Speaking with Silence

As an intruder in the Sepulcher, the player is set upon by hostile (and unkillable) Nightingale spirits and must sneak through, uncovering more clues about its purpose as they progress. While the sepulcher is named after a tomb, it does not house the dead – it is named so as the tomb of twilight, where the darkness of night overtakes the remnants of daylight. It seems that worshippers of Nocturnal peacefully coexisted with the Nightingales and their spirits in the chambers until a struggle a few years prior, after which its guardians became increasingly unstable and eventually turned on the priests.

The player learns that the Twilight Sepulcher fortifies the Ebonmere, a conduit to Nocturnal’s realm of the Evergloam from which her luck is granted, and that the Nightingales are charged with its protection. The Ebonmere can be unlocked by the Skeleton Key, one of Nocturnal’s artifacts.

The Skeleton Key is not required to hold the gate open. As with any key, it is required to unlock the door, and does not need to behave as a door jam, but the door may be sealed in absence of the key as the maws of the portal knit themselves quickly back together. With the gate open, the key can unlock extraordinary potential in its wielder. Alongside Nocturnal’s charge to protect the Sepulcher, the Nightingales have historically protected against the Key’s removal to maintain balance amongst themselves and to prevent the gate from being shut with no means to reopen it.

Entering the brink of the Inner Sanctum, the trainee is suddenly ambushed. After a brief struggle with a seemingly invisible opponent, they are shot and paralyzed in the darkness. The gaunt face of a haggard dark elf emerges from underneath a hood as black as midnight. Karliah has nothing left to lose, and everything to gain, by defending herself to her captive audience. She has been preparing for and expecting a last confrontation with Mercer – and is as surprised at your presence as you are at hers.

Karliah asserts that Mercer was the traitor who murdered Gallus in cold blood. According to Karliah, Mercer wrested the Skeleton Key from its place in the Sepulcher against Gallus’ wishes. Mercer then turned on his partners. Gallus succeeded in severely wounding Mercer, but was cut down; during their struggle, Karliah managed to shut the Ebonmere, limiting Mercer’s newfound power. Crippled by his injury and facing an enraged Karliah backed by a horde Nightingale spirits, Mercer was forced to retreat. Karliah is in fact responsible for the guild’s run of bad luck, as whatever her motivations, she was the one who shut the Ebonmere.

Ever since, Karliah has been holding the Sepulcher, guarding the gate from being reopened and Mercer’s powers becoming fully unleashed. However, her power to maintain the stalemate is waning – Mercer is learning and honing his (still limited) mastery over his new power, while the Nightingale spirits are weakening as their connection to the Evergloam wanes, losing their grasp on reality. As the spirits became more violent, Karliah was forced to lock herself in the Inner Sanctum, effectively sealing what she thought was her own tomb. No new Nightingales can be inducted with the Ebonmere closed, so neither Karliah nor Mercer can create powerful new allies this way.

Asked about the mysterious adversary, Karliah is unable to identify them, as she has been fortified inside the sepulcher with no outside contact (although she is heartened to hear that someone might have questioned her characterization as a traitor). Because new Nightingale spirits enter the Sepulcher from the Ebonmere, Gallus’ spirit has been barred, and so Karliah was not granted the small comfort of even her lover’s ghostly company. She surmises that someone within the guild opposes Mercer’s methods and is wary of Mercer’s unchallenged ascension.

Karliah urges the player to find a way to strike against Mercer before he seizes the Sepulcher and becomes unstoppable. With it being her word against Mercer’s, Karliah hopes that if the recruit uncovers and aids the traitor in seeding doubts about Mercer in the guild, they will be open to listening to her side of the story. She also hopes that a public confrontation would force the truth, or at the very least, allow the guild members to make a final, informed decision after having been kept in the dark. Forced to choose between either facing Mercer’s inevitable push into the Sepulcher or putting some faith into the player’s motivations, Karliah takes the last chance at redemption for her failure. Whatever the response of the player, she asserts that she will prepare and be ready to ambush Mercer at an ideal opportunity, rather than wait for him like prey. As a sign of her hopefulness, she gives the player her last paralysis arrow, hoping they can use it to subdue Mercer when he is surprised by Karliah’s appearance.