Elder Knowledge
The bronze gears creaked and groaned as the stone elevator descended further down the shaft. Akira pulled her arms close to her body as the temperature dropped, wishing her mage robes were more insulated. As if the mountains and tundra of Skyrim weren't cold enough. Sometimes she wished she were back in Elsweyr, away from all this nonsense. She rubbed her shoulder where that damned-to-Oblivion Redguard had bashed Akira with her spiked shield. The healing spell may have removed the hole, but that didn't mean it had stopped hurting.
The elevator lurched and Akira wondered just how sound these Dwarven constructs really were. The more she thought about it, the more paranoid she got. What if it jammed, leaving her in a pit to starve? What if whatever was locking the gears broke, sentencing her to a deadly fall? What if that insane scholar Septimus had been lying and there was nothing here and Akira was going to be stuck here forever and oh Divines there's no way out is there? Part of her was threatening to have a claustrophobia induced panic attack while another part was wondering if she could use her claws to climb the grooves in the walls to get out.
Just when she thought that she couldn't take it anymore, a doorway rose from below the elevator. Akira rushed out before it even had a chance to stop, deciding that anything would be an improvement over the small elevator shaft. Even running headlong into a horde of frost trolls. At least she could fight those. Luckily, she didn't have to. The doorway opened up into a large stone room with a bronze gate on the opposite side. The bars in the gate were too close together for Akira to get a clear view of what lay beyond.
After casting a Detect Life spell to make sure there was nothing waiting right on the other side to attack, she pushed the gate open to reveal a stone balcony overlooking- whoa. Akira's jaw dropped. Before her was a cavern so enormous that an entire city could have fit inside with plenty of room to spare. There were entire forests of giant mushrooms that gave off an eerie blue light. Luminescent blue spores drifted through the air. Stone towers that looked to be Dwarven in make rose out of the ground in seemingly random points. Off in the distance was… some sort of castle? There seemed to be what looked like a miniature sun floating above it. She told herself that she would have to visit it sometime. But there were more important reasons for being here.
In the midst of her gaping at the scenery, Akira caught some movement out of the corner of her eye. She cast another Detect Life spell and a figure on the path below started glowing with a red light only she could see. The lumbering, hunched-over way it walked could only mean that it was a Falmer. Divines, she hated those blind, feral pit-dwellers. They smelled terrible.
Having been broken from her awed stupor, Akira checked her compass. Supposedly, she had to go southwest to find the entrance to "Tower Mzark," as Septimus had called it. That's where the Elder Scroll would be, along with some inscriber thing that she had been told to use on a "Lexicon," a brown cube covered in some sort of Dwarven crest and faintly glowing with blue energy.
Akira noticed that her route would take her right past the sun-castle. Perhaps she'd be able to visit it after all. Readying her Detect life spell in one hand, so as to keep tabs on any enemies she'd find, and a fireball spell in the other, she descended the staircase leading from the balcony down to the path below where she had seen the Falmer, and headed southwest, towards the mysterious Elder Scroll which may or may not actually be there. This should be fun, she thought to herself.