Chapter Text
Today is Middas, the first of morning star, or Wednesday, the first of January, if I were to keep to the calendar I'm used to.
Keeping this diary will likely be the only thing that stops the looming dread of what has happened to me, or maybe it will make it worse? Only time will tell on that part, but maybe someday in the future a random person studying here, or maybe even the Dragonborn of all people, will set foot in the College of winterhold and stumble onto this diary, read the words within and laugh at the mad ramblings I leave behind.
There is no real way to describe what I have been through in the last month: waking up in a pile of snow on one of the upper walkways of the college with a random student staring down at me before passing out from the sheer cold that this horrid place has to offer. Apparently, the delicate workings of conjuration magic are very susceptible to the brief brushes realities have with each other, and that even with multiple planes of Oblivion, Aetherius, and the apparent infinite other realities of existence that Tamriel could have brushed against, mine ended up being the one that drew the short straw.
I feel like a character from some cautionary tale when I walk the college grounds; the teachers here stare, and the students avoid me like I am cursed.
Maybe I am.
But I have to keep going till I have paid back what the college used to heal me when I suffered from hypothermia after passing out in the snow.
Today should have been New Year's Day, but here they call it the first life festival, and apparently the younger students here at the college are intending to celebrate by jumping into the freezing waters under the college and drinking by a fire till a guard comes to get them, or they get hungry enough to raid the tavern in town. I can't imagine a worse way to spend the first day of the new year, but what would I know; just like back home, I have to work.
The job I have isn't the worst: assistant to the librarian Urag gro-Shub and fetcher of books throughout the college; most days I spend in the main room of the library sorting the piles of books by the strange system that Urag had devised. Never before today had I thought I would miss the Dewey Decimal System, but you never know what you have lost till you do, I suppose.
Speaking of loss, flush toilets, never in my life have I missed the cold plastic and porcelain of a modern toilet more than since I woke here. The toilets they use are almost like those of some campgrounds back home, a stone seat that covers a large hole that feeds off to somewhere unseen; I hope it stays unseen.
For a first entry, this feels like enough; after all, I only got this journal today, and already I can feel the looming eyes of a certain altmer waiting to snatch it up and read the pages.
Thank the gods of this place that the written language doesn't match my own; I can't think about what kind of reaction people would have if they could read how dragons will return or about the existence of an elder scroll so close by, if it were.
Well, to whoever may read this someday in the future, or even myself in the times yet to come, I hope it gets easier, if not better.