The Aftermath: Entry #5

20th Morning Star, 4E 199

Drusus Varo, Overseer of the Ascadian Isles Expedition

I don’t normally have the same dream more than once. But I did the other night, and a couple nights before that. I neglected to write about this because I hadn’t realized it was the same one. There’s also the fact that real life is more important.

In retrospect, I think I first had this dream on the boat we sailed across the Narrow Sea. I nodded off a couple hours after noon. The storm had upset my internal clock, so the sun was setting when I awoke on the cabin floor (that last part wasn’t strange; I often roll I remember an instance of lost time, as if my dream had carried on for days, though I was only asleep for a few hours. All the details had slipped away too. All I remembered was a feeling of sorrow and secrecy, which lingered with me until I forgot that too.

The next time was during the ash storm. The three men were singing the bawdy song and the Dunmer was angry. Mehra, I think her name was. I quickly fell asleep to the silence that followed Mehra's scolding (even left my lamp burning on the desk) and woke up with the same feeling. But Vira assured me that I had slept for one hour and fifty five minutes exact. This time I had a memory of fishing. Just fishing in a boat, with an old woman who I didn’t recognize, in a place I didn’t recognize.

It was last night that I realized this had been the same dream, but I was remembering different chunks of it. The brain does odd things; that’s all I can say. Moving on to something more important.

I plan to conclude our excavation of this canton and begin scouting the next one. Call me impatient, but the search has been pretty dry so far. Anything above water level has disintegrated into a sorry magnitude of ash and dust. Almost everything below is eroded beyond recognition, but so far the only artifacts we uncovered were underwater. This means that Ervis Dran, another mage, needs to watch our tails at all times and cast water breathing accordingly.

One find was the Daedric shrine within the sewage tunnels. Mostly rubble. I could still make out the form of the walls and statue in the center. Every surface was dulled from erosion. Despite this, I try to picture how the cruel chiseling of the walls might have looked before Red Year. One object was intact: a single diamond. It was shining at me through the murky water. Almost taunting me. “Pick me up,” it said, “I’m all shiny and glimmery.” Thankfully Ervis identified it as a cursed diamond. That mans by picking it up, I would have summoned a dremora and killed us all. I’ll be periodically reminding myself to be careful from now on.

Previous entry: http://www.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/2d3w1x/the_aftermath_entry_4/

First entry: http://www.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/2cx8v6/the_aftermath_entry_1/

If you are reading this on mobile, please note that some crossed-out text might appear normal, possibly messing up the tone and syntax. I hope you will bear with my terrible formatting skills. Thank you for reading!

Edit: I accidentally "20thth Morning Star"