"To think this was hidden here this entire time. How many people have walked past it without knowing what lay mere feet from them I wonder?" Alontar said with a quiet sort of awe.
"Countless no doubt. The Dwarves vanished in the first era just before the Dunmer were cursed into their current form by Azura. With no one left to know this was here and to know how to open the way we may in fact be the first people in all four eras to step foot within it. Be careful of the structure though. The Dwemer might have built their stuff strong enough to last until today but geology will have taken it's toll on the place without active maintenance." I warn as I push the great metal doors open releasing a gust of dusty stale air that had likely been trapped within since the first era.
"You expect to find areas collapsed?" he asked warily as he peered into the dim passage forward.
"I do. There's also a nonzero chance of a collapse occurring while we are inside from us tripping a trap or simple bad timing for our visit. Should that happen cling to me immediately if you can. Between my innate durability and magic I should be able to preserve our lives. Key word being "should" in that sentence." I say absolutely seriously.
"Is there any way to prevent a collapse?" he asked with a shudder at the mental image.
"Yes and no. I will be lessening the chance of one by reinforcing the walls and ceilings with magic as we get deeper but if a trap or distant point causes a collapse we could still get caught in it. Additionally I will only be reinforcing the ceiling and walls of the area we are in. If a collapse comes from below us we will get pulled down with it. That sort of collapse though I can definitely keep us alive in. Falling is far easier to counter than a literal mountain of rock falling on us." I say honestly.
"Wouldn't reinforcing the walls and ceilings burn out your magicka rapidly?" he asked with a frown.
"Not exactly. The work i'll be doing is minor in scale. Mending cracks, pressure deformations, and material dissolutions. Things that are incredibly small in nature but when compounded across entire ceilings and walls cause serious structural weakness. I'll certainly be spending a good amount of magicka to deal with them on such a scale but if we pace ourselves my innate regeneration will just barely outpace the cost. It also helps that i've got a magicka pool so massive it matches most mages on their fifth darkening." I say frankly.
"Of course you do. Why am I not surprised?" he said relieved while simultaneously once again questioning how anyone is supposed to compare to my absurdity.
With that understood we finally stepped into this long empty ruin and began our eyes adjustment to the dim light.
The first thing I noticed was the structure of the hallway that presented itself. It was almost perfectly rectangular in shape going down at an incline like someone had taken a square shaped object and pushed it through the stone creating this passage. Only through careful observation would you notice that the corners were rounded slightly making the place almost like a tube. The walls had thin artistically placed clean lines of the metal the Dwemer just seemed to have an overabundance of for some inexplicable reason. Not deeply placed but both aesthetically pleasing and just as equally reinforcing.-
I lightly channeled [shape stone] through my feet as we walked in and the tonal magic in the metal rib style lamps overhead detected living frequencies and activated to illuminate the way forward. As I had expected the stones had many small flaws caused by time that weren't expensive to fix but the sheer amount of them had us walking at a slow pace forward. A good maybe fifteen meters in on this path brought us to the first rooms of the ruins. A set of double doors on either side of this hallway.-
We moved to the first on the right side and pushed it open easily as it wasn't locked. It could have been as a lock did exist on the door. But I guess the Dwemer who lived here didn't do it before they and all of their race went poof and vanished. A case that was eerie but quite common in Dwemer ruins according to adventurers. Clearly the Dwemer simply didn't have time to lock up more than coincidentally before going poof. This was also why the Dwemer Animunculi(the robots) were doing whatever they had been tasked to before the vanishing even thousands of years later.-
The room inside was dusty but otherwise almost perfectly intact. It was a simple furnished place with a single stone bed with ancient fabric scrap that would crumble to dust if touched. A metal chest at the beds foot and a stone workbench with tools and raw material scattered across it. On the opposite side was a round dinning table with a singe carved stone chair that was pulled out at just a length that adding the heavier dust on the plate and clearly fallen metal silverware it was obvious the owner of this room vanished midmeal.
"If there was ever solid evidence that their disappearance wasn't a planned thing this is pretty much as solid as it gets. Imagine it if you will. A Dwemer man or woman was sitting right in this seat eating a meal and then just wasn't. Silverware clattered onto the plate and the food just decayed into powder over time until we opened that door and walked in." I say and he seems solemn.
"Perhaps they were just taking a break on some personal problem when it happened. Makes you wonder how many innocent uninvolved people got dragged into whatever caused it." he said quietly.