Chapter Text
“Well, shit,” Alexa muttered, looking at the strange green sky above her and the inky black water, full of giant tentacles, stretching to the horizon on either side of where she stood. Her day, thus far, had already contained a barrow, a dragon priest, a word wall, and now a book that was a portal to – she gave the archway, made of black-bound books, in front of her an apprizing once over – Apocrypha. Not quite the way she’d envisioned it – Morian Zenas’1 description had been of a maze of shelves not islands made of books – but, yes, this was clearly Apocrypha. Which meant the chance of contact with yet another of the daedric princes had just increased to near certainty. She took a step forward.
“So, another seeker after knowledge enters my realm,” a booming voice with the slimy, sucking, undertones of a pool of mud, announced. “This is Apocrypha, where all knowledge is hoarded. Sate your thirst for knowledge in the endless stacks.” Alexa looked up, in the direction of the voice, to see innumerable tentacles and eyes bubbling out of dark splotches in the air. She tried not to blanch. She’d always found goat eyes a little disturbing. Disembodied floating goats eyes the size of her head were, honestly, nightmarish. “If you tire of your search,” the sucking voice continued, “read your book again to return to your world. For a time. The lure of Apocrypha will call you back,” the voice chuckled smugly to itself as the daedra faded from the sky. “It is your fate.”
Alexa squashed the sudden, nearly overwhelming, temptation to prove the Prince of Fate wrong by immediately reading The Winds of Change again, to leave, and never come back. There were answers she wanted, to the questions of the world, and this place probably had some of them.
Damn it.
She cast invisibility on herself and notched an ebony arrow to Auriel’s bow.