There’s more bandits on the way to Rawl’kha. At this rate, it’s easier to figure out which way to go just by following the line of bandit camps.

Finally, we arrive. Rawl’kha. A magnificent little town I could see myself spending a lot of time and coin in. It even has a wayshrine right next to the bank and market district.

There’s a Khajiit priestess who wants help with some bandits who stole some artifacts or something. I agree before even getting much in the way of details, and get some locations noted on my map.

The bard in the inn is singing that damned “Red Diamond” song and I wind up accidentally disrupting his tune with my own ambiance. Unfortunately, the tune that comes up in my head is the theme that plays whenever I think about the Heart of Lorkhan. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. The bard is looking very confused, glancing about to try to see who the other bard in the room is and where the drums came from, while all the Khajiit in the room instantly have their tails in a twist.

Oblivious to the musical mishaps, a mer tries to rope me into some sort of card game, but I decline and turn to leave the inn as I make a concerted effort to cease my maddening concert, but then pause and decide to just use my words instead of freaking out over a stupid song.

“’Scuse me,” I say to the Dunmer bard. “Could you please play anything but that damned song? I’ll pay. I will, in fact, pay you to never play that damned song again. Unless someone else specifically pays you to, I guess. Hmm. Actually. Do you write songs?”

“I could slap something together, I suppose,” he says. “What subject did you have in mind, muthsera?”

“The glorious defeat of Manny the Worm,” I say. “I’ll tell you the details if you can do it.”

“I could put it to the tune of an old Nord drinking song,” the Dunmer bard suggests. “The locals won’t know the difference. And I’m sure they’d be happy to drink to that.”

I find Kuna’s office and let her know what happened in her delve. The only thing she’s happy about is that the trolls have already been taken care of, saving her the trouble of hiring sellswords to clear the mine. There’s a copy of The Red Book of Riddles in her office, which I make disappear when she’s not looking. (Though once I read it, I’m not sure why I bothered. It’s baffling. And terrible.)

Outside the temple, a Bosmer by the name of Rollin is lamenting some relics that Telenger was letting him study that have gone missing. Merry stiffens at the mention of Telenger’s name.

“Neri,” Eran says. “We can help out this guy while you continue on to the temple.”

“Right, yeah,” I say. “Hopefully people haven’t been waiting for me long.”

It seems half the party that was at Dra’bul portalled to Rawl’kha in the meantime, plus the ex-Mane who is here now. Queen Ayrenn, the Silvenar, and the Green Lady are here, along with their entourages. Razum-dar and Cariel have also made it here ahead of me. It’s not like I took that many detours. They’re clearly just taking full advantage of having a portal mage on hand. I give them a brief update on what happened in Greenhill, and entirely skip over the fact that I took the time out to become Grand Champion of the Thizzrini Arena just because it was on the way. I’m sure they’ll hear about it soon enough.

The problem with Khali and Shazah is that the Mane is born during an eclipse, and this time, twins were born. Only one of them can become the Mane, and it will be up to me to decide which one. I wonder aloud what happens to kittens born during an eclipse who don’t wind up becoming the Mane and am treated to the start of a history lesson about the Forgotten Manes before somebody politely puts in a reminder that we’re trying to get a ritual done here.

A priestess tells me that I need to guide them on a trial path, and we all need to drink a cup of moon sugar elixir, which is probably even more potent than normal moon sugar. (I’d ask for their recipe but they’d probably be offended about their sacred whatever. I have nothing but respect for a culture that offers moon sugar.)

The moon sugar elixir is actually quite delicious and tingles on the way down even as it clouds my vision with purple fog and stars. It’s fizzy, like a Dwemer fizzy drink. The one they put bubbles in but it was actually bitter as fuck, this stuff is like that except mixed with a mana potion and moon sugar syrup so potent I’m already in space.

I head off into Shazah’s vision quest first. By which I mean we go through a door into another part of the temple where we can hallucinate vividly without it disturbing the very important people in the next room, who are now standing around watching nothing while waiting for us to get back. I saw those Dominion marines standing at attention and wonder how long they were standing at attention while I was fucking around town. (I’m kind of hoping that they just had someone waiting for me to show up and portaled in when I was spotted near town. The Queen, Silvenar, and Green Lady have got to have better things to do than stand around waiting while I meander slowly across Valenwood.)

“This one hates to admit it, but that elixir was actually rather tasty,” Shazah says with a quirk of her lip.

“Yeah,” I say. “I wonder if I could make something that tastes similar to that but doesn’t send you to the moons.”

“You could sell it.”

Shazah’s visions that plague her are visions of the plague that killed her father. I have to wonder how much my presence here is affecting the visions, seeing as I wind up having to fight almost everything that her hallucinations dream up. (Except her dad. He just does the hovering transparent ghost thing, gives words of wisdom, and disappears. Thanks, ghost dad!)

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I’m not sure if Shazah was supposed to be learning a lesson from all this, perhaps a lesson in “if you need something horribly killed, call in Neri” if nothing else. I’m not even terribly sure what’s happening beyond fighting zombies. (The Knahaten flu does not actually create zombies. It probably would have been easier to stop if it could be battled in battle.)

We complete Shazah’s vision quest successfully(?) and return to the main room of the temple. I make the mistake of glancing over to the congregation of important people while still on the vision elixir. Everyone is simultaneously there and somewhere else, and surrounded by auras of color. Khali touches my arm and directs me into another room for her quest.

“Hah! It might be nice to stare at all the pretty colors until the sugar wears off but we have a ritual to do!” Khali says. “Also Khali was totally staring at the pretty colors while you and Shazah were in her ritual.”

I could easily hear either Khali or Shazah speaking that sentence. I look at Khali, and see for a moment two vague Khajiit shapes standing behind her, one dark and one light.

Looking at the dark shape, a beat began to thump in my head. The heartbeat of the Doom Drum.

“Do you hear that?” Khali asks, ears shooting up in alarm.

“The heartbeat?” I say quietly. “I’ve got to make it stop.”

I forcefully stop the drumbeat and blast out something heroic to drown it out.

“Hearing the heartbeat of Lorkhaj is not a good sign,” Khali says, scowling.

“I’ve been… hearing it for a while,” I say. “I have a gift that lets me cause music to play in the air around me. Lately, it has been… getting harder to control. The Doom Drum keeps slipping out. It’s… disconcerting.”

“You should speak with a priestess about it,” Khali says seriously. “Shazah would know. She spent more time than Khali studying that sort of thing. Come. Let us do Khali’s trial.”

Khali’s visions are of the Colovians that killed her mother. Once again, this mostly entails me slaughtering a bunch of hallucinatory Colovians because apparently anything I’m ever involved with ends in violence. Again, I’m not terribly sure what Khali might be learning from this all, but whatever. The ritual is complete, and we head back outside and for fuck’s sake is everyone still standing there? Just waiting for us? Couldn’t they sit down or something? Some of the Khajiit are more sensibly kneeling on pillows but every Altmer in the room is still standing up.

Once the ritual is complete, I raise a hand to interrupt the priestess. “Priestess, we need to speak in private. Just you and me and the two candidates. Please.”

“Of course, Hallowed,” the priestess says, since every Khajiit in Reaper’s March suddenly forgot my name and refuses to call me anything other than the Moon Hallowed. (Except Ilara and Raz, of course, who continue to call me “the bloodthirsty lunatic with the battle axe”, which is extra funny since I’m pretty sure that still amounts to the same thing. Masser and Secunda are lunar axes of steel and blood, after all.)

I find myself in another room, blinking. “Uh… sorry, I’m still quite high.”

“Quite alright,” the priestess says with a faint smirk. “The effects of the elixir should be wearing off shortly. What did you wish to speak about? Did something come up during the ritual?”

“Sort of,” I say. “This is going to take some explaining a bit of background.”

“Go ahead,” the priestess says. “Take your time.”

“Okay, so, a while back, during a job I was doing for the Mages Guild that required visiting the Shivering Isles because I was the only one they could find that was crazy enough to take the job, I wound up with a gift that makes music play. Like, a metaphysical sort of gift. Usually it just plays just in my own head, because if people wind up mad from spending too much time in the Shivering Isles, at least hearing music in my head is a usually benign sort of madness, but I can make it play audibly to those around me if I want to.”

“Mm, yes, Oblivion rarely leaves one untouched,” the priestess says patiently. “How does this relate to the trials?”

I take a deep breath. “When I looked at Khali, I saw two Khajiit standing behind her, one made of light and one made of swirling shadows like the one I saw come out of the old Mane. I only saw them for a moment, but when I looked at the dark one, I heard the heartbeat of the Doom Drum and not just in my head. I stopped it as soon as I could but Khali was alarmed and told me to talk to you. I am spending half my attention consciously suppressing it just to be able to have this conversation.”

The priestess frowns deeply. “Khali was right to be alarmed. It is said that the dro-m’Athra are created when a Khajiit loses themselves to the heartbeat of Lorkhaj so that they no longer hear their own, and dance only to the drums of darkness. Bent Cats, we call them.”

“That’s so much easier of a name to say than… anyway,” I say. “This isn’t the first time I’ve heard it, but I’ve been hearing it more and more lately. Does that mean I could become a … Bent Mer?”

She shakes her head. “Only Khajiit can become dro-m’Athra, but there may be danger to any Khajiit around you if you fail to suppress your gift. A gift that becomes a curse when twisted to darkness. A sad thing. Perhaps one that could be turned to a better purpose, no? This one can teach you a song that you may be able to play that might protect Khajiit from being twisted into dro-m’Athra.”

“That could be useful,” I say, perking up.

“It is dangerous to play, but under the circumstances you may consider it to be worth the risk,” the priestess says. “The dro-m’Athra will try to kill you for it.”

“They’re already trying to kill me, so that doesn’t make much difference,” I say. “Please teach me.”

The priestess teaches me the “Chase Away” song, and then tells me that the moons told her I should go to Moonmont next, because the Dark Mane is there and I need to hit him until he stops being a problem. Okay, she doesn’t put it quite like that, but that’s my takeaway from this. She also mentions some sort of golden claw that I might find in a monastery named Do’Krin which might help in some way if I retrieve it.

I’m betting both Moonmont and this monastery are full of mathra, because that’s just the way these things go. Still, I already feel a little better just for knowing that song. Lorkha(n/j)’s heartbeat might not affect me in the same way as it does the Khajiit, but it’s still disturbing to hear.

It’s pouring outside by the time I leave the temple and look around for my friends. (The priestess does make me and the candidates wait until we are no longer high as fuck before letting us leave the temple.) I hope my friends haven’t run into too much trouble.

While I’d been busy having vision quests, they were delivering meat pies and catching wisps. They didn’t wind up having to kill anything, so I’m not too disappointed for having missed it. I thank them for running off and doing the compulsive errand I would have been doing and leaving every important person in the Dominion waiting. (Look, I didn’t know they were all there! Why were they all there?)

“There was also a claw necklace had been sold to a merchant named Atrius,” Eran says, politely ignoring my rambling. “He’s already left town, heading south.”

“We can keep an eye out for him when we leave town,” I say. “Or his remains, if the item was cursed or just bad luck or something.”

“Where are we heading now?” Eran asks.

“The priestess wants me to go to someplace called Moonmont, which is south of here, and I don’t terribly want to do it so I’m just going to procrastinate by solving every problem between here and there. Most of which are going to turn out to be important to solve anyway.”

“So, same as usual, then,” Eran says.

“At least the dro-m’Athra are flammable,” Merry says. “And likely everywhere.”