Something had been bothering me since things settled down on the ship. There was time to think then, to decompress from the blood and the terror of fighting through the barrow. I’d been pushing the thoughts away every time they crept in, every time they poked a hole in the veil, but now it was too much.

Why had I thought that the Nords of Skyrim were meant to be Vikings? Northmen who lived and died by the sea, from lands that couldn’t be found on Nirn. Tamriel wasn’t the land of my last life, I knew that. Why do I know, not suspect, or see a connection, but absolutely know that the Nords are a caricature of the Vikings from the world I was really from? The question was driving me mad. The answer was there, somewhere, infuriatingly ethereal when I tried to snatch it.

It was the same when I thought back to other things over the past few weeks. I had memories of fighting a war much more dangerous, albeit much more mundane, than what I faced here. There were flashes in the darkness of tracers flying over my head. The woosh and the roar of steel dragons, jets, raining death on a scale that would never be believed in Tamriel. I’d been on the receiving end of those dragons, diving and ducking between ruined buildings, hiding in the sewers, but I didn’t know why.

Every time I narrowed in on the specifics, it drifted away, blown in the breeze. The only thing I was sure of, was that I had died. I’d been sitting in a subway station, there were beds and wounded everywhere. There was something in my hands, a medallion, a badge, maybe a medal, then the ceiling caved in, and I’d woken up face down in the snow. I couldn’t help but shake the feeling of some higher power deliberately blurring what I could remember.

There wasn’t any other explanation. If I’d been hit on the back of the head hard enough to scramble my mind like that, it was more likely that I’d have ended up as one of Jurger’s corpses. There really wasn’t a whole lot of wiggle room between concussion and vegetable when it came to brain damage. It tended to be relatively minor, or life changing, not whatever this was. I still knew how to fight like I had from my past life, I could strip down a rifle if one were to materialize in front of me. My instincts for traps, tracking, and tactics were all intact, but the personal memories were all but gone. I couldn’t remember what my parents looked like, their names, who my friends were.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

If it wasn’t a Divine playing with my head, I had to be the luckiest unlucky bastard around. That was another thing I knew. The Divines, the Daedra, the angels and demons of this world were indisputably real, and took action. They interfered with things here, it wasn’t blind faith when people prayed to Akatosh or Mara. They had real, hard evidence that their gods were watching. Every village and town across all of Tamriel had been the victim of some sort of daedra at some point, and they remembered it.

It also meant that the religious wars weren’t just ideological, they had real, physical effects on the world. When a major temple or shrine was destroyed, a holy artifact misused, it could have world shaking implications. That was a flash that I hadn’t been too happy to remember. The damned Thalmor were playing with fire, a fire that would destroy Mundus if they were right.

Every time I thought of those gold tinged cunts, the urge to stomp them out of existence reared up in my head. It wasn’t just plain old racism, or that they would kill us all if they had the chance, it was an outside urge. Whether that was Stendarr, Lorkhan, or another of the Divines spurring it, there was no way to know. It didn’t do much good to dwell on the tangled mess of memories and implications in my mind.

The reason I’d pushed it all away to begin with was the fact that there weren’t any answers to come to. It was like putting a puzzle together with half the pieces, and only a few of them fit together. The important part was that I was alive, I had a goal, and there were people depending on my help whether they realized it or not. The damned vampires were trouble several magnitudes higher than a few necromancers playing with corpses, and it seemed like I’d be forced into dealing with them too. It was all too much to think about at once, so I opted for a tried and true method of stress relief, I went back to sleep.