(Note: Piece of a torn pamphlet found in an empty tenement house in the Kirkwall Alienage. Twenty-seven reported missing. Templar Knight-Captain Cullen)

Fragment begins—dan Immigrant's Guide to Your New Home—

Second consideration: Lyrium. Don't bother bringing any. There is no lyrium in Skyrim. There are also no darkspawn, no Abominations, no Blight, no Templars, and no one here is made Tranquil. Can anyone else see the connection? At any rate, something here causes all forms of lyrium to decay rapidly and become completely inert and useless within hours. If you're a mage, don't bother bringing your staff unless you need a walking stick. Runes will also quit working. There is still plenty of magic, although you will need to relearn certain things. More good news is, here you don't have to be Tranquil to cast enchantments on—Fragment ends.

Leather. Wood smoke. Crushed pine needles. Lavender. Lavender? These were not the shipboard smells I had come to know and loathe. The ship had been one huge fug of odors including, but not limited to, unwashed bodies, dead fish, smoked nug meat, and mabari shit. I opened my eyes to see a neatly stitched leather seam inches from my nose. The night before—the snowy wastes, the tiger-man, the tent, and the girl. The girl! I was in her tent and covered up in a cloak of tawny, thick fur.

I rolled over and my head nearly came off, or at least that was how it felt. I Healed away the pain, feeling my skull for any damage. All I found were some stray pine needles. Then I let myself look at the person lying next to me, her head down by my feet. All I could see of Eryka from this angle, without sitting up and disturbing her, was her dark hair. If she was real—if this was real, if Skyrim was real and everything was as she had said—I wasn't quite ready to face the implications. I lowered my head to the ground again.

It was morning, but not a very bright one, at least not yet. The light trickling in at either end of the tent was grey and diffuse, soft as old linen. Again I wondered at how warm it was in there. Stretching my arm over my head, I stuck my hand outside—then yanked it back, because it was cold out there. But not in here…Experimenting, I reached out again. The zone of warmth started and ended at the tent cover. Some kind of enchantment was at work here. It could be nothing else. Yet magic and enchantments only worked on magical cold, not the natural kind, or at least it had back in Thedas. It seemed things worked very differently here. But how? And how had I come here in the first place?

All of these questions were somewhat overshadowed for the moment by the fact that I had to relieve myself. There is nothing more apt to put a clamp on a man's bladder than the fear that his manhood will freeze off, though. While I am often troubled by internal conflict, it usually isn't so physical. What to do…I had to decide before much longer, or the problem would, ah, take care of itself.

Then I heard a deep, waking inhalation, that first conscious breath that means someone is back in their body and checking to make sure everything is there and still works. My tentmate raised herself up on her elbows and glowered at me. Right. Last night I had wrongfully accused and attacked a person who saved my life and had been nothing but kind to me. Instead of leaving my sorry arse out to freeze solid, she had dragged me back in the tent and covered me up. (Not to mention that she knew the way out of this frozen hell and back to civilization and I didn't.)

"Eryka, I have to apologize and explain—."

"Uhh. Not— just now," she made a gesture as to fend off any attempt to talk as she wriggled out of her bedroll. "Give me a moment. I've got to—. Wh're my boots?" Finding them , she pulled them on, whisked the cloak off me and around her shoulders, and climbed out of the tent. "Make off with my things, and I will leave your body for the scavengers!" she tossed behind her as she disappeared into a thicket.

"Nothing could be further from my mind," I called back, putting on my own boots. Groveling, begging for forgiveness, pleading that I would do anything, anything at all if she wouldn't abandon me in the snowy wastes, yes. Stealing her gear, no. But any desperate plea I might make would have to wait until after I attended to my own business, of course. I found a handy tree and turned some snow yellow.

Women take longer about answering the call of nature than men, so I was first back to the tent, where I took the opportunity to examine my staff. It was somewhat the worse for wear after having been used to cudgel a bear, but no amount of damage should have affected the lyrium it was infused with. Instead of coruscating with cool fire, it had gone dull grey. Even the damage-enhancing runes had gone dark and dead. Acting on a hunch, I dug in my belt pouch for the two small vials of lyrium potion I had stashed there. Something had happened to them, too. Instead of the silvery-blue liquid I knew, these were simply water with a greyish sludge at the bottom. Opening one, I tried a drop on my tongue. It tasted like stale water. What could cause lyrium to decay like that? Something told me it was nothing to do with the extreme cold and everything to do with why this place was so different.

"Do you still think I'm some sort of Seducer Daedra?" Eryka stuck her head in the tent, eyeing me warily.

"Seducer Daedra?" I had said Desire Demon but she interpreted it as Seducer Daedra. Maybe we were talking about the same thing. "Ah, no."

"Are we likely to have a repeat of last night?" she asked.

"No."

"Good." She sat down opposite me. "I'm ready to hear you out now."

"First of all, I want to tell you that I am deeply and profoundly grateful to you for last night, twice over. You could have killed me any way you pleased or just left me out to die of exposure, and that was after I insulted you and attacked you. I don't know why you didn't, but thank you."

"Well...I might have, if it weren't M'aiq who brought you," she admitted. "I am not sure exactly what M'aiq is, but he's not just another Khajiit. However, what I want to know is, why turn on me at all?" She fixed her eyes on me, somber and serious.

There was something fire-eaten about her, something like my connection to my passenger. Clearly I should not have thought of him, because now he spoke up. It was not a conversation. Justice/Vengeance and I don't have conversations. He just takes over my mind at times, and I find myself having thoughts that I know are his.

What he interjected now was: Propitiate her. I/we require her aid. I assure you, I would never voluntarily think the word 'propitiate' about anyone. It's just such a stick-up-the-arse word. Anyhow, I was the one who was apologizing, so I ignored him.

"It's…complicated. Remember how I told you that where I'm from, if you can do any magic at all, no matter how small, you're considered a mage?" She nodded.

"There's more to it than that. Once you're found out, once people know you're a mage—it's a sentence to life in prison. They take you from your family and send you to a place called the Circle, supposedly to learn, but really to be watched, scrutinized your whole life by people who hate mages so much that your Jarl of Winterhold loves them like a brother in comparison. There is no aspect of your life that the Templars don't interfere with, and they can do what they like with you or to you, with no fear of punishment. If you don't comply, if you fight back, their solution is to burn out part of your mind and leave you a passionless dullard the rest of your life.

"So when you answered me as you did, when you described what life was like for mages and magic users here—that's everything I ever wanted. Then with you being compassionate and resourceful and, and, intelligent—" and attractive, but no, I wasn't going to say that, not now, possibly not ever. "I—couldn't believe it. It was too much."

She thought it over. "And for that you tried to kill me?"

"I am sorry. Truly. Please forgive me. I am utterly alone here, I have no knowledge of this land, its people or its customs—without your help and your friendship, I will be lost in every sense of the word." Good. That was Justice's comment, which disturbed me.

Eryka thought about it again, her brows drawn together. "I make no promises. From here I planned on going to Dawnstar, so we'll start by getting to Dawnstar. I've an errand to run there. If we can do that peacefully and you want to continue traveling with me, from there I planned to hire a carriage and go home to Whiterun. If that goes well, when we get to Whiterun, we can talk further. Unless you want to find a ship at Dawnstar to wherever you were going, that is."

"I'm not sure there are any ships that would take me there, and even if there were—the place I was going was little better than the place I left behind. I will follow you for as long as you'll have me."

"Well then!" She clapped her hands together. "There is a sack with food behind you there. Let's eat."

But I/we will return. Justice whispered. I/we will learn about this world. She will guide me/us. I/we will learn how we got here, I/we will return, and then I/we will bring the others here. All the mages. Any and all who wish to come.

A/N: Thank you to those who reviewed. I can't send Lisa a PM, so I will express my appreciation here. A tremendous thank you to you. I plan to reveal some of Eryka's history and background in the next chapter.

Speaking of next chapter and beyond—Sometimes vanilla just doesn't cut it.(Which is why PC players mod the hell out of their games.)

If Skyrim were a real country they'd be in serious trouble even without all the dragons, bandits, necromancers and civil conflicts. I know Bethesda had to limit things or the game would be too huge, the programming too complicated, but if the game were to be taken exactly literally, then there are only about forty children, all of whom are eight to ten years old—no babies, no toddlers, no teens— in the entire country. Plus one of them's a ghost and another a three hundred year old vampire.

There are never any baby animals of any kind. The seasons never change, nobody wears heavier clothing in the snowy areas, there are very few fruits and vegetables either in cultivation or growing wild, and nothing ever goes bad or out of season. All the woven cloth must be made of goat hair, tundra cotton, or maybe spider silk, because there aren't any sheep and the only place you can find linen is in draugr tombs. You never find herbs like frost mirrim or elves' ear growing anywhere, and you can't order an enchanting table for Breezehome instead of an alchemy lab. I could keep going, but you get the idea.

So I'm going to put in things that aren't in the game but logically should exist in that world. Enough said.