19th of Heartfire, 4E201
When I woke up this morning, Marcurio was gone. I got worried at first, then heard whistling nearby. I looked over the wall, and saw him walking around outside of the fort gathering birds' eggs. I thought it was strange, but to each his own I guess. He came back to the camp not long after that, while I was polishing my armor. Then he asked if I was hungry. I said that I was, and he asked me to find us some plates and silverware while he cooked breakfast. I found some, and took them down to the river nearby to wash the bandit off. After I managed to get them clean, he called down to me and told me that breakfast was ready. When I got back up to the camp, he had a little table set up, with food on it. He explained that he'd noticed the food in the bandits' kitchen in the fort last night, and hated the thought of it going to waste. So, he'd gotten up early to go and get it, then planned what to cook. We had some salmon, and ale, and some things he called omelets. They were eggs cooked with vegetables and meat and cheese in them. I didn't care what they were called, they were delicious! After breakfast, we put out the fire and he packed up some of the food and cookware into his bag in case we needed it again. As we left the fort, I wondered if Jenassa had ever eaten an omelet before. If she hadn't, it seemed sad that she never got the chance to. I thought about her often, and tried not to cry when I did. Marcurio seemed nice enough, but I didn't want him thinking that I was weak or anything. I didn't know if I could trust him or not, but for now I was thankful for his company. And his breakfast ideas.

We made it to Ivarstead that afternoon. We would have been there sooner, but we had taken a shortcut through the forest. The shortcut had ended up taking longer due to bandits and spiders and wolves, but I did manage to find an enchanted circlet. And we found some treasure near part of an outside Dwemer ruin. In town, Klimmek was happy to see me again, and gave me a thousand septims for the delivery. Perhaps it had been worth it visiting the Greybeards after all. While we had lunch, Marcurio asked what I'd done to get all those septims, and I told him about the climb up the seven thousand steps. After my story, he asked who Jenassa was, and I told him all about her, and about our time together. I tried to keep my emotions in check, but I ended up crying anyways. I didn't tell him about Aventus though, or killing Grelod. I didn't want him turning on me and reporting me to the guards. While I'd been talking about Jenassa, and crying, he kept looking like he wanted to comfort me, but stopped himself. He did give me a hankerchief though. He told me about himself, and about leaving Cyrodiil behind after a falling out with his family. He also confessed that although he supported the Empire, since he was an Imperial, he didn't agree with what the Thalmor were doing. He'd heard stories about people losing family members to them, and their family had never seen them again. I told him about my mission to free the roads of Skyrim from them, and he thought that it was a good idea, and promised to help me. We talked for hours, and didn't realize how late it was until some of the villagers in town started coming to the inn for dinner. It seemed that we weren't going to be doing much travelling for the rest of the day, so I went ahead and rented us a room for the night. Wilhelm, the innkeeper, told us a story about the barrow near the town, saying that it was haunted. The only person who had tried exploring it was a treasure hunter about a year ago, but the night he left they heard screams from the barrow and he was never seen again.

During dinner Marcurio asked if we could explore the barrow. He seemed to think that it might be full of treasure, and that the ghost story was a fabrication of the locals to get people to come gawk at the barrow and stay at the inn. Since we'd been relaxing around the inn all day, I said that we could explore it. I warned him that barrows tended to be full of draugr though, at least in my experience. He assured me that he wasn't afraid of a few dead ancient Nords.He also told me that one of his hobbies was studying the ancient Nords, and their ruins and barrows. I added exploring the barrow to my list, and he laughed a bit. It seemed that he was started to understand how I ended up with so many things to do.

We explored the first section of the barrow, and found the ghost that everyone had been talking about. It was the treasure hunter, and he'd made some sort of potion to make himself look like a ghost. After reading his journal, it seemed that he had eventually gone insane. We couldn't get any  farther into the barrow than we did for the same reason that he was stuck: we didn't have the claw that unlocked the puzzle door. I took the journal, and some of the potion to study, and we went back to the inn to tell Wilhelm about what we had discovered.

Wilhelm was angry that the treasure hunter, a Dunmer man named Wyndelius, had been tricking them all for a year now. He thanked me for taking care of him, and gave me a sapphire dragon claw as payment. It was ironic that Wyndelius had been tricking the one person whose help he needed to get the treasure in the barrow. It was starting to get late, so I decided to finish exploring the barrow tomorrow. Marcurio seemed like he wanted to go back tonight, but he understood that we needed to be well rested to avoid having traps or draugr kill us. Thankfully the room at the inn had two beds, so we wouldn't have to argue over who got to sleep on the floor.