We head over to road up on the east side of the river and destroy a Dark Anchor along the way. A quick stop at Jathsogur to check in on things reveals the new chief is Mog, the Orc who spent the whole fight fishing, on account of his great wisdom in not attacking me and my friends.

We take the road north and shortly run across a twitching Argonian enveloped by lightning.

“Okay, you know what?” Eran says, looking down at the hapless Argonian. “I think I was wrong. You don’t cause weirdness. Tamriel is just weirder than I ever imagined and I simply hadn’t left home and poked my nose into everything to find out about it.”

“This one thinks that is accurate,” Ilara says. “What happened to the poor Argonian?”

There’s a journal laying nearby, and I’m the only one feeling brave enough to touch it right now. I suppose in any group, people quickly pick out which of them is the bravest, and the others stand back and wait for that person to do the stupid thing that needs to be done. The problem in a group of strangers is that nobody’s sure who is the bravest. It’s especially funny when Nords do it. They all try not to be the brave one while pretending that they could have been brave.

Hmm. My memories of Nords and Dwemer are less messed up than the ones of Chimer, for the most part. Not that I’m exactly about to spend a lot of time in my head quantifying them.

“Neri, what’s the book say?” Eran asks, jarring me from my train of thought. “We should probably either help or kill this Argonian. Preferably from a safe distance.”

“Oh, right,” I say. “There’s instructions to go to an alchemy table just up the river. And time is of the essence and who knows how long he’s been here already.”

“Let’s time-is-of-the-essence our way up the river, then,” Eran says.

We locate the Argonian’s camp, where another book gives instructions to use a potion to control a thunder bug. Since I’m still the brave one here (and also the one most likely to be able to recover from the effects of dubious potions), I do the honors. I drink the potion, get a thunder bug to follow us, and lead it back to the Argonian. And then promptly confuse the thunder bug by jumping off the not-very-tall cliff near the Argonian.

“I don’t think thunder bugs like cliffs,” Eran says.

The thunder bug decides that it has had enough of following me around and wanders off, forcing me to go find another thunder bug and this time carefully leading it along the bank and not up and over the rocks. When it gets close to the twitching Argonian, it draws off the excess electricity and leaves him miraculously none the worse for wear.

“How did that not hurt you more than it did?” Gelur wonders as she makes sure he’s in good health. “You really ought to be dead.”

The Argonian goes on about risks and rewards and plans to off to immediately go try again because he just knows that this time, it will work.

“Well, while I’m hardly one to speak of experimenting on drinking your own experimental potions, it might be best not to do it unsupervised?” I say. “I’m admittedly more durable than most.”

He tells us about how he came here with some others but they didn’t appreciate his genius or something, and goes off to continue his unwise experiments. I make a note to check the river later to see if there’s a dead Argonian laying around.

We return to the main road and continue on. Further on, we come upon a wayshrine, which I light. There’s an Orc with a cart here claiming to be selling items for a guild named “The Skooma Emporium”. I stare at him incredulously for a long moment at just how audacious that is, and also wonder if that’s where Dra’bul has been getting their moon sugar. I suppose I don’t have much cause to speak of being audacious, but seriously, what next? People walking up to random passersby asking if they want to join the Thieves Guild?

Across the road from the wayshrine is a town called Valeguard, and I head in to explore and see if anyone wants me to solve their problems for them and whether there’s some sort of (possibly werewolf related) disaster going on. I also sense a Skyshard nearby, so I search every nook to find it and absorb it.

A Khajiit bard (named Shandi) is trying to write down stories from the spinners but something is wrong. The spinners have been telling a different story than the ones Shandi had written down.

(I still sometimes think I’m from Silatar. I love/hate it even though I know it’s wrong and even though they’re more pleasant than my actual memories, but the worst of it is that it feels more real than my actual memories because my actual memories aren’t sure what was actual.)

(There’s an actual word in Chimeris that best translates as “love/hate”. The Dunmer have probably forgotten what it originally meant. Loss of nuance of connotations is worse than any mere change in coloration or religion.)

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

So, if it’s some indication something is wrong, the people in Valeguard don’t seem to realize that the Silvenar and Green Lady have already been married and there’s a celebration ongoing right down the road. Even weirder, that wood figurine thing with the red ribbon that they called the “handfast” is here instead of in Silvenar.

One of the spinners, by the name of Indraseth (who I am promptly calling Crazy Indy) wants to change the story so that the Silvenar and the Green Lady aren’t together and have never been together. After that thing that happened with Ari back in Greenshade, I’m wary about how much this can affect and what the implications of it would be.

“The Hound calls the Green Lady…” Crazy Indy is saying.

“The Hound is dead,” I say. “I killed him myself.”

“No,” Crazy Indy says. “The story will be changed. The Hound will marry the Green Lady and the Silvenar will be no more. We will return to our true nature, as one with the beasts!”

I sigh. It seems even killing him won’t stop his nonsense. Either he’s being obnoxious from beyond the grave, or he’d already set things up here as a contingency plan in case some hero showed up and kicked his ass.

We head into the nearby cave where the spinners’ weird story magic is taking place, and meet an obnoxious apparition of the Hound.

“You’re dead,” I tell him. “Do I need to kill you again? Did Hircine send your Vestige back somehow to continue being annoying?”

He doesn’t even seem to realize that I killed him. He taunts us for a bit and then vanishes.

The next apparition we encounter looks like Calm Indy but he’s really a representation of every incarnation of the Silvenar, from what he says. The story is trying to erase him from history. We stopped the Hound at Silvenar but if they can change the past, well, I’m quite sure that it’s going to be a huge mess. I still don’t know if anything that happened in my memories of Silatar was real.

A Bosmer deeper in the cave is muttering over a book, very confused that the book isn’t listening to him. From the sounds of it, he bought it from Jurak-dar over in Belarata, who had made some dubious claims about it being able to magically write down his stories. Except it’s just a book, and works the way a book normally does. So instead, he wants us to collect some hoarvor blood and a chunk of old mammoth meat in order to use that to somehow write a story.

“You know, we’re kind of busy attempting to save the history of the Bosmer here…” Eran hedges.

“More confidence,” I say. “Hedging is good for understatement but people need to know where the line between ‘no’ and ‘maybe’ is.”

Eran clears his throat. “We are here to save the Silvenar and set right the story of the Bosmer. If you want this done, why don’t you follow after us and collect the blood from the hoarvor we’ll inevitably wind up killing?”

The Bosmer grumbles and reluctantly agrees to follow at a safe distance rather than make us collect bug blood for him. I swear, I don’t mind helping people with things. I do it all the time, after all. But it seems like some people completely fail to grasp the urgency of the situation they’re in, or even that they’re in a situation at all.

In the next cave, we encounter a big plant thing, except this one is purple and transparent. Once we destroy it, Crazy Indy is less crazy for a moment and babbles something about how the Hound is in the story trying to control her.

“The Hound is dead,” I repeat, as if repeating it often enough will make it stick in this story.

Further on, we find a spectral version of the Green Lady who is very confused as well. She thinks the Hound is her consort and doesn’t even recognize the name Silvenar. Nor his actual name, either, or at least the actual name of the current one. I think this Green Lady must be somehow conceptually every Green Lady too or something. I’m not sure, this is getting pretty weird.

There’s a strangler vine who speaks with a beautiful woman’s voice and it’s really creepy. She wants us to feed her thunder bug entrails. Right, the less said about this, the better. Moving swiftly on now.

Past the vines, we find a ghostly version of the Hound in a circle of stones who attacks us along with a pack of ghostly feral Bosmer.

“You know, the thing I’ve come to appreciate about Nirn is that the things you kill tend to stay dead and not show up again later causing more problems. Kindly stay the fuck dead this time.”

We kill him again.

“You killed him!” the transparent Green Lady says. “I didn’t think it was possible.”

“Twice!” I exclaim. “I’ve killed him twice now! This better not become three or I’m going to be annoyed.”

We exit the story cave and return to town, and go over to the handfast to dump a couple of glowy light balls into it. I have no idea what this does or what’s going on and I don’t care anymore.

“This is supposed to be in Silvenar,” I say, looking at the green-glowing handfast.

“Yes, we will get it there as soon as possible,” the spinner says. “We wouldn’t want to miss the wedding.”

“I mean, it was in Silvenar when we left there, days ago,” I say. “We were just there. This thing was there.” I throw up my hands with an exasperated sigh and turn to my friends. “We’re leaving now. And then heading back to Silvenar to make sure nothing is fucked up there.”

Fucking. Bosmer. Story magic. I hate weird magic and this is weirder shit than usual.

The Khajiit bard is baffled that the Bosmer who wanted us to collect blood wound up imbuing his story onto a block of meat, and decides to try turning it into an actual book rather than well-aged lunch.

“I suggest heading out of town now, too,” I advise her. “Something weird is going on here and I hope whatever it was we did fixed it because I don’t want to deal with this shit anymore. Actually, hey, let’s go find the skooma Orc. I’ll bet he’s got moon sugar for sale and my stash is getting low.”

“… skooma Orc?” asks Shandi incredulously.

The Khajiit follows after us in puzzlement with her weird story meat. She doesn’t know how bad things were.

Once we’ve used the wayshrine to return to Dra’bul, I say aside to Gelur, “No offense, but this Bosmer story magic shit creeps me the fuck out.”

“None taken,” she says, looking pretty ragged and deflated herself. “This was pretty fucking bad.”

“That’s what they did, isn’t it,” I muse, looking off into the trees. “They rewrote the story to make themselves gods. But I still remember the version where they weren’t.”

“That’s… not good,” Gelur says softly.

“And I fear that’s what I’m going to have to do, if I want to truly make them gone for good. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Or what consequences there might be. I…”

I manage to get back into my longhouse before having a complete breakdown.