We might have almost found where Serpent’s Grotto is supposed to be when we run across a Bosmer who has been hunting a troll. He tells us about how it’s been terrorizing the hunters in this part of Valenwood and wants us to track it and kill it. What is it about the Bosmer in Greenshade that think we want to track things for them?

“Oh, for love of Xarxes,” Merry mutters. “Gelur, can you track this thing?”

“Sure,” Gelur says. “Wanna bag us a troll?”

“Neri, no need to go off chasing trolls,” Merry says. “We’ll take care of this and meet up with you at Seaside Sanctuary, or whatever spot between here and there you’ll probably still be killing things at by the time we get there.”

I admire my friends’ dedication to keep me from getting too badly distracted when there’s an actually urgent problem that needs to be solved. And I’m fairly certain that if I weren’t here, Merry would have been the first to say “go kill your own damned troll.”

There’s a wayshrine standing outside of the grotto, which I stop and light. I take a moment to pop over to Marbruk real quick to drop off some books with Sahira-daro and let her know about Rootwater Grove, before heading into the grotto.

And of course there’s trouble in Serpent’s Grotto. A wood elf inside tells me the sea elves are here because of course they are. And the name of the place wasn’t just a metaphor. This cave was named after some sort of legendary giant snake that was bound here with blood magic for a few centuries. The Maormer were probably like “Cool, a big snake!” when they heard of it. The Bosmer woman here thinks they must have some great plan to control the thing, but no, I just think they’re snake fans and nothing else.

So naturally, our job here is to slaughter some pesky Maormer and re-bind the giant snake, because it’s one of those things that’s supposedly impossible to kill. Presumably not in the manner that Daedra are impossible to kill, which is because they’re quite killable and just come back.

We head through the grotto, kill a lot of sea elves and wave a blood-infused glowy thing over some magic pools, then meet up with the Bosmer priestess at the end of the cave.

The lead dumb sea elf is on a cliff outside the grotto, doing some magic in front of another magic pool. The translucent image of a giant red snake wavers in the water below, tall enough for the head to be above the cliff.

“He’s about to unleash the serpent!” the Bosmer cries. “We have to stop him!”

“Why did we do all that in the cave if he can still release it?” I wonder, running toward the Maormer mage. “Never mind, whatever it is should be solvable with hitting him repeatedly.”

We proceed to pound the sea elf into paste, in time to stop whatever it was he was trying to do. I’m almost disappointed I didn’t get to fight the giant snake, though.

Merry and Gelur catch up to us at that point.

“Well, you certainly made your path easy to follow,” Gelur observes. “A line of dead sea elves and their snake pets pointing right to this spot.” She makes sure I’m not injured, but my Restoring Light has already done the job.

“We return with news: Trolls are still flammable,” Merry informs me. “And that particular one will not be bothering anyone else.”

“How’d things go here?” Gelur asks. “Aside from the obvious.”

“Giant snakes summoned today: Zero,” I say. “On to the sanctuary?”

I have to wonder what things must be like in Pyandorea for so many Maormer to constantly harass the shores of Tamriel. Is it rocky and barren, wracked by constant storms? If so, they seem insufficiently Chimer-like to choose to live somewhere that challenges you. Although in either case, it would be a great way to discourage anyone from bothering to try invading your land, much like how people rarely invade the Ashlands, and never with the intention of actually living there.

Another tunnel through an Ayleid ruin so boring that it’s not even worth mentioning anything but the doorways, and we’re on the next shore overlooking Seaside Sanctuary (I assume).

The bridge is a long way around the bay, but the docks are right there, so I decide we ought to take a shortcut with a short swim. The docks are swarming with sea elves and racist bandits, and the sea elves have hung their stupid snake banners from every bar that you hang banners on. I make a point to set every one of them on fire as we hurry by.

As it turns out, Raz is waiting for us on the other side of the bridge I didn’t feel like going over and crossing, outside of an exit from Serpent’s Grotto that wasn’t the one we came out from. With him are some Dominion soldiers, Eyes of the Queen, and the crew of the Prowler who are complaining about their ship being seized by sea elves and feeling much better about their chances of getting it back when they see me there.

“Ah, you are finally here,” Raz says. “Did you take the long way around?”

“Sorry, had to deal with some sea elves trying to summon a giant snake on the way here,” I explain, not mentioning the other detour we made to visit a Daedric library.

“Oh, good,” Raz says. “Giant snakes are Raz’s least favorite part of dealing with Maormer.”

A wayshrine stands just outside of the town not far the bridge, and near it I find a book titled The Green Pact and the Dominion next to a skeleton hiding in the crook of a large tree. Everyone is mildly annoyed at me for delaying assaulting the town but I insist that it’s very important that I go over and light the wayshrine.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

“I’m not sure how that helped anything, but if you say so…” says the Dominion major, an Altmer woman named Cilenwe. Cirelwe. Cenirwe?

“Cirenwe,” Merry hisses.

“I have the utmost confidence in your ability to do battle with sea elves,” the major says. “But as Razum-dar informs me that you are bad at names, I will not be offended at you immediately getting it wrong moments after you were told it. You can simply call me ‘major’ if it would help.”

“Appreciated,” I say.

The major tells me about the sea elves having taken some hostages and goes into detail on exactly who these hostages are and why they’re important and I’m not terribly paying attention because I don’t really care who they are and I’m not the one who’s going to be sneaking in and freeing them from the sea elves anyway.

Is ‘sea elf’ supposed to be capitalized, too? Bother. Maybe I should just start capitalizing all race names if I can’t keep track of which are supposed to be capitalized and which aren’t. So stupid. The alphabet used by the Chimer only sometimes made the first letter bigger but made it bigger (sometimes huge and a different color) just depending on how important the word was. Or whatever the person writing it felt like. For instance—

“Neri?” Eran nudges me. “Razum-dar and Ilara-daro are going to rescue the hostages. We’re going to take out the Maormer commanders once the hostages are safe.”

“You told me there’d be a hostage exchange!” protests the Maormer prisoner.

“Oh. Right,” I say, then look to the major. “Did you promise a hostage exchange?”

“I don’t know if the hostages are even still alive as it is,” the major admits. “And I doubt they’d consider this bastard as important as the people they captured anyway.”

“Why did they even take hostages?” I wonder.

“Probably to discourage us from charging in,” Eran says. “I doubt they’d let them go.”

We head in and hunt down the commanders, killing every sea e—Sea Elf that crosses our path. (They’re dead; they probably don’t care what I call them anymore. Probably didn’t care in the first place, actually.)

At the bottom of the lighthouse, amid several bodies sits an Altmer man with a bandage over his face, groaning in pain. Gelur rushes forward to start healing him, pulling off the bandage to be able to heal what’s underneath.

“Restoration magic… help has arrived?” the Altmer says. “I don’t suppose you can heal gouged out eyeballs, can you?”

“I don’t think so,” Gelur says upon seeing what’s under the bandage. “I’m sorry.”

“Then just let me die.” He starts ranting about Pelidil and Asteril’s sister whose name he can’t remember either tortured him and the others here and were doing some sort of evil ritual to bring High Kinlady Estre back to life and give her dark powers except she was being even bitchier than usual after they brought her back to life.

I consider trying something, but I don’t think he’d appreciate any eyes Sheogorath or Hermaeus Mora would give him. I’m quite sure that they would ‘help’ here if I asked and that this poor fetcher would very much not be happy about it because they’d probably make him see things that would instantly drive him mad.

“Where’s that music coming from?” he mutters.

And if any Dwemer were around, they could have implanted mechanical replacements. I’d seen it plenty of times, with people who had lost limbs or were paralyzed. I’d imagine most Altmer would object to being part machine. This one seems just as offended over the thought that he’s ugly and scarred as that his eyes are gone. Fucking Altmer. Most races bear scars as a badge of pride for surviving. Not the prissy High Elves. Fine, if living ugly is too hard, then be pretty in Aetherius. I don’t have time for this.

We climb the lighthouse and light the beacon to signal the Dominion troops after moving the mirrors to the other side where they’ll send the light toward the troops outside of town and not out to sea, as signaling the Maormer wouldn’t exactly help.

When we head down from the lighthouse and back out into town, the Dominion strike force is busily striking. I’m sure they appreciate that we went straight to our targets and left them plenty of Sea Elves and Racist Bandits to kill. We report back to the major and meet up with Raz and Ilara again.

According to reports, Pelidil has gotten on a ship and headed out to sea. The Prowler has been retaken and ready to give pursuit, however. We’re not letting him get away this time. I prefer being able to stroll across Tamriel at a leisurely pace and solve whatever problems I run across on my own time rather than rushing ahead to deal with some fetcher who has made me have to prioritize them. I have an odd tendency to arrive in places just when I’m needed and not a moment too late, after all. I have a Dragon God’s sense of timing, I think.

Jimila and her crew are fine seafarers if they can beat Sea Elves at their own game. Which is a good time to take a nap up until they’ve found him. It’s been a long day or week or… I’m not even sure how long it has been since I got back to Tamriel.

Ilara wakes me up when we’ve engaged the enemy and we head up top to see Sea Elf mages hurling balls of fire at the deck, which I assume has at least some protection against being set on fire with magic because it’s not burning nearly as much as I would have expected it to. Dumzy in hand, I charge in to repel boarders. One of the people on deck yells in alarm that the Maormer have a sea serpent.

“Yes!” I exclaim, then look out at the huge snake in the water. “Wait… I don’t think I can swim well enough to hack that apart.”

“Use the ballistae!” shouts someone. “Brace yourself! It’s trying to ram the—”

The giant serpent slams its head into the side of the ship. I stumble and nearly fall overboard, steading myself against a railing. My battle axe isn’t so lucky. My palms slick from seawater, it slips out of my grip and plummets into the sea.

“Noooo!” I cry. “Not Dumzy!”

I leave my friends to deal with the boarders and mer the ballistae instead. After several good shots (and a few not-so-good shots), the serpent is either dying or has decided “fuck this, I don’t like Sea Elves enough to die for them”. Which one it is isn’t terrible important, just that it’s stopped attacking us.

I pull out my hand axe, Souvenir, from my pack and rejoin the battle on deck. The Maormer mages have opened portals to board the ship, which seemed very clever until we use their portals to board their ship.

Pelidil is on board, backed into a corner (or the middle of the ocean, whatever) with nowhere to run (unless he can get one of those mages to open a portal back to shore, which he’s not doing, especially since we just killed them all). He spends the entire fight taunting me and blustering and—you know, it doesn’t even matter, we kick his ass. Honestly, it’s no wonder the Maormer decided to work with him. He’s just as much a snake as the scaly kind.

“Let me take a moment to give a few words for the fallen,” I say when we’re back aboard the Prowler. “To Dumzy, sadly lost in battle. A fine companion and stalwart comrade.”

“You’re giving a eulogy for your axe,” Eran says flatly.

“Dumzy’s the best axe I had this month!” I protest. “Anyway, once we get back to town, I ought to buy a couple of them if this is going to keep happening.”

By the time we return to port, the Dominion has secured Seaside Sanctuary. Congratulations are to be had all around, although there’s one tiny problem I have to inform Raz and the major of.

“Pelidil already raised Estre as a lich,” I say. “And she wasn’t here, either, nor was the magic stick he stole. I have it on good authority from a source you don’t want to know that she’ll be heading for a place called… um, shit, I wrote it down, give me a moment.” I pull out my journal and flip to the correct page. “Hectahame. That was the name. I’m not sure what she’s looking for there, but it was something about the heart of Valenwood, so that doesn’t really sound good.”

“Dark Moons,” Raz breathes. “No, it most certainly does not.”