Explorer’s Journal Pages

[Tattered, dirtied, and lost excerpts from a deceased Echmer proletariat’s personal logs about some secret expedition funded by the Council of Dull Chimes.]

####28th Cycle of the Seventh Wheel, 281st Annum of the Third Aeon (28th Sun’s Height 3E 281) Who knew that our underground caverns were so expansive and mysterious! Yneslea is compromised of eight islands, and the Dweech spans all of them. Our race has lived in these subterranean systems since our inception and yet we’ve still haven’t traverse it in full.

Annoyingly our work has been hastened by the Council due to the forceful annexation of our lands by the Tamrielic Empire, who now attempts to rule over us with an iron fist. The arrogance of these people! They must not discover the full extent of our researches down here…they might try to claim our hard work for their own. This ‘empire’ seems to be very good at that indeed.

I’ll have to stop my recollections here for the night. We’re to begin unsealing an ancient cave-in predating the arrival of the Dwemer to our lands. Imagine the discoveries!

####31st Cycle of the Seventh Wheel, 281st Annum of the Third Aeon (31st Sun’s Height 3E 281)

We’ve found something, something both exciting and disturbing that makes our superiors question the cave-in as a natural occurrence.

There are pictographs carved into moss-covered walls, very unlike the ones drawn by the Hyu-Ket and our primitive ancestors. They depict what seems to be a race of what appears to be men wearing insect-like armor, worshipping a strange scarab deity. The ruins Oexra’numsaz is built over also boasts these types of pictographs as well as the same architecture, but we never considered…

Fascinating, this is simply fascinating! Is it possible that a race of men dwelled on Yneslea before the creation of our ancestors and the arrival of the Dwemer? We never even thought of the beings being men, mostly because we didn’t know that such a thing as a ‘man’ existed until the Tamrielics came.

What makes it disturbing however is that in these pictographs the men seem to be wielding staffs topped with bat skulls. Perhaps they encountered our primal ancestors and used them as a source of nourishment? Who knows? Regardless, there seems to be evidence that there was another race living on Yneslea not only before us and the Hyu-Ket, but the Dwemer as well!

We must explore further…never know what else we might find…

####5th Cycle of the Eighth Wheel, 281st Annum of the Third Aeon (5th Last Seed 3E 281)

We made a grave mistake coming here. A very grave mistake. We’ve stumbled upon something, something ancient that shouldn’t be alive.

It was the biggest thing I ever seen, so huge that it ate five of the other workers in a single bite. Some form of insect, but the power radiating from it suggests something much more sinister. Whatever these extinct men did down here, it seemed to revolve around the worship of these creatures. Wherever it tread greenery sprouted up on the rock only to die again. Is it some form of nature spirit?

No, one of the nature spirits. It has to be. But they are all supposed to be dead. How…

Need to write this down, consolidate my thoughts so I don’t go insane. Me and one other crazed survivor is all that is left. I must return to the Council of Dull Chimes to report in our discovery…lives could be at stake here…