We return to Elden Root for some errands briefly. Repairing our equipment, selling all the junk we’ve collected and don’t want to keep, checking in at the Mages Guild for updates on various projects (resulting in politely being told to go away, they’re busy), a quick stop at the outlaws refuge for important supplies, that sort of thing. I also file an official report about the fate of General Endare so I don’t get blamed for it.

I make a quick stop at Cormount as well. I find the portal mage in the treethane’s place and politely request to speak with their ‘guests’ about something important that has come up. He’s a bit skeptical, but does take me to the chamber in the ruins they’re using as a prison.

I approach the Camoran cousins and pull General Endare’s severed head out of my pack, and toss it on the ground at their feet with a splut. “I brought you something.”

“Is that…” says the father, wide-eyed.

The Vinedusk Rangers all look over to me in alarm as I pull out the rest of her body and dump it on the floor too.

“This is, indeed, General Endare,” I say flatly. “Or was, at least. She enslaved the Falinesti Faithful to force them to dig up a divine artifact for her, claimed it for herself, and murdered her own soldiers. And then she tried to kill me with it. It was a cloak that lets you be in more than one place at once. I had to kill several of her. I don’t know what sort of trouble she might have caused had she been able to get out of there with that thing.”

“By the Green,” whispers one of the sons.

“Anyway, thought you might like to know the Jade Bitch is dead,” I say cheerfully. “Tata.”

With two of the three things needed to operate the Orrery in hand (or at least the Mages Guild’s hands, where I don’t have to carry them around), we decide to head south to Southpoint, which is a point on the south coast of Grahtwood, where the person who was supposed to be able to operate the Ayleid machinery was supposed to be.

That is to say, we decide to head toward Southpoint after a quick detour to kill some Orc in a mine because I found a wanted poster on a dead mercenary inside the mine because of course I had to poke my head into the mine. I feel like I haven’t run across a single mine lately that was actually still being a mine when I got there and not a den of monsters or bandits. This one actually is being used as a mine in addition to a bandit den.

Bandits: killed. Enslaved miners: freed. Skyshard: absorbed. (I feel like I’m getting better at finding these, like I can almost sense them nearby or something.)

On the way there, we encounter a rather chatty skull who introduces himself as Dringoth. From what he says, there’s some Worm Cultists in this area (called the Bone Orchard, of all the cheery names), digging up the bones that make up the orchard and creating skeletons. Or assembling skeletons, seeing as the skeletons had already created themselves long before they died. Living bodies are very good at becoming bones, after all. In any case, this is a good enough reason to go in and hit some necromancers before they can do whatever it is they’re here scheming to do, because you just know they have to be scheming about something and not just animating some undead since you can find remains anywhere.

“Volunteers to carry around the chatty skull?” I ask.

My friends exchange looks. No one raises a hand (or paw).

“Fine, I’ll just tie him to my belt then, I suppose,” I say with a chuckle. “At least until I can find him some new legs. Or new old legs.”

“Why, exactly, are we reassembling the skeleton again?” Merry wonders.

“Because he asked nicely,” I say.

With the skeleton reassembled, Dringoth leads us off toward a dig site to question a skull that’s longer than a fully grown Altmer even with the end of it missing. It looks… rather like a dragon, really.

There’s a tree in the center of the Bone Orchard called the Barrowbough that was apparently grown to keep some very large bones asleep, and the Worm Cultists of course want to kill the tree and dig them up so that they can have super-sized slaves.

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After conferring with the possibly-dragon skull about some stuff I don’t quite catch, Dringoth directs us toward a nearby cave where there’s a Spinner who I’m calling Ammy. She’s not a fighter and certainly wasn’t up to taking on a bunch of Worm Cultists by herself, so she’d decided to stay in the cave and figured a patrol from Elden Root would be by soon enough to clear out the cultists. This, of course, assumed that the Worm Cultists weren’t going to dig up anything more dangerous than a handful of ordinary mer skeletons in the meantime, since the magic tree over the place protects the big old bones from necromancy. Which requires the tree to stay alive and intact.

Ammy gives me a horn to blow so we can get inside and… do something that will involve beating up more necromancers.

“Neri, are you feeling alright?” Eran asks.

“Sure, why?” I wonder.

“It’s just that you’re kind of fumbling around blindly hitting anything that moves if it’s made of bones or wearing a black robe. Usually you’re a little more lucid. And talkative.”

“What are we doing again?” I ask.

Ilara sniffs lightly at me. “Ilara-daro thinks she smells moon sugar on your breath.” Her whiskers twitch and she grins in amusement. “Where did you find it?”

I clear my throat. “Ah… the Elden Root outlaws refuge.”

Eran sighs and points toward the hill. “We’re going in there to stop the Worm Cult from reanimating some very old bones. But if you need a cup of kaveh first to get your brain working again, I’m sure we’ve disrupted their operations enough for the moment that they’re not going to get anywhere in the next few minutes.”

“Kaveh sounds excellent right now,” I say. “Do we have any?”

Gelur produces some from her own magic bag. “Drink up!” she says. “We need you in top shape in case you need to talk to something and not just hit something.”

“I am impressed that you are still capable of fighting if you ate enough moon sugar to be walking around half-asleep,” Merry says.

One magically warmed cup of kaveh later and we’re inside the ‘hill’ that is actually a really big skull with dirt covering it. Dringoth’s actual skull, as it turns out. This one would be considerably harder to carry around on a belt unless I were as tall as the Elden Tree.

The hill/skull/cave is full of very talkative bones, all very accusatory toward Dringoth and very unhappy about the current state of affairs. We go inside and talk to one of them by the name of Olphras I think it was, whose voice sounds surprisingly feminine. I guess there’s no reason why Olphras can’t be a female name for whatever race she was when she was alive. She tells me a lengthy story about how awful it was that Dringoth liked to wander around and accidentally stepped on things.

“I’ve probably stepped on a lot of anthills,” I say. “It doesn’t sound like he was destroying anything deliberately. I’ve killed quite a lot of people deliberately. Hopefully most of them were bad people, but quite a lot of them were simply people who were in my way. Honestly, I can get behind someone who destroys things accidentally. That still makes him a better person than me.”

I probably should have put on my Hortator voice and gave her a convincing argument, and it might just be the moon sugar but I don’t even give a fuck to bother right now. I’m very relaxed and feel like I don’t have to play the Hortator.

I don’t know how convincing I really was, but she does concede that it wasn’t Dringoth’s fault that they were imprisoned and that the Worm Cultists really do need to be stomped on. Although none of us are currently controlling bodies that can do so literally, we certainly do make sure they’re all about to become bones themselves.

Dringoth wants to see the world. While puppeting the bones of some dead wood elf so that he doesn’t accidentally step on anyone. I wish him luck and suggest that he stop by Vastarie’s tower sometime and say hi. (And let him know that it shouldn’t be that hard to find because there aren’t very many tall high elf-style towers in the middle of the Grahtwood. It’s almost as hard to miss as the Elden Tree, and I don’t say that lightly because I have a bad habit of missing really obvious things sometimes.)

We make one more thorough sweep of the area to make sure all the Worm Cultists are dead and nothing is moving that isn’t supposed to be moving, before moving on.

Then I remember the Ayleid fragments that one researcher wanted, so we locate the ruins she’d pointed us toward. I collect the fragments, absorb another Skyshard, and find a book titled Monomyth: “Shezarr’s Song” for good measure. (And it’s a good thing my pack is waterproof. Even if that’s just because the items in my pack aren’t really in my pack.)

“Ugh,” Merry grumbles, trying to dry off his robes with a warmth spell. “Eminaire just said the fragments were on the coast. She didn’t say the ruins were partially submerged.”

“I hope those were what she wanted,” Eran says.

“I did grab as many things as I could that she might be interested in,” I say. “Although now, is there some way back up that cliff to get to the wayshrine, Gelur?”

“I don’t think so,” Gelur says. “We’ll probably just need to go down to Southpoint or up near Gil-Var-Delle to climb back up again.”

“We might as well just head for Southpoint then, since that was where we were going anyway,” I say. “Although now my pack is full of Ayleid bits. What if I need to put something else in there?”

“Like another dismembered corpse?” Eran says dryly. “Neri, if you feel the need to rob Southpoint or carry around dead bodies, you can always just put something down. Or have Gelur carry the runestone fragments.”

“True,” I say. “Okay! To Southpoint!”

“He’s not refuting the bit about stealing,” Merry murmurs.

“Eh, who cares?” Ilara says with a shrug. “He could probably talk himself out of jail time if he somehow got caught.”

“That wasn’t what I— oh, never mind.”