In the middle of the big building, a mage is admonishing one particularly handsome (or so he claims) Khajiit to keep his tail still long enough to cast an illusion on him. This building actually seems to be the home of the Fighters and Mages Guilds, the Thalmor, and whatever is leading the town itself? I think that woman over there is the treethane. I’m not sure—most places would have put those in different buildings.

“Ah, there you are,” Raz says. “Raz is glad to see his little sister well. This one trusts you ran into plenty of trouble on the way here?” I know Khajiit expressions well enough by this point to recognize when one of them is smirking.

“Yes, we probably solved every problem between here and Marbruk,” I say. “Are you getting a magical makeover to make you look less handsome?”

“Indeed,” Raz says, tail twitching again, eliciting another grunt of annoyance from the mage, and tells us about their brilliant plan. The brilliant plan here is to use an illusion to make Raz look like Queen Ayrenn in order to draw out someone who might try to assassinate him. Her. Whatever.

“Your magic earring won’t do the job here?” I ask.

“Sadly not,” Raz says. “It is currently in the hands of another Eye who is probably using it for something equally important.”

Also attending this meeting, such as it is, are the town’s treethane and some guy who I’m guessing is a high-ranking member of the Thalmor, but I’m just going to think of him as the Thalmor guy because I don’t actually care who he is and he rubs me the wrong way from the start. The treethane thinks there’s a spy in the Thalmor. The Thalmor guy thinks that’s preposterous and insulting but seems to be going along with this all just to prove the Thalmor are awesome and infallible.

“You did hear about the incident at the College of Aldmeri Posterior, didn’t you?” I ask.

“Propriety,” the Thalmor guy retorts. “And yes, I heard. How could I not have? That was the actions of a small number of infiltrators and no true Thalmor, however.”

Ilara hisses. “No true Thalmor, he says. Ilara-daro is more of a true Thalmor than them, and Ilara-daro is no Thalmor. She quit, after they hurt her and beat her and mocked her for having a tail and when it turned out those weren’t even ones supposed to be teaching us… what difference did it make? This one decided she would rather trust the ones who actually helped her rather than anyone who called themselves Thalmor and thinks the whole thing is suspect.”

The Thalmor guy continues to look offended over Ilara’s outburst, but doesn’t say anything about it.

“You should stay behind where it’s safe, Ilara,” Raz says, expression darkening at her pronouncement at what she experienced at the college. “This will be a dangerous mission.”

She sniffs and her tail twitches in annoyance. “Ilara-daro will accompany you. Magic her to look like her annoying brother if you must.”

“She’s as stubborn as you, that’s for sure,” says the Altmer mage. “At least turning a cat into another cat would be easier than turning a cat into a Queen. She already almost looks like you.”

“Pfah!” Raz says. “Fine. Raz supposes it would be more believable if Raz were also accompanying the Queen, but let it be known he does not like this.”

“Ilara-daro is an adult, Raz,” Ilara says. “Do you want to hear about how she snuck into a Wood Orc camp and planted lurcher seeds to drive them off?”

Raz makes an interesting face somewhere between impressed and terrified.

“You could make me look like the Queen,” I suggest. “Then Raz can look like me and Ilara-daro can look like Raz.”

“How would that be an improvement?” the mage says incredulously. “Aside from the fact that you don’t have a tail to hide.”

“I’m more durable than Raz and I don’t stay dead when I die,” I say. “If someone actually succeeded in assassinating me, it would mainly be an inconvenience and the Khajiit siblings could kick their ass.”

I spend the next several minutes uncomfortably being marveled over for accidentally becoming immortal, before getting on with it already. They opt to keep this simple and disguise only me and not the Khajiit.

A few spells later and I’m looking very pretty, that’s not going to be confusing or anything, and the three of us head out to the old Imperial underground that for some reason they’d leaked that Ayrenn was going to personally inspect. I have no idea which is sillier, that they decided it was sensible for Ayrenn to want to inspect a sewer or that they’d think the racist bandits would fall for it.

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

We’re supposed to be meeting a Thalmor officer there by the name of Asteril whose loyalty is under suspicion (by the treethane, at least, not the Thalmor guy), under the assumption that she won’t be able to resist the opportunity to assassinate the Queen.

Everything looks fine at first. We stroll into the sewers underneath one of the ruined Imperial towers, and I, Queen Ayrenn, strolls up to speak with Asteril. And then she blows me up. An explosion knocks me off my feet and leaves me stunned and badly burned.

“You will die, and the true Queen of Alinor will rise again!” the racist bandit yells, and then disappears in a puff of smoke. Dammit, why do people keep doing that?

I groan softly and cast a Restoring Light on myself. My illusion clearly wasn’t designed to deal with significant damage, and in the wake of the racist bandit’s disappearance, I’ve reverted to being a slightly singed ex-King rather than an inexplicably undamaged Queen.

Raz doesn’t even waste time asking if I’m alright. “She can’t have gone far. We must catch her!”

The underground (not really a sewer but more of a fort, actually) is swarming with racist bandits. We kill them all and retrieve some incriminating correspondence, but Asteril herself has gotten away.

“Raz heard from some of his contacts that they were not putting all their hopes on the Veiled Queen and Prince Naemon,” Raz says, looking over the papers we’d retrieved. “Prince Naemon is not playing along with them any longer and High Kinlady Estre is dead. They had a backup plan… and now Estre’s body is missing, and Pelidil has the staff.”

I sigh. “I’d complain about people not staying dead but I haven’t stayed dead so I’d have to include myself in that. You know, here I was on Tamriel just starting to get used to the idea that I’d only have to kill most people once and then not have to deal with them anymore, but as it turns out, dying in Tamriel is just as much of a Dwemer revolving door as dying in Oblivion, apparently.”

We hurry back to the big building and report to the treethane and the mage what happened and what we found. The Thalmor guy is still insulted by the idea that Asteril is a traitor, despite the fact that the three of us quite clearly saw someone who looked like Asteril try to blow up someone who looked like Queen Ayrenn. I acknowledge that this may not mean terribly much. We wind up going to the Thalmor barracks to try to question her, although why she’d be there I have no idea. Likely we might find clues rather than the traitor herself, or an Asteril who is bound and gagged and has no idea that someone is posing as her, one of those.

A cat is sitting outside the Thalmor residence, watching the door intently. I lean down and ask, “Hey there. Did you see anything? I bet you must have seen everything.”

Ilara clears her throat next to me. “Neri, that’s just a cat, not an Alfiq Khajiit.”

“It was worth a shot,” I say, straightening with a shrug.

Inside the building, the corpse of an Altmer who looks very much like the one that just attacked us is laying on the floor, stone cold and having been dead for long enough that I have to wonder why none of the Thalmor in town have gone in here and noticed it by now. The mage is more concerned about the integrity of the Thalmor than her death, and I restrain the urge to smack him.

“You know, it’s too bad no one ever imagined that illusion magic was a thing and had a way to detect it,” I say.

The Thalmor guy (Raz calls him Oromin—I never bothered asking for his name) huffs indignantly.

Behind a bookcase, Raz finds a secret room with a trapdoor leading down to somewhere, so we head down and find a cramped cellar with a rough passageway leading into caves. A note from Pelidil has conveniently been left on a table, addressing, apparently, Asteril’s twin sister, whose name is Laryaril. I can understand being jealous of having an easier-to-pronounce name.

The cave opens up into a skeever-infested sewer and more of the Imperial underground, also full of highly-killable racist bandits.

We fight our way through the corridors into a prison, and find Larry already wounded and dying, because Pelidil is such an incompetent villain that he decides to have his own minions killed for no good reason. And for some reason, she still believes in the Veiled Heritance and what they’re doing.

And if the racist bandits weren’t bad enough, Pelidil is working with the Maormer and plans to give them Valenwood in exchange for helping topple the Dominion. (Does he even realize that they’d never even be able to control more than the beach?) Racist bandits and sea elves are definitely becoming my favorite things to hit around here, by which I mean I’m really tired of hitting them and would like to have different problems for a change so I’m quite happy to keep hitting them until they stop being problems. At least I get to take breaks to hit other things from time to time.

According to Larry, the Maormer are going to attack a town to the north called Seaside Sanctuary, which already doomed itself by putting the word ‘Sanctuary’ in its name. After receiving urgent instructions from Raz and the treethane to hurry to Seaside Sanctuary which is totally what I’m going to do in the midst of getting distracted by every problem along the way, I meet up with my friends again. I bring them up to speed on what’s going on.

“You just had to mention an undead Estre,” Eran groans at Merry. “You just had to.”

“I did not believe they were mad enough to actually do it,” Merry protests. “Admittedly, I did not believe they were mad enough to open Oblivion gates in the middle of a major city, either.”

“If we’re leaving town now, we ran into someone who wants a wispmother killed,” Gelur says. “Out to the north. Wasn’t terribly specific on the exact location, but the statues of his companions ought to be a clue.”

“All you had to say was something dangerous to hit,” I say with a grin.