Chapter 37: Hamvir - the puzzle

[4th of Midyear 4E 202]

Daeril, Irene, the three archaeologists, my housecarl Antonius and myself had started to explore the hidden ruin below Hamvir՚s Rest, and further down we had met three mage brothers – a fire mage, an ice mage, and a storm mage. Together we had explored further, and we had found some kind of obelisk with inscriptions on the walls around, in Ayleid language. Based on some experiments, the obelisk seemed to hide and protect something, but we had not managed to gain access yet, although we believed that we had followed the small inscriptions in the corners properly.

"What did we miss?" Helvius asked, looking around. Apparently he was as clueless as I was.

"Is there a chance that we somehow got the numbers wrong?" Daeril asked.

"No, I double checked, and the order is clearly correct."

"But maybe we are supposed to reverse the order and start from number four?"

"Unlikely, but we can try."

We did as he had suggested, but the result was negative; not even a small opening showed, but a shock spell was somehow cast from the obelisk in all directions; fortunately it was a weak one, and it was more annoying than actually hurting.

"Apparently not" Hulbert commented dryly.

"Was there anything indicating a number five somewhere?" I asked. "It looked like we did steps one to four correctly, as an opening started to show; this seems to indicate that we did something right at least. So, maybe we missed another one, or some other additional inscriptions?"

"But there are only four corners! Where would a number five be located?"

I almost started to chuckle, as my mind wandered off for a moment. When the term 'number five' was mentioned, I had to think of that old movie I had once watched, titled 'Number Five is alive' or something very similar. It had been about a series of robots being produced in a factory, and a nightly lightning storm had hit one of them, somehow making it intelligent. It had been so funny watching this robot finding a human settlement, getting into one of the houses and asking the lady living there to allow it to read some of her books; the robot had browsed book by book very quickly and told the lady 'need more input'. Yes, that had been a real good movie, and I had liked it.

Meanwhile, the others pondered options, and I tried to pay attention once more; we sure would not meet an intelligent robot down here or anywhere else in Tamriel.

"Why don't we check the writing and symbols again" Mila suggested and started to do so together with her colleagues.

There was silence in the room for some time while we all looked for hints we might not have seen before. Irene found something eventually:

"Look here, below the inscription and the number, there is something else, but very small."

The archaeologists joined him in the corner where he was, and Helvius confirmed:

"You are right, Irene, and it looks like the Ayleid symbol for the number five. So, as you are standing in the corner with the inscription for fire, maybe we have to cast a fire ball again at the end."

I stood in another corner and also looked below, and I found another tiny inscription there. When I called Helvius over, he confirmed:

"The healing corner has the same, also five. Is this in all four corners?

It turned out to be, and Helvius shook his head:

"Why is there the same number in all corners?"

"Maybe we have to cast all four spells simultaneously at the end?" I suggested.

"Young man, you may have a point."

Technically, I was not a man but a male Khajiit, but that was totally all right for me; the archaeologists did not spend the tiniest effort in racial distinction and such, and for them all male members of any sentient species was simply a man, I assumed; I wished that everybody would see it like this. But anyway, nobody had a better idea, and so we positioned ourselves again. The mage brothers started, I cast my healing spell, and we were rewarded with the same kind of rumbling and partial opening again. Then Daeril counted from one to three; at 'three' all four of us sent our spells at roughly the same time. There was more rumbling, the top of the obelisk started to glow, and one side opened up fully, revealing a narrow staircase leading down. Contrary to earlier attempts, the rumbling subsided and the opening stayed.

"We did it!" Daeril shouted.

Indeed, we had done it. This had been one of the most complex puzzles I had encountered so far in this world, but good teamwork had allowed us to solve it, and I was somewhat proud that I had been able to provide some of the hints. What kind of power and magic made those mechanisms work after such a long time? That was really fascinating, even if I could not really grasp how it worked. Was there anything even remotely equivalent on Earth? Based on my education, I was somebody who had a good grasp on various aspects of modern technology, but this was totally different. At least for now, though, I was fully happy to know that magic worked in multiple mysterious ways, and I did not necessarily have to understand it in order to use it. After all, my restoration spells had helped others and myself multiple times, and I was grateful for that.

So, what were we going to find when we followed the stairs which had opened for us? Was there really going to be a lot of treasure, or just more danger? Naturally, we were curious, and rather than debating the possibilities, we descended the stairs after a quick break and a snack. Spirit went first, and she would hopefully trigger traps first, if there were any. However, nothing hindered our progress for now; at the bottom of the stairs, we entered a narrow passage, and one by one we followed it. Antonius, my Imperial housecarl, was right ahead of me, and all of a sudden the ground opened below him and he vanished. I shouted to alert the others, made sure that the ground I was on looked stable and then slowly moved forward to see what had happened. Mila had been right ahead of us, and she checked together with me; it looked like Antonius had somehow managed to trigger a carefully hidden trapdoor, and he was now several meters below us, in some kind of pit. I was not sure if Spirit had been too light to trigger the trap or maybe my housecarl had stepped on some plate the others had missed, but that wasn't important right now. I called down to ask if he was all right, and he called back:

"I've got a few bruises, I guess, and my right ankle feels hurts a lot; maybe it's sprained."

"Is there a way out of there from what you can see?"

"No, doesn't look like that."

Without outside help it seemed quite impossible, indeed, to escape the trap; even without the sprained ankle, my housecarl would not have been able to jump high enough, and the pit walls were practically vertical with no good options for climbing, at least as much as I could see it. I had left my rope back in the room with the balcony, where we had come from above and met the mage brothers, but Mila also had a rope in her backpack, and she now got it out. Without further hesitation I jumped down into the pit and looked at my housecarl's ankle; my magicka pool was full, and I spent most of it to heal the injury, carefully channeling the healing energy into the joint as Danica had taught me some time ago. The rope was now hanging down, and I attached it around Antonius' body. I lifted him up on my shoulders, and Mila and Daeril were easily able to pull him up from there. While they took care of him, I looked around, and it appeared that others might have been down here before, as I noticed some bones on the ground; I could not tell if those bones were from humans or animals, though. On the walls I could see some writings, but was unable to read them. Maybe some of those just stated something like 'Explorer Tim was here' or 'Adventurer Joe is about to die alone here soon'?

Daeril interrupted my musings and asked from above:

"What about you now?"

"Let me see if I can jump first."

The people above stepped back, I bent my knees and jumped as high as I could from my position. This was not fully good enough, but I managed to grab the rim with both hands, and when Mila and Daeril helped to pull me up, I was soon outside, too. First I double checked my housecarl's ankle, and once we had assured me that he was fine again and perfectly able to walk, we decided to move on. Slower than before, carefully looking down and checking where we walked, we proceeded, and after a few more turns the passage opened up into a very large cavern. The temperature around us rose, and in the background I could see some glow from open lava, or maybe, as we were below ground, it should be called magma here? All around us multiple passages allowed access deeper into the mountain, and ahead there was a smelter and a forge, but both larger than the normal ones. To the sides many shelves were lined up along the walls, and they were partially filled with ores and ingots of various types and a few books and notes.

"This is amazing!" Helvius called out.

"It is, indeed" Mila confirmed. "I know something about smithing, and this is very exciting. Does that look Dwemer in origin?"

"I believe that it does, mostly at least. It appears that we have left the Ayleid section behind and are now clearly in unknown Dwemer land."

We all stepped close to the impressive forge, and the whole setup down here reminded me a little bit of the Aetherium forge in the game. In that one, there had been some special guards, right? Before I could follow that line of thought, I hear some odd noise, and when I looked around, I saw the lava in the background move and something coming up. Soon I recognized a Dwarven centurion, and likely it was a special and very powerful one, too; so, of course there was a guard. Fortunately, we all had fought a centurion before and knew what to do. The three mage brothers conjured their atronachs, I operated my crossbow, and Irene, Daeril and Hulbert sent powerful fire balls at the monster, so that it got attacked even before fully rising from the magma. A few times one of us had to jump to the side to avoid the hot steam and fire the centurion blew from its mouth, and a few times one of us suffered minor burns. In the mid of the fight, a dozen or so spiders joined in, and I sent Hanni, Nanni and Spirit to handle them, with Antonius assisting. The centurion was indeed a very powerful one, and it seemed to take little or no damage from our fire spells. Now something clicked in my head, and I realized that the Centurion had stepped out from glowing lava; thus, of course, it was obviously immune to heat and fire. Ennic, the ice mage, had apparently come to the same conclusion, and his ice spikes slowed down the monster a little bit at least. Irene had also noticed the situation and shouted:

"Use Ice! This monster cannot be hurt by fire!"

Immediately Dariel and Hulbert followed her example and switched from fire balls to ice spikes. However, even with ice attacks and after taking care of the little spiders, we had to work hard to avoid getting killed; a couple of times the centurion's huge hammer just barely missed one of us. Ennic conjured a frost atronach each time the previous one was defeated by the Centurion, and that eventually gave us a break. Ennoc's storm atronachs also had some effect at least, while I tried to hit some joints with my bolts. After many minutes of fighting and combined effort we succeeded and managed to defeat the special centurion, and it was about time, as we were pretty much exhausted and out of magicka now. Ennic was on the ground; he had been hit by the automaton's last blast of hot steam, and his skin showed multiple severe burns. While he drank a healing potion and his brothers also applied restoration spells – it turned out that all three of them were decent in that school of magic – Mila stated:

"That must have been one of those legendary Forgemasters."

"Have you encountered one of them before?"

"Not personally, but I have heard about them. According to legend, the Dwemer protected some of their most valuable and special forge areas with them, like the Aetherium forge."

She knew about the Aetherium forge? That was a term I was familiar with, and I wanted to know more about that, specifically as I could not know if that concept was the same as in the game:

"Aetherium forge? I heard somebody mentioning that word, but what is that?"

Mila walked over to the shelf with the books and picked one, showing it to me:

"Look here, I have seen a copy of that book before. It is called 'The Aetherium Wars' and tells about places where special items might be found. Read this section here:"

… Modern scholars know Aetherium as a rare, luminescent blue crystal found in some Dwemer ruins. Most consider it little more than a curiosity, as it has proven all but impossible to work with: while it has a strong magical aura, it is alchemically inert, and no known process can enchant, smelt, mold, bind, or break it. To the dwarves, of course, such problems were merely a challenge. In the years following King Herald's reign, the Dwemer discovered a considerable source of Aetherium in their deepest delvings. An alliance of four cities, led by Arkngthamz, the great research center in the southern Reach, was formed to oversee its extraction, processing, and study, and a new 'Aetherium Forge' constructed to smelt it under precisely controlled conditions. If the inscriptions I discovered are to be believed, the results were nothing short of spectacular: the items produced by the Forge were artifacts of immense power, imbued from the moment of their creation with powerful enchantments. The Dwarven alliance shattered almost immediately, as the four city-states and their rivals attempted to claim the Forge. …

Right, I had done that quest a couple of times before in the game; wasn't it that one where a ghost even helped you along? I asked Mila:

"Has that Aetherium forge been found yet?"

"No, not according to what I know. Many Dwemer ruins in Skyrim are still unexplored, including the one mentioned here, Arkngthamz, and going in there is one of our goals. We have heard rumors about adventurers going in, but the ground trembled in there and they feared for their lives, specifically when a ghost urged them to turn back."

"But this forge here is not the Aetherium forge, right?"

"No, I don't think so, but it must also be something great and special. We need to take some time and study the notes and books here, and maybe we know more later."

I nodded, and while the three archaeologists started to browse the various book and notes, some of us examined the fallen Forgemaster and checked it for loot; there wasn't much there, above and beyond the usual dynamo core. Thus, we decided to look around and explored the many side passages starting from the large cavern. The one my saber cats and I looked at led us further down, and soon we found a number of ore veins along the walls, albeit I was not sure about the type. Contrary to a nice mod I had always used to highlight the specific colors of different veins, some of them looked very similar in real Skyrim, and likely only an experienced person might be able to reliably call them out, specifically down here in dim cave light rather than bright daylight.

There was one particular small side passage which led to small room with an odd light shining from it, and when I looked closer, I found another one of those brightly shining and kind of buzzing crystals, looking somewhat like a skyshard in the game. Wait, actually there were three of those crystals in the room, neatly arranged in a row and buzzing around like they were in a competition with each other. I had seen one of those before, a single one, in Stone Creek Cave, and I had even touched it, but not observed any result from that. Same as the other one, the glowing did not stop or change when I touched one of them, just the buzzing got a little more muted. So, what was that really about? Maybe one of the three archaeologists would know?

When I returned to the central cavern, I waited for the others, and we learned that almost everybody had found some ore veins. Mila and Antonius had sufficient knowledge to identify the types, and the two of them together went into each passage to try to determine the ore types. Meanwhile Helvius mentioned something:

"Based on our preliminary studies of the books and notes in here, we may get one step closer to learn about the creation of Dwemer ingots and metal."

"What's so special about it?"

"For most types of metal, we either find it in pure form in ore veins, like iron, or know how to make alloys from ores, like steel from iron ore and corundum ore. Dwemer metal sticks out; we don't even know if it is a pure element or an alloy, and we don't know how to make it. All of the Dwemer armor and weapons we have are, as far as I know, based on Dwemer scrap metal, which seems to exist in larger quantities. Look here, the book 'Dwarves – The Lost Race of Tamriel – Volume I: Architecture and Designs – by Calcelmo, Scholar of Markarth' has a section on this."

I read the passage he pointed at:

No other race has replicated whatever process was used to create dwarven metal. Although it can be easily mistaken for bronze – and in fact many forgers of dwarven materials use bronze to create their fake replicas – it is most definitely a distinct type of metal of its own. I have personally seen metallurgists attempt to combine several different types of steel and common and rare ores in order to imitate dwarven metal's exclusive properties, but the only method that has been successful is to melt down existing dwarven metallic scraps and start over from there.

"So, we don't know how to make Dwemer ingots from scratch?"

"No, we don't. However, the notes here seem to have some hints, and we need to study them in more detail. I am not saying that the solution is written here in plain text, but at least it seems to be something an experienced blacksmith can start with."

When Mila and Antonius were back, the female archaeologist reported:

"This is so amazing! Most mines have veins of only a single type, like the common iron mines almost everywhere, the silver mines in the Markarth area, the special coal mines and so on, and veins of different type are not usually found in the same area. And yet, this ruin seems to have veins of most or even all known types all together. How did the Dwemer arrange that?"

Helvius suggested:

"Maybe they searched many mountains and built this place here because it is one of the very rare places where many different veins were located?"

Hulbert added:

"And maybe the Ayleids knew that before, too?"

Helvius shook his head:

"Unlikely, my friend. The Ayleids were not known to dig that deep, and the architecture down here is undoubtedly pure Dwemer. I believe that the Dwemer must have had means to kind of scan mountains for veins, probably with very special magic. Maybe they just used the already existing Ayleid underground area as a starting point."

"But why did the Ayleids build the place in the start?"

"That we do not know; I had no idea that Ayleids were in Skyrim at all, ever. But anyway, in my opinion, this exploration has been very successful. From a scientific point of view, we have found another amazing Dwemer ruin and some hints towards the origin and composition of Dwemer metal. From a mundane point of view, we have found plenty of Dwemer scrap metal which can be used to create a significant number of Dwemer metal ingots. B'lushona, I expect that this is something useful?"

"It is, indeed. Since the first dragon showed up in the Whiterun area, Jarl Balgruuf the Greater has asked for options to get better equipment for the hold guards, and now, with Whiterun no longer neutral, there is a second reason for that. Armor and weapons made of Dwemer metal instead of steel should give our soldiers an advantage, and specifically arrowheads made of that metal will be welcome. Yes, the Jarl will appreciate that. But, I wonder how to get some of that out of here?"

"Good question, my friend, but remember the lift we found earlier. If it does indeed go up to the surface as we hope, this is likely our best chance."

I nodded, and I had forgotten about the lift for a moment. Yes, that should be doable, and I wondered where the upper end of the lift might be. We did not know for sure if it'd go up to the surface at all or just to a different level of the ruins down here, and even if it did end up on the surface was it going to be on some cliff which could not easily be reached otherwise? No, that would not make sense; whoever had built those lifts would have made sure that access from out there was possible without too much trouble.

[Author's Notes: So, another skyshard, actually, three of them. Is there something special about them?]