Fated Fortune

Yellow lantern light helps dispel the inky veil of darkness. The cave opening gives way to sharp, spiked architecture. The stone is old, carved at odd unnatural angles and engraved with long wriggling lines of a barely decipherable script - ancient and dying. Archways that long since held doors stand crooked and dark like gaping maws. A sense of foreboding takes root in his chest. It takes him a moment to realise why.

"These ruins are daedric." The man breathes, voice barely above a whisper. "We should leave."

If one wanted to split hairs they were a warrior, a mage and a thief. However, here they all wear the mantle of dungeon delvers. Their leader, the sorceress, raises a claw and the party of three stagger to a halt like a disjointed caterpillar. The khajiit turns on her heel, feline eyes narrowing into slits. The breton withers under her gaze, his brow beaded with sweat.

"I- I just want us to be safe." He says after a particularly wet swallow.

"This line of work isn't safe."

"As safe as we can be. We don't need to take unnecessary risks."

"How heavy is your coin purse?" She lets the question hang in the air. The thief lowers his gaze to the floor. The warrior gives him a playful punch on the shoulder as if this alleviates things; by contrast the bosmer is raring to go.

The sorceress' voice softens an inch. "Quentin, we are not amateurs, nor do we have any other options. Keep your wits about you and tell me what you see. We have our first obstacle."

She gestures ahead and Quentin sparks a night eye spell to match her acute vision. Magicka pools around his eyes, bathing his vision in a uniform ultraviolet. He scans the room in sequence: floor, walls, ceiling. The cobblestones that make up the floor ahead are incongruous with the rest - marked with unfamiliar shapes too. Some have fallen away revealing dark and murky depths. There is the faint lap of water, but nothing further to suggest its true depth. The walls are marked with their own similar runes - none recognisable. The ceiling is ornate, covered in deep green swirls, but most importantly not obscuring anything.

"A tile puzzle. Or a variation of it." He takes a moment to collect his thoughts. "I assume you have to step on the right symbols - the safe ones - or you fall. But, I don't recognise any of these." The thief backs off, throwing a gesture in the direction of the trap - opening the floor for a discussion. Metaphorically, he hopes, so as to avoid doing so physically to their own peril.

Parwinel, the warrior, muscles past her fellows with ease despite being a head smaller than everyone else. She drops into a crouch, extending her lantern as far as she can. "Cor! This trap is no small potatoes. Not that I recognise any of it - not my area - but usually you just have to look for the symbol that repeats and that's the safe part, right?"

"Yes, but this one thinks that is a lazy trap design. An infant could do it." Chiara folds her arms, tail bristling with annoyance as she looks between the floor and walls, trying to make some connection.

The bosmer flashes her teeth into a grin. "You have no idea what the solution is, do ya? You're being real quiet right now."

"Give this one time. I am thinking." The sorceress huffs.

"Quentin, you think we cheese it? She's gonna be pondering a while."

The trio gather at the threshold and observe the architecture.

"Ceiling's too high to anchor anything. No walls we can skirt along," the thief sucks on his teeth, "I could try improvising something."

Chiara gets out a roll of parchment and starts scrawling down her ideas in chicken scratch, tutting to herself intermittently. Quentin and Parwinel hammer metal spikes into the wall to create a thin platform. Extremely perilous but they don't have a lot of options. Eventually the sorceress looks up to see the warrior hefting the man by the loop of his belt as some inane form of a safety precaution. She sighs heavily to herself. She spent too long and now look what has happened. She paces the room, agitated.