"Skyl."
"Skyl, wake up."
Skyl opened his eyes and saw a Nord man smiling down at him. "You're finally awake."
A chill for no reason ran down his spine and made him shudder.
"Did I succeed?"
"Of course," came the Khajiit's hoarse voice. "J'zargo confirms it. Master Skyl has achieved a great victory."
Brelyna helped Skyl sit up from the sickbed. She carefully tugged the blanket straight so it wouldn't slip, then adjusted the height of his pillow; her attentiveness could not have been more thorough.
Skyl's brain was still lagging behind. His heart was pounding with unease, and only after a long while did he realize he wasn't injured or ill at all. What was he doing lying in bed?
He tilted his head back. High above, on the black, boundless vaulted sky of the Tower of Tomes, the Eye of Magnus hung suspended. It was like a star, dangling near that illusory sun where the "Lord of the High Tower" resided, orbiting around the phantom sun like a planet.
"So beautiful," Skyl whispered. When he stared at the Eye of Magnus, a flood of knowledge poured into him from his all-seeing vision; a mortal mind could not bear it, and he had to look away.
"Yes. Beautiful and powerful," Brelyna said, turning her head as well. "Does that Daedric Lord like the gift we offered?"
Onmund and J'zargo both pricked up their ears.
Looking at their hopeful faces—trying so hard to pretend they didn't care—Skyl smiled and nodded. "I believe the great Master of the High Tower is very pleased with this offering."
"Don't you all feel it?" Onmund finally voiced the question he'd been sitting on. "Ever since that sphere came to the Tower of Tomes, the ambient magicka here has gotten… really dense."
Brelyna also fixed her eyes seriously on Skyl. "What exactly is that sphere? And why would the ancient Psijic Order go all out to stop us?"
Skyl didn't hesitate. "It's time to reveal the answer. That sphere is a relic Magnus left in Mundus. Its name is the Eye of Magnus."
"What?!" all three cried out in unison.
In myth, Magnus held a very high place; an artifact named for his eye had an even more special historical standing.
And there was no way to explain all that in just a sentence or two.
"So," Skyl began, "this goes all the way back to the beginning of the universe, before the mortal world of Mundus was even born. The cosmos, called Aurbis, gave rise to a host of original spirits—et'Ada. You can think of them as the souls of abstract concepts. Some of these spirits were more powerful than others. The two strongest were 'Aka,' who represented time, and 'Lorkhan,' who represented space.
"Now, our man Lorkhan was not like his brothers and sisters. He was more lively, more rebellious. One day, on a whim, he decided life as it was had gotten way too boring, so he started egging everyone on to create a brand-new world.
"If you think of creation as a big real-estate project, then Lorkhan is the developer, Aka is the investor and credit guarantor, and Magnus is the contractor in charge of the build."
"At first, everyone thought this project had massive potential. They rushed in with funding, all fired up. Halfway through, though, Old Ma—the contractor Magnus—realized something was very wrong. Lorkhan had not been dealing straight. Beforehand he'd just bragged about how incredible the project was, how the return on investment would be ten thousand percent. In the end, it was all empty promises. There wasn't even any rebar or concrete for the buildings. Anything you built would fall over even without the wind blowing on it.
"The only way to make that 'building'—the Mundus plane—stable was to sink divine corpses as the foundation piles. The moment Old Ma realized that, he threw down his tools and bailed, taking his whole crew of mortar-mixers with him. When the entire construction team grabbed their buckets and ran, poor, heartbroken Lorkhan was basically like: 'Oh, Magnus… Magnus, how could you.mp4'
"The crew may have left, but the investor watches the project every day. Once everyone took a closer look, they realized the guy named Lorkhan hadn't just scammed their wallets—he wanted their bodies too. He was planning to use them as those divine corpses for the foundation. When Aka finally realized he'd been played for a sucker, he was so furious he practically burst a lung. Without another word, he grabbed his boys and went straight to war with Lorkhan."
"On Aka's side were the original spirits and the elves—original spirits who had degraded. On Lorkhan's side were the humans he had created.
"The result of that war was that Old Lorkhan lost. Aka literally tore him apart, ripped out his Heart to nail down space itself. Lorkhan's two severed halves became the twin moons that still circle above Nirn's sky to this day.
"The legendary grudge match between Aka and Lorkhan was later dubbed the 'Dragon-Serpent War' by scholars. One was the god of time, the other the god of space. Their struggle stabilized the framework of time and space in the mortal world, allowing things to persist and develop.
"So what does runaway contractor Magnus have to do with all this?
"The answer is: quite a lot."
Skyl spread his hands.
"Aurbis is a universe that repeatedly ends and is reborn, like a great wheel rolling in circles. The Dragon-Serpent War also plays out over and over again. But this divine conflict needs a third-party observer to step in and confirm which side has won. It's a bit like Schrödinger's cat—without an observer, the war never truly ends, and time and space never fully stabilize.
"The Eye of Magnus, if you tie it back into myth, might just be the artifact Old Ma uses to observe the timelines. Now that Skyl has swiped it, who knows how this world's history will warp? Maybe the next time the world reboots, there will be no observer, and so time and space will never settle, Mundus will never be born, and no living soul will ever reincarnate into a new world."
He paused, then shrugged.
"But what does that have to do with Skyl, a shameless outsider? He just happened to 'pick up' an artifact along the way."
To him, the Eye of Magnus wasn't some sacred tool of creation. It was just a divine-power power bank.
In the Tower of Tomes, Skyl studied the Eye of Magnus. Through its immortal outer shell, he could see a miniature world hidden inside it, condensed from the pure power of the realm of light—a tiny star of divine energy. The light and heat it radiated baked the inner surface of the shell, and that transformation gave birth to magicka.
Because divine power is eternal, even when it is converted into magicka, it doesn't actually diminish the amount of divine power itself.
"Well now. A perpetual-motion machine… of magic. You're something else," Skyl said, elated.
From here on out, in the Tower of Tomes, Skyl had an inexhaustible supply of magicka to squander. And on top of that, he had a lump of pure divine power at his disposal. Divine power can do anything; by expending it, he could literally make his wishes come true.
Skyl already possessed omnipotent authority inside the Tower of Tomes, but that didn't mean he could do whatever he pleased; the limiting factor had always been the shortage of divine power. Now, though, he could afford to indulge a little.
The divine power stored in the Eye of Magnus would be enough to expand the Tower of Tomes into a pocket realm the size of a whole star system. Doing that, however, would be a massive waste, because magicka itself is a universal solvent. As long as he used this "weakened" divine power cleverly, it could still produce exceptional results.
With the great work achieved, it was time to hand out rewards.
"The Lord of the Tower of Tomes has issued His decree," Skyl announced to the other three.
"We will listen."
"He grants us the right to build classrooms within the Tower of Tomes. From this day on, our knowledge will endure as long as the Tower of Tomes endures."
Brelyna and the others nodded, faces solemn.
Skyl blinked. Everyone looked at everyone else. For a moment, silence fell.
Onmund was the first to react. "And then?"
"What do you mean 'and then'?"
"That's it?" J'zargo asked, puzzled.
"Yeah. That's it."
Brelyna sighed. "We're just a bunch of apprentices. So what if we establish classrooms? Besides, what exactly does 'classroom' even mean here?"
"It seems you still don't understand just how heavy a gift the Master of the Tower of Tomes has given you," Skyl said, his tone meaningful.
He swung his legs off the bed, hopped to the floor, and walked toward the countless floating bookshelves drifting in the void.
"Come with me."
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