InsaneJournal

Note: This drabble is a precursor to "Alduin's Bane", which will be written after this drabble. There is another part of 'Discerning the Transmundane' in the game that involves the harvest of elven blood, but I'll likely toss that into a future 'main quest' chapter and allow the conclusion to take place, organically.

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Once Ysmir left the College, he descended down the bridge and took off on the pathway that curved underneath and down before the cliff's edge. Once he reached the shores of the Sea of Ghosts, it started to get even colder, the icy wind biting at his face and making his eyes water. He pulled his hood up over his head for some extra warmth and started carefully maneuvering his way over the planks of ice that dotted the surface of the water.

Eventually he found it - Septimus Signus's outpost. There was a small round door like the sewage covers in the city that lead inside to a great cavern of ice. He wasn't sure exactly what to expect when he entered - would Septimus even be alive? Had he succumbed to some awful sickness or had somebody perhaps found him here and killed him?

He was relieved when he at last entered and found a man dressed in purple robes, wandering around and muttering to himself.

"Dig, Dwemer, in the beyond. I'll know your lost unknown and rise to your depths. When the top level was built, no more could be placed. It was and is the maximal apex."

"Septimus?" Ysmir called after him. "Septimus, is that you?? Urag told me you might be here. I heard you know about the Elder Scrolls..."

"Elder Scrolls. Indeed," the old man replied. "The Empire. They absconded with them. Or so they think. The ones they saw. The ones they thought they saw. I know of one. Forgotten. Sequestered. But I cannot go to it, not poor Septimus, for I...I have arisen beyond its grasp."

"Okay, so where do I find it then?"

"One block lifts another," the man mused. "Septimus will give you what you want, but you must bring him something in return."

"That sounds fair enough, what do you want?"

"You see this masterwork of the Dwemer," Septimus said, gesturing to the giant brass orb in the room. "Deep inside their greatest knowings. Septimus is clever among men, but he is but an idiot child compared to the dullest of the Dwemer. Lucky then they left behind their own way of reading the Elder Scrolls. In the depths of Blackreach one yet lies. Have you heard of Blackreach? 'Cast upon where Dwemer cities slept, the yearning spire hidden learnings kept.'"

"Alright... where's Blackreach? How do I get there?"

"Under deep. Below the dark. The hidden keep. Tower Mzark," Septimus carried on. "Alftand. The point of puncture, of first entry, of the tapping. Delve to its limits, and Blackreach lies just beyond. But not all can enter there. Only Septimus knows the hidden key to loose the lock to jump beneath the deathly rock!"

"Just give me what I need, and I'll go to this Blackreach for you," Ysmir urged. "What do I need to get in?"

"Two things I have for you. Two shapes. One edged, one round. The round one, for tuning. Dwemer music is soft and subtle, and needed to open their cleverest gates," Septimus explained. "The edged lexicon, for inscribing. To us, a hunk of metal. To the Dwemer, a full library of knowings. But...empty. Find Mzark and its sky-dome. The machinations there will read the scroll and lay the lore upon the cube. Trust Septimus. He knows you can know."

"So, what to you is an Elder Scroll, then?" Ysmir asked. While the book he'd read barely made any sense, Septimus was talking some kind of sense, here.

"You look to your left, you see one way. You look to your right, you see another. But neither is any harder than the opposite," Septimus said. "But the Elder Scrolls...they look left and right in the stream of time. The future and past are as one. Sometimes they even look up. What do they see then? What if they dive in? Then the madness begins."

"The future and the past is one... That's kind of what I'm trying to do with this Elder Scroll. You know about the Time-Wound, right Septimus?"

"Of course I know, child. The Scroll you seek is the one used to banish the World-Eater!" Septimus replied.

"How can you be so sure of that?"

"All the Elder Scrolls at the Library in Cyrodiil are catalogued. As I said, the Empire thought they got them all, but one was forgotten, and it lays in wait for you to retrieve it."

"Well, thank you for this information, Septimus. Where is Alftand so I can start looking?" Ysmir asked.

"You will find Alftand south and west of the abandoned city of Saarthal, high on the mountaintop."

Ysmir wasted no time and took off, out of the outpost and back across the Sea of Ghosts, towards Saarthal. From there, he followed the road south and west until he finally saw one Dwemer tower. "This has to be it... but it has to be further up from here..." he muttered to himself.

When he finally reached the true entry site of the ruins, he found some small shacks and a couple tents scattered around. Clearly, somebody was in there and it wasn't as deserted as he might have imagined. He found a small journal laying outside in the snow and picked it up. The contents only confirmed his suspicions, and he knew he was likely in for a bit of a fight.

A wooden boardwalk guided him lower to the entrance, which just opened into another glacial cavern. Now that he was inside, it wasn't as cold but the pathway inside was littered with an array of crates and barrels, and some of the nooks had bedrolls laying on the floor. Further in, the snow was painted red with blood - whose, he didn't know.

He managed to loop himself back around to the entrance without being detected, but now he was being more careful and sneaking around to see if he could hear anyone. With all the blood, he imagined maybe they'd all been killed by the Dwemer automatons that usually guarded these places. As he carried on further down the tunnel, he could hear a distinct Khajiit voice talking.

"Where is it? I know you are trying to keep it for your self, J'zhar... You always try to keep it for yourself! No! There's got to be more Skooma..."

The voice sounded like it might have been coming from above, but it was too hard to tell, yet. Ysmir kept quiet and continue sneaking down the chamber, waiting to see any sign of the Khajiit. He sounded like he was pretty unstable - if they'd been down here for a while, he might have been going through withdrawals, and would be rather volatile if he was detected.

There was a new room with a table in the center, and it curved around to a slope with some large brass pipes running near the walls. Ysmir followed the slope upward and down into another cave network, where at last he found the owner of the voice.

"What? Who is this, brother? Another of the smoothskins looking for food? But this one wasn't trapped with us..."

The Khajiit attacked him, and Ysmir drew his sword, swiping at the air as the Khajiit drew closer. The Khajiit hissed in pain as Ysmir's steel cut through the flesh of his chest and clutched his hand to the wound, which allowed Ysmir another swipe, this one lodging into the side of the Khajiit's throat. He gathered the journal from J'zhar's body and the few useful supplies he'd had with him before taking off down the trail to another little room where he found yet another journal. Apparently the excavation crew here had been trapped in these caverns during a nasty winter storm and most of their supplies had run out.

As he continued down through the corridors of the ruins, he noticed a certain warp in the air - there was gas here, and he should be careful to not use any fire or shock magics. Most of the Dwemer spiders and guardians he encountered along the way were quickly dispatched, the pieces of their broken bodies scattered along the ruin floors.

It wasn't until he came across a set of Chaurus egg sacs that he inaudibly groaned - he hated those wretched, oversized insects. Nonetheless, he collected some of their eggs in one of the empty vials he'd brought with him - they made an excellent poison.

A barred gate stopped his advancing, but there was a lever nearby and he pulled it, watching as the bars dropped. Going forward, he knew he was going to face off a few Falmer - wherever there were Chaurus egg sacs, there were usually Chaurus, and the Falmer that kept them as livestock.

He came across a "dead end", which was really just a platform that dropped down to another level of the ruin. There was a woman's body down there, but he wasn't sure if she fell or jumped.

"Feim!"

His body turned transparent and he hopped down off the ledge, landing with a "thud" on the ground below him. Even though it did hurt, his Thu'um had protected his corporeal body from any real harm. Several Falmer and Dwemer spiders closed in on him, and he fended them off with fireballs and his Voice, flinging them off the open stone pathways. Once the coast was clear, he went around and used his knife to remove the Falmer's ears from their bodies - another useful alchemy ingredient.

He carried on through the next room with ease - his ruckus from a few minutes ago must have drawn out all the Falmer from that room, but he knew there would be countless more ahead.

Eventually he reached what he could only describe as a torture chamber, and there on one of the stone beds laid a dead Altmer woman - he assumed her to be "Valie" as described in the journal he'd found after he killed the Khajiit.

Eventually, he managed to reach the end of another stretch where he saw a crude claw trap set with a very obvious tripwire. "That looks like it would have hurt..." he chuckled.

The next door lead him into the Alftand Cathedral where he found another Falmer faced away from him. He crouched down and became invisible as he crept up behind the creature, bringing his sword heavy and hard upon his head, killing him immediately.

The next area was a large cavern with a few more Falmer and a rather impressive Centurion, which yielded the key to the lift once they'd squared off. As he opened the gate, two figures came out from behind the pillars and he snuck down again, listening to them.

"Sulla, let's just get out of here. Hasn't there been enough death?" the woman spoke.

"Oh, of course you want me to leave. Just waiting for me to turn my back! So you can have all the glory for yourself!" accused the male.

In just a few short moments, the pair of them started fighting and Ysmir kept tucked away behind another pillar, letting them wear each other out or kill each other, whichever came first.

Umana seemed to be rather fierce, as Sulla laid dead on the floor a few moments later. Ysmir went invisible once again and looped around behind her before dragging his blade across her throat, letting her body fall to the floor with Sulla's. The gate ahead looked like the elevator that would take him up and out of this place, so he did. His pack was starting to get rather heavy and he knew it was probably best to unload some things and come back in a few days with a lighter pack before tackling Blackreach. Septimus was a patient man, he believed.

A few days later, after he'd sold off or stored what he'd found, he at least returned to Alftand with Lydia in tow, and took the lift back down to the mechanism Septimus had mentioned.

"Wow, this thing is amazing," Lydia commented, running her fingers over the brass rings. "How did the Dwemer even come up with these things?"

Ysmir implanted the attunement sphere into the empty slot and watched as the loops swirled around until all the spheres were aligned closest to him. A staircase dropped down beneath them and they went down to the door. "This should be the entrance to Blackreach, Lydia... you ever heard of it?"

"No, what is it?"

"Some lost, underground city or something. I went and found a guy named Septimus Signus who said it would be here; the Scroll, that is," Ysmir said. "You ready for this? I don't know what's going to be inside."

"I've got your back, my Thane," Lydia said, stepping aside so he could open the door. What they found through the door was beautiful - though there didn't seem to be any natural light in here from the sun, the area was still illuminated anyway by a series of large, glowing mushrooms.

There was a Dwemer sphere guardian perched on the steps just outside a small building and Ysmir used a nearby crossbow mechanism to shoot it from afar, blowing it to bits. He and Lydia moved down the stairs from the entrance platform and entered the small building, which was in disarray. The most notable thing they noticed first was the crimson Nirnroot plant, humming and glowing in its pot.

"You ever seen a Nirnroot that looks like that?" Ysmir asked, looking over at Lydia. "Take a look around and see what you can find, I'm going to collect these alchemy ingredients, I don't think anybody human has been down here in years..."

"Sure thing," Lydia said, trailing off behind him to the other side of the room. The building was quite small, so there wasn't really any other place to go. "Ysmir! This skeleton... it's Sinderion."

"Sinderion? You mean that alchemist from Cyrodiil?" he asked, turning towards her.

"Look, I found his field journal," she said, handing the book to Ysmir. "He knows... knew somebody in Riften. We should bring her some samples of this nirnroot we found, she has a farm outside Riften. I guess she was an apprentice of his. She might like to know what happened to him."

"We'll bring some with us if we find any, or I'll come back later and look for some more to bring her," he said, tucking the field journal in his bag.

"That journal mentioned thirty," Lydia said. "Are you ready to get out of here and find that scroll?"

He nodded and let her out of Sinderion's study. "I'll come back later for that skeleton, we should give the poor soul a proper burial."

The path was marked by cobblestones and the pair stuck close to each other, working together to bring down the Falmer and Chaurus that attacked them as they traveled through Blackreach.

Lydia had a few close calls with some of the Chaurus that infested the place but Ysmir healed over her wounds and lended her a few potions to help resist the poison. He liked traveling with Lydia, but he always worried about her getting hurt or dying in battle while protecting him, so he usually just traveled by himself. While as Nords, dying in battle was usually ideal, Lydia was too valuable for him to just let her die if he knew he could prevent it.

As they continued down the pathway, he finally spotted it; the tallest tower in Blackreach. "That has to be Tower Mzark, the other place Septimus told me about. Hopefully the tower is empty and we can just do what we need to do," he said.

They entered the tower and he pulled the lever to lift them up to the proper floor. Down the hallway there was a door that opened up to a giant brass orb, much like the one he'd seen in Mzulft back when he'd been doing things with the College.

"This thing is huge..." Lydia said, following him up the ramp. "And it looks like there's something up there, encased in that crystal..."

"That's got to be the Scroll," Ysmir said. "You stay right here, Lydia. You can watch it and I'll see about these buttons, but first..."

He went up the next ramp to where the control panel was. There were four buttons and a center panel, all in separate tubular stands. All the buttons were currently inaccessible, but once he'd put the Lexicon in its own stand next to the buttons, two of them brightened and came "alive". Though he pressed them both a couple times, they didn't seem to do anything. "Lydia... if this puzzle is anything like the one I had to work with in Mzulft, try hitting one of those center prongs there with some frost or fire."

Lydia nodded up at him and directed a simple frost spell at the center of the contraption, and it lit up. "Like this?? That seems to have done something..." she said, stepping off the sphere.

"Exactly like that, and now the buttons on the left have opened up for me," he said, giving them each a press until the largest crystal finally dropped down and pulled away in the center. "That's it... That's the Scroll, Lydia."

Ysmir left the podium and went down the ramp, stepping up to the scroll. "Septimus was right, this is the one. I don't know why, but I can just... I can feel it. I'm not going to open it up right now, trust me. I'll wait until I'm back at the Time-Wound with Paarthurnax." He collected the transcribed Lexicon from its socket and put it in his pack before strapping the Scroll to his back.

"Well, what do we do now?" she asked, following him out of the Tower and to the lift that took them directly out to Skyrim. The entrance to Alftand was somewhere far away from them now, and he lead Lydia down through the mountains towards civilization. "For now... I'm dismissing you. You can go back home to Whiterun, Lydia. I have a delivery to make for Septimus."

"I'll see you back home, then," she said, patting his shoulder before they took off in opposite directions.

Ysmir took off for Winterhold and returned to Septimus's outpost, climbing through the manhole and descending down the ramp. "Septimus, I've got your Lexicon here," he announced as he approached the scholar.

"Give it, quickly!!" Septimus blurted out, taking the Lexicon from the Dragonborn. "Extraordinary. I see it now. The sealing structure interlocks in the tiniest fractals. Dwemer blood can loose the hooks, but none alive remain to bear it."

"Well, what do we do about that, then?"

"A panoply of their brethren could gather to form a facsimile. A trick!" Septimus explained, admiring the Lexicon before grabbing a syringed device off his nearby table and handing it to Ysmir. "Something they didn't anticipate, no, not even them. The blood of Altmer, Bosmer, Dunmer, Falmer, and Orsimer; the elves still living provide the key. Bear you hence this extractor. It will drink the fresh blood of elves. Come when the set is complete."

"That's it?? I just have to fill these with different elven bloods?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. "Why would that even work?"

"Because all Mer descend from the same origin," Septimus explained. "All different, but the same..."

"Alright then... I'll come back to you when I've got those blood samples," Ysmir said. "Enjoy your Lexicon in the meantime."

Septimus busied himself with the Lexicon as Ysmir walked back up the ramp, only to be stopped by a grotesque, black mass of tentacles and eyes staring back at him.

"I've been watching you, mortal..." the entity said. His voice was slow and deep, almost like what one hears underwater. "Come closer. Bask in my presence."

"Who are you?" Ysmir asked, his hand wandering down to the hilt of his sword.

"I am Hermaeus Mora. I am the guardian of the unseen, and knower of the unknown. You are... most impressive," the voice drawled on in that unique lilt.

"Well, Hermaeus Mora, you're blocking my way out of here. Be gone, I don't want to deal with you right now," Ysmir huffed.

"Be warned," the writhing mass spoke. "Many have thought as you do. I have broken them all. You shall not evade me forever."

Herma-Mora's presence vanished from the entrance, and Ysmir hurried out of the outpost. He'd had a fair dealing with the Daedric Princes at this point, and at the moment, he wanted to avoid dealings with them as much as possible.

The Daedric Princes loved to meddle in mortal affairs much more than their Aedra cousins, who largely kept hidden away. It was rare for the Divines to show their physical presence outside of significant mortal toil, such as Akatosh's appearance during the Oblivion Crisis.

Now with the Elder Scroll in his possession, Ysmir's focus was on the Throat of the World, and no mortal, beast, or god of any ilk was going to stop him from going there.