We’re starting our journey into Reaper’s March by teleporting to the wayshrine at Baandari Trading Post, the closest one I have to the fort Lord Ghareshi-ri pointed me to. Before I leave, though, someone has a message for me.

“I have that name for you,” says the captain of the Gold Coast Mercenaries whose name I forgot.

“Okay, great,” I say, pulling out my list of names.

“Faltonia Lerus, in Anvil,” she says.

I write it down, and have her spell it out for me. “Alright, thank you. I’ll get to that once I’ve sorted out a crisis in Reaper’s March.”

“You’re not just going to hire someone to assassinate her?”

“The way I see it, why hire an assassin when you can murder someone yourself?” I say. “Besides. I want her to know exactly how annoyed I am at her for potentially disrupting my Orcs’ moon sugar supply lines.”

Although come to think, assassins would be quite useful for those situations where I’m trying to kill one person and not everyone in their general vicinity. Something to think about.

The east gate leading out from Baandari Trading Post opens into the region of Valenwood known as Reaper’s March. Just on the other side, I spot a cart with a book laying on it. Ancient Scrolls of the Dwemer IV, another questionable offering from Marobar Sul. (Summary: It’s really just a bad joke.) This is an auspicious start.

We travel down the path, and after some time, come upon a wayshrine, which I light. A Dunmer man with a merchant cart full of huge blue crystals sits next to it. He is not selling the blue crystals. He also doesn’t seem particularly concerned that the town he’s next to, Vinedusk Village, has been under attack.

“Alright, Jingles, into the bag,” I say. “War is no place for a monkey.”

Jingles hops in and vanishes. He doesn’t really seem to mind riding in the bag when things get too dangerous. He probably thinks it’s a neat trick to hide in there.

A Bosmer scout by the name of Mengaer welcomes us and tells us about how they’ve been attacked by Colovians, and she’s about as cheerful about that as I would be. They’re Vinedusk Rangers, relishing a fight, and the scout sends us to speak with a captain up the big tree if we want to lend a hand. I’m sure whatever is happening with the Mane isn’t so urgent that we should walk right past an invasion without pausing to smack a few Colovians.

Captain Odreth tells us about some plan for a counterattack which involves alchemical fire and violence. They don’t seem overly concerned about the Green Pact, either.

“Ooooh, alchemical fire!” I exclaim. “My favorite!”

“I was going to warn you that Gloo is odd, but it seems you’ll be in good company,” the captain says with a touch of amusement.

“Your alchemical specialist is named Gloo?”

“Glooredel, yes,” the captain says.

“Let’s go meet Gloo!” I say cheerfully. “That’s the best way to get out of a sticky situation!”

The captain looks aside to my friends. “Is he quite alright?”

“He might be high again,” Eran says with a shrug. “It’s fine. At any rate, we just killed an asshole necromancer and we’re on our way to investigate some other shit, but he’s hardly going to resist a detour that involves hitting things and setting things on fire.”

“I am, in fact, not high, just excited!” I reply.

Gloo’s lab is up at the top of a tree-pod ‘apartment’ complex, and I find her guts-deep in a fire shalk when I step inside. She would probably not offer her shalk-gut-covered hand to shake with a king, but nobody ever asks kings to do anything fun.

“How well do the shalk guts work?” I ask. “I usually use kindlepitch and fire salts.”

“Quite well!” Gloo says. “Although they’re rather more difficult to store. My mixture uses shalk guts and fire salts. You get to do the exciting part!”

“Fuck yes, I love you guys,” I say.

I hand my pack to Eran first because it’s difficult to retrieve things from burning buildings. Figuring out how to keep that with me when I die stupidly has not been a very high priority. I go through and put the mixture into urns linked into the root system from each tree-pod house while my friends follow along wiping out invaders and helping the villagers. The sap burns beautifully and I find myself giggling at the sight of it.

(I wonder what it would be like to have my soul back. How much of… how I am… is because of spending an era and a half in Coldharbour, and how much of it is just because of being separated from my soul for so long? People like Vastarie who know about such things tell me that souls are important. I guess if our ridiculous venture works, I’ll find out.)

I meet up with Gloo again to set the final ignition, and she’s more than happy to let me do the dangerous part while standing well out of the way of the resulting blast. Fire erupts out of the urn and heat engulfs me, I grin madly and don’t even bother to try to stand back or get out of the way.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

I find myself at the wayshrine, and… I’m not naked. Armor? Intact. Ring? Still on. Wobbly? Still in my hand. What changed? Was it just getting the ring, or whatever Malacath did? Whatever it was, it’s absolutely fantastic and I’m even more gleeful as I practically skip back into the village.

The flames are beautiful. Devastation and corpses surround me. I feel alive, like I could watch the entire world burn and only cackle in glee, a force of destruction sweeping across the land leaving only ashes in my wake.

I shake myself out of those thoughts. Not a good line of thinking. I go to meet up with the captain and retrieve my belongings from Eran.

“I’m not entirely sure how burning down the village helped with anything,” Eran says. “But we sure did burn that village down good.”

“Eran!” I exclaim, taking my bag back. “I’m not naked!”

“Congratulations,” Eran says flatly. “I really hope this doesn’t encourage you to do more reckless shit but I just know that it will.”

The captain has a plan for a counterattack using the tunnels in the Ayleid ruins beneath the village, because they deliberately built their village on top of an Ayleid ruin for that.

The sergeant gives a quick inspiring speech to the rangers in the tunnel. I grab more of the burny stuff on the way by. They tell me we’re going to be burning more stuff, and it’s presumably going to be the Colovians’ camp this time.

Dear fucking gods, the Colovians are storing kindlepitch in this tunnel. WHY are the Colovians storing kindlepitch in this tunnel? I can’t stop laughing when the sergeant mentions it. They’re trying to get a captured soldier to tell them where the enemy commander is and suggest I set the kindlepitch on fire to convince her. Even my friends are looking a little nervous about this.

Have I mentioned yet that I love the Vinedusk Rangers? These n’wahs are crazy like me. Once they have the information on the enemy commander (Festius), they send me up top to cause chaos in the Colovian camp and set everything on fire.

For some reason, the Colovians have a book titled The Homilies of the Blessed Almalexia. Normally, I would be grabbing an interesting-looking book to take back to Sahira-daro’s library, but you know what? Fuck this. Some books do not deserve to be preserved. I slather Ayem’s stupid book in alchemical admixture and blow it up too along with the tents it’s in front of.

Around me, my friends are mostly sticking to fighting the Colovian soldiers and healing the Vinedusk Rangers. It’s so nice of them to let me do the fun part. Most of them haven’t really gotten firmly into feeling the beauty of fire. My favorite thing about fire is that it’s hot in the very way Coldharbour is not. They’ll never understand how good it is to be able to feel heat.

The guy in charge of the Colovian force is hiding inside another section of the Ayleid ruin, so we go in and kill him and put an end to this particular incursion. It’s nice to not have to bother asking if they’re sure they want to mess with me since they attacked the Bosmer village first.

In the room beyond the one the enemy commander was in, the Rangers have been keeping the bones of their ancestor. From what I can tell, they move him around every time they burn down their own village and relocate. Some of the Rangers come in and speak with the ghost that appears but I can’t help but frown at it.

“Take care with that,” I say. “My friends and I killed the leader of the Worm Cult, but I doubt all of the idiots he inspired will have gotten the memo about it. You probably don’t want to have to fight your reanimated ancestors.”

“Yeah… it’s a good thing you were ambushed by Colovians and not necromancers,” Eran says.

“It’s embarrassing enough that Colovians were able to take us by surprise.”

“Alright, is that it for the invaders?” I ask. “I’d love to stay for the barbecue, but there’s something weird that needs to be solved somewhere over that-a-way.”

The Vinedusk Rangers express gratitude and see us on our way away from their smoldering village.

“I appreciate the amount of focus on actually urgent things you have been managing,” Eran says. “Well done.”

“Is this more urgent than negotiating on behalf of the Orcs who trusted me to negotiate for them?”

“I’m sure they can handle the rest themselves,” Eran says. “The biggest hurdle was in convincing them to trust Queen Ayrenn if not the rest of the Altmer.”

“It’s… strange,” I say. “In a way, I’m just glad to be back out in the field. I might be good at that sort of thing, but I’d rather be tackling problems head-on. I just realize that I can’t exactly win a war by myself unless they obligingly come at me two at a time through a doorway.”

“Have you thought about how you might handle… you know?” Eran asks gently.

“Oh, yes,” I say. “I been delving nose-deep into mythology in hopes of finding some ideas. And I have ideas. They’re mostly just grasping at straws, though. I need to do more research and I don’t even know what the fuck exactly they did to themselves. Stupid weird magic.”

“Still, I think the addition of the Wood Orcs could make a significant difference up until the point when it’s necessary to deal with them,” Eran says. “I don’t know how much they might intervene in an invasion of Morrowind itself. I’ve heard rumor that they repelled the Akaviri invasion personally when it went too far.”

I sigh and nod. “It’s a long-term problem, to be sure. I’m laying groundwork but it’s all going to topple if they’re willing and able to kick it over. At least I can focus on the immediate crises. There’s enough problems going on that every idiot I smack still helps in some way, even indirectly.”

“Killing… ahem, ‘Manny the Worm’, was definitely something that needed doing regardless of how the war might go,” Eran says. “As is stopping the Dark Anchors.”

“Burning down Coldharbour in searing hot flames would be glorious if possible,” I say. “It was too much to hope for Manny’s death to have stopped the Planemeld. Fucking Dark Anchors are still dropping.”

“I’m sure the others will figure out something and point you toward something that can be solved by hitting it repeatedly,” Eran says with forced confidence.

I chuckle. “You don’t have enough faith in them not to hedge your assurances, either.”

“Honestly, I have no idea how they managed to accomplish anything,” Eran says. “I can’t imagine our group working together nearly so badly. I mean, for one thing, any of us would have noticed Mannimarco was evil. And Lyris and Sai can’t stop bickering with Abnur even when he has a point. And seriously, hiding things from a necromancer in tombs, what the fuck was that? Their hearts are in the right place but their decision-making skills leave something to question.”

“Yeeeeah, I really hope Vastarie can be the voice of reason with them dealing with the amulet of doom.”

“Sorry to bring up the amulet of doom again,” Eran says.

I shake my head. “Shit’s not gonna go away just because I’d rather not have to deal with it, sadly.”

“You seem to have been doing better lately,” Eran says. “Self-immolation aside.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew what had been going on in my head.”

“Maybe you could even figure out how to turn that light power of yours into a shield so you can set things on fire without killing yourself?” Eran suggests. “Crazy thought and all, I know.”

As it turns out, deciding to follow a god of vengeance has done nothing to quell my bloodlust. Maybe if I’d decided to worship one of the Aedra instead. Like Mara. Somehow, I can’t picture myself as a priest of Mara.