4E122, 9th of Rain's Hand

Success!

The workers discovered an entrance to a sixth chamber behind a wall-plate of bronze. Make no mistake-I do not refer to the ubiquitous Dwemer-metal that covers this whole place. I mean modern second-era bronze! Behind this was an orichalum-clad portcullis; we lost two men trying to discover its mechanism before I took a closer look myself and the pointed bars slid smoothly out of my way. Stout oak posts salvaged from the mine above will ensure the bars remain raised. Tomorrow I shall discover what they protected.

I have increased the skooma ration to keep the remaining workers from grumbling. As I write I am immersed in the thick lusty stink of it wafting up from their enclosure. I have ordered Jsar to ramp up production accordingly. She says the remaining moon-sugar has been tainted by some specie of cave fungus, and must be dissolved in hot alcohol, twice-filtered through charcoal and re-crystallized before it's safe to use. I asked her if the slaves would notice if we skipped all that nonsense and she could only shrug.

So, I told her-skip all that nonsense.

4E122, 10th of Rain's Hand

The sixth chamber is no natural cave!

Beyond the portcullis we found a passage that looked to have been melted out of the bedrock instead of cut. I had the workers gather all the rope they could find and tie each span in series. With one end secured by the entryway, I ventured in and unwound the rope as I went. I discovered a warren of winding tunnels and circular rooms that appeared to have been smote from the firmament in the same fashion. Who but Dinbar gro-Deg could do such a thing? Who but the breaker-of-mountains?

The glassy walls have a dizzying effect. The sheen reflects torchlight blue and green and the sickly glow is quickly swallowed by the dark. My own shadow somehow became divorced from my feet and smeared over the walls like the chickenscratch of a neophyte mage.

I came upon a crossroads of sorts and spied a flicker of blue down the rightmost path. Before I could discover its source I reached the end of the rope and was forced to turn back. I have a more robust strategy planned for tomorrow's delve. (How will I sleep tonight?)

Addendum! Jsar has made enough skooma to last six months or more. The 'tainted' moon-sugar somehow delivered a tenfold-yield of the intoxicant. Jsar is trying feverishly to isolate the precise variety of fungus so that the effect may be reproduced. She believes she can out-cook the boilhouses of Elsweyr and dominate the market north of Cyrodil.

(I must admit that her mercenary spirit has dampened my own excitement some. She does not seem to care that we may have discovered the last resting-place of Dinbar gro-Deg...she has mistaken the means for the end!)

4E122, 11th of Rain's Hand

Treachery! A pair of young Imperials left their enclosure and made for the sixth chamber, presumably to escape with whatever valuables they could scratch together. I'm told they had been gradually limiting their skooma intake for a week or more. The deserters' first sober decision in who-knows-how-many years was an unsurpassed awful one. They should have made straight for an exit and taken their chances in the wilderness. I will be very surprised if we ever see trace of them again.

Their disappearance had the remaining workers in a state of agitation. Jsar shared out the first crystals of the bulk-skooma batch (and observed each of them taking good deep draughts of the stuff), which put them in a more amenable mood. I gave them a short talk on the dangers of thinking for themselves and they made the appropriate groans of agreement.

I ate skeever stew with Jsar. She was as excited as ever I'd seen. Corpse Finger, she said. She was sure of it. The moon-sugar had been invaded by the silvery hyphae of the Corpse Finger mushroom. She needed another batch of raw material upon which to test her new process. She was ready to leave through Shatterback mine and wave down the nearest Khajiit caravan herself!

I convinced her to wait until I could provide a suitable escort. These are troll-hills, I reminded her, and the roads below are choked with bandits.

Her lovemaking was not nearly as fierce as usual. I think she is upset with me.

4E122, 11th of Rain's Hand (night)

Give me whooping trolls any day! Oh, to be ambushed by a merry bandit band!

I shall record the events of this accursed day while I still can.

After the workers had their fill of oat-and-cabbage gruel I had them craft torches from pitch and mule-hay and whatever else they could find up in the mine. I gave them each a number, one to fourteen, and ordered them to take up as many torches as they could carry. I marched the troop down through the Dwemer ruins to the entrance of the obsidian tunnel.

I placed a barrel-chested Redguard there and bade him call his number at regular intervals without ceasing. He was to keep a torch lit at all times. I walked the remaining workers into the tunnels until the Redguard could just barely be heard and there I placed a second man, lighting the first of his torches with my own. I had the second man call out his number in response to the first. A while later I planted a third man the same fashion, and I continued in this way-following the dim blue glow ahead-for what must have been a half-mile underground, until at last I came to worker fourteen.

The queer reflections in the tunnels seemed to be working on my worker's addled minds. Worker fourteen-a frail Bosmer-seemed skittish as a maiden mudcrab as I tied the rope to his ankle. He struggled to conceal a tremor in his hands as he scanned the shadows for who-knew-what.

With the rope looped loosely around my belt I followed the glow from tunnel to chamber to tunnel until I arrived at a wide antechamber of sorts. A perpetual fire burned in a wide grey orichalum bowl. Beyond this sat a pair of heavy doors that each bore half of the club-and-moon seal of the first and greatest Orcish mage, cast in strange light and heavy shadow.

At last! My fool head filled with visions of a triumphant return to the College with a library of lost Orsimer magic. Oh, the scorn they heaped on me. I have no doubt that the Arch-Mage funded my research just to keep me out of her hair. But I would be Master Wizard before long. Yes, Torug gro-Deg-a brutish Orc wielding the most refined of magicks!

I had a shoulder against the doors and had made a little progress when I heard a most unsettling scream emanate from the tunnel. This was followed by another wail, and another. The coil of rope snaked out of my belt and disappeared into the dark. The numbers ceased. I heaped damnation upon the skooma-suckers, and levelled a curse or two at myself for investing any faith in them. But what could I do? My rope was gone, and presumably my way-markers too. I could only move forward. I made a gap in the doors just wide enough to squeeze through and let them grind shut behind me.

In the passage beyond the doors I found my escaped Imperials impaled twice and thrice by a nest of barbed pikes. The shafts retreated into the walls as I approached, snagging bone and stripping flesh as they went. It was writ in legend that gro-Deg would only reveal his techniques to a fellow Orc, and a kinsman at that. Unfortunately for my Imperials, Orcish magic is built to last!

What did I expect to find next? A modest dolmen, perhaps, and in it a dusty scroll or two. In ten lifetimes I would never have expected I would walk into a single domed space twice as large as any Great Hall, and find in it an entire stronghold-longhouse, yurts and all. But there it was, six furlongs under a mountain! It glowed red and pink in the light of the ancient bowl-fires that hung from the smooth black walls on chains as thick and dark as Orcish arms. The silence was vast as it was old.

I searched.

In the longhouse I found Dinbar gro-Deg. He was perched on a high bed of furs surrounded by the bones of his wives on silk cushions. He sat cross-legged, head raised, arms outstretched with palms upturned in a gesture of welcome. What astonishing effort of will could command a skeleton to hold a pose for centuries after death? The showmanship of it! I knelt and said words of fealty before him; in response his arms fell straight down from their sockets and his skull rolled from his neck to land jawside-up between his legs. His skeleton slumped in relief. His long watch was done.

I folded his bones in the proper way. I resolved that I would transport my family ossuary from Orsimer to this sacred place as soon as I had a chance, and place Dinbar first among them.

Behind a mammoth-skin I found library of unique second-era arcana and an impressive collection of lost mechanisms of enchantment. In just one nook I saw an early blood-binder, a table with an inset spiral of cleverly-interlocked soul gems, a hollowed-out giant's femur bearing the mark of Molag Bal. I wanted desperately to read it all, try it all! I found a likely-looking skin-bound book with old-Orcish cut into its spine and set it on a small reading-table. I opened it to a random page.

It held its form for a count of ten, perhaps, before crumbling apart like a brick of Red Mountain ash. My heart sank into my bowels.

I took another book. The same. Another. The same. Another. The same. The pages had been replaced by dry sheaths of some pale mold that broke apart on contact with the air. In despair I pulled away the remaining furs that concealed the bookshelves. I covered my mouth with my sleeve. The wood was thick with crooked stalactites of Corpse Finger fungus; they seemed to point, accusing and mocking.

Thump. I heard the pike-trap lash out in the stronghold entrance beyond, followed by a low lizard rasp. I peered out and saw the stone doors wide open. Framed between them was the silhouette of an Argonian, lifted bodily from he ground on a pair of pikes, struggling against the barbs to free himself. Number thirteen! In one hand he carried what I imagined to be an unlit torch. I left the longhouse and approached the poor reptile in the hope of relieving him of his pain. In the light of my own torch I saw that he was in fact holding the lower leg of one of the Imperial corpses, pale and bloody. Still treading air, the Argonian stripped the flesh from the leg with his pointed yellow teeth and swallowed it back. He dropped the bones, turned his gaze to me and grasped at the space between us.

He was acting oddly, even for a Black-Marsher.

I dared a step towards the pikes and they shrank once more into the wall, ripping the lizard inside-out. He managed a few shaking steps towards me-still attached to the pike-hole by his own trailing pink innards!-before he collapsed. His death-rattle was met by a chorus of wails that were not nearly as distant as I would have liked.

I readied an incendiary spell and quaffed the few viable potions of magicka I could root out in a cursory search of the nearest yurt. I dared not tarry longer in the stronghold-if they were all like this, then how many of my workers could the defences impale before they piled through with sheer force of numbers? I regret that I did not have time to search the stronghold more thoroughly. I am quite certain that Dinbar gro-Deg did not trust his entire legacy to the vagaries of vellum.

I slunk by the perpetual flame and found blood pooling on the floor. It flowed towards the antechamber like the hot effluent of Orsinium flows to the sewer-vale of Wayrest. Following it was as good as any rope or monotone chorus of skooma-slaves-I do not think that I made a single wrong turn on my journey to the Dwemer habitat. All but three of the workers had vacated the tunnels for the upper levels; of those that remained I found two spread among the circular chambers like slaughterfish chum and another stripped to a bloody carcass, one lidless eye looking wildly about, flayed heels still thrumming on the tunnel floor. I put an end to him with the heel of my boot.

Emerging into the Dwemer halls I kicked away the oak posts that held the portcullis aloft. As I stepped away I heard the bars grind solidly into place behind me, blocking the way of any worker who might still have been stalking the tunnels below. A pair of bloody-clawed Khajiit women came hissing around the corner ahead, hugging the walls as if for support, eyes rolling in cannibalistic ecstasy. I unleashed fire once, twice, three times at them, turning one to charcoal from the waist up, causing the other to run screeching out of sight with her grey fur aflame.

I crept through corridors of marble and gleaming Dwemer-metal smeared all over with flourishes of blood. In a place of bare Dwarven pipework a Redguard pawed at me from behind a grille, grunting nonsensically; I put a smoking hole in his chest before it occurred to him that he had only to sidestep a support to get to me.

With that last burst of flame I was wholly spent, and had only my ceremonial dagger with which to defend myself-a thing more suited to opening letters than throats. Among tumbledown machinery I found a heavy driveshaft to use as a club. My ancestors would surely have approved.

The golden stair to the upper levels was slippery with gore. Perhaps seven workers were accounted-for below; I slipped on the warm viscera of another, leaving six. I swallowed two steps with each stride until I had almost reached the top. There I found one end of my rope, black with blood. I readied my club in one hand and wound the rope in with the other until it became taut. Nothing tugged against my grasp. I gave it a stout pull and a butchered Bosmer leg came tumbling past me down the stair.

Five, then. Surely Turog gro-Deg could manage five mangy skooma-addled whelps! Atop the stair I emerged on to the wide shelf where we had built our worker's enclosure. I imagined that they would not willingly return to it, so entered through one of the thick plank doors and slid along the walls as silently as I could. A fallen torch had incinerated the straw beds and they smoked and crackled still, stinging my eyes.

You must understand-I was blind!

Through a haze of smoke and tears I spied something coming at me from behind the communal dresser and timed a swing at it with my club, connecting cleanly with flesh and bone. I swung again, swatting my assailant to the floor.

I had put all my weight behind the killing-blow before I realised my attacker was crying my name. It was too late.

I'm sorry, Jsar. You were a good woman. In your own way, you were a fine alchemist.

I took the ladder from the worker's enclosure to our living quarters and lifted the hatch just a crack with my bloodied club. There I saw the remaining workers in an orgy of excess. They had turned over Jsar's little laboratory and piled the grain-sacks of skooma in the middle of the floor. They were eating the crystals raw, fistfuls at a time. They were no longer men, or mer, or beast. They had become something else entirely. Crooked and twitching and bloated like drowned men. A Breton and an Argonian were rutting on the floor nearby, cooing and hissing. The stink of it! Their skin was dark with veins that fed bunches of long ashen warts and berry-like buboes that looked like Oblivion's own grapes.

Or...the fingers of the dead.

I let the trapdoor down gently and returned to the worker's enclosure. I chanced a dash across the wide marble floor to a little-explored and walled-off adjunct of the ruins and bashed the old planks aside. The creatures cried out to each other. I heard three thuds as they dropped from the upper level to investigate. They dropped thirty feet with all the ease of children jumping into a pond.

I made one blind turn, and another, and another, until I found this room. I shouldered the door shut and barred it with my club.

Here I am still.

4E122, 12th of Rain's Hand

It was a communal sleeping-place, perhaps. Who can know how the Dwemer lived?

I have stripped the cladding from the walls and floor, and damn near ruined my hands in the process. I appear to have retreated to the only chamber the Dwemer ever hew without so much as a drainage chute. Curse my luck!

The smells are thick in the air now. Skooma and rutting and death together. They do not sleep, they do not sit still. They communicate now with naught but hooting and snarling. There is a tireless scraping at the door and, more recently, a thudding somewhere nearby. I dare not guess what these sounds mean.

4E122, Date unknown

I have taken to eating paper, so this shall be my last entry. I wish I had brought food in my satchel instead of this journal.

Outside there is only scuttling and crying and that Aedra-damned thump-thump-thump. I have not dared unbar the door. But I am a starving man, and desperate, and I suppose I have a spark or two left in me.

I will not die in this room.