“I’m still not sure how you got the mer-hating Argonian to like you,” Eran says.

“I just forced her to see a person rather than a mer,” I say.

“You mean a lunatic,” Merry says. “You made her see a lunatic.”

“My sheer force of lunacy short-circuited her mer-hate into confusion,” I say. “And then we shared booze smeared with the blood of our common enemies.”

“Short-circuited?” Gelur asks, puzzled.

“It’s… a Dwemer thing,” I say. “Never mind. Anyway, the key to personality is to be interesting enough that people see you as an individual rather than a member of a group.” I glance over at the Khajiit I notice writing. “Are you taking notes, Ilara-daro?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Ilara says with a grin.

“By ‘personality’ he means ‘being weird’,” Merry says. “You are not nearly as weird, but I am certain that should you wish to be, you can probably cultivate some oddity.”

Ilara scribbles a few more words, mumbling, “Cultivate… oddity…”

A runner arrives at the Thalmor camp outside of the Gray Mire requesting assistance at an Ayleid ruin to the north. I agree to take my group to check things out, since we can move faster through the wilderness than soldiers. And we can probably take care of the matter ourselves.

Daggerfall Covenant troops have been amassing in the ruin, and the scout thought that they must have a portal that they’ve been using to send people in. What this really means is that there will be plenty of humans and possibly Orcs to hit. The Dominion scouts at the entrance to the ruin warn us not to try to kill everyone inside and just shut down the portal to prevent them from gaining reinforcements, but fuck that.

Ilara is having none of it, though. “If we charge in making noise and violence, they might send more people through the portal in response.”

“Let them come,” I say. “That’s fewer Covenant troops the Dominion has to deal with.”

Ilara gives me an unamused look. “Let Ilara-daro sneak in and close the portal first. Then we can kill everyone.”

“If you think you can make it… alright, but be careful. If you’re not back out in an hour, we’re coming in looking for you.”

Ilara nods, and heads in. It’s a tense hour of waiting, particularly since I don’t have a clock and I was never good at telling time without one. Sadly there’s no more Dwemer around to make me one. Dwemer clocks are awesome. Maybe I can find one left in a ruin somewhere. They won’t mind if I swipe it. Probably not a lot of Dwemer ruins in Valenwood, though. I’m still musing about the Dwemer when a Khajiit nose emerges from the Ayleid ruin.

“Ilara-daro was successful. The portal is closed.”

“Excellent!” I say. “Well done. Time to kill everyone!”

We go inside and make absolutely certain that there’s no more Covenant soldiers in this particular part of Valenwood. Also there’s a Skyshard behind a statue for some reason, which I absorb. The Redguard lieutenant fights fiercely upon realizing she’s cut off, but she’s no real match for us.

Leaving the Dominion to clean up the mess and kill or capture anyone that was hiding really, really well, we leave behind the Ayleid ruin and make our way back to the main road.

Some ways further down the road, we run across a mer sitting next to a campfire and either incredibly drunk, suffering from a concussion, or both. For a moment, he thinks we’re his captain and crew. He mumbles something about pirates and a mutiny, which is our signal to go find out what’s going on and who needs to be stabbed and where the treasure is.

The place is called the Cave of Broken Skulls (or something like that), and the Altmer captain (Linwen) is just up the hill. She’s gripping a wounded arm, and there are a handful of other injured sailors sitting nearby. Gelur goes up and starts healing people.

“Are you with the Dominion?” Linwen asks.

“That depends,” I say. “We either work for the Dominion and we’re here to save everything, or we’re totally just independent adventurers who are looking for something to stab and/or steal. Or both.”

Linwen looks at me dubiously, then explains that her crew is independent but wanted to swipe some old Imperial treasure to give the Thalmor so they can be privateers. And then pirates showed up, kidnapped her wife, and generally made a mess of things.

“Be careful,” Linwen says. “The Imperial vaults are full of undead and traps.”

“Did you say traps?” I perk up.

Merry groans. “Can I just deal with the undead and pirates while this lunatic plays with traps?”

We head into the cave to look for survivors, but the only one we find is a Khajiit with a pet monkey. Also quite a lot of giant bats, but I don’t think those were part of the crew, unlike the monkey. The monkey is apparently quite smart (probably more so than a lot of Altmer I’ve met) and is capable of disarming traps without setting them off. I feel that that’s not very sporting, but it turns out that the Imperials weren’t fucking around with their traps. Rather than spikes popping up and down at precise intervals, arranged in a convenient staggered or checkerboard pattern, these spikes just cover the entire floor.

“Ilara-daro thinks she cannot jump that far.”

“Yeah, let’s let the monkey do this,” Eran agrees.

Reluctantly, I agree to stand back and let the animal disarm the traps rather than start hopping and dodging, although my friends can tell I’m a tad put out by it. After a few corridors, we run across the ghost of a human who introduces himself as Decius, who I assume must be a dead Imperial since their names often end in ‘-us’. He talks about how the Imperials had planned to create a bunch of undead to guard their secret cache, which seemed like a great idea up until his fellow mages betrayed him and screwed everything up.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Undead make for terrible guards,” I comment. “Then again, living people often make for terrible guards, too.”

“Most people aren’t insane enough to prance into the middle of a bunch of undead giggling in glee at the sound of breaking bones,” Eran points out. “While yelling ‘Yay, skeletons!’”

“What can I say?” I raise my hands. “I love my work, and I had to get some amusement after the monkey stole my joy at the traps.”

The dead Imperial looks at me like I’m completely insane, and clears his throat. “If you can bring me the skulls of the other three mages, I can reverse the ritual and let us all pass on to Aetherius.”

“Sure,” I say. “Do you have some way of identifying which skulls you want, or shall I just grab all of them?”

Decius does not have an answer, so I just start tossing skulls into my bag. Some of them are bound to be the ones he wants and it’s not like I don’t have plenty of room after clearing out some junk in Elden Root.

Fortunately, the monkey didn’t disarm all the traps. There’s still some lovely fire traps to time jumps over with people to beat up on the other side, along with some fascinating Imperial correspondence that I immediately pocket after skimming it.

We meet up with the nice-pirates again, who want us to go beat up the bad pirates and the mutineers, because if they’re seen the bad pirate will kill the captain’s wife. Fair enough; they’d have just gotten in the way anyway. Except they don’t want us to actually just go in and slaughter everyone, because some of the mutineers were coerced into working with the bad pirates, so instead they want us to grab some kindlepitch and fire salts to cause a distraction.

“Kindlepitch and fire salts!” I exclaim. “My favorite cocktail! I love that sort of distraction.”

“I really hope you’re not planning on actually drinking them,” the captain says dryly.

“Come to think that would be pretty distracting…” I muse.

“No, Neri,” Eran says firmly.

“Ilara-daro would suggest she sneak in and make a big fiery distraction, but she’s afraid you have not been able to cause enough mayhem yourself today.”

I laugh aloud at that. “Ah, don’t worry about that, my protege. I enjoy seeing mayhem caused almost as much as causing it myself. And if it’s caused because I had someone else do it, it’s still me causing it indirectly.”

“But then wouldn’t Captain Linwen be the one causing mayhem here?” Eran asks.

“We have a veritable chain of mayhem here!” I exclaim. “Merry, can you deal with the mutineers so we can sort out who needs to actually die later?”

“I suppose,” Merry says. “Dealing with them non-lethally would take longer than doing it lethally. Do we have that sort of time?”

“Perhaps Ilara-daro could slip in and rescue Captain Linwen’s wife while you are causing distractions instead?”

“Now that sounds like a splendid idea,” I say. “Let’s do that one.”

So, we head in and start making a big distraction for Ilara, and keeping people off of Merry so he can turn them to stone. At some point the mutineers realize they’re charging toward explosions next to a wizard who keeps turning them into statues. They are not insane or stupid, and at that point just decide to surrender or run away. Although unfortunately for them, there’s not much more space in this cave to run away to, nor a lot of places to hide.

Once the crew has been dealt with, Linwen’s wife comes up to us and makes sure we know she’s Linwen’s wife so that we don’t turn her to stone too. Linwen and the handful of loyal crew members with her come out and reunite with her.

“Where’s Ilara-daro?” I ask worriedly.

“She’s in the captain’s cabin,” Linwen’s wife says. “After she killed him, I think she wanted to pick his pockets or loot the place.”

“I’d protest that that’s our loot but if she killed him I’d say she deserves a reward anyway,” Linwen says. “The Dominion will want the Imperial war supplies here more. That should be enough to buy us a pardon and letter of marque.” She looks around at the statues and cowering mutineers, then to Merry. “You can turn them back, wizard?”

“Of course,” Merry says. “We can sort through them one by one.”

As they go off and deal with that and I leave my friends to secure the area and tend to anyone that’s still wounded, I go up to the ship to look for my protege. Protégé? Stupid Breton words. Who invented diacritic marks, anyway?

Ilara is not looting the captain. When I open the door and poke my head in, she’s just crouching on the ground looking at the corpse of a Nord man.

“Ilara-daro?” I ask. “Are you okay? You’re not wounded or anything?”

She shakes her head. “Ilara-daro killed him,” she says quietly. “He didn’t hear this one coming. The door was open, so… Ilara-daro put a knife in his back.”

“Congratulations,” I say. “Wait, did you never… kill someone up close and personal like this before?”

Another shake of the head. “It’s different from shooting them with a bow when they’re charging at us to fight us. This Nord never knew Khajiit was here.”

“You’re getting very good at being stealthy,” I say.

She’s quiet for a long moment. “Would you judge this one if she said she enjoyed that?”

I grin. “Not at all. It’s such sweet victory to achieve something flawlessly.”

“Perfectly,” Ilara says. “Elegantly. Ilara-daro did not come up here intending to kill him but she saw an opportunity to good not to take.”

“He probably had it coming,” I say.

Ilara smirks. “Probably. Maybe. You do not always deeply investigate every problem you agree to solve.”

“True,” I say with a shrug. “Whoever asks for my help first and sounds more convincing.”

Ilara chuckles. “It hardly seems important most of the time, doesn’t it?”

“Come on,” I say. “I’ve got a bunch of skulls to get back to a ghost who probably isn’t going to do anything sinister with them and I did not deeply investigate. Unless you want to stay here and loot the corpse and everything in the immediate vicinity.”

She giggles softly, and goes over to check the pirate captain’s pockets. “Let’s loot quickly and go do that, then.”

We go back to the ghost with my pack full of entirely more skulls than necessary. He stops me from pulling them out after realizing he can’t hold them and just indicates that we ought to do that in the ritual chamber, which is somewhere nearby except he’s forgotten how to get in aside from walking through walls and I’m too solid of a dead person to walk through walls.

A nearby lever gets us inside. The three mages have their ghosts stuck in the middle of casting the ritual they fucked up. Forever. Damn, that must be an annoying punishment for fucking up, if they’re even aware of anything. (I check. They’re not. Or at least if they are, they’re incapable of responding in any way.) Unfortunately, we’re going to need to match up which skull goes to which ghost. I dump all the skulls out onto the floor.

“I wish these fetchers had carved their names into their foreheads or something,” I say, picking up a skull to test it on the first ghost. “Unless you’ve got any better ideas, grab a skull and let’s start checking.”

“Alas, this one does not,” Ilara says. “Perhaps we should have brought Merry.”

“Ah, he’s busy, and it’s not like there’s that many skulls,” I say. “These ghosts have been trapped here for years. They can wait a few more minutes.”

After some trial and error, we go through our pile of skulls and match them all up correctly, at which point they vanish and the chatty ghost comes in and thanks us for freeing him. Rather than moving on to Aetherius, he seems to want to go get a job with the Mages Guild or something. I wish him luck, and we head back to the ship cave.

“He’s probably not going to take over the world,” I say lightly.

“Might be hard without being able to touch anything,” Ilara agrees. “Why are some ghosts more solid than others?”

“No idea!” I say cheerfully. “Say, I wonder if any of these pirates or not-pirates have any moon sugar…”

“Shall we go find out?”