A/N: Well, here it is! Again, I'm sorry for the mahoosive wait between chapters – this one was a long time coming, because I had to think long and hard about my conception of the Clockwork City, what I wanted to change, what would stay the same... It was a fun chapter to write but it was also a hard chapter to write; I'm not used to Llovesi being alone. I also got hit with a massive bout of writer's block, as such I'm kind of fed up of looking at it now. It's one of my longest, it came easy in some places, but in other places it was like getting blood from a stone. May not be my best, but do tell me what you think regardless.
Thanks to OnnaMusha for reviewing the last chapter, and that's enough from me.
Chapter 17: Like Clockwork
The young mer that went by Julan, husband of Llovesi, was crouched in his cell with his hand against the lock, shooting blast after blast of magicka into the mechanism.
"That will not work."
Julan looked up, and beheld Her in Her Glory. Her battle mask was on: Her green horns and tusks framing a face that was crafted to instil fear in anyone who dared defy Her. But the young mer only continued to look defiant. She wondered briefly at the stupidity of those in love. Perhaps that had been another of Her mistakes.
His hands left the lock and, seemingly unconsciously, he started to rub at a dull metal ring on his finger.
"And neither will that."
Julan stood then, a little clumsily, and wrapped his hands around the bars. He had his own battle mask this one, a great lattice-work of cuts surrounding bruised cheekbones and eyes that were nearly swollen shut. Her Hands had done their work well, Almalexia thought approvingly.
"What do you mean?" he asked thickly, before spitting a mouthful of blood to the floor.
"I know. I have always known. And I will always know. About those rings that tie your thoughts together. Every little decision you make and have made, from dealing with the puppet king, to spying for his mother, to helping then double-crossing me–"
"We never double crossed you," Julan whispered. "We were against you from the start."
Almalexia laughed, though it felt slightly more forced and brittle than usual.
"Don't you see? She wasn't. Your precious Llovesi wanted to help me, before you turned her mind. But it matters not, not now. I have sent her far from here. Maybe she thinks she will find Sotha Sil. But all she will find is death."
Julan roared, and slammed a fist ineffectually against the bars.
Almalexia raised Her own hands to the bars, showing the deep, red gloves She had so recently earned. She wore them up to Her elbows, a symbol of Her triumph.
"I had thought ridding her of your influence might have opened her eyes. But still she persists in her madness," She whispered back. "I feel she will have to meet the same end as poor Sotha Sil. When I have bathed my hands in her blood also, and sealed her tomb, my Ordinators will release you so that you might behold my glorious return and know that you have failed. The world will talk of the poor Nerevarine, who finally lost her mind at the death of her mother in law, who was twisted into committing atrocities by the poisonous words of the puppet king and her Ashlander husband. I will speak of how her death was a mercy to her, how even with her last breath she begged my forgiveness. Poor Nerevarine. The soul of another was too much to bear, in the end. And when I have done this and you have borne witness, I will be free to be the one true God!"
Julan fell to the ground slowly, his hands still weakly grasping the bars. Almalexia stepped back.
"Maybe I shall release you to crawl back to your tribe, like the insect you are. Or perhaps I shall keep you as a trophy. Who knows? I know everything, except what shall come to pass in the Clockwork City."
She fought to keep her face calm, but perhaps a brief tremor passed over her forehead. She shouldn't have mentioned it, but it was true: her far-sight refused to reveal what would arrive in the Clockwork City. It was as if a dark veil had been hung over the events; one she could not brush aside with a flick of her mind. She forced her features back into a smile.
"But I feel I will emerge victorious. It's time I went to my destiny."
She walked away, leaving Julan to withdraw finally from the bars, and clasp his hands beneath his battered chin.
Azura, please protect her. Please, please, please... just let her be okay.
Drip.
Drip. Drip.
She was lying in water, her clothes billowing out slightly from under her cuirass and greaves. Her hair fanned out around her, each braid spreading like an uncurling, searching fern, finding only algae and more water.
Drip.
The small droplet landed on her closed eyelids.
Drip.
Finally, her eyelids shook, her nose wrinkled, then Llovesi was sitting up and gasping, sending a great wave out around her.
She stood as quickly as her creaking limbs would allow, grasping weakly against the metal wall of the flooded room. Her hands tangled in slick, green vines and ferns: plant life that burst determinedly through the faintest cracks. Wherever this place was, it had been long abandoned. The wall directly behind her seemed to confirm this–what had perhaps once been a door had now collapsed under a rock fall.
Llovesi shivered, her eye wide, in her sodden apparel with her hair plastered to her face and she tried desperately to think.
Falling.
I think you should discover a place where you will be able to use that sword...
Moving carefully away from the wall, Llovesi drew Trueflame now. The blade served another purpose, a warm light in this unfamiliar place. It revealed metal walls, the same metal the Dwemer had used in construction and smithing. Water stood up to her shins, surprisingly clear. There were several large cog-like shapes on the wall, though they were not the source of the sounds Llovesi could hear: a rush of running water and a soft clicking, like the steam-powered pistons in Dwemer ruins. Llovesi strained her eye in the gloom, and saw a mechanism on the far wall. Part of the metal wall seemed to have been stripped away, exposing a cluster of smaller, rotating cogs. From here she could not see the mechanism's purpose, only the slowly revolving cogs. They never missed a beat, she thought. Even in this abandoned and possibly ancient room, they continued to turn like clockwork.
Like clockwork...
The Clockwork City?
Meet the one who first divined the use of the tools...
It had to be. The inner city of Sotha Sil. The domain of the one who, if she were to believe Almalexia and Helseth, had attacked Mournhold. Why send her here?
She wants me to deal with him. But, Llovesi thought, Almalexia has to be lying about Sotha Sil's involvement in the attack on Mournhold. What if Sotha Sil was unlike Almalexia; what if he had been unaffected by the loss of his godhood? Vivec had suggested as much, once. Almalexia was expecting them to fight but what if, and at this thought her heart pounded furiously, he might help? She had to find him. And if Alamlexia intended to hold true to her threat of finding Llovesi here, Llovesi had to find him first.
There we shall have our last.
But, it didn't look much like a city. Llovesi held Trueflame aloft like a torch again and splashed through the water towards the mechanism, looking back at the collapsed door. Maybe she was in the inner city, the part that belonged exclusively to Sotha Sil.
But why did it look both long abandoned and recently damaged? For the plant life couldn't have grown overnight but, as Llovesi examined the cogs more closely, she noticed that the exposed panel looked to have been forcibly removed from the wall. Whether deliberately or through malfunction she couldn't tell–all she could see was it lying in the water by her feet. And the water was steadily rising. Not at a rate to make her panic yet, but she knew she had to move on.
She followed the cogs downwards with a raised finger, and a switch caught her eye. It was a rusted thing, like the forgotten handle of a spade, buried into the wall. She grasped the bar and when she found she couldn't pull it, she pushed. Almost instantly the cogs in the wall started to turn in the other direction. Slowly, the giant cog on the wall started to grind upwards, driven into the ceiling with a metallic clang. It was a door. They were all doors. Right.
The water was now sloshing around her shins as she sheathed Trueflame and darted through the new tunnel, emerging into another large room, this time lit by soft blue lights. Here she could see more of the cog-shaped doors, and also steady streams of water gushing into the room through the weakening metal walls. Burst pipes perhaps. She was almost certain it wasn't an architectural feature.
As if confirming her suspicion, one of the cog-like doors on the far side buckled suddenly. Llovesi only had a moment to duck before the pressure became too much, and the great hunk of metal soared across the room like a cork flying from a bottle.
Llovesi pulled herself out of the water again, only to be hit by the powerful cold spray flowing from where the door had been. Behind, she could see collapsed rock, dust was making the clear water murky, and two of the white, spiny fabricants had apparently been crushed to death beneath the boulders.
The water was now waist height.
I have to get out of this place before it completely collapses.
She swam to the nearest wall, cursing at how poorly her limbs pulled her through the water. She was about as adapted to water as slaughterfish were to land. She pulled herself upright near another lever and pushed it firmly. The mechanism clicked, the door soared upwards, but revealed only a dead end.
She dove back towards another lever, this time on a pillar. Which lever opened which door? That was the puzzle she had to solve, before the water got any higher.
It had reached shoulder height.
Grasping slick ferns on the pillar, she reached for the lever and pushed. A door on the opposite side of the room opened and she threw herself towards it, splashing through the water like a child having her first swimming lesson. If there were any living fabricants they would surely find her now.
There was no flood beyond this door, and Llovesi found herself carried through by the rushing tide. Coughing, sprawling and shivering, she flung out an arm blindly, and her hand found another rusted switch. Pushing it slammed the door shut behind her.
She turned to look at it, not quite believing she'd made it, hearing the way the displaced water now slapped against the door from the other side. A large puddle had followed her in, but for now she was safe.
Then a large screech made her turn back to the corridor.
A fabricant was running towards her, horn lowered, metal claws raised–
–when a great axe came slicing through the air between the walls. The fabricant's mangled body sailed the rest of the distance towards Llovesi, landing against the cog door with a wet crunch.
More axes were now swinging in the corridor. Perhaps the fabricant had tripped a switch somewhere. What strange experiment is this?
The door creaked ominously behind her.
Death by drowning or death by dismemberment. What a choice.
She had to get through, and survive. If only I had some spell to increase my speed, to send me through like a breath of wind.
But she didn't. So Llovesi began to run.
She didn't really know how she made it. Perhaps it was the slick moss beneath her feet, giving her an extra burst of that much-desired speed. Perhaps it was the rush of adrenaline from feeling the swoosh as a four-foot long axe came hurtling perilously close to the back of her head. But make it she did, and as she neared the end she threw herself at the opposite metal wall, where she collapsed into a heap, bruised but alive.
I'm alive.
She laughed weakly, a little stupidly, but above all: with relief. Then she picked herself up, and continued. The corridor was less mossy here, and seemed to be holding itself together far better than the flooded halls below. For she was climbing now: sets of small steps that led her up past intricately carved motifs, strange cables, pumping pistons, and clicking cogs.
A small shower of sparks as one of the overhead lights burst was a reminder to stay on her toes. But, maybe she was past the traps now. Llovesi reached another of the doors, and immediately looked for the switch to open it.
However, as she approached, it opened itself as if it had sensed her presence. Two halves shot back into the wall, revealing a large room beyond.
There was a word for this, Llovesi thought distractedly as she walked through with Trueflame raised again: these switches powered by cogs, these swinging blades and these doors that opened by themselves. Technology.
This room was large and circular, with a long pole in the middle, and littered with the corpses of fabricants. She could hear the whirring of another mechanism close by.
Suddenly, something hit her in the side, knocking her off her feet and winding her completely. She realised, with a small shriek, that it was another mangled fabricant, its head hanging from its neck by only a few metallic ligaments. She pushed it off her, and looked upwards to see where it had come from.
That was when she saw the blade.
It was an impossibly long thing and impossibly fast too: a sharpened hunk of metal attached to a blunt arm that was running the entire perimeter of the dome shaped ceiling from an axis in the centre of the room. There was a mezzanine up there, with a ramp that sloped down to Llovesi's level, but the blade spun up there at waist height. She would be sliced in half if she tried to walk up.
Llovesi got to her feet and moved into the centre of the room, trying not to panic. Start with the basics –where do I have to go? Then figure out how I get there.
There were two doorways, one behind her, above where she had come in, and another to the right, closer to the slope. But, even as she glanced at the closer doorway, the whole room suddenly shook violently.
The second doorway contorted dramatically as the corridor behind was bent out of shape by a new rockfall. A hulking red fabricant came staggering through the crushed passageway, howling and on fire. The blade caught it and sent it flying in pieces into the other side of the room.
This place is falling apart.
Her options for progression had just been narrowed down to one. And she couldn't outrun the blade. But... could she climb past it? The mezzanine stood about an arm's length above her. If she jumped...
Llovesi tried, her fingers grasping at air, then metal. But she didn't have enough surface to hold, she was slipping... She clawed wildly at the mezzanine, screaming as two fingernails popped loose, then she was falling backwards, landing with a hard smack on her tailbone.
Groaning, straining, Llovesi pulled herself back to her feet. Giving up was not an option. This time, she turned to the axis in the centre of the room: the tall pole supporting the blade.
It was a stupid idea. It was a dangerous idea. But maybe, just maybe, it was an idea that would actually work. The pole was about as thick as her thigh, and looked to be made of metal. Surely it would support her weight. Llovesi began to climb.
She didn't dare look down. Not that the drop would be fatal, but another painful landing would set her back even further. She had maybe one shot at this, and she didn't want to lose sight of her goal.
Finally, muscles screaming, she was just below the spinning blade. She felt the power of it rotating overhead, and didn't dare go any higher. Instead, she clutched the pole, trying to stop herself from slipping, and counted.
The blade passed.
One.
Two.
Three.
It passed again, dragging a horrible screech from the metal walls.
When Llovesi counted to three again, she launched herself backwards, and caught the arm of the blade.
She had only a moment of brief, ecstatic relief, before she released how fast she was going. The room became a blur as she struggled to keep her grip, and the contents of her stomach.
There it was, a darker patch in the yellow metal blur: the doorway. It appeared again so fast it was as if there was a whole wall of doorways, yawning open and waiting to receive her. Tears flowed desperately from Llovesi's eye, trying to moisten her drying eyeball, only succeeding in blurring her vision even further.
She closed her eye, and let go of the blade.
She was flying again–no, falling. Falling, falling, falling through blackness. Then she hit a hard surface with a bone-breaking thump.
It was a while before she dared open her eye. She lay against a wall, both legs throbbing with a splintering pain, breathing in and out with long shallow breaths.
But she was still alive.
Opening her eye finally, Llovesi saw that not only had she landed on the mezzanine; she had managed to propel herself down the short corridor to the exit. Maybe Azura was still watching over her. Unfortunately, both of her legs had caught her fall, and they were bending beneath her in way that was queasy and wrong.
Lights popped behind Llovesi's eye as she dragged her broken legs from under her body. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she set the bones, healing with small sparks from her fingers as she went. When the sharp, dizzying ache had dulled slightly, she pulled one of her precious healing potions from her pack to finish the job.
She lay back against the wall again, listening to the sound of the blade as it continued its deadly circuit.
"Bet Dagoth Ur wished he had traps like this," she said aloud, and then started to giggle weakly. Before she could help herself, she had collapsed into hysterical laughter. It had to be funny in some small way, because otherwise how could she make sense of the place? Who built a room entirely devoted to spinning-blade death traps, or a corridor filled with swinging axes? Either Sotha Sil really didn't want any visitors, or some of his tinkering had gone horribly wrong.
Her laughter echoed oddly of the metal walls, unnerving her, so she stopped. The almost crushing absence of any other voices hit her all at once. Dagoth Ur had talked to her the whole way through his citadel, plied her with hollow promises and hints at their shared history.
Sotha Sil was silent.
There was no Julan by her side to keep her going, as she had done and would do for him. The thought of him spurred her on again, but her legs were still too weak to take her weight. She collapsed back down, feeling all her bruises and exhaustion far more keenly now than before. She had to go on... but... sleep called to her, closed her heavy eyelids...
Llovesi woke suddenly later, cold and feeling that strange sense of disorientation one experiences on waking from an unintentional doze.
At first she wasn't sure what had woken her, then another large rumble shook the room. The ceiling creaked worryingly, and spider-thin cracks appeared in the aged metal above. Llovesi jumped to her feet as the cracks groaned and widened, spilling dust into the corridor. Pins and needles pierced Llovesi's feet, but she managed to stumble into the direction of the door, which opened in front of her. As it closed, the first of the rocks began to fall, and the walls and floors shook with tremors. But the door held fast, and Llovesi breathed out a huge sigh of relief.
Perhaps Azura really had decided to take pity on her champion, for the second half of Llovesi's journey through the Clockwork City proceeded far more smoothly than the first.
Not that there weren't hitches as she figured out the complex puzzles and mechanisms that filled Sotha Sil's halls, or setbacks as she had to navigate collapsed parts of the experiment rooms. Not that her legs didn't itch where they had broken, and her arms didn't ache, or her lungs burn and head pound. She was slow, tired, confused and alone, but she made it through.
The room she had rushed into as the blade room collapsed turned out to be a sort of vertical maze. At least, that was the closest description Llovesi could come up with for the mass of shifting walls and moving staircases that she had to navigate to find a path upwards to the exit.
The walls and floors moved on cog-powered rails, slowing clicking in and out of place, seemingly at random. They revealed the steps required to move on, or worse, pits of spikes tipped with dried blood. Twice Llovesi was forced to jump from a receding floor to catch a rising wall before a pit of spikes swallowed her up into its vicious maw. The second time, her body slamming into the metal with enough force to knock all the wind from her lungs, a fabricant had come falling from above. It fell pitifully through the air, smashing into walls and floors, before landing abruptly in the pit of spikes. Llovesi watched it as she rose slowly, then she turned away and continued to climb. All around her were the clicking of cogs, the hissing of steam and jumping sparks, and the crying of the dying fabricant.
She met live fabricants too, when she pulled herself out of the shifting metal maze. These attacked her and so she killed them. It was her or them, even if they were defending their home as it collapsed before their eyes.
She met them in the creaking hallways, with their artistically carved wall panels, then metal strings and cog-shaped doors. She encountered them in rooms that she was beginning to think more and more of as workshops.
One such room had her creating fabricants to solve a puzzle. At least, that seemed to be what Llovesi was doing. The corridor had led her onto a balcony overlooking a large room below, in which five egg-shaped containers sat on their sides. They were the same burnished metal as the walls, and large enough to contain a person... or a fabricant, as Llovesi discovered when she pressed a button at random.
The door to the container on the far left had hissed open with copious amounts of steam, and a slim silvery fabricant had stepped forward on wobbly legs, like a new-born guar calf. Llovesi had tried all the buttons and random, until the middle container had opened, revealing a door built into its flat rear wall. But it was shut. She pressed the buttons for the container, quickly alternating between the door opening and shutting. Fabricants flooded the room while the lights above the eggs flashed between green and red like sparkling Saturnalia lanterns.
Finally, either the machine had malfunctioned or she'd solved the puzzle, for both doors stayed open. The fabricants were still blinking in the dim light of the lanterns, cocking their heads at distant and approaching rumbles. They didn't bother Llovesi as she vaulted over the balcony and raced through the container.
The next room had presented her with a fair simpler puzzle. It was a large room, with two platforms ether side. In-between the platforms: a sea of lava. The heat rose up in staggering waves, breaking fresh sweat on Llovesi's forehead, and papering her tongue to the roof of her mouth. But the challenge was simple. Cross the lava. There was another of the rusted switches on her platform, and Llovesi quickly figured out what the challenge was meant to be.
The lever was incredibly hard to depress. No doubt it was an experiment in strength, but Llovesi was not as strong as a normal Dunmer woman. She was stronger. She leant on the lever with all the power she could muster and, even though her muscles started to give, she felt the clicking of a mechanism being forced into action.
Before her eyes, a bridge began to assemble itself. Great metal arms pulled sections from the walls, and laid a path down for her to cross. It was perhaps the easiest challenge she'd come across. Which was good, Llovesi reflected, because she had very nearly been overcome half way through the Clockwork City. She didn't want to become exhausted again, before the end.
She was standing now in front of another cog door. The name of this one was carved on the frame in Chimeris, as with all the other rooms and halls she had entered. Some without even having time to look at the door.
But someone had also carved the name in Daedric underneath, seemingly as an afterthought, a more recent addition. And it read: IMPERFECT.
Llovesi didn't bother wasting time wondering what it meant. If she went through, she would find out. She shouldered her pack again on aching shoulders and, holding Trueflame aloft, went through the door.
The room was large, dome shaped again and almost empty. Almost, save for two very large centurions. Forget large; they were gigantic.
Llovesi felt like she should make some sarcastic remark to calm herself, but her heart wasn't it in any more. Clearly these humanoid creations were the final defence. Test. Experiment. Whatever you want to call it. Even from a distance she could see the way large clumps of metallic thread mimicked muscle and large metal plates mimicked skin and bone. Their waists seemed almost two small, and were counterbalanced by massive arms joined to the body by massive pauldron shaped shoulders. Just one swing of those fists and she would be pulp.
Llovesi pushed the image from her mind and crept over the floor like a bug.
Suddenly, one of the constructs began to move. It lurched forward, billowing steam in great clouds from every joint, great arms compressing and decompressing...
It managed one step, then collapsed in a heap on the ground, the impact shaking the walls.
Llovesi swallowed her heart, and lowered Trueflame slightly. Of course, the centurions probably were so old they would just break down. She continued to make her way towards the door. That was when the other construct started to move.
Llovesi waited, but when the steam finished billowing it took one step then another, gradually getting faster. Llovesi realised with dull horror that this one was not going to collapse. She realised it just in time to dive out of the way of its massive fists as they came crashing to the ground.
She rolled back onto her feet and dodged again, rolling backwards to put some space between her and the giant fabricant.
Imperfect, her mind said.
It didn't matter what it was called, it was going to kill her if she didn't come up with a plan.
It seemed to consider her from a distance, and then it started to launch great jolts of electricity across the room at her. Llovesi dodged this way and that, increasingly feeling like a performing artist–albeit one threatened with death if they put a foot wrong. She couldn't attack it from afar; she couldn't attack it up close. So that left... Llovesi began to run.
She ran until she was right by the Imperfect's stomping feet, then she jumped, catching onto the Imperfect's descending arm and swinging onto its back. It groaned, a deep metallic sound, and tried to throw her off, but Llovesi hung on with white knuckles. When she was sure of her grip she slashed Trueflame at the cables in the Imperfect's exposed joints.
It took her several tries, clinging desperately to the gaps between the metal plates on the Imperfect's back, while it swung its arms at her and groaned. Then the cables began to splinter, small threads peeled away, the tension grew too much and the cables snapped one by one. The Imperfect swayed, then fell backwards. One of its massive hands found Llovesi finally, and pulled her from its back, but it was lying on the ground now, and Llovesi twisted in its loosening grasp before driving Trueflame into its flat, impassive face.
The fingers loosened, and the great hand came crashing down to the ground. Llovesi was dropped onto the Imperfect's chest, and she watched as it became still, as it died. Then, she stepped down from the metal corpse, and tried to walk calmly towards the exit.
This door, too, had a name in both Chimeris and Daedric. It read, simply: SOTHA SIL.
There was no hesitation this time; this was not the Temple of Mournhold. This was a strange and eccentric workshop collapsing in on itself, and Llovesi desperately needed to meet its master to stand any chance of escaping.
She abandoned all pretence of being calm, and ran through the door as it whooshed open.
"Sotha Sil?" she called frantically. The room was dark; a single spark of light from a large, raised and damaged circular set of consoles was lighting the scene in feeble bursts.
That's why the Clockwork City was collapsing. The central control system had been vandalised.
"Sotha Sil?" Llovesi called again, more cautiously. What if he had gone mad? Turned against his creation; condemned it to flood and burn?
Another burst of light and she could see a figure.
Darkness.
Light. And the figure was standing in the midst of the consoles.
Darkness.
Light.
Not standing. Hanging.
Llovesi drew even closer in the flickering gloom, a steady sense of sickening foreboding eating away at her optimism. Something was deeply wrong with this scene.
Then another spark of light from the strange cable, and the whole horror was thrown into sharp relief.
Sotha Sil was strung up like a slaughtered guar. His arms were splayed wide, pulled taught by thick metal cables on his wrists. His legs were... gone, lost to a pulp of dried blood and metal shards. Blood streaked his pale skin; skin that was like the underbelly of a kwama grub, something weak and unprotected that was never meant to see light.
The spark died finally, mercifully restoring the image to darkness. Nothing. She could pretend she hadn't seen it, because this was too horrible, too dizzyingly unreal...
Then there was a rumbling overhead and, one by one, every overhead lamp came back to life. But not the body in font of her, his misshapen face frozen in a final scream, his eyeball rolled to stare at the cavernous ceiling: stare at nothing. He stayed as he was, broken, alone, and silent.
Sotha Sil, her last hope for an ally, her last chance for an escape, was dead.