Martin steeples his fingers, hunching forward and pressing his nose against his hands. A shimmer falls upon them, muffling their voices to the carriage driver. "The Dragon doesn't see time the way mortals do," he begins, using the calm-but-earnest tones of a scholar. "Time isn't fixed. Even the prophecies written in the Elder Scrolls are not absolute. But once an event is carried out in the mortal realm, it becomes fixed within them."

His voice drops an octave, adding gravity. "When the Dragonborn Ruler loses his throne. The end of the Septim dynasty and the Septim empire became fixed." It's easier to speak of this when he doesn't use first-person pronouns. "But through my desperation to save Tamriel, I never considered the consequences mantling the God of Time would bring."

"I'm here because I'm a part of Akatosh." A grandiose statement, if it came from some other person. "Souls don't die. They can end up in Aetherius, in Oblivion as servants of the daedra, recycled through the Dreamsleeve, or...bound to Nirn, like the gods themselves."

"I'm bound to Nirn because Time itself wills it. I am, in essence, a part of Time itself. I'm a dragon, riding the currents of time much like Akatosh itself. But there's something about this particular stream of Time that forced me to coalesce into it." At this, Martin smiles knowingly. "Perhaps the very Elder Scroll that foretold my death, the very same used to cast Alduin forward in time?"

"The very scroll you used to defeat him once more, and the scroll you still have."