Capstone Cave, north-west Cyrodiil. 23 Dawn's Beauty, 4E55

The three adventurers raced through the tight, dark, damp tunnels of the cave, lit only by ghostly blue night-eye enchantments. They could not use torches or magical light – no-one could know they were in here.

In the cave that bears the prize's name.

It was the one clue they had found that led to this location – Capstone Cave. The prize was known simply as the Capstone, a pyramid-shaped Daedric gemstone of simply immense power.

The man at the front of the group stopped at an intersection of three tunnels. He stood proud, wearing a suit of ultra-light Mithril armour built for him by master Elven craftsmen, with a thick fur coat wrapped around the top of it. Rare and valuable weapons hung from him – an ebony longbow on his back and a sword made from an extremely rare red glass sheathed on his belt. His name was Camri Everlight, and he was known everywhere. The man who saved the world.

And now the game was back on.

"Any ideas?" he asked to the two women who stood behind him.

"If what we know about the tomb is true, we need to head down," said the Imperial woman, Hermione Barca. She was Camri's newest adventuring partner, the daughter of a former member of the High Council of the Guild of Mages. She was the Arcane University's official treasure-hunter, frequently being dispatched to far-flung areas of Tamriel after a scholar discovered anything noteworthy when studying old texts. Camri, working as a freelance adventurer simply to make ends meet, often accompanied her – it was how he had come by much of the weaponry he carried with him.

Camri nodded down one of the tunnels, leading off to the right. Glancing at his compass, he saw that it was pointing north as he faced into the tunnel. Right into the heart of the mountain.

"It can't be far now," he said. "Ariel, any ideas how long we've got?"

"At the rate they were moving, maybe half an hour before they find the cave – if they can find it straight away"

Ariel Lasaille was a truly unique individual. A Breton in her early twenties, she was an extremely gifted mage in the field of mysticism, and also abnormally intelligent, leading many to describe her as having savant talents. Her grasp of mathematics and fuzzy logic enabled her to draw correct conclusions in fractions of a second, and she was widely accepted to be Tamriel's best practitioner of telekinesis. When she worked alongside Camri, the pair were virtually unstoppable.

"It's going to be close," Camri said, drawing a deep breath. "Come on"

The tunnel led down, steeply winding to impossible depths beneath the Jerall Mountains. As they descended, an ambient heat began to warm the tunnels, making a change to the cold, dank air higher up. The heat grew as the tunnel sank further still, until it flattened out at a complete dead end.

"This isn't good…" Hermione said. "But it doesn't make sense. This heat – it must be coming from somewhere…"

"Exactly" Camri said as he began running his hands along the wall, until suddenly he stopped dead. He ran his fingers over a tiny vertical seam in the rock, only a few millimetres across but perfectly straight – carved by man. Camri pushed against the rock wall next to the seam with his shoulder and a loud rumble suddenly sounded through the narrow tunnel, before an entire section of the cave wall quickly receded down into the ground, revealing a brick-clad tunnel beyond it. A hidden door.

"By the Gods, we've found it!" Camri exclaimed. "Come on!"

The three filed through the doorway, Ariel coming through last and pulling on a lever mounted on the wall just inside the corridor. It caused the false door to rise back up to its original position. They didn't want to make the task of finding the refuge any easier for their pursuers.

It didn't take long before the corridor rounded a sharp corner and the three beheld the stunning Refuge of Melethar.

Bruma town, the previous day

Camri Everlight was awoken just as dawn broke by a loud knock at his front door. Groaning, he climbed out of bed and wrapped his fur coat around him, and trudged up the stairs. Like many of the houses in Bruma, his bedroom was on a subterranean level, designed to hold in heat against the bitter elements outside. As he ascended the stairs, he heard the knock again.

But it didn't seem to be coming from the door.

Was his mind playing tricks on him? He'd lost count of how many times his tankard had been refilled with ale at the Tap and Tack the night before…

No, it had come from one of the windows facing out of the rear of the house. Someone was deliberately avoiding the front door.

Then, he saw it. It almost made him jump out of his skin. A face, peering through a window. A young Breton woman with wavy brown hair, a blue hood pulled over her head.

Camri undid the latches and threw the window open, helping her inside.

"Ariel! What are you…?"

"The Capstone. The game's on" Ariel said quickly, interrupting him.

Camri slammed the window shut with such force that a few clumps of snow tumbled off the roof of his house. "How do you know about the Capstone?"

"Jauffre has been in touch with me. He wanted to know if I knew anything that could help him find it"

"Jauffre's involved?" Camri asked, thinking about the retired Blades Grandmaster. He and Ariel had fought alongside the old monk many times – he was a trusted ally, and a good friend. After the dissolution of the Empire and the collapse of the Blades, he had become a freelance spy, selling information on to whoever he thought was most worthy of it. Camri had heard of the Capstone through Jauffre, through whisperings in the underground intelligence community. A Daedric artifact, thought to be pyramidal in shape, a Sigil stone of infinite power. An unlimited source of magicka.

Ariel almost read his mind. "I know enough about the Capstone to know that whoever gets their hands on it will be able to wield immense power over Tamriel. Think of how powerful a nation's armies could be if their weapons and armour were enchanted by a limitless source of energy…"

"I know," Camri said. "Ariel, ever since I've heard about the Capstone I've wanted to get my hands on it. Not to use it – to prevent others from abusing it. But nobody knows where it is… do they?"

Ariel nodded conspiratorially. "I know where the trail starts. A Dunmer called Melethar Selevras"

"Where do we find him?"

"He died hundreds of years ago," Ariel said flatly. "But he was the last of a Dunmer bloodline who were the keepers of the Capstone. I don't know how they got hold of it, but intense inter-house fighting and turf wars in Morrowind led to him spiriting the Capstone away while his family fought to the death to defend their lands from other powerful families"

"There are ancestral tombs bearing family names all over Morrowind. Surely…"

"No, that's where people have been going wrong. In a message he left behind in Morrowind which has been passed down as local knowledge, he said he was taking his worldly goods and inheritance and depositing the means to finding them in 'the cave that bears the prize's name'"

"The Capstone?"

"Yes, but I've only just made that connection. I've been reading into the Capstone ever since Jauffre approached me about it. It has been widely known that the Selevras family possessed the Capstone, but like you say, people have been concentrating their efforts in the family's burial chambers. But I checked the Selevras family manifest, and it seems that poor Melethar did not receive any inheritance from the family's elders. So, what is this inheritance and worldy goods that he spoke of?"

"The Capstone… Wait, what did you say the message he left behind was?"

"He said he hid the means to finding his treasure – obviously a map, a riddle, a codex, something like that – in the cave that bears the prize's name"

"Ariel, there's a Capstone Cave south of town…"

Ariel gasped. "Can it be?"

"There's only one way to find out," Camri said, running back down to his bedroom and calling back up the stairs. "I'll go to the Imperial City and fetch Hermione, you hit the books and find everything that you can about Melethar and Capstone Cave"

Ariel bounded down the stairs after Camri. "Wait… there's something else"

Camri stopped in his tracks and spun round. "What?"

"As soon as I left the library in Narsis where I was tracing Melethar's connections to the Capstone, a group of Dunmer men went in. They looked quite wealthy and were very threatening – they barged straight past me and marched up to the keeper of the library, demanding to see the Melethar family documents. If they made the same connection I did…"

"Then it's going to get a bit crowded in Capstone Cave. If they did, I doubt they'll be far behind you. We'll have to hurry"

Ariel nodded. "I'll meet you at the University tomorrow morning"

As Ariel turned to leave, Camri placed a hand on her shoulder. "It is nice to see you, by the way, you just caught me by surprise a bit"

Ariel smiled softly and wrapped her arms around Camri. Since their last quest together, they had not seen much of each other. They had spearheaded a nationwide effort to defeat a shadowy doomsday cult known as the Selective, a plot spanning back for aeons to destroy the whole universe. It had taken over their lives for years, and they had lost many dear friends during the quest. After its dramatic climax atop White Gold Tower, they had decided to try their best to go back to their old lives, Ariel working as a scholar and teacher at the Arcane University and Camri going back to freelance adventuring, with a few paid exploration jobs coming from the Imperial Cartography. As such, Camri had been quite surprised for Ariel to turn up at his house so suddenly.

But now it seemed they were once again to be drawn into a fight for the safety of the free world. Some things never changed.

Capstone Cave, the present day

The cave itself was impressive enough. It vaulted at least four hundred feet into the air, a cone-shaped cavern whose entire floor, bar a few man-made constructions, was a gigantic lake of lava. The heat was almost unbearable, as was the stench of gases, and a constant roar emanated from the very bowels of Nirn itself.

But at the other end was an even more impressive feature – seemingly carved into the very rock itself was an enormous, ornate wall, fortified with battlements and guard towers and with a large arch-shaped doorway in its centre. A wide forecourt made a few steps down to the lake of lava. But above the doorway was something quite unusual – a network of pipes and troughs carved into the stone. High above them all, at the top of the course, was a large funnel-shaped stone formation, above which was a sluice cut into the wall of the cave.

Odd, Camri thought, before he noticed the room's final feature. A narrow stone path skirted around one edge of the lake, at various points disappearing into the cavern wall and, near the forecourt where it emerged, it sank into a tunnel that went beneath the surface of the lava.

"It's a trap," Camri observed. "A bloody enormous time-and-speed trap"

"I think you're right," Hermione said. Ariel looked at the pair for explanation.

"My guess is that at some point on that stone path is a trigger stone," Camri explained. "It starts something – probably more lava – flowing out of that sluice up there and down the pipes. You have until it reaches the doorway into the fort to make it along this path, which I'm going to assume is laced with traps too…"

"We don't have time to ponder it…" Ariel said hurriedly.

"Right," Camri replied. "Follow me, and step exactly where I do"

Then, Camri took a deep breath and stepped out onto the pathway that led around the lava lake. This is what he had spent most of his life doing…

Breaking into a run, it didn't take Camri long to activate the trap. He stood on a concealed trigger stone which caused the sluice at the top of the citadel's wall to open. Thick, gooey lava began to ooze out, filling the funnel beneath it and making its way down into the network of pipes and troughs, beginning a convoluted path down to the arched doorway.

Camri knew this was going to happen. He didn't let it break his pace. Every few steps he would trip another trigger stone, but he was quick, almost instinctive in his dodging of the traps. He dived into a forward roll under a razor-sharp crossbow bolt which blasted out of a wall recess, and leapt gracefully forwards as an entire section of the pathway quickly receded back into the wall. He ducked under head-chopping blades as he dived into the tunnelled section where the path burrowed into the cavern wall, but no sooner had he done so than several pendulum-like blades began to swing across the tunnel.

Ariel, following close behind him, dealt with the threat. She used telekinesis to halt the blades at the lowest point of their swing, leaving them dangling harmlessly in the middle of the tunnel. She did the same as a mace-like spiked ball attached to the end of a chain swung down from a shadowy hole as Camri exited the tunnel.

By now, the lava was most of the way down its course to blocking off the door into the Refuge, but only one obstacle lay between them – the tunnel that led below the lava's surface. Camri bolted down the stairwell that led into the tunnel and stopped at its base. He noticed round metal trapdoors in the tunnel's roof, and that the floor had been carved from individual slabs. He bent down more carefully to examine the floor…

"Camri…" Hermione said nervously, eyeing the falling lava.

He stood up and turned to face the other two.

"Exactly where I stand," he repeated. He had noticed that while some of the floor slabs were completely separate from the tunnel, others were constructed into it, hewn from the same rock. They were the safe stones.

Camri danced across the tunnel, avoiding the trigger stones, and Hermione followed close behind him. Camri waited at the other end of the tunnel for the other two to catch up – Hermione didn't miss a step, and carried on running for the Refuge.

Ariel raced down the stairs but tripped as she neared the bottom, falling over and landing clumsily and painfully on her elbows and knees. But as she landed, in a sickening moment she felt the floor slightly sink downwards, and heard a loud 'Clack!' above her as a catch was released and one of the round metal trapdoors slid open. Thick strands of lava began to ooze through the hole.

This was it.

No spell or telekinetic action could stop the lava…

Suddenly, a powerful grip clamped around her wrist and dragged her to safety, fractions of a second before the lava cascaded onto the stone floor where she had been lying.

"C'mon!" Camri said gruffly, dragging her to her feet and leaping over the other trigger stones.

"Camri! The lava!" a voice called from further up. It was Hermione, now standing in the safety of the arched doorway.

"I know…" Camri said through gritted teeth. It was less than twenty yards to safety, but the lava was seconds away from completing its journey through the channels. It was a simple mathematical truth – it was going to be close.

As fast as they possibly could, Camri Everlight and Ariel Lasaille sprinted towards the archway. But, injured in her fall, Ariel soon began to flag, her pace slowing. But then, Camri shoved her powerfully from behind, to be caught in Hermione's arms, before he dived forwards into the tunnel, a mere second before a waterfall of lava cascaded over the doorway, flooding the forecourt in seconds.

"How are we going to get out?" Hermione asked.

"We'll worry about that later," Camri said. "All I know is that by setting off that trap, we've made life very difficult for those Dunmer bastards who are behind us somewhere. Are you alright, Ariel?"

Ariel nodded, breathing deeply as she cast a healing spell on herself. "I've missed this, in a way…"

Glancing back, Camri saw that their way out was completely cut off by a curtain of lava, which was now beginning to creep along the stone floor towards them.

"Anything we should know about, Ariel?"

Ariel quickly cast a life-detection spell. "Nothing inside"

She began to turn around then froze. "They're right behind us!"