Middas, 11:53 AM, 23rd of Sun's Height, 1E 173

Gates of Dusk

The problem with the ruins of Skyrim was not that they were dangerous. It was that they were ruins. Even after a mere couple centuries of neglect, a building could be reduced to nothing, be it by deliberate damage or simply by the elements. And that was far worse a shame than any sort of danger. So much hidden knowledge, so many lives' work, lost forever to the darkness of history. These ruins were full of things that didn't deserve to be buried.

As far as Sirese was concerned, it was the least she could do to try and uncover some of them. She hadn't become Thane of Hjaalmarch by sitting around and waiting.

The Gates of Dusk were a prime example of this sort of issue. She had not so much as known about this ruin until only the other week. Like most ruins of any real age, the surviving portion was largely underground, which at least shielded it somewhat from the decay of nature. The only visible portion consisted of the gigantic, ornately sculpted iron doors on its westward hillside—the ones, ostensibly, for which the ruin had been named.

Unfortunately, it had been built beside the swamps of her hold's northern half. Its great doors were now sunken halfway into the ground, and fused together with rust. Whatever decoration had adorned their surface was unrecognizable now. The very foundations of this ruin had been slowly descending into the earth. In a few hundred years, it would likely be gone entirely. Entering normally was out of the question.

So here Sirese stood, at the bottom of a sloped pit of muddy earth, just deep enough to come up past her head. The base of the pit was just about as wide, exposing a solid, gently arched surface of stone. There was plenty of room to stand around on.

She and her housecarl had been very busy with their shovels these past couple days. As it happened, ruins on hillsides tended to have hilltops above them.

"I think we're ready," Sirese said. "Ydris, the flask?"

At the moment, the man was standing above her, right at the pit's edge. Ydris, her housecarl, her husband, likely a few other things of hers in between. He made an imposing sight in his steel armor. Then again, no doubt did Sirese herself. No doubt would anyone with the good fortune to wear what they wore. The High King might have proclaimed his people the one of Nords, but their blood still bore the Atmoran affinity for steel.

"Careful," Ydris murmured, as he lowered the ebony vessel down to her. It was a simple thing, about the size of a typical tankard, with a threaded lid and a lever-operated spout. But there were Daedric artifacts that were safer to carry than this.

Sirese wordlessly accepted the metal flask, then knelt down over the stone. This would have to be done very carefully. She took a deep breath in… and began to slowly exhale. Even her lungs might not be safe from this.

She poured out its contents in a slow, controlled dribble, tracing a complete circle in the stone around her. And where the liquid touched the stone surface, it instantly sputtered to life, hissing and frothing, dissolving everything in its path. This would not take long at all.

The Dwemer used this substance to extract pricelessly rare metals from otherwise-unusable ores. No doubt, they would hardly appreciate how Sirese was using the flask's worth to explore a Nord ruin. Actually, they wouldn't appreciate that she was using it at all. They were likely still looking for it.

The moment she was done, she stepped out of the foaming circle, and took Ydris' hand for a lift. She came up out of the pit with just two steps in the soft loam slope. Safe at last.

Sirese took another moment to drink in the fresh air. The acid's fumes had been prickling at her face even without her breathing in. As an afterthought, she cast a brief healing spell upon herself, in case.

"Show-off," Ydris muttered.

"Only as much as need be," Sirese grinned, before tossing the empty flask in the general direction of their campsite. Then she turned around to view her handiwork.

To her delight, the circle looked to be just about perfectly uniform in shape. The acid had already eaten a narrow, deep groove into the stone, and was still going. It would have taken days to do this job safely with pickaxes. This method was going to take mere minutes. Sirese was content to watch and wait.

In fact, it happened only two minutes later. There was a sudden, messy-sounding cracking noise from the stone below, and an instant later, the entire circle of stone simply fell away, leaving an empty dark hole in its place. A couple seconds after that, it landed loudly on some hard surface down in the depths.

"Well," the Thane said, clapping her hands together. "Let us give it a few more minutes for the acid to settle down, and then we can toss in the rope. Is it ready?"

"As it'll ever be, I reckon." Ydris gave the rope in question a tug. They'd brought a good hundred feet of the stuff, and tied one end around a nearby tree trunk. The rest of it was knotted every couple feet, for easier climbing.

Not that either of them needed knots to climb a rope. It was more a question of climbing a rope while wearing heavy armor. And Sirese had no idea how tall the room below was going to be.

She spent the intervening time preparing herself for the task ahead. Checking her armor, her weapons, her potions, doing some stretches to warm up, bringing the coil of rope over to the pit. They were about to enter a place where the living hadn't been in centuries. Even if she was indeed used to that thought by now, there was no sense in getting careless.

Eventually, Sirese clambered down into the earthen pit and checked on the edges of the new hole. The acid seemed to be done with its work by now. She could see a little of the room down below, too, from the sunlight coming in. It was close to exactly noontime, and at this time of year, the sun wasn't far from the zenith. There was a very visible circle of well-lit stone flooring, about twenty feet down.

"The rope, please," she said, holding out a hand without looking.

Ydris threw the coil of rope straight past her into the hole. It unfurled all the way down to the bottom, where the excess all landed heavily on the floor.

Sirese held up her empty hand in exasperation, then sighed and started climbing down. Close enough.

The first thing that she noticed was the air. Every Nord ruin she'd ever really explored had been underground, and it was always unpleasantly stale. This … wasn't much of an exception, but somehow, it felt warmer and cleaner than the air outside.

Maybe because of the swamp so nearby. But that didn't feel like a complete explanation. In any case, it was quiet in here.

She ended up landing right on the thick disc of stone from the hole in the ceiling. It had broken in two from the impact of the landing, which flattened out its arching curve. The moment Sirese landed upon it, she hopped off onto the floor proper, and dual-cast a single spell.

It was akin to the alteration spell of candlelight, but divided by a hundred. A brilliant multitude of glowing white motes of energy spread through the air around her, out to a radius of ten or so feet, lighting up the room with a diffuse glow. Even after reaching their full distance, the dots of light all drifted through space, slowly orbiting the Nord's body.

Oh, how she loved the ways of the arcane. The magic-fearing Dwemer didn't know what they were missing.

Besides that acid, anyway.

The room looked like a typical antechamber to a Nord ruin. On her left were what had to be the front doors—the Gates of Dusk, as they were known—except that the walls had broken down in that area, and the doors were blocked to about halfway up by a huge slope of dirt. On her right was a much smaller doorway, with a staircase down to some lower area. And on the remaining two sides were a few recessed shelves. For draugr.

Like the ones that were climbing out onto their feet right now.

There were four of them, in total. Two in front of her, two behind. They were warriors, armed and armored, like her—but their gear was as old as this ruin. And so were they themselves. Their bodies were withered, sinewy things, with eyes that glowed eerily blue in the dark. Life had left these beings. They existed only to defend their resting place.

Sirese reached down to her belt, and pulled up her war axe in one hand. If she couldn't handle these few creatures, she was going to be very disappointed in herself.

Before the draugr could close in, she leapt forward and batted the left one's mace downwards with her axe, only to bring its edge right back up into the assailant's throat. There was enough power in her swing that it went through nearly to the bone.

The light in its eyes instantly went out. That was Sirese's first kill of the day.

It was no coincidence that she'd brought an axe with her today. In fact, it had been made specifically for this task. Generally, she preferred swords, for how quicker and nimbler they were to use. But draugr flesh was too tough and dry for swords to cut well into, and thrusts were near useless against an enemy that couldn't bleed. The weapon in her hand now was a Skyforge steel axe, with enough heft behind it to cleave straight through flesh and bone alike. It was the perfect draugr-killer.

It also had a wide enough edge that it wouldn't readily get stuck in targets. Sirese turned to face the right-hand draugr and pulled her axe free in one swift motion.

This one had a sword and shield. Not a bad combination. But the other two draugr were coming close. Sirese had only a couple seconds to act. She lunged in once again, and brought her axe down atop the draugr's shield, deflecting an incoming sword strike with her free bracer on the way. But it wasn't as though she wanted to damage the shield at all. She simply yanked it downwards using her axe as a hook, and then stabbed her axe's spike into the creature's exposed face. That stunned it just long enough for her to kick it onto its back.

At that moment, the other two draugr caught up with her. She didn't even have time to put her foot down. One of the draugr, wielding a huge angular longsword, brought its weapon right down on her shin. It would've taken her foot nearly off, except that there was a steel armor plate in the way. The impact barely even hurt.

Fortunately, by this point, Sirese's magicka had replenished a little from the light spell. She deftly circled to the right, putting the two draugr in a row in front of her, keeping her axe on guard the whole time. Then she raised her free hand and sent a jet of searing flame across them both.

It wasn't like with a living target. Draugr flesh wasn't only unliving—it was dry. The fire ignored what little armor the creatures were wearing, and tore right through their skin like it was made of paper. Their muscles fared no better, steadily disintegrating as they burned. But draugr flesh also wasn't like a living target in that the draugr didn't even care. They kept trying to attack her all the same. And after a couple seconds of backpedaling and casting the spell, Sirese ran dry of magicka once again.

And now the draugr were both on fire. So that was good.

The front draugr, the one with the longsword, had taken the brunt of the damage. It lifted its weapon slowly, intending to make some sort of vertical strike, despite its own degraded muscles. Sirese didn't wait for the strike to come down. While the sword was up, she stepped forward and swung her axe straight into the draugr's forehead. That was more than enough.

That left just one draugr still standing. Still on fire a bit, but very much standing. And it still carried a sword in one hand. But it raised its free hand to cast a spell instead, and sent forth the very start of a stream of frost—before Sirese deftly chopped the offending hand off.

At that moment, Ydris landed behind the draugr, and swiftly beheaded it with a single stroke of his own axe. There was that dealt with. The draugr's body crumpled to the floor, finally devoid of its unliving energy, and missing a hand and a head.

"I had it already," Sirese snapped.

Ydris shook his head mirthfully. "And here I thought you were going to complain I took too long."

"That too. Some housecarl you are."

The one draugr with the shield was struggling back to its feet. Ydris walked over and casually took its head off as well.

"My sword and my shield," Sirese went on, trying hard not to grin. "Killing the enemies that weren't threatening me, protecting me from enemies I already brought down."

The Nord man shrugged at her amiably. "You know I didn't have to be a housecarl. I could've sworn my oath to the Companions instead. Gone around slaying all the terrible Falmer, or whatever they do."

"And I didn't have to become Thane of Hjaalmarch. I could've been one of High King Harald's by now. But then you'd be bored, and I'd be bored, and Yngva wouldn't exist."

"How many times have we had that conversation, again?"

Sirese started walking towards the far doorway as she spoke. "Well, Yngva is fifteen, say we have this conversation once a week—how many weeks are in a year?"

"Fifty-two."

"Fifty-two times fifteen… five… uh…" Sirese quickly did some numbers in her head. She was grateful she even knew how to do this. Most Nords didn't. Incidentally, it was very easy to cheat Nord merchants sometimes. "All right, this is the seven hundred and eightieth time we've had that conversation. Contemplating how we could've done differently in life."

"In fairness, we do not talk about that once a week."

The doorway led to a staircase heading downward—no surprise there, the hill on top of this ruin wasn't big enough for anything else. It went down twenty feet or so, then turned a corner and proceeded out of sight. Even with her spell active, this was still an ominous descent into darkness. Looking down ancient abandoned passages underground tended to have that effect.

As she began her way down, Sirese switched to holding her axe by the head, snug between her fingers in a resting grip. These staircases never had railings. If she fell and landed on her own axe the wrong way, she would be the laughingstock of Sovngarde forever.

Also, then she wouldn't be there for Yngva anymore. It was nice to have something to come home to, but having a daughter was another matter entirely. She was the sweetest young woman anyone could have wished for. Perhaps Sirese could find some trinket in this ruin to bring back to her.

The staircase proceeded down to a second corner, and then a third. Along the way, the Nord renewed her starlight spell. It normally lasted for roughly a minute before expiring. When left to its own devices, luck had a way of putting the moment of expiration in the middle of a fight.

"I'm surprised," Ydris' voice said behind her.

"Hmm?"

"These stairs. I would have expected them to have a trap on them somewhere. Perhaps a swinging ram to knock someone down from the corner, or…"

Sirese laughed lightly. "Are you really that afraid of falling down these stairs?"

"Mainly because I'd land on you."

"Gods forbid."

After the third corner, the stairs went down to a small, bare antechamber, with a pair of large iron doors on the far wall. And unlike the ones at the top of the ruin, these were perfectly intact. Not particularly decorated with anything, just the usual engraved scrollwork, but they might have counted as their own noteworthy find.

The handles on the doors were two great big iron loops, set vertically at waist height. Sirese tossed her axe up to catch it by the haft, then walked up to the doors—and waited.

Ydris appeared at her left side a moment later, his own axe in hand. They both reached for the door handles, and simultaneously pulled each one open.

This room was different. A spacious, eight-sided atrium, all built around a thick iron-shod pillar running from floor to ceiling. A small, empty stone table sat on the floor in front of the pillar, almost like an altar. But that was all Sirese could see. The radius of her light spell stopped very short of the far walls. For an open structure deep underground in a sinking swamp, they seemed surprisingly untouched.

And they were lined with shelves for more draugr.

"Split," Sirese said.

"By your will, my Thane," Ydris replied.

With that, Sirese hefted her weapon, and ran straight at the nearest shelves on the right.

What ensued was a frenzied, frantic struggle to move and strike with lightning efficiency. These draugr were all starting out in their shelves, and when they were in their shelves, they couldn't fight. Sirese ran up to them just as they began to awaken, and with one brutal chop after another, cut each of them right back down. She could hear Ydris doing the same, on the far side of the room.

Soon, she was facing draugr who were already out on their feet. But it didn't slow her down. Their attacks didn't even matter to her. She let them strike her armor, ignored it, kept going, lethal blow after lethal blow after lethal blow, draugr coming before her in a nightmarish blur of skeletal faces, with her axe ready to meet them every time. At this rate, she'd be able to—

"Fus, RO DAH!"

An unearthly rumble swept through the room. There was a huge wave of bluish magical energy coming right at her. But the instant she heard the guttural sound of the 'fus', Sirese had already put up a ward spell. The shout's force simply broke over her harmlessly.

It was a draugr, of course. With that voice, it had to be. This one was wearing some elaborate iron armor, and carrying a fearsome battle-axe. It stood with all its fallen allies around it. The lord of the crypt, no doubt.

And Ydris was still busy. This was a bit uncomfortable.

Sirese and the draugr began walking towards one another at the same pace. She raised her axe, the draugr raised its own. Armor or no, that battle-axe was going to break bones if it hit her.

And then, right as Sirese came within range of the longer weapon, she threw her axe straight into the draugr's exposed face. Its attack fell dead with the rest of it.

One unexpected move. That was all it had taken. Such was the nature of battle.

By the time she was ready to retrieve her weapon from the armored corpse, Ydris was already finishing off the last few draugr on the other side. And that made her realize something—this room was a dead end. The far wall from the entrance had nothing on it but more shelves.

"Ydris," she said, while renewing her light spell again.

Her housecarl was in the middle of kicking the last undead body off of his axe blade. He turned and looked at her before he was even done. "You all right?"

"Yes, the shout wasn't a problem," Sirese nodded. "I feel like I expected this ruin to be bigger."

"Well, not all tombs are the size of cities. Some are the size of tombs." Ydris walked over to her slowly, looking around the room as he did. His eyes focused on something on the floor. "You forgot your axe, by the way."

"Ah, right." How had she forgotten to retrieve that thing? This was embarrassing. She must have gotten distracted with how pretty Ydris was.

The axe was still embedded deeply in the draugr lord's skull. Sirese planted one foot on the side of its face, and wrenched the axe head free with one good tug. And she was all ready to move on, in the middle of stepping away, when she hesitated in place, and gave another look at the undead creature's messily-cloven visage.

The undead man's visage, rather. This was definitely a man. Or he had been, once. And Sirese usually didn't stop to think about that, but perhaps the shout had gotten her wondering.

She asked idly, "Really makes you think, doesn't it?"

Ydris came up beside her, and looked down where she was looking. "Eh?"

"This was no common servant, this fellow here. He was a Tongue. Must have been a great warrior, in life. Now look at him." Sirese nudged the draugr's helmeted head with her toe. It turned away from her a little. "It's sad, isn't it? For a good warrior to end up like this. No more than another mangled undead corpse. Not much of a legacy."

"Mmm, I don't know about that. You really think this part is what matters?" Ydris paused. His breath was still labored from the force of the fight. But this was what they did—they fought through hostile places, and studied what was left. "A lot of warriors end up as mangled corpses, after all. Doesn't diminish who they were in life."

"Perhaps there were people who cared about this man. But I bet a fair few of them are on the floor with him now. All mere mangled corpses, just like he is. No one is going to know him as anything else."

As she spoke, Sirese began circling around the room slowly, examining it for more details. It wouldn't do for them to lose their alertness to a bit of contemplation.

"Well, that's not so bad," Ydris replied from behind her. "Is it? It's not like we only amount to what people remember of us. Or… or even what mark we make on the world. This Tongue fellow of yours had a soul of his own."

"Yes, I'm sure," Sirese murmured absently. She was already focusing on something else. The stone table in front of the column. At first sight, she'd thought it was empty, but there was something on it after all. A simple square of iron plate, eight inches or so to a side, flat in the middle of the table's surface. The edge opposite the column had a single knob of metal on top, like a handle.

A lid. The table had a lid on it.

On the way over, the Nord raised a hand and renewed her light spell again. She likely didn't have to yet, but it was a habit.

Up close, she could very clearly see that the iron square was connected to the table by a pair of bolted-in hinges. It looked very heavy. But strangely, there was no visible lock of any sort on it. She could have just taken hold of the metal knob and opened the lid in this instant.

"That's the most obvious trap I've seen in my life," Ydris said from beside her.

"Yes, it is," Sirese nodded. "Come on, let's move back."

She didn't try again until they'd both retreated all the way to the antechamber. It was a simple process. Just a brief flash of telekinesis, and the lid flipped upwards and revealed its plain metal underside. It came to a rest just past straight up.

Nothing else happened.

Yet this was far from over with. Something was waiting underneath the lid. It looked metallic, much brighter than the lid itself, but from here it was hard to see.

"Wait here, Ydris." Sirese murmured.

"As you wish," her housecarl nodded. That was a relief. She'd half expected him to try citing the whole sword-and-shield thing on her.

The metallic object turned out to be a handle. She'd seen dozens like it in Nord ruins. It was a simple twist bar, set in a recess in a small sculpted dome. To activate it, all she had to do was pull the bar out far enough to turn it, and then do so. Not very interesting at all.

Except that this one's assembly—handle and dome both—were made of Dwemer metal.

If this had some special significance, it was lost on Sirese. All she knew was that this was one of those moments where her best choice was to act. She just reached in, pulled the handle up, and gave it a good quarter turn, as far as it would go.

An instant later, a loud, metallic thud shook through the floor. Some dust and dirt floated down from the walls. Then a low, grinding noise began, like a hundred gears turning in chorus, far below, out of sight—and the great iron column began to split open.

It was like watching a flower bloom, but one that started out as a stem instead of a bud. The column's solid casing came apart into eight sections, one facing each wall of the room, and the sections began to fold down into themselves, coming away from the ceiling, spreading outwards in a seamless motion of interlinked machinery. And as it opened up, a brilliant, bluish light began to leak out from within, throwing strange patterns on the walls, growing brighter by the second.

Sirese had never heard of a Nord tomb with anything like this inside. How had it even been built? It made no sense.

As the iron shell peeled steadily away, its contents became quickly visible. A beam of solid white light was running from floor to ceiling, trapped between two glowing green lenses—and right in its center, some ten feet up in the air, was an orb of a thousand blinding colors.

The instant Sirese laid eyes on it, a jolt of pain shot through her head. She gasped involuntarily, turning her head, squeezing her eyes shut, trying to clear her thoughts—what was this? How had this happened?

Something had changed when she looked at the orb. She'd realized something. This was no treasure for them to bring home. That much, she knew already. They had to forget they'd ever found this. It wasn't just dangerous—it was impossible to know, to understand, to even grasp in the slightest. Whatever this was, it had to stay put.

"Well," she began to say, turning back around to look at Ydris.

And she turned just in time to see a blade draw across his throat. He fell to the floor in a shower of glimmering blood.

Everything stopped.

There was no time to think. No time to feel, no time to react. The threat was coming towards her. This was what she had trained for her whole life. Her instincts told her to fight, and she obeyed.

A figure was stepping over the steel-armored form. It wasn't the figure of a normal living thing. It was an inhuman creature, featureless, made of sleek black skin, with golden lines running over in strange patterns. In its hand was a sword, made of the same golden substance, dripping red with blood—

She knew the golden substance. Of course she did. It was more Dwemer metal.

The figure was upon her in an instant. It bounded forward and leapt through the air, and a moment later, a foot slammed into her abdomen with the force of a battering ram.

It was an impossible impact. She felt the breath leave her lungs, felt herself go off her feet, felt a hard edge strike the back of her helmet—the edge of the stone table—she was seeing stars, but she raised her axe just in time to parry the killing blow of the sword.

Another strike came in. She raised her arm, made it bounce off her bracer. Rolled sideways, came up onto her feet with a sweeping parry, deflected the sword again. This creature was fast. So fast. But she had an axe that could cleave through bone. All she needed was the chance.

And the creature wasn't going to give it to her. So she would have to take it. The next time the sword came in, she stepped aside and knocked the blade away with her arm. There was a split second, just a tiny split second, where the creature's neck was exposed. She swung her axe in with all of her strength.

Her swing stopped short.

The creature had grabbed her by the wrist. Its grip was crushing, painfully crushing, as it slowly twisted her arm away. Sirese could only stare in shock at this creature. At its featureless blank face.

It didn't even have eyes. How could it see without eyes?

The sword plunged into the side of her neck, downward, through the gap below her helmet. She felt the sharpness pierce her skin, right through her throat, right into her body. She couldn't breathe, the pain stopped her all the way through. The blade pulled messily away a moment later. There was so much wetness. So much.

She almost forgot to think of home.