The Dwemeri Soul-Meld Machine

You find a notebook lying on one of the tables inside the depths of Bthandchend. You nearly died to dwemeri animunculi, so you hope that the trip was worth it. As you blow some dust away, the pages on the book tear and you try to preserve the book as best as you can. There are a lot of diagrams of different animunculi, and some kind of device, vaguely resembling a triangular shape. After going back to the surface, you travel to Markarth, where you give the notebook to Calcelmo. Calcelmo glances over the book, and offers 500 gold. You gladly accept. Calcelmo goes into his study, and looks over the book. It is bound in some sort of leather, of unknown origin, although later inquiries would suggest that it is similar to Tsaesci skin recovered from the 2nd era. It has a border made from Dwemer Metal and the symbol of the Tonal Architects stamped on it, and although barely visible, it is very similar to another symbol inside the Tower of Mzark. Calcelmo grabs a roll of paper and his pen, and begins translating the notebook.

I have yet to encounter a willing candidate for the experiment, and I will not revert to using Falmer until necessary. I will try one of the poorer kin. I hope they will accept a smaller amount, I barely have enough money to support my experiments nowadays, and I don’t have the resources to bribe people.

Someone accepted! They should be here any minute now. I’m just preparing the equipment. I hope this works so I can finally begin producing these all across this continent. If this does work, I will at least know that I tried to convince Kagrenac against using the heart. It was bound to be our undoing ever since he permanently attuned it to Dwemeri souls. What I’m doing will at least preserve our race, and although we won’t be in our true forms, we will still prevail.

I can’t believe that it actually worked! I thought skeever souls would be too weak, but apparently they are just the right ones! The sphere seems to be sentient, and I don’t think it will be communicating anytime soon, so I’m just going to have to go on theories. I need just a bit more time, and then I can present it to the other Architects.

Damn Kagrenac! His Nu-Midium will wipe out our race; he and all the other architects have all been blinded by the Heart! But not me, I’ll keep working on this, even if it has to stay secret. I’ll still have to organize a team though, I can’t build these on my own, and Kagrenac took my previous team. I hear [Skyrim?] is where most jobless people go, maybe I’ll try there.

I didn’t realize how perfect Skyrim is for my experiment! Snow-Throat is the tallest mountain in the world, and I think I can get permission from the monks there to get through. Even if they don’t allow it, I will still go. I don’t know how many Dwemer will be affected, but standing about 10 meters away should meld the closest Dwemer automatically to the machine. Not all of the machines will be attuned for the more powerful Dwemeri souls, but if my calculations are correct, I’m going to have to attune the Central Tonal Broadcaster to the signal of the heart, so that when Kagrenac finishes Nu-Midium and places the heart within, I might have enough power to do this.

The monks didn’t let me get to the top of the mountains, which was expected, but even attempts to climb up myself have proven futile as there seemed to be some kind of force pushing me back. I didn’t try to resist as I was afraid of dropping precious equipment. I have set up base lower down the mountain, which still should work, but unfortunately not on all the Dwemer. It would seem that only the Dwemer in [Skyrim?] And [Morrowind?] will be affected by the machine. It will have to do.

Me and my team have set all of the equipment up all around the affected areas, now all I have to do I get close enough to the Heart to attune the power rod to it. It shouldn’t be too hard since Kagrenac still trusts me, but we’ll see. For now we wait here in the cold of the mountains. One of my team, an apprentice Dwemer engineer, should be getting here by now with 6 Dwemer animunculi for each of us.

Attuning the power rod to the heart was easier than expected. Kagrenac wanted my “Expertise” for some kind of problem that he had, but I said I was busy. I suspect that it was some kind of trap, but if it was, Kagrenac wasn’t too insisting. I’ll have to hurry back though, Numidium looks almost completed, and I still have a lot of preparation to do now that I have the power rod attuned.

Well, it seems that we will have to delay, there are some problems with the local Chimer, and Activation Day has been postponed. We will prepare everything just in case it was a trick, but I highly doubt it. Kagrenac isn’t one for not publically sharing his accomplishments.

This is the most inconvenient time for a full on war to start. It’s an absolute nightmare. It looks like it is going to last for a long time, so I told my team that I give them a holiday of sorts, and if anything interesting came up, I would contact them immediately. I don’t know if it will be possible to contact them in time. You never know when Kagrenac might activate the Nu-Midium.

30 years have passed, and there is still nothing, I don’t think I could find any of my team if I wanted; they probably died in this damned war. I don’t even know if Kagrenac is still alive. But I will stay here until the day I die. I have already preset everything that my team was supposed to do, so now all I have to do is wait for the power rod to activate and I just have to press the lever. I don’t ---

The writing cuts off here, it is hard to imagine how the notebook ended up inside Bthandchend, but later inquiries proved that there was indeed a cave opening inside Snow-Throat, however no equipment was found there. Calcelmo was still intrigued by this and reported it to the Dwemerologist guild in Cyrodiil, which gave him the resources to study the topic more.