Prepare Yourself!

            (4E-199 4th of Sun's Dusk)

      It had only taken Galeron and his Atronachs a day and a half to clear a path to Saarthal's doors. The rubble burying the Nordic ruins wasn't nearly as firm as the ground between Crystaldrift and the crypt and it gave way fairly easily.

     Stepping up to the doors, he pushed them open and felt the crisp mountain air rush past him, as he took a step into the dark and dusty tomb. Turning around, he conjured a massive and highly explosive fireball spell and then shot it forward, at the highest point he could aim for directly across from Saarthal's entrance. 

     The fireball streaked across the distance in a little over a second and caused a frighteningly large explosion and subsequently an even larger avalanche. Immediately upon witnessing the start of the avalanche, Galeron slammed the doors shut and sealed them together with a Fusion Spell. He had created that spell as a derivative of the Transmutation Spell in order to assist in his magical blacksmithing but he was certainly happy to see that its applications clearly extended far beyond that.

     Galeron took a deep breath, once he was locked inside, listening to the muffled sounds of the chaos ensuing right outside the door. The air inside the crypt was stale and musty. The scent of preservatives and alchemical reagents, presumably used in the creation of the Draugrs, hung heavy in the air despite no Draugrs being visible, at the moment.

     Galeron began walking along the cave-like tunnel and ended up inside of a large cavernous room, with several pillars that supported thin bridges that connected the balconies of the upper floor.

     After banishing a couple of his Atronatchs and summoning a few Dremora, Galeron made his way through Saarthal's various chambers looking for a particular necklace.

     Nearly an hour of searching later, he came across a strange section of wall with an indentation. Using his knowledge from his time playing the game, he was able to recognize a couple of key locations and arrived here at this wall, with a necklace resting inside of it's indentation. The necklace had a rectangular talisman hanging from it and two tooth-like adornments, on either side of that rectangle.

     Of all the things that Galeron remembered about this place from the game, this amulet was the thing that worried him the most. He wasn't sure what putting on this amulet would cause to happen but he was certain that the Dragborn had met with the Psijic Order shortly afterwards. 

     'If I put it on now, will the Psijic Order be able to see me? Perhaps, they can already see me and are watching me even now? I would just put it on an undead or an atronach but, if they are already watching, wouldn't that make them suspicious? After all, it's not hard to determine the effect of the necklace. There's no need to do such a thing, unless I was trying to avoid any hidden effects the necklace might have. 

     'If they can already see me, are they just sitting around watching me all the time? How can I possibly escape their detection, if I don't even know the extent of their scrying abilities? Dammit! These Psijic Assholes are a real pain in the ass! They claim to be non interventionist yet they also contacted the Dragonborn and even spoke of passing judgment, should his actions not be deemed acceptable.

     'While the Eye of Magnus may have been their excuse for interfering, the whole passing judgment deal seems a bit arbitrary. Who are they to judge and why would they seek to do so? If they see my actions, my experiments, my plans, how would they judge me? Would they send someone to try and stop me, if they knew what I was up to?

     'As much as I'd rather avoid putting on that amulet, it may be the only way to get through this wall. Of course, if it isn't necessary, why risk it? Let's see, if I can't find a work around?'

     After carefully considering the consequences of his actions, Galeron quickly decided that he couldn't avoid taking some level of risk, if he wanted to get past this wall. Relying on his Mysticism, he reached out with his magicka and began carving out a man sized mailbox slot near the bottom of the wall. He accomplished this by disconnecting that section from the rest of the wall at a molecular level.

     With the slot now open and the cutout section set aside, he used levitation on himself, turned himself so that he was face down with his head pointed at the slot, and then carefully maneuvered himself through the slot, until he was comfortably on the other side. Once on the other side, he retrieved and replaced the cutout section, once again utilizing his Fusion Spell.

     With the amulet and whatever trap the Psijic's had set up, seemingly, having been avoided, he continued forward through the halls of Saarthal. He soon arrived in front of a roundish room with several black nordic sarcophagi placed vertically against the walls.

     Stopping just before reaching this room, Galeron took a moment to consider his path forward. He knew that this was the room where Quaranir would make his appearance in the original timeline and, despite having snuck past the amulet, he was still hesitant to go anywhere that he suspected the Psijic's fingerprints might've been left behind.

     Knowing, also,that this room would most likely initiate his first encounter with the Draugr, he sent two of his Dremora and two Flame Atronachs into the room, while he retreated a safe distance away. He had no way of knowing how far any potential Psijic traps might reach and he wasn't about to take any chances.

     Once he was in position, he gave the order for the four summons he had designated to enter and for the others to wait at the room's entrance. As he had expected, the Draugr didn't have any particular 'protagonist affinity,' cutscene trigger, or any other such nonsense. 

     Instead of waiting for him personally to enter the room, all three of those sarcophagi immediately burst open, releasing the Draugr within, as soon as the fist of his summons had crossed the room's threshold.

     As soon as he witnessed the central Sarcophagus' door falling over, he instructed his other four summons, two pairs of Flame and Frost Atronachs, to go to each side of the room to hold off the other two Drauger.

     His central team focused exclusively on the central Draugr and, despite clearly outnumbering it, the undead managed to hold on much longer than Galeron would have expected. However, it was eventually burnt to a sliced up crisp, under the combined power of his Atronachs and Dremora.

     Once the central Draugr went down the central team split off to the sides to assist the other four with their respective Drauger. Using this highly effective strategy, the three Draugr eventually laid re-dead at their feet.

     Orthe, who he had named as his sort of Dremora Commander, received the report of the other Dremora, who had searched the room and scouted a short ways into the hall beyond the central Sarcophagus. He then returned to Galeron and informed him that no Psijic projections or other such magics had been detected.

     Feeling a bit more at ease, Galeron gathered Orthe and his other three Dremora around him. He commanded one pair of Fire and Frost Atronachs to walk in front of him and his Dremora bodyguards and another pair to walk behind them.

     Saarthal, like every other place in this world Galeron had visited, was  considerably larger than its in-game counterpart. As such, Galeron and his Deadra Squad continued killing their way through the Draugr infested halls of Saarthal for nearly three more hours, before Galeron recognized a particular room ahead of them.

     This was the final gate and the final puzzle, before they would enter Joryk Gulderson's Interment Chamber. The 'puzzle' he wasn't too concerned with, since it was absolutely simplistic and apparently was only placed there to ensure that those entering are sentient mortals. That was, at least, what he had heard regarding the claw key doors and these animal puzzles, although he wasn't entirely sure whether he bought that particular explanation.

     Regardless, they were now on the last leg of their journey to the heart of Saarthal and he didn't plan on rushing into what would absolutely be the hardest battle he's fought so far.

     The reason Galeron had caused the avalanche immediately after entering Saarthal, was to ensure that anyone, who might have been trying to follow him or perhaps just had a similar idea, would inevitably require quite a bit of time and effort to get to him.

     He had needed to get here as soon as possible, to ensure that he was the first, and, now that the other Draugr had been dealt with, he needed time to prepare for his inevitable battle with the final one.

     Returning to a large circular room, which had several vertical Sarcophagi lining the walls, a pool of water in the  middle, and a bridge running over that pool, he posted his summons up in strategic positions and sat down to rest  and recharge his magicka.

----------

         (4E-199 16th of Sun's Dusk)

     Galeron had spent nearly two weeks inside that chamber inside Saarthal. Every day he had sent a Dremora to check on the ruins entrance to make sure there were no disturbances there.

     Luckily, the ruin's entrance had remained relatively undisturbed and he was allowed to practice his new and improved conjuration skills uninterrupted.

     During this time of practice, Galeron had attempted to imbue his Flame Atronachs with his own high quality flames.

     He was already aware that those Atronachs came from a plane of Oblivion made entirely out of molten magma flows. However, the flames of that plane were balanced in all aspects of Fire and the flames that constituted the Atronachs themselves, he could clearly tell they were inferior to his own flames at least in terms of temperature.

     After having integrated the Daedric Rune for Fire into his magicka core, he felt as though his flames had reached a kind of apex and were not likely to become any more powerful. The hottest burning flame he could currently produce was very nearly crimson in color and could even turn a metal like Ebony into magma. Thus, he was always a bit disappointed to see his very own Flame Atronachs using such low intensity flames.

     With these thoughts in mind, Galeron had started by simply trying to force his own elemental magicka into the Atronachs but this proved to be futile. After going through several dozen destroyed Atronachs, he had finally landed on the solution.

     Galeron used, yet another, one of his handy dandy Mysticism spells to analyze the make-up of the Flame Atronach's solid parts and then recreated that material. With this critical ingredient in hand, he then went back to his original Flame Font Runic Trap Enchantment. Once the material was properly inscribed, he then summoned a Flame Atronatch and fused it with the solid bits of its exoskeleton.

     The Atronach, surprisingly, was able to accept both the fusion and the enchantment. However, the high intensity flames mostly congregated near the Atronachs center, while bits and pieces would mix in with its other flames, thus creating a slightly hotter overall Flame Atronach.

     This was certainly not what Galeron was looking for and so he eventually came up with another idea. 'The Atronach can't directly accept my magicka, elemental or otherwise, but it can accept the enchanted brimstone. So, what if I were to Transmute the enchanted brimstone and the Atronach into an entirely different type of Atronach.

     'Is such a thing even possible? If it works, will it still be bound to me?'

     As Galeron soon discovered, the answer to his first question was, Yes. The Atronach was successfully Transmuted. However, as to the second question, the answer was clearly, No. He had to spend about a half hour running around trying to rebind the Atronach but he eventually succeeded. Thus was born his first ever Smelting Atronach.

     After his success in upgrading his Flame Atronachs potency, not only did he 

upgrade his Frost and Storm Atronachs, Sub Zero and Voltaic respectively, he also had yet another flash of inspiration. One he was thoroughly disappointed in himself for not having had sooner. So much so that he had wanted to kick himself and so he did so repeatedly.

     When he had first begun learning about Conjuration, he had started off with the same simple spells that most people started with. The Conjure Familiar spell.

     At the time, he had quickly brushed past this spell as he found it entirely too cumbersome, for such a weak effect. Now however, he was beginning to suspect that he had made a grievous error, in neglecting a thorough investigation of this low level spell.

     Despite its low level and its seemingly disappointing effects, Galeron was beginning to suspect that the reason why his last experiment was a success was due to the soul he had placed into the enchantment and not just the enchantment itself. Unlike other Conjuration spells, the Conjure Familiar spell was actually the creation of a type of pseudo-soul, via energies conjured from Atherius.

     These energies would only take on their animalistic nature, if the caster had a sufficiently deep understanding of an animal to transfer into those energies. Without that sufficient level of understanding, those summoned energies would simply disperse into the ambient magicka of Mundus.

     Although Galeron was tempted by these new revelations, he still had a fight to prepare for and so he spent several days, after his breakthrough, forming the Daedric Rune for Oblivion in his magicka core.

     Having just recently increased his natural summoning limit to five and his augmented summoning limit to ten, he felt that he was now ready to take on Jyric Gauldurson and claim the artifact he had been so desperately longing for. However, he soon remembered that actually recovering the artifact would be much more problematic than simply defeating a centuries old Draugr.

     Thus, Galeron went around collecting various sized rocks and began his experiments, once again.

     One of the many magics that seemed to be nearly ubiquitous in ESO but hardly used at all in Skyrim, was Portal Magic. This particular trick could open up magical pathways from one location to another, allowing for almost instantaneous travel across vast differences. This particular application of magic was one of the many reasons he'd focused so intently on studying Mysticism.

     He knew it would not only make the learning and practice of other schools of magic that much easier, it would also allow him to rediscover the long lost art of "Tahdah! It's a portal!"

     Unlike the other tasks he sought to accomplish with Mysticism, he knew the least about the various aspects of reality he was attempting to manipulate in regards to portals. He knew that space was some kind of fabricky spacey wacey stuff but that wasn't really all that helpful. He also couldn't be sure how much, if any, a role time played in the understanding of space in this Universe.

    He wasn't entirely sure how anyone in this Universe ever managed to create a portal at all given their lack of scientific understanding but then this was magic and it's not like it was entirely logical to begin with. It may demonstrate some logical tendencies but it was ultimately the subversion of logic and rationality.

     The practice of many forms of magic was often paradoxical in that way.

     After several more days of experiments, attempting to teleport small rocks from here to there and then increasing the size of the rock and the distance being teleported whenever he had succeeded, he finally reached a level of proficiency he felt would suffice for the task at hand.

     'Alright! I've got my ten total summons, upgraded Atronachs, and I can teleport head sized rocks across nearly a hundred meters! I suppose I'm as ready as I'll ever be. If anything goes wrong it should be on the matter of a successful ex-fill, in which case, I should be able to hunker down here for a bit longer, until I'm strong enough. Alright, Jyric Gauldurson, get ready to re-die and have your sweet juicy artifact hijacked! It will be mines!'