Another Ruin Filled With Undead

So Ustengrav, the Nordic ruin I'm sent to retrieve this horn from, is a ruin like no other.

That's a complete lie. It's exactly the same as the others I've been in. There is one significant bonus though. It's already full of people killing each other! This makes it a lot easier, for obvious reasons. That terrifying flame atronach that haunts my nightmares can stay far away in Oblivion and I'm free to raise the dead, whether once or twice dead conveniently irrelevant, to my heart's content.

To clarify, it appears that a group of mages, conjurers (like myself) and destruction talents have either tried to move in where they're not wanted, or perhaps had been here for a long time but delved too deep and discovered something unpleasant. Whatever the case, there's corpses everywhere and I have no trouble navigating down through the darkness.

I did pick up a new spell which I decide to try out. Turn Undead will send the shrivelled corpses fleeing in the opposite direction, which is fabulous. It is temporary though, and they tend to run away from my own precious zombies, who have a limited shelf life. I spend a lot of time trying get in the way of the 'bad guys' so my own guy can do some damage, but then it occurs to me that if they're not attacking me I can just run past. So I leave these undead buddies to their frolicking and go on my merry way.

There's a lot of dark passageways down here, and the undead do have a nasty habit of suddenly going "Rah!" and jumping out at me. There's some nasty contraptions in here that work to my advantage. The plus side of these things being dead is that they're not very clever and having them repeatedly following me over a plate that triggers spouts of fire from the floor proves an effective way of eliminating them. I heal myself, of course, but they have no such option.

The same technique comes in handy when I come across some spiders. The smaller ones finish each other off, but when a horrible giant one drops down from the ceiling (I'm getting really sick of that) and even my resurrected spider buddies can't help, I take comfort in my own creativity. The calm spell works surprisingly well and the spider is unphased, serene even, as it casually brings about its own fiery death.

The spiders turn out to be the last of the tombs surprises and overall I'm a little underwhelmed by the experience. What's even more underwhelming is the total absence of anything resembling a horn. Instead I find a mysterious note that essentially boils down to "Haha I got here first, come find me if you want your horn back."

It's with a sigh (partly at the wasted time, partly at my own sense of heroic obligation for coming down here in the first place and now feeling compelled to find this person) that I take a convenient shortcut through a tunnel back to the entrance and emerge back out in the chilly sunlight of a late Skyrim morning.

I'm heading back to Riverwood apparently.