“Grishka sure is something,” Eran comments as we’re heading back to the wayshrine in the morning.

“You jealous, Eran?” Gelur teases lightly.

“I have no particular desire to have Orcs throw themselves at me,” Eran says. “I’ve seen what Orcs find attractive. Should I wind up in a position where I find Orcs desiring a relationship with me, I may need to reconsider my life choices, or they’re just strange Orcs.”

“Grishka’s a bit of a strange Orc,” I say with a chuckle. “In a good way, mind you.”

“She’ll fit in well, then,” Gelur says. “How’d she take the… you know? Did you tell her?”

“Of course I told her. It apparently makes so much more sense than me just being a really strange Altmer.”

“Ah, but the last scion of a dead race is such a romantic tale!” Gelur says.

“At least you’re not an Ayleid,” Eran says.

“If I were an Ayleid, I would likely be struggling with the constant urge to punch myself in the face.”

We teleport back to Baandari Trading Post and head north, in the general vicinity of that weird Dwemer ruin Aelif took me and Eran to. I keep an eye out, but see no sign of her, and the place is sealed up tight again. I’m sure everything will work out alright.

As we’re traveling, we run across the ghost of a Bosmer woman standing on a bridge. She recognizes me, and after a reminder, I realize that she’s the old Green Lady, Finoriell. She tells me about how when she died in Pyandonea, she was drawn back to rest in the sacred grove of Treehenge, but there’s something wrong here that’s keeping her from getting in and actually doing that resting thing.

“Back up a moment here,” I say. “You actually went to Pyandonea?”

“I swam there, with the fury of the Green behind me!” the former Green Lady says, launching into a lovely tale of slaughtering Sea Elves.

“Clearly, even slaughterfish won’t get in the way of a Green Lady bent on vengeance,” Eran says.

“We’ve been beating them off from the shores of Valenwood ourselves,” I say. “They’ve been a right nuisance. Can you tell me exactly where Pyandonea is?”

“You want to launch an invasion yourself?” the old Green Lady asks.

“Not exactly,” I say. “I want to deforest it by opening portals for logging. It would mean the Wood Orcs would need to cut down fewer trees in Valenwood, and the Maormer would have fewer resources to build ships to harass Tamriel with.”

“That… is actually pretty brilliant,” she says with a laugh. “I’ll tell you everything I know once the situation here has been resolved.”

We head into the root-covered tunnel. We find the hengekeeper (who I assume keeps the henge, although I’m not quite clear on what a “henge” actually is) not far inside, talking about how the spriggans are mysteriously angry and attacking anyone that comes close when they’re normally docile.

“Alright, now taking bets,” I say. “Five gold on it being somehow the Hound’s fault.”

“I say Worm Cult,” Merry says, and Eran agrees.

“It was the Worm Cult,” the hengekeeper says.

“Oh, thank Malacath,” I say. “I’ve had quite enough of dealing with Hircine’s shit for now. Let’s go beat the shit out of some cultists and fix whatever’s wrong here.”

We head through the tunnel, smacking spriggans as we go and poking green-glowing roots to wake up some more ghosts which will help somehow? I wasn’t really listening to much after “Worm Cult”.

The tunnel opens to the top of a hill, with a woman-shaped tree in the middle of a ring of stones and flowers. More woman trees grow nearby, and the ghosts we’d awoken are standing beneath them. (Is ‘grow’ really the right word? If they grew much more, they wouldn’t be coincidentally shaped like women for much longer. Or does ‘growing’ also include the coincidental leaves covering their wooden tits?)

The other ghost Green Ladies speak of how the cultists are poisoning the grove, and this is obviously bad. As we’re speaking with them, the… I can’t just say Green Lady here, they’re all Green Ladies. Finar… Finol… oh hell with it. Finny. Finny screams as purple chains appear around her and she vanishes. The hengekeeper thinks she was vulnerable since she wasn’t properly rooted and the cultists want to corrupt her because they want to corrupt everything.

“There’s an altar near here,” the hengekeeper says. “You must cleanse it with the moon and stars!”

I make a soft choking sound. “What?”

She clarifies herself as meaning moonlight on water and “stars” as torchbugs.

“That’s not…” I sigh. “Yeah, fine, we’ll get right on it.”

I’m trying very hard not to roll my eyes at poetic nonsense or wonder why exactly this is necessary and what it has to do with fixing things here.

“… in fact, my friends here will get right on it,” I say. “I’ll go clear out the cultists. It will be much easier to do that with fewer necromancers being assholes.”

“Good plan,” Gelur says generously.

The “moon-kissed water” is actually covered in vertical blue shafts that definitely don’t go anywhere near the moons and neither Masser nor Secunda is actually blue. It’s Azura that’s blue, and I have no idea why these Green-loving Bosmer would worship Azura. It’s surrounded by hoarvor, which I’m happy to clear out and while Gelur collects weird blue-glowing water and Ilara catches ordinary-looking torchbugs and I want absolutely nothing to do with something called “moon and stars” right now. Call me paranoid, but sometimes I’m paranoid.

They use those on the altar in question, and a green wisp appears above it speaking in Finny’s voice. She speaks of how the cultists want to corrupt her and turn her into an abomination and she needs to take root and then she flutters off to “take root” inside the hengekeeper which just sounds a little creepy to me, but yeah let’s get back to hitting cultists.

I run across an Altmer woman dressed in Mages Guild garb babbling something not especially coherent about the cultists ruining her research, something about retrieving notes and carved ivory or something and taking it back to the Mages Guild and oh by the way she’s dying of poison.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

“You might have led with that,” I say as I shove Restoring Light into her, but Gelur is already healing her.

“My time has come!” the Altmer says dramatically, looking like she’s about to throw herself back onto the ground and perish on the spot and seems rather confused when there’s no perishing happening. “Huh?”

Gelur practically force-feeds her a potion bottle she’d grabbed out of her bag. “Antidote. You’ll be fine.”

“How did you know what sort of poison to cure?”

“Magic,” Gelur says. “I’d hardly be a very good healer if I didn’t have diagnostic spells. Now get yourself to safety. If we don’t find whatever it is you wanted us to look for, you can look for it yourself once we’ve killed all the cultists.”

When we get back to the hengekeeper, we find her glowing green with Finny’s… spirit? Or something? I guess? Whatever it is, the hengekeeper sends us out to stop the Worm Cultists from torturing spriggans next. This doesn’t really need to be complicated. Step 1: Enter grove. Step 2: Kill all cultists. Step 3: Anything that needs to be done will be a lot easier to do once all the cultists are dead.

The cultists who are tormenting the spriggans are making themselves extra obvious with columns of red light surrounded by black swirly badness. It’s so nice of them to advertise their presence so I know where to put my axe.

Once we’ve killed those, a voice from nowhere tells us how our efforts are wasted and to follow the light to the waterfall and the slowest ass torchbug letting off white light slowly, slowly moves in the general direction of the waterfall. I hope she didn’t mean that literally because I’m not waiting around for that.

At the waterfall, a spriggan talks to us and tells us to go get some seed from a cave to use it to heal Finny. And for all people keep talking about how things are so urgent and we need to be quick, they really insist on talking about the history of absolutely everything. Look, plant lady, I don’t need to know about how this weird magic seed existed before the Green Pact and whatever else.

And maybe the spriggan could have avoided the whole ‘slowest torchbug ever’ and ‘most pointless history lesson ever’ in favor of actually making the haste that she insisted we needed to make, since while it was busy yanking us around with that, Finny’s been captured again. I’m not the one who has trouble prioritizing things here to need to be kept on track, for fuck’s sake.

We come up to the end of the path to find a cultist hovering in the air while waving their hands around ominously, surrounded by pillars of red light, with Finny’s green glowing orb of soul/spirit/self/whatever floating over a basin. I plant an axe in the cultist while Gelur plants the soul in a plant.

I jump off a small cliff to get back to the hengekeeper and for once my friends don’t complain about it. (It’s not like it’s a tall enough cliff to actually hurt us anyway.) The hengekeeper decides that since Finny is so weak, she’ll need to give her all her life force so that she’ll root properly.

“Wouldn’t part of the life force of multiple people work better?” I wonder.

“I’ll help!” Gelur volunteers.

I’m not even entirely sure what ‘life force’ entails. Magicka? Stamina? Health? Any of those should be simple enough to restore without significant long-term harm. I mean, provided you have miraculous restoration magic skills. Look, I barely understand what magicka is. I trust Gelur knows what she’s doing more than an over-dramatic hengekeeper, though. (Really, why do so many people feel the need to be so dramatic about everything?)

Finny roots, whatever that means, and I can’t help but keep thinking it sounds vaguely dirty (heh), anyway she’s fine, everyone’s fine, except the cultists who have all taken a swift trip to their asshole god courtesy of a battle axe so they’re fine too.

“This is incredible,” Finny says, appearing before us as a mer-shaped ghost rather than a glowy green wisp again. “The roots, the thoughts and memories of the other incarnations of the Green Lady… ah, but I believe I owe you some information.”

“Information?” the hengekeeper says, then looks at me. “You didn’t withhold your aid for the sake of a reward, did you?”

“They did nothing of the sort,” Finny says. “Neri is an old friend who helped me avenge my Silvenar when he was murdered by the Sea Elves. I swam to Pyandonea and killed as many as I could, but perhaps what I saw will accomplish more than I did in stopping those accursed Maormer.”

“Are we actually doing this?” Merry asks.

“Which of you will be casting the portal?” Finny asks.

“… I don’t think any of us can actually do that,” I say. “My method of transportation requires sites I’ve attuned myself with. Are you sure you can handle this? You still seem kind of weak.”

Finny chuckles. “I am still weak, but I grow stronger by the minute. This is nothing. Bring me your portal mage and I will help.”

“You intend to strike back at the Sea Elves with a long-range portal?” the hengekeeper says. “That’s… bold.”

This is the point where I pretend that I actually had a plan and not just an insane idea I had while high.

“I’ll find one,” I say. “I’ll need to set up some logistics. I know someone who might be willing to help, though.”

“Tell me you’re not thinking of Ealcil,” Merry says.

“No, no,” I say. “That guy in Cormount. Whatever his name was.”

“For once, I also don’t remember his name,” Eran says.

“I’m not especially confident in you convincing someone whose name you don’t even remember,” Merry says. “But then, you can sell sand to Khajiit.”

“It’s either that or go help the Prophet and hire him on in exchange for helping with his bullshit,” I say.

Next stop, Cormount, and since we’re quite a ways from the nearest wayshrine, I decide to be lazy and teleport us directly to the Cormount wayshrine. I am so glad that I realized (that is, Malacath told me) that I could do that. It feels like such a cheat I almost expect to have to pay for it or something, although that would be silly. In my albeit limited experience, gold is not a common component in magic.

I speak with the treethane, who does helpfully point me to the portal mage. I make a bit of small talk, asking how things have been going with the stuff we probably shouldn’t talk about in public, and he makes vague positive noises to indicate that they are probably happening in a direction he’s happy with.

“Things have been slow going, unfortunately,” the portal mage says. “Proper, legal justice apparently takes more time to arrange than summary executions. I’m getting tired of waiting. Still, things have been quiet here, so I shouldn’t complain.”

“How do you feel about Sea Elves?” I ask.

“Now that’s a leading question if I ever heard one,” the portal mage says. “We don’t get a lot of trouble with them in Cormount, obviously, but I haven’t exactly heard anything good about them. They’re a constant scourge on the coastline.”

“I think I’ve spent as much time fighting Sea Elves as anything else,” I say. “Do you think your portals could reach Pyandonea?”

The portal mage frowns thoughtfully. “I’d have to know exactly where it is and be able to visualize it. I don’t know how long I’d be able to sustain an inter-continental portal, even so.”

“The last Green Lady says she swam there to avenge her Silvenar, who was murdered by Sea Elves,” I say. “She said she’d help target it.”

“She swam there?” the portal mage says. “By Y’ffre. You’ve contacted her spirit?”

“I just had to deal with quite a lot of bullshit up at Treehenge, yes. The Worm Cult has been being irritating again. And yet I’ve still fought the Sea Elves more often than them, which is just fucking ridiculous.”

“So you want to invade Pyandonea?” the portal mage asks.

“No,” I say. “I want to deforest Pyandonea.”

He coughs in surprise. “What? That’s… Seriously?”

“Fewer ships for Sea Elves to harass our shores with,” I say. “Fewer trees in Valenwood that the Wood Orcs will need to cut down.”

The portal mage just starts laughing. “Oh, Y’ffre, that’s…” He starts laughing again. “Where did you even come up with this idea?”

“Moon sugar and a lot of focused irritation at having to constantly deal with Sea Elves,” I say. “How impractical is this?”

“It’s… well, it’s going to take a lot of magicka and resources, and I assume you’re good on the Orc lumberjacks, who I also expect would be able to defend themselves from any Sea Elves that find out and take offense. Maintaining a portal large enough to haul goods through might be difficult.”

“What if they used magic bags?” I ask.

“Exactly how much money are you planning to put into this project if you’re looking to equip Orc lumberjacks with magic bags to carry logs back in their pockets?”

“I’m really, really annoyed at Sea Elves and I have Orcs who are going to need wood. Would magic rocks help? I took over quite a lot of Ayleid ruins. Some of which had fucking Sea Elves in them.”

“Before you sink too much into it, I’ll get to Treehenge and see if I can get a portal to reach that far at all,” the portal mage says.

“So you’ll help?”

“With the rebellion taken care of, I don’t have much to do here right now and it sounds like protecting the Green in an incredibly circuitous manner would be fun. What else did I spend so much time perfecting the art of portal magic for?”