I’d like to go through Greenshade and clear up all the marked locations on the Wilderqueen’s map, but alas, priorities. Ari would be disappointed if I didn’t first deal with the immediate threat. We return to Marbruk via wayshrine to make a report to Queen Ayrenn and deliver a message the major sent along with us. (Without any portal mages under her command at the moment, I had the quickest way back.)

Prince Naemon is absolutely furious when he hears about what happened with his late wife. “He did WHAT?”

“He’s dead now,” I tell him. “I killed him.”

Naemon lets out a ragged breath and covers his face with his hands. “I never thought I’d be glad to hear someone say that. This is atrocious. What of… what of the abomination that he created with my wife’s body?”

“That’s another matter that will need to be dealt with,” I say sourly.

“See to it that it is,” Naemon says. “If I’d known what sort of madness the people around me were capable of…”

“I understand,” I say sympathetically. “Seriously I do. My wife and closest friends murdered me, after all. At least you survived.”

“I suppose you do at that,” Naemon says. “How do you even move on after such a thing? Even if you weren’t busily being dead at the time.”

“Nothing to be done but to make better friends,” I say. “Betrayal is sometimes the price of trust, but I won’t let it stop me from trusting people.”

“If I’d realized you were the long-dead ghost of a king, even the king of such a blasphemous people as the Chimer, that would have been different than my sister greatly trusting some random Altmer she’d just met.”

“Would that really have made me more trustworthy, or just less offensive to trust?”

Naemon sighs. “And I hate to have to ask you to do this, but… you need to kill my wife again. I don’t—I don’t even want to see this thing that Pelidil has created.”

I nod. “I’ll take care of it.”

We’re not in for a break here. Reports from the city guards indicate that the undead are already at the city gates. They sure as fuck moved fast. Estre must have used teleportation magic to cross half of Valenwood too. And to think, all becoming a lich did was change the first sound in her description.

My group heads out of the northern gates to Marbruk and we speak to the people in charge of the defense. A beautiful combination of racist bandits and undead are out there, waiting for me to put an axe through their heads, which quickly reminds me that I haven’t gotten a new axe yet. In my haste to speak with the Queen and Prince and get out here to see what’s going on, I’d entirely forgotten.

“Just a moment,” I tell the Vinedusk Ranger who had just finished telling me how shitty it is out here. “I need to go shopping real quick. I’ll be right back.”

“But—”

“My friends can stay here to help hold the line,” I say, and run off back through the gates.

The merchants in town, of course, can tell quite easily that I’m in a hurry and overcharge me at least three times what the weapons are actually worth but I don’t care. I buy two of them just to make sure I have a backup, a shiny Altmer-style one and an imported one in House Redoran style being sold by a Dunmer merchant. Someone with more poetic aspirations might have named then Dawn and Dusk or something like that. I, however, name them Wibbly and Wobbly because I’m in a rush and not feeling very poetic.

I return momentarily to the front lines and rejoin my friends and very concerned Rangers. My friends have taken the initiative to push forward a bit in the meantime, but there are still plenty of racist bandits and skeletons to hit. We fight our way to what Gelur calls the old merchant tunnels, where the Mane (what the Khajiit call their king) has taken refuge.

“This one is going to meet the Mane,” Ilara says giddily.

The Mane is named Akkhuz-ri, and I am making note of that now in case I need to call him something other than ‘the Mane’ and won’t be able to remember how many K’s are in it. He’s a white-furred Khajiit with a mane of golden hair on his head, and grateful to see reinforcements.

“Akkhuz-ri saw her with his own eyes,” the Mane says. “The Lich Queen, veiled in darkness. She came here leading an army of undead, but then she vanished and this one does not know where she went.”

“I’m glad she didn’t push through and start opening Oblivion gates in Marbruk or something,” I say.

The Mane introduces us to a Bosmer man by the name of Indaenir, a considerably less angry Indy than the last Indy I encountered. While the Mane heads off with some bodyguards toward Marbruk, Calm Indy tells us about how he wants to interrogate some dead souls who were bound to their remains for violating the Green Pact.

“She wants something in Hectahame,” Eran says. “Before you need to look up the name again.”

“That’s not good news, but I believe there is more going on than that,” Calm Indy says. “Let us gather what information we can.”

Outside the tunnel on the other end, there’s a book titled Vivec and Mephala laying on the ground. I pick it up and glance at the first couple pages then toss it into my pack in disgust.

“Of course Vivec would never have conspired to murder Lord Nerevar, but it happened so long ago… who can know the truth?” quoth the book. Fuck you, Vehk, just fuck you.

“Are you alright… Neri, was it?” Calm Indy asks.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Just peachy,” I answer. “Hopefully there’s more undead to hit.”

Calm Indy talks to a torchbug to convince it to lead me off to find some skulls to interrogate. I’m not really in the mood for this shit, but Ilara quickly picks up on my mood and slips me something sweet. Fortunately, there’s plenty more racist bandits and undead to hit among the burned and abandoned tree-pod buildings up across the bridge.

While I’m focusing on hitting everything, Ilara gathers up the skulls in question, and we bring them over to Calm Indy next to a stone table with a scenic view of a waterfall.

According to the skulls that Calm Indy makes talk, Estre is planning on veiling the Valenwood in shadows. I have no idea how or what this might do but it sounds like she probably ought to be hit repeatedly and made stop, but then I was planning on doing that anyway. I bid Calm Indy to release the two dead Bosmer who were helpful. The third one, being an asshole and blustering about how the shadow will remake Valenwood into some dark doomy dead place, I pick up his skull and hurl it into the waterfall. I miss, startle a vulture, and go pick it up again and make sure it actually clears the cliff this time.

“You know, it’s a good thing that your line of work does not depend on hitting things with thrown objects,” Eran comments.

We’re heading down that way anyway to protect Calm Indy while he closes some shadow rifts, but it’s the principle of it. I don’t know what he means by ‘shadow rifts’, but once we find one down in the gullies, it turns out to be some sort of floaty glob of black and blue in the air, with a group of skeletal mages waving their skeletal fingers at it making more shadowy stuff.

This sort of shit is why I don’t like this sort of magic. Magic that sets things on fire or heals people? Fine. Those are concrete and useful effects. Magic that fucks with reality like this? Why can’t people just leave this shit alone? Once we’ve destroyed the skeletons and closed the rift, a voice echoes from nowhere and warns us to leave the rifts alone. As if. And once we’ve gotten them all closed, she one-ups her bluster by sending us right into the ‘Shadow Wood’, which mostly looks like Valenwood normally does except it’s tinted dark blue. The music turns ominous.

“Estre was a worshipper of Mehrunes Dagon who was going to betray him to worship Molag Bal instead,” I muse aloud. “Did she wind up taking a left turn at Nocturnal afterward? This doesn’t make much sense to me so I’m hoping someone has a solution.”

“I don’t suppose you can make the music a little less ominous?” Merry asks dryly. “It’s making this more unnerving than necessary.”

I focus for a few moments and manage to switch it to upbeat, heroic, ‘we’re going to kick your ass’ music. “Better?”

“Much.”

Calm Indy leads us back to the stone table where we’d interrogated the skulls, because something about a gateway between life and death and whatever. A transparent red guy is waiting for us there, who blusters at us and threatens us but is ultimately quite hittable for being see-through. Once he falls, a rush of whiteness sweeps over us and brings back the sun, and the lighting in the forest returns to normal.

“Great, that’s taken care of,” I say, then look aside to Calm Indy. “Is it?”

“I can sense disturbances throughout the forest,” Calm Indy says. “More will need to be done yet. I must investigate. I will meet up with you later.”

“Give us a yell when you find something else that needs to be hit,” I say. “Good luck.”

Calm Indy disappears into the forest, and the rest of us head back. Fortunately, we can reach the gates of Marbruk from here via rope bridge rather than going back through the tunnels, and I totally don’t wind up back at the entrance to the tunnels before someone points this out to me. I never claimed my exploration of Tamriel was particularly efficient.

We meet up with the Vinedusk Rangers and happily see that there’s no longer an army of undead at the gates of the city, to which I’m sure everyone is relieved. Or at least everyone who has a heartbeat. And isn’t a racist lunatic. I report back what we encountered, which is definitely not a relief, but at least no longer an immediate problem. The Ranger fellow tells me that Calm Indy will probably wind up at one of a couple places whose names contain a V that I’m sure we’ll stumble upon shortly.

We run across an Altmer with a couple of Orc bodyguards at a small camp, but I spot the blue shaft of a Skyshard down at the bottom of the cliff and jump off before going to speak with them.

“Neri!” Eran yells, then sighs. “There he goes again.”

I have to circle around a bit to get back up, and run across a wayshrine along the way, which I light before noticing my friends are already there to meet me.

“The Altmer fellow says his betrothed has been kidnapped,” Gelur says. “He gave us a magic flute to find her.”

“Oh,” I say. “That… makes sense, I guess?”

When we find the missing Bosmer woman, we discover that she was kidnapped by the Falinesti Faithful to replace a lost tribeswoman, which greatly clarifies why she’s tied up as a ‘test’. Sometimes Bosmer customs are more comprehensible than others.

“Okay, so, I take it you’re not happy living in an Altmer-style city like Marbruk,” I say. “And he probably wouldn’t be happy living in a tent? Couldn’t you just live in one of those tree-pod towns instead?”

“But I have a new life and new duties now,” she says. “I mean, that sounds like a dream and I do love him but…”

“While I can understand duties and all that, I’m not a big fan of kidnapping people and tying them up for it,” I say. “Why can’t they just make you eat a frog and talk to a tree like normal people?”

“I could escape from these flimsy ropes anytime I want,” she says. “This is all a test to see if I can endure pain and hardship.”

“Gelur, answer me something here, would you?” I say. “Is kidnapping and hurting people up a typical way Bosmer expand their tribes? I can’t imagine Brackenleaf’s Briars would do something like this.”

“That’s not the way we do things, no,” Gelur says. “I’ve heard of tribes that do it, though. Seems ass-backwards to me, though. Someone ought to want to join your tribe.”

“What would happen if we were to re-kidnap her?” I ask with a smirk. “You’d think they’d consider that fair, right?”

Gelur chuckles. “They sure ought to.”

Where they were keeping her tied up, I leave a note for the tribe for when they come back to look for her letting them know their captive has been re-kidnapped and suggest they try recruiting by distributing pamphlets instead. She’s very confused as we lead her back to where we left her lover, and they head off saying they’ll try Woodhearth.

We run into another Bosmer woman who wants us to track a mammoth because of course she does. Merry, behind me, just gives a heavy sigh.

“We’re kind of busy on some pressing things involving Daedra and undead, and my friends will probably put their hands on their faces if I run off after a mammoth,” I say. “But I’ll bring you the tusk if we run across one.”

She’s not impressed by our lack of dedication to the hunt but understands we’re after bigger prey that’s usually smaller unless the Daedra summon a particularly large ogrim. And then a Dark Anchor drops nearby so we run off to deal with that and drag her along with us to do something more useful than crouching in the forest trying to goad passing travelers into hunting mammoths for her.

“Well, that’s not the sort of prey I was expecting to hunt today,” the hunter says once the Dark Anchor has been destroyed. “But it’s just as well I came over here. I’m spotting signs of a mammoth having come through this way.”

There’s a marker on my map for a cave near Driladan Pass, so we head over to check it out. Turns out the mammoth the hunter was looking for is just outside, so we kill that and she extols our amazing luck rather than our amazing tracking skills. (But come on, seriously lady, is it really that hard to track a mammoth?)

There’s a bunch of big cats inside, and some strange rambling notes inside a tent that someone set up inside the cave for some reason. It sounds like someone tried to get themself a pack of tigers (is ‘pack’ even the right word?) which worked until they ran out of meat. Whatever problem was here appears to have taken care of itself, but there’s a Skyshard in here, so thanks, Ari!