Fakhriya learned from Paartharnux, the dragon practitioner of the Way of the Voice, that the ancient Nord Heroes used a specific Shout to cripple Alduin but were unable to defeat the World Eater atop the Throat of the World in the First Era. Instead they used an Elder Scroll to force Alduin out of the stream of time. Now that the World Eater has rejoined the linear flow of time in the plane of Mundus, Fahkriya must find an Elder Scroll to use at the Time Wound that was created in that ancient battle to learn the Shout of the ancient Nord Heroes and defeat Alduin once and for all.
The scent of the air became salty well before Fakhriya and Jenassa could see the city of Winterhold, which was situated on a bleak cliff high above the Sea of Ghosts. The city, which was the seat of the hold of the same name, was a meager settlement that seemed to be losing in the struggle against the icy waters that battered the coast. According to legend, the great Archmage Shalidor created the city in the First Era with a whispered spell. Since then, Winterhold had always been associated with the arcane arts. The Mage's College, which was established by Shalidor with the goal of developing higher standards in the instruction and use of magic by skilled practitioners, stood apart on an isolated butte separate from the mainland like a defiant gem glittering in the open sea.
The Velothi Mountains separated the college town from the bustling port of Windhelm to the southeast. Vast glacial plains made travel treacherous between Winterhold and the smaller port of Dawnstar to the west. Despite Winterhold's remote and inhospitable location at the northernmost tip of Skyrim, the city historically rivaled Solitude in wealth and political importance.
When High King Borgas of Winterhold was murdered in 1E 369, Jarl Hanse of Winterhold was considered the heir apparent. When the Moot, the council of Jarls who elect the High King, failed to install Hanse, Skyrim was plunged into the War of Succession, which lasted fifty years and firmly established Solitude as the seat of the High King with the accession of Olaf One-Eye of Whiterun. As a result of the War of Succession, the Pact of Chieftains established the convention that if a sitting High King had a direct heir, the Moot would not challenge the succession, but would still convene to formally recognize the installment of the heir. The Moot, however, reserved the right to remove a sitting High King if the Jarls lost confidence in the High King's ability to rule.
Since the 1E 420 there had not been a challenge for the throne of the High King until Ulfric Stormcloak challenged the accession of Torygg to the throne after his father's death in the 4E 201. Ulfric challenged the heir to personal combat in accordance with ancient Nord tradition and defeated the young High King. Although Ulfric's victory in hand to hand combat against the High King gave him a claim the throne, there was much controversy over the challenge. Ulfric's detractors were quick to point out that the tradition Ulfric cited to legitimize his right to challenge the accession predated the Pact of Chieftains. Furthermore, Ulfric's use of a Thu'um in personal combat, though a common tactic in the First Era, had not been widely considered a legitimate use of the Voice since Paarthurnax assumed his post atop the Throat of the World. Ulfric's supporters claimed that the challenge was a fair exercise of the rights of Jarls as defined in the Pact of Chieftains and asserted that Ulfric's adherence to the old ways mark Skyrim's return to its true Nordic roots. In Rain's Hand 4E 202, Ulfric's claim to the throne of the High King was a driving issue of the ongoing civil war.
Fakhriya had briefly considered attending the College of Winterhold to study either Alchemy or Alteration magic, but settled on studying music at the Bard's College instead. Her mother came from a long line of alchemists, but Fakhriya found she lacked the raw talent and the passion for mixing potions that her mother had. Her mother's sister had taught Fakhriya the basics of Alteration magic when she was a little girl against the wishes of Fakhriya's father, who adhered to the Redguard belief that elven magic was inherently cowardly and deceitful. As a child, Fakhriya entertained her friends by casting light orbs in dark rooms, but as a young adventurer, she had come to find the armor spells of the discipline invaluable. Her father did have some influence on Fakhriya sensibilities in regard to magic. Like her father, Fakhriya hated soul gems. Fakhriya found the idea of storing a life force, even that of an animal, in a crystal to be unnatural and evil. As a result, Fakhriya did not use enchanted weapons and would not even carry a soul gem for the purpose of selling it.
Because neither Fakhriya nor Jenassa were students at the Mage's College, it took some effort to gain admittance to the campus, but after a conversation with the self appointed admittance officer and another with the dean of magic studies, the adventurers were permitted to enter the Arcanaeum, the college's library.
Except for two or three individuals who studied at different tables, the arcanaeum was deserted. Most likely the students who had assignments due on Morndas would not arrive until Sundas to complete their work. As Fakhriya recalled from her own studies, no one went to the library on Fredas. The chief librarian, a burly Orc, sat at a large desk directly opposite the entrance at the far end of the arcanaeum.
"I don't recall seeing the two of you in here before," said the Orsimer librarian when Fakhriya and Jenassa approached his desk, "so I will give you the same speech I give all new students. Many of the books in here are very rare, very valuable and irreplaceable. I will consider it a personal offense if you carelessly do any damage to any of them. Understood?"
"Yes, sir," Fakhriya replied. She felt sort of bad for the students at the Mage's College. Although there were some rare books at the Bard's College, most books the students used were widely available, so students felt free to add their own lyrics or interpretative drawings to the margins. Some of the impromptu work was remarkably clever.
"Now that we have that clear, how can I help you ladies?" the Orc asked.
"We've come here in search of an Elder Scroll," Fakhriya said.
"Do you even know what you are asking?" the librarian laughed. "I don't have an Elder Scroll here, and even if I did, I certainly wouldn't hand it out to any student who asked for it. That thing would be locked up so tightly that the greatest thief in Tamriel wouldn't be able to lay a finger on it."
"Well, I need to find one and I was told you could help," Fakhriya said. "Do you at least have any information on Elder Scrolls?"
"That I can do you for," the librarian replied as he got up from his seat. "We don't have much and what we do have is mostly lies leavened with rumor and conjecture, but you're welcome to it." He left Fakhriya and Jenassa standing at the desk while he went to several nearby shelves. He returned with two books.
"You are not permitted to take these out of the Arcanaeum, but you may look through them as long as like. Be careful not to spill anything on them," the Orc said as he placed the books before Fakhriya on the counter. Fakhriya took the books and sat down at a nearby table.
"I've actually read this one," Fakhriya said as she handed Jenassa the first book, entitled Effects of the Elder Scrolls. Jenassa opened the book and started skimming through it. Fakhriya turned her attention to the other book, Ruminations on the Elder Scrolls. The book made no sense. At first Fakhriya thought she simply wasn't reading carefully enough, but the book read like someone's streaming, disjointed, nearly crazed thoughts. Sentences would begin with one idea and end with another. She brought the book with her to the librarian's desk.
"I can't seem to make any sense of this," Fakhriya said as she placed the book on the counter. "Can you help me with it?" The librarian turned the book so the title faced him.
"That's the work of Septimus Signus," the librarian said as if that would explain the craziness of the text. "He's the world's master of the nature of Elder Scrolls, but...well. He's been gone for a long while. Too long."
"He's dead?" Fakhriya asked.
"Oh, no," the librarian said, "at least, I hope not. But even I haven't seen him in years, and we were close. He became obsessed with the Dwemer and took off north in search of some artifact. The last I heard, he was somewhere in the ice fields if you want to find him."
"And he'll be able to help me find an Elder Scroll?" Fakhriya asked.
"He's probably the best shot you have," the librarian replied. "Is there anything else I can help you with?"
Fakhriya turned to see Jenassa fully engrossed in the other Elder Scroll book.
"Actually, there is something else," Fakhriya said. "Do you have anything on the Markarth Incident?"
Fakhriya and Jenassa spent Fredas night and the better part of Loredas in the Arcanaeum. While Jenassa read Effects of the Elder Scrolls cover to cover, Fakhriya read more casually through the two books the librarian found on the Markarth Incident, The Madmen of the Reach and The Bear of Markarth. Both were written by an Imperial scholar who took a dim view of the Nord's historical treatment of the Reachmen and of the events in the Reach after the Great War. The second book, The Bear of Markarth, flatly accused Ulfric Stormcloak of committing war crimes in the Reach. Late Loredas afternoon, Fakhriya and Jenassa went shopping for horker skin boots, which would provide better protection against the frigid waters of the ice fields.
Bright and early on Sundas morning the women followed a path that lead down to the water at the edge of the city and continued onto the vast expanse of ice that extended well into the Ghost Sea. Armed with only a crude map drawn by the librarian, the women spent the better part of the day searching for Septimus Signus's outpost. It was past midday by the time they found Septimus's hideout, but with the college clearly in sight from their vantage point, they were hopeful that they could return to Winterhold after they concluded their business with Septimus before nightfall.
That optimism was short lived.
Septimus was as crazy as his book. Septimus talked in endless circles about Elder Scrolls and Dwemer and time and astral planes and all sorts of esoteric topics. Fakhriya could barely make heads or tails out of anything the hermit scholar said, but she did understand the only two parts of Septimus's monologue that mattered to her: One, there was likely an Elder Scroll deep beneath the ruins at Alftand, the site of a Dwemer archeological dig located on the glacial plains in the Pale, and two, Septimus would supply the key for accessing the Elder Scroll. In exchange for the key, Septimus asked that Fakhriya use a Dwemer machine to scribe a blank lexicon cube with the information contained in the Elder Scroll and return the cube to him. Fakhriya wasn't keen on promising to return to the remote outpost, but it seemed a reasonable trade. The women stayed the night in Septimus's cramped quarters and set out the next day for Alftand.
The Dwemer, or dwarves as humans typically referred to them, were an industrious and mysterious race of people, who were unrivaled masters of science, engineering and the arcane. Unlike the other ethnicities of mer, which can trace their origin to the first tribes of Altmer, the Dwemer seemed to rise concurrent to but separate from the Altmer. Where most mer societies are daedric worshipping, the Dwemer were agnostic. Dwemer technology, which utilized elaborate networks of water and steam carrying tubes to operate hydraulic machines and used soul gems to power drone guards, was unlike anything else ever seen in Tamriel. The Dwemer were among the original inhabitants of modern day Morrowind and built vast underground cities in modern Morrowind, Skyrim and Hammerfell. The Dwemer warred frequently with the Nords in the First Era, but the humans were considered a minor threat until the third century of the First Era when decades of in-fighting among the Dwemeri underground city-states left the Dwemer vulnerable to human encroachment. A common human enemy led to an uneasy alliance between the Dwemer and the Chimer, the forerunners of modern day Dunmer. With the expulsion of the humans from the underground cities, the Dwemer and Chimer eventually went to war with each other in Morrowind. Meanwhile, in Skyrim, the tribes of Dwemer faced a decades long uprising of Falmer, a mer tribe who had been utilized as slave labor by the Dwemer since humans first appeared in Tamriel.
Then sometime around 1E 700 the Dwemer simply disappeared. There has never been a scholarly consensus on why or how the Dwemer left Tamriel. An entire race of people just left the continent with only their ruins as proof they had ever existed.
Alftand was one of countless Dwemer sites that dotted Skyrim's landscape. Because the Dwemer were such clever and secretive engineers, few of their cities had been thoroughly explored. Fakhriya and Jenassa, however, were not the first adventurers to reach Alftand. An earlier expedition had dug deep into the snow to gain access to a building well beneath the surface. The earlier expedition could not have arrived more than a few weeks ahead of Fakhriya and Jenassa, as one of the Khajit laborers on the dig was a skooma addict who apparently killed his brother in a withdrawal fueled rage. Fakhriya and Jenassa killed the Khajit when he attacked them. As Fakhriya and Jenassa pressed deeper into the Dwemer ruin, they discovered the bodies of other members of the dig who fell victim to Dwemer automatons or to bands of Falmer who still occupied the abandoned city. In the Alftand Cathedral Fakhriya and Jenassa stumbled upon the last two surviving members of the expedition who were half crazed and fighting each other. Sadly, the women were forced to dispatch the winner, who turned on them after she defeated her friend. With an attunement sphere given to Fakhriya by Septimus, Fakhriya was able to unlock a staircase that exited Alftand and opened to the vast underground cavern of Blackreach.
It had taken Fakhirya and Jenassa roughly three or four days to work their way from the surface where the expedition had set up to camp to the depths of Blackreach. Now the women had their work cut out for them. Immense glowing mushrooms were the only light source in the cavern. The women could see roughly a mile where the light was adequate, but there were expanses of inky blackness that extended Divines only knew how far.
Septimus told them they needed to reach the Tower of Mzark to find the Elder Scroll the Dwemer locked away, but the women had no idea where that would be in relation to where they were. There was a road of sorts in front of the Alftand Cathedral. That was as good a place as any to start. Fakhriya and Jenassa stuck to the road as well as they could as they fought off assaults from Falmer, huge flying insects, and Dwemer automatons. In some buildings along the way, they even came across humans, but since the humans attacked the women on sight, Fakhriya and Jenassa could not determine who they were or why they were in Blackreach.
After several days of exploring and resting fitfully whenever they could, the women were exhausted. It was a lucky thing that they happened to stumble upon the tower they were looking for. They were surprised to realize they were not the first to make it that far. In the first room of the tower Fakhriya and Jenassa found the remnants of a camp site. It clearly had not be occupied for quite a while, but it also was not anywhere near as old as the surrounding structure. If the previous people had met a bad end, it didn't appear that they suffered their fate in the immediate area. Although it was hardly comfortable to sleep in old, abandoned bedrolls on a hard, stone floor, that night Fakhriya and Jenassa slept better than they had since reaching Alftand.
The next morning Fakhriya and Jenassa discovered the Oculary, a massive device with huge lenses that were controlled from a series of buttons on a platform adjacent to the structure. On the edge of the Oculary Jenassa discovered the skeletal remains of the man who likely left the make shift camp behind. In the journal that was discovered near the body it was revealed that the dead man had spent his final days trying to line up the lenses of the device, although there was no indication that the man knew what would happen if he succeeded. The journal suggested that he had his own lexicon - apparently the device would not operate without one - but his lexicon was no where to be found.
Fakhriya and Jenassa took turns working the buttons, reading the journal for clues and sitting in frustration while the other tried her luck in lining up the lenses. When the lenses suddenly aligned after hours of fruitless attempts, Fakhriya shrieked in delight.
"By Azura's light, you did it!" Jenassa exclaimed when she looked up from the journal and saw the glass enclosure that housed the Elder Scroll that rose out of the center of the device beneath the line of lenses. Jenassa walked gingerly along a strut to the center of the device to retrieve the Elder Scroll.
"Oh, I almost forgot the lexicon," Fakhriya said as she left the platform to meet Jenassa. She went back up to fetch the cube. The intricate etchings in the cube were among the most elaborate Fakhriya had ever seen. From her position on the Oculary, Jenassa could see a doorway leading to a hydraulic lift. The lift took the women to a gateway at the top of the tower. It took several minutes to get their bearings from the remote mountainside where they emerged, but Fakhriya recognized Fort Dunstad off to the northeast. Fakhriya and Jenassa were still in the Pale, but they were nearly a day's travel from Alftrand.
The women were as good as their word. Although neither wanted to make the return trip north, Fakhriya and Jenassa knew they never would have found an Elder Scroll without Septimus's help. After returning the etched lexicon to Septimus, the women journeyed to Winterhold, then to Windhelm and finally to Ivarstead. The last weeks had been taxing, so the women took the opportunity to rest a few days in the sleepy little village.
When Fakhriya and Jenassa reached the Throat of the World, it would be to face Alduin at the Time Wound.