The Seeker’s Sight indicates that the first missing aspect of the Celestial Mage maybe hiding in the ancient Dwemer settlement of Rkundzelft in eastern Craglorn. Once I find my way inside it’s heavy Dwarven metal doors I am a little startled by just how intact and untarnished everything seems to be. Of course like most of the Dwemer settlements I have delved, the still-functioning automatons work tirelessly to maintain the machinery, habitat, and each other, just as they have done so for hundreds of years.

But as I travel deeper into these subterranean corridors and caverns, ever under the watchful eyes of the Dwarven faces forged into every piece of architecture, I discover many books, diagrams, and charts lying almost invitingly open. In most other delves such knowledge has long since been looted, decayed, or destroyed. So it begs the question, Just what lies in the depths beyond that has kept the treasure hunters from pillaging the marvels and wonders of Rkundzelft?

It has always seemed remarkable to me that in the many hundreds of years since they passed from Nirn, we have not been able to replicate the mechanical knowledge of the Dwemer. Especially given all the brilliant minds in the Mages guild and their singular obsession, which perhaps rivals even that of Hermaeus Mora, in the collection of all knowledge in the form of books and scripts of antiquity.

I was a brash young man in my youth, who thought he knew something of everything, and I would regularly visit taverns across the Heartland to share obnoxiously loud opinions with other brash young men, especially once we had shared in a few tankards. It was one such evening that I recall hearing for the first time somebody postulate that if we could uncover the secrets of Dwemer industry, then it would surely render magic, and thus mages, obsolete. Now I have neither the knowledge, nor the pomposity of my youth to be making such a contention now, however. I have sometimes mused over the Mages Guild obsession with collecting all these books, tomes, and scrolls. Is it for the preservation of knowledge… or for its suppression?

As I discovered in the open ruins of Volenfell deep in the Alik’r desert, not all Dwemer automations were created equally. Some were designed far bigger and more deadly, with the sole purpose of defence; or attack?! Certainly Mzeklok, the giant Dwarvern Spider at the heart of Rkundzelft, explains why this settlement has remained unlooted for so, so long. But, albeit unwittingly and perhaps somewhat ironically, it also successfully protected a hidden aspect of the Celestial Mage.

S.K