Morning sees Merormo and I on the road to Skywatch. He’s profusely thankful at not being dead, so I take the opportunity to try to glean some arcane information from him. Sadly, he’s not very well-versed in translocation magic and knows nothing about wayshrines, so he can’t help me there.

“Your theory is sound,” he assures me quickly. “I just don’t know enough in that field to help you. If I knew how to teleport, I wouldn’t have walked through a forest full of aggressive animals in order to get back to my tower.”

“Do you know anyone else I might be able to ask about it? I didn’t have any luck in the Mages Guild in Vulkhel Guard either.”

He has a few suggestions, which I immediately forget to write down. As we approach Skywatch, we come upon a fenced pasture by a stable, full of horses and feathered animals that look a little like bantam guar that go ‘buh-gock!’ and scatter when we approach. Chickens, I’m told they’re called.

The city looks like it might be about as large as Vulkhel Guard. There’s a merchant camp set up outside, and a wayshrine up the stairs near the gates, which I go up and light.

Merormo gazes into the flickering blue flames that result. “So—”

I cut off whatever he was going to say. “No, I am not letting you experiment with this.”

Merormo shuts his mouth and holds up his arms in surrender.

The marine captain I’d met in Silsailen is standing near the gates leading into the city proper. His name starts with a T… I look it up in my journal before embarrassing myself again: Tendil.

“Captain Tendil!” I exclaim. “Good to see you here.”

“Neralion,” Tendil says, nodding to me. “My sentiments as well. Welcome to Skywatch.”

Tendil mentions that Queen Ayrenn and ‘our mutual Khajiit friend’ are already in town and up at the manse. (I guess Altmer are too fancy just to call it a house.) He also mentions that there’s a celebration going on in town at the moment, commemorating that time the high elves kicked the tails of some giant slug people or something.

It’s good to see that Altmer know how to have fun, although their idea of celebrating is a bit more sedate than I’m used to. There’s drinking, but it’s wine. There’s music, but it’s a bard strumming out a tranquil tune. There’s dancing, but it’s more ballet than lava foot stomp.

“I completely forgot about the Festival of Defiance,” Merormo says quietly at my side as we walk through town. “I was so caught up in my work I lost sight of everything beyond my own foolish project…”

“Well, you can settle in and enjoy the festival for a bit, then,” I say. “I need to go speak with the Queen. I’ll meet up with you later at the Mages Guild, alright?”

“I don’t know…” Merormo murmurs. “There might be people there who wouldn’t appreciate my presence.” He makes a cough that sounds a bit like, “Telenger.”

I snort softly. “Fine. Then I’ll meet up with you later at whichever tavern is closest to the docks. That’s least likely to have mages in it and most likely to have the saltiest food in town.”

“Fair enough. I doubt he—ahem, anyone I might not want to see—would be down slumming at the docks. Good luck with the Queen.”

Skywatch is a very pretty city, although it looks enough like Vulkhel Guard and the other places I’ve seen (that weren’t on fire or something) that it’s really just more of the same. More Altmer. Not that that’s unexpected in the land of the Altmer or anything, but… I don’t know what I was hoping for. At least the wayshrine is in a sufficiently different spot that I should be able to tell where I’ve wound up should I wind up there.

I take the opportunity to browse the shops and see if I can find anyone selling teleport scrolls. If the Queen’s hairdresser or whatever she was had a stack of them just laying around, you’ve got to be able to just buy the things somewhere. They’re probably too expensive to use just to be lazy, but I’m doubtless going to run into no end of emergencies that would make me glad to have a couple of them on hand. A Khajiit in one of the tents is offering teleport scrolls for a fairly reasonable rate.

“How do these scrolls know where to take you?” I wonder. “I’ve used them before but they took me to a makeshift camp that I doubt anyone deliberately wrote scrolls to teleport people to, but neither I nor the others who used them made any attempt to specify our destination.”

“Mazil-jo is glad you asked,” the Khajiit says, and then proceeds to go into an excessively technical explanation that I don’t understand.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

I gather that the destination can be set or changed if you know how to. I don’t, and am a bit busy right now to learn an entirely new field of magic. I guess the lady back at Glister Vale (so my map named the spot with the crazy mage) was already making preparations to rescue her companions when I came along, and so had the scrolls keyed and ready. Fine, that knowledge isn’t really of dire importance.

“I’ll look into that further when I have time,” I say, having no intention of doing so. “Can I get a couple scrolls keyed to Skywatch?”

“Where in Skywatch?” Mazil-jo asks.

“I don’t care,” I say. “The middle of town, the wayshrine, the manse, wherever? I travel a lot and it’s not like I’m so lazy and rich as to use these things just to get out of walking across town.”

“You’d be amazed, then.” Mazil-jo hands me two scrolls. “These are keyed to the marketplace outside my tent.” I pay him, and he bids me a good day.

I know I’ve found the right ‘manse’ when I walk in on Queen Ayrenn and High Kinlady Estre arguing about the racist bandits. I stand near the door awkwardly, not wanting to interrupt them. Once Estre is gone, I go up to Ayrenn and give a bow and a greeting, but aside from some pleasantries and welcomes, she doesn’t want to discuss anything sensitive in public.

A voice from the side hall tries to get my attention with a, “Psst! Over here.” Now, that sounded very much like Razum-dar’s voice, or at least a Khajiit male who sounds suspiciously like him, but there are no Khajiit in that direction at all, just an Altmer man with a smooth head and a luxurious beard. When he speaks again, it’s very amusing to hear a Khajiit accent come out of an Altmer mouth.

He leads me into the kitchen and a nook below the stairs, before taking off an earring and transforming back into a Khajiit.

“How long have you been loitering around here looking like that just to get people used to seeing that face?” I ask quietly.

“Oh, a while, not too long. Raz is glad you are here, though. We need to investigate the Veiled Heritance, and you are the perfect one to do so.”

“Of course,” I say lightly.

He gives me the earring, a passphrase, and sends me to a tavern down by the docks. After putting on the earring and trying to examine my disguise (it doesn’t really look too different from my normal appearance), I rub my chin to see if it actually gave me a beard or just an image of one. Nope, my hand clips right through the beard. Razum-dar probably would have had the same problem with an invisible tail. Somehow I think just putting on an actual fake beard would have been more effective.

I do a bit searching of the manse (and Raz is amused but does not protest), and locate a bushy brush and some glue and improvise my own fake beard underneath my illusion of a beard. It didn’t need to be flawless, since an illusion would be smoothing out the rough edges, but nobody would think someone would bother to wear a fake beard and an illusionary disguise.

“You know that glue will not come off skin easily, yes?” Raz asks, peering over my shoulder.

“That was kind of the idea,” I say.

“It will not come off easily when you are wanting to remove the beard again when you are done, either,” Raz points out.

I shrug. “Then I’ll make sure to have a healer on hand.”

Raz gives me an odd look. “You are quite cavalier about pain, yes?”

“Pain is nothing,” I say. “And I’m sure I’ve experienced worse things than tearing off a fake beard.”

“Ah, and Raz was hoping you’d say you were willing to suffer any length for the sake of Queen Ayrenn,” Raz teases lightly.

“Having to do the stupid things you ask me to do is worse than any pain,” I tease right back.

As I leave the manse, I spot the blue shaft of a Skyshard on top of the building to the left. Looks like it’s the Fighters Guild, and a considerably smaller one than the one in Vulkhel Guard. Nobody protests as I head in and climb upstairs to absorb the Skyshard.

“Comrade, a word!” a Dunmer woman says, running up to me as I’m leaving the building.

“Pardon me?” I turn around to look at her.

“Oh, my apologies, you’re not who I thought you were.”

I spot Merormo down by the docks, engaging in… frog racing? Whatever, at least he’s staying out of trouble. He doesn’t recognize me, so at least I can be sure the disguise works well enough to fool someone who was just speaking to me and not some Fighters Guild member who probably wasn’t even looking for Neralion anyway.

The inn by the docks is named the Barbed Hook. (A sign outside mentions there’s vacancies.) Raz wasn’t specific about who I should be speaking to here. Apparently I’m going to need to find my contact on my own. I proceed to gossip to everyone in sight about how the wine here is made with Alik’r grapes, a name I would never be able to guess how it’s spelled without having seen it written before. People react… very oddly. One woman thinks I’m coming on to her. Really now.

When I finally give the passphrase to the right person, he gives me a good once-over before determining I look racist enough, then tasks me with a ‘test’ to ‘end the threat’ of the royal guard by taking one of their swords for some reason? He probably intended me to kill one of them, but was rather non-specific about it. Not the time to question people who are asking me to do weird things.

Now, I suppose I could just sneak into the barracks or something and swipe one, but that would be a bit of a hassle and I’m sure there’s simpler ways. I head back to the manse and find Razum-dar where I left him under the stairs, and give him an update. As it turns out, Raz happens to have a sword of the appropriate type laying around because he’s been sparring to get out of going to meetings, the clever cat.

I return to my contact (whose name I never got) and ask awkwardly, “Do you want me to say that thing about the grapes again, or just give you the sword? Because I’ve got that sword you wanted right here.”

“Well done!” he says. “And so quickly, too! You could be officer material!”

This guy isn’t even being particularly subtle about using this tavern to recruit for the racist bandits. Everyone is either pretending very hard not to hear this or is too drunk to care. He offers me a drink and a toast, and I pretend very hard not to be suspicious of accepting drinks from known racist bandits even if I doubt they’d actually poison someone they thought could be racist officer. I drink it anyway. What’s the worst that could happen?

I black out.