It’s a bright new day with a distinct lack of nightmares or regrets.
The bloodthralls have been cleared away when I return to the ruins where I picked the salloweed. This is definitely the place I was directed to. Probably. The map says it’s Ondil, at any rate.
It would seen that magical lighting was very popular among the high elves’ ancestors. Come to think, these were probably my ancestors, too. These ruins probably pre-date the split of the Aldmer into the Altmer and the Chimer. Glowing yellow crystals light up much of the old ruin.
Oh, and it would seem that the mercenaries missed that the ruins are full of bloodthralls. Perhaps they’d been in here before and they just didn’t feel like coming in here. How many thralls did the alchemist’s son seriously create? Or is there another vampire in here? Perhaps the one who turned the boy? Still, kinder to send them to Aetherius than leave them like this.
I make my way through the ruins, collecting some very old, worn books along the way, and although I try to avoid the thralls wherever I can, I’m not pulling any punches with them any longer. The townspeople are less likely to come down here than the mine and see the severed limbs of their loved ones.
One of the books is glowing purple and hovering in the air, making it clear that this one is weirder than usual. When I jump up to grab it, it summons a projection before me of a robed Nord who tells me to take this apparently-blank book back to Valaste and says that fire will show the words. Naturally I attempt to set the book on fire to see what it says, and while it still remains blank, fortunately it’s non-flammable. Must need a magic fire.
Turns out there’s another vampire in here after all. His name’s Aluvus, judging by the various notes I find laying around. At least until he meets Stormy and winds up in five pieces. Then it no longer matters what his name is. (Also not sure if he’s a Maormer or if being a vampire makes someone’s skin and eyes weird colors.) He was the one who turned the alchemist’s son, and sounded very pleased with himself in the process. Good riddance to bad bloodsuckers.
In front of a shrine, I find a Skyshard sitting in a large sconce like a light. Not sure who this is supposed to be a shrine to, but the statue depicts some robed guy with a sword, book, and his foot on a skull. Good gods usually don’t have skulls in their motifs.
I return to Phaer with the vampire’s notes in hand. “I killed the vampire who turned the alchemist’s son,” I tell Velatosse. “He was holed up in Ondil. There’s a lot more bloodthralls in there, by the way. Do you have those letters written?”
“Yes, here you go,” Velatosse says, handing them to me. “At least one less vampire in the world is good news.”
“And bad news is that I don’t know who turned him,” I say. “He hadn’t been a vampire very long and he met some enchanting woman in Vulkhel Guard, it seems. I’ll have to keep my eyes open there.” I grunt. “I didn’t set out to become a vampire hunter, but I don’t exactly have any love for Molag Bal’s bastard children and they keep putting themselves in my path.”
I take the notes and leave Phaer. I have a good bit of walking to do if I want to make it back to Vulkhel Guard before nightfall.
I sit at the wayshrine outside of Phaer to rest for a few minutes and have a bite to eat, and wish there were a quicker way to get back to Vulkhel Guard. Dying near here would make me appear at this wayshrine, after all, but maybe there’s some way to exploit my apparent connection to the wayshrines for the sake of teleportation. I have no idea how, though. I need to speak with a real mage about the possibility. Where did Rurelion get off to, anyway?
The walk is a quiet one, though, marked by a dearth of overly aggressive wildlife and overconfident bandits (racist or otherwise). I even stop to pick a few flowers along the way, purely for alchemical purposes of course. Say, didn’t the alchemist’s notes mention that butterfly wings could be used in health potions? Maybe I should catch a few and try it out.
Catching butterflies turns out to be a much tougher prospect than I’d thought. As I’m leaping about trying (and failing) to grab one, a passing merchant stops and approaches me.
“Name’s Nadonil. Can I interest you in a butterfly net?”
I stop trying to catch them with my hands. “They make nets just to catch these?”
“You might have noticed it’s hard to catch them with your bare hands,” Nadonil says. “Just like it’s hard to catch fish with your bare hands. I sell fishing rods and bait, too.”
I peer at him. He’s definitely not holding any visible fishing rods. “You are… carrying considerably more than I would have guessed.”
Nadonil laughs, takes off his pack, and opens it up wide, displaying far, far more than I would have thought someone could carry. “And no, the bag is not for sale, but you can probably find a pack merchant in a major city that’ll sell you a magic bag of your own for a pretty gold piece.”
“That… is very good to know,” I say.
I buy a butterfly net from Nadonil, and toss him a tip for the tip about the bags. It occurs to me that maybe the marines back in Silsailen expected that I, as an adventurer, would already have a magic bag that could fit all their armor and weapons in to carry back to them. Huh. I wish they’d mentioned it, but then, we were kind of in a rush and the building was on fire. I try out my new net, and while catching butterflies is still tricky, it’s at least possible with the net.
Back at Vulkhel Guard, I drop some things off in my inn room which is conveniently near the gates of town, deliver Velatosse’s letters, and explore the marketplace. There’s a building with a sign depicting a bag, and I had just assumed that it sold, well, bags, and not magic bags.
“The name’s Quaranon,” says the Altmer man inside, giving a distasteful look to my pack. “Ugh, where did you find that? Lying on the side of the road? Let me sell you something so you don’t look like an impoverished brigand.”
“That’s why I’m here,” I say. “Let me see what you have.”
As it turns out, Quaranon’s bags are expensive. For the top-tier price, I could buy a house! Then again, they’re probably considerably more portable than a house, even if I could teleport.
“Are they difficult to damage?” I ask.
Quaranon looks at me like I’m daft. “The packs themselves have a number of protective enchantments on them, however, as their contents are not actually inside the bag, they are impervious to harm. You will not break any glass bottles placed inside of them even if you sit on them.”
“I… don’t understand,” I say.
“Ugh, do you know nothing of interspatial transliminal—no, of course not, you’re an adventurer, you just hit things for pay.” He takes a deep breath. “Each pack is a portal to a pocket space tucked away in the folds between Nirn and Oblivion. This space is centered on you, and the physical pack only serves to access it. As such, that items inside cannot be damaged or stolen from you.”
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I am incredibly impressed at the advances in magical convenience that have been made over the past few thousand years. Or the intent of high elves to be as lazy as possible and spend copious amounts of magical research just so they don’t have to carry things. I’d assume this sort of magic is less common in human lands.
“So what’s the difference between the packs?” I ask.
“Style, of course,” Quaranon says. “You’d hate for your look to be mismatched—well, perhaps you wouldn’t—or to be wearing last decade’s fashions. But, the bulk of the price is on the inventory expansion spells. That is to say, the pack can hold more because the interspatial pocket adjacent to you is larger.”
“I… see,” I say.
This sounds like the sort of thing my dear old friend Seht would be interested in. I’d bet he’d take this sort of magic to its natural conclusion and carry an entire city around in his pocket or something.
I can’t afford more than the initial investment right now, and that takes almost every coin I have to my name at the moment, but I’ll definitely be throwing more gold at this later. I then proceed to feel even more ridiculous by shoving everything I own that I could conceivably want to have on hand into my pack.
I think maybe I could brew potions and sell them for more money, but I impress the alchemy vendor considerably less than I’d hoped for and only get offered a few coins for my trouble. I could get more than that by selling the ingredients! But not to this vendor. While Siriwen is very patient with me, she’s not too keen on buying my shitty potions and mangled ingredients.
“You might want to try selling your alchemy reagents through a guild vendor instead,” Siriwen says.
“What, like the Mages and Fighters Guilds?” I ask.
“No, merchant guilds,” Siriwen says. “Although they might be happy to take your potions should your technique improve.”
I thank her and decide that this is something I may need to look into further once I’ve taken care of my business with the Mages Guild. I hadn’t really planned on being a merchant, but selling my excess junk for better prices certainly couldn’t hurt.
I return to the Mages Guild and show my various finds to Sahira-daro, and my new pack makes it much easier to carry large quantities of books. She goes to sort through most of them, but directs me to take the blank book to Valaste.
As it turns out, the Mages Guildhall does keep around a magic fire that shows invisible words, as opposed to a magic fire that destroys things that are hard to destroy. I’m not sure how good of a method of keeping secret texts this is. I mean, if I were trying to hide the text of a book, I’d not make all the pages blank. That’s too obvious either something is hidden or someone didn’t just get around to writing it. No, better to put the secret text on top of recipes for ash yam biscuits.
The book apparently left instructions for summoning Shalidor, so we summon him, glowing purple, straight out of Aetherius, as if he were a scamp or something. He also thinks I glow with ‘good fortune’ but he’s probably just detecting the Aedric energy I’ve absorbed from the Skyshards. So he starts going on about how he made an island sanctuary called Eyevea (he kind of rolls his eyes at me when I ask him to spell that), and he’s quite enamored with it and wants to steal it back from the Madgod, Sheogorath.
“Wait, Daedric Princes can just steal entire islands from Nirn?” I wonder.
“Well, there was a bit more to it than that, but that’s not important right now,” Shalidor says. “Rest assured that Eyevea is a very small island and it would take a Daedra considerably more effort to remove something the size of—where are we? Auridon?”
“I’m not sure how reassured I am,” I say dryly.
Shalidor wants to open a portal to the Shivering Isles and send me, of course, through to retrieve some books. Everyone else in earshot quickly takes backward steps in hopes of not being volunteered.
“The Shivering Isles, huh?” I say with a wild grin, pulling out my butterfly net. “Sure, this sounds like fun.”
I skip through the portal Shalidor opens, and find myself in a big stone room that looks like it could be anywhere Daedric. An aging human man works behind the desk. Not nearly flamboyantly dressed enough to be the Madgod, turns out he’s the Madgod’s chamberlain, Haskill.
“I was honestly expecting more butterflies,” I say.
“If you’ve come to the isles to hunt butterflies, I’m certain you can be obliged,” Haskill says flatly. “Is that why you’re here?”
“Er, no, actually I’m here hunting books,” I say. “Shalidor is absolutely obsessed with his stupid island and convinced me to jump through his portal and I’ve always wanted to visit the Shivering Isles.”
“Ah, well, you may have been better off with the butterflies,” Haskill says. “You may be obliged in that as well. First, however, you must obligatorily prove yourself worthy by a gratuitous display of mindless violence. I’m sure you’ll do fine.”
I put away my butterfly net (is a butterfly net considered a weapon to be given a name?) and draw Stormy as a portal opens and begins spewing forth scamps. Easily dealt with, and once that’s done, Haskill lets me through a door leading outside.
The left hand side is ashen and volcanic, like Vvardenfell. The right side is verdant and bright, like Auridon. I make my way down the middle road, occasionally dealing with other minor Daedra along the way. At the end of the path, a larger-than-usual clannfear guards a library (hopefully). And of course as soon as it catches my scent, it tries to jump me. I love to play with clannfears. All the rolling and jumping and dodging and swinging. This one puts up a good fight, but my reflexes are too quick for it.
In the back of the room, four glowing purple books hover above pedestals, fluttering like butterflies just out of reach. I pull the net out of my pack and, after a couple tries, manage to catch one.
And then a mad voice echoes through the air, declaring me a puppy killer.
“Aw, I was just playing!” I say. “With a battle axe. It’s a Daedra—it’ll be back.”
Sheogorath appears before me, looking like a human in a fancy, garish gold-and-purple suit. Now here’s one Daedra who doesn’t see the need to make himself look more intimidating just by being enormous with flaming eyes and covered in black spikes. His demand to know why I’m here should sound more terrifying.
I give a bow. “It’s an honor to meet you, Lord Sheogorath. I’m here because I was the only one crazy enough to let Shalidor convince them to go to the Shivering Isles and look for some stupid books. I honestly don’t care one way or another but it sounded like fun.”
Sheogorath throws back his head and laughs madly about that. “Well, then! Maybe you’d be up to some more fun and games?” He describes a contest of some sort, in order to win each of the other books.
“Just to be clear, there’s no penalty for failure or delay beyond simply not getting the books?” I ask. “Because if you want my soul for failure, you’re going to need to get it back from Molag Bal first—which if you can, you’re welcome to it.”
“Oh, that would tweak Rosie’s nose, but no,” Sheogorath says. “No penalties for failure. In fact, if you tell Shalidor you don’t want to help him anymore, the look on his face will be worth a piece of cheese!”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard Azura referred to as ‘Rosie’ before. “Tempting,” I say with a grin.
“Let’s just summon ol’ Shally here to let him know what we’ve agreed on, then, shall we?”
Shalidor (still glowing purple) appears with a pop. He starts yelling at Sheogorath but I cut him off.
“Hey, Shalidor,” I say. “I don’t want to help you anymore.” I pause. “I’m going to anyway, because it sounds like fun, though.”
Sheogorath chortles. “Oh, the look!” A wedge of cheese appears in my left hand.
Shalidor pins me with a stare. “Did you seriously tell me that because he promised you cheese?”
“Yep,” I say, taking a nibble. “Totally worth it.”
“I’m glad someone here is easily amused, but I am not,” Shalidor says.
“Too bad; I’m what you’ve got,” I say.
Sheogorath tells Shalidor about the contest I’ve agreed to, and also curses the books so Shalidor can’t read them just to add insult and make things more difficult. I honestly don’t even like this self-important Nord, but things are bound to be entertaining.
I return from the Shivering Isles with a book in a butterfly net in one hand and a wedge of cheese in the other. Nobody asks any questions.
I go over to Valaste and relay what happened and about Sheogorath’s little contest, and let her take the book out of the net. She’s going to have difficulty translating these without Shalidor being able to help directly, but she’s determined to see this through.
“This one does not wish to be involved in anything related to the Madgod,” Sahira-daro tells me quietly. “She will leave the translation to Valaste.”
“I’d think you, of all people, wouldn’t object to dealing with Daedra,” I say.
Sahira-daro makes a face. “Not all Daedra are equal. With the Prince of Madness, there is no telling what you may encounter. Valaste seems foolish enough not to care what may come of delving into the Madgod’s mysteries.”
“And what of me?” I ask with a crooked grin.
Sahira takes one look at me and snickers. “Valaste steps into the storm thinking her wit and power will let her control it and see her through safely. You step into the storm knowing you will be blown away and thinking it will be a fun ride.”
“I’d argue that, but…”