Up the hill, I spot more recent buildings made of wood, or at least wooden lamp posts and what appear to be open-air vendor stalls with colorful canopies. Just what I’m looking for. I approach one that has weapons out on display and make to admire the craftsmanship, but to be perfectly honest I don’t even know what passes for good craftsmanship in this day and age. Surely it doesn’t hold a candle to whatever the Dwemer might have made, but also being perfectly honest, Dwemer craftsmanship was weird.

I wonder how the Dwemer are doing lately. Hopefully they’ve fared better than my own people, but I can’t imagine they’d take kindly to my former friends calling themselves gods. They weren’t really a religious sort of people, after all. Nobody has mentioned them, but then we’re very far away from their homeland. I’ll need to look them up at some point, or ask someone discreetly.

“Fine weapons, imported from the mainland!” the Khajiit merchant declares. “You are looking to buy, yes? Palmur-dra has just what you need! Dangerous times, these days, what with talk of pirates about. You look like you can handle a weapon, walker. What do you say? Does one of my swords strike your fancy?”

“No, I’m more of an axe sort of elf,” I say. “How much for that one?” I point.

Palmur-dra names a price. It’s slightly more than the amount the commander whose name I have already forgotten gave me for supplies. I manage to haggle him down a few coins, but it looks like I’m not going to be able to get any armor or anything to go along with it. Oh well. At least I have a weapon again now, and that’s the important part. Now it just needs a suitable name. Wait, does it already have a name? I ask the merchant, who gives me an odd look.

“It’s just a weapon,” Palmur-dra says. “Does it need a name?”

“It absolutely needs a name,” I say. “Alright, I hereby dub this axe… Bubbles!”

The Khajiit stares at me. “Bubbles?”

“I almost drowned and lost my last axe in the ocean, so it’s a fitting name, isn’t it?”

“As you say…” Palmur-dra says, clearly not feeling like arguing with a paying customer.

There’s a temple at the top of the hill as well, although apparently not the one I was looking for as there’s just a cat woman inside praying to the moons or something who gets annoyed at me and tells me not to interrupt and shoos me outside again. Cat women only have two boobs, by the way. Just as a note. I’m not quite sure whether I ought to be disappointed by that. This particular temple is apparently named the Temple of the Crescent Moons. I wonder if there’s also a Temple of the Gibbous Moons, a Temple of the One Moon New and the Other Half Full, and so forth?

As I’m leaving the temple, I spot another Khajiit cowering behind a ledge. “Is something wrong?” I ask.

“Muzur was just trying to set up a shop!” the Khajiit manages to get out. “But there was a ghost! At least, this one thinks it was a ghost. She looked a bit like an elf but you could see right through her and she warned this one to get away so this one got away!”

I examine my newly purchased but completely ordinary axe. “I’m not sure if this can hit ghosts, but ghosts can be surprisingly solid sometimes. I’ll go see what her problem is, at any rate. Where exactly did you see this ghost?”

“Be careful!” Muzur urges me, pointing a claw trepidatiously at the stone platform behind him. “This one would hate for you to be hurt on account of Khajiit.”

I set my axe down on the platform momentarily to climb up and take a look around. At first I don’t see anything but some broken crates and barrels, but then a translucent blue figure shimmers into view hovering in the air and demands that I come no closer. I pause, smirk, and come closer anyway. She starts rambling something about doom and danger, and I clear my throat and interrupt her.

“Is this some doom and danger that can be dealt with by hitting it with an axe?” I ask.

“There were three books,” she goes on. “They’re a trap for the weak-minded, and they destroyed me, leaving me to haunt this island forever—”

“Are they books that can be dealt with by hitting them with an axe?” I interrupt her again to try to keep her from going off about gloom and doom some more.

“Sadly they resist such mundane methods of destruction,” the ghost says. “They’d need to be destroyed in sacred fire, but they would surely ensnare anyone that tried to do so. Can you not hear them calling to you?”

“I can’t even see any books from here, never mind hear any, but I assure you that if I heard a book trying to talk to me I’d definitely throw it into a magic fire. And was it really necessary to spook that poor cat man over this?”

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“He might have been ensnared by the evil books! But if you are immune to their call, perhaps you might be able to destroy them. Take them to the shrine and cast them into the sacred flame! Do not be ensnared by their evil!”

“I’m not going to be ensnared,” I say. “How does one even get ensnared by a book? Does it shoot webs out of its pages or something? Where are these books, anyway?”

“If they aren’t here, then I don’t know,” the ghost says. “Probably scattered around the island.”

“So was it really necessary to spook the cat man away from this particular spot if there are no evil books in this particular spot?”

“Well… maybe not,” the ghost grouses, then vanishes.

I snort softly and return to Muzur. “I got the ghost to go away. You can relax now.”

“Oh, thank Jone and Jode,” Muzur says, breathing a sigh of relief. “This one thanks you.”

“So, what do you sell, anyway?” I ask.

“Well, nothing yet,” Muzur says. “But come back later and you will see a shop of wonders! This one will even give you a small discount for your assistance.”

“Sure,” I say. “Good luck with that.”

To the other side of the temple, I find a small shrine with a cat statue with a brazier in front of its paws. It’s not lit at the moment, so on a whim, I go up to light it. Magic has never really been my thing, but I’m still an elf, after all. Even I can light a fire. The brazier bursts into blue flames, and I jump back in surprise warily. Is my magic still being affected by Coldharbour? No, it’s not the icy blue flames of Coldharbour. This fire is warm and tingly, like Skyshards. Aetherial energy or whatever it was the Prophet was rambling about.

“You’ve lit the wayshrine?” a nearby cat woman says. “Jone and Jode will surely light your path, walker.”

“Forgive this humble Altmer his ignorance,” I say, “but who are Jone and Jode?”

The Khajiit chuckles. “Ensa-ko can see that you are an outsider here. Jone and Jode are what we Khajiit call the two moons, that you might call Masser and Secunda. They are sacred to us and central to our culture.”

“The moons,” I say. “Okay, sure, why not.”

I like these cat people. Their habit of speaking in the third person makes it easy to remember their names and a lot of people are not polite enough to introduce themselves. Like that silly ghost. Not that it greatly mattered what her name was, but still.

“The moons still shine upon this temple, but the same cannot be said of all of Khenarthi’s Roost,” Ensa-ko goes on. “There is trouble at the Temple of the Mourning Springs, on the eastern side of the island. We avoid the place, but Ensa-ko has heard the waters have dried up. This is bad, very bad.”

“I’ve heard about the undead,” I say. “I was planning on going and hitting them until they stopped being a problem.”

“Simply hitting them will not be enough, walker.”

“Didn’t think so,” I say. “I’m betting that magic rock that shoots water that the dumbass mages took from the place is going to need to be put back. Mages never know when to leave things alone.”

“Ensa-ko believes you have the right of it. Look for the moon-stones! They will reveal your way.”

“Thanks for the tip,” I say. “I’ll see what I can do.” With a tuneless whistle, I start to head for the stairs, but then stop and turn back toward Ensa-ko. “Which way is east, anyway?”

Ensa-ko points. “Head down the stairs and turn right.”

“Right, thanks.”

I head out. It’s a lovely day for a stroll. Blue skies, green grass, fresh air, armed cat people patrolling the roads who are doing nothing about the alits and giant blue bugs just a short way off the roads. Some of the trees around here are these odd ones with curved branchless trunks and long, broad leaves in a cluster at the top. No colorful giant mushrooms around here, and it feels very exotic without them.

The giant bugs on the hillside seem to be a good reason to test out my new axe. With a fierce but not particularly articulate battle cry, I charge at one. Aaaaand it turns out the giant blue bugs shoot lightning. Ow, ow, ow. I manage to hack it apart as it keeps trying to shock me until I’ve lopped off all its legs and split its shell open. Laughing and still tingling, I go tumbling down the hill, the dead bug’s abdomen rolling alongside me. I bump against a tree right at the hooves of a rather puzzled woolly creature, who bleats at me disinterestedly and goes back to chewing its cud.

There’s a Khajiit sitting on a rock nearby watching over a number of these livestock. “Ziakar thanks you for thinning out the thunderbugs. Sometimes they go after his sheep.”

Sheep. I guess that’s what these white fluffy things are called, who seem too dumb and docile to even run away if a giant bug shows up near the pasture. And ‘thunderbugs’ seem like a rather on-the-nose description of bugs that shoot lightning. I suppose they couldn’t have been called lightning bugs because those are something else.

I pick up the thunderbug remains and examine it. “I don’t suppose there’s anyone who might pay me for bug bits?”

“Ziakar hears the wood elves make booze out of them.”

I blink. “Electric booze? Cool! I have got to try that sometime.”

“That merchant right there might take them, though.”

Ziakar points toward a nearby building. Half building. What do you even call a building that has one side, two half sides, and an awning? Though I guess it’s more of a tent since they’re not really walls. Still better than the ruined buildings down on the beach, by far. I take the dead bug over to the vendor stall and manage to exchange it for some coins. Having succeeded at actually making a profit, I go and kill a few more thunderbugs and return with the glands that I’m told are the valuable part and much easier to carry than the entire bug.

“You’re twitching,” the Khajiit merchant says.

“I might’ve gotten shocked a few times,” I say with a short giggle.

“Ranabi thinks you should lay off the thunderbugs for a bit.”

“That…” My arm spasms. “… might be a good idea, yeah. Hold on.”

I try to hold my hand steady long enough to get off a minor healing spell. It takes a few tries to get it off but I manage. Not sure if it actually helped any, though. I was never good at magic, or at least I don’t think I was, but maybe I could become less bad. An old Chimer might be able to learn new tricks, after all. Especially when I’ve already forgotten half of the old ones. Most of the old ones. Look, I still remember how to hit things, and that’s what really counts, right?