Down along the beach north of Southpoint, we run across a pair of very large senche-cats overlooking another patch of ubiquitous ruins who take issue to us coming close and prove to be a great fight. Gelur refers to them as Nindaeril the Monsoon and Bavur the Blizzard, and that they’ve been the bane of travelers in this part of Grahtwood for some time.

“Ah, I love Valenwood,” I say. “There’s so many dangerous things around.”

“You’re insane,” Merry observes.

On the shore by the ruins, I find another book on religion next to a small boat and a broken crate. I hope someone wasn’t expecting a book delivery by sea here. Mine now. We’ve been fighting a few crocodiles along the way, too, and stopping to let Gelur skin them and shove their hides into her bag. And their meat. And their bones for good measure.

“Why not just shove the whole thing in there if you’re just going to take it all?” Eran wonders.

“Good point!” Gelur says, inspecting the second one to eyeball a measurement. “I think they’ll fit.”

She stretches the bag open as wide as it will go while Eran and I help heft the entire crocodile inside.

Gelur closes the bag with a grin. “I should have gotten myself one of these sooner.”

While strolling down the beach (which quickly turned soggy when it started raining) my first impression of Southpoint is that people are squatting in another ruin. Did all the masons in Valenwood seriously get murdered or something? Anyway, I suppose someone must have been watching the beach and runs up when they spot us approaching the place, telling us to halt because there’s great danger. I’m pretty sure she had to have seen us casually hunting crocodiles and by ‘hunting’ I mean dancing in front of and hopping over while my friends kill them and remind me how far away the last wayshrine is if they bite me too hard.

“Ah, excellent!” I exclaim. “And here I was afraid this was going to be a boring trip.”

The Bosmer woman gives me an odd look and curtly informs me that Southpoint is off-limits anyway.

I clear my throat. “Ah, I suppose word didn’t get ahead that we were coming. We are inspectors working for Queen Ayrenn, and we were sent to investigate the situation here.”

“Oh!” she says. “Well, in that case, I’m glad you’re here. And that Dominion ‘inspectors’ frequently go heavily armed. We could definitely use the help. There’s chaos in the streets and citizens have turned on one another. We’ve been trying to evacuate survivors, at least the ones that aren’t attacking anyone on sight. You’ll want to speak with Captain Elonthor down near the gates, not far from the wayshrine.”

“Will do,” I say.

Once out of earshot of the scout whose name I didn’t catch, Eran says quietly, “We’re pulling the ‘inspectors’ thing again?”

“Hey, it’s technically true, and technically true is the best kind of true,” I retort. “We were sent in this general direction, just for a… completely unrelated reason that probably isn’t actually that unrelated, seeing as if they were trying to find why what’s-their-name hadn’t come back, uh… let’s hope that what’s-their-name is okay and hasn’t been murdered randomly in the streets by lunatics because I don’t know where they’re going to find another Ayleid expert on short notice.”

There’s a small camp set up within sight of the walls. I stop to light the wayshrine before speaking to anyone. And then grab a book on Khajiit religion when I think no one is looking. And then I get the sense of there being a Skyshard nearby that I can’t really explain. I never used to get this sensation, or maybe I did and it wasn’t strong enough and I didn’t recognize what it meant. In any case, my friends don’t do more than look out for wildlife when I determinedly lead us off the path and into a cluster of large rocks to find something hidden behind foliage.

“You knew that was there?” Merry asks.

“Seems so,” I say.

“Fascinating,” Merry adds. “Perhaps it is a sign that your Aedric powers are strengthening.”

A man leaning up against a large tree near the refugee camp is complaining about carnivals. Apparently he had a job lifting stuff or something there and he got annoyed about something and left. I’m not very clear on that.

“A carnival sounds like fun!” I say. “We should check it out after we’re doing fixing whatever the fuck’s going on in Southpoint.”

“Finally, a sensible order of priorities,” Eran comments.

“Well, if you do decide to check it out, you may be disappointed,” the hauler says. “I wish you luck in getting the performers to actually put on their acts.”

We locate the captain near the gates, a Bosmer with long hair slicked down to his neck with rain. Very helpfully, he has no idea what’s going on in the city, and the scouts he sent in haven’t returned. I know where this is going. Also, even more helpfully, they’re spread thin because General Endare pulled many of their troops away and the only other forces who could have helped have been busy worrying about some refugees from Black Marsh.

“General Endare again?” I grumble. “You should know that the woman went mad, stole an artifact meant for the Queen, and murdered her own troops. My condolences if you knew any of the fallen. I’m surprised you haven’t gotten word back yet from the winter site.”

“What?” the captain says. “Oh, Y’ffre, that’s just what we need. Where is she now?”

“Aetherius, possibly,” I say. “She tried to kill us, too. I’ll let you figure out who won by which of us is standing here now.”

“I’m not sure whether that’s really a relief or not,” he says. “But if you were capable of taking down someone of General Endare’s caliber, maybe you can help here, too. There was someone else who wanted to go in and look for my scouts. A mage named Daraneth.”

“Daraneth, hmm…” I open up my journal. “Conservator Daraneth, from Elden Root?”

“That’s the one,” the captain says. “Thinks she’s pretty important, but what do I know?”

“We were supposed to meet up with her here,” I say. “Of course, the meetup wasn’t supposed to be quite this interesting, but I don’t think I’m capable of having a boring life.”

An Altmer woman, having heard her name and having clearly been eavesdropping, swoops in with theories on how this was obviously the work of Sheogorath, because obviously Sheogorath is the sole possible cause of anyone becoming murderously insane.

“This again,” sighs Captain Wet-Hair.

“You know, I’ve seen a lot of people lately being murderously insane,” I say. “But I’m assuming that nobody heard them yelling ‘For the Heritance!’ or declaring that the world would burn in the name of the God of Schemes or the Prince of Destruction or whoever, or you would have mentioned it, yes?”

“Not that I’ve heard of, at least,” the captain agrees. “But I can’t rightly say what’s going on as it is.”

The Altmer woman tuts something about how she’s been getting her way since before I was born. That would make her pretty damned old, if she had any idea.

I roll my eyes. “In any case, we were going in there anyway. Merry, the townspeople are probably being mind controlled, possessed, or riled up by some weird Daedric or Ayleid or whatever artifact. Could you just turn them to stone while we sort things out?”

“It is more difficult to do with people who are actively attacking us,” Merry points out. “But if you can keep their attention on you and away from me, it’s doable.”

I turn to Conservator Fussypants. “You are welcome to come along if you like.”

“Just try to stay behind me and Neri,” Eran suggests.

We slip into the city through a break in the ruined walls that gapes wider than the boarded-up gate. I’m not sure what anyone thought that was going to accomplish seeing as this hole is about twenty feet from the gate and quite obvious.

Merry petrifies anyone silly enough to attack us, and we investigate each of the buildings and chat with some people who are still pretty delusional but in a non-violent sort of way. They mention something about a (clearly mad) mayor who has declared the city independent of the Dominion, forbade anyone to leave, and sent ‘cleaning brigades’ out killing people. An innkeeper is preparing his beds for the arrival of the Eight Divines, so he says. I collect every bit of potentially incriminating correspondence that I spot along the way.

“Is that really necessary?” complains the conservator.

“Yes,” I say firmly, tossing a note from someone calling themself ‘Sorion the Talented’ into my pack. Sounds like someone else who might be Sorry. “You want to find out what’s going on. Every bit could be a clue.”

“That’s true,” she says.

In one of the buildings, we find someone (I think) dressed as a Dominion scout, possibly. More telling is that he’s tied up and protesting that I can’t eat him until dinnertime.

“Is this because I’m wearing Bosmer armor, or is it a height joke?” I ask. “I know I’m shorter than most Altmer men, but come on, I’m not that short.”

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Eran clears his throat. “Are you with the Dominion? Captain Elonthor sent us to look for you.”

“Oh!” the lieutenant says, letting us know that he’s a lieutenant and look, I can spell lieutenant properly. (Silly Breton words, anyway.) Right, I can spell lieutenant but I already forgot his name, oh well. He tells us that the mayor turned his fellow scouts into bears for some reason.

“Bears?” I wonder. “Really? Why wouldn’t he turn them into something that isn’t the size of a hut and capable of mauling people? Bunnies seems more usual. Although I once turned people into cheese. Cheese never killed anyone. I mean, unless someone ate it and it had gone bad.”

“Neri, you’re babbling,” Merry says. “And are you high again?”

“… maybe a little.” I untie the lieutenant. “You’d best report back to the captain. We’re going looking for your missing bears, provided nobody has eaten them. Bear is tastier than mer, after all. Fortunately, we have a transfiguration expert here. Oh, and don’t mind the statues on the way out. They’ll be fine.”

“Right…” the lieutenant says dubiously, and takes the opportunity to flee while he can.

Two bears turned back into mer later, and the conservator wants us to get into her laboratory to retrieve a scroll that will break the magical ward protecting the mayor inside the cathedral, because we really need to give the mayor a talking to about all this. And directly over the laboratory is a strangely localized lightning storm primarily located inside the building somehow.

“Did you leave behind an experiment that went wrong while you were away or something?” I wonder.

“No,” the conservator says. “Someone has to be conjuring this, and they’re probably doing it from the highest point in— wait!” she explains, noticing me heading for the door into the building. “Stay out of there! The lightning will destroy you!”

“Is it in the basement? Because the hatch is right there.”

“Well, yes, but you’ll never survive it!” she insists.

“Gelur, can you hit me with one of those ‘healing over time’ spells?” I ask.

“You got it,” Gelur says, sending a stream of magicka over me, along with a shield for good measure.

“Be right back!” I yell as I cheerfully skip inside, dodging at least some of the lightning. There’s only one thing in here that looks like a magic scroll, so I quickly grab it and rush outside again before Gelur’s spell wears off.

“You are insane,” Merry comments. “Just so you know.”

“No arguments here!” I hand the scroll to the conservator. “Is this what you were looking for?”

“Yes, that’s the one,” she says. “You can certainly move!” She chuckles. “There’s still someone standing on the tower shooting lightning at everything in sight, though.”

“Ah, you don’t think you’re as much up to dodging as me?” I ask. “Okay, I’ll go up and have a chat with him. You can just stay here out of sight.”

“No, that’s quite alright. We can probably make it past.”

Undaunted (but not those Undaunted) we carefully or not-so-carefully make our way through the town and get to the cathedral. The magic scroll gets the door open, and we head inside. The mayor’s name is Aulus, and the conservator goes up to him and starts berating him for being a pathetic mortal, and then the Altmer body goes flying back onto the floor and the Madgod pops out in full purple-and-gold regalia.

“Sheogorath!” Merry hisses.

“Hi, Uncle Sheo!” I exclaim, waving.

As it turns out, Aulus made some sort of deal with Sheogorath in hopes of gaining the respect of the people, because the Madgod is precisely the person you want to make a deal with when you want respect. I guess he thought anyone that respected him would have to be insane. Sheogorath is unimpressed with what he’s done with his gift of a tongue that drives people mad, and suggests ripping it out and giving it to his favorite mortal, me.

“It’s a bit late for that, Lord Sheogorath,” Merry says. “He already has a tongue that drives people mad.”

“That’s a point!” Sheogorath says.

While I’m flattered that I’m his current favorite mortal, that only lasts for about five seconds until Aulus begs pathetically and Sheogorath waves some purple glowy stuff at us and everything goes black.

…

I wake in a cell, along with my friends and the conservator. (Why are there cells under a cathedral that look more like something you’d keep prisoners in rather than monks?)

“Conservator Daraneth, are you alright?” Eran asks.

“Not going to ask me if I’m alright?” I ask cheekily.

“No,” Eran says with a smirk. “Everyone else but you. If you weren’t alright, you’d be launching a naked rescue of us from the wayshrine outside of town.”

“I am alright,” the conservator (right, her name was Daraneth) Darry says. “And myself again. I’m surprised you didn’t think I was acting strangely, but then I suppose you did not know me while I was not being possessed by the Madgod to have a framework for what was normal for me.”

“To be fair, any weirdness you may have displayed got a bit overshadowed by the lunatic with the battle axe,” Eran says.

After a quick rundown between one another to make sure that everyone is alright and probably not being possessed, mind controlled, or anything, Sheogorath poofs in front of the door in a sparkly purple poof.

“So, Neri, you up for another round of fun?” Sheogorath says. “Because you’re going to have another round of fun! But no cheese this time, not yet anyway. You’ve got to earn your cheese.”

“You either want me to hit Aulus repeatedly or give him a pep talk to make him properly mad,” I say.

“Either of those will do!” Sheogorath exclaims. “The way he squandered my gift and made such a mess of things… I’m disappointed in him! No cheese for him yet either! I even brought him a hero to destroy!

“Really?” I ask. “If you brought me, I’d more think it was because you wanted him hit repeatedly, not the other way around.”

“Eh, true,” Sheogorath says. “You’re uncommonly resilient for a mortal. Or something passing for a mortal. Anyway, yes, go upstairs and turn his brains to paste one way or another. Oh, and your friends have to stay here till you’re done. Purely out of concern for their safety, I assure you! After all, I’ll dearly love to watch him kill you and then have you come back naked to try to beat his face in with your bare hands.”

“Sure thing,” I say.

“As for you,” Sheogorath turns to my friends and waves a hand. A table appears, and a purple-and-gold tablecloth unrolls to reveal a small banquet, heavy on the cheese. “Mustn’t be a poor host! Here, eat and watch what Neri’s getting up to.” A mirror pops into existence, showing my current location. I wave at it. “Tata!” Sheogorath waves and disappears.

“Um,” Eran says. “Right then. We’ll just sit right here, then. I’d tell you to be careful, Neri, but, you know. Have fun and try not to lose your axe in deep water again.”

“Will do!” I say. “Wait. Will… try not to do? Agh, you know what I mean. Right, you guys stay safe. I’ll be fine.”

I head out to try to find my way out of the catacombs and up into the cathedral. It doesn’t take long for Sheogorath to get bored and summon some Daedra in my path to make things a little more interesting.

“Aw, Golden Saints? For me?” I say. “Thanks, Uncle Sheo! You shouldn’t have!”

I fight my way past the Daedra, pull a lever to raise a bridge because it was too easy, and then fight a Daedroth apparently named Free Will. Cute. Because he gave me the choice between pulling a lever and fighting something. Of course I was going to fight something. Much more fun than levers. Unless the levers are to lava, and I haven’t seen any lava around here, although if I think about it hard enough Sheogorath might decide to remedy that.

Mayor Aulus is up on the ground floor of the cathedral, wibbling at Sheogorath again until the Madgod finally encourages him to kill me and disappears.

I sigh. “Is this all you are? A sniveling, whining skeever who had the privilege to be blessed by a god, but doesn’t appreciate that gift for what it is?”

“I never wanted this!” Aulus snivels and whines. “He made me do it! All I wanted was to be respected! Please, I don’t want to die. Surely we can work something out?”

I put my face in my palm. “I’m not really in the habit of murdering people who aren’t fighting back. It’s not sporting. This is why I’m very good at pissing people off so that they’ll attack me. Anyway, look. I don’t know that Sheogorath would have been my first choice in patron deity in the hopes of gaining respect and obedience, but it is what it is.”

So, he starts in on some sob story about how his family (he’s an Imperial) used to rule over Southpoint (because of course they did) and now they don’t and nobody will bow to him anymore.

“And that’s why you requested Daedric help to regain rulership of your ancestral city?” I ask. “And this was the best you could do with it?”

“Sheogorath cursed my tongue and then let me make a mess out of everything!” Aulus wibbles.

Quite frankly, I don’t think he’s any serious threat to me even if he weren’t too busy feeling sorry for himself, but it wouldn’t do to let my guard down. There’s no telling if Sheogorath gave him any nifty powers that weren’t just making people crazy by talking to them. (And anyway, it probably wouldn’t affect me since I’m already mad. Could I be madder? Probably? It’s a good thing Merry isn’t here to question that.)

“I could give you some advice, you know,” I say. “I could tell you how to be a proper ruler and gain the respect of your people.”

Aulus stops wibbling long enough to look at me warily. “You could?”

“I could,” I say. “However, you haven’t exactly given me much confidence that you’d fare better with my gift than Sheogorath’s.”

Aulus looks at me indignantly. “I would be a great leader!”

“Oh, yes, you’ve done a smashing job of that so far,” I say. “Especially with the smashing. What were you even telling people to do? Just ‘respect my authority’? What does authority even matter but for what you do with it?”

“What would you do with it?” Aulus asks.

“Me?” I chuckle. “Well, let’s see. First, the need to establish supply lines. You told everyone they couldn’t leave, sure, but people’s supplies would run out eventually and they’d starve to death. Having a portal mage at your employ would be fantastic for that, if you could convince one to do something so mundane. You’d think people would study magic more to solve logistical problems than to make a mess of the vicinity through ill-conceived experiments.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Aulus admits sheepishly.

“Then I’d see about shoring up the town’s defenses,” I say. “You have maybe two-thirds of a town wall here and gaps in it as wide as that space between your common sense and a metaphor that pranced away from me like a deer made of cheese.”

Aulus stares at me.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I say. “You have people in your town thinking the Eight Divines are about to come by for tea.” I shake my head. “Anyway. You also should support the Aldmeri Dominion, because Queen Ayrenn is awesome and will be totally awesomer as Empress Ayrenn. And if you’re saying you’re an enemy of the Aldmeri Dominion, I might just have to turn your brains to paste because I support the Aldmeri Dominion. Or Ayrenn, at least.”

Aulus probably has something else to say about this but I’m kind of past the point to care about anything he’s wibbling about. This is entirely a waste of time and I don’t know how I let the Madgod talk me into this or why Sheogorath likes this fool anyway. I guess because he is a fool, of the hilariously incompetent sort.

Oh, right, he’s saying something about how he’s not going to bow to some high elf what did he just call her? Oh he did not say that.

“Aulus,” I say tightly. “You’re going to the Shivering Isles now. Last chance to put in any requests about how painful your trip is. Which is to say, if you convince Sheogorath to take you now, I’m not going to hit you repeatedly for insulting a woman I like. You should talk fast before this very generous offer runs out of time.”

It doesn’t take Aulus much more wibbling to decide that he’s likely to enjoy begging Sheogorath to take me away from this dangerous lunatic and get a closer view of other dangerous lunatics.

“Sheogorath,” I say once Aulus is gone and I’m no longer seeing red. (Mostly just purple and gold by this point.) “May I speak frankly with you for a moment?”

“What’s this?” Sheogorath asks. “Being polite and asking permission rather than simply babbling? Now there’s a shock! Go ahead.”

“What did you see in that guy?” I ask. “Was he just funny because he’s so incompetent?”

“Eh, a bit of that,” Sheogorath says. “Those Imperials are especially funny when they’re incompetent, and they get so uptight about it, too. An incompetent Nord will just yell louder and hit things less accurately but is otherwise indistinguishable from a competent Nord.”

“Were you just messing with him when you said he was your favorite mortal?” I ask with a smirk.

“Everyone I talk to is my favorite mortal of that moment. Unless they’re not. Now, favorite mortal, I’m going to show my second favorite mortal around the Isles. I’ll let you get back to your friends. Ta!”

Sheogorath disappears, and my friends appear before me. Eranamo is brandishing two forks, momentarily frozen in surprise at his sudden translocation. Ilara’s arms are full of cheese, and Gelur and Merry also have a few pieces. I ask no questions.

“I never want to see cheese again,” the conservator grumbles, turning on her heel and making for the door as everyone starts shoving cheese in Gelur’s pack.