“Ooof!”
The cry of pain had been preceded by a meaty smack and was followed by the metallic rattle that Sayma recognized instantly as the sound of shackles rattled by the weight of the prisoner in them. She ducked down and hugged the wall, raising her matched blades and creeping out toward the hallway. She froze as a figure in the distinctive golden armor of the Thalmor walked past the open cell door, and grimaced as he passed. There was another cry of pain from down the hall to her left, followed by a defiant cry.
“That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?”
Sayma had picked up journals from chests she’d looted along the way, journals purporting to have belonged to Caio Umbranox, Seviana’s ancestor, the one who had set up this trial by trap and puzzle. The journals stressed that the clever thief undertaking this journey, the one he assumed would be Dragonborn, must be silent, and leave no trace, and sneak past all obstacles. But Sayma had no love of the Thalmor. She was silent, to be certain; she crept down the hall behind the Thalmor soldier and then stood, and struck with both swords, killing him instantly. The soul-trapping enchantment on her off-hand sword did its work; the air exploded with the resounding boom and sizzle of a Thalmor soul being ripped from its body and housed in the grand soul gem she had taken from the Blades ghost.
The Thalmor in the cell, who’d been performing the torture, rushed her. She calmly took him out with the same efficient stabs and slashes she had used on the first.
“Sorry, Caio,” she murmured. “I’m a thief, but I’m first and foremost an assassin these days and these two needed to die.” Besides. I’m not Dragonborn. I may have enough of that energy floating around me to fool everyone but you’ve got the wrong sibling. So I will not consider myself bound by your rules. I’ll try, but no promises. Thalmor don’t count, as far as I’m concerned.
The prisoner who had been putting up such a brave front was unconscious, hanging in his shackles. She unlocked them and lowered him to the floor.
I have no idea what’s going on. If this is the Imperial prison, it’s definitely not in Caio’s time. But if it were in my time, the present day, surely there would be more people – Thalmor, officers, who knows what else. Wouldn’t there?
Well it doesn’t matter when I am; I know roughly where I am. Now what?
She explored the length of the cell block. The only way out of it was an upper level door that was clearly barred from the other side. In the farthest cell from where the tortured prisoner lay she found, behind stacks of dusty crates, the skeleton of someone who had clearly had similar treatment a long time previous. She searched the ancient bones and found, under one of the legs, a spell tome.
“Ancient Vision, eh? Well I don’t know this one but let’s see.” She studied it for a bit. The spell didn’t look too terribly difficult, even for someone who did not specialize in magic. Its use, according to the book, was to reveal what one’s surroundings had looked like in ages gone by.
Given how I got here, I’ll bet I know where to try it out, too.
She returned to the cell she’d started in and raised her left hand, casting the spell. It was a loud spell, bursting from her with a ringing, percussive sound. Her vision blurred and things around her took on an almost pinkish hue. And there, in the spot where the smooth rock wall had been just a moment earlier, was the arched entrance to a tunnel that she’d seen in her vision of what had happened in this space two hundred years earlier.
Without any hesitation, she entered the tunnel. It was a crude tunnel, dirt and rock, probably excavated by some long-forgotten generation of prisoners or those helping them to escape. She hadn’t travelled too far along it when the spell’s sound repeated behind her. Startled, she turned to see that the archway had disappeared, and the tunnel once more ended at a smooth, solid stone wall.
I see. It won’t change where I am, but it won’t retain the changes around me for more than a few moments. Good to know. I guess there’s no way to go but forward, now.
The tunnel emptied into an enormous cavern. Dirt ramps led to its bottom far, far below Sayma but it was the landing across the cavern’s width that caught her attention. There was light there that spoke to her of an opening but did not reveal one, and no other visible exits anywhere else. She spent a few minutes going down to the floor of the cavern for a cursory look around, but found nothing aside from a few lonely ferns and a great deal of collapsed rock. Returning to the upper level, she nodded to herself and cast Ancient Vision again.
The spell exploded, and a rope bridge appeared before her, stretching across to a dirt pillar in the middle of the cavern. It was glowing in a shade of purple that left no doubt that she was looking at a magical construct. She started across the bridge, carefully, but had not made it completely to the end when the spell began to dispel. She caught the beginnings of its sound with just the barest moment left to leap for the dirt platform; and she stood for a moment, waiting for her heart to stop pounding, looking back at the very empty place where she’d been just a moment before.
I guess I don’t get to linger when I cast this spell, do I.
There was a substantial gap between the platform and the ledge she was heading for. This time, when she cast the spell and a second rope bridge appeared, she moved across it briskly.
If there’s something waiting for me, I’ll just have to fight it. Because that fall would kill me.
There was nothing on the other side. At all. Sayma looked around at the narrow ledge on which she stood, sighed, and cast her spell again. At some point in the distant past stones had fallen from above to block the hallway that Ancient Vision revealed. She moved briskly along it and around a corner.
This was yet another old fortress, and at this point Sayma had no idea at all which one it might be or where she was in relation to anything else. She was utterly confused. The next hour or so did nothing to relieve her confusion. In fact, the only thing that made complete sense to her was the down-staircase leading to a locked room with a number of chests inside. This, she thought, I can handle. This is a lock, a normal lock. I can pick a lock. She’d come away from that room with her backpack far heavier than it had been before. Farther along the corridor she found another door, this one wooden, of the type that was simply not going to yield to her efforts to pick it open.
Ok, so this is my next task. Obviously. Find a way to get this open.
The rest of the place was a nightmare of casting Ancient Vision, throwing levers, retracing steps to cast the spell again, up and down stairwells and around twisting hallways until her head was spinning. In some places, the spell revealed hidden handles. In others it removed walls, but only for a moment or two. It took an absurd amount of time but eventually Sayma had opened enough passages that her last casting took her to a small room. A bust of the Gray Fox grinned over a table containing gold ingots, books, and a silver bowl with gemstones and a key resting prominently in its center.
“Finally. I am not sad to see the last of this place,” she said to the bust. And now I’m convinced that I’m mad. Talking to a piece of sculpture.
This is new information, to you?
Shut up. Go back to sleep. I’m trying to concentrate.
She found her way back to the locked door and unlocked it.
Behind it was … a wall.
Gods damn this place.
After casting Ancient Vision again, Sayma entered a room with two levels, the higher on the far side. Two staircases led up to it. At the top of the stairs was a long table with a pull handle mounted in its center. Four candles were arranged along the table’s length, each resting in a patch of differently-colored light. And directly behind the pull handle was none other than the Gray Fox.
“Another puzzle, eh? I suppose I really ought to ask you for a hint before I go at it, this time.”
She touched the bust and once again felt words. This time, the Gray Fox spoke of light coming in a specific order: Sun, Candle, Fireplace, and Moon. She rubbed her eyes and forehead and heaved a great sigh.
“Ok. This is ridiculous, but ok, I can figure this out. The moon is easy. Moonlight is this light grey over here. But the first one is Sun and sunlight ought to be yellow.”
There was no yellow light on the table, but there were two different shades of orange. Sayma was tired, and frustrated, and wracked her brain to no avail. Sunlight was yellow. Or orange. Or…
She stared down at the table again and realized that one of the patches of light was green.
Ah! Yes, of course! Green, growing things need sunlight! And green doesn’t work for either candle or fireplace, so…
She lit the green candle. Nothing bad happened.
It took her a few moments to decipher which shade of orange would be Candle and which one Fireplace, but after deciding that the darker orange would be more like a fireplace’s stronger, ruddy glow, she lit the rest of the candles in order: light orange, dark orange, gray. She grinned at the bust and activated the pull handle.
Slowly, noisily, with a great deal of dust, a section of the thick stone wall behind the table lowered itself into the floor below it. Beyond it, Sayma saw something she had not been expecting at all.
In the many months since leaving Riften, Sayma had made one or two trips across the southern border into the northernmost province of Cyrodiil, looking for any remnants of the Dark Brotherhood and finding that they had all scattered to the winds. What she saw before her, as she crouched in the entrance to the partially-flooded cavern before her, looked like the ancient Ayleid ruins that dotted Cyrodiil’s countryside. The stonework was smoother, and of different materials than that in Skyrim’s dark, rough stone barrows and keeps. The graceful, sweeping curves and sharply peaked arches of these structures were like the ones she had marveled at in the Bruma area.
Whatever this had once been, it was now partially collapsed into the floor of the cavern. Parts of it stood high and dry and others were visible just beneath the surface of the water. In one place, someone had built a crude wooden staircase of sorts up over the rubble and onto the Ayleid-era stones. Sayma darted down the dirt ramps and splashed through the incredibly cold water to that staircase, wincing as it filled her boots and froze her calves, hoping that whatever was on top of the structure would lead her where she needed to go.
There was a long, horizontal platform there, at the end of which was what looked like a very large and darkened Ayleid well, topped by an enormous, airy arch in nearly perfect condition. But Sayma couldn’t get up to look into the well. Its outer rings of stone were too tall for her to jump onto from the front and no amount of searching around its base revealed any other way to get there. She tried leaping onto the blocks along the path’s edge and ended up falling back into the frigid water, gasping as it took the breath from her lungs and narrowly missing the crueler edges of the rock rubble that had fallen into the spaces between smooth, tooled stone. She gritted her teeth and tried swimming around the edges of the cavern, because there were large pieces of what once must have been concentric circles of stone rising up out of it at strange angles. There was nothing, just nothing that was going to get her up onto that well. She hauled herself back up onto the wooden staircase to catch her breath, to wring water out of her hood and cape, and to rub warmth back into her arms if she could. Finally she cast Ancient Vision, standing as close to the well as she could get. The spell’s sound echoed around the cavern and its purplish light flooded the area but she could see nothing else happening. When the magic dispelled, she tsk’d and looked around in frustration.
Well I know that’s where I need to go. What else is there in this place aside from that smaller circle down in the water? Is that a well, too? I may as well go see, because this is getting me nowhere.
Sayma made her soggy way to the smaller structure, unable to avoid getting completely soaked once more. Shivering as she climbed onto a rubble pile and approached the stone circles, she saw that in fact this was an Ayleid well, much smaller than the other but in almost perfect repair. She didn’t hesitate more than a moment before casting Ancient Vision again.
The well before her began glowing, almost bubbling, with the light blue magical energies that were the hallmark of Ayleid wells, a shaft of light extending up toward the roof of the cavern. She stared at it in awe for a moment until it dawned on her that she had only a few moments to take advantage of whatever else might have happened in the room. She ran to the near side of the well and looked around; sure enough, the large well had a column of reddish energy extending upward from it. She leapt into the water and made her way back toward the large well.
The spell dissipated. The blue light behind her, in the smaller of the two wells, vanished. The reddish column of light above the larger well did not. As she reached the bottom of the wooden stairs Sayma began to hear a pulsating, humming sound.
In retrospect, she would wonder why it hadn’t occurred to her to notice the difference in the two energies, or ponder why one had vanished with the spell but the other hadn’t. But she didn’t notice, and she didn’t consider. Instead, she ran toward the light.
As she reached the base of the well, the energy and the sound vanished. In its place appeared a vertical portal, a circle partially flattened on its sides and top with ominous spikes extending inward. It began glowing. She started to back away in alarm as she saw Daedric symbols in a vivid purple appearing all around its edges; but she couldn’t move backward no matter how hard she tried to fling her body that way. The portal had her.
And it sucked her in.
For some period of time, how long she could not tell, there was nothing. She neither saw, nor heard, nor felt a thing. It was just black. She would have been terrified if she’d been able to have an emotion other than confusion, but she couldn’t.
Then there was light. And the light was purple. And the ground was dark, and gray, and dead, with only a few spears of grayish grass daring to reach toward the sky.
On a hill before her was a tall tower, over which hovered a circular structure like the portal that had claimed her but round, not flattened on the sides. Enormous chain ropes extended from it to the ground beneath, like anchors. The wind was howling, clouds and a ring of something, possibly debris, swirling in a tight circular pattern around the top of the portal. Sayma caught her breath, then, the fright that she’d been unable to feel before beginning to mount inside her.
I know this. Anchors. I’ve heard of these. They are… They are… Think! Think!
She looked around and saw that she was on a small hill, near the shores of some vast grayish-purple ocean. She stood in the center of a ring made from tall, ominous, spiked pillars of the deepest black.
A deep, sinister laugh came from nowhere and everywhere at once, and she jumped from fear, whirling in circles to find its source.
“What have we here?” the voice asked. It was a male voice, very deep and not completely unpleasant, but threatening because she could not tell where it was coming from. “A new pet for my realm?”
Even terrified as she was, Sayma was still defiant. “Where are you?” she shouted, trying to be heard over the roaring wind. “I’m nobody’s pet!”
“A very peculiar pet,” the voice answered her after a pause. “Where are you from, you mortal? Let me guess: the trap under the Imperial City?”
“I didn’t come here on foot or horseback, fool,” she snarled, not knowing whether she could be heard or not.
“So the trap beneath the city has been triggered again, after two hundred years. How foolish these mortals are,” he said thoughtfully. “But why are you so – oh, interesting! The Gray Cowl of Nocturnal, eh? You’re seeking the Gray Cowl. You’re here to follow the path of the one who was here two hundred years ago.”
“Why I am here is none of your concern,” Sayma yelled.
Best keep it under control. You haven’t figured out who you’re speaking with?
No, I haven’t, she snapped at her internal voice. And if you have nothing useful to add to the proceedings then just shut up!
“Yes. Caio Umbranox. Ciao Umbranox was here, but he successfully escaped Coldharbour. Are you here to escape my realm as well? Can you?” He laughed. “I don’t think so.”
Coldharbour.
I’m in… Coldharbour. That means I’m speaking to…
Her father’s voice answered her.
Yes, of course you’re in Coldharbour and of course you’re speaking to Molag Bal. I would have thought the Dark Anchor would have given you a clue. Gods know you’ve spent enough time in the company of vampires that it should have come to you.
Sayma growled. Of course it was Molag Bal.
I wasn’t here two hundred years ago, Papa. I’ve never seen one of these things. Forgive me for not being able to name it instantly. I was getting there.
“So, my friend,” the huge voice continued. “Let us see whether you can escape this realm. But I have a request to make of you. This place is filled with guardians of Coldharbour. Kill none of them. Do that, and I shall have a special reward for you. Do not break the silence of Coldharbour. Go now, and – how do they say it in the Thieves Guild? Shadows hide you.”
The voice laughed long and loud once more and was then still.
“They say ‘Eyes open and walk with the shadows,’” Sayma muttered. “That’s what they say in my Thieves Guild.” She laughed, and yelled up toward the sky. “And silence? Are you kidding me? You made enough noise to raise the dead!”
She turned around, slowly, taking stock of her surroundings.
Maybe that wasn’t the best way to phrase that.
I’m in Oblivion, and I have to get out.
Excellent.
