14th of Heartfire, 4E201
This morning, we had a nice breakfast with Roggi. He talked more about mead, and said that he missed travelling to Riften, where the best mead in Skyrim, Black-Briar mead, came from. He hadn't been there in years. When we left, I stopped to tell him goodbye and gave him a bottle of Black-Briar mead that I had been carrying around to sell someday. He stood up and gave me a hug, then ran around the inn celebrating. I  laughed and told him goodbye, and to enjoy his mead. Jenassa just shook her head, but I could see a small smile in the corner of her mouth.

We continued south from Kynesgrove, and I found a lot of alchemy ingredients growing along the way. I even found some of the "rare" jazbay grapes for Avrusa Sarethi. I found the twenty bunches that she had wanted with relative ease, and grabbed a few more to experiment with myself. I guess they were only rare if you didn't know where to look. We kept hearing a dragon roaring in the distance, and we finally saw him further south. He was west of the road, and circling around his roost. I was going to ignore him, but then I spotted the falls near Darkwater Crossing in the distance, and remembered my friends there. I couldn't leave that dragon alive and have them in danger. We took off across the volcanic tundra, weapons in hand, to defeat the dragon.

He flew to us and spewed fire down on us. Jenassa shot him with arrows until he landed, then I finished him off with my sword and my frost atronach. He set me on fire, and I jumped on top of his head, slicing at his eyes and face until he finally collapsed in death. I healed our wounds and burns, and we made our way to his roost to see if he'd had any treasure. There was another chanting wall, and a large chest.I didn't know why such a large dragon needed a chest that would have been too small for him, but I doubted that I would ever find out. In the chest was a coinpurse of septims, a scroll, an Imperial helmet, and an elven greatsword. It was too heavy for either of us to carry without difficulty, so we left it there for an adventurer to find. I left the helmet too, it was dirty and grimy, and you could buy an Imperial helmet in almost every town in Skyrim. We climbed back down from the dragon's roost, and hurried back to the road.

At last, we made it. We'd seen what looked like Dwemer stonework from the road, so we followed a footpath up the hill and found the ruins.  According to where we were and the mark on Jenassa's map, this seemed to be the right place. We readied our weapons just in case and went inside. Just inside the door we found a wounded mage mumbling something about a crystal being gone. Jenassa looked around for trouble and I sheathed my sword and hurried over to him to help him. He bled to death before I could help him. Before he died, he said something about finding someone in something called an Oculory. He was clutching a book in his hand, so I gently closed his eyes and took it to figure out what had happened. Apparently the Council of the Synod had sent them here with a crystal of some sort  to do something, but something had gone wrong. I kept his book, and tried to open the door near him, but it was locked. I apologized to him and searched through his pockets for a key. Thankfully he had one. I used it to open the door and pocketed it in case we'd need it later. We walked quietly, heading further inside with our weapons ready in case of trouble.
Not too far from the door we spotted a dead mage in a hallway, and were nearly killed ourselves when spikes suddenly came down from the ceiling. There hadn't been a tripwire or anything. Thankfully they didn't go far enough to kill us if we flattened our bodies against the floor. We waited on them to stop trying to impale us,then got up and hurried over near the mage and out of the way. There was blood everywhere. He didn't have any sort of journal or research log with him, but he did have a magicka potion. He wouldn't be needed it anymore, so I carefully put it into my bag. Not far from the dead mage, we were attacked by metal spiders! How were these machines still working? The halls were filled with gears and pipes, all making noise and turning away. The Dwemer had vanished ages ago, yet all of this still worked without them. It was enough to nearly make my head spin. The spiders had soul gems in them also. One had fallen out when Jenassa broke it nearly in half attacking it. If we made it out of here alive, we'd have plenty of septims after we sold these gems.

We also found some moonstone ore veins. I remembered moonstone being expensive at the blacksmith shops, so I mined as much as I could. Jenassa was getting a little nervous as I mined, because we kept hearing an odd clicking sound. We soon found out what it was. It was a giant insect of some sort, and it was nearly the size of a small pony! I summoned a frost atronach to block it from getting closer to us, and we aimed around it to shoot at the creature. We found two more mages in the area that it was in, dead with their faces splattered with some sort of greenish liquid. They'd been torn up and partially eaten as well. Near one of them, we found two bedrolls. There was also a table near the platform that the bedrolls were on, as well as some food that was beginning to spoil. Another moonstone ore vein was near the table, so I quickly mined  the ore before any more of those things came. Further along, we found two more of them, but they were thankfully smaller and a little easier to kill. They spit some sort of poison at us, but thankfully missed. It smelled foul as it flew past my head. More machines attacked us in the next area. They were about our size, and seemed to be half man and half sphere. They also moved very fast. I wished that we could find a lever somewhere that would turn them all off. I didn't like things coming out of walls to attack me. We were both getting hungry, so we found some shadows to hide in and quickly healed our scrapes and bruises and had something to eat. I summoned an atronach to guard us. Further into the ruin, we found more traps and machines trying to kill us. I discovered that my frost atronach seemed to last longer against the metal beasts, so I decided to summon him from now on.

Through a door and down a hallway, we found a few dead machines and a dead creature that I'd never seen before. It looked like an elf, but it was eyeless and nearly nose less, and had sharp teeth and claws. It was wearing rags, and had weapons and armor plates, made from a material that looked like the shells of the insects we'd seen. We found another dead one and more dead machines further down the hall. They looked like Altmer that had been cursed to become monsters. I hoped that we would only find dead ones.

In the next area, we found more dead machines, but I saw one of the cursed Altmer creatures skulking around between the shadows. We crept closer and stayed still in the shadows, and he walked right past us, wheezing heavily. I summoned my bound bow and killed him from the darkness. We also found another
dead mage, seemingly throttled to death by the creature.

Hours later, after trekking through miles and miles of creature and bug infested tunnels, we finally made it back into what seemed to be the Dwemer ruin again. We'd found a few more mages in the tunnels, probably dragged there by the creatures. Just inside the ruin, we found a locked room that the creatures hadn't managed to get into. I picked the lock, and we shut the door behind us and looked for something to block the door with. All of the furniture was carved stone, but I did find a key on a table that fit the lock in the door. We locked ourselves in. It was a small room, with a table, a chair, and a stone bed with a long dead skeleton on it. There was also a chest on the table with a beautiful emerald ring in it. We pushed the skeleton off of the bed and made a mattress of sorts with some of our clothes. We ate some dinner and studied the room. Most of the room was chilly, but it was warm near the bed thanks to some steam coming out of a few spinning gears in the floor. I put some fire runes near the door in case anything managed to get in, and we huddled together in the small bed. We'd been through the closest thing to hell that we could imagine, and we were nowhere near out of it yet. I wondered if we'd ever get to see the sun again.