The countryside of Falkreath Hold is lovely; it’s a shame the weather is so terrible--it’s almost always grey and thundery, threatening to rain if not actually raining, and with poor visibility owing to the mist. There’s also the problem of a general lack of cooking pots; I’m now equipped to make my own campfire to cook with--which is precisely what I do--but it seems a little uncivilized to do this in town, and it’s difficult to find a good spot outside the town, one that isn’t too far away, but is flat and clear enough that the campfire doesn’t look as though it is perched weirdly on a slope or about to catch on to some nearby trees.
Another problem is the lack of streams in the area: there’s no shortage of water in Falkreath itself, of course, but finding water is a problem if I want to camp out (and I do! I will endure the tedium!), so I spend the next couple of days exploring the region until the early hours of the evening, and then, failing to find a good place to camp, I scurry back to a warm bed in Dead Man’s Drink as fast as Snowberry’s legs can carry me.
I start my morning with a large slice of goat cheese (it’s tasty, filling stuff--an excellent meal to fuel a day of hiking in the mountains--and Solaf seems to stock cheese wheels regularly in his store; if I didn’t have to boil water I could give up on cooking entirely), and then Jade, Snowberry, and I set off to explore the paths in the highlands south of Falkreath. To the southwest of the city we find a cave not far from the road that I instinctively name Halldir’s Cairn. There is nobody about, but a couple of burial urns sit outside, mostly in pieces, which is not a good sign. The one intact urn contains a few coins and a gem that, having no desire to violate an old Nord burial ground, I leave as they are.
But I can’t just walk away from the place; there are too many mushrooms growing there. After harvesting everything within reach, I’m even willing to venture inside. Jade and I enter very quietly and cautiously, and I am rewarded with the finest, most impressive crop of fungus I have ever seen--half a dozen different kinds growing in large clumps everywhere I look. The interior of the cave is otherwise not reassuring: the wide ledge we’re standing on overlooks a spacious chamber with a column of intensely blue light rising from some sort of rock formation--the cairn of the place’s title, no doubt--in the middle. I neither see nor hear any creatures moving about, but there are bedrolls on the floor, I don’t like the look of it at all, and Jade is clearly uncomfortable. She soon expresses her dissatisfaction in an outburst that uncannily echoes my own thoughts: “Did something just touch me?” she says, her voice rising sharply. “I think something just touched me! I really don’t like caves.”
I collect as many mushrooms as I can without climbing down from that high ledge; there are even more below, but my daring will only take me so far. Leaving the cave and continuing west, we arrive at an arch that stretches over an otherwise unremarkable section of road. Jade and Snowberry refuse to follow me though it, and I realize that we are very near the Skyrim-Hammerfell-Cyrodiil border. For some reason, I find myself, like my friend and my horse, unable to go further: it is almost as though I am blocked by an invisible wall--but this sensation is surely the work of my own fancy. Might not this “wall” be an obstruction built up entirely in Nona’s mind? She lives in Skyrim now; she has no desire to venture into unknown Hammerfell or return to familiar Cyrodiil--in fact, she has objections to both. Her home is here--somewhere--and she is bound to find it eventually.
An orc charges us, sword swinging, as we head back east, and despite my exaggerated caution (I am, as usual, reluctant to strike for fear of hitting Jade as she and our opponent circle each other), we manage to kill him. Another pointless death--what is it that drives these anonymous orcs and high elves and others to forsake their communities and friends and attack random strangers? What would it take to reduce someone like me to a state of such mindless aggression--catastrophic career failure? The tragic, accidental death of my dear friend Jade? The loss of my horse? I have a brief, terrifying vision of a future in which Nona, maddened by grief, clad in weirdly mismatched armor and now known only as “Imperial,” assaults some innocent stranger in a senseless explosion of violence.
Southeast of Falkreath, a bridge hangs over the road, suspended between a pair of wooden watchtowers. Seeing no guards in attendance, I crouch suspiciously in a shadow nearby while I scan the area for bandits. Jade’s powers of observation prove superior to mine: she’s already running toward one of the towers by the time I’ve spotted the man that provoked her. He activates a device at one end of the bridge, causing a trapdoor to drop; large black boulders tumble down onto the road, missing both me and Jade--me because I am still a considerable distance away, and Jade because she is already well to the side. But the man who released them seems to lose his balance while aiming his bow; he topples off the bridge, falls to the road, and is crushed by one of his own boulders.
Jade and I wait tensely for a few moments, but nobody else appears on the bridge or the towers. Approaching carefully, I find the reason why--directly beneath the bridge lies a second bandit crushed under a rock. Not only was the first fellow stupid enough to die in his own booby-trap, but he had very likely seen the same thing happen to the last guy.
It’s getting late, though--having liberated these watchtowers without the ugly necessity of unsheathing our weapons, we’re left with little time to enjoy the view, and head back to town rather than camping out. It’s raining quite hard when I get up the next day, so I spend the morning divided between mushroom experiments at Grave Concoctions and smithing practice at Lod’s forge. But I soon get bored in town; I’m not finding anyone new to talk to, so I sell my potions, browse the general store, and then off I go exploring again, despite the weather. Jade and I find a dilapidated fortress to the west of Falkreath; turning north to avoid it, we discover a shack that my naming instinct tells me belongs to someone named Lorne. This Lorne, an alcoholic judging from the number of mead bottles piled on and near his bed, is nowhere about, and though his place appears to be otherwise well-kept, it is not sufficiently rainproof to tempt me to wait around hoping to meet him.
As we leave the shack, a black-robed necromancer and a dead-eyed Imperial woman come running out of the woods to attack us. The battle gives us little trouble--this wizard, like the other spellcasters we have fought so far, favors frost magic, which Jade (being a Nord) is highly resistant to; she has no difficulty keeping him occupied while I dispatch the woman, who turns out to be a reanimated thrall. Her master goes down soon after, and I spend a mournful moment contemplating my nameless former countrywoman, who was wearing a ragged outfit similar to what I had on when I first arrived, and in death has become no more than a faintly-glowing pile of dust. Here, perhaps, is the worst possible fate that might befall someone like me, given sufficiently bad luck: even the mindlessly aggressive, exclusively-race-identified thugs that I’ve encountered near roadsides have more dignity than this poor soul.
Not far from where the bodies fell, we find a rough stone bench; it’s covered in gruesome remains, but there’s also a book, 2920, Frostfall, v10, that I make the mistake of reading. In thoroughly uninspired prose, it tells part of the story of a man so bitterly embarrassed by his own failures that he tricks a coven of witches into participating in a (surely ill-advised) plot to kill his former lord, the living god Vivec, who was one of the rulers of Morrowind in the Third Era. (It also improves my Conjuring skill.) I don’t know what, exactly, makes this book dangerous, but its position on this altar tells me that it is, and for a moment I consider removing it as a sort of public service (Nona saves the world from lackluster reading material, one volume at a time!). In the end, though, I decide that I would rather not have the nasty tome in my possession.
Further on from the altar is a large, raised mound, and as I am speculating as to its purpose I notice a green, glowing figure in the distance. I’m developing a truly annoying and dangerous habit of continuing to gawk at things even as Jade starts to panic: it turns out that there are two green, glowing figures, neither of them disposed to be friendly. One of them sends a stream of glowing motes toward me that, as I turn and flee, causes my health to drain at an alarming rate. I run as fast as I can, chugging healing potions as I go. Nona is no sprinter--all of her efforts at physical improvement go into bolstering her health, which seems only reasonable, given how many poisonous ingredients she eats experimentally--and in almost no time at all she is utterly exhausted and the spriggan(s) are still chasing her. She gets hit with another draining attack, chugs healing and stamina potions, keeps running. It feels as though I’ve been running forever as I arrive back in Falkreath; I must have consumed a good third of my supply of restoratives. Jade soon catches up, and we stand in the rain, catching our breath.