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The Falmer gone off in persistent search of my Thrown Voice, and the chaurruses likewise having scuttled away like cats to the rattling of their food-bowl, I bent beside the chest, – which I had determined was either
not Falmer
; or else some Falmer, tired of spiky grey minimalism and chitin plate, had decided to try a new design. I would not put it past the Falmer of Blackreach, – it must get dull down here, – once the novelties of scrap Dwemer metal and exciting new species of mushroom had worn off; but I was convinced this was from the
above-ground
; and made by the decidedly
not scuttly
. The wood had begun to crumple a little; and the hinges had fared little better; but there was a magic on it which even the miserable mizzle of Blackreach could not get to, which my own magic went determined into, and bounced straight off.
‘Oh!’ said I: ‘do you know a better lockpicking spell?’
Marcurio looked askance at me, and said that the first thing every student learns, when clambering back to the university after a night of revelry, with the curfew in full force, is from the renowned book
It's A Hard Lock Life For Us
. – I therefore invited him to try. His spell, – o I could not imagine him
revelling
!, – bounced straight back as mine had.
‘If experience is anything to go by,’ said he, ‘the hardest locks guard fifty-seven septims and an iron dagger. – We ought to keep moving.’
‘Oh!’ I returned, ‘I want to see, – it rattles, listen, –’
And so after much deliberation, we decided upon trying a combined spell; joined hands, summoned it; and not knowing quite if combination worked, tried it regardless. The poor battered box looked miserably at us; creaked; and gave up entirely.
‘A crimson nirnroot!’ I cried at once.
‘Julienne, we already have thirty, –’ Marcurio protested.
I must scowl and pick up the thing (which was damp quite beyond the norm for a nirnroot, more on the slimy sort of scale); and putting it carefully between two bits of paper, slide it in with the rest. The others in my bag were still chiming, faintly; this one let out a pathetic little whine and fell silent.
‘Julienne, –’ said Marcurio suddenly.
He thrust his hand into the box, and drew out the thing I'd wholly ignored, in favour of the sad nirnroot. – A thing which had kept its lustre, despite or perhaps because of the nirnroot-slime at the edges; which was so golden as to half blind us, in the thin darkness of Blackreach; and which we thought, somewhere in our unconsciousness, that we recognised. It was long, thin and perfectly unearthly. It was an
Elder Scroll
.
Marcurio whistled: held the thing up as if to read it: thought better of it, valuing despite everything his sanity; and so kept it rolled up and wielded it quite fit to hit someone over the head with it. – I looked about for Falmer and doubted they’d succumb to a whack with a scroll. – The place still empty, – for my Voice had echoed over cliffs and chasms and possibly directly into a troll-nest, – he beheld it eyes gleaming, and said:
‘This
must
be what we’re looking for! Someone’s been to Mzark before us, –’
‘Oh!’ said I, ‘I hope they haven’t done anything stupid.’
‘They have left an Elder Scroll in a box in a Falmer camp,’ said he, ‘I don’t think we can hope for too much.’
‘How will we know if it is the right Scroll?’ said I.
Marcurio feigned having already been inspecting the thing for identifying marks. He was just about to declare that a particular engraving looked like a dragon; when suddenly he deflated, and cried:
‘The damnable, – the
bloody
, –
And all at once, he unfurled the Scroll and held it before him; I jumped forwards and feared we’d both be blinded and the ceiling collapse and the world end, – but nothing happened save that Marcurio put his head in his hands and threw the Scroll in my general direction. It did not blind me; nor was it inscribed in enigmas and mysteries; it said at the top:
Special Limited Edition
; and in the rest of it, things which cannot be related for reasons of decency and copyright. In the early Fourth Era, it seems, there had been a fad for novelty books, which had exceeded the boundaries of decorum, and also of people’s bookshelves; and which had, apparently, gone so far into the tacky and out of the other side, that we’d both of us been fooled. A run of popular books had been printed in the form of
Elder Scrolls
; and for reasons known only to a certain debauched actor of deepest history, one of them had been
The Lusty Argonian Maid
.
‘I want to gouge my eyes out,’ said Marcurio.
I looked at him; at the scroll, foolishly; thought the same thing; wondered if a Moth Priest had ever been driven to voluntary blindness by bad erotica; and burst out laughing.
‘It isn’t funny!’ said he: ‘we wasted so much magicka on that damn lock, –’
‘Oh!’ said I, ‘we have a crimson nirnroot, –’
It was too dark to see what else was in the box: but perceiving glimmers which reflected the distant pinpricks on the vault, I put my hand in. I found a coin or two, – what I hoped for fear of worse, were the wet remains of another nirnroot, – then, at last, after all our treasure-hunting efforts, my fingers fell upon something
smooth
, something
cut
, something
faceted
, –
‘A NEW HAND TOUCHES THE BEACON! –’