You’d think that the city of Silvenar would be easier to get to, being a city and everything and a rather important one, but the roads in Valenwood are not always paved or clearly marked. Only the occasional stretch of stone wall and light post lets us know we’re going the right way. I just let Gelur lead the way and keep an eye out for werewolves, although most of what we encounter along the way is pissy tigers and spriggans. I suppose that’s one way to deter an invasion, though.
And then at one point, Gelur decides to take a “shortcut” that leads us through quite a lot of angry wildlife, and I also spot a book titled Tamrielic Artifacts, Part Two just sitting on a rock. I’ve given up on figuring out why people just leave books lying everywhere.
We encounter Arithiel’s party near Silvenar, helping some people who had fled the city, because there’s werewolves here. Because of course there’s werewolves here, why in Oblivion would there not be werewolves here? I really hope the head werewolf is here so that I can make him the head dead werewolf. The Hound, of all the silly appellations, and I called myself the Black Wolf once (because I was in a hurry and couldn’t think of anything better, admittedly).
“Oh, good, you’re here!” Arithiel says. “You were definitely right about there being trouble.”
“I had to deal with some different werewolves first,” I say. “Have you seen the Silvenar and the Green Lady?”
Arithiel shakes her head. “They must be further on, or they haven’t shown up yet. I hope that they simply haven’t shown up yet and not that they’re trapped somewhere.”
We locate the Silvenar at a campfire at the edge of town along with some guards. He tells me about how the city has been sealed against him and the wards twisted to nefarious purpose, and something about physical manifestations of stories that I don’t even slightly understand apart from that he wants us to go beat up some werewolves and grab some silver shards from them. The Green Lady herself is probably inside the city, hidden behind those wards and possibly trapped herself.
A scout nearby mentions how some musicians were trapped in the ravine on the way to the celebration, so we agree to look for them while we’re killing werewolves. Or rather, I ask Arithiel’s party to come in behind us to help out after we’ve cleared the path. They rescue the musicians and locate their instruments in the Houndsmen’s camp while we sweep through killing everything stupid enough to attack us.
The musicians tell me about a big, angry, music-hating werewolf who calls himself Grimclaw, and considering they know his name, he was probably running around yelling things like “Grimclaw hate music!” The musicians attract him by playing, and I really wish it were always so easy to find something fun to fight. Once I’ve killed him, we take the weird story shards back to the Silvenar, who wants us to kill something called the Guardian of Silvenar.
The Guardian of Silvenar is… incredibly flammable. It’s one of those big plant guardian things, and would probably be considerably more impressive to, you know, normal people. The sort of people who don’t go around killing trolls and Ogrims for fun. The Silvenar assures us that it’ll respawn later but it needs to be destroyed now, so we make short work of the thing.
The Silvenar then sends us in to rescue the three spinners. We need to interrogate some of the Houndsmen’s witches to find out how to free them. The witches in question are terrorizing cowering Bosmer who run off when we distract their terrorizers. The witches beg for mercy when we attack them and offer information.
“You can’t kill me!” one of them protests. “Don’t you know who I am?”
“Are you fucking serious?” I say. “Do I look like I care who you are? I don’t care if you’re the Emperor of Cyrodiil. You’re being a dick!”
They insist that they were coerced or deceived by the Hound and beg to be let go. I’m not exactly in any mood for mercy at the moment, but against my better judgment, I let them go anyway. I don’t want to think about how many other Bosmer that I’ve killed might have simply been coerced or deceived, even though I spared most of the Orcs. (To be fair, quite a lot of the Houndsmen are werewolves and it’s too dangerous to leave those alive.) Let’s face it, though—I sympathized more with the Orcs than the Bosmer in the first place.
And let’s face it also that I enjoy fighting. Unless I have some pressing reason to show someone mercy and a tactical situation that won’t make sparing them disastrous, I won’t hesitate to kill someone. I probably shouldn’t have spared these witches. Too many things that could still go wrong here. But too late to reconsider. They’ve already disappeared into the trees.
The spinners are being held in their own homes by fucking Ayleid constellation puzzles. Seriously!? I make my friends solve them and just keep killing werewolves. I would dearly like to know whose stupid idea that was so I could separate their head from their body. Probably the Hound. And that’s probably not too far off.
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With the spinners freed, the wards are down and we break into the audience chamber at the top of the great tree. The Hound is there, and the Green Lady, and that fetcher has her under his control somehow. My first thought is that I don’t want to hurt her, but my second is that damn she’s strong and it wouldn’t be easy to do so even if I wanted to. I need to break his hold on her and get at him instead but although I can see him, my axe passes through him as if he’s not even there. (At least I assume that’s the Hound, since he’s babbling about how they’re meant to be together and some other nonsense I’m not really listening to.)
Killing is almost too easy, really. Any idiot can kill. Something I need to explain to my Orcs sometime is that it’s much, much more difficult to fight without hurting your opponent. And I don’t want to hurt the Green Lady, and she’s resisting all of Merry’s spells. Dammit. A battle axe is not a good weapon for fights where you’re not intending on killing or maiming your opponent, but at least my friends have less lethal options and I’m good at dodging. By this point we’re well acquainted with what sorts of injuries are easy for Gelur to heal.
Fortunately, the Silvenar just needed us to stall for long enough to do his thing. With a burst of green magic, the Green Lady stops attacking us and goes over toward him, and the Hound starts yelling some more nonsense about how she belongs with him or whatever. That doesn’t last long because he’s hittable now, so I don’t waste any time in starting to hit him.
Someone who was capable of overpowering the Green Lady is no slouch of an opponent. I wonder how much of his strength he had before and how much was given to him by Hircine—and what he had to pay for it. Daedric Princes have been known to give people artifacts and declare champions for completing the most trivial of tasks, but many times those Daedra ask terrible things of people and their gifts may come with a price that wasn’t immediately apparent.
I’m under no illusions that Malacath is any exception to that, but I know full well what he expects of me. He’s in a bit of an odd position himself, being a former Aedra whose nature was changed under unusual circumstances and a publicly acceptable patron for Orcs. Also, I’m apparently the sort of person who has casual philosophical internal monologues while in a life-and-death struggle with a guy who has been causing problems for me and my friends since I arrived in Malabal Tor. It’s meditative rather than distracting, in a way, like there’s two threads of thought going on in my head and the fighting-me isn’t really the thinking-me. Ah, maybe I just lost my mind at some point. I’m not very concerned.
The Hound goes down as fighting-me finally gets in a killing blow. The Silvenar and Green Lady are in a rush to complete their wedding ceremony that’s more than just a wedding. Under more normal circumstances, this would probably have had a lot more ceremony leading up to the ritual magic that binds them together and does something with the Bosmer I really don’t understand. Something more than just symbolic.
As it is, once people start coming in following the epic battle, they have one of the scouts bring in what looks like some sort of wooden icon with a red cloth draped over it, which they call the “handfast”, whatever that means. I refrain from making any inappropriate puns as we stand back to watch. The Silvenar and Green Lady start hovering in the air and glowing green. And they just keep at it, waving their arms in the air. After several minutes of this, I have to wonder how long this ceremony is supposed to take and whether I’m expected to just stand here watching the whole time. A glance to the side indicates that people have started getting food and drink and milling about, so apparently this is going to take a while.
According to some of the Bosmer who presumably know what they’re talking about, the celebrations here will last several days. They’ve gone surprisingly quickly from the town being under occupation by hostile forces to celebrating. By the time we head down the ladder to the ground floor, there’s no sign of bodies and people are starting to eat food which is hopefully not made from the bodies. The musicians we rescued have set up on a stage nearby and are warming up.
“Did I lose track of time while high or something?” I whisper to my friends. “I didn’t think I was that high.”
“You were probably staring at them for hours,” Eran murmurs back. “I didn’t want to say anything. It wasn’t exactly an important situation to un-distract you from.”
“Do I lose time like that often?” I wonder.
“Constantly,” Merry says with a sigh.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Don’t worry about it,” Eran says. “I know your mind… ah… well, how do I put this politely? Your mind is still pretty damaged, and no amount of healing magic can help with it.”
“You’ve been doing better lately,” Merry says. “Roku is good for you and your Orcs give you something to focus on. There have been times when it seemed like you were simply stumbling along hitting anything that was stupid enough to attack us with little regard to where we were or what we were doing.”
We stay for a bit to enjoy the celebration, but I want to be out of here in the morning. There’s still things to be done and I don’t feel like I can afford to relax for too long when there still might be werewolves and non-werewolf Bosmer around who haven’t gotten the memo that the Hound is dead. And I want to visit all the Orc strongholds to get their support in joining the Dominion. Though I have confidence in the surviving ones in Grahtwood and Greenshade listening to me. I’d also love a chance to wander and explore a bit now that there isn’t anything immediately pressing going on.
For the moment, though, I suppose there isn’t much reason to leave before morning. I get something to eat and drink and settle in to listen to some music before dozing off.
I don’t dream of Oblivion tonight.