Heart in the Darkness

I felt a heavy burden atop my shoulders as I brewed the potions we need for our upcoming journey. As I carefully cook the hearts with the mushroom, I glance at Kiya, who for the past few days has been quite difficult to get along with. I notice from the edge of my sight how she crushed the Daedric hearts she acquired for her own armor with a fierce, impatient face. I do not know if I crossed the line with whatever I said or did, and she is not really of a mind to talk to me about it, nor do I know what to do to fix it. If this keeps up, our daunting task of finding the Elder Scroll in an uncharted place might not even take place. 

Luckily enough, she seemed determined to find this scroll even without talking. She readily agreed to have her armor upgraded so we'll be ready for Alftand, and now I find myself glancing at her pound away at evil hearts, and I can imagine  her imagining that those are mine. 

Bits of heart in the arrowhead, probably?

It took us quite a long while to obtain all the ingredients and materials we needed for her forging and my brewing, but we eventually finished our preparations. We rushed to Alftand and found a vast Dwemer ruin before us. I urged all of us to proceed with care, as we did not know what lies in these ruins. Dwemer technology is far too advanced for any of us to understand, and who knows how many machines lie there in wait for their masters to come back?

How are we going to climb that?

If I thought that Kiya was determined to find the scroll, little did I know she was a bit too determined. She kept running far and ahead from Serana and me, making sure to distance herself from us. I often reminded her that upgrading her armor to one of the best ones in all of Tamriel does not make her invincible, but that only made her run farther away. It's a good thing that I can run far without stopping, and I always caught up to her already fighting some mechanical being on wheels. 

Kiya lights up any place she walks in to.

Traps were all over Alftand, keeping us on our toes and forcing us to look at our every step, even while fighting. Kiya took one illumination of one of the more dangerous traps in the ruins, one that, when triggered, unleashes several whirling blades that go up and down the stairs, slicing anyone that comes near them. 

I wonder how the Dwarves were able to get around with traps all over the place.

Apart from traps, Falmer and their chaurus pets made a home out of the Dwarven ruins. They set up their camps almost anywhere accessible to them, and being aggressive for no reason, we had to take them down. We took advantage of their blindness by leading them to traps and triggering them. It was not inviting to watch, knowing too well that we might end up the same way if we were not careful enough.

Come here falmer, falmer, falmer...

We finally reach a spacious cave with dwemer machinations. No machines on wheels or spider machinations -- just Falmer. It seemed to me that we were reaching some deeper, underground cave untouched even by the Dwemer, as this part of Alftand looked undeveloped by their technology. I was both right and wrong at my thinking.

This is a Cathedral? What do they worship here, metal?

I was wrong to think that there were no dwemer machines living in these parts. We were able to open the gate to another passage, but were were stopped in our tracks by a gigantic human-like dwemer machine. It was twice my size, completely made of metal, and spewed hot steam from its arms that almost got through my armor and burned me inside it. Kiya managed to capture an illumination of us fighting the huge monstrous machine as it tried to sever my head off.

Look at that throwing posture!

Barely surviving our last encounter with the huge machine, we barge in a room with two adventurers arguing. As if by some strange and twisted coincidence, the man was Imperial and the woman was Redguard. I did not quite get what they were saying, but it looked like they were arguing pretty aggressively. The argument escalated when the Imperial man attacked the Redguard woman. He died in the process, unfortunately, while we had to defend ourselves when she attacked us in her mad rage. We did not have time for diplomacy to ask her what had happened. 

That's some lover's quarrel.

It was just as well, then, that either of them were not able to get the Attunement Sphere had they defeated us (which was unlikely, if I may add), for they would be able to unlock the Dwarven mechanism to unfold the stairs spiraling downward. Before we went down, I asked Kiya if she was ready for this. She seemed to be sobering up due to our last encounter, but she tried not to show it. The fact that me being a Redguard and she an Imperial, and that the two adventurers arguing earlier were our counterparts might have played a role in making her talk to me. She told me that she was as ready as I was, and that we had to be careful down there. I became glad of even that short response from her, for it was the first time she talked to me in a long while. I nodded, and she let me go first. As we descended the final steps, we were greeted by a cave not beheld by any man's eyes in a very long time.

Glowing mushrooms that light up the place grew all over, some as tall as the cave itself. It would seem that there were dwemer constructions here as well, meaning that this place had been abandoned by the dwemer like they did their other dwellings and left to the elements. It was glorious to behold. We had finally reached Blackreach. Kiya even took off her helmet to get a better look as I took an illumination of the place.

The effect of large mushrooms.

Looking at her like this made me sigh. She looked so... beautiful and deadly at the same time. Unfortunately, that is the case even when I'm the one in front of her. I absolutely wanted to finish this scroll-finding quest as fast as we could in order to get it out of her mind and be able to talk to her... about us.