The people of Karthdar are understandably shaken by their treethane’s betrayal, and we’re still not sure whether he was actually replaced or Rolon himself decided to join up with practitioners of dark magic. The town is safe now, though, and the forest is tranquil once again. Gelur takes a moment to examine Gathiel to make sure there were no lingering effects of the disease.

“You seem alright to me,” Gelur says. “Though I don’t know whether it’s the flower having done it or simply that a spell that caused it was canceled. If you run into further problems, contact Brackenleaf.”

“Would they be able to help?” Gathiel asks.

“Not really, no,” Gelur says with a chuckle. “But they’d be able to pass along word to us, and we’ve got a method to travel long distances and can procure ingredients from Summerset easily.”

Morning sees us on the road to Cormount again. Naturally this is a journey of about five minutes, not five days.

There’s a wayshrine just outside of town, and I light it on the way by. There’s some tents erected near the wayshrine, some of them Bosmer and some Altmer, and judging by the yellow eagle banners, I presume they’re Dominion military. And one of them has a book laying by their cot titled The House of Troubles. Curious reading material for a soldier.

As we’re crossing the bridge into town, I run smack into a Bosmer appearing right in front of me. This guy introduces himself as a Vinedusk Ranger named Forinir, working for the King. And they’ve been watching us and have need of our talents! (I’m going to take that as a compliment, even though his tone was anything but complimentary. Grumpy mer.) He talks about how something called the Blacksap Rebellion is causing trouble here and wants to take us through a portal to his base of operations.

“Now hold on one moment here,” I say. “Not that I’ll complain about helping you with whatever, but we’re already on a quest here. We’re looking for a jeweler who can destroy a piece of murderous jewelry!”

“There is indeed a jeweler in town, although I believe he is retired,” Foronir says. “But we need assistance from someone who isn’t known in town.”

“The cursed item can wait, Neri,” Eran says. “It’s not going anywhere.”

“I certainly hope not,” I say. “Alright, I guess we’ll deal with that later, but if the situation here were really urgent and you’ve been watching us, why wouldn’t you have contacted us sooner? Your portals could have saved us a bit of a hike.”

“I am an expert in portal magic, although it has been behaving strangely lately,” Forinor says. (However you spell that name.) “Possibly due to interference from the Planemeld, but no matter. I have been quite busy. Now, are you coming or not?”

“Fine, let’s go, I suppose,” I say.

Fironir’s portal takes us to an Ayleid ruin somewhere (could be anywhere, I suppose). From the looks of things, they’ve set up shop in an underground chamber that whose only corridor leading out has been completely blocked by collapsed rubble. Hopefully they’re also using magic to keep the air from going stale, although I guess the Ayleids probably already did that too. Probably not the same methods the Dwemer used. Most likely something to do with crystals.

My thoughts are jarred back to the present as it seems I missed an unnecessary history lesson about the Blacksap Rebellion. The pertinent information here is that they want us to capture the sons of a Bosmer named Gelthior, who is the King’s cousin and had been doing the rebelling the rebellion was based on. Gelthior is over on the other side of the room being held here as his inescapable prison. (Well, nowhere, not even Coldharbour, is inescapable, but this one would seem to be highly inconvenient to jailbreak without the use of both a skilled portal mage and someone who could find the place to begin with. For all I know, we’re somewhere in northern Cyrodiil right now.)

I have a little chat with Gelthior to find out information I can use to capture his sons. He seems to want me to capture them, because he knows the rebellion is over and he wants them to live. And as for the cause of his rebellion? I’m not sure whether he seems more annoyed about there being high elves in Valenwood or that the Vinedusk Rangers aren’t the staunchest defenders of the Green Pact.

“Could Valenwood have held out against the Pact and Covenant on its own?” I wonder.

“They’d have had no reason to come here had we not joined the Dominion,” Gelthior says.

I shake my head. “Oh, they would have come. They’d have come for your resources, to cut your trees for lumber to build ships to invade the Summerset Isles. Valenwood being neutral would not have kept them out. And I know the Bosmer would have fought fiercely, but on your own? There would have been great losses. Valenwood would have burned.”

Gelthior stares at me for a long moment, as if gauging my words. “You may be right. It’s a moot point now, regardless. I just hope this alliance with the Altmer and Khajiit doesn’t lead us to ruin anyway.”

We take Foranir’s portal back to Cormount. (I’m still getting his name wrong, aren’t I? Dammit, this is why I keep writing them down and I was too busy grousing to ask him to spell it.) Anyway, Cormount is situated in a big tree, like Elden Root, although it’s not as big of a big tree and there’s a few smaller trees linked in too with bridges and ramps. Also there’s a book about Vaermina, Daedric Prince of Nightmares, sitting around in the inn, leading me to start wondering what is with this town and its choice in literature?

By the word of the Vinedusk Rangers, we head up to speak with the local treethane, a Bosmer woman with an eyepatch by the name of Iirdel. That’s right, with two I’s, unlike her face. I don’t think she’d find that funny, and fortunately I manage to avoid grinning like an idiot when I think of it.

She gives us a list of rebel sympathizers along with code phrases, and I shit you not that they seriously use things like ‘the Falinesti peeper swims at night’. This is some bad spy novel shit here. I’m going to need my lying face just to keep a straight face here.

As it turns out, my lying face wouldn’t have helped, since I can’t figure out where the shrine with the fire is that’s mentioned in the book of code phrases in order to give the final one. So people keep summoning assassins at me until I guess right. I’m being the worst spy ever today. (I’m probably pretty obvious looking up and reading lines out of a book, too.) When I eventually do manage to arrange a meeting with Lorchan (not Lorkhan), probably sounding suspicious as fuck, it’s probably with as much intention of trying to capture me as anything else. That’s alright. My friends will be watching out for me, and if I fuck up things too badly, there’s a wayshrine right there.

“What do you mean, you couldn’t find the colored brazier?” Gelur hisses to me as we’re about to leave town. “It was right there by the inn!”

“Never mind that,” I say, feeling rather silly. “I’m just going to go walk into a trap now.”

Eran sighs and puts his face in his palm. “Alright then, we’re right behind you.”

“Far enough behind you to be able to pull your arse out of the fire once you walk into it,” Merry adds.

It should probably go without saying that the rebels attempt to kill me. It should probably also go without saying that they fail. When we come to their leader, Lorchan, he decides to talk to us instead like a sensible, non-suicidal person, and once he learns that his father is alive, he immediately surrenders. (You’d think being surrounded and his rebels laying dead would have been enough for a surrender, unless he’s got bullshit magic or can turn into a giant monster or something.) Oh, and tells us that his brother, Gorinir, is planning something potentially bloody and we ought to stop him. I hand Lorchan one of the rings the Rangers gave me, and a portal opens and drags him inside.

“Well, that went well,” I say.

“We just practically killed half the rebellion here ourselves,” Eran says. “Was that what we were trying to do?”

I shrug. “Let’s go find the other brother. This will probably lead to killing the other half of the rebellion.”

Lorchan’s directions lead us to a cave a short ways east of town, and if we thought we’d actually killed half the rebellion here, we’d sorely underestimated their numbers. Quite a lot more rebels stand in our way here. Inside the cave, the rebels are… doing something with some sort of creatures that look kind of like golems made of burnt wood with weird green light on the inside. The plant things are immobile at the moment, but I’d venture to guess that the rebels are aiming to change that.

Once we reach the back of the cave, Gorinir (Should I be calling him Gory? Seems needlessly cruel even for me.) calls off his guards on the logic that they’re obviously no match for us. So good of him to notice.

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“Camoran Gorinir, I take it?” I ask, absolutely certain that I’ve gotten all the vowels in the right place.

“That’s me. Adventurers? You’re no Dominion military. Are you Fighters Guild? Thalmor Justiciars? Vinedusk Rangers, if they’ve decided to start taking cats and high elves?”

“Brackenleaf’s Briars,” Gelur replies.

“The Briars?” Gorinir repeats in puzzlement. “Brackenleaf’s Briars have always been true to the Green Pact. You don’t mean to tell me you’ve accepted Altmer and Khajiit into your ranks now, too?”

“That’s right,” Gelur says.

“The high elves are invaders!” Gorinir protests. “They butchered my people and put my sodding cousin on the throne!”

“Believe it or not, Gorinir, not every outsider comes here to destroy us or impose their ways on us,” Gelur says. “Some of them come to become a part of us.”

Gorinir frowns deeply at that. “Well, these might not be the ones who murdered my father, but it doesn’t change the fact that my father is dead.”

I clear my throat. “About that? Your father’s alive. I just spoke to him before we came here.”

“Alive?” Gorinir says. “But we searched everywhere! How can that be? Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“But you just said you spoke with him.”

“Yeah, and I have no idea where we were,” I say. “They’re keeping him in a deep chamber in some ruin. Everything leading there is collapsed and the only way in or out is by portal. Your people would have had a hard time finding him. That ruin could be anywhere on Tamriel for all I know.”

“Ugh, no wonder!” Gorinir groans. “Clever bastards. I need to speak to my father, if what you say is true, and it seems I don’t have much choice. It’s too late to stop the forest from rising up against the Dominion military camp, though. My constructs are about to start attacking as we speak.”

I hand him the ring, and he gets taken through a portal as well. That’s got to be convenient. (It seems like the minute someone learns a neat bit of magic, they immediately start using it for absolutely everything. I know I certainly did.)

“Alright, let’s hurry back and chops some stupid wood golems into kindling before they overrun the military camps,” I say, heading for the cave entrance. “Although if the Dominion military are really so inept that they can’t beat off some wood on their own…”

Back at the camps near the wayshrine, Dominion soldiers are holding their own against walking wood things. They might have had a tougher time of it had the golems stuck together and formed a sweeping wave of wood, but instead, they’ve split up and each of them is trying to tackle a cluster of tents on its own. I suppose complex tactics can’t be expected of bundles of sticks.

Once we’ve dealt with the situation, the portal mage whose name starts with F contacts us again and takes us back to the ruin in wherever. (For all I joke that it might be in Cyrodiil, it’s honestly probably right under our feet. Tons of Ayleid ruins in Valenwood, not a lot of Ayleids.)

Gelthior and his sons are absolutely thrilled to see one another and proclaim such in a very loud, bickery sort of manner. From what the Vinedusk Rangers tell me, they want to hold these Camoran cousins here until their rebellion dies down and gets forgotten about.

“In my experience, people’s leaders disappearing often does very little to discourage them,” I say. “Why not do a public trial and be done with it rather than dragging this out? I’m sure they’ve committed plenty of crimes aside from disagreeing as to who should be on the throne. Like, just today, they tried to kill me and animated some wood golems to attack the Dominion camp. Surely that’s got to be illegal somehow.”

“Hah! You’ve got yourself a point there, friend. It’ll be up to the King to decide what he wants done with them, now that they’re in custody, but I can advise him to give them a trial.”

I go over to speak with Gelthior briefly before we leave. He seems utterly convinced that a trial will lead to him being on the throne.

“Oftentimes, the true battle you need to win is fought with words and not weapons,” I say.

Gelthior grunts. “Maybe things would have been different if you’d been the one in charge of the Altmer forces and not General Endare. She’s nothing but a butcher. She certainly wasn’t interested in talking with anyone.”

“General Endare,” I repeat. “You know, I keep hearing this name often enough to actually remember it, and never in a good context. She coincidentally pulled her troops out of Haven immediately before it was attacked by pirates, for starters.”

“Is that so?” Gelthior says. “I won’t shed any tears if the Jade Butcher turns out to be a traitor and you have to bring her to justice.”

The portal mage returns us to the surface. Now that the situation in Cormount has been taken care of, I can finally get around to finding that jeweler. The one we’d gotten directions to is an old Bosmer by the name of Rondrin. He informs us that he’s retired and no longer does custom jewelry, but I cut to the chase by describing the amulet we found and its apparent effects.

“Ah! That one! My masterpiece!” Rondrin says. “Did it work? You found it on the Argonian’s body? I spent all my resources to create it and track him down, but it’s been a long time so I was starting to wonder if it would even work.”

I frown. “If this whole chain started with an Argonian, it didn’t end with one. You mean to tell me that you put a cursed item into the world and then didn’t keep track of it to make sure it didn’t hurt anyone else?”

Rondrin pales. “Are you serious? You can’t be serious.”

I open my pack to try to find the journal of the Breton I’d found the amulet on (I have a lot of junk in here and really need to put some of this away or sell it), and pass it over to him. “Here, take a look at this. That amulet killed a high elf and this Breton, and that’s just the ones I know about.”

Rondrin takes the book with a shaking hand and look at it. “Oh no… I never meant for this to happen. I didn’t mean for anyone else to get hurt. Where is the amulet now? Do you have it with you?”

I shake my head. “We buried it and put a ward over it until we could find a way to destroy it because I have enough mental issues without cursed jewelry messing with my head further. It’s a ways from here, but fortunately there’s a portal mage who owes me a favor.”

Rondrin nods slowly. “I’ll need to bring it back here to my workbench, but yes, I should be the one to carry it. It shouldn’t affect me.”

The portal mage whose name I have given up on remembering is waiting outside with my friends. He doesn’t know the location where we buried the amulet, of course, but he does know where the Elden Root temple is. From there, Gelur leads us toward the spot.

“I don’t see why this is necessary,” says the portal mage from behind us. “I could just open a portal to drop it into a volcano.”

“I would be a poor jewelry crafter if my creations could be destroyed by throwing them into a volcano,” Rondrin says. “No, if we want to be sure of this, I need to destroy it properly.”

“Hmm, it should be around here somewhere,” I say, peering about at every tree that looks pretty much like every other tree.

“Here!” Gelur exclaims, pointing.

I’d been a little afraid that even with Vastarie’s wards, someone might have taken the amulet by now, but the wards are intact and let us pass, and the cairn is undisturbed. We uncover the amulet and let Rondrin pick it up. Another portal sees us back in Cormount outside Rondrin’s tree pod. We part ways with the mage, and Rondrin and I go inside.

“I never meant to hurt anyone,” Rondrin is mumbling. “I should be destroyed by this amulet.”

“Put it down,” I firmly. “It’s affecting you anyway. And unless I missed something, it doesn’t actually hurt anyone itself, just makes them want to hurt themselves. So it’s succeeding.”

“Ugh, I’m such a fool.” Rondrin puts the amulet onto his work bench. “I’ll take care of this right away.”

I don’t know precisely what goes into destroying a piece of magical jewelry that resisted destructive spells from experienced mages and would apparently survive molten lava. Rondrin fiddles with it for several minutes before sparks fly away from the amulet with an audible pop like a fizzled spell.

“It’s done,” Rondrin says. “No one will suffer for my folly again. Thank you for bringing this to my attention and helping me fix this.”

“Thank you for actually taking care of it,” I say, looking at the glittering shards on the work bench. “This was your masterwork, you say? This was the greatest thing you ever made?”

“Yes, alas,” Rondrin says. “To think I wasted my skills on petty vengeance. My lost son deserves better.”

“You say you’re done making custom jewelry,” I say. “But what if you were to make something else, to redeem your skills and be remembered for something other than death?”

“That’s a fine point,” Rondrin says. “But I’m getting up in years and my hands shake too much for delicate jewelry work anymore. That’s why I had to retire.”

“There might be a potion that could help with that,” I muse.

Rondrin’s eyes widen with tentative hope. “If I had such a thing, I’d be able to start working again.”

I pull out my alchemy notebook (rewritten to combine all the various stolen notes and my own experiments) and sift through it thoughtfully. One of them (the one from Phaer I think) had an idea that might work.

“I’ve an idea of what to look for,” I say. “I’m going to go check the shops in Elden Root first to see if they carry anything, though, before I try making anything myself. I’m not a particularly great alchemist myself and all my knowledge of it was either stolen from people who were using their skills to hurt people or through throwing a bunch of flowers into a cauldron to see what happens and then drinking my own questionable concoctions.”

“You really don’t need to go to this much trouble for me,” Rondrin says.

“Not for you,” I say. “You used your skills to hurt people, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t recognize your skills. I want you to craft something for me.”

“Oh!” Rondrin says. “Of course. I’ll make you whatever you like if you can get me a potion that would let me actually make it.”

I return my group via wayshrine to Elden Root and promise not to try to cause any incidents if we split up. Eran looks dubious at me but agrees reluctantly.

I start off by taking a look in the stalls on the ground floor but don’t see what I’m looking for, so I head up the tree to the Mages Guild. I find an Dunmer alchemist by the name of Edrisi. She’s hesitant at first, but quickly turns eager once she realizes I’m offering to show her all my stolen notes and my own experiments. Surprisingly, this is a rare opportunity for an alchemist, who tend to carefully guard their secrets.

Edrisi’s lips quirk when she runs across one bit in my notes. “You must have had a very uncomfortable night after drinking this one.” She points to the page where I discovered the laxative properties of Namira’s Rot. “I’ve sampled almost everything on Nirn that can be made into a potion, and a few things not from Nirn for good measure. You seem to have been pretty bold about experimentation, too. I’m surprised you let me read this.”

“I don’t make a living by alchemy and I don’t have any secrets worth guarding,” I say. “It’s just a hobby for me in between doing battle with monsters. Do you think you can do something with this?”

“I’ll need to test a few things, but there’s definitely a promising start here,” Edrisi says. “If you’d be willing to leave your notes with me for a bit, I’ll copy things out and get them back to you.”

“Feel free,” I say.

“Who is this for, anyway?” Edrisi asks. “You don’t seem to have a problem with the shakes yourself.”

“A jeweler up in Cormount,” I explain. “If you can get something working, I’m sure he’d be thrilled at having a steady supply available so he can do his profession.”

“A worthy goal,” Edrisi says. “I can have your notes back by tomorrow if you’ll still be in town. As for the potion, well, go off and battle some more monsters and check in later to see if I’ve got something.”