We make it back to Dra’bul via the coast side, passing (and destroying) the Dark Anchor on the way in. I get Roku and her father up to speed on what happened since I last saw them and that the most immediately pressing current issue has been taken care of.

“Shaman Glazulg, are there other Orc strongholds in Malabal Tor that I ought to visit and make sure they’re not working with the Hircine worshippers whose leader I’ve already killed? And by ‘tell’ I mean ‘punch them in the face until they listen to me’, of course.”

“Of course,” Glazulg says with a grin. “There’s another stronghold in Bloodtoil Valley you could check out. I haven’t heard much from them in a while and I don’t think they were involved with that business with the Hound. I’ll mark it on your map.”

Our journey to Bloodtoil Valley is interrupted by me diving off a bridge for a Skyshard, killing a bunch of hoarvor at the bottom, having to figure out how to get up the cliff again, and enduring Eran’s face-palms.

“Fortunately, I have a rope…” Eran says with a sigh, helping me up to the top again.

We come upon a wayshrine and light it on the way. The roads in this part of Valenwood are… not actually more confusing than the roads anywhere else in Valenwood, actually, but Gelur assures me we’re going in the right direction, so that’s good enough for me. Which makes me feel even sillier when I realize I can see Orc-style walls from the wayshrine.

I spot a book titled The Red Paint behind a couple of stranglers. Summary: Orcs kill each other for stupid reasons.

Now, look, I’m hardly one to dismiss traditions just because they’re traditional, but you’ve also got to keep in mind that just because something is old doesn’t mean that it’s good. There are plenty of old things that are very, very bad.

Anyway, the worst of it is that I can’t even find a way inside from this side. Why would they put the gates on the wrong side from the wayshrine? I have to remind myself most people don’t use these things to travel fast.

“We should probably not just use the rope to climb over,” I say. “They might get the wrong idea from that. Let’s see if we can find the door.”

“Good idea,” Eran agrees wryly.

The Orc stronghold in Bloodtoil Valley is situated atop a cliff, allowing limited approach. Smart, but inconvenient in this case, especially considering there’s a Bosmer village situated right outside. Considering how far we have to go around, we might as well have just approached from the Vulkwasten wayshrine instead. I head up to the stronghold by myself, send Eran, Gelur, and Merry into the Bosmer village to ask questions about the area and current events, and have Ilara hide in the trees and watch my back.

I go up to the first Orc who looks at me funny and say, “I am Neri gro-Drublog. I bring news from Dra’bul and I must speak with your shaman and your chief immediately.”

“Shaman’s in the shrine,” says the Orc, pointing to a door. “If you want to talk to the chief, she’s in the longhouse at the top of the hill.”

Their chief is a woman? Huh. Maybe those books I read and the impromptu Orc culture lessons from Roku didn’t cover everything. I head for the shrine first.

The Bloodtoil shaman is in the middle of torturing a young adult Orc and performing some sort of blood ritual with him. This very much looks like one of the dumb reasons Orcs kill one another that I was just reading about, so I cast a Restoring Light on the boy and shove the shaman to interrupt his casting.

“What are you doing!?” the shaman demands.

“Terribly sorry, I’m allergic to torturing children,” I reply. “What the fuck are you doing?”

I check on the young man. Still in terrible shape although possibly no longer immediately life threatening. I’ll need to get Gelur to take a look at him once I’ve defused the immediate situation, but until then, I dump all my mana into healing him as much as I can with just Blinky.

“He’s trying to use a blood ritual to mind control my mother, the clan chief,” the young Orc replies in between spitting out blood.

“Well, you’re too late to stop it!” the shaman retorts. “Even as we speak, she’ll be declaring war on the Bosmer!”

“Then I won’t waste time talking to you—” I decapitate him with Wibbly before he can react. “—before killing you.” I turn to the boy. “Sometimes killing them stops their weird magic, but if it didn’t, you’ll need to angrily challenge your mother for control of the clan before anyone does anything stupid.”

The boy mumbles some profanity beneath his breath as he follows me out of the shrine and up the hill. I’m terribly glad that I came here first. My friends are probably over in the Bosmer village still trying to ask Bosmer how to spell Orc names.

We reach the front of the longhouse as an Orc woman is yelling orders to a group of warriors, trying to work them into a good rage. The kid cuts in and yells, “Mother, stop this!”

“Ulagash!” the chief snarls. “That Wood Elf girl has poisoned your mind! The Code of Mauloch strictly prohibits mixing races!”

“Uh, no it doesn’t,” I put in. “At least not the version of it I read.”

Admittedly, I read that version on a stolen paperweight, but it seemed simple enough. No stealing, no killing kin, no attacking without cause, or you pay the blood price. Nothing about racism in there.

“Mother—Chief Ulukhaz!” Ulagash yells. “I hereby challenge you to a duel for chiefhood!”

“About time you put your balls to use on something other than trying to make half-breeds,” the chief says, grabbing a battle axe. “Fine. If you want to make yourself a martyr in the name of harmony with the other races, then so be it.”

Ulagash whispers to me, “I don’t even have a weapon.”

I toss him Wibbly. “Good luck! I believe in you!”

To be fair, my belief in him is completely unfounded and I just met him five minutes ago, at which point he had been near death and has not yet been fully healed nor given a chance to rest. Maybe I should have just challenged her myself. Well, if nothing else, at least the Orcs are now egging on the mother-and-son duel happening before then rather than attacking their Wood Elf neighbors, which will give Ilara a chance to warn the others. And they’ve been too busy to even notice I’m not an Orc.

Which… hopefully she has overheard enough and gone to warn the others? Dammit, I really need to teach them a system of hand signals or something.

I also may have overestimated the kid’s capabilities. Ulagash has spirit, but the only thing keeping him in the game is his rage rising every time his mother insults his girlfriend. He keeps trying to tell her she’s being mind controlled but she’s too deep into rage and racism to listen. I’m pretty sure the rest of the clan has become convinced that the shaman must have done something since she’s usually not quite this ragey and racist.

“She will never be good enough for you!” chief mom says. “You should just marry a few nice Orc women!”

“Why can’t I marry a few nice Orc women and Dalaneth?” Ulagash retorts.

“You can do it, Ulugosh!” I yell.

“My name is Ulagash!” he replies.

I’ll give him credit for being able to dodge his mother’s clumsy, angry blows, at least. Eventually, the young Orc gets the upper hand, and hesitates at killing his mother with a tearful look in his eye.

“Is there any way to cure her?” Ulagash wonders, clearly addressing me but wisely not taking his eyes off of the barely-conscious chief.

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

“Dunno,” I say. “But I’m always hesitant to say something’s impossible. You could just tie her up and wait and see if she calms down on her own and get a mage to look at it.”

“Oh, come on!” heckles one of the Orcs watching. “Kill her already! I want to see some blood!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Ulagash retorts. “She’s my mom! If you want blood so badly I’ll show you yours!”

I go over to the unconscious Orc mom and make sure her injuries aren’t immediately life-threatening before helping tie her up and move her into the longhouse. Ulagash did technically win the fight, as nobody said it had to be to the death, but I’m pretty sure she only passed out because of whatever caused her to fly into a rage.

“So, who are you, anyway?” Ulagash finally asks once the situation is under control.

“Name’s Neri,” I say. “I’m the new chieftain at Dra’bul and I wanted to meet the chief and shaman here to make sure they weren’t doing anything fucking stupid like every other damned Orc in Valenwood seems to be doing lately.”

“You came by yourself?” Ulagash asks in surprise.

“Nah, but my friends are over talking to the Wood Elves across the stream,” I say. “I’d best go let them know what’s going on.”

“I owe you my life,” Ulagash says. “I am in your debt.”

“Support my bid for joining the Dominion and taking the fight to the Ebonheart Pact instead of our neighbors. I’ll be back shortly.”

Ulagash looks at me speechlessly for a moment before laughing. “Absolutely! How are you going to get close to the Bosmer village without anyone getting suspicious of you?”

“Tell you a secret,” I say, grinning and showing my lack of tusks, pointing at my face with the hand wearing my ring. “I’m really, really bad at pretending to be an Altmer.”

“Why do you bother?” Ulagash asks. “You seem to make a perfectly good Orc to me, whatever your birth defects.”

“Long story,” I say with a chuckle. “Tell you later, maybe.”

I find Gelur sitting on a big rock in the middle of the stream with a Malacath altar sitting on top of it, and I approach.

“Where’s the others?”

“Back in the trees,” Gelur says. “Didn’t want to spook the Orcs with a bunch of people standing on their borders in plain sight.”

“Should be okay now,” I say. “There was a situation. I unsituated it, but there’s a couple people who still need healing and someone who needs to be checked over for magical compulsions.”

The Orcs here do have Restoration mages on hand, but I bring Gelur in along with Merry to check anyway. It’s not that I don’t trust them to be able to heal. It’s that I trust Gelur to be able to heal any ridiculous thing I put in front of her. There’s nothing like the experience of being able to repeatedly heal a guy who keeps doing insanely reckless things. Fortunately, things are calming down and nobody takes too much offense to their non-Orc visitors, especially once I tell them why they’re here.

Merry takes a look at Ulagash’s unconscious mom and runs some arcane analyses that I don’t follow. “Yes, I’m detecting remnants of a blood ritual here. It should wear off soon, though, and it’s already fading. Luckily there wasn’t a life sacrifice behind it or it might have been more permanent.”

It’s time to go over and talk to the Bosmer myself, after getting filled in from my friends, though it’s already pretty clear what happened from this side given the protests against the Ulagash dating an Elf girl. The young Orc in question has, upon Gelur made sure he was fully healed, gotten into some fistfights to establish dominance, but it doesn’t look particularly serious. Just Orcs being Orcs.

Along the way, some books have mysteriously found their way into my pack talking about the local religions. The Orcs worship Mauloch, obviously, which is generally considered just another name for Malacath considering it was definitely a Malacath axe banner inside that shrine. The Bosmer here are apparently worshippers of a god named Z’en, complete with the unnecessary apostrophe the Bosmer seem to love putting into the names of their gods.

According to the various Bosmer and Orc journals I find scattered about, both say they felt the presence of their god in the area and wanted to build a shrine here, leading me to wonder if they both happened to wind up worshipping the same god of vengeance and toil under different names, or perhaps merely different aspects. Religion is confusing.

So when Gelur, Merry and I get to the Bosmer village and meet up with Eran, we wind up walking into the middle of an argument between father and daughter over the daughter dating an Orc.

“Everything alright here?” I ask, looking between them.

“Were you in the Orc village?” the daughter asks. “Is Ulagash alright? Shaman Yarnag attacked me, but Ulagash got in the way and told me to run.”

“He’s fine,” I say. “I killed the shaman, so he won’t be causing anymore problems.”

“Ugh,” the father says. “I told her it would be trouble. I, of course, forbade her to see him and told her that no relationship between them would last.”

“I married an Orc and joined their clan,” I say mildly.

The man is taken aback, giving me a closer look. “I mean—um—I’m sure it works for some people, but I knew the Drublog would take it poorly.”

“I feel like my life’s mission here is to travel Tamriel and punch people in the face while telling them to stop being racist,” I say. “Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be any problem aside from the shaman—you said his name was Yarnag?—he was trying to use Ulagash as a blood sacrifice to warp his mother into mindless fury. That situation has been deal with. Primary with battle axes, but dealt with.”

“That’s horrible!” the daughter says. “I can’t believe Shaman Yarnag would do something like that!”

I forestall another argument by turning to the father and asking, “Is there a shrine to Z’en around here?”

“Of course,” the father says. “It’s right in here.” He gestures toward a cave covered with a ‘door’ of vines and roots.

I head inside, with the three of them trailing in behind me. A book is laying by the altar, titled The Book of Dawn and Dusk. Summary: My asshole former friends plagiarized pithy sayings. I’ll admit I hate seeing shit about the Tribunal on the other side of Tamriel and it’s honestly starting to creep me out.

I look up at the red banner with a battle axe symbol. “Was this a shrine to Mauloch?”

“No, of course not. This is a shrine to Z’en.”

I turn to him and hold up my hand to show him my ring. “Tell me, which god am I champion of?”

“Ah!” he exclaims, examining it. “You’re a champion of Z’en! What good fortune you came along!”

“I’m a champion of Malacath. That’s Malacath’s symbol. There’s an identical banner in the shrine of Mauloch across the water. If they’re not the same god, then they’ve got to be twin brothers, or mirror reflections, or something. Either way, they’re a lot more alike than they are different. Ugh. I’m not nearly high enough to make sense of mythology today.” I take a seat and start pulling some substances out of my pack. “Do you mind if I take a moment to, ah, commune with Z’en here?”

“Of course. Is that moon sugar? And… Hist sap? Really? Dare I wonder what those combine to do?”

“They let me make sense of religion, mythology, and philosophy. And possibly offend both Khajiiti and Argonian cultures simultaneously. Could I get some privacy for a moment, please?”

The two Bosmer look torn between protesting, being offended, and just backing away from the drug-addict lunatic. Eran, on the other hand, looks like he’s trying very hard to stifle laughter, and leaves, followed by the Bosmer.

“Are these Bosmer just worshipping you by another name?” I wonder aloud.

The impression of a presence is heavy in the air. “Huh. Looks like it.”

“What do you mean, looks like it?” I say. “Couldn’t you tell?”

“People call me all sorts of different things,” Malacath replies with a shrug. “Goblins even like to paint my idols blue. No idea why.”

“So what in Oblivion am I going to tell them to convince them to set aside their differences and live in harmony with their neighbors so I can get them all to go invade my enemies instead?”

Malacath laughs. “Tell them whatever you want, and punch them in the face if they don’t listen. Religion doesn’t make much sense to me either. Most of it’s just shit someone made up at some point. Or they were on drugs.” He pauses. “You’re on drugs, aren’t you.”

“I am on so many drugs.”

“Well, you’re in a perfect state to make up something good, I hope,” Malacath replies. “Good luck!” His presence vanishes.

It had never really sunk in before just how few fucks the gods really give about what mortals do. Which, to be honest, is probably just as well. I hate to think what sort of mess they’d cause if any of them seriously cared. Oh, maybe that’s why my backstabbing friends made such a mess of things and managed to convince anyone they’re totally gods. Even the miracles that could be accomplished with fake divinity are still beyond what most mortals see from real divinity.

It’s strange, the way gods can go by different names to different people, but Malacath would hardly be the only one of those. With Y’ffre/Jephre, Auriel/Auri-El/Akatosh, Xarxes/Hermaeus Mora (at least I think they are, but I’ll admit I’m not terribly familiar with Xarxes.), oh, and never mind my former friends claiming that Boethiah, Mephala, and Azura were their ‘Anticipations’. I really love/hate reading shit about their religion.

She cut off my feet! What the fuck!? Something pierces my chest. A spear. I can’t breathe. Cold. Cold. Cold. So cold. A horned face. Malicious laughter, that voice, that voice…

My perspective shifts and wheels.

*What did they do to me? I’ll never be beautiful again! How dare they!? I will have my revenge! Ashes… Maybe I can work with this. The Aldmer are weak. I will teach my followers to take up arms from birth that they might never be weak. They will need strength if they are to survive in a world arrayed against them. Let them grow strong, and one day we will have our revenge!

A man with four faces, each bearing a different expression. A crystal with many facets, each of them bearing a different face. Each of them reflects the face of the observer.*

“Fuck, I need to write this down.”

*It’s more than just revenge. Judgment needs balance. Justice needs fairness. The Blood Price must not be too low or too high.

Skies above mushrooms. Nine ziggurats afloat. But the city is not yet real. A pomegranate hurled from a wedding. A stone, suspended in the air above the city that will be. Why not destroy it? Why leave this here and let there be a city here? To force them to love their god, of course. But you were not a god. This isn’t what happened. Which Nerevar died at your hand, the one where you were born a god or the one where you were not? Or did you murder us both just to be sure?*

…

I wake up to find myself passed out on the floor of a temple cave with a pounding headache and a splitting headache simultaneously. I look around and see the trappings of a shrine to Malacath. Weird. I would have expected Sanguine, with how I feel about now.

I feel about for my journal and open it up. The gist of a conversation with Malacath, that I vaguely remember. And then some lovely metaphor involving a crystal that I’m totally using, before devolving into incoherent babbling. Well, at least I got something useful out of that.

And I apparently have divine permission to just make shit up.