Tirdas, 6:50 AM, 15th of Evening Star, 4E 201

Markarth

When he was a small child, no older than ten years, Ancano had decided to build a play fortress out behind his home, in the field. For his age, he thought, he had shown a remarkable amount of foresight. The first thing he'd done was to gather some good thick sticks and use a mallet to pound them into the earth in a nice wide ring. Then he built a sort of palisade around them, from smaller sticks, of course, and things went from there.

Within a month, he'd built, with his own two hands, a fortress so elaborate he could actually live in it if he wanted. There was a central sort of hut with a deerskin roof, a few little lookout posts, a flag with his own personal logo. A few times, he played with his friends in it, and they were always impressed with how much work he'd done. If it were anyone else, they might have been skeptical that he'd built it himself at all.

Before long, though, the young elf's parents had had quite enough. They told him to get rid of his twig-fort. It was an eyesore, or something of the sort, looking bad in front of the neighbors. Ancano wasn't going to disobey them, but they couldn't expect him to take that lying down. The next morning, he went out back, systematically doused the whole fortress with lamp oil—which he paid for, out of his own pocket, they couldn't pin that one on him—and set it ablaze. It burned so hot he couldn't go anywhere near it until after lunchtime, and then it was a mess of ash and smoke.

Strangely enough, he didn't mind the loss. If anything, it was gratifying, in a queer, counterintuitive sense, to stroll through his handiwork afterwards. He distinctly recalled the scent of wood smoke in the air as he stepped through the smoldering remains of the fort he'd destroyed. His parents had been less than pleased, of course, but he'd contained the blaze perfectly, and ash spread out easily enough. They couldn't complain.

From that day forward, it had been a fantasy of his that one day, he would stroll through the ashes of some site he'd conquered, still smoldering from the unstoppable attack he had visited upon it. It lingered with him for decades to come, just an amusing thought in the back of his mind. And when he showed up the morning after the attack on Markarth, some part of him was hoping his fantasy would actually be realized. Unfortunately, Markarth was built into a mountainside, fashioned in the architecture of the Dwemer. It was made entirely of stone. There was simply nothing to burn. Ancano felt singularly cheated.

They took the city in the dead of night. It was an effortless affair. All they had to do, truly, was send a few men over the walls with grappling hooks and ropes, have them open the gates, and send in the 14th Unit. Exactly one hundred mages, hand-picked elites of Alinor. Within half an hour, the guards had been subdued, the Jarl had been captured, and all was well. Ancano himself had supposedly been busy organizing the main body of troops to occupy the city, but the truth was that he wanted to give himself a chance to introduce himself by strolling in through the aftermath. In any case, the general himself did not enter the city until sunrise. By this time, his soldiers were already taking down the Imperial flags and replacing them with the Aldmeri standard. Still no smoldering ash, though, very unsatisfactory.

Ancano entered the city at the head of a massive formation of Altmer soldiers. Their marching was likely loud enough to rouse any locals who hadn't been woken up by the guards' struggles. The streets were not very wide in this place, and Ancano had to give the order to halt before his elves could crush him against a building or such.

Four Thalmor wizards in uniform marched down the steep streets towards him. They seemed to be dragging someone by their knees. Ancano realized it must be the Jarl. That would be the only person his elves would bother bringing to him.

"General Ancano!" One of the wizards called out. Ancano did not move to approach them. He waited, standing perfectly still, until they were close enough for him to speak in an indoor volume.

"This is Jarl Igmund?" Ancano was impressed to find that the Jarl appeared entirely uninjured. Stunned, perhaps, but without a single mark on him.

Igmund blinked and looked up at the general with dilated eyes. "What… What is the meaning of this…"

"I thought it best to ask you what to do with him," the same wizard as before said. With his hood up, the morning sun shone down on his head in a way that just barely obscured his eyes. It looked very dramatic.

"Thank you, mage," Ancano nodded. "From what I have heard, Jarl Igmund has long supported the White-Gold Concordat. He has done a splendid job of ensuring cooperation between the Empire and the Thalmor."

He crouched down in front of the Jarl and continued. "The White-Gold Concordat has been discarded. The time of cooperation is at an end."

The Nord's gaze came to focus on Ancano's face. "Oblivion take you," he spat.

"Well, that's that, then, isn't it?" Ancano's first impulse was to summon a sword and slash the Jarl's throat open. But he had better foresight than that. It was always possible to execute a prisoner, while magic had not advanced enough to un-kill anyone. He stood up.

"What are your orders, General?" the wizard asked.

"I want him and any surviving members of his staff incarcerated. Separately. Keep them under constant guard, but… Treat them well. They may be valuable as hostages yet."

"He was the only one to be spared, sir."

"Very well, off you go," Ancano sighed. The wizards turned and dragged the Jarl off while he spouted some impotent rhetoric about how they would all pay for this.

The soldiers behind him numbered some four thousand strong. The remainder had stayed in their mountainside camp as a reserve, but there were still far too many to address. Still, Ancano turned around and did his best.

"Markarth is ours! Proceed to the Imperial garrison. Make yourselves at home."

And with a rousing cheer, the soldiers filed their way into the city. Ancano wisely decided to outpace them and head for the keep. All he had to do was stumble his way through a city whose roads were mostly staircases first.

Understone Keep was in dreadful condition, Ancano thought. If Markarth was to be treated as one great Dwemer ruin, then the keep was the most Dwemer-like, and the most ruined. It lay at the very back of the city, recessed into the mountain itself, shut off by a massive pair of dwarven metal doors. Behind them was an absolute mess. It was like an archaeological expedition interrupted halfway through. There was a spacious central atrium, but it was filled with debris, mounds of dirt, giant chunks of broken carved stone. Between here and the throne room as an impressive gallery of ancient ruins, and apparently, off to the left, there was an entrance to an entire underground dwarven complex. The humming and hissing of ancient machinery filled the air, a constant low rumble in the background, more easily felt than heard. Very grand, all of it, but Ancano did not understand how the Jarl had worked in such squalid conditions.

Still, the throne room seemed like good enough to relax in for now. Ancano had not entirely woken up yet. He slouched almost comically low in the stone seat—which was truly made of stone, by the way, it seemed awfully uncomfortable to sit in for very long—and propped his chin up on one hand. At some point, a regent overseer would be installed in the city, and they would have the honor of sitting up here. For now, though, it was Ancano's hard-earned privilege to try to rest on this great awkward piece of rock.

At the moment, he was hosting the gracious company of two elves. The first was the leader of the 14th Unit, Commander Lestra. The second was his acquaintance Prime Justiciar Elevir. There was no strategic reason for Elevir to be present—Ancano simply had come to enjoy his presence, after a fashion. Much better company than the late Ondolemar. Unfortunately, however, the throne room was little more than a small staircase with a stone chair crammed in at the top, so his esteemed companions were all sitting down on whatever flat surfaces they could find.

"Well, that was easy," Ancano deadpanned.

"We knew Markarth would be a pushover," Elevir shrugged. "The Thalmor have been intensely active here for years. Every single one of the Justiciars who came to High Rock from here could tell me the strengths and weaknesses of the city."

"I must admit—I expected more resistance from the Imperial garrison. They must have known what they were up against, at least."

"There weren't that many, honestly. The garrison was almost empty. We've sent out scouts to see if they're outside the city."

Ancano sat up, eyes narrowed. It didn't take a master strategist to know that that was wrong. "That's not good enough. Lestra!"

"Yes, General?" The black-robed elf on the left side of the room stood at attention.

"I want your mages to search the Dwemer complex beneath this keep. Leave no stone unturned. If the Imperials have retreated down there, we're in for an ordeal."

"Sir, yessir." Lestra turned and excused herself from the room. Ancano's company was down to one.

A minute or two of silence passed. Clamoring voices in the distance were faintly audible over the noise of machinery.

"Should've done this years ago," Ancano muttered.

"Hm?" Elevir gave Ancano an odd look.

"Oh, I apologize. I said, we should have done this years ago. It's turning out to be so… Easy. The entire Legion could throw itself against the 14th Unit, and the entire Legion would likely lose."

"Ah." The Prime Justiciar nodded appreciatively.

"On second thought…" Ancano paused for a few long seconds. "I am far too bored today. Come, Elevir. We are going on a little expedition."

With that, the Thalmor general and the Prime Justiciar exited the throne room. From here was a massive staircase down to the rest of the keep. No railings, of course, and the steps were in as abhorrent condition as one might expect. They were harder for Ancano to go down than up. The Prime Justiciar addressed him as they walked.

"If I may, General," Elevir said, "I do not feel our concerns should stop with the Imperial Legion."

"Let me guess. The Dragonborn?" Ancano was beginning to hate that title.

A few braziers very dimly illuminated the keep here and there, but off in the direction they were walking, the walls were host to the hard, bright light of Dwemer lamps. This was good, because the floor quickly degenerated into bare dirt and rocks for a stretch.

"Yes, sir. The Dragonborn. One of my Justiciars told me his given name is Iseus."

"How very… Helpful."

Elevir blinked and shook his head. "We've spent the past twenty-six years preparing for the Second War with the Empire. We're ready to fight the Legion. We're not ready to fight the Dragonborn."

"Why do you continue going on about that man, Elevir? He's only one man. I don't know what you expect from him."

The hallway opened up into a reasonably spacious cavern. This was the first area that looked properly like a Dwemer ruin, but it was still obvious that the Nords had been here afterwards. There was a stream of water, running rapid over jagged stones, across the middle of the cavern, and a dwarven bridge across it. On both sides of the bridge—right up in front of him, and in a couple of distant tower-like structures—were more of those glowing braziers. On the bridge's far side was a staircase up to a set of double doors, wide open. Lestra and her wizards were nowhere to be seen.

"That would be our ruin, right?" Elevir asked.

Ancano said nothing and continued walking.

Flanking the stairs were two stone columns, which were topped off with what Ancano recognized to be absolutely massive dwarven spheres. They were unfolded, but motionless. It reminded him of the Nord tendency to put the severed heads of powerful beasts on wall mounts.

On the far side of the doors was a large, atrium-like chamber that looked like it had endured a cave-in. There were stairs up to more doors on the left and right, but most of them were blocked off by debris. Ancano noted that there were massive cobwebs on some of the surfaces here. Frostbite spiders, no doubt. He flicked his wrist. An ethereal sword appeared, with the telltale aura of something being summoned from Oblivion, already in his hand.

Beyond this door, the stone masonry simply stopped, and gave way to rough dirt walls once again. This was quite certainly the territory of frostbite spiders. Ancano was quietly alarmed by the realization that this had always been here, not two minutes' walk from the throne room. Safest city in the Reach, indeed.

"Wait," Elevir said. "Is the 14th Unit already down here?"

"I believe so." Ancano shrugged and continued walking. "You haven't answered my question."

"The… What? The one about the Dragonborn?" Elevir took Ancano's silence for agreement, which was accurate. "I've been working in Skyrim for a long time. I thought our affairs here were under control, and thanks to him, they're not, anymore. And now my Justiciars are no longer active anywhere in the province."

"Besides Markarth, of course."

"Besides Markarth. Thankfully, my intelligence network isn't all so obvious, but it has been… Crippled. In the past weeks. It's no longer so easy to track the activities of one man who does not wish to be followed."

This cave had already been explored, recently. Torches were still burning, though magically enhanced oils meant those could be weeks old. Spiders the size of wolves laid here and there on the floor, motionless, blackened with the telltale burns of destruction magic. Indeed, the 14th Unit had already passed through this area.

"I wonder why Jarl Igmund never bothered to kill these things," Ancano mused, mostly to himself. "It couldn't be that difficult. They already defeated enough automatons to stock a Dwemer museum."

"You mustn't forget how dysfunctional the Reach is," Elevir said. "Why should they have cared about whatever's beyond those doors back there? They're easier to shut out than many things."

"Yes, well…" Ancano trailed off. His idea departed him prematurely, in due deference to what he was looking at. They had just walked into a chamber absolutely covered in spider silk, barely any patches of bare ground to be found. It was also covered in great black burn marks. But the thing that had stolen Ancano's focus was the giant spider in the middle of the room. It was obviously dead, abdomen flat on the ground, legs splayed out awkwardly—head practically burned to a crisp.

"Wh… Did the 14th do this all just now?" Elevir asked with an incredulous quaver.

Ancano took a moment to regain his composure before he answered. "Ah… Most likely. Truly, Elevir, they're meant for more than pest control. What's this, now?"

On the far side of the room was another set of Dwemer doors, set in a proper stone frame. The doors were just barely ajar. In front of them lay a corpse in Imperial armor.

Ancano's sword reached its time limit and dissipated from the air. He ignored it, and stepped over the body with delicate disdain, to open the doors. There was a staircase leading steeply downwards through a stonework passage. This would be where the ruin started properly, then. But the elf's attention was less on sight than sound. With the doors open wide, he could distinctly hear the sounds of war from somewhere down here. Shouts, cries, metallic crashes, all down there in the distance, audible even over the omnipresent white noise of Dwemer machinery.

"Let's go," he said quickly, and started striding down the stairs, two steps at a time. He was still bored, after all. It would be a shame to miss out on the action. Unfortunately for him, the staircase took that moment to suddenly quake under his feet. Something, somewhere, must have caved in. Ancano very nearly fell and broke his neck.

The 14th Unit, like all of the Thalmor Mage Units, was exactly one hundred elves in number, no more, no less. These hundred were divided into five sections, and these sections were divided into five teams. They were trained to do more than cooperate, to act as more than the sum of their parts. Every mage was coordinated within his team; every team was coordinated within its section; every section was coordinated within the unit. Because of this, the Mage Units were known to defeat enemies seemingly far more powerful than they were.

Ancano turned the corner at the bottom of the stairs, and happened upon the source of that din of combat. It was another cavern, one that extended far below his feet. A small network of bridges and open towers filled the space between a flooded floor and a glittering ceiling. Any other day, it would have been a beautiful place to sit and think, but it was in this network that the 14th Unit was doing battle.

There were automatons everywhere. On the bridge between Ancano and the nearest tower, pieces of broken metal were littered so thick that he had to watch where he stepped. He could see most of the cavern from up here. A team of Thalmor wizards with bound swords was circling in a deadly dance with two dwarven spheres. Three massive frost atronachs were piling on top of an even larger steam centurion, trying to wrestle it off the side of a bridge. Spider workers, like mechanical caricatures of the arachnids Ancano had just passed, were trading lightning bolts with elves. Just by a quick estimate, there looked to be no more than twenty mages in here. That was wrong. Had Commander Lestra ventured down here with only one section?

The closest automaton was a dwarven spider worker one level below him. The bridge it stood on connected to the same tower as his. It was advancing towards an unseen target, probably inside the tower itself.

Ancano did not wait for a better opportunity to strike. He was a trained Thalmor soldier, and more importantly, he was here on his own initiative. He took off at a breakneck sprint, casting a layer of mage armor over himself with one hand, and conjuring a new sword with the other. His footfalls had to be perfect. There was so much debris to avoid, and if he were to slip now… Well, it was a long fall down to that water.

The elf's path took him right off the bridge's edge, just before it reached the tower. He leaped off the side at the same time that he twirled his sword around into a reverse grip. He'd timed it so the spider worker would be directly beneath him when he jumped. The fall was perhaps ten feet down. Ancano held his ethereal hilt with both hands, and with a cry of exertion, brought the weapon plunging down just as he landed. The impact on his feet jarred him, but his blade carried true. It drove straight into the spider worker's dorsal gyro, so deep that he couldn't pull it back out. The spider had the audacity to continue trying to move, so Ancano gave his sword a wrenching twist, and that finished it off. Unfortunately for him, the spider then proceeded to explode in a shower of lightning.

He couldn't see. It felt like someone had just thrown a fistful of hot coals in his face. His arms were numb, he couldn't feel his fingers. If it weren't for that armor spell, Ancano might not have even survived that. He sank onto his knees, so as to avoid stumbling blindly off the bridge, and absently cast a healing spell on himself until he was feeling better. The joys of being a mage. Strangely, the greatest worry on his mind was whether the electrical shock had disheveled his beautiful long white hair. The joys of being a high elf, perhaps.

When he wasn't seeing spots anymore, Ancano realized that the target had been a mage to his right, down on one knee with a crossbow bolt in his thigh. His vision also cleared just in time for him to see the steam centurion smashing the last surviving frost atronach in two. It was close enough by him that he could see the individual runic patterns engraved on its metal plating. It didn't look like it had been damaged at all so far. It noticed him.

The dwarven centurion was, by a wide margin, the largest and strongest automaton to ever see use. It stood at some ten feet tall on two thick legs, and like the dwarven sphere, its arms both ended with weapons. However, its size came with the obvious weakness of being very slow to move. This centurion was lumbering its way up a long, curved ramp towards Ancano. If it reached him, he would die. There was no contesting this point. Fortunately, the general had a few good seconds to stop and think.

Long ago, Ancano had read a sort of guide on cave exploration. It had said that after one hundred feet or so, a falling impact on a body of water was simply not survivable. Water was always a liquid, but at that speed, it would be like a landing on solid stone. This drop looked more like seventy or eighty feet, but that standard was for mer and men. A steam centurion was far more durable—but also far more massive, and a little top-heavy. He understood the logic behind those frost atronachs.

The elf's thoughts then went to his company. The 14th Unit. Deliberately designed to maximize the effects of teamwork. To work together.

At the top of his lungs, Ancano bellowed, "Everyone! The centurion! Telekinesis!"

By itself, telekinesis was not a powerful spell. Unusable, in combat. It was too slow, too weak, simply by nature. But what if five mages did it at once? Ten? Twenty? Ancano dropped the sword, raised both hands at the centurion and pushed. An aura of red-orange energy appeared from his palms outward. It felt to him like pushing on a stone wall, but he kept doing it. And as the mages around him did what they could to stun the remaining automatons, more of them were free to pitch in. The centurion's steps were becoming slower, more labored. It was starting to slip in place. All they had to do was keep pushing…

The centurion tried to take a step backward to steady its footing, but it slipped instead. Its metal foot scraped ineffectually over the stone, and for a moment, the automaton's whole body was in a state of critical imbalance. Then it toppled over the edge, and fell like a rock, straight down, down to the water. There was a deafening crash as the centurion landed on the surface. Ancano couldn't tell how much was the water splashing and how much was the centurion breaking.

Then the fight resumed. There wasn't much left to do, by now, just mopping up. Those two dwarven spheres had been destroyed long since. Ancano looked back at the wounded wizard to his right. He had pulled the crossbow bolt out, it was on the floor in a little red puddle, and he was struggling back onto his feet while healing himself back up.

"Mage!" Ancano called out. Not very loudly, they were only fifteen feet or so apart.

"Sir!" The wizard gave him the briefest of glances. He was already readying a destruction spell.

"Where's Commander Lestra?"

"She took the others into the ruins, sir! The automatons were just motionless before. They came to life right when she left!" The wizard threw a lightning bolt down at a dwarven spider on the bottom level.

Ancano took another look around the room. "Which way?"

The wizard wordlessly pointed past Ancano, at the doors at the bridge's end.

Ancano nodded in thanks and turned away. He started across the bridge, blinking away the last of the disorientation from that spider's shock, and summoning another sword for himself. The telekinesis had drained his magicka almost entirely. He had to walk unarmed for a few seconds while preparing himself for any new spells.

He didn't get all the way to the doors, though, because they opened up to reveal—big surprise—Commander Lestra. She barged through with the authoritative sort of air that any Thalmor leader exuded, then abruptly stopped and looked around the room. Her eyes settled on Ancano. "General? What are you doing here?"

"I got bored. Did you find the legionnaires?"

"No, but we found a massive den of Falmer." Lestra was flanked by three mages carrying bound weapons. The members of her team, of course. "At least a hundred fifty."

"I take it they're dealt with." Ancano did not feel bad about stopping to chat. The fight out here was largely over with.

"We brought the roof of their cave down on their heads, you may have heard the impact." Lestra said it like a fact of life.

In fact, Ancano did remember hearing the impact. Rather, he remembered feeling it. After all, it had almost broken his neck, going down that staircase. "Excellent work, Lestra. I hope none of your wizards have been hurt."

"A few injuries," Lestra shrugged. This was a relief. Replacing members of Mage Units was supremely annoying business. The unit hierarchy was not designed to accommodate Thalmor deaths. In other, more pleasant news, the fighting sounds had just about stopped.

"Very well. I maintain that this venture was for the best. Truthfully, I'm still struggling with the notion that so much hostile force was right beneath Markarth this entire time."

"Nothing that the 14th couldn't handle, of course."

Ancano smirked.

"Commander Lestra!" Elevir's voice shouted from somewhere behind the general's back. Footsteps were rapidly approaching. It sounded like he was running up to them.

"The legionnaires aren't here," Ancano said without turning around. He felt he'd dispensed enough respect for now.

"Oh." Elevir stopped just behind him. "All right, then. I hope our scouts come back with some good stories to tell."

Lestra peered over Ancano's shoulder at the Prime Justiciar. This was too fun. "I don't remember there being so many wrecked automatons out here."

"Oh, is that what you were so confused about?" Ancano asked wryly.

"That, and we left the cavern through a different door. The passage loops back around to here, it seems."

"The section you left here was fighting the automatons when we arrived," Elevir said.

"Yes, apparently they were in some sort of standby previously? They activated spontaneously, or so I'm told," Ancano added.

"Yes, I recall the automatons out here," Lestra said. "When I saw the steam centurion, I declined to have them pre-emptively destroyed. Speaking of which, where is the centurion?"

"I don't think it managed to claim any lives out here," Ancano said, "but you might want to send a salvage team down to the water. I remember reading that the dynamo cores are very useful."

"So…" Elevir paused. Ancano imagined him looking from one elf to the other. "What do we do now, sir?"

Ancano turned around and looked at Elevir, eyebrows raised. "Honestly? My honest judgment? I think we should just take the day off."