Morrowind Mod:Tamriel Rebuilt/The Warped West

It was a morning like many other mornings before it. The difference being that it was not like them at all, but like all of them at the same time. A multi-faceted familiarity, unfamiliar in it's doubling and tripling and so forth of one's fabric of being. Each small degree a known quantity, a glimpse of the usual; the whole of the thing several degrees stacked one on top of the other or side by side or by some other means, to create a confusion of what in it's individual parts could be known.

I realize it doesn't make terribly much sense, but that is the nature of the thing. When Akatosh is given pause, or made to be uncertain, or whatever was the case, the people cannot be unaffected. I felt as a divided oneness, a creature with more than one set of hands. Indeed, many sets. And each set belonged to someone else who was also me, and I controlled all of them. And they all did much the same thing, because I was of the same mind in each of my minds.

The trouble of the matter was that all of my many hands, all of my many minds each belonging to someone else who was also me, were not distinct from mine. One could see a strange blurriness, a doubling effect as if one had had too much drink. But one could also feel the limbs that were thus multiplied, and the limbs existed. Often, they seemed to exist in the same space as one's true limbs, whichever those were. Akatosh misstepped, and in each misstepping so you were anew and the same, though not the same.

It is easy to imagine this warping effect spreading outward from some epicenter, like an earthquake who's [sic] force shakes even those distant from its origins. A thing that was one, splintered Akatosh and became six. So I was one and became six, each set of my hands, each mind I had reacting to each deed the six great golems undertook. Each titanic manifestation a finger of the same Brass God, dabbling in the distinct timelines it had created. Each division acting in concert, a half dozen threads of Time that were one.

And then it was over. The wrinkles folding into each other. The effect had rippled me, like a stone cast into a fountain, and when the Numidia had completed their tasks the waters were allowed to still slowly. The waves finding ways to fit into each other, to lay down one reality from the many facets. When it had happened, I was a bowstring pulled taut and loosed, my self seeming to fill more than one space at the same instant. When it ended, the bowstring found it's place again and was still, and I was in one space again.

And outside the West, Akatosh kept his steady pace, his sure hand. And when in the West Akatosh found his stride again, much was changed. I think and think of it, and am left with a gnawing sense of wrongness in my center. Not for the obvious changes wrought by the Numidia, but for some smaller, subtler, unintentional, unseen shift.

For when Time flowed clear and true away from us, and grew muddled and odd where we were, it caused a disjointment betwixt the two. Here, the steady straight-line march was stopped, and all within the stoppage became unhinged from that which was untouched. I can dream of no precise reason why this unhinging ought to cause my feeling of wrongness, of dread.

And yet, with all of the various enchantments, with all of the prophecies, with all of the connection between provinces, surely something has gone awry. With all of the territory that was effected, all of that land, all of those people on it, all of the objects in it, all the threads of magic... There is simply so much there that even if we had looked for something gone off course, it might have eluded discovery. And this is what frightens me. That the imbalance of the Warp allowed something to be that should not be, and if said something exists, we don't know the first thing about it.