My friends make me spend some time with Roku before we continue exploring Valenwood, possibly to make sure that I haven’t completely lost my mind after visiting the Shivering Isles, or whatever would pass for me losing my mind. (I mean, sure, sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind, but I don’t think the Shivering Isles is going to be what does it. Even the bad parts of it are like the nice parts of Vvardenfell. Although maybe that says more about Vvardenfell than anything else…)
I check back in at Silvenar to make sure everything still hasn’t turned weird. The party is still ongoing. How the fuck long is this party going to last? At least I get a chance to speak with the Silvenar and Green Lady this time, who assure me that whatever it was that I did at Valeguard actually fixed something.
I meet up with that former Worm Cultist that was feeling guilty about it and turned on them back at that other Ayleid ruin. What was her name again? Not-Ari.
“Thanks for letting me enjoy the party for a little bit,” she says, as if I hadn’t just forgotten about her. “Where do you want me?”
I consider for a moment. “Is your party staying with you?”
Not-Ari nods. “We’re sticking together. We’ve already been through a lot together.”
They’re not nearly as skilled or experienced as a party like mine, or they wouldn’t have run into as much trouble as they did with the Worm Cult. Admittedly, they were taken by surprise, but still. I don’t know them well enough to gauge what their actual capabilities are.
“Head for Dra’bul and report to my wife,” I say. “Tell her Neri sent you. She’ll know where to put you and get you more training if need be.”
Someone at the party mentions a village called Wilding Run not far from there. They were expecting a relative who would have been there to come to the party, but there has been no sign of them. I decide to go check it out and probably bring back some bad news, given the way things have been going in Tamriel. It’s too bad the Silvenar didn’t give me a map of problems to solve in Valenwood like the Wilderqueen did.
Not far from the wayshrine, we run across a Bosmer who says something about undead and how he was expecting the Fists of Thalmor to show up and take care of it, and then gets confused about the huge grin on my face as I pull out my axe.
“Fuck yes!” I say. “Let’s go hit some undead!”
“Well, if you’re not with the Thalmor, then I’m grateful for the battle-lust of Orcs, I suppose,” the Bosmer says.
We charge in and start killing zombies. As we’re doing that, a Bosmer woman (a corporal, as she shortly introduces herself) runs up to us wondering at our sanity and urging us to leave.
“We’re trying to find some missing soldiers,” Eran says. “Also, I’d like to see you try to discourage this guy from killing undead.”
I let out a joyful whoop as I decapitate two zombies in one strike.
“Good point,” the corporal says. “I’ve found some corpses, but I haven’t found the captain or the lieutenant. Normally I’d be concerned about these undead getting up and attacking us later but the way you’re dismembering them and setting them on fire will probably keep them down for long enough to search the camps and the ruins.”
“If anything gets up to be annoying again after that, I’m sure Neri will just hit them again and explode them for good measure,” Eran says.
The corporal decides she’d be better off following along with us as we make our way through the infested area. The unfortunate part about all this is that we’re within hearing distance of the Dark Anchor still and I keep twitching and wanting to run over and hit Daedra. That thing is entirely too close to absolutely everything over there, though, and between the Fighters Guild and the mercenaries I prodded into making themselves useful instead of annoying, they’ve got the thing covered.
As we move further on, the zombies are joined by angry ghosts who threaten us, but they’re fortunately the hittable sort of ghost that dissipate when I smack them hard enough. We also find fragments of a journal by someone named Ralion. Ralion, like an idiot, dismisses things as mere “nursery rhymes” and “doesn’t believe in ghosts”. Seriously? I can’t imagine that anyone on the face of Nirn could possibly not realize that souls are a real thing and there are a million kinds of undead in varying degrees of corporealness and angriness. Even though I’m admittedly more well-traveled than most, it seems as foolish as denying the existence of, say, Daedra, or Nords.
When we reach the central ruins, we’re attacked by a Khajiit named Marafi who might be alive but is definitely crazy. Something about how someone “will never be yours and belongs to Marafi”.
At the far edge of the village, on a cliff overlooking the water with an excellent view of the Gold Coast within spitting distance from here, I find a Skyshard and a book titled The Totems of Hircine. (Summary: Some people think lycanthropy is awesome.)
“Could I swim to the Gold Coast from here?” I wonder aloud.
“There’s probably slaughterfish down there,” Eran says reasonably. “You probably shouldn’t try, considering there’s perfectly good boats.” Then he notices my expression and sighs. “Or at least do it naked. You’re totally going to go swimming in slaughterfish-infested waters naked sometime but you can do that later. We’re busy killing undead, remember?”
“Right, yeah,” I say. “Back to the undead!”
We come upon a man the corporal recognizes as the captain, and also a transparent blue hound that looks distressingly familiar and raises my hackles. I grip my axe tightly and wonder if this apparition is solid enough to give a good solid smack. The captain doesn’t acknowledge our presesnce, merely continues gazing at the blue canine.
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The dog speaks in a voice I’ve come to be highly annoyed of, and introduces itself as a shadow of Ulthorn, also known as the Hound, and seeks to make amends.
“You damned well better be seeking to make amends,” I say. “Do you have any idea how fucking annoying you have been? I had to do timey-wimey story bullshit! And you were sexually harassing the Green Lady! I killed you! Twice!”
“Yes, I am… sorry about all that,” the Hound says, and I’m not good enough at reading canine expressions to tell whether he’s being properly contrite. “I am but a piece of him, and not the piece that did all that. I can help you save the captain, if you let me. It will not be easy.”
“Fine,” I say.
“You think we can trust him?” Eran wonders quietly.
“No,” I say. “But seeing as killing him hasn’t stuck, we might as well give it a shot.”
That’s when the Hound explains what happened with him, terribly, horrifyingly. Hircine took him in, and hollowed him out, and broke off any parts of him that were good, calm, or peaceful. He forged Ulthorn into the Hound, a weapon to hunt down the Green Lady in his name. I almost drop my axe when I hear the way he describes it.
“By Malacath, that’s awful,” I say, holding fast to Malacath’s name to not think about how Molag Bal could have done that to me if I’d faltered for even a moment. A mer with my face, destroying everything I ever cared about. I eat a piece of moon sugar candy and take some deep breaths.
(I shouldn’t eat too much of this stuff or I might see butterflies, but seeing butterflies is much preferable to thinking about the God of Fuck-You.)
The Hound takes us into a prison pocket of Oblivion where we need to solve some puzzles to release the captain. I let Ilara do it this time rather than the monkey while I busily hit anything that’s being aggressive. There’s a bunch of huntsmen in here, though there won’t be for long, unless they’re actually Daedra or just Vestiges that already belong to Hircine and are here because I killed them back on Nirn already. Doesn’t matter terribly much, I suppose.
With the puzzles solved, the way is open to let us enter a creepy cave. A big snake Daedra that the Hound calls Ozzai is inside, tormenting the captain, so we charge in and kill it. Him. Her? What the fuck ever, it’s a snake Daedra, who even cares? If Daedra don’t want to be called “it”, then they shouldn’t act like monsters.
Once the harvester has been temporarily inconvenienced by means of a battle axe (and some spells and arrows), the captain is freed and the Hound sends us back to where we started.
“Damn, that’s awful,” Gelur says. “He brought it on himself, when he went to Hircine in the first place, but who can blame him for being distressed…” She shakes her head. “He went nuts, and the Prince of the Hunt was ready to take every advantage of it.”
I really hate to think what might have happened had I been unwilling to let Ari become the Wilderqueen and been desperate enough to see a Daedric Prince about it. And what might have happened if I had my heart set on marrying Ayrenn but that wasn’t possible for whatever reason? And I’m not even going to bother to think about Ayem because I probably would have been better off without her.
But now I have Roku, an unexpected wonder but one that goes to show that if you cling too hard to wishes and expectations, you can miss out on opportunities. We reach the wayshrine and I teleport us back to Dra’bul, looking forward to spending the evening with her. I encounter her not far inside the gate, with an Orc woman I don’t recognize behind her.
“Welcome back,” Roku says. “There’s an Orc here looking to marry you.”
“I’m Grishka gra-Gushnukbur,” the Orc woman says, introducing herself with a full name that I am never, ever going to attempt to use in casual conversation. “You killed my father. He was an ass and had it coming when he decided to challenge Bramblebreach. I, like any sensible Orc, decided to run away when the entire forest decided to attack us. Only a fool battles a natural disaster.”
“I might classify myself as a natural disaster sometimes…”
I may have slightly forgotten the part about Orc chieftains tending to have multiple wives. Or at least, my mind has been busy focusing on stopping one crisis after another. I swear I did not intend to start an Orc harem. I’ve barely even had a chance to get used to being married to Roku.
“I’m not sure how I feel about marrying the daughters of people I killed,” I say.
“You killed my uncle,” Roku reminds me.
“It’s a bit inevitable, isn’t it? A lot of the clan woman you’ll find are daughters of chiefs, and from what I’ve heard, you killed a lot of chiefs.” Grishka chuckles. “Not that only chiefs marrying means only chiefs have sex, of course.”
“How did you even get here so fast?” I ask.
“I, like any sensible Orc, used the resources available to me,” Grishka replies. “I asked someone at the Mages Guild in Marbruk to teleport me here.”
I blink. “… I think I like you already.”
Grishka laughs heartily. “It seems like useful magic. I wonder how hard it would be to learn? I know a little magic, but it’s mostly for patching up idiots.”
“Don’t listen to the Altmer,” I say. “They’ll claim it will take you a hundred years, just because it takes them a hundred years to learn to pull on pants. That’s why so many of them wear dresses.”
“It’s called a robe, Neri,” Merry says blandly. “And yes, alas, we slow-learning Altmer must make the terrible choice between mastering the weaving of magicka and mastering the wearing of garments.”
“I see you’ve found time to master the art of sarcasm in there, too,” I say. “Roku, what do you think?”
“I think she would make a good addition to the family,” Roku says with a grin.
I rub my face and say to Grishka, “I think you do need to know what you’re getting into here.”
“I already know that you’re a High Elf,” Grishka says.
“There’s a lot more to it than that and I’m not… let’s just reconvene at my longhouse and sit down and I’ll explain. I’ve got the mother of all ‘it’s complicated’ going on here and I just had to dealt with some idiot who thought it was a great idea to cry to Hircine when he couldn’t get the girl he wanted and he’s been causing problems for literally everyone in Malabal Tor and I’ve killed him twice and now I just had to deal with some more weirdness involving him being split, hollowed out, with part of him being turned into a weapon and part of him into a prison, and it was weird and stupid and I need a drink.”
Grishka stares at me with an expression becoming increasingly incredulous and sympathetic as I rant on. “Damn, that sounds crazy.”
We head over to my longhouse. I’m kind of surprised at myself here. I’d expected that I would be freaking out more over Orc women coming out of the woodwork wanting to marry me, but after all the shit that’s been happening around me lately, I think I’ve completely worn out my ability to freak out at something that’s… actually completely normal? It’s so amazingly, refreshingly normal.
Look, I’m hardly so egotistical or vain to think everyone should be falling all over themselves wanting to sleep with me. But I acknowledge that apparently the things I do regularly are things that Orc women find attractive.
“Well, I’m going to take a bath before eating,” Eran says, nudging my friends in a very obvious bid to get me alone with the Orc women. “We still smell like zombies and it’s made me lose my appetite.”
And that Orc women apparently consider showing up smelling of battle to be as good as Telvanni bug musk.