There’s no moonstone for sale at the Dawnstar smithy, and no canis root at the apothecary; both my elven helmet and the next batch of paralysis poison will have to wait. I mix a few potions anyway, as there’s always money to be made, and Jade has drunk the healing potions I gave her and needs some more. (She seems to drink only the restore health potions; she hasn’t touched the potions that both restore and temporarily boost health--maybe they taste funny.) It’s bright and sunny as we head south from Dawnstar. The first real obstacle in our path is Fort Dunstad, a large structure that sits in the middle of a snowy, wooded valley. It is, of course, occupied by bandits, and so presents the usual problem of how to get past without aggravating them. It looks possible to go around it in either direction; I decide to go to the right--the long way around--as there appears to be more room to maneuver on that side, and good cover from the woods. We climb the side of the valley and are afforded an excellent view of the bandits walking obliviously back and forth along the walls. It looks as though we’ll have no trouble, but as we approach the far end of the fort, the gap between the wall and the cliffside becomes very narrow: we’ll have to leave the trees and get very close to the bandits in order to pass, and in this glaring sunlight we’ll be hard for the sentries to miss. It would take a ridiculously long time to walk all the way around in the other direction, though, so I decide to risk it. I watch the bandits patrolling for a while, choose a moment when they are moving away from the corner I’ll be approaching, and then, with Jade, Vigilance, and Snowberry in tow, I creep down the snowy slope to the wall of the fort. For once, my timing is absolutely perfect--nobody notices. Even Snowberry attracts no attention. Miraculously, we get safely through the gap and back on the road without hearing a peep from anyone. There’s no way we’ll reach Windhelm before nightfall, though--that would have been a tall order even without the long walk around Fort Dunstad--so we stop for the evening at Nightgate Inn, pleasantly situated on the edge of a small lake. The innkeeper says that he doesn’t get much traffic through here, but there is one long-term resident, an orc who likes his privacy and pays so well that he practically keeps the place afloat on his own. The orc says he’s a writer, the innkeeper tells me--“Talks real good--not a savage at all.” I’d like to meet this fellow--not that there’s anything exceptional about an orc who is not a savage; the ex-Legion orcs I’ve met are no less civilized than Nords, in my view--but he doesn’t make an appearance, sadly. I talk instead to a man named Moris the Draugr (he wears armor in an ancient style that makes him look rather like a walking corpse, although he doesn’t seem to think that this is the source of his nickname), and then, because I find him self-important and clueless and sort of annoying to talk to, I turn to an agreeably crude Bosmer woman named Callen who spends much of our conversation making fun of him. Callen tells me that she became an adventurer because of her inability to do anything else: she hates taking orders, and so failed as a soldier; she hates giving orders even more, and so failed as a trainer of soldiers; and she considered being an assassin, but crouching hurts her back. I ask her why she came to The Pale. “This is going to sound pretty stupid, because it is,” she says. And it really is: she’s here because of a friend who likes horker stew. Really likes horker stew. In fact, he’s so serious about his horker stew that one night when he was enjoying some in a tavern and Callen got drunk and accidentally upset his bowl, he walked out in a fury and hasn’t spoken to her since. Callen is trying--rather sweetly, I have to say--to earn his forgiveness by hunting down the perfect horker so as to get the perfect cut of horker meat with which to make the perfect bowl of stew. And the name of the oversensitive gourmand she’s trying so assiduously to please? It’s none other than Gorr, the ex-gladiator I met in Riverwood. I part from Callen only with the greatest reluctance: if I were the sort of person who undertook quests, then the Quest for the Perfect Stew is exactly the sort of quest that I would undertake. But I’m not that sort; I content myself with wishing her well and we head out again the following morning. I’d been hoping to do some fishing in the lake, but it’s snowing as I step outside, and just looking at the water with all of those white flakes blowing around is enough to make me feel cold, so I abandon that plan. We pass an entrance to a place called the Forsaken Cave--but it doesn’t look forsaken enough to tempt me to go anywhere near it, what with the large brazier burning outside--and arrive in Windhelm at around noon, having encountered nothing worse than an Argonian thief and the occasional wave of frostbite spiders. (We’ve killed so many of these creatures that I’ve started routinely coating my arrows with their poison.) I don’t intend to stay here long: I learn from Arivanya that the Butcher is still on the loose--she says that he’d have been caught by now if the guards would only listen to Viola--and I don’t want to run into Scouts-Many-Marshes, because, you know, awkward. I visit Sadri’s, where I sell my potions and purchase an odd combination of refined moonstone and chaurus eggs, then divide several hours between the White Phial and the smithy. I make an elven helmet, finally replacing that cheap hide thing, and forge a new gilded elven cuirass using the quicksilver I got in Dawnstar. My efforts bring me to level 13. The weather looks bleak next morning, but it clears up wonderfully by around 8 am, allowing me to see the terrain that when I first came north to Windhelm was almost completely obscured by thick, soupy fog. The volcanic tundra is surprisingly pretty, all spraying geysers, colorfully variegated rocks, and bright yellow dragon’s tongue flowers that have fully recovered from my last visit and can be picked again. As we reach the southern end of the valley, a bear growls at us from somewhere in the trees. It’s not too close, and seems content to let us hurry away from it, but after we’ve moved a bit further along I look back and see that it has followed us to the road, maintaining the distance. As I walk on, keeping a nervous eye on the bear, two Vigilants of Stendarr come down the slope, and as soon as they pass me, the bear charges them. I back up, thinking that perhaps I can lend them a hand, from a safe distance, if things get bad--but thinking that thought is all I have time for before the bear has killed them both and is turning its attention on me. Fortunately, I’m already somewhat prepared, and it’s already somewhat injured, and after I’ve shot it full of poison it doesn’t give us too much trouble. Soon after disposing of the bear I find a dead goat, possibly one of its victims. I attempt to skin and butcher it, but I find only two silver garnet rings--that’s it, two jeweled rings; no hide, no meat. I’m not sure I want to know what’s happening to the wildlife in Skyrim. We have to fight one more bear during the climb--a fresh one this time. While bears do try to warn people off before they get too close, they also chase other wildlife with maniacal intensity, and so a bear that appears to be at a safe distance can suddenly reappear not at a safe distance if a deer or goat crosses its path. We manage to kill this one--it hits hard, but it’s nowhere near as fast or as tough as that snowy sabre cat--and I’m not too badly hurt, although fighting the bear in close combat does give me a nasty case of bone-break fever. But lunch is well overdue anyway, and some tasty fish soup clears up the disease. We’ve finally returned to the Rift. The trees are as lovely as ever, and I find a new plant specimen as I’m walking along, or rather an old one that I never before took notice of in the wild--canis root. It’s a dry, twisted, woody plant, and it’s no wonder that I was never able to distinguish it from all of the alchemically irrelevant dry, twisted, woody-looking things out there. We reach Shor’s Stone with plenty of daylight left to get to Riften, but I’m so obsessed with my new discovery that I pitch our tents there in the middle of the afternoon and wander into the woods, fully prepared to spend the rest of the day searching. I find a few more plants, and as night falls I notice torchlight coming from a nearby hill--it’s unlikely to be a guard, as it’s some distance out of Shor’s Stone and not moving, and also unlikely to be a bandit, as they tend not to be considerate enough to carry torches. It is actually a man named Kjoli, who is out enjoying the beauty of the forest while waiting for his wife. He tells me that he is on his way to Riften to adopt a child, but he hasn’t told his wife of their true purpose in going there. This seems to me like a very unwise thing to surprise one’s spouse with, but Kjoli feels certain that she will be pleased. As we finish our conversation, his wife, Inari, shows up--she’s a Khajiit, surprisingly, but seems very much attached to her husband, and the unlikely couple heads off toward Riften very lovingly. (I also get a quest update telling me to visit them in Riften; I certainly intend to do so.) Back at Shor’s Stone, I visit the smithy to work some hides, and Filnjar, the smith, notices I’m wearing an Amulet of Mara. He’s interested! And I find that ever so--weird. Because Filnjar has a quest, a quest to take care of the spider infestation in Redbelly Mine, and I haven’t done that quest, and I won’t do that quest. People in Skyrim usually want to marry you only after you’ve solved whatever problem they have at the moment, even if it’s a really stupid problem like being too lazy to deliver rum to the Blue Palace, and so I’m a little confused by Filnjar’s sudden ardor. It seems desperate, somehow--almost as though he has suddenly realized that Shor’s Stone is economically dead without its mine and that this unmarried woman in his shop has thousands of septims jingling in her bag. Still, I can’t help taking a look at the inside of his house while he’s eating his supper, and it’s not a bad little house, although there’s only a single bed. But I’ve already decided not to marry Filnjar: I couldn’t live in a mining town in which the miners are permanently out of work; I’d feel terrible. Also, I don’t like his hair, or lack of it. Not that I have a problem with baldness, but a man who is bald on top should not attempt to compensate by growing the sides really long. He. Should. Not. So Jade and I camp for the night in Shor’s Stone, and have an easy, pleasant walk the next morning. We widely skirt Fort Greenwall once again, pick canis root here and there, and after just over a month of traveling and exploring and gathering and fleeing together through every part of Skyrim save Winterhold, we finally arrive at the gates of Riften.
2 Comments
Cousin Vacua
9/18/2013 05:31:43 am
Dear Nona,
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Michelle
9/19/2013 03:16:18 am
Poor Filnjar. Some guys are so clueless about the whole balding thing.
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201 And All That
Nona Plaia may well be the most boring person in Skyrim. Below are links to her "adventures" in chronological order.
A Life More Ordinary Mods An NPC is Born The Lady in the Lake Adrift in the Rift Opportunity Chops Studying Abroad Witches, Wolves Footwear is Not Enough A Modest Proposal Scales of Love Dances with Beers Five Rules to Live By Plain and Pusillanimous Watery Woes How Not to Stage a Murder Hot Heads and Cold Graves Run Nona Run Interlude A Fool Suffers Gladly The Markarth Discomfiture In Search of the Unknown It's Raining Bandits Down and Out No Holds Barred Beyond the Pale The Slippery Slope Mission Implausible The Nord in the Next Room The Only Living Girl Victory is a Gateway Drug Continuity Break Wherever You Go Archives
August 2014
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