Theryn Teldras has arrived at the Hollow City speaking of some strange village or trio of villages that were in the middle of being pulled into Oblivion. She mentions that Ilara-daro is there and had remained behind to try to save them or something. I don’t know whether I’m proud of my protege that she’s trying to be a hero or be worried about her, so I settle for rushing out there to find her as quickly as possible.

Theryn leads us out to a spot some ways east of the Hollow City and across some icy pools of plasm. A fancy archway holds a very strange portal that looks like a tunnel made of swirling clouds into a pinpoint of light.

“Is… that a portal?” Eran asks uneasily.

Theryn nods. “I’d say it’s perfectly safe but I honestly have no idea how safe it is or not. I just know it didn’t immediately kill me when I went in there and came out again.”

“Let’s do this, then,” I say.

I step through the portal, followed shortly by my friends and Theryn, and emerge into someplace that definitely is not any typical part of Coldharbour. The sky is all wrong, for one thing. Above the pale haze of the horizon, the sky overhead is vivid purple speckled with bright blue stars. And the waters of Oblivion, the seas of chaotic creatia, don’t look quite like the azure plasm of Coldharbour either.

“Where in Oblivion are we?” Eran wonders.

“I don’t know,” Theryn says.

According to Theryn, there are three villages here, one of Khajiit, one of Orcs, and one of Dunmer. That doesn’t explain why so many buildings are floating in the air. I think my favorite thing about Nirn is consistent gravity.

Not far from the portal, I spot a familiar tan Khajiit with a red hair ridge. Ilara is here, and she’s fishing.

“Catch anything?” I ask.

“No fish, at any rate,” Ilara replies, turning around. “Neri! And everyone else! Good to see you all made it.”

“We’ve been worried about you,” I say.

“This one has probably missed many adventures,” Ilara says. “After scouting Coldharbour a bit, she felt that the sensible thing to do would be to stay put somewhere relatively safe and wait rather than wander off and get captured or something.”

“Sensible,” Farry says. “I’m Faraniel, by the way. I’ve been filling in… your position, I think. But your friends are insane and you’re more than welcome to it back.”

“I’d argue, but…” Eran says.

“How have you been doing, Ilara-daro?” I ask.

“Well enough,” Ilara says. “She came here and rescued a few people but could not truly solve the problems here. This one… realized this was beyond her. Even with Theryn’s help. There are too many enemies and they are too strong, and we are both built for sneakiness and not for a straight-up fight.”

“There’s no shame in knowing your limits,” I say. “Malacath knows I haven’t poked my head into every potentially dangerous place we’ve run across.”

“I hope they didn’t have anymore trouble at the Banished Cells,” Eran says.

“I’m sure they’re fine,” I say, hefting my axe. “Shall we go hit whatever is here?”

“Absolutely,” Ilara says with a toothy grin.

Also taking advantage of the relatively safe area near the portal, there’s a Khajiit worshipper of Meridia wanting to seal the tears in the veil the villages are being pulled through.

“Is there any chance we could push them back through somehow?” I wonder.

“This one does not know how.”

“Neither do I,” I say. “Last time something got yanked back to Nirn in my vicinity, I was unconscious. And also wasted on a questionable Hist sap-based mixture. Although I do know of someone who yanked an island out of the Shivering Isles, but that was a bit of a weird case and he has probably stopped glowing purple and returned to Aetherius by now.”

My seven-person group (my usual five plus Farry and Theryn) fights its way through the so-called “Village of the Lost”, which is an excessively pretentious and not to mention inaccurate description of this place, which is closer to “Three Villages We Found”.

A Skyshard was pulled into Oblivion along with one of the villages, leaving me to wonder how many more of these things have gotten swallowed up.

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As the priest closes tears (which are a lot smaller than I’d imagine something sucking entire villages out to be), we discover that each of the villages was betrayed by one of its own in increasingly foolish deals. Why is it always foolish deals? I suppose non-foolish deals don’t wind up in the ass end of Coldharbour.

The Khajiit priest is disappointed at one of his fellow Khajiit making a stupid deal even more than the stupid Orcs and stupid Dunmer. “Not that this one has anything against Orcs,” he says quickly, looking at me. “Just stupid ones.”

With the tears sealed and a bunch of Daedra beaten up, we meet up with the survivors Ilara rescued on top of a cliff. One of them has a brilliant idea to get them back to Nirn.

“I want you to die,” she says. “The cliff behind me should be the most expedient way.”

“Okay!” I say brightly.

Eran groans. “He doesn’t generally need any encouragement to hurl himself off of cliffs.”

“Might I inquire as to why this is necessary?” Merry asks. “We are capable of simply teleporting you back to Nirn. Will your sacrifice ritual affect your villages as well?”

“I’m starting to feel like grabbing the land is more important to Molag Bal than the souls,” Eran says. “Much of the Coldharbour we’ve explored was just stuff that was once on Nirn.”

“I’m sure the souls don’t hurt, either,” Gelur says. “But you’re right. The Planemeld isn’t about killing people and taking their souls. He’s just ripping land out of Nirn and stealing entire villages.”

While my friends are busy chatting about Molag Bal’s real estate jealousy, I’m already heading for the cliff and taking a nose-dive into the blue lava below. I respawn back at the entrance to the village(s). Convenient. I might have thought of where I was going to respawn before jumping off a cliff, but hey. I guess Oblivion sucked in yet another wayshrine.

My friends are less than amused that they have to cross the entire half-floating half-sunken mess of terrain themselves but seem to have expected no less of me.

“That was mildly annoying and completely predictable,” Merry says dryly.

“Did they make it out?” I ask.

Eran points silently toward a projection of a Dunmer woman that has appeared nearby. She profusely thanks me before vanishing.

“Ah, this is just the sort of madness Ilara-daro has missed,” Ilara says, whiskers twitching in amusement.

“Let’s head back to the mysterious nameless Meridian city that got flung into Coldharbour,” I say. “I’ll fill you in on the rest of the nonsense we’ve been experiencing in the meantime.”

“This one would wonder how much nonsense you could have possibly gotten into in the short time we have been in Oblivion, but she knows better.”

“Would you believe we ran into Estre again and didn’t kill her this time?” Eran asks.

“Oh, right, I think I’m going to need to have a chat with Naemon,” I say. “Before he finds out about this latest bit of nonsense from someone else. We rushed out here because Theryn mentioned you were here. She made it sound considerably more urgent than you hanging around trying to fish in the seas of Oblivion.”

“Ah… sorry,” Ilara says with a chuckle. “But Ilara-daro managed to fish up such interesting things! A boot, a skull, an entire crate of skooma…”

“Would it be stereotypical if I were to suggest that came from the Khajiit village?” Eran says. “No, no, I’m sure there just had to be plenty of Dunmer and Orc skooma addicts as well.”

“True, but honestly? It was probably the Khajiit village,” Ilara says.

I give Ilara-daro the tour of the Hollow City and summarize our adventures in Coldharbour thus far.

Ilara shakes her head in bafflement. “Why do so many people think it is a good idea to make deals with Molag Bal? If one must make deals with Daedra, there are better ones to choose.”

“There aren’t many worse ones to choose,” Eran points out. “Although that might just be because we have more experience with seeing what shit Molag Bal does than any of the others.”

Leaving my friends to unwind, I return to Nirn and attempt to locate Prince Naemon. Being able to casually hop all over the Dominion’s territories is helpful for that. It almost makes me feel sorry for any spies attempting to track my movements in a mundane manner. Today, I have been seen in Skywatch, Vulkhel Guard, Firsthold, Marbruk, Elden Root, Woodhearth, Cormount, Arenthia, and Rawl’kha, before finally locating him tucked away in an inn in Dune.

I really should have checked there first, honestly, considering that’s where he was when I last saw him. It just has felt longer than it has been. Coldharbour does that to you, when it’s not doing the opposite.

“Neri,” Naemon says blandly when he opens the door to his room and sees me standing there. “How has the Coldharbour campaign been going?” he asks, probably out of decorum rather than any specific interest.

I come inside and take off my helmet. “It’s been an interesting bit of a mess. The expedition was scattered and I’ve needed to go rescue everyone. I might as well have just gone myself. And I’ve encountered quite a lot of people who made dumb deals with Daedra and got stuck in Oblivion.”

Naemon stares at me for a long moment as he digests that. “Did you encounter Estre?”

I give a short nod.

Naemon sighs and grabs a bottle. “So that is where she wound up. She had dealings with so many Daedra that it was an open question who would wind up with her soul in the end. Normally Altmer would be looking forward to joining their family in Aetherius after they’d passed on. But I am not spending my afterlife in Oblivion just because my wife made poor life choices.”

“Well, now you don’t need to die to see her again,” I say. “If you’re so inclined.”

“You didn’t kill her again?”

I shake my head. “I didn’t see the point.”

Naemon does not sip fine wine. Naemon takes an undignified guzzle of some unidentifiable Khajiit moonshine in a poorly-labeled bottle.

“I don’t know,” Naemon says. “There are so many things I wished to say to her, given the opportunity. But I don’t know where I’d even begin or which of them I’d actually want to say.”

“Think about it,” I say. “We found a sort of safe haven, a city Meridia shoved into Coldharbour to use as a staging ground against him because Meridia really hates Molag Bal for some perfectly understandable reason. I made her Canonreeve because the expedition really wasn’t set up for the logistics of running a city.”

I even know what a Canonreeve is now!

Naemon nods. “A good use of her skills. That should give her enough busywork to keep her out of trouble. And if she decides to worship Meridia after all that, at least that’s a less objectionable Daedric Prince, I suppose. Still not one whose realm I wish to spend eternity in. She cared more about being Queen than she ever cared about me.”