From what Gelur tells us, the Falinesti Winter Site is where a giant walking tree named Falinesti used to hang out in the winter, except Falinesti seems to have walked off to who-knows-where and hasn’t been seen in some time. I’m surprised nobody has asked me to go find the missing walking giant tree yet. They seem to be wanting me to do absolutely everything else.

Such as, for instance, a Bosmer woman outside of a kwama den that has been overrun by thunder bugs. Naturally, we (I) volunteer to go inside and find her notes from the back of the infested caves. We head down and shortly find her notes at the bottom of the mine next to a larger-than-usual thunder bug (killed) and a Skyshard (absorbed).

“You actually found them!” she exclaims when we return them to her. “Twenty years worth of research and I was afraid I’d have to start over!”

“Might I recommend making copies and putting them in a secure place?” I suggest. “There’s a bank in Elden Root that claims to have trolls guarding their vaults.”

“I’ll have to be moving on from this location, anyway,” the kwama researcher says. “Too many kwama dead and the survivors have gone berserk with the loss of their queen. Thanks so much for your help, regardless.”

Further down the road (not that we’re exactly following a road here), we come upon an Altmer scholar in an Ayleid ruin who is having no problems and would prefer to be left alone to translate Ayleid inscriptions. And while she’s dubious about my “maybe” response at whether or not I could even read the language (or decipher the myriad dialects of the entire mer diaspora. I mean, look, I know the word ‘diaspora’, I’m already doing pretty good, aren’t I?), she’s more interested in us going adventuring to bring more fragments of the inscription. Although she can’t give us a more specific location than the coast south of Gil-Var-Delle, and you know, I think the gratuitous hyphens might make it easier to remember that name.

When we finally get close to the Falinesti Winter Site, someone runs up to us calling for help.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, pulling out my axe and looking around. “Trolls? Hoarvor? Racist bandits?”

She stops in her tracks. “Well, there were trolls, but—it’s alright, nothing’s immediately attacking me! I guess I was a little overenthusiastic about yelling for help there.”

She (I fail to get her name) tells us about how some Dominion soldiers led by one General Endare (she spits the name like a curse), the so-called ‘Jade Butcher’, have effectively turned a pilgrimage site into a slave camp and are forcing them to work to try to find some artifact.

“General Endare again,” I say with a sigh. “I’m getting a little tired of hearing that name. And if she’s deciding to force Bosmer to do menial labor for her, then I’m going to cheerfully classify her as a racist bandit and probably smack her when I see her.”

“If you think you can help, talk to Brelor,” she says. “I’m going to run on ahead to Elden Root to warn the Mages Guild.” With that, we part ways.

There’s a lovely view of Elden Root from the top of a waterfall, and I absorb a Skyshard nestled in another bit of ubiquitous ruins. All of Grahtwood that I’ve seen so far seems to have this feel over it that the ancient elves built shit everywhere and then trees grew over everything. The ruins near the base of Elden Root are just slowly and inexorably being torn apart by roots larger than hallways.

After asking around the camp, we finally find Brelor, a wood elf wearing odd-looking robes that I think must be Bosmer leather Mages Guild robes or something. Upon realizing that we’re here to help and that we don’t work for General Endare, he attempts to explain the situation but I immediately get distracted and forget what he was talking about. My mind is pretty scattered today, like it’s working in every direction except at the problem at hand. It takes a supreme amount of focus and nudges from my friends to keep me from wandering off too frequently to fight Hircine-worshipping Orcs with giant bears and poke at mysterious old graveyards.

I find a book titled Monomyth: Lorkhan and Satakal laying about the camp, discussing parallels between the Aldmeri and Yokudan pantheons. I’ll toss it in my pack to read later. These mythic tomes are always a trip. (I didn’t just steal it. Really. A nearby mer told me that it belonged to someone who’d been killed when the frost trolls came out and I was welcome to it if I was planning on avenging them.)

A wayshrine sits at the far edge of the camp, which I light. The camps around the site are so extensive that if Falinesti were still walking around in the general vicinity, it would have trouble finding a spot to park. Would it politely ask the Altmer to pack up and move, or just root itself down right on top of their tents?

“Don’t let it eat me!” yells Brelor suddenly, cowering in terror.

I look up thinking he must have spotted a troll, but no, it’s just a skeever. “Brelor,” I say, trying hard to keep the amusement out of my voice. “Relax. It’s a skeever.”

Merry knocks the large rodent away from Brelor with his staff when it tries to bite him.

“Oh,” Brelor says. “I heard something move and I thought… well, never mind.”

“Let us go find those Welkynd stones already,” Merry says. “I feel like we’ve been lumbering through muck for days here already and it’s raining again.”

“Don’t you have spells for that?” Eran asks.

“Well, yes, but I need to reserve my magicka for the trolls,” Merry points out. “They have a bad habit of healing themselves if I do not char their wounds after they have been cut up.”

The camps have been set up around a large depression dotted with strange icy caves, with wooden ramps and scaffolding framing the edges. (Probably put up by the Altmer soldiers, as if General Endare were intent upon offending the Bosmer in addition to enslaving them And there’s trolls and skeevers everywhere.

We escort Brelor around the edge of the big hole so that he can do some sort of magic over the glowing blue rocks, which reveals snatches of memories involving a creepy Khajiit trying to woo a mer woman who keeps telling him to piss off. Rajhin, dude, no means no. Rather than pissing off, he eventually gets pissed off and does something weird with ice because of her ‘frozen heart’ and I don’t really follow what’s going on here aside from that it still sounds creepy.

Ilara makes a face. “This one does not think this is how lovers should be won…”

After speaking with the Falinesti Faithful (the Bosmer who were sitting around thinking happy thoughts about their giant walking tree showing up again until the Jade Bitch told them to dig) we head down to the dig site to see if we can find what they were digging for before the Jade Bitch does. While killing pretty much every troll in the area in the process. A number of people thank us for saving them from the trolls, some of whom I hadn’t even noticed before attacking said trolls, being so fixated on dealing with the problem in front of me.

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Mud turns to slush around the frigid cave entrances, and Merry complains that it has stopped raining just in time for us to be going inside.

“Oy, mage!” Gelur says, bopping him lightly on the head with her staff. “Quit your whining already.”

Merry mumbles a half-hearted apology as we head inside.

Down in the back of the ice cave is a figure who reminds me a little of a nereid, being blue and gratuitously floating two feet above the ground, but she’s made of ice. Her voice sounds like the Altmer from the creepy Khajiit images whose name I immediately forgot. Fortunately Eran was paying attention and gives her name as ‘Nairume’. Through some magic I don’t care to think too hard about, her real body is trapped somewhere nearby but she can do weird ice shit from a distance. Okay then.

Nairume tells us she’ll help us retrieve Rajhin’s Mantle if we promise to free her. Apparently the creepy Khajiit made it so she’d be forced to love him if she touched the cloak so she can’t do it herself.

“Would that affect anyone else that touch it?” I wonder. “Would I suddenly find myself head over heels for a creepy thief god? Would the Queen, who wants to use it for some sort of ceremony?”

“It’s doubtful,” Nairume says. “He meant it to ensnare me. But I understand your caution. Artifacts of this nature are powerful and dangerous, and might try to twist your mind, no matter who you are.”

Nairume’s ice-thing sends us over to another cave that she opens the passage into. This one leads down into what looks like an Ayleid or Aldmer complex, full of lovely high elf-style furniture and snow. It’s snowing indoors. Stupid magic. Stupid creepy thief gods. Nairume is here too, somehow not frozen to death or starved from being trapped in here—probably more stupid magic.

People are capable of bending the forces of reality to their whim. Why do they use it on such bleeding stupid things?

I digress. I’m going to start ranting again if I’m not careful. Ugh. I need some moon sugar.

The inner vaults are full of skeletons and gargoyles, because of course they are. At least breaking things gives me something to do. When we finally do find someone else who looks alive, it’s an Altmer woman in a Dominion uniform surrounded by a weird blue-black aura yelling, “You’ll never take it from me!”

“General Endare!” I snap, putting on my best Hortator voice and drawing myself up to look official. “Snap out of it! That artifact is trying to bend your mind to its own ends. You’re an Altmer! You’re better than that! No cat trinket can force you to do its bidding!”

“Nnngh…” With great force of will, General Endare becomes momentarily more lucid. “It already forced me to kill my own soldiers. It animated my own shadow into a force of death…”

The moment doesn’t last long. The mind-affecting powers of the mantle soon overwhelm her again and she attacks us. And then her shadow splits, and splits again, and before we know it, we’re being attacked by an entire squadron of Endares. Shadows can be surprisingly solid, apparently. I suppose there wouldn’t be much point in animating someone’s shadow if all you could do was make it produce rude gestures against the wall.

General Endare might have been a terrible and mighty general, but she’s alone here aside from her own shadows, without her army. Unfortunately for her, I’m not really in the mood for mercy at the moment, and she’s been causing problems for me since before I even arrived in Grahtwood. She goes down in due order, leaving the five of us staring at the ground, at her bodies (all but one of which disappear before our eyes), and at the creepy Khajiit artifact that seems to do mind control weirdness over people who touch it. Nobody’s in any great hurry to grab that thing.

“Neri,” Merry says. “If any of us are likely to be unaffected, it would be you.”

“Right, you’ve got the whole soulless thing going on,” Eran says.

“True,” I say. “Okay. Just be ready to do something if I start acting weird. I mean, weirder than usual.”

Hesitantly, I go and pick up the cloak, but it does indeed seem to have no immediate effect upon me. Not caring to see if there’s a time limit on that, I hurriedly shove it into my pack. Along with the pieces of Endare’s body, much to the disgust of my companions. They don’t even ask what I plan to do with it.

We go back upstairs to find Nairume. The temperature has risen and the snow is already melting rapidly. Which means this lovely once-frostbitten room is now ankle-deep with tepid water, which has not particularly made it more pleasant. Nairume directs me to stick the cloak in a brazier to burn away the curses on it and assures me that it won’t be hurt. Whatever you say, lady.

When I put the cloak into the brazier, an image of a Khajiit man appears briefly, taunting her about how he’d stolen her precious walking city while she wasn’t looking. Rude.

“Is it true?” Nairume asks. “Is Falinesti truly missing?”

“That’s true, so far as I know,” I say. “Although whether he had anything to do with it or not is an open question.”

“I’ve been trapped for so long, I don’t know anything about what the world is like these days,” Nairume says. “They mentioned an Aldmeri Dominion, and that it’s now the Second Era.”

“Ah…” I say. “Yeah, I was kind of in the same situation myself. I was stuck in Coldharbour for thousands of years. It has been… taking some adjustment.”

Her eyes widen. “Coldharbour? By the stars! I suppose I should not complain of my own frozen isolation, then. At least I wasn’t trapped in Oblivion on top of that.”

“Complain all you like,” I say. “You’ve every right to be pissed off at some stupid Khajiit god who couldn’t take no for an answer.”

“I’ll need to figure out what to do from here, especially if my home is gone, but that’s a discussion that can be had under the open sky.”

We head up top, and Nairume’s gazing at the open sky almost immediately gets interrupted with my friends and I having to fight off more frost trolls. She’d found them terrifying enough when she was just scrying the area with magic, but seeing them up close and personal sends her shrieking behind us for cover.

“Sorry!” I cry out as we take care of the immediate problem. “We should have come out first and checked.”

“No, no, I should have remembered they’d be here,” Nairume says. “I got so eager to see the sun again that I got ahead of myself and forgot about the trolls.” She looks down uneasily at a dead troll, wrinkling her face. “I should remember that I’m not helpless anymore, either. I wasn’t a mage before becoming trapped in there, but being alone for centuries at least left me with nothing better to do. I thought if I learned enough I might be able to eventually find a way to free myself, which might have worked better had I been trapped inside with any books on magic for translocation or breaking wards rather than ones on elemental magic.”

Merry winces. “I feel that.”

“I’ve never used magic in actual combat before, though,” Nairume goes on. “I won’t be afraid. I’ll try not to be afraid. I’ll try to stay back in the back and see what I can do, if you can stay between me and the trolls?”

“That’s our job,” Eran says with a grin.

“Oh, it’s beautiful out here,” Nairume says. “Not quite like I remember but I’m sure a lot of things have changed and it’s going to take me a while to catch up on things.”

“You haven’t had anyone to talk to for a while,” Ilara says, whiskers twitching in amusement at the torrent of words.

Nairume shakes her head. “When that General Endare came and started talking to me, I was ecstatic. I thought for sure this would be a chance to be free, but once she’d gotten the information she wanted out of me, she didn’t care about anything else and wouldn’t speak another word to me. I hope you won’t be in trouble with your superiors for killing her, even if she left you little choice.”

“Yes, Neri, how* were* we going to explain that?” Gelur asks. “Or you, at least, though we’ll certainly back you up if our word would matter.”

“I’m sure Queen Ayrenn will understand,” I say.

“Is that her name?” Nairume asks. “General Endare mentioned a Queen but didn’t even say her name, as if I was supposed to know somehow!”

“I’ll give you a summary when we get back to camp,” I say. “Maybe me repeating it will help me keep things sorted out, too. I have my memory problems sometimes and my mind is a little scattered still, though some days are better than others. First, though, I’d very much like to see Brelor again and get this creepy guy’s cloak out of my hands before it makes me murder my friends and mate with dead frost trolls or something.”

“Uh,” Eran says, then decides to pretend I didn’t say that.

Once away from the trolls and out of the hole, we find Brelor back at the camp and make some introductions.

“Brelor, I’ve got the creepy Khajiit’s coat in my pack,” I say. “Are you sure you’ll be able to handle it? It hasn’t been able to affect me, especially not from there, but it drove General Endare mad, which is why she’s laying dead in the bottom of the vault and not out here with us. Although given what I’ve heard of her prior actions, I think she was already a little bit mad to begin with and the cloak just inspired her to take her madness to new stupid levels.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Brelor says, looking over the cloak when I hand it to him. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll just be delivering it straight to the Mages Guild in Elden Root where it can be contained and studied, and be ready for the Queen.”