Loredas, 8:14 AM, 2nd of Second Seed, 4E 202

Eastmarch Impact Crater

Logrolf's body was still in Skyrim, but his mind was in another world.

He had lost track of his idea of time long since. All that mattered now was this stone. Like many things, its appearance was deceiving. It was a stone sphere, engraved with arcane patterns, which might lead one to believe it held some kind of great power within it. But that was wrong. It wasn't a container, it was a conduit. As he stood touching its surface, he became a part of its connection, and he was free to look through into Aetherius.

There was no way to wholly describe how such an innately immortal view looked. It defied the conventions of mortal imagery. It was like the starry expanse of the sky, pinpricks of brilliant energy scattered through the empty space of creation. Or, it was like an endless river, fed by unseen tributaries, spreading into distant deltas, yet lacking any beginning or ending. Or, it was like the insane ramblings of an old man who had seen too much of the fabric of reality. Logrolf hated crossing paths with those types. They were useful sometimes, yes, but they were so, so annoying.

No, his sanity was perfectly intact. He was sure of that. It must have been something about the stone, keeping him from seeing these worlds within worlds in a way that would overwhelm him. He couldn't even begin to guess how this stone had been created, let alone why. But here it was, and the Nord was glad to use the opportunity.

He wasn't feeling hungry or thirsty, he was finding. Certainly not tired. His body seemed to be in some form of altered state. On a probably very related note, a swirling cyan bubble of glowing magical force had grown around him, in quite the healthy radius. If anyone was looking at it from outside, he couldn't tell. He also didn't care. In here, the rest of Mundus was an unnecessary distraction. His eyes were on something much bigger.

Like any mortal in such a situation, when he realized what this stone actually did, Logrolf had been filled with questions. But the first and foremost in his mind was: What could he do with this?

He'd spent a long time just passively observing what the connection showed him. Every time he tried to make sense of what he was looking at, his idea of it changed. The best he could do was to try and find things in common between the different ideas. But even that was a challenge. After what'd probably been hours of watching and waiting, he'd succeeded in little more than giving himself a headache. Not an insanity headache, just an exasperation headache. Aetherius was so big, and he was so small. If he were going to work with this, he had to do something to make himself bigger.

Or he could just dip a toe into the waters and see what happened. Worst case scenario, his head would instantly explode and paint everything nearby with drippy red potential alchemy reagents.

It was a strange experience, when he finally extended himself into the connection. There was no physical action to it. All he ended up doing was to will something on the other end of the connection to move.

Logrolf's head didn't explode. Instead, his image of Aetherius snapped into focus as a bottomless sea of thick, sluggish water, shining with rays of sunlight from a surface that wasn't there. It was filled with tiny, floating shards of light, like so much detritus in the surf. He forced a hand through the water, and the shards moved aside.

This was going to take a while, he realized. This image was as flawed as any of the others, but he would do for his purposes. It would still take a while. He was a mortal, interfering in the affairs of all existence through the connection of a mysterious artifact. Of course it would be difficult to move, through this… extremely thick version of water. It was like trying to move through neck-deep mud, if the mud were crystal-clear and filled with the energy from which all things originated.

At first, all he did was move through the water, examining the shards as they floated past his view. They were such an infinite expanse, but every one was different in its own way. Before long—or maybe it had been a long time, he didn't know—he'd begun to observe patterns in each shard's unique traits. Some were soft, dim things, simply holding things still, and some shone brightly with radiant energy, no doubt casting their rays all the way down to Mundus.

Was Mundus the seafloor in this vision? Was there a bottom to this sea after all? Logrolf shook his head. He couldn't afford to get distracted by questions like that. Right now, ignorance was a strength for him. It let him continue to act in this realm, even if he didn't entirely understand what he was doing.

Which led him to an obvious issue. This was all a truly wondrous experience, but he still didn't know what he was doing. Ideally, he'd come out of this wielding some great form of power, something unattainable by any properly mortal means. This stone, this shooting star, had been a gift for whoever would use it first, and that happened to be him. This conduit to Aetherius was the perfect chance for him to begin on a new way in life. He hoped that soon, Boethiah's disappearance would no longer even feel like a loss.

But the shards were uncooperative. Every time he reached for one, it rushed out of his closing grip, propelled on the displaced currents of the thick, stubborn water. He lost count of how many shards eluded him this way. Tens, hundreds, thousands, he wouldn't know. Time wasn't so important here. But his patience wouldn't last forever. As much as this sea of shards felt more usable than any vision before it, this obstacle was truly troublesome.

The answer came when he found a break in the pattern. A shard that was different, somehow. It pulsed with a different, distinct energy, and when Logrolf looked on it, he knew it was a violent force. Not an Aetherial force in the slightest. Nothing from Aetherius could be so focused on destruction … and that was when he realized it.

He hadn't been looking at Aetherius. That wasn't what this conduit connected to. He'd been looking at the entire Aurbis.

And these shards were from all of its inhabited planes. Only the bright, radiant ones were from Aetherius—the dimmer ones were from Mundus, and this one? This violent-looking one? This was one of the last remaining shards of Oblivion.

Maybe it'd been part of a Daedric Prince, once. It didn't seem to have much of an identity now. No matter, either way. It was remarkable enough that his image of the Aurbis hadn't changed on him when he realized its nature. There was no doubt in his mind that this shard of Oblivion was what he needed.

And sure enough, when he reached out to grab it—it actually worked. He didn't dare to open his hand once more, for fear of losing it, but he could feel the furious heat of the shard against his palm, and he knew he had found what he was looking for. It was incredible, being able to control something in the mists of the Aurbis. There was no point denying it: He felt like a god.

From there, it became a search for more shards of its kind. With this first one in his hand, Logrolf eventually realized that some of the brighter shards would now stay within his grasp as well, but he stopped after only a few of those. Perhaps they could amplify the power of the first, more violent one, but he refused to believe that he had found the only shard of its kind in all existence. He would keep looking.

Time stretched on, and on, and on, and Logrolf continued on his way through the sea. It was a truly long time before he found the next heated shard. By then, he had grown so accustomed to the heat in his grasp that he had nearly forgotten it was there. But to his surprise, not only did this second shard stay in his grip, it brought itself into place against the first. They seemed to fit together, in an odd way. He was holding an increasingly great cluster of shards in his hand.

They would fit easily, of course—their size was irrelevant, compared to the limits of the power he could withstand holding. Or that was what he imagined was the case. No matter what, he didn't want to waste his energy, or his choice in shards.

Time continued to pass yet further. More heated shards came into view, and he grasped them. At some point, Logrolf wondered how much time had passed in Mundus, but he couldn't bring himself to care. His body had been brought above such trivial distractions, and the barrier around him would never be penetrated. Not unless he willed it—and until he was ready, he was content keeping the thing up. There was much more work to be done.

As this went on, he was collecting something like two of the shards of Aetherius for every shard of Oblivion. It seemed like a fair proportion. He couldn't describe why, really—something to do with balancing power and control, he didn't know—but it didn't matter. The details were probably something he wouldn't understand, at least not without losing the analogy of the shard-bearing waters. And so far, this was working.

This was working. The thought made him smile. On some level, it felt too good to be true, but at the same time, it most clearly wasn't. Maybe this was the Aurbis' way of balancing out the void that Boethiah had left. Logrolf could continue the reign of power in her name. She'd certainly taught the Nord plenty about how power worked.

After a time, Logrolf found himself wanting to ask questions once again. Not even particularly grand or lofty ones. They were more questions of what all these shards were doing here, and what he was doing with them himself. Because honestly, even now, he didn't entirely know. But there was no one to ask the questions to, and when he wondered about them himself, he had to remind himself not to try to see the Aurbis a different way as a result. Who even knew what his shard collection would turn into, if he did? He didn't want to guess, for his own sake.

And so he kept swimming through the thick, uncooperative water, and kept collecting shards. The cluster in his hand was growing larger and larger all the time. By the time he got to the ninth violent-type shard, the cluster was letting off enough heat that it seemed to warm up the water around it.

When he added this ninth shard, something happened. Some tipping point had been reached, some threshold had been met. But he felt the shards in his hand start moving. Not just shifting into place with each other, but… moving. Something else was controlling them.

"Mmm… What is this?"

The voice was a low, menacing rumble. Logrolf struggled to discern where he was hearing it from, before realizing that it was coming from within his own head. So the shards were responding to him. This was good. This meant he had something he could direct.

"What am I? No. Who am I? This makes no sense—"

"Silence," Logrolf said. And there was silence. He smiled. "You are my creation. You are nameless. You've been brought into being in order to assist me."

"You," the voice said. "Who are you? A mortal… a mortal… interfering in the affairs of Aetherius?"

The Nord shrugged blithely. "I wouldn't call it interfering. This conduit was a gift. And we're not in Aetherius, we're in… well, everything."

"This… this… this conduit." Now the moving presence of the shards began to reach back through the tunnel into Mundus, the one Logrolf had been working through. It was hard to believe that this was truly happening. "Where does this lead?"

"Mundus. My home. Soon to be my domain, with you in tow. Do you obey me?"

"Obey what? Strange for you to ask. … So many thoughts. Which of these are mine? Why did you make me like this?"

That wasn't a yes. Logrolf supposed he couldn't expect blind obedience from an intelligent mind he'd just pulled out of nowhere. It was like conjuring an unbound denizen of Oblivion. It needed some reason to bend to its conjurer's will. Doubly fitting, since his new creation was about one-third made from Oblivion anyway.

"The answer is one long word, my precious little creation: Power. I've given it to you. Be careful. I can unmake you as easily as I made you."

"You made me? What am I, now? What have you done?" The shards flared up angrily, all through the tunnel. "So much of me is… wrong. I don't understand. You did something."

"Yes, I created you," the Nord replied evenly. "All of you. You are mine. You'd best accept that, so we can move on."

"No. You were supposed to put me back together. And you did it wrong. This new form is all wrong. I'm not me yet! I'm something else!" The voice rose in anger. "What have you done?!"

He was supposed to put the voice back together. How many different Daedra had had tiny bits of them added to this cluster? This voice didn't belong to any of them. Honestly, Logrolf had hoped that adding all of the shards of Aetherius would have muted those little bits of identity. But he was starting to feel something he was sure countless thousands of mortals had felt before him—that he'd gotten into something whose consequences he didn't understand.

The voice was twisted in fury, yet it kept on speaking. "This existence is wrong. I shouldn't be this way. I'll take from you … what you took from me. You don't deserve to exist. Neither does your Mundus. Maybe I can't unmake myself. But I'll unmake everything else."

Logrolf knew fear when he felt it. But mainly, he just wondered if perhaps he should have kept switching through images of the Aurbis a bit longer. This shard business wasn't a perfect way of handling things.

He definitely might have made a mistake here. At this point, it seemed like a fair thing to say.

The shards coiled and leapt through the conduit with incredible force. The conduit's walls split and unraveled, light pouring in through unseen sources beyond. Logrolf didn't even have time to react.

When the shards emerged through this end, through the conduit into Mundus, the very first thing they did was to embrace him in their fire.