We found ourselves in a dark tunnel, accompanied by a soft humming of magic.
Serana sounded surprised and more than a little relieved, "That… wasn't as unpleasant as I thought it would be. Kind of soothing, actually. I feel a little warmer, now."
It's not just you," I agreed, "I do too, which is a welcome change."
The wayshrine on this side was surrounded by strange tubular plant life that glowed pink, or purple; a contrast to the green glow of the nearby mushrooms. The only light source within this section of the caves seemed to come from bioluminescent plants and fungi.
To my surprise, the glowing tubers retracted their glowing segments as we approached, reminding me of small, flower-like sea creatures from off the coast of Hammerfell. Anemones, I believe they were called. Only these weren't sea creatures; merely plants sensitive to movement. This brought a thought; plants would evolve ways of protecting themselves from herbivores. And where there are herbivores, there are carnivores to hunt them. I kept my bow ready for trouble, and moved as quietly as I could.
We followed the passage heading north, with puddles of standing water along the undulating path. A short way down, I spotted a chaurus cocoon and we whispered our battle plans before cautiously approaching. The thing exploded out of its containment, spraying green slime everywhere. Serana skewered it with an ice spear before it could even finish shaking the slime from its agile wings.
We were forced to kill a handful of Falmer as we made our way through the dark tunnels. Once past these, a short tunnel led to a chamber with a low ceiling, where we encountered two of the ground crawling chaurus and took them down.
Serana discovered and harvested some glowing, bell-shaped flowers. I had to admit that the flowers were pretty. Lilac at the base, shading to a vibrant, tropical-sea blue at the edges of the petals, and emitting a soft pastel glow matching the colors. Serana decided that she wanted some for alchemy purposes, and filled a bag with them.
Once finished, she offered me a single flower with a shy smile. A rush of warmth went through me at her small gesture, and I accepted the beautiful bloom: weaving it into my hair.
We found a narrow tunnel, flanked by the pink and purple anemone plants, and headed down it, killing a Falmer along the way.
Serana stopped abruptly, and pointed out a trip wire at ankle height, nearly lost in the deep shadows. Using my bow as an extension of my arm, I tripped the wire and leaped back. A claw-like trap swung forward and struck the wall with a loud crash before slowly swinging back into position. I cautiously examined it and saw that it had been fashioned from the chitinous legs of a chaurus. The thing would have impaled me at three separate points if it struck home.
Nasty.
The passage eventually opened up into a large chamber containing several chaurus cocoons. Retrieving my elven arrows from these exploding bags of slime was not my favorite task. To be fair I preferred fishing them out of slime to trying to retrieve them from the chitinous body of the chaurus.
There were stone ramps, railings made out of chaurus body parts, and lots and lots of Falmer. We did our best to travel through quietly, but their hearing was too keen for us to get through a war camp without killing them all. I could only feel relief that there were no Falmer children to be found, so at least we weren't slaughtering a village.
Then Serana called me over to one of the tents, "Lasirah, come look at this!"
I jogged over to join her, and stopped, staring. "This Falmer has eyes!" I exclaimed softly in shock.
I stared down at the blind, milky white eyes. From what Serana and Gelebor had told me, the Falmer had gone blind long ago and had somehow devolved into not having eyes at all. But this one…
"That's not all," Serana said. She peeled back the creature's upper lip to reveal a pair of prominent, protruding vampire fangs.
I sat down abruptly, glad that the area was safe enough for the moment. I had obliquely acknowledged to Gelebor that it was possible for his brother to be under Vampire Seduction, or at least, some variant of mind control spell. But it was still a bit of a shock to have it confirmed that vampirism had made its way down to this secluded system of caves. It was clear that these ancient, vampiric versions were socially accepted by their brethren, which meant they served some sort of purpose.
We eventually entered a huge cave that was cut in half by a screen of waterfalls. There was a narrow chasm that we were able to cross by finding a place where the rock safely spanned the gap.
On the far side was a fenced compound with a pair of gates. Inside the compound was a grisly totem formed with various human bones. It was centered on some blue crystals and surrounded by fencing. To the left of the gates was an open pen filled with human bones and skulls. It didn't take any imagination to guess the fate of the other travelers that Gelebor had sent on this task.
To the west was a separate chamber; stretched across the path was a string of bone chimes. Serana and I carefully stepped over the trap and followed the path around the chamber, before it entered a tunnel, turned back, and started to rise.
At the top, we entered yet another chamber with a large pen in the middle containing two chaurus and several egg sacs. We were in the cavern above the waterfalls, with a much broader gap between the stone edges. Fortunately, there were two Falmer-designed bridges crossing through the sheeting waterfalls.
We ended up bypassing another claw trap; one that swung down from above this time. We came to another chamber containing a large, ornate Falmer tent flanked by two chaurus cocoons and two normal Falmer tents.
After skewering the insects that exploded out of the cocoons, a cursory inspection turned up a bottle full of red liquid that did not look at all like a health potion. Serana popped the cork and took a cautious sniff. Her eyes widened.
"It's blood," she whispered. "Falmer blood, if I'm to hazard a guess. I bet the vampiric Falmer live in these ornate tents, and their people donate blood somehow to avoid infection."
There wasn't much to hint at what the vampiric Falmer did for their society, but then again, Serana and I weren't experts on the race. A race without eyes doesn't exactly make use of written languages. Stories, perhaps? I could see where immortality would do wonders for a historian of a tribe. Wisdom passed down through the ages from someone who knew it firsthand would definitely have its advantages.
We passed four more claw traps before entering a tunnel. This nasty bit ended up having a tripwire that released a wooden tray attached to the ceiling and filled with boulders. At least one of the travelers had perished here, as we found a skeleton pinned by a fallen boulder.
Further on, we found another skeleton laying by what initially appeared to be a dead end with a satchel next to it. A note in the satchel commented;
.
Strange why the Falmer have set up so many traps near this stone barrier. They had to have done it for a reason and I'm not about to go rushing in to find out why.
Going to rest for a bit, regain my strength, and not take any chances. Maybe I can try and use the traps to my advantage.
.
After a bit of searching, we found two pull ropes. The presence of a body made us cautious, and Serana suggested I stand well back and let her use her vampiric reflexes to take the risk. She pulled one of the ropes and leaped back, safely dodging a claw trap from above, spears shooting up from below, and a vicious barrage of poison darts from the side.
"Divines," I muttered, staring warily at the pull rope. "Overkill much?"
"They're definitely protecting something," Serana agreed, and eased forward to pull the second rope. Thankfully, this rope proved to be the one we wanted, as with a soft grinding sound, a stone door slid out of the way to reveal a new tunnel.
Things changed drastically on the other side of the stone door. There were no more Falmer to encounter, just animals. At the far end of the tunnel we found ourselves in, motion stirred and something large and feline slid into a crouch with a deep rumbling growl.
We approached cautiously, and took the creature down when it attacked. It was, of all things, a sabrecat, but unlike any sabre cat I had ever seen. Instead of tawny brown or white fur, it was dark gray, and mottled with purple markings that actually glowed! The purple glow was extinguished upon the death of the beast. It was built much slimmer than the stocky, heavy beasts in the regular parts of Skyrim, though it kept its long saber fangs.
The path curved around a natural stone pillar, and we came to an abrupt stop at the sight of something in the path. It looked like a flower, but the petals were made of a strange honeycomb mesh surrounding a round, purple core.
As we rounded the pillar, the plant reacted to our arrival by beginning to shake. The mesh petals made a soft clattering sound: like bones rattling against one another.
Serana eased forward warily, volunteering to see whether the movement was harmless like the anemone flowers, or whether something more hostile was going to happen.
It was the latter. As soon as she got close enough, the mesh petals fell outward, and the purple core convulsed, spewing a green gas into the air before disintegrating. Serana lurched backward with vampiric speed, coughing and choking. I held my breath, stepped forward, and grabbed her arm, pulling her clear as her legs started to fumble in their retreat. Whatever fast-acting poison was in that bloom, it was enough to make a vampire falter.
I set her against the wall as she continued to cough and gasp, worriedly digging through Serana's pack before finding a potion with red liquid inside. The label identified it as Cure Poison.
Praying to Stendarr that the generic poison-stopping mixture would work, I yanked the cork out and pressed the bottle to her lips. She gulped a mouth full, choked, and coughed again, losing some of the potion. She sputtered a little before desperately fighting the urge to cough so she could swallow again. Her body, lute-string taut with the violent coughing bout, finally relaxed by the third swallow. Silence descended as she sucked the last of the potion out of the bottle, swallowed, and sighed.
"Bless the Divines," I breathed, taking a linen to her chin to wipe up the spilled potion. "I don't know what we would have done if that didn't work. Maybe we shouldn't have you be the test subject for these things."
"I only caught a whiff of it," she wheezed, "and I had my vampiric speed to get me clear. I don't think you would have fared so well."
"Maybe, but you're our alchemist," I pointed out. "Of the two of us, you're the one who knows how to do potions properly. If that potion had been lost during our fall into the river, or we had run out..." I couldn't finish and shook my head, focusing on folding the linen so it could be stored again.
Serana's smile was tremulous but she caught my hand gently, stroking her thumb reassuringly over the back of my hand. "I'm okay, thanks to you. And… I'm pretty tough. Even if we didn't have a potion, I would have recovered in time."
I smiled back, a little surprised by her initiative, but glad to see her taking steps toward being comfortable with touching.
We made a point to avoid the poison blooms, passing more of the blue and purple flowers, and stepping around more glowing, crystallized rock. We encountered a deer with glowing green bioluminescent spots and streaks. I made a mental note that the carnivores were purple, and the herbivores were green. Whatever biological sense that made, it was nice to have a color-coded glow to tell us at a distance which sort of creature was lurking in the shadows. We wound our way through the cave system, startling the occasional deer and skirting a sabrecat den at a safe distance.
Eventually, we came to the next wayshrine, and came face to face with the spirit of one of the prelates.
"Welcome, Initiate." The spirit greeted us, his voice echoing slightly as it crossed from his realm to ours. "This is the Wayshrine of Illumination. Are you prepared to honor the mantras of Auri-El and fill your vessel with His enlightenment?"
"I am," I told it.
"Then behold Auri-El's gift, my child. May it light your path as you seek tranquility within the Inner Sanctum." The spirit performed the same gestures that Gelebor had, and the wayshrine rose to its full height; revealing the bowl within.
"May Auri-El's brilliance illuminate your path." the spirit told me, as I dipped the ewer into the water.
Another portal appeared, revealing yet another tunnel. This tunnel, however, turned out to be icy cold.
I groaned and pulled my coat tightly closed around myself, muttering, "Not a fan."
"Hey, look on the bright side: this breeze means there's a way out, and pretty close, too." Serana gave me an infectious smile, "Come on! Let's get out of these caves! I'm starting to forget what the sun looks like."
I chuckled a bit, and let her grab my hand and pull me along the winding path to the surface.