Morndas, 9:30 AM, 22nd of Evening Star, 1E 173
Mzulft
It all began like another day's work. Ever since the fateful incident in the debate hall, Chief Designer Hizeft had been given free reign to do as she pleased with the oculory. And so Dalzren's new work regimen consisted of scrambling to reassemble the Implier with a much, much larger lens machine.
To call the project 'troubled' was an understatement. Dalzren, with aid from Hizeft and Angmthanz, had found herself working completely from scratch. The oculory lens array was highly versatile, but all of her calculations for the five-sided Implier were rendered useless by the absent fifth Elder Scroll. To allow an unbroken connection of implications, all of the scrolls had to be arranged in an equilateral pattern. What was more, there were four new objects to establish connections to: the three modular lenses on the ceiling tracks, and the interface machine that Hizeft had designed.
It was a staggering amount of work. Dalzren had been working twelve-hour shifts in a frantic effort to complete the Implier, and it still wasn't enough. Due to the nature of the project, and due to the political climate in Mzulft, she and Hizeft had agreed not to bring in any additional help (beyond her junior designer Tazarin for errands), for fear of secrets leaking out and saboteurs leaking in. While the work was in progress, the doors at the base of the oculory entrance were locked, and the Specter was on watch.
That was another matter all to its own. Dalzren had now met the Specter. A mute Dwemer, by all appearances, wearing an armored suit unlike any she had seen before. According to Hizeft, the suit was made of a unique weave of ebony scales and purified Aetherium fibers, rendering it all but completely unbreakable—but more importantly, amplifying the wearer's strength and reflexes to an impossible degree. Dalzren couldn't claim to understand how it worked, but the Specter unsettled her. He didn't respond to commands from anyone but Hizeft. He simply stood on watch, ready to subdue (or perhaps slay) any Dwemer who ventured near the oculory without permission.
And in the event that all these factors weren't enough—the Soul Fray had returned. Dalzren now wore articulated braces beneath her robes on both legs, for the same purpose as those on her hands. Without them, she could barely stand, let alone walk.
The tentative date for completion of the project was the 25th of Evening Star, in three days. She hoped she would last that long.
This morning, Dalzren was running a test on the newly installed lenses. She and Angmthanz were standing in the middle of the oculory chamber, atop the segmented crystal floor around the top of the steam-powered oculory sphere. They were watching the lenses from opposite sides while Hizeft used a control rod on the balcony's newly-installed interface table.
Dalzren may have been responsible for much of the physical work in this project, but Hizeft was the only one who could activate the interface table. It was keyed to her soul print in particular, and no one else's. The only way to circumvent that measure would be to build a new copy of the table's core components, and only Hizeft knew how they worked.
Personally, Dalzren would have liked to be the one using the control rod. It would have been more interesting than staring at the lenses and waiting to see how they behaved. But it was understandable to limit the possible users of the new Implier. There were four Elder Scrolls in this very room—four! The opportunities for increased power were too dangerous to imagine.
But imagine they would.
"I'm increasing the beam intensity by another 20 percent capacity," Hizeft called down. They were at 40 percent already—the lenses were coping with the intense beams of light from above, but only just. For testing purposes, the interface table included controls for apertures on the lens array itself.
Dalzren held up her targeting thermometer, aiming it at each lens within sight. "Temperatures are still nominal," she called back up.
"Same," Angmthanz added, aiming the same device from the other side.
"Keep watching," Hizeft said. "I'm going to try activating the scrolls again."
Perhaps it wasn't the most experimentally rigid test. They hadn't established a single hypothesis, let alone independent and dependent variables. It was mainly a question of trying to find a way for the Implier to function as planned. After all, even once it was ready, the three of them would need time to learn to use the machine side by side.
Hizeft set down the control rod and laid both her hands flat on the table. The sphere rotated once beneath Dalzren's feet, and four beams of light appeared from the scroll shells. The elder Dwemer closed her eyes as she immersed herself in some unseen sensation.
The temperature of the lenses began to rise slightly. Well within safe limits for these materials, but Dalzren was watching carefully. If she'd been more rigorous right now, she would've been using a clock to monitor the temperature changes over time, and recording all of the results on paper. But it hardly mattered for posterity's sake. This machine was likely to be dismantled not long after its first use.
"So far, so good," Angmthanz said to Dalzren.
It was good on her end, as well. She opened her mouth to reply.
Her reply never came. She was interrupted by a sudden sound from below.
The sound was of Tazarin's voice, screaming one single word at the top of his lungs.
"INTRUDER!"
Dalzren's heart stopped.
The implications of that word all rushed through her mind at once. If Tazarin was alerting them of an intruder from the passage directly before the oculory chamber, then the Specter must have already failed to stop the person from coming through. But he'd said the word 'intruder,' as in the singular noun. What did that mean? One single Dwemer from the city below?
It didn't matter. They were in great danger. Her heart was racing now. She called up to Hizeft, "What do we do?"
The Chief Designer had let go of the table. She looked down at Dalzren, then at Angmthanz. "Get up here!" she shouted. "New plan! We'll do it today, here and now!"
Dalzren couldn't think anymore. Her mind was in such disarray. She hesitated in place. Whoever was down below would be upon them in seconds. "But it's not ready—"
But Hizeft simply repeated: "Now!"
She willed herself to obey. Her mechanical leg joints allowed her only to speedwalk up the ramp, nothing faster. By the time she'd joined Angmthanz and Hizeft on the balcony, they were both staring at her with frantic urgency.
The Chief Designer said, "Place your hands on the table. I'll put a protective field around us."
Angmthanz asked, "What about the Implier?"
"It'll be fine," Dalzren said, before Hizeft could reply. "It's more dangerous to itself than we could ever be to it."
Hizeft raised her hands, then hovered them an inch over the elaborately etched golden surface of the table. "On three. One two three—"
Dalzren, Hizeft and Angmthanz all connected at the same time. The same white rolling light washed over them all.
Her body melted away, receding in the shadows of the illusory past. There was only empty space. Formless, colorless, immutable, unknowable. The empty void upon which creation was built.
It was a familiar place.
A square traced itself through the space, angled at 45 degrees and bisected by two perpendicular lines that divided it into four right triangles. A simple geometrical statement that meant the entire world. All four of the outer corners were glowing radiantly against the darkness, bleeding shadow against the light. They were blinding and perfect.
Two hands formed the square into a circle, then twisted it three-dimensionally into a sphere, expanding it outwards until it went beyond their reach. Hizeft's protective field.
So that was dealt with. They'd have longer than a span of a few seconds to attempt their desperate work.
A voice—no, a thought—appeared to Dalzren. Like words on a page, or whispers in her ear, or thoughts in her mind. Fleeting and ephemeral, nameless but for its content. "This is Hizeft. Are you both here?"
Another followed it. "Angmthanz here. I'm in."
"Dalzren here," Dalzren thought, or said, or wrote, in the space in front of her. "I'm in. What now?"
In the distance, impacts echoed numbly against the emptiness. Distant, discordant sounds, like a war in another plane of being. Perhaps the Specter hadn't been vanquished after all.
"Now, we search for FalZhardum Din. Follow my thoughts where they lead."
The light and darkness were both swept away in an all-consuming gray mist. It was cool like raindrops on the touch, hissing down to the ground—to her skin—in a gentle wave.
There was an empty flat plane. Squiggly and crooked around the edges, but flat. Nothing lay upon it. Oceanic waters lapped at its edges. Stars rotated above, but they were foggy and dark. A chorus of low, humming voices rang out with a low harmonic chord, on and on, with no need for breath. It was strangely dissonant, but she had heard it before.
She had heard it before. The droning sound continued.
The shape of the flat plane seemed wrong. It was unformed. It shifted and rearranged constantly, pieces ebbing and rising against the watery waves, only barely remaining afloat. Ripples ran underneath it, causing ridges to travel across its surface before vanishing again.
Dalzren watched.
Suddenly, instantaneously, a shape appeared. In the background, a bell rang, sharp and metallic, accompanied by the mechanical thumping of a great clock in motion. The shape was a silver spike from the far left corner of the plane, punching up through from beneath. When it appeared, the flat mass ceased moving. It was done. It was doing. Something was made.
The clockwork noise faded out again, leaving only the sound of the waves washing, and of the deep wordless chorus. Its notes remained unchanged.
She examined the shape. Its point was sharp. But it was clean, precise, perfectly straight. It knew what it had been designed to be.
More shapes sprouted through the waves. The next was a smoldering bulge in the static shape, on the far-right corner, undulating grotesquely like a beating heart. It stretched the colorless surface beneath it, staining the color a rusty red, like old blood. The shape sounded so wet and terrible. Ominous, like meat beneath the surface. It did not belong.
Yet it was a part of creation, and creation was blind to what things mattered over others. The chorus continued unimpeded. Dalzren understood them. She understood what it meant not to wish for these things.
Or she did not. She suspected what this flatness was, but now she only watched.
A third shape rose into view. A smaller, sharper cone deposited on the center rear of the plane, rumbling and roaring with a distant cry. The sound reverberated in her mind. It was unlike any living voice she had ever heard. There was such strength within it.
She examined the new shape. Part of the cone had been chipped away at the top, leaving only half of the point still remaining. The exposed surface within was raw and glowing with sparks of severed power. It was frozen, motionless, forever.
The drone of the chorus continued. Stars rotated overhead. Dalzren was one with her fellow minds. They were the same.
In another plane, in another world from another point of view, the sounds of war grew louder. They were an unwanted distraction. She wanted nothing to do with them.
She realized that it was becoming harder to focus. Green prickling energy was clouding the edges of her vision. She wanted to open her mouth and expel it from her throat before it could choke her, but it was stifling, clinging to her, eating at her vision.
An imperfection. A flaw in the machine of the Implier. There was no choice but to tolerate it. They had come this far. To stop now would be a condemnation to death, or worse.
In the other world, the sounds of war paused. There was only a voice instead. A soft, nameless voice, speaking to another in that world.
"I know who you are, Ceyrel. I know your name."
Who was the speaker, and who was the listener? It mattered not. Dalzren's other thirds reminded herself that it mattered not. She needed to focus on what lay before her.
The static plane rotated slowly upward, the view shifting and the object shifting in kind. The inky black waves of nothing surrounding it rotated as well, flattening out more and more until Dalzren's vision collided with them.
There was a drowning, bubbling sound. For a fleeting moment, the voices faded away to sheer silence.
Then everything was in reverse. She was looking at the plane from underneath. The waves reflected light in bizarre patterns. The shadows were bright instead of dark. Something had happened to the voices. They were discordant because they were backwards because they were inside-out. Comprehension failed her. This view was impossible.
The green energy encroaching on her vision turned a garish bright pink, like petals of flowers shredded to a million specks. Like blood spraying through the air in a mist. There was no time to waste.
Outside, the fighting sounds gave way to more words. More spoken words. They weren't relevant. This was exactly where they needed to be. The Implier was giving them everything they needed, and it was working without any unexpected snags. Soon, the process would be finished, and nothing the intruder would do could reverse what they had done.
There was no time to waste. Yet Dalzren listened on.
She heard it all. There was no mistaking it. As the voice spoke, the truth came out in a long, ugly cascade. The Specter wasn't a Dwemer male, but a Falmer female. She was named Ceyrel. She had been taken in by the Dwemer of Mzulft as a child, and transformed somehow into Hizeft's personal assassin.
Dalzren remained connected to the Implier's world. But her thoughts drifted elsewhere. There was an avalanche of conclusions after this revelation, and they were all horrible. They were all frightening to her. They were raising even worse questions.
For example: If Ceyrel could respond to verbal commands from Hizeft, if she could listen to the intruder's voice, then she wasn't a blind white-souled Falmer. She was a sighted black-souled Falmer, untouched by the Dwemer's conversion process. Pressing such a Falmer into service wasn't the same. Dalzren accepted, as all Dwemer in Mzulft did, that the white-souled Falmer were little more than animals. They had been designed that way. But this wasn't husbandry. It was slavery.
Also for example: Hizeft had designed this Specter herself. It had been her personal project, not only completely unsupervised by her superiors, but also unknown. And Angmthanz had said that Hizeft had already been at work on her projects when he shared his knowledge of FalZhardum Din.
She snapped back to the image in front of her. It was moving again. Beneath the far center end of the inverted shape, a blue spike was pointing downward, made of crumbling pieces of stone. They were all frozen in place, as though by a magnet. On the underside of the plane, it stood entirely alone, pointing in a direction that no other entities did.
The Black Stone. FalZhardum Din. The connection to Aetherius responsible for the mysterious blue magical ore.
It lay there before them. Through the creeping pink energy, Dalzren saw it. They all saw it, lying there beneath the ice, vulnerable and exposed. They were one. So far, they had only observed, but now was the time to act. Now, in one stroke, after one single use of the Implier, the treasures of the Black Stone would be theirs.
Or such was the idea.
Dalzren's loyalty was guaranteed by one simple fact: If she did anything to contravene her superior's wishes, she would die, and her son would die as well. But more than that, she believed in Hizeft's goals. She believed that Mzulft was at a disadvantage against the other freeholds. One day, her city would collapse under the pressure of the outside world. That was her belief.
But she was a Dwemer. She was skeptical. Even now, in the place of the defiance of all reason, with energy eating away at her eyes and her mind, with the Black Stone ready for the taking, she hesitated.
The voice was still speaking. The fighting had stopped.
She listened.
"I never chose any of this. I had a simple little life once, but that's gone. I've been obeying the will of one person after another. And I've never really had the chance to choose anything for myself. I haven't even known who I am anymore."
Dalzren knew who she was. She was a Dwemer, a designer, a widow, a mother. But something was happening out there. The intruder was refusing to fight. Why?
Not because he intended to let the three Dwemer on the balcony continue their work. Dalzren doubted that anyone would be able to destroy the machine in time to stop them regardless, but the intruder made no such concession. He was refusing to fight because of something else.
Because it was wrong.
The thought came to her in an instant.
SDalzren couldn't allow this to proceed. She couldn't let the Black Stone be taken from its anchored place. Not because the Dwemer of Raldbthar deserved it—but because Hizeft did not.
The Chief Designer had orchestrated this entire operation, from start to finish, to gain power for herself. Not for Mzulft, but for her own personal gain. She had victimized an innocent Falmer girl and made her kill countless undeserving people. She had disgraced the Clan Chief and manipulated Mzulft's politics, destabilizing the freehold so she could gain power for herself. She was even inviting war with another freehold, making an enemy of Raldbthar in order to steal their riches—no doubt, that supposed proof of their conspiring with the Nords was a forgery. And she had enlisted Dalzren in her service. Dalzren, the designer who couldn't resist even if she wanted to.
She was looking through the crackling pink noise. It nearly blinded her now. A wisp of inky dark energy was beginning to curl around the inverted spire of the Black Stone. Hizeft was continuing her plan.
If Dalzren intervened, she and Amalest would both die. She would sacrifice not just herself, but her son as well. Who was she to decide his fate for him? She would be no better than Hizeft, sacrificing an innocent child for her own goals.
The spiral of energy was tightening. Closing around the blue spire, beginning to tug it away.
This was wrong.
She hoped Amalest would understand someday.
With a horrible, mind-freezing push, Dalzren forced herself free. She forced herself back out of the Implier's world, into reality.
The balcony was surrounded by a giant globe of swirling cyan energy—Hizeft's protective barrier. Down below, to the right of the lens array, two figures were in the room. A stranger in robes like those of the Atmoran Dragon Cult, standing over Ceyrel, who was on her knees. Dalzren could barely see them through the globe, but she could see that Ceyrel's helmet was off. Her head was pale and bare. A Falmer indeed.
That was all the information she could absorb. There was only a fleeting moment in which to act. Hizeft was still connected to the Implier interface. So was Angmthanz. They had to be stopped, now, or else FalZhardum Din would end up in the wrong place.
There was only one option. Only one way for Dalzren to live with herself now.
She grabbed Hizeft's control rod off the floor in both hands, raised it past her shoulder, and swung the heavy crystal-bearing end with all her strength at the Dwemer's face.
Flesh and bone broke beneath the blow. Hizeft staggered backwards, her hands sliding off the table. The cyan globe vanished. She slumped down onto her back, and remained there, her head transfixed at an unnatural angle to her shoulders.
It was done. There was no turning back.
Down below, the figure in the Atmoran robes looked up at them. "Wait," he said, in the language matching his outfit.
Angmthanz grunted loudly and recoiled from the table, shaking his hands out vigorously. "Ugh. What happened?"
Then he focused on Dalzren, standing there holding the bloodstained control rod. Then he looked at the Chief Designer's lifeless body on the floor. "Oh."
Dalzren couldn't bring herself to let go of the rod. She wanted to, but she couldn't. Not with Angmthanz standing right there before her. "Angmthanz," she said. "Did you know about this?"
"About the Specter? No. I can't believe you did this." He seemed to truly mean it. This was hardly a fitting response to seeing one of his co-workers murder the other in cold blood.
The figure in robes called out, still in the Nordic tongue, "What's going on up there?"
Dalzren took in a deep, shuddering breath. Tears were threatening to escape her eyes. She walked up to the balcony, and tossed the control rod off over the edge, leaving it to clatter on the floor below.
"I had a change of heart," she said. There was no denying what she'd just done. No one could ever use the Implier at its full power again. Perhaps she could buy herself more time by using the incomplete Implier as she had once done, but inevitably, she would die a premature death, and someday Amalest would follow. That was all that could happen now.
She looked sideways to Angmthanz. "Did you move FalZhardum Din?"
"No. The vision collapsed before anything could happen." The old Dwemer leaned his hands back on the table, but without any effect this time. "I can't believe it. We were so close to making it work. The Black Stone could have been ours."
"It wasn't meant to be," Dalzren said numbly. "Come. Let's go meet our new friends down below."
They met at the base of the left ramp, arranging naturally into a loose circle facing each other. Dalzren, Angmthanz, Ceyrel, and the intruder. Up close, Ceyrel was a shocking sight. She was a young girl, barely even pubescent—no older than fifteen. Her head was bare, shaven hairless but for the eyebrows, to make room for three parallel interface tabs running up her crown. With a sickening start, Dalzren realized that they weren't a garment, but an implant, surgically attached to the girl's brain through the top of her skull.
If Dalzren had regretted her actions a moment ago, that feeling left her now. There was no justification for transforming a child into something this wicked. Hizeft had made Ceyrel half-machine. But there was dark red blood streaked all down the Falmer's face, from her nose and mouth, from up above her eye. She was only half-machine. Used for as brutal work as an automaton, but still able to bleed like an elf.
As if on cue, Ceyrel raised a hand and cast a healing spell on herself.
The intruder turned to her and asked, "You couldn't have done that any sooner?"
"Your staff," she replied tersely. "It killed my magicka. My stamina, too."
The intruder glanced across the room. A pale wooden staff was on the floor, not far from a true alloy sword. "Huh. Well, it is made of elderwood. I didn't ask a lot of questions about it."
"Excuse me," Dalzren said. "Who are you, exactly?"
Upon closer examination, the intruder was even harder to identify than before. He was a male, of course, and he was speaking in the Nord language, but that was all. His head was mostly obscured by a hood, and his upper face by a gray mask marked with indecipherable blue runes. It didn't seem like something a resident of Mzulft would arrive in.
The intruder shook his head. "I can't answer that. All I can tell you is that I'm the wearer of an artifact from Nocturnal, the Gray Cowl, that prevents anyone from knowing who I am. My associates called me the Gray One."
"Nocturnal? You're referring to the Daedric Prince?" Angmthanz turned and stared at the intruder in some mix of awe and trepidation. "Why would a Daedric Prince see fit to destroy our work?"
"She didn't," the intruder said. "This was my idea. Ceyrel killed a lot of people whom I cared about. I came here to kill her and stop whatever you were hoarding Elder Scrolls for."
The old Dwemer stroked a hand down his long beard. "Well. No need for that last part. Dalzren here just snapped our leader's neck. This device is unusable without her."
The intruder glanced at Dalzren. "Thank you."
She couldn't bring herself to offer a response. This outcome was a death sentence for her and Amalest. But these two warriors didn't know, and Angmthanz was too busy being upset at the demise of his project to care. She'd simply have to cope with that reality later.
Ceyrel was wiping the drying blood off of her face with one hand. She glanced down at the floor, but said nothing.
Dalzren said, "I'm sorry, Ceyrel. I didn't know your identity. I might have killed Dalzren much sooner if I had."
The Falmer girl turned and looked at her blankly. "You are a Dwemer. Why do you care, after what you have done to my people?"
It was a fair question. Dalzren supposed it would have been too presumptuous on her part to merely say the reason was complicated. But it was. What had been done to the Falmer race was a grand, political move, an act of necessity that granted them far more individual mercy than the Nords ever would have offered. What had been done to Ceyrel was an act of focused, purposeful cruelty. It was an adequate distinction for allowing the Dwemer to live with themselves. But Dalzren didn't expect that an actual black-souled Falmer would care.
Instead, she asked, "If you hate us, why have you fought for us so loyally?"
Ceyrel didn't have the chance to answer.
Suddenly, without warning, all of the lights in the oculory all went dim. The beams of white light flickered and died. A ghostly tremor shook through the floor, through the air. Wisps of bluish fog rose from the floor, running in fluid lines, converging on a point just in front of the balcony.
As the four onlookers watched, the blue wisps coalesced into a single mass—a glowing orb, hovering in the air. For a moment, it expanded out into a massive, brightly glowing sphere, lashing outward with spiraling arms of energy. Then it collapsed back down upon itself, leaving behind a tall, narrow shape of pure white light.
The light faded away. A woman stood in its place. A pale, elegant woman in flowing black robes, whose lower half trailed out to inky wisps of nothingness.
Dalzren was in the same room as a Daedric Prince. She didn't know what to think.
"Hello," the woman said. "I am Nocturnal. This conversation is long overdue, and I apologize for that."
That didn't sound like a very Daedric thing to say.
The intruder asked, "What are you here to do?"
"Firstly, to apologize. You were a hapless victim in everything that has transpired. I was wrong to doubt you. But secondly, to explain. You deserve that much."
Angmthanz was staring speechlessly. No doubt, he'd waited his whole life for a moment like this. Perhaps he'd eventually think of something to say.
"Millennia ago, in the Dawn Era, I was a young being, unburdened with the weight of experience. The line between mortal and immortal was not as clearly drawn in those times, and I wandered Tamriel freely, experiencing life as it unfolded. But the inhabitants of Tamriel then, the Ehlnofey, were Aedric in origin, fundamentally unlike myself. They could never see me as I truly was. They only saw an illusion, as you do now. I was content with this, for darkness was my sphere as a Daedra. An existence in the shadows suited me.
"But one day, I met an Ehlnofey who changed everything. His name was Vek. Even without knowing me, he understood my thoughts better than any other creature, Aedra or Daedra. He was so eager to join my side in traveling Tamriel, and I… for the first time, I wanted to share my shadow with another. In his presence, I was complete. I have always been, and will always be, the embodiment of my Daedric sphere. Vek showed me not what I was, but what I could be. He opened my mind to the idea that one day, I could be more than my Daedric sphere. I could be more than what the Aurbis had made my essence. Yet he could never see me. And that knowledge filled me with a great, unremitting sorrow.
"So I fashioned him a gift. A shroud for his Aedric soul, one that would veil him in my own shadow. At the time, it was among the most powerful artifacts in all existence. It was intended not to hide him from others of his kind, but to allow him to see beyond his natural limits. He could see me, as I truly was, to the fullest depth of my existence. When Vek donned it, the artifact became a mask, and he wore it in the gray shadow. We were one together. Those times were the happiest I had ever known.
"But it was not made to last. Vek realized the power that I had granted to him, and he wished to use it to its fullest. He embarked on a campaign to gather might in Tamriel, using subterfuge at first, then using sources of power he had unveiled using my Cowl. When I confronted him for his misuse of my gift, he claimed I intended to make him subservient to me, and that I only wanted him to know enough to make me happy. He claimed that I had never wanted him as my equal. He mistook my Daedric sphere as a declaration of power.
"I realized then that I had erred in creating the artifact. But Vek never gave me the chance to undo what I had made. He cast the Cowl into the abyss of Time, binding his own soul to it in the process. He was forevermore out of my reach, and the Cowl—despite being of my own essence—could never return to my plane of Oblivion. It was cursed to find one undeserving owner after another, tainted by what Vek had done.
"To him, it was the culmination and ending of his life as an Ehlnofey. To me, as a fledgling Daedric Prince, it was a valuable lesson. Mortals crave power. They deserve only to be dealt with on a basis of transaction. The Cowl was the last gift I would ever give without a price to be paid for it. I have suffered to watch it fall into so many wicked hands. But I think today, I must make an exception for you."
Nocturnal's gaze settled on the intruder.
And the intruder spoke. "Vek is the Place, isn't he? That presence in the back of mind. He wanted me to kill Ceyrel. He almost convinced me that I wanted to. Except you showed me all of those visions of the little Falmer girl. You didn't have to do that."
"I didn't," Nocturnal said.
Nobody spoke. Dalzren didn't understand this conversation. Her mind was elsewhere.
Nocturnal continued. "The last wearer of the Cowl intended to use its veiling power to read an Elder Scroll, expecting to choose what he would discover as a result. You chose as well, although without knowing it. The Cowl is of my essence, and so I saw what you looked for. Time and time again, you showed yourself the many visions of Ceyrel as an innocent girl. I doubted it would be enough to convince you to stay your hand. But you did."
Angmthanz raised a hand tentatively. "Nocturnal? I have a question."
"Yes?" The woman looked at him, stoic, unyielding. No doubt, she hadn't appreciated the interruption.
"I don't know how to say this, but … are you truly Nocturnal herself? I've read about Daedric Princes and how they commune with mortals. You sound like a mortal being. The way you're speaking, the way you're acting."
"Well, I take that as quite the compliment. I had many centuries to practice this demeanor. It has seen little use since the Dawn Era. Most Daedric Princes never reached out to Mundus as I did, and I myself am no longer inclined to try. Except today."
The intruder was not dissuaded from responding as before. "Honestly, the seeing-special-stuff part of the Cowl sounds great, but I'm surprised the last wearer wasn't in it for the mysterious person inside the Cowl sharing his mastery at everything in life. I was hopeless at fights before this."
Ceyrel turned and looked at the intruder. "So, that's how you won?"
Nocturnal ignored her and replied only to the intruder's comment. "I believe Vek spoke to you more actively than to previous wearers. I see so much in you of what he used to be. And I expect he saw the same." She paused. "Now. The first that I came to do was to apologize. And the second was to explain myself. But I feel it's time for a third. A gift. The first I have given since I first made the Gray Cowl."
No one spoke.
"The Gray Cowl is of my essence, and so I have watched you work in the world. I expected you would succumb to the temptation of power eventually. That you would embark on your own agenda and allow the Place to take you there. But I was mistaken. The Gray Cowl should never have found its way into your possession. You don't deserve such a curse. My gift to you is to banish it from your person.
The intruder stepped forward eagerly, up by Dalzren's side. He smelled of blood. His own blood, likely. "Take it. Please take it."
"Remove the Cowl," Nocturnal said, "then let it fall."
With that, the intruder reached up with both hands, lowered the hood of his robes, and raised the gray mask up off of his face.
The man standing there was a Nord, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, just shy of six feet tall. His build was hard to determine beneath the robes, but Dalzren thought he looked muscular. His skin was pale like any for his race, and his hair was a messy pure blonde, running down the sides of his head all the way down to the shoulders in an arching center-part style. His face was youthful, but hardened and lean, and adorned with a sparse but unkempt golden-blonde beard from days spent without grooming. He gazed around the room with piercing blue eyes, taking in all its contents. Despite his age, he looked like he had seen too much already.
He let the Gray Cowl fall to the floor. It vanished into nothingness before it could land.
"It's gone," he breathed. "The Place is gone. Am I free?"
Nocturnal nodded. "You are. You may tell them your name."
The intruder turned back around and faced his three mortal peers. "My name's Emund. It's nice to meet all of you."
"Hello, Emund," Ceyrel said mildly.
Dalzren nodded.
Before she could think of anything to say, however, Angmthanz spoke up. "Well, I'm Angmthanz and this is Dalzren. We work here in Mzulft. It's really a good thing no one raised the general alarm, or they'd be breaking down the door by now."
"Hi, guys," Emund said. "What did you want with all those Elder Scrolls, anyway? I'm assuming it had something to do with seizing huge amounts of power."
"That's really all it boiled down to," Dalzren muttered. Did she ever feel like a fool right then.
Emund and Ceyrel. The two unwilling warriors. They were both practically children. How had they ended up here in this manner?
Emund asked, "What's wrong?"
Dalzren swallowed. Her eyes were threatening to begin shedding tears again. "Nothing, I only … this whole device is unusable without the help of the person I just killed, and I'm slowly dying from the condition called Soul Fray and it'll kill my son too after I'm gone, and I'd been promised we could use the machine to fix me after our mission was complete. But that's no longer possible. I'm going to die in a matter of weeks, and then it's only a matter of time for my son."
"Oh, no," Nocturnal said, with some sort of sympathy in her voice. It might have been genuine. "That's terrible. Would you like me to fix that?"
"What's your price?"
"None today. I'm in a giving mood. Hold still." Nocturnal raised an arm straight at Dalzren, and sent forth a low, thrumming pulse of bluish energy, traveling towards her in a vertical wave.
It washed over Dalzren's body with a faint, almost warm touch. A pressure relieved itself from the back of her mind, one that she hadn't realized was even there. It felt uncanny. She saw the room differently now.
She didn't understand what this meant. If she had just been enlisted into a Daedra's service, things were about to become complicated.
Nocturnal said, "It's not in my power to replace what parts of your soul have been lost, but you won't lose any more. Go and live your life as you would. Just remember to stop playing with soul gems so much."
The revelation came to her like a landing on solid ground. All the tension left her heart in an instant. Her Soul Fray had stopped. Her life wasn't going to end after all. And neither was Amalest's. After everything she had done, after all the desperate effort to save herself and her son, the entire problem had been solved by a Daedric Prince's charitable whim.
"Thank you," Dalzren whispered, not grasping her own words.
She backed up against the wall of the ramp behind her, and sat down slowly on the floor against it.
Nocturnal continued talking like nothing had happened. "I could have appeared at any time before or after now, it is true. But I wished to see if you would prove yourself, Emund, and now there are many gifts to dispense. There is one more, in fact, but it's not truly mine to offer. It's for you, Ceyrel."
Once, Angmnthanz had told Dalzren that the forces of opinion were all that truly shaped the world around them. She had taken it as an annoyance, at most. A distant fact of reality that still had little to do with her daily work. But now, she had seen within the Elder Scrolls, seen what whimsical and arbitrary a construct she had assumed was the foundation of reality. The reason the Implier allowed its user to change reality was because it exposed reality as a fleeting falsehood.
And in case she had required further convincing, a Daedric Prince had just now stopped Dalzren's Soul Fray in its tracks with nothing more than an idle gesture and a few words.
The Falmer pointed to herself. "Me?"
"Yes," Nocturnal said. "I know what has kept you here. I have been asked to help set you free."
A moment passed.
Emund asked, "What has kept you here? Dalzren asked you the same."
Ceyrel turned to him. "You don't know?"
"No."
"Hizeft was the one who saved my village. She brought a team of her most elite fighters to intercept the Nord raiding party. And since we were no longer safe there, she brought us back to Mzulft. Except that by then, all of the other Falmer in the city had been long since transformed. She made us a proposition. Instead of transforming us, she would place us in a special form of stasis, freezing us in Time, until the day came that Skyrim was safe for our people once again."
"Until the Nords were driven out," Emund said. "Or killed."
Ceyrel nodded. "Yes. But she also used some of us for her own ends. It's something about the way Falmer bodies work, as opposed to Dwemer bodies. We were more receptive to what she wanted. I was the only one who survived the experimentation. She filled me with her inventions, trained me to read and speak and fight, clad me in this Aetherium skin, and told me to go out and kill for her. She told me that it was necessary if I wanted to see the Nords gone in my lifetime. And that if I didn't obey her, she would begin killing the other Falmer in their stasis cells."
Dalzren stared. She'd understood that Ceyrel's predicament was needlessly brutal, but now she was realizing she hadn't known Hizeft at all. The Chief Designer had been manipulating her, right up until that final moment.
Something had to be done now. She'd been complicit in too much. Not just the Chief Designer's actions, but every crime committed against the Falmer race. Because she realized now—these Falmer had chosen, in their desperation, to submit to this cruel process. Perhaps Ceyrel hadn't expected to be made into a living weapon, but the rest of them had decided to imprison themselves rather than submit to the normal approach. The normal approach, of course, was for them to be blinded and made to produce white-souled offspring.
The Dwemer called it a politically necessary move. But looking at this Falmer girl with her own eyes now, Dalzren didn't understand her own people's idea of necessity.
She pushed herself back to her feet. "I'm sorry, Ceyrel. I truly am. What Hizeft did was… unforgivable. And what my people did before that was a crime as well. But I'll do whatever I can to make this right. Where are the stasis cells now?"
"A secure location outside the city. She let me visit now and then to make sure they were all still alive. But if I try to break in, the cells will automatically begin killing their occupants. And even if we free them together, they will still be in a land dominated by the Nords. They will be as good as dead."
Nocturnal spoke again. "Hence my gift. When you go to the holding location together, an elf in robes like mine will meet you. He's an Altmer from Artaeum, by the name of Quaranir. He has asked to transport you and your villagers to his home island, to keep you safe until Skyrim is ready to receive you again. You will not be required to fight for him, or even follow him there. But he asked me to tell you all of this. He can be trusted."
That was new. Dalzren had scarcely even heard of Artaeum before, besides in her geography lessons. She asked, "Why do the elves there care about the Falmer here?"
"Because there are precious few left alive and uncorrupted, and they wish to keep the Falmer spirit alive."
Angmthanz chuckled. It was a low, almost mirthless chuckle.
Dalzren turned to look at him. "What's amusing you?"
The older Dwemer glanced at her, still smiling slightly. He said, "Oh, well, everyone's getting gifts today, aren't they? Emund's freed from his curse, you're freed from your Soul Fray, Ceyrel's freed from her servitude. I'm glad for you all. I am. But when this is all over with, and Nocturnal goes on her way, you and I are still citizens of Mzulft. We're at a disadvantage. A great one. Raldbthar is about to go to war with us for what we've done, and now our effort to turn the tables is spoiled. Many Dwemer will die for this."
A fair point, Dalzren thought. She needed to think about Amalest's future in the city now. He wouldn't have a good life if the Dwemer of Raldbthar conquered it.
"I'm sure you can handle that yourselves," Nocturnal replied lightly. "I would recommend returning their Elder Scrolls over to them, perhaps along with your Chief Designer's head and some financial reparations. People can become very dangerous when you take things that belonged to them."
Angmthanz said, "We'll have to explain this to the people of Mzulft, too. It won't look good. An agent of Nocturnal showing up, a secret Falmer soldier, all these other things? It's insane."
"Just say I was a saboteur whom you successfully repelled," Emund commented. "I don't care what the Gray One's reputation ends up becoming."
Dalzren added, "And I slew the Chief Designer when I realized that she was about to endanger our entire city, possibly with death, and that she could not be reasoned with. That's close enough to the truth. I'm sure the Clan Chief will agree with the latter portion."
"All right. All right." Angmthanz held up his hands. "We'll figure it out. But … as long as we're talking like this, I do have one question for you, Nocturnal. Feel free to ignore it if you like."
"Ask," Nocturnal said.
"Do you think there's any hope for the Dwemer people? All of our reason and logic. It's a lie, isn't it? We're just trying to impose our own force of opinion on the world. What do you think will happen to us?"
"I see three possibilities. First, you, as a race, continue your awkward pretense of a logical world, always struggling and at odds with the real way of things. Second, you move on from your fixation, and learn to accept the world as it truly is. Or third, someone of your race tries to rewrite the Aurbis even more fundamentally than your Chief Designer intended to. Only in the third case would I lose hope for your people."
Another moment went by.
"I see," Angmthanz said quietly. "Thank you."
Nocturnal righted herself, arms down at her sides. "I must depart now. I have done what I set out to do. This will be the last time that any of you see me. I wish you all the best of lives."
And with that, the Daedric Prince vanished from sight, and the lights in the room brightened to normal once again.
Dalzren looked between the three others. "What now?"
"You'd better follow Ceyrel to wherever her secret site is," Angmthanz said, pointing to the Falmer girl beside him. "I'll take care of things here, don't you worry."
Ceyrel wordlessly raised the pieces of her helmet back up, sealing them one by one over her head. The cranial plate clicked audibly onto the implants on her skull. Once again, she became the faceless entity that Dalzren had known.
Faceless, but not nameless.
Dalzren focused on Emund. "What about you? Where will you go?"
The Nord man raised the hood of his ancient robes. His face remained fully visible beneath. "My work here is complete as well. I'm going to leave, and like Nocturnal, I don't think I'll be seeing any of you again. In fact, with the exception of you two Dwemer, I suspect this is where we all part ways."
He looked sideways to Ceyrel. "Good luck out there. And tell Quaranir I said thanks for the horse. He'll understand."
"Goodbye, Emund," Dalzren said softly.