XVI
The least I had expected was to be attacked by an ally. Out of nowhere, the dark silhouette whirred past me with stunning speed and hid in the shadows beyond. I briefly wondered what it was, for I could tell all the things it evidently was not, when I got interrupted by a searing pain in my right hip. The black gust had slashed me on its way past!
Even more surprised was I at the sudden assault for my trying in removing the helmet that had grown around my head. The horned contraption, I imagined, was probably the reason someone or something was trying to put me down in the first place. Albeit I had no way of observing myself, I must have looked absolutely terrifying judging from the length and pointiness of the single horn that protruded from my forehead like a dæmoniac perversion of the fabled unicorns. In any case: I did not see the attack coming.
Blood poured out of the fresh wound. It closed all too quickly however. So quick, in fact, I thought I had imagined the gash - but the pain persisted regardless. As the wound magically healed itself, the attacker came back for another round. They were swift - but not swift enough to hide their identity. Before another blade could enter my field of view I glimpsed the attacker's likeness. I was confused to find that it had been Nephethys who turned her weapons against me. But in the heat of battle I couldn't communicate to her who or what I was - or wasn't. But I saw that she did not engage with the same ferocity that I knew her for. In fact, it almost looked like her power was being consumed at triple the usual rate, resulting in an early state of fatigue on her part. I managed to dodge and avoid a fair number of strikes, which is a fact that speaks for itself, before Nephethys was finally too exhausted to continue the onslaught.
I still got my share of injury and had I not this growth around my body to protect me, I surely would have died there. Then again, without all the festering hemerite she probably would not have attacked me. Mostly because I would have drowned in the flooded tunnels.
I looked at my opponent. The fear in her eyes made me feel a kind of emotion I never felt before. She was afraid of me because to her, I looked like one of the abominations that roamed the dead world above. I felt filthy, sad and sorry at the same time. I needed to get rid of that helmet quickly. I could not bear seeing her like this. My heavy steps inched forward to reach out to her. Nephethys backed away but she couldn't escape me. I witnessed my hand grope her neck, lifting her up just a little off the ground, as I realised: I could crush her.
I let go. The Dunmer fell to the ground. Now I was the one to back away. There was some force present in the hemerite that attempted to seize control. To tear apart and consume. I resisted it at first but the urge to destroy grew ever larger. While I struggled to retain my sanity and sense of self, Nephethys seized the opportunity and fled into the dark bowels of the cove. I watched her limp into the shadows. I tried to shout after her but she would not listen. When she was gone, queer sensations in my body arrested all of my attention.
An electrical trickling in my topmost skin layer began to shew itself on different parts of my body. Like little sparks of lightning that would dance across my electrified skin, its intensity heightened in places. It was an uneven distribution of electrical force, the reasons for which I didn't know.
Over time the sensation lessened somewhat until it was only faintly noticeable as soon as I concentrated on it. As if it was some sort of additional sense, although I could not fathom what it was for and how it reciprocated. I only knew that I had to find my dear friend and clear a few things up. I still hadn't figured out how to deal with the helmet which meant that, until then, I needed to protect Nephethys from the shadows if I didn't want to provoke another conflict that might weaken her even more.
She was far from the strong, agile woman that I knew and loved. Instead, she was limping around in her undergarments, blades at the ready not with her usual confidence but in fright and defence. She must have known that something was wrong with her. Either that, or she was hunted by a thing more terrible than anything we had hitherto encountered. Either way, I had to be careful in my pursuit.
I witnessed the dark elf hasten down a corridor straight ahead so I turned my back on the floating flesh sacks for the time being and followed her trail. Once I did, I noticed the electrical feeling in my body subside completely as I entered the darkness. Did the shadows suppress whatever sense I acquired? I was unsure but there was no time to ponder. I had to find Nephethys and make her understand I was no vile creature. But how, I wondered. I found myself able to speak but the helmet appeared to mute my voice for the outside world. At least I believed that Nephethys hadn't suddenly gone deaf.
So my only hope was to find a way to remove the protective plating around my head. There had to be a way without trying to break it open. Just then I stopped walking in the middle of the corridor, halting movement in shock. I realised that the hemerite coating and my skin were no longer two separated layers. They now were one, thick, protective layer, the outermost hemerite an extension of my skin. I could feel with it as though my skin was exposed.
Which meant that nerves had already grown through the stone, anchoring and embedding themselves within.
Unable to truly grasp the ramifications of this fact, I remembered in a haze how I was able to shape my hands like tools at will. Perhaps, with some practice, I could do this to my entire body to some extent. Given enough time. As I picked myself up and walked, still in pursuit of Nephethys, I thought of naught but a way to command my armour. I tried thinking the strongest of thoughts but ultimately all I got was a headache. However, as should later become worryingly apparent, I was given a lot of time to think.
During my search of the runaway dark elf I encountered no living thing at all. No merfolk, no flesh sacks. Not even the usual, marine lifeforms one would happen upon in damp caves. The many tunnels seemed almost devoid of life. "Maybe Nephethys caught their attention and they went after her", I mumbled silently into my helmet. I had been walking for a long while but I failed to make any real progress at all. Neither did I pick up a trace of Nephethys (probably because Dark Brotherhood assassins are hard to track in the first place) nor did the helmet obey my thoughts. On top of all that I lost my path multiple times over until I couldn't tell where I was anymore. The narrow tunnels of the cove stretched on endlessly as I wandered, seemingly without purpose.
After some time, I began to ask myself what became of Shthelith. I remembered that both Nephethys and Shthelith got carried away by the raging waves of the flood. Perhaps she had some idea where that blood elf could be. I didn't want to admit it to myself at that point in time, but I began to have suspicions towards Shthelith. Maybe he didn't lose us - he left us, I thought underneath my armour plating. I was of course getting furious at the hopelessness of the situation and willingly accused him of being responsible for it. I didn't truly know, however, and in the end it didn't bring much comfort. But I had to think of something else other than my entrapment in those caves.
I don't know for how long I've been wandering through the damp, iron-filled mists, wading through knee-deep water, sometimes even climbing low walls of rock and putrid flesh. With time the air got thicker. My footing, too, suffered to a degree as I had the impression that the floor suddenly started to give way under my weight. I began to have doubts as to my choice of path when the first, dessicated corpse came into view, half submerged in some fluid. I couldn't quite tell what it was, only that it wasn't entirely human. As I went, I fancied I was under some kind of illusion spell for the walls and ceiling, too, appeared rather flexible. The longer I spent in that tunnel the higher both temperature and humidity of the surrounding air seemed to rise until it clicked and I realised that I trod some all too familiar territory. The soft walls, floor and ceiling, the warm and moist atmosphere, an altogether putrid stench and the occasional, steaming puddle or hanging corpse. This could have only been a shredmound!
One of the things I've learned during my stay in that realm of terror and madness was that one mustn't panic inside a shredmound. It works a little like the web of a spider - if you move too fast or erratically it is going to take note and will, as consequence, start producing digestive fluids. So I crouched and slithered ever so quietly along the skin of the inverse beast. I remembered well what struggle it was for the three of us to fight our way through the shredmound beneath the Aímeri chapel so I dared not to move any faster than I had to or try to open passageways that have overgrown with flesh and skin.
Meanwhile, my control over my new body began to increase. I started to feel the material moving and shifting whenever I invoked a few thoughts. As I waded slowly through the shredmound, the exit, if you could call it that, revealed itself. A circular, pulsating ring of red flesh with a small hole in the middle about as big as a head. To open it meant to wake the creature, but as it was the end of the terrible hallways of meat, there was no real danger to be feared (unless I dealt with a moving shredmound; which I was not). I conjured a sharp blade from my right arm, gently inserted it into the hole, placing its edge on the flesh and with one, swift downward motion, tore it asunder. The splattering blood was seemingly consumed by my armour as I heard the thing wail in pain at my sudden assault. I breached through the cut and fell to the ground. Looking behind, there was only the movement of swinging tentacles and acid glands on the inside of the thing. I turned my head and looked forward to continue my journey.
XVII
I realised soon, however, that all of this meant that Nephethys didn't go this way. If she had been, I had been exposed to an enraged shredmound. Either that or she somehow found a way to fit through the hole at the end. Either way, my hopes were getting crushed the further I went. This maze of tunnels that could be flooded at any given moment was too vast that even a map wouldn't have been of much help. Some of the tunnels I encountered after that were barely traversible. Floors as roughly cut as the walls and ceiling made it nigh impossible to properly navigate. Had it not been for my armour I would have probably not come very far through these hostile passages. This lessened hopes of finding Nephethys alive even further. How much can a sick, half-naked Dunmer without food or water do in those depths anyway? I kept asking myself this very question for the remainder of the travels through the tunnels repeatedly. I was unaware that even greater peril was close at hand, so I carried myself slowly in despair towards what I suspected to be yet another twisted turn in the cave system. But fate would not have it that way.
The next few moments are all but a blur, for everything happened faster than I was able to really keep track of at that point. Although I haven't felt hunger or thirst in hours I was still getting seriously tired and my mental acuity lessened in response to the increasing stress of the journey.
Wearily I approached the winding path when suddenly the ground gave way. Below me the rock crumbled to dust under my weight and I fell into the hole. I hit my head and body several times on the surrounding walls and on things protruding from them. It was too dark to make out all the things I hit. As I landed, I could hear my voice as it reverberated through the even lower caves for the first time since my transformation. The pain was almost forgotten at the sound of my voice as it was thrown back at me. My helmet must've taken severe damage during the fall. I inspected it with my hands and found that it had developed several cracks in its hull, allowing the air to reach my nostrils once again.
This was a relief. I could finally communicate with the outside world. However, I had fallen deep and all leftover sense of direction that I had retained up to that point stayed up above at the edge of the hole. I rolled over slowly and pushed myself up from all fours onto my two feet. The crushing fear that I might never again see the light of day was pervasive as it was persistent. Worse still, my companions were nowhere to be found either. There I stood, all alone in the pitch black void that reeked of dead fish, blood and other, less definable things. But there was yet hope, for the tunnels went on in dryness. I must have fallen so deep that even the water was unable to penetrate the many, many layers of soil and stratum. I welcomed this new environment. It still smelled like the cove that I knew but it felt different. The air was less damp as opposed to above and the overall temperature was warmer. It was still incredibly dark but through the hemerite layers of my damaged helmet I could see clearly. There was a path right in front of me that I took.
I left the chamber that I crashed into and in doing so, the familiar smell of rotting, marine life vanished altogether. The tunnels down there were somewhat wider and more irregularly hewn - clearly the work of some resident work force. But by whom was the stone molded so coarsely? I wondered this, as the usual tunnels carved out by the merfolk were finely cut in comparison and much narrower. I trod hitherto unknown territory. A layer of caves that went even deeper than the cove above my head. And it was then that I wondered just how far down I could go. I was incredibly lucky, too, to have been covered by such an amount of armour. I might have been already dead otherwise. But there were yet more things to that place that I needed to discover.
I ventured down the path and soon came about a set of stairs cut into the solid rock. And might I say, I hadn't seen stairs ever since we left the overgrown village around the castle of the Undead King. My curiosity was set ablaze and for a moment I forgot about Nephethys and Shthelith. I needed to go down those stairs and discover what secrets lay beyond. During my descent I noticed a weak, electrical pulse run along the surface of my skin and armour. It wasn't a continuous occurrence but it happened every so often. I still didn't quite understand what this sensation wanted to tell me. What I could without a doubt tell, however, was that the temperature kept rising the further down the spiralling stairs took me.
In time, the darkness went from simply dark to oppressive. Something about the atmosphere seemed heavy and burdened. And the farther I got the stronger the electrical trickling in my skin became. Before long I felt watched but I failed to visually perceive any entities. When I came off the stairs, all I saw was a semi-large room with a chiselled pillar in the middle whereupon were engraved words in an unknown script. I slowly approached it, sliding my armoured fingers over its smooth surface, running along each individual letter in an effort to make out a hint as to what the text could have said.
Just then, the pulse that made my skin crawl spiked and behind me, a large, fleshy, red dripping, tentacled sphere, as horrifyingly disfigured as it was, appeared from the shadows.
It caught me by surprise and managed to hit me with its writhing appendages. I realised then that my armour had been compromised and blood poured out of my skin in the places where it touched me. Jumping back, I tried to mold my flesh into deadly weaponry once more but it refused to work in this instance. As if my suit of armour had run out of energy and was in need of some replenishment I had to rely on my swordsmanship to survive. So I drew the hemerite blade from its sheath and attacked. I found that I was still rather durable and quick in spite of the armour's state. Using this to my advantage, I avoided the many-teethed flesh-sac and its assaults as I elegantly cut off its tentacles one by one. It screamed in protest and opened its mouth, more akin to a pit of bones, teeth and meat than anything else, to tear me apart.
I answered with the sword and let out groans of battle as the blade sliced through its maw, burying itself deep into the body, killing it in the process. The thing fell apart completely and only the remains of a few teeth and nails hinted at its previous life as either a human or an elf. Then I perceived curious noises behind me. As I turned around, the central pillar that I had touched earlier appeared to "drink" the blood of the dead creature. The strange glyphs on it began to glow ever so faintly and, soon enough, a loud clicking noise could be heard. Something had opened.
I watched the pillar turn slowly around its own axis before it gently descended into the floor, opening up a secret passage beneath the flooring, leading down even further. I turned one last time to examine the room when in the distance, I spotted a humanoid figure, advancing slowly towards me.
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