"Lasirah?"

I turned toward the soft call, then opened Dexion's bedroom once more, "I'm still here. Do you need me to fetch you something?"

"No, my dear girl. Just please do me the honor of granting me a few more moments of your time." His voice sounded incredibly weary, and for the first time, like that of a frail old man.

"Of course," I stepped into the darkened room and saw that the Moth Priest was sitting up on his bed, his expression distant.

He turned his head a little toward me, but his eyes looked unfocused, and his head hung as though bowed under a great weight. "I believe I can help you find one of the Elder Scrolls. As I sort through everything that I've learned so far, the name 'Septimus Signus' stands out very clearly to me. I also have the feeling that you must travel north from Winterhold, and out upon the Sea of Ghosts."

I grimaced, "Uh, Dexion, there's nothing but ice and freezing ocean beyond the shores of Winterhold."

He nodded slowly, "The path will not be easy, nor pleasant by any stretch of the imagination. Nevertheless, that is where you must go."

I made a face, but nodded respectfully to the old man, "Thank you. I guess it won't hurt to ask around Winterhold and see what they can tell me."

"Ask for information about Elder Scrolls at the college," he advised me.

The idea of slipping and skidding across floating icebergs, in slaughterfish-infested waters no less, was my version of an afterlife of torture and misery. But, I didn't voice my objections to him; he had read an Elder Scroll for only a few minutes, and it had drained him to the point of exhaustion. For such a small bit of help, he had paid a considerable price and certainly didn't need to hear my whining.

I quietly left the room and waited until the door closed behind me before I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and sighed deeply. Go hunting for an artifact, and meet a powerful coven of vampires with an Elder Scroll. Prepare to exterminate them, and become embroiled in a prophecy. Try to figure out the prophecy, and find more Elder Scrolls. Go hunting for more damn scrolls and then what…? Try to hunt down a recluse in the middle of an ocean. One complicated thing leads to another, more complicated thing!

I let myself sink into a well of frustration for a few moments more, and then reluctantly headed to a store room to prepare for the trip.

Early the next day, Serana walked ahead of me out the front doors, slipping her hood over her head. She was definitely eager to get out of there, and I couldn't blame her at all.

.

Back to Winterhold College we went, and were treated to Urag's grumpy company once more.

"I'm looking for information on where to find an Elder Scroll," I told him.

The old orc snorted, "And what do you plan to do with it? Do you even know what you're asking about, or are you just someone's errand girl?"

"For your first question, we need to read it or have it read to us. For your second, I have a rough idea of what they are, and in a way, yes, I am an errand girl." I paused then admitted, "I won't turn down any information you may have on them, though."

Urag rolled his dark eyes, "An Elder Scroll is an instrument of immense knowledge and power. To read an Elder Scroll, a person must have the most rigorously trained mind, or else risk madness. Even so, the Divines usually take the reader's sight as a price."

I thought back to the strain Dexion had been under, and his distant gaze in that darkened room, and felt a small trickle of foreboding. "A price for what?"

"The simplest way to put it is 'knowledge,' but there's nothing simple about an Elder Scroll." Urag explained, "It's a reflection of all possible futures and all possible pasts. Each reader sees different reflections through different lenses, and may come away with a very different reading. But at the same time, all of it is true. Even the falsehoods. Especially the falsehoods."

Oh Stendarr. My head was starting to hurt again. I hated it when conversations slipped into jargon or philosophical doublespeak. Hoping to steer the conversation back to something a bit more mundane, I asked, "Who wrote the Elder Scrolls?"

"It would take a month to explain to you how that very question doesn't even make sense." Urag shrugged his broad shoulders, "The Scrolls exist here, with us, but also beyond and beneath. Before and after. They are bits of Divine made substance so we could know them." His expression became apologetic, "Sorry. Talking about the scrolls, you usually end up in irritating and vague metaphors like that. Think of them as the blueprints that the gods used to make the universe. Anything and everything that could exist, has ever existed, exists now, or will exist in the future, is contained in one Elder Scroll or another. Often broken up into several of them."

The trickle of foreboding increased to a stream. I prayed to Stendarr that poor Dexion's mental defenses and studies had protected him. I couldn't even imagine the depths of madness that would be brought on by more information than he could handle. Being blinded was bad enough; having his mind broken would be horrible. And I couldn't help but feel guilty for bringing him to the damned thing. "Do you at least have any information on Elder Scrolls? Books? Research papers? I need to find one and was told you could help."

"I'll do what I can. What we do have are plenty of books. Thing is, even if I bring everything we have on them, it's still not much. So don't get your hopes up," the Orc shrugged. "It's mostly lies, leavened with rumor and conjecture."

Urag got to his feet and went searching through a locked book cabinet before coming back. He placed his hands on his desk and gave me a menacing glare. "I better not see you treating these books poorly, are we clear?"

I held my hands up in a gesture of surrender, "Crystal."

"Here you go. Try not to spill anything on them."

I found myself looking at two books. Only two. In the largest library in Skyrim, kept and tended for centuries, they only have two books on the subject of Elder Scrolls. Yikes.

The first book I picked up turned out to have the title, "Effects of the Elder Scrolls." Reading through it just confirmed what I had Urag himself told me.

Shaking my head, I put the book down and picked up the second. Looking at the cover, my eyes widened, "Rumination on the Elder Scrolls, by Septimus Signus, College of Winterhold."

This was the man we needed to see, and he had written a book about them! I eagerly opened the book, and stopped in confusion after a single page. "Urag, this 'Ruminations' book is full of nonsense."

"Not nonsense," the old orc corrected, a small smile creeping in around his tusks, "I warned you not to get your hopes up. Septimus Signus is the world's master of the nature of Elder Scrolls, but... well… he speaks in metaphors a lot, and tends to ramble. I suspect that's part of the cost of becoming so knowledgeable about them. He has never read an Elder Scroll, but I'd say his mind is a bit… bent... anyway."

Meekly, I asked, "Can you help me sort this out?"

"The Arcaneum is pretty quiet today," Urag acknowledged, a smirk pulling at his mouth. "And I'm always up for enlightening the ignorant plebs. Sure."

Ignoring the jab at my intelligence, I picked up the book and read a passage,

"Imagine living beneath the waves with a strong-sighted blessing of most excellent fabric. Holding the fabric over your gills, you would begin to breathe-drink its warp and weft. Though the plant matter fibers imbue your soul, the wretched plankton would pollute the cloth until it stank to the heavens of prophecy. This is one manner in which the Scrolls first came to pass, but are we the sea, or the breather, or the fabric? Or are we the breath itself?

Can we flow through the Scrolls as knowledge flows through, being the water, or are we the stuck morass of sea filth that gathers on the edge?"

I put the book down and gave the orc a weary look.

"Think of the ocean as knowledge," the orc explained, "And the Scroll as the fabric. There's a lot of knowledge out there; more than a mere human can comprehend. The scroll is like a filter, giving us a tiny portion of that knowledge, based on what we're looking for. The Scroll prevents information that we do not need or want from coming through. I would warn that even the tiny amount of information you gain can be too much."

"It said that the scroll could stink of prophecy," I mulled over the words. "I'm looking for information about a prophecy, contained in an Elder Scroll. I don't need the ocean's worth, just a tiny bit of what the Scroll filters out."

"Well," Urag admitted after a moment. "Let's hope that the very tiny amount of information you seek is all you get if you use that Scroll. You might even get away with your sight and your sanity intact."

I grimaced, thinking about Dexion again, and picked up the book to read the next passage,

"Imagine, again this time but different. A bird cresting the wind is lifted by a gust and downed by a stone. But the stone can come from above, if the bird is upside down.

Where, then, did the gust come from? And in which direction? Did the gods send either, or has the bird decreed their presence by her own mind-making?

The all-sight of the Scrolls makes a turning of the mind such that relative positions are absolute in their primacy."

"Would the wind be knowledge?" I hazarded, "Birds use the wind to fly, just as humans use a certain amount of knowledge to survive in the world."

Urag's smirk became a more genuine smile as he nodded, "Not bad. And like the bird, too much wind can send the bird out of control, leaving it vulnerable to be struck down by other forces at play."

"He's warning us," I nodded, feeling a chill sink into my bones. Slowly I lifted the book and read,

"I ask you again to imagine for me. This time you are beneath the ground, a tiny acorn planted by some well-meaning elf-maiden of the woodlands for her pleasure. You wish to grow but fear what you may become, so you push off the water, the dirt, and the sun, to stay in your hole. But it is in the very pushing that you become a tree, in spite of yourself. How did that happen?

The acorn is a kind of tree-egg in this instance, and the knowledge is water and the sun. We are the chicken inside the egg, but also the dirt. The knowledge from the Scrolls is what we push against to become full-sighted ourselves."

I swallowed, as my aching head began to pick up an understanding of Septimus' rambling. "Sounds like he's telling us that even if we take every precaution, we will still end up vastly changed by what we learn."

"You're beginning to understand what you're up against then," Urag approved. "Are you going to continue your search for that Elder Scroll, knowing what you know now?"

I didn't need one more Elder Scroll… I needed two, and someone else had already paid the price for helping me with it. But... "I don't have much of a choice," I confessed, "That prophecy I mentioned is a very important part of a much bigger scheme. If I abandon it, the prophecy will still continue toward its end."

Urag sighed, "And prophecies are never about small or simple things. Ignoring it won't make it go away. All right. Read that last bit, then."

"One final imagining before your mind closes from the shock of ever-knowing. You are now a flame burning bright blue within a vast emptiness. In time you see your brothers and sisters, burning of their own in the distance and along your side.

A sea of pinpoints, a constellation of memories. Each burns bright, then flickers. Then two more take its place but not forever lest the void fills with rancid light that sucks the thought.

Each of our minds is actually the emptiness, and the learnings of the Scrolls are the pinpoints. Without their stabbing light, my consciousness would be as a vast nothingness, unknowing its emptiness as a void is unknowing of itself. But the burnings are dangerous, and must be carefully tended and minded and brought to themselves and spread to their siblings."

I closed the book and pinched the bridge of my nose to stave off the headache, "This, at least, I can understand. It's a double-edged sword. The knowledge people receive from reading the Scrolls is vital to prevent society from sinking into complete ignorance. The knowledge needs to be shared, but the price of having that knowledge is just as high as not having it."

The orc patted my shoulder with a large hand, his voice warm with approval, "Hmm. Not such a pleb after all. That Moth Priest had to putter, ponder, scribble notes, and meditate for days before coming to those conclusions after reading Septimus' ramblings."

"I think on my feet," I admitted. "You have to be able to process information quickly in my line of work. Thank you, Urag, for letting me read the book." I handed it back to him, "Unfortunately, I need to talk to Septimus Signus in person."

His face fell, "Ah. Well, unfortunately, that's going to be a problem. He's been gone from the college for a long while. Too long. I haven't seen him in years, and we were close friends. He became obsessed with the Dwemer. Took off north saying he had found some old artifact."

"I was told that he was out on the Sea of Ghosts," I said.

Urag nodded, "The Three Hold Storm did quite a bit for freezing over the sea. Even now, it freezes most nights, so if you're going to go out there, wait until night has fallen."