Skyrim Secondaries- The Bards’ College: Water You Up To?

In addition to all of this, two large trap-door gates form part of the room’s floor.  The one nearer where you entered contains a draugr you can loot, but the farther one is a drop into some water.  As there is no other exit to this room than the one you arrived by, you will have to pull the chain on the wall and drop into the water, making this the Point of No Return- traveling any further precludes leaving until you’re done here.

Hopping into the oubliette lands you in some fairly deep water, but don’t bother diving as there’s nothing below it to gather.  Instead, wade into the hallway leading out of the deathtrap, where you’ll find a skeever also taking a bit of a dip.  Slay it quietly if you can, so as not to risk alerting anything nearby- the hallway weaves a little and then leads to a large multi-level room with draugr in it.

The first of the draugr is on a ledge on the far wall, up level with the walkway that crosses the middle of the room.  If you’re careful, this one can be taken out pretty easily, as it just stands in place for the time being.  Any good ranged attack can more or less take it off at the knees.  As you advance into the room, though, the sarcophagus underneath it opens, as do one to the immediate right of the door and another on the far wall off to the right of the room.  They open in order, but immediately after each other, so anything you can do to take advantage of the time the undead spend climbing out of their entombment will be well-spent and save you taking some injury.  None of these draugr are especially dangerous, thankfully, so even having to face all three at once shouldn’t be too bad, provided you’ve removed the archer from overhead.

Once you’ve looted the re-corpses of the ancient Nords, you can ascend the spiral ramp on the right side of the room and enter the cage that covers its upper landing.  Opening the iron gate here gives you access to the walkway, but it also starts a series of bladed pendulums set to cripple you and knock you off of the stone bridge.  While you can time your movement to leap from the walkway to the ledge where the archer stands without ever encountering any blades, the trip is one-way: the ledge is too low to leap to the walkway from it.  Instead, just time your movement across the pendulums’ path and yank the chain at the far end to stop the trap.  You can then leap to the ledge with no danger and hop down to the waterlogged floor to climb up a second time, now not having to worry about any sort of trap.