I might just need to break down and buy a horse (I can probably afford a horse now) and learn how to ride the stupid thing. While I feel like I could walk anywhere at an easy pace, that’s not necessarily useful if I’m in a hurry to get somewhere. And even if I could find a guar to ride out here, a perfectly ordinary Altmer might be noteworthy and attract unwanted attention.

Am I in so much of a hurry that I can’t stop and pick alchemical ingredients? Probably. I’m sure Raz’s runner got to Tanzelwil before I crashed last night. (Would Queen Ayrenn even be at Tanzelwil yet?) It’s too bad whatever was left of that glow juice got washed into the sea by the Maormer’s storm atronach. I wish I’d had some when I came across Teldur. While I don’t think I could have saved him had I gotten there sooner, maybe a potion could have. I should either stock up or learn to make my own.

I spot a wayshrine from the road, and go over to light it. Laying on a bench nearby, someone has left a scroll about the Dwemer. I sit in the morning sunlight reading for a few minutes before reminding myself that there are places I need to be and things I need to be doing, so I shove it in my pack and get going again. It sounds like it’s pretty clearly fictional, anyway, and written by someone who hadn’t the faintest clue about the Dwemer. I can read inaccurate historical fiction on my own time. (Why would someone put bad fiction on a scroll, anyway?)

Note to self: Angry letters to publishers regarding inaccurate depictions of the Dwemer would probably not be good for avoiding attention, either.

I pull out the map of Auridon I’d acquired in Silsailen and try to figure out where I am. Would it kill these high elves to put up some signposts? Also, this map doesn’t mark wayshrines, which are kind of more important to me than most of the landmarks it does note, so I proceed to deface the map by adding in wayshrines. This wayshrine appears to be next to a bridge by a crossroads near a town called Phaer.

As I’m poring over the map to determine which way to go from here, an Altmer woman with a white horse comes down the road from Phaer. I greet her, and she warns me to stay away from Phaer because there’s a plague. So I proceed to do the most sensible thing to do when warned to stay away from someplace because of a plague: I head for Phaer.

A plague is not something that I can use an axe to deal with. But if a necromancer, cultists, or racist bandits somehow started it deliberately, I’d be able to hit them. Might as well stop and investigate, since it doesn’t seem too far out of my way. I’m sure the Queen will understand.

The town of Phaer is full of agitated Altmer, and I piece together the situation from speaking with a few of the townspeople. The situation here has been going on for about a week, and a number of the sick have been quarantined inside an old mine. One woman thinks contact with mangy Khajiit and poxy Bosmer was responsible for spreading the plague here, but another thinks there’s something fishy about the entire situation in general.

One man is complaining about, “Why isn’t our new Queen doing something about this plague? This never would have happened in the old days!”

I clear my throat. “Actually, Queen Ayrenn did send me to investigate the plague.” Technically true, if in a non-specific manner.

“Oh,” he says. “Well, good! I hope you can get this cleared up in due order, then.”

Okay, so I’m not much of a healer, and while I do know how to make a healing potion, that’s for wounds; I don’t know how to make one that cures disease.

An alchemist by the name of Hendil (I write this down) has been tending to the sick and distributing a salve, and is currently in an old barn with a number of people groaning on pallets and a bunch of alchemy equipment in the back. Why a salve? I’d have expected a potion. Is this disease a rash?

At any rate, when I speak to him, he informs me that he’s out of salloweed, one of the main ingredients in the salve, and asks me if I can go collect some for him. I have to press him a moment to describe the stuff for me since I don’t know what it even looks like and he’s so sleep-deprived that he forgot that detail.

Once out of sight, I cross-reference this with my alchemy notes. I probably threw this stuff into a cauldron at some point to see what happened. Large, spiky red plant? That might be it. My notes indicate this made me numb and drowsy when I was being silly enough to drink my own questionable potions to see what they did. (There are times that being basically immortal makes you a tad reckless.)

I run across another scroll while collecting plants and as I’m glancing at it, I promptly get attacked by a woman yelling “BLEH!” What the fuck? If she’s the one who has been leaving questionable literature everywhere, she seems a bit deranged to be angry about it now. In fact, she seems sick and out of her mind. After dealing with her violently (having no better way to deal with her), I take a more cautious look around the area. There’s a number of others milling about the area in a zombie-like state, whom I avoid as I collect some more plants for Hendil.

His flat response to my informing him about the overly-aggressive diseased people in the fields raises my suspicions a little. What is going on here? The alchemist here says he’s making ‘an aloe’, but I thought aloe was a kind of plant, not a salve? Weird. In any case, he tells me he’ll send mercenaries to ‘treat’ the sick farmhands (really? I could have done that myself) and asks me to distribute this batch to some townspeople who are ‘the next victims on the list’. (What is going on here!?)

Maybe I could at least feel him out for being a racist. “Do you know where the plague came from? One of the townspeople thought it came from Bosmer or Khajiit. Do you think that’s possible?”

Hendil seems a bit caught off-guard by the question. “I—I suppose that’s possible. My son was the first victim. He may have had contact with outsiders for that.” He hands me a jar. “Here’s the latest batch.”

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That was a lack of racist rant, at any rate. I toss the jars of salve in my pack and wish I had a reputable alchemist I could ask about analyzing this recipe. Someone I can trust. Hmm, but maybe I do, in a roundabout way. Hendil probably keeps alchemy notes or journals locked up in his home. I feel like there’s way too many plants and possible interactions thereof to memorize all of them.

I approach the woman (whose name is Velatosse) who thinks there’s something not right about the situation. “Do you know where Hendil lives?”

“His house is that one right over there,” Velatosse tells me, discreetly indicating one. “You don’t trust him either?”

“What makes you say that?” I ask.

“You came out of that barn looking like you just discovered a skeever tail in your soup,” Velatosse says.

I chuckle softly and nod. “Something very strange is going on here and I mean to get to the bottom of it. And I want to know exactly what this salve of his actually does. I don’t trust that he’ll come out and tell me—alchemists tend to be a bit secretive—but he’s probably got notes somewhere about it. Gods know I do, but my own alchemy notes are probably a complete mess since I don’t know the proper names of half the plants I’ve experimented with.”

Not to mention that there isn’t a single plant that grows in the area that I’m familiar with. A pang of homesickness leaves me missing the sight of coda flowers lighting up the swamps of the Bitter Coast at night.

I tell her the names of the ‘victims’ I’d written down. “I’m not giving this stuff to anyone without knowing exactly what it does.”

“He asked you to give it to my son, Nelulin?” Velatosse says in alarm. “But he’s not even sick! They’ve already had my other son locked away in that mine for days.”

Hendil’s door is locked, of course, but one of the windows is broken and I can get inside that way. Very carefully. It almost looks like this window was broken from the inside out, judging by the way the glass is scattered on the ground. Weird.

Note to self: Acquire lockpicks. Addendum: Learn to use them, too. (Or remember how?) Breaking down doors with an axe is not very subtle and best kept for when I don’t care if anyone notices me breaking in.

Rummaging through the house, I locate a book that might just be a journal, presumably because it has ‘Hendil’s Journal’ stamped on the front. As I’d already surmised, the salve is a sedative, but there’s something very odd going on with his son. He doesn’t specify what, but seems very worried about the townspeople finding out the truth.

I make sure to steal any alchemy notes I can find while I’m at it. They’re a little light, and he’s clearly not the greatest alchemist on the island, but he’s still worlds better than me. Also I suspect this is going to end in him being dead or arrested, so he won’t miss them.

I need to get into that mine and see what they’re hiding in there. The most obvious source of incriminating evidence tends to be in places people are trying to prevent you from getting into, and nobody is allowed in there but Hendil, his assistant whose name I forgot to write down, and the mercenaries he hired because of course you hire mercenaries to deal with a plague rather than an actual healer.

To that end, I sneak into the mercenary barracks and steal a uniform. (Actually, this looks exactly like my Vulkhel Guard marine uniform…) Fortunately, no one is inside at the moment, probably all out guarding the mine, although I’d have thought the night shift would be napping here at least. What a shoddy operation. They’re also clearly not very tight-knit, as they don’t recognize my face but take one look at my stolen uniform and do nothing to stop me from going into the mine.

There’s no one immediately inside, but as I go further in, mad, diseased people attack me. I really need a better way to knock people out rather than killing them, as I can’t avoid these. Could these still be saved, or are they too far gone? I’m probably sending some of them to Aetherius just to get through, but no help for it. I at least try to knock them out rather than dismember them. (Could they still be healed? They’re unnaturally pale and completely out of their minds. Which suggests… Oh no.)

Up ahead, Hendil’s voice says, “Hold him, Amuur! We can’t let him find out the truth!”

Well, if I didn’t already suspect something was up, it’s pretty clear now. Amuur is a far better fighter than a simple alchemist’s assistant should be, but hardly a match for me.

As it turns out, Hendil’s son is a vampire and he’s been sending people in to be fed off of. A vampire is something that I can use an axe to deal with.

“Please, I’m just trying to save my son!” Hendil insists. “This will all be over once I can find a cure.”

“Is your son more important than Velatosse’s?” I aks. “Or any of the others you’ve dragged in here?”

“Don’t hurt him! He’s just sick! He’ll get better!”

I shake my head and brush past him, axe at the ready. As I go into the next room, the vampire attacks me, intent upon feeding from me and making me its next thrall, saying incredibly creepy things all the while. Yes, yes, I’m sure a vampire would find my body delicious, but that doesn’t make it any less creepy. Hendil draws in a choked breath from across the room as I get a good swing of Stormy in and behead the vampire that was once his son.

“Oh, Tancano, my son…” Hendil sobs.

“Hendil, there’s got to be a line between feeling sympathy for your son and feeding people to a vampire,” I say. “Is it possible to still save any of the surviving thralls now that he’s dead?”

“I don’t know,” Hendil says, hanging his head. “You’re right. I deserve to be punished for what I’ve done.”

“Well, at least we’re in agreement about that,” I say. “But don’t think I’m letting you off easy by removing your head like I did your son’s. The people you lied to have got to see your face and hear your confession.”

“I don’t know if I can face all those people…”

“Then you should be attacking me to force me to end you with violence,” I say.

“What’s even the point anymore?” Hendil mumbles, slumping down to the ground.

“Ugh.” I tie him up, just in case. “But first, let me just ask you one thing. Are you with the Veiled Heritance?”

“What? No, of course not.”

“So it’s just completely coincidental that your son got infected with vampirism right when all this trouble started,” I say. “’Kay then.”

“I don’t know anything about the Veiled Heritance, I swear,” Hendil says. “If I did, I would tell you.”

“Don’t go anywhere,” I tell him. “I’m just going to get the guards.”

Velatosse is waiting angrily outside the mine. “What’s going on in there? Did you see my son, Iwelien?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Nobody in there was in their right mind. They… well, in short, Hendil’s son was a vampire and had been feeding on and enthralling the ‘plague victims’ that were being sent in there. There was no plague.”

“By the stars, how horrible!” Velatosse exclaims.

“I don’t know if the thralls can be cured now that I’ve killed the vampire,” I say. “They were attacking me and I tried not to harm them more than necessary, but it might not be possible to help them regardless. And a lot of them were already dead by the time I got inside.”

“What of Hendil?” Velatosse says. “Where is that ill-bred skeever who was behind this foul scheme?”

“He’s tied up just inside there,” I say. “He lost his will to live after his son lost his head, but I didn’t feel like executing someone who wasn’t fighting back. I was going to turn him in, but if you want to take over here, I’ll leave you to it.”

“Oh, I’ll deal with him, alright,” Velatosse says with a scowl.

I’m past the point of caring if an angry mother wants to get revenge. I do, however, stop and let the mercenaries know just who it was they were working for before moving on. Needless to say, they’re utterly thrilled about it.