, and writing this account is my last task.

Working for mages is not something a lot of Nords would want to do, especially if you’re like me and have no magical ability. But I’ve always loved the old tales of war and valor, and I don’t see why I should only like the parts with the swords. My father trained me as a blacksmith and I developed special skill and eventually a good reputation for delicate and precise work. How this brought me to Winterhold is a long story, but I can say from experience that even a college full of brilliant mages and scholars needs someone to fix door hinges. Hundreds of blacksmiths can do that, but a college often needs careful bespoke mechanisms built by someone with real skill. After talking the Archmage into taking me on for a few week’s trial, he eventually hired me to work full time. The college got a skilled smith and I was able to refine my craft and satisfy my own thirst for knowledge among the wise men and ancient books.

One day I saw a scholar studying a manuscript by looking at it through a glass. This was a special glass shaped to magnify whatever it faced. I had heard of these things, but never seen one. Fascinated, I borrowed it. I discovered that it could be used to project images. Hold the glass toward a window, and hold a paper on the opposite side of the glass at the focusing distance, and an image of the window appears on the paper. It’s like I was able to do magic! The students tell me I’m not really doing magic, but I was amazed anyway.

One thing the faculty loves to talk about are the stars and planets. They talk of the bodies of the gods, and of holes in the void, and of fragmentary echoes of creation. I don’t know much about those things, but I’ve always loved walking in the wilds of Skyrim and admiring the beauty of the sky. Could I use the magnifier to see them better? Unfortunately I found that you can’t just look through a magnifying glass at distant objects. It’s just a blur. I tried projecting the planets onto a paper, but it was a dim image and very small.

I was disappointed until a conversation with a student, a brilliant but prickly cat friend of mine named J’zargo. (They aren’t all bad.) He suggested using a second magnifying glass to look at the image formed on the paper. Only one magnifying glass existed at the college, so I spent many hours of my free time carefully polishing a piece of glass into a larger and better lens. It’s the kind of work I’m good at, but it took many long weeks of labor. J’zargo’s idea worked, but not very well. The image was just too dim. But eventually I had the idea that the image didn’t need to be projected onto paper at all. I could just put my eye in the air where the image would be if the paper were there. This didn’t work either, I just saw a bright blur. But then I realized I wouldn’t see anything if I just put my eyeball up against a real object either. So I put the magnifying glasses in a line using a mechanism I built to hold them in place, and I used the smaller lens to focus on the point where the image would be produced by the larger lens. It worked! I could see faraway things as though they were ten times closer, with great clarity. That night I marveled at the beauty of the stars and planets. I could see stars I had never seen before, and I could see holes and scars on the surfaces of the planets as they wheeled overhead. It was beautiful and glorious.

The next day I made my mistake. I wanted to see the sun up close. This was extremely foolish, but the very source of life and magic! How could I not? When I looked at the sun with my device, I saw a blinding flash. There was a rush, I heard a sound of wind, I saw constellations pinwheeling in the blazing dark, I smelled the smell of burning parchment. I was found unconscious, but the skilled restorationists revived me. I am now blind in one eye, but it was not purely the intense rays that took my vision. It was not just light that I experienced, I am sure of it. I am heavy with the sense that great knowledge that I don’t understand has been burned into me. I cannot ignore this. I must find out what it means, at any cost.

The Archmage doesn’t want me to leave. He’s interested in my device and my experience. But the librarian told me that blindness and knowledge are known in another place in the Empire. Tomorrow I leave for the Imperial City, to seek the only people who may know what has happened to me.