There’s quite a lot of Imperial ruins in this part of Valenwood, much more than just Fort Grimwatch. A section of wall here, a curve of part of a tower there. The wayshrine I come upon and light, however, is of the type typically seen in Valenwood, with the worn stacked stones with swirly green lines on them.

A burned village, and one that came pre-burned and not one that I was responsible for. I spot a Skyshard up in one of the scorched husks of tree-pods. Was this perhaps the last Vinedusk Village? They did seem pretty eager to burn down their own homes for some reason.

An old Imperial mansion (at least I think it’s old but it’s not in ruins so it might be relatively new) at the top of a hill overlooks the countryside, and I climb up to get a good look at the surrounding countryside and not just because I wondered who lives there and whether it’s full of things that need hitting.

“So,” Eran says. “We’re going to investigate the mansion?”

“Yep!” I say. “There might be… cultists inside, or weird shadow things.”

“Or it might just be an inn,” Merry says tiredly. “If it is, let’s get inside and get lunch because it’s starting to rain.”

We go inside. It is not an inn. Or at least, not the sort of inn that anyone wants to stay at, but the sort of inn that’s the setting of various murder and horror stories. There’s the copious amounts of candles, obviously enchanted to remain at exactly the same illumination that’s just enough to keep you from stubbing your toe but dark enough to look ominous. And then there’s the pile of books with red glowing Daedric O’s on the cover. Those are interesting too.

“So…” Eran eyes the books. “Cultists?”

“Ilara-daro found a letter,” Ilara says, holding it aloft. “It is from one Javad Tharn, perhaps a relative of Abnur, berating someone named Graccus for not destabilizing the Dominion properly.”

“Alright, so there’s probably someone here named Graccus, who is probably a cultist and doing something bad,” I say.

“Huzzah for poking our heads into absolutely every cave, ruin, and vaguely interesting-looking building that we run across…” Eran says. “I’d complain about time lost on searching for the Mane and doing whatever we were supposed to do with the ‘Moon Hallowed’ thing, but it looks like this is probably something that needs doing anyway.”

A search of the mansion reveals that Graccus’ particular brand of insanity is Hermaeus Mora, and we find a key to the cellar and hints that there’s probably something needing to be hit down there.

The cellar begins normally enough, with barrels and sacks full of foodstuffs. A less focused adventurer would be shoving them into their magic bag, but not me. I would never stop to toss a bag of flour that costs a couple of coins into my bag and fill it up with garbage.

Further down the stairs, a Bosmer woman has been chained to a post. She introduces herself as Mel, a spinner formerly of the village that Graccus burned down to have a mansion built on the spot. She wants us to find some personal items belonging to the late villagers while we’re exploring the tunnels.

Now, breaking into a Colovian lord’s manor and slaughtering his servants while they’re minding their own business would be very rude, so it gives me great pleasure that there are no innocent servants here, just cultists, assassins, and lunatics who all attack us on sight. Or enemy soldiers who are probably also cultists. I don’t stop to get everyone’s opinion on Daedra or the Dominion.

After slaughtering a knot of assholes, I accidentally touch a book that summons a tentacled specter of Hermaeus Mora. I freeze, but he doesn’t seem to recognize me.

“Ah, an Orc,” the tentacled eyeball blob says. Very. Very. Slowly. “Perhaps a more well-read one than many of your kind.”

“Sorry, wrong book,” I say. “Excuse me, Lord Mora, but I need to kill these guys who are casting ice spells at me.”

Hermaeus Mora, undeterred, continues talking very slowly while I do that. I catch the names “Graccus” and “Oghma Whateverum”. Mora’s supposedly amazing book with the secrets of the universe or something in it. Apparently he thinks the random Orc who just bumped a book would be a better recipient of it than the Colovian fuckup who has his sights on it right now. But really, he’s a Daedra. They’re not ones who go “eh, books aren’t for stinky Orcs”.

The sprawling, crumbling tunnels seem unlikely to have been a recent construction, so perhaps the Bosmer built their village on Imperial ruins in the first place. Seems likely, given how many ruins we’ve already run across in the area. I wonder if there’s any Khajiit ruins underneath this one?

And then we come to the drop. It’s impossible to see how far down it goes.

“I wonder what’s down there…” I muse aloud.

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

Eran sighs. “Well, I’m not jumping down there. You are welcome to do so if you want and we’ll meet you back at the wayshrine. You’re the only one of us who can survive if it’s too far a drop.”

“Okay, I’m going to jump down deliberately rather than slip and fall and land on my head or something,” I say. “See you soon.”

I hop into the hole and fall. And fall. And keep falling. Floor after floor of what might have once been mines or catacombs or tunnels fly past me. Finally, after what feels like several minutes airborne, I splash down into deep water. (It’s a good thing that the water on Nirn is so soft.)

A massive natural cavern surrounds me, although the presence of an Ayleid-style sconce with a blue glowing rock indicates that those assholes probably once had their fingers in the vicinity. Probably Hermaeus Mora worshipping Ayleids. I find a Skyshard behind a moderately large Daedroth after sending it back to Oblivion.

While the humans in the upper levels could plausibly be Imperial soldiers, the ones down in these tunnels are quite obviously cultists with undead minions. I fight my way past them, and past a frozen tunnel full of frost atronachs.

The tunnels open up to a broad cavern with a man floating in a column of sinister red light waving his hands about in the manner of “I’m an evil cultist and am in the middle of doing something evil, please hit me!” He’s either Graccus or he’s some other asshole who needs to be hit repeatedly, so I charge up and attack.

I’m… glad, very glad, so very glad that I didn’t bring the others here. Hermaeus Mora is watching the entire fight, just hovering there staring at us with too many eyes. Shadowy tentacles grope at the air around us, writhing and and intangible to the body but the touch of each one is quite tangible to the mind. Waves of pain and disorientation pulse through me, but Graccus isn’t spared the treatment either. Both I and my opponent are frequently left clutching our heads in pain, unable to fight for several long seconds. Despite Mora making the fight more “interesting” with the distractions, I eventually prevail.

Hermaeus Mora is talking again, but I’m not really paying attention. He’s hard to listen to, and in any case, I’m busy exhaustedly healing myself. Sadly, Restoring Light doesn’t do anything about mental damage or I’d have been a lot saner by now. I have a headache like I’d just gone on a drinking binge with Sanguine from one end of Tamriel to the other, and my healing magic is doing nothing about it. Ugh, I’ll need to see if Gelur can do anything, or I’ll just try “treating” it with moon sugar.

I take a closer look around at my surroundings while I rest for a few. Ayleid ruins fill this cavern, but they look like someone dropped a puzzle box down a hole and shattered it to pieces. Mora is saying something about “a city twice-forgotten”. So, this is a Colovian mansion on top of a ruined Bosmer village on top of an Imperial ruin on top of an Ayleid ruin. Tamriel is just ruins all the way down.

Oh, and Mora doesn’t give me the Oghma. I didn’t want it anyway. He leaves behind a different book on the altar, which I shove into my pack and pointedly don’t look at. I’ll give it to Sahira-daro later. (I’d pointedly not touch it with my bare hands, but I’m already wearing leather gloves anyway. I mean, it’s no wonder people keep mistaking me for an Orc when they can’t even see that my skin is bronze and I don’t have tusks.)

I look for a way out of here, wondering if I’m just going to have to teleport back to the wayshrine, but I assume that Graccus had some way in and out of the ruins. Unless he just used levitation spells. He was levitating there, even if it was just the usual pointless two feet off the ground sort of levitation. Well, doesn’t hurt to look, anyway, because otherwise this is going to be a long climb. Another side tunnel leads up to a door, which I head out through.

I emerge, eventually, at an exit on a cliff high above the mansion, across the river. It’s quite a nice view but I have no idea how I wound up so high after falling so far. Maybe my mind is just still blurry from being tentacle mindfucked. I jump off into the river below and swim awkwardly across to the dock.

Spinner Mel is on the dock, and helps me out of the water where I dry off with a few quick fire spells that do not set me on fire. I sit down to rest for a bit and rub my head. The spinner doesn’t have any magic that helps.

My friends emerge from the mansion shortly afterward, with the personal articles the spinner had requested, which they turn over to her. By that point, my head is starting to clear, but it’s still irritating how he could do that to me like that. I’m so not touching that book he left me without Sahira-daro present. I do value whatever is left of my mind.

“How did it go?” I ask.

“Took out the trash, mostly,” Eran says. “Or at least buried it. You?”

“Killed a bad guy, got mindfucked by a tentacle god, took a swim,” I say.

“Are you alright?” Gelur asks, hitting me with some healing magic.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say, popping some moon sugar candy in my mouth. “Oh! And I got a book I don’t want to touch!”

“So, pretty normal,” Eran says. “Shall we continue? I don’t think this would be much of an inn to stay at for the night. Little bit creepy for that. We still have some time to make more progress before dark.”

“Let’s get to the wayshrine,” I say. “I want to get over to Marbruk and see if Sahira-daro is in.”

“Let’s go see your book-wife,” Ilara teases lightly.

“Don’t give her any ideas,” I say with a chuckle.

Fortunately, Sahira-daro is currently at Cliffshade Library and is happy to see us. Or at least to see me and Ilara, since the others decided to wander off rather than go hang out with the tentacle worshipper. She briefly goes over what she’s been doing with helping out with that ruin full of floaty books and crazy people over near Woodhearth, and I fill her in on what I ran into in that weird mansion in Reaper’s March.

“When we met on Khenarthi’s Roost, this one did not anticipate all the manner of things you might encounter,” Sahira says. “And to have spoken with the God of Forbidden Knowledge more than once without deliberately seeking him out is… amusing, to say the least. May I see the book?”

“You may keep the book, too,” I say, gingerly pulling it out of my bag and quickly dropping it on the table.

“Discourse Amaranthine,” Sahira-daro says, reading the cover.

“At least this one probably won’t eat you?” I say. “Hopefully. Make of it what you will.”

“This one will bear that in mind.”

“Have fun with that,” I say. “Now I have to go stop the corrupted Mane from overrunning Reaper’s March with droma-thra or whatever they were.”

“… that seems important, yes,” Sahira says, blinking. “This one believes she is glad to be here and not there.”