The Secret of the Stone of Snow-Throat: A C0da

I came up with this a few days ago when thinking about making a personal mod for Skyrim. I don't know a whole lot about Snow-Throat other than what the UESP says and that bit from MK about it's stone being a cavern, and that it may be the place where men were born or something, but I thought I'd share what I came up with to see if it jives with the lore, because the lore in the mod I made for myself for Oblivion, while quite well written, was wildly inaccurate.

Numanoncluarium Excavation - Throat of the World, Skyrim

4E192

Demnevanni Dres, Project Chief

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Eight hundred feet of sedimentary rock, a 20-foot thick barrier of a kind of poured stone, six puzzle-locked vault-grade gates, a small army of mechanical Spheres and a caved-in entryway was what kept the staggeringly ancient Dwemer ruin of Numanoncularium from the outside world for several millennia. After a decade of throwing mountains of gold at this excavation project, I've managed to thwart the ancestral minds that chose to seal this place away and expose it to new air, and, to tell the truth, I'm not at all glad that I did.

I came to the Numanoncluarium ruins on Calcelmo's rather passionate suggestion. I originally thought he was just being alliterative with the translation he gave me of the Dwemer text I happened to find in a book on these ruins at the College in Winterhold, but he insisted, with no shortage of indignation and professional pride, that his translation was "one hundred percent" accurate and true to the original text.

It read: "The Sacred Senses Sorrow in its Sojourn toward the Serpent Sorcerer's Sacrifice. The Secrets of Subgradience Sit with the Stone of Snow-Throat"

I knew little of what "subgradience" meant, but Calcelmo waxed academic on the mythic importance of this “Stone of Snow-Throat,” rambling on about Towers and cosmic power or some such nonsense, and implored me to follow up with this lead for the sake of discovery.

Cosmic power indeed. I could have done without that.

Excavation was ordinary enough, if not exceptionally arduous. Judging from the fairly rudimentary architecture and conspicuous lack of machinery, the Dwemer must have built this little laboratory long before they became masters of mechanical magic. It was after the final blockage was cleared though when the real fun began. I had always thought I'd most definitely find some interesting trinkets and maybe a few more tablets of writing in the Numanoncluarium ruins.

But I didn't count on the Plant being there.

It turns out the ruins are a fairly small, if not immensely interesting, part of the larger structures nestled rather nicely in the bowels of this impossibly huge geographic oddity the Nords call the Throat of the World. Visitors might be forgiven for mistaking the Plant's facilities for Dwemer make, given the ubiquitous pulsating machinery, but these gears and gadgets are most certainly not of Dwemer origin -- no mortal would have been able to craft what I’d found in those depths. It would have taken a divine level of sadistic insanity to design this place.

The Dwemer called it the Plant, if I'm reading Calcelmo's handwriting correctly. It is indeed a Plant, from the look of it, and the Dwemer say it must have been originally used to manufacture "components and parts" for something called the "Mechanism," terms that are a lot more innocent that what I believe this facility deserves. They managed to make a smaller version of it in the Numanoncluarium laboratories, and it appears to produce a rather primitive design of animunculus, the remains of which no longer work. I don't believe the constructs themselves were meant for anything more than experiment, or proof of concept perhaps, which means the large swaths of dried blood near the components intake receptacles for the Dwemer's Plant facsimile must have come about not through accident but in a more, shall I say, planned manner.

The Plant itself is not only labyrinthian but gargantuan, eight times the size of what we would expect regular mortals to construct. Gears the size of castles churn somewhat slowly and fretfully in this impossible place — no one, not even the oh-so-haughty Altmer could have built, let alone conceived of, such a mechanical monstrosity. Whole sections seemed attached to the very stone surrounding them, and off in the distance chunks of earth the size of small mountains were being slowly carried off to unknown destinations for unknown purposes. The design itself defied even a basic understanding of mechanics – connected gears turning in opposite directions, lifts rising with heavy loads under the power of absolutely nothing, lattices of axles as thick as Graht-oak trunks that appear straight as arrow shafts but weave between components as if space itself was being warped. And all the while, a constant hissing sound originating in the deepest recesses of the facility wails with unfortunate similarity to a woman's cry.

Lost as I am to the technical functioning of these devices, I'm sure a Dwemer, spending all her days wandering the walkways and access shafts of the facility might have gleaned some higher knowledge from its working. Imagine that, a primitive Dwemer culture in Skyrim discovering this horrible place, building up a base of operations on top of it and learning their special mechanical art simply by watching the endlessly pumping pistons and massive, constantly grinding cogs of the Plant. No doubt they were clever enough to divine its function. No doubt that discovery contributed in some way to their nihilistic philosophy. It's not hard to see why, not after you've seen the Core.

A cavernous space, bigger than the biggest vaults of Blackreach. The space is walled by a single, circular tank filled with a glowing blue fluid, which I refrained from studying further, which gives the few feet in front of the tank a ghostly light while the rest of the chamber remains bathed in darkness, except for the Interface.

A table larger than Dragonsreach dominates the chamber's middle area, lit from above with an intense, icy white light, and on top there appear to be straps the leather for which no extant cow could hope to match in size. It is overhung with several uncomfortably sharp, needle-like devices suspended upon hooks and clear tubes containing that same eerie glowing fluid in the tank. The largest of the hanging instruments is a claw device, dangling on several chains attached to a complex pulley system that must have been able to apply considerable amounts of pull upon whatever that claw was hooked on. This grisly surgery table clearly wasn't meant for any mortal.

The floor was nothing more than a large grating, with openings here and there near the table with trap doors still flung wide. Most of the space was thankfully cloaked in shadow, but, from what I could tell from that icy light, in piles beneath the table lay debris and fragments from what I assume to be failed "products" but twisted into the unnerving, uncanny shape of bones. The area, the table, the instruments, in particular the claw that still slowly swayed casting angular shadows in the pool of light, is splattered with a dark, long-dried film I might have said was probably oil originating from the machinery if I hadn't absolutely convinced myself already it was actually blood.

And there, rising on the other side of that gigantic giant's table, drenched in that black residue, cold and colossal, was an open receptacle, the depths of which no light in the room managed to plumb, and from which it seemed that unnerving wailing sound was coming. Down into the mechanical depths that receptacle went, carrying whatever was put inside it into a never-ending cacophony of colossal machinery, machinery that seems to be turning the heart of Nirn itself.

It is here I find myself writing in this journal, sitting up against this mesmerizingly blue tank and watching those instruments above the Interface sway with the still churning force of the facility's gears. It is here I listen to the constant wailing of this horrible place. It is here I begin to think.

This place is too big, too impossible. This place was not meant for mortal use, and yet it sits beneath the very place these Nords believe they were breathed into life upon this world, buried beneath an impossibly tall pile of rock, rock that no tectonic fissure or magma chamber could have supplied, rock that thankfully quiets that breathy agonizing wail that never stops. This machinery, it's everywhere, cranking and moving the very earth we stand upon. I don't believe it is much of a leap to say it. I think I have stumbled upon the very foundation of the world.

The Dwemer believed this place was meant to manufacture the "components and parts" needed for the "Mechanism." I wonder what was used to make those parts?

Like any Dunmer scholar worth his flin, I know my Monomyth, I know what the High Elves think of Lorkhan and the fate of the Aedra. They became Earth Bones, Ehlnofey, the comatose planetary bodies orbiting the Starry Heart. They sacrificed their essence to create the Arena. They built this world with their own selves.

It seems I've seen its inner workings, and it makes me feel ill.

I was never particularly religious, so I never really questioned the narrative that us mortals were tricked out of our former divinities by the Trickster, as it never seemed to matter much to me. The weight of such a philosophical conundrum isn't easily felt until you come face to face with its consequences, and facing those consequences doesn't happen in such a profound way as when you stand in the place where it actually happened.

Isn't that the Secret? Buried beneath a lonely impossible mountain is a secret place where the guts of the world sprout up to change the Sacred into the Profane, to use these cruel tools and instruments to forcibly remove divinity so it could be used for spare parts. I wonder if it's Designer knew the horror this machine would visit upon its victims? Did he experience it himself, or did he run like a coward?

That is why I feel ill. Some part of me I think remembers being on that table, millennia ago, confused and scared. Maybe not. This IS where we lost ourselves, where we lost what made us divine, lost to this cold and merciless place. Is that what it took to Create? This pile of bones beneath the floor, is this the Sacrifice needed to make the Trickster's folly?

In the depths of Nirn, faced with my own mortality's origin, I find myself somewhat sympathizing with the Dwemer. If this is how the world had to be built, then I don't think I want to have any part in it anymore.