Every city in Skyrim has good points and bad; among the merits of Solitude, for example, are its excellent shops, its beautiful location, and its colorful local personalities, including the instructors and students at the Bards’ College, the sailors that crew the Red Wave, and the Argonian prostitute who can generally be found leaning on a wall in the middle of town and who keeps calling out to me to come see him if I get bored. On the negative side, I have to go all the way to Dragon Bridge whenever I need to refill my waterskins and then invade someone’s home in order to cook. Still, I wake up the next morning with the cheerful prospect of puttering around the city all day, making up for my inability to do any productive work in Dawnstar. First things first, though: I’m running low on arrows and really need to replace them before I forget. Thinking to make some of my own, I walk down to the sawmill to fetch some firewood (my supplies are getting low). The weather turns thoroughly miserable as soon as I’m out of the city gates: a furious storm rises up and rain pelts down so thickly that I could just as well jump into the ocean and swim to my destination. And of course I discover, upon actually reaching the mill, that there’s no axe handy and I haven’t brought one with me. I chat with Hjorunn, a Nord, and Kharag Gro-Shurkul, an orc, who run the place together. Kharag tells me that he likes working with Hjorunn, who treats him much better than the city folks do; the only problem is that Hjorunn is sometimes too drunk to go anywhere, so Kharag has to conduct their business in town. I trudge back up to Solitude—that’s the entire morning wasted—and go through Snowberry’s saddlebags. I could have sworn I had an axe, but I can’t find it; perhaps I left it at Lakeview. I visit the local merchants, including Ma’Dran in the camp outside the gates, but none of them have one for sale. The smith doesn’t have one either, so I consider making one—but it turns out that despite having learned to smith many different weapons and armor pieces from various materials, I somehow haven’t picked up the technique of making a simple woodcutter’s axe. I make some arrows anyway, dipping into my firewood supply—I probably won’t run out if I continue to do my cooking in other people’s houses. I’m very pleased with the new arrows: they’re Bosmer-style, greatly superior to the iron arrows I’ve been using until now. After lunch, I mix potions and sell them to the three merchants who are interested—the apothecary Angeline, Sayma at Bits and Pieces, and Ma’Dran. I’m able to do quite a bit to make up for my recent dry spell. (Sales of Nona’s All-Natural Conjuring-Enhancing Magic-Suppressant continue to be impressive.) The weather clears in the afternoon, and as I go out into the marketplace I see hawks soaring over the rooftops, tracing languid circles against the clear blue sky—a sight so beautiful that I am overcome with the desire to shoot down these magnificent creatures and pluck out their feathers. I head down to the docks—shooting at hawks within city limits seems wildly antisocial, even if I will be firing my arrows into the air—where I discover that I have enough trouble just hitting these small, moving targets, let alone ensuring that they fall in places where I can easily reach them. I use all of my remaining iron arrows and hit only two birds, both of which plummet into the sea. But then they bob to the surface and float there, retrievable after all. Why not? I strip off my armor and jump in to get them. After swallowing a hawk’s beak for educational purposes, I return to the Winking Skeever with my little retinue. Over the noise of the usual crowd I can hear Nythriel, the incorrigible Blue Palace gossip, asking a woman named Veralene how her search for a spouse is going. Curiosity piqued, I chat with Veralene myself—I’m not sure what I want out of this conversation other than a little shared venting about the frustrations of trying to get married in Skyrim—but Veralene is incapable of expressing anything but pity for herself (she used to be rich, but lost everything when the dragon attacked Helgen) and contempt for everyone else. And yet I continue speaking to her even after she tries to drive me away with personal insults: her naked interest in marrying for money (and it appears that, for all her hostility, Veralene would be willing to marry me for that reason alone) amuses me no end. Even I was never that desperate. Neither was I ever so rich, of course; Veralene is clearly accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and considers death to be but a tiny step down from living on an inferior income. I doubt that Nona could afford to keep such an expensive wife, even if she found one worth keeping. I’ll be leaving Solitude tomorrow, and my next destination will be Winterhold. I’ve wavered over this decision for some time; Winterhold, from what I’ve heard, has only two points of interest—its College, a school for wizards, and the Shrine of Azura, which is said to be well worth seeing. The former tempts me not at all, the latter only somewhat, and I’m not entirely sure that the sightseeing is worth the risk—Winterhold is one of the snowiest parts of Skyrim, and snowy areas mean snowy cats, snowy bears, and snowy trolls. And yet I want to make the journey, if only so that I can say that I’ve visited every hold in the province. (And there’s always the possibility of discovering something exciting and new—an alchemical reagent that grows nowhere else, an attractive single gentleman in want of a better place to live, etc.) We head out the next morning, reaching Morthal with a few hours of daylight left; I gather ingredients in the marsh while Vorstag and Meeko fend off the spiders. We go on to Dawnstar the next day and stay only long enough to find out whether Frida’s shop is open—it isn’t—and then take the road south. I once more attempt to bypass Fort Dunstad by riding around it at a full gallop, but this time one of the the local bandits takes an interest in one of my followers, and I turn around to find that both Vorstag and Meeko have become embroiled in a chaotic melee. While I’m hesitating—reminding myself sternly that I am paying Vorstag to protect me, and shouldn’t feel obligated to protect him—Meeko comes running out of the fort, pursued by two bandits. I make a brief and foolish attempt to fight them, but they are far too tough for me to fend off alone. Mustering my inner reserves, I command them with every ounce of authority in my being to leave me be. They cannot resist the Voice of the Emperor, and immediately sheathe their weapons, but the sounds of battle from inside the walls continue—most of the bandits are out of range of the Voice—and I can’t afford to hang around waiting for Vorstag forever, as the two I’ve calmed down will recover eventually. I mount up again and ride away from the fort. Vorstag, to my relief, catches up a few minutes later. We stay at the Nightgate Inn, continuing east in the morning. Not far past the inn, a snowy path splits off from the main road, leading up to some sort of monument. I’m normally a lover of broad, clear, trustworthy roads with reassuring signs endorsing them, and distrustful of unmarked side-paths; but this one looks wide and inviting, and the view promises to be spectacular. I make the climb and find a small Nord burial site which my uncanny instinct for naming things tells me is called Yorgrim Overlook. Peering at one of the coffins is a tall man in College robes; before I can offer any sort of greeting we are surprised by a couple of animated skeletons clattering over with weapons at the ready. The stranger whirls around and shoots one with an arrow fired from a glowing bow; Vorstag smashes the other with his battleaxe. The stranger turns out to be an affable high elf with a few daubs of paint marking his cheeks. Putting away his fantastical weapon, he introduces himself as Rumarin, an “adventurer, bladebinder, and grave-robber,” and invites me to partake of whatever valuables the Nords have carelessly left lying about. I tell him primly that I prefer not to steal from the dead, and his wise response is that I might do better as a priest, and steal from the living. He speaks in a steady flow of almost hysterical good humor, such that I am hardly surprised when he suggests traveling together—no man this entertaining could possibly be happy with only himself for company. As usual, I’m reluctant to accept, for fear of disappointing him with my complete lack of intrepidity, but it occurs to me that if he’s a member of the College of Winterhold, as his outfit suggests, we might visit it together. He is quick to correct my misapprehension, cheerfully explaining that his robes are fake—he knows a crafter with a talent for creating such counterfeits—and that he only wears them to impress people; he doesn’t know any spells other than the ones he uses to conjure weapons from Oblivion. “That would require … ugh … studying,” he explains in a dismal tone. I actually find his conjured weapons more impressive than his robes, but I suppose that’s proof of my ignorance. Letting Rumarin go his own way, we continue our journey into the mountains, only to be confronted with a military fort that takes up almost the entire valley. The road passes so narrowly around its northern side that there is little hope of getting by without attracting attention, and I haven’t recovered enough yet to use the Voice of the Emperor again. I get on my horse and ride very slowly closer, just to get a better look, and someone or something I haven’t yet spotted starts shooting at me; I wheel Snowberry around and ride away in a panic. When nobody emerges to give chase, I dismount and turn back again, only to discover that Vorstag and Meeko have rushed into the fort and are now engaged in a vicious fight with what sounds like wizards—I can hear the crash of magical icicles hitting the walls, the tinkling as they splinter into shards. As I wait, tensely, for the noise to die down, I catch a glimpse of Vorstag running along the battlements in pursuit of an enemy mage, an enormous icicle protruding from his head. Any lingering notions I might have had about the proper relationship between an employer and her hireling are suddenly extinguished, and I gulp down a potion of frost resistance and run into the fort in helpless anxiety for my bodyguard’s safety. My efforts turn out to be entirely unnecessary—the only remaining enemies are skeletons with bows that are easily finished off; Vorstag has slain all of the wizards. He’s also used a couple of the healing potions I made, which brings me some small comfort—I am taking care of him, in my own way. Past Fort Kastav, we run into a couple of Alik’r warriors on their harassment tour of Skyrim. They’ve just finished threatening some random woman as we approach, and as they’re heading towards Winterhold, we walk along with them—I’m always glad for extra company on the road. A few minutes later, a snowy sabre cat charges us; I’ve lagged a little behind by then, distracted by the scenery (the weather is very clear), and before Vorstag can catch up or I can decide which poison to use, both of the Redguards have fallen to a few lazy swipes of the beast’s claws. I’m a little stunned; fortunately, someone else arrives to help Vorstag and Meeko with the sabre cat. He’s dressed like a Vigilant, which is unusual—I’ve never seen a Khajiit Vigilant before. The three of them together dispatch the cat, and the newcomer introduces himself as Qa’Dojo, a simple monk on a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Azura. He’s an interesting fellow, with a religious philosophy that finds an agreeable balance between the stability of the Divines and the change wrought by the Daedra—a philosophy that would most likely be considered heretical by the Vigilants. I ask him about his future plans, and he tells me a parable of a wealthy Count who hired a carpenter to hang a painting in his castle. The painting looked very good in the place that was initially chosen for it, but the Count insisted that the carpenter move about the premises, hanging the painting up and then taking it down. Only after the painting had been seen in every conceivable spot did the Count decide that its first placement had been best after all. He ends the story by asking me to be his carpenter: by following me in my utterly pointless wanderings, Qa’Dojo seems to be saying, he will realize that some place that he has already visited—or some other companion he has previously had—is, by comparison, greatly preferable. I love it! Providing a balancing contrast with more interesting people and places could well be my calling. I’m eager for further conversation with Qa’Dojo, but it feels terribly disrespectful to get acquainted over the bodies of these two unfortunate Redguards, so I invite him to travel with us and we continue on towards Winterhold. Winterhold barely qualifies as a town at all: collapsed and broken-down buildings almost outnumber the functional ones, and of those there are few--an inn called the Frozen Hearth, a large house that most likely belongs to the Jarl, a much smaller house, and what appears to be a general store. There’s no smithy, no mill, no mines, no farms; no signs of productivity other than a few chickens pecking at the frozen earth and a horse that someone has left near one of the ruined buildings. The road leads up to a precarious stone bridge that passes over a dizzying drop and into a massive fortress. A lone Altmer woman named Faralda stops me at the bridge, barring my way; it leads to the College of Winterhold, she tells me, and members of the College don’t care for casual visitors. With nothing more pressing than mild curiosity urging me to enter, I turn back and go into the Frozen Hearth. There’s not much of a crowd, so I settle in near the fire and take the opportunity to get to know Qa’Dojo a little. I’m especially curious about his association with the Vigilants: he explains that he trained as a priest of Stendarr, but his distaste for the more militaristic aspects of the religion led him to contemplate converting to Julianos. As he was packing to leave, he saw a book that he had been searching for, Aedra and Daedra, on top of a high shelf, and imprudently attempted to climb the shelf to retrieve it. The shelf tipped over, causing him to fall and hit his head, and at that moment he had a powerful vision in which he saw all of the Gods—Aedra and Daedra—as integral parts of the same constellation. I’m no expert, but I see no reason to assume that a heavy blow to the head is inferior to any other source of divine inspiration; surely people have received religious visions in many a sillier fashion. I’m actually rather excited to be traveling with this monk, who asks only that I go wherever I feel like going. (I can do that!) Tomorrow, therefore—because I’m just full of surprises—we’ll head for the place that Qa’Dojo was going to visit anyway: the Shrine of Azura. I don’t want to stay in Winterhold for long—the place is a depressing and not-so-scenic ruin, I have not exactly been overwhelmed by the attentions of attractive single gentlemen, and I’m not sure whether I can even fetch water or cook here—so we had best do our sightseeing as soon as possible.
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Sorry to interrupt Nona’s story once again. It’s not the weather this time; it’s Vorstag. The man won’t behave. In the last episode, when Nona gained a level, he suddenly started refusing to use the armor that she had so painstakingly crafted for him and switched back to his old goat-pauldron thing. When I checked him out using the console, I realized that his class had changed, and he was no longer proficient with heavy armor (or one-handed weapons, for that matter). Thinking it was a bug, I simply changed him back. Well, it was a bug, sort of: what happened was that the Unofficial Skyrim Patch team decided to change his class to match his starting equipment. Except that the class they picked only fits the armor he starts with, not the weapon and shield he’s carrying. (There’s actually no class type in the game that fits his initial equipment set well.) In any case, I don’t want to have to readjust his class to match the equipment that I made for him whenever Nona gains a level, and I certainly don’t want to play without the Unofficial Patch, so I’m going to live with the change. It's an annoyance, though, because Nona can’t afford to make a whole new set of equipment for him at present. I’m therefore going to cheat a bit. I’ll sell the steel armor and pretend it never existed; I’ll ditch the elven sword, and I’ll create an elven battleaxe—Vorstag prefers two-handed weapons now—using the console. I’m not skilled enough to make a proper set of light armor for him: I’m certainly not going to put him in Thalmor-style armor—that would be horrible—and while Bosmer armor is a possibility, I’m not sure that Vorstag and Nona’s relationship has reached the stage where they can be seen in public wearing matching outfits. When you see him next, therefore, he’ll be wearing his original goat-pauldron thingy and using a two-handed weapon. Also, there most likely will be some sort of weather change at some point—I’m considering switching to Pure Weather (I still like RLO’s weather, but the light during severe rainstorms in RLO is so dismal that it’s nearly impossible to take screenshots that come out; and Pure Weather has the advantage of being compatible with Pure Waters). OK, I lied. I wasn’t able to avoid the subject of weather entirely. There should be some actual new “adventures” up within the next week. Thanks for reading!
Frida, the missing proprietor of the Mortar and Pestle, shows up in the Windpeak Inn as I’m getting ready for bed. She and Thordir launch into a discussion of the extreme aggression displayed by the local wolves, who, they observe, are constantly running into town in packs and attacking people indiscriminately. (If they only got out more, they’d know that this unfortunate psychosis afflicts wolves all over Skyrim.) I talk to Frida briefly; she complains that the Jarl Skald is a fool, and tells me that Brina is the one that people really turn to for help. This topic is not without interest—Skald practically accused Brina of treason in public once, for no better reason than that she used to be in the Imperial Legion—but Frida does not tell me what I most wish to hear, which is an explanation for why her shop has been closed all day and a promise to reopen it. I turn in, still determined to leave Dawnstar at first light. I decide to head towards Solitude, with its busy marketplace and multitude of shops. It’s a miserable snowy day, and I can barely see the flowers I’m picking. (They’re blue, as it turns out.) We trudge through the snow without incident until a faint rattling sound reaches my ears, and Vorstag is attacked by an ice wraith. These creatures are quite deadly—they weave about in the air and are translucent, almost invisible. Most of my arrows miss completely, and I can see Vorstag dipping into his supply of health-restoring potions as the creature strikes at him. But he makes steady progress against it until a heart-stopping moment when it breaks away abruptly and lunges at my horse. Snowberry runs into the woods in a panic, and Vorstag and I pursue—an exercise most likely doomed to failure unless the terrified animal randomly decides to change direction and run toward us. She eventually does, to my relief, and Vorstag finishes off the wraith. Later, I am attacked by hooded Khajiit assassin, whom I almost feel sorry for—he or she (it’s hard to tell, with the cat-like face and the very dark clothing) must have waited a long time in the dismal, freezing weather, in clothing that offered neither warmth nor camouflage, to encounter me, only to be unceremoniously hacked to death by Vorstag. I gain a level while fending off the assassin—I’m honestly too surprised to do much more than that—and retrieve a note, identical to the one I found on the assassin who attacked me outside Whiterun. It appears that this mysterious Astrid person still wants me dead. Well, I have no better notion than before of what I might be doing that could induce someone to take out a contract on me, so I can hardly stop doing it. I wonder when—and if—these attacks will finally cease; surely Astrid will run out of assassins to send after me eventually? I mean, if Vorstag slaughters enough of them, they’ll start asking for more money than anyone is willing to pay, right? Right? I mix and sell some potions in Morthal, and taste a few ingredients I haven’t tried yet, including, with some trepidation, the teeth of the ice wraith that Vorstag killed earlier. After recovering from the usual reagent queasiness, I take my mind off the possible long-term health effects of consuming ice wraith teeth by completing both the elven sword I made for Vorstag and my Bosmer armor set. Well, almost: there are a couple of extra pieces that I don’t yet have the materials for, but the basic outfit is done. Then I enter the wizard Falion’s house, right next to Al’Hassan’s smithy, where Falion immediately assumes that I have barged into his home to accuse him of sacrificing children and eating the hearts of the dead. I haven’t, of course: I’ve only barged in to boil water in his cookpot, which appears to be free enough of children’s hearts for my purposes—not that I’m generally inclined to be picky, to be quite honest. In the Moorside Inn, I talk to Gorm, housecarl to Jarl Idgrod Ravencrone. He tells me that he’s very worried about the Jarl and her mysterious visions, and seems to be trying to work up the courage to ask me to do something about it. From his hesitancy, I can gather that the something he would have me do is something that Idgrod might not like, and so I cut the conversation short before he can get to the point. I’m not about to get into the business of undermining Jarls, however lucrative such a business is likely to be in Skyrim. I pay for a bed for the night and go into my room to try on my new armor. I am pleasantly surprised to find Anum-La sitting in there, and we chat about her past. She was in a mercenary company, she tells me, that split up in disgrace after a terrible incident in which they mistook a group of mourners for necromancers and slaughtered them. (Gods be thanked, I tell myself for neither the first nor the last time, that I am not an adventurer.) She came to Skyrim in the company of a child who was present that day and would not leave her, and who may in fact have been a figment of her imagination. This leads her to the subject of the funereal garb she wears, which might be interpreted as mourning for the innocents who died that day: “There’s only one thing in this world I truly mourn,” she declares. “My sanity!” It’s a pity I can’t spend more time with Anum-La; we enjoy each other’s company and she would even be willing to travel with me, but she’s clearly the heroic type—I’m sure she’d find my lifestyle stupefyingly dull. The next morning, I leave Morthal and head west, wearing my new Bosmer outfit. What a difference it makes! In my Thalmor-style armor I always felt sluggish and awkward—as though someone had drugged me at a party and left me dressed that way. Now I feel sprightly and competent: a dangerous sensation, as the most sober self-assessment I can dredge up informs me that I am neither of those things. Fortunately, no truly dangerous enemies appear for me to embarrass myself against, and I have ample time to consider a subject that has been weighing on my mind. We’ll soon be passing the area where I found Meeko, the dog who was living in the shack in which his owner died, and I can’t decide whether I should adopt him. I miss Vigilance terribly, and I’d love to have another dog. But if something similar were to happen to Meeko—Vorstag doesn’t use spells, but he might accidentally shoot Meeko with an arrow—I don’t know what I’d do. I never liked Marcurio to begin with; he was always a smug, irritating man, and in losing what little regard for him I had, I wasn’t truly losing anything. But I like Vorstag: if I were forced to send him away because I could no longer stand the sight of him, it would be a grievous loss indeed. I resolve this inner conflict by trying an experiment: I confiscate Vorstag’s hunting bow. If he can function without it, I decide, then I’ll adopt Meeko, assuming he’s still there. Vorstag doesn’t seem overly concerned by the loss of his bow, and in fact his tendency to close immediately with frost spiders rather than firing a few opening shots at them is, on the whole, a change for the better. We pass Fort Bunny-Killer without incident and find the dog, still hanging around his dead master’s shack, on the other side. He’s overjoyed to leave his ramshackle home and come along with me, and when I shoot and injure an elk, he and Vorstag merrily charge off in pursuit of it and don’t come back for several minutes. We reach Dragon Bridge just after lunch and continue north, having no pressing reason to stop. Past the settlement, we are attacked by an angry troll, and a few unarmed drunkards who are having some sort of party nearby come running over gallantly to assist me. I get very concerned for their safety as they crowd around shouting and punching at the monster, getting in the way of my shots and interfering with Vorstag, but to my great relief we manage to kill it before any of these well-intentioned morons get torn apart. They are so delighted by their victory that they offer me a bottle of Honningbrew mead in celebration. Caught up in the festive mood, I drink it down immediately and chase it with a big, gooey lump of troll fat. And then I … don’t feel so good. I’m not sure whether it’s the alcohol, the troll fat, the combination of the two, or perhaps something else that those nice fellows may have slipped into my drink, but this is even worse than Nona’s Rabbity Reagent Salad. Everything looks very wrong, and I begin to have trouble keeping my balance. I continue to totter vaguely in the direction of Solitude, hoping that nobody, except possibly Vorstag, will take advantage of my impaired condition before I reach the safety of the city’s walls. I’m feeling much better by the time I reach the city gates, where I vow never again to eat or drink anything that has been given to me by a random stranger or that used to be attached to a troll. I realize that only a complete fool would find it necessary to adjust her behavior to include a rule that should be glaringly obvious to everyone, but the first step to recovering from extreme stupidity is to admit you have a problem. I visit Radiant Raiment to buy a new set of fine clothes, then go by the smithy in order to craft some Bosmer arrows and a new hunting knife. At suppertime, I retire to the Winking Skeever, where a hooded and robed orc named Cassock engages me in what at first appears to be a friendly bar conversation but quickly takes a turn for the worse. I tell him I’m just here for a drink, and he rambles on in an increasingly sinister tone about thirst and blood and spilling. Rather than find out to what or whom these insinuations tend, I turn away from him (I’ve become quite adept at cutting people off before they can burden me with quests) and ask Corpulus for news. He hands me one of those helpful notes that I like to carry around to remind me of the many unique and interesting places in Skyrim that I would very much prefer not to visit. I spend the rest of the evening strutting around the Skeever in the hope that Sorex will notice that I’m with Vorstag and, I don’t know, get all stupidly jealous and make a huge scene that ends in his bursting into tears and being knocked out in a fistfight. Or maybe he should get into a fistfight with Vorstag and then burst into tears; I would think less of Vorstag if he hit a man who was already crying. Sadly, Sorex remains completely indifferent, no matter how determinedly I march back and forth through his field of view, and when I finally decide to speak to him, he immediately begins flirting with me even though Vorstag is standing right there. Confound the fellow! He won’t do even the simplest thing to make me happy. I can’t believe that I seriously considered marrying him.
I could hang up my travel gear, put Snowberry out to graze in the Falkreath Hold hills, and stay for the indefinite future in my beautiful new house, where I have just about everything I need—only an alchemy table is lacking, but I can find those in Riverwood and Falkreath, not far away. I’ve already been puttering around here for four days, and my vegetables are starting to come up. I took a little walk before going to bed last night and found luna moths fluttering around just outside the front door, which added to my ever-growing sense of satisfaction in the place. But I’m determined to build that alchemy table eventually, and it’s better done sooner than later. For one thing, there’s the matter of Vorstag’s wages, or lack of them; he asked for 500 septims when I hired him, but I have to assume that he intended that as a payment to be made periodically, and not as his price for selling himself into indentured servitude. There’s a chance that we’ll have a future together as something more than Ms. Timid Alchemist and her Hired Bodyguard, but until that question is resolved, I decide that I’ll pay him 500 septims a week; that means that his next payment will be due tomorrow, on the 8th of Frostfall. To Dawnstar, then. I have augmented my alchemical knowledge by adding the Poisoner perk—I still feel a bit weird about using poisons, but they’re becoming necessary, and so I may as well learn to make stronger ones. There aren’t many preparations to make apart from that, so after eating a breakfast of bread and cheese while sitting at my own dining table, I put on my armor and head out. (I’m also starting to think seriously about changing my armor: I could replace the Elven armor with Bosmer armor, which I would normally avoid because it exists only owing to a mod that I installed for use with characters other than Nona, but the two are about equivalent in terms of protectiveness and it would be nice to look like something other than a tubby Thalmor agent.) I stay on horseback until I’m past Riverwood—I’ve been back and forth so many times that the plants in between Lakeview and Riverwood have been uniformly stripped of any blooms, pods, and fungal growths that could possibly be of interest to anyone—and then continue on foot. On the descent towards Whiterun I’m attacked by a determined high elf who bathes me in a heady mixture of flames and ice while I stumble about blindly, wondering why Vorstag isn’t around to help. I have barely enough presence of mind to drink a potion that offers some protection against both fire and frost magic and then crouch behind a rock. Still no Vorstag, and the elf has decided to wait patiently on the other side of the rock rather than follow me around. I start to get panicky, because my protector is missing and I’m afraid that my potion will wear off, so I come out from behind the rock with sword in hand and slash hysterically at my attacker while hoping that she won’t get too many spells off before she dies. She barely manages to cast anything after I start swinging, but it takes about a dozen sword cuts to kill her, which isn’t very reassuring. (I should have used poison!) I manage to retrieve my bodyguard and my horse, who have gotten stuck a few turns up the road behind me, and continue north. As I reach the crossroads east of Whiterun, it starts to rain heavily, and the thrill of traveling by a new road lined with as-yet unpicked flowers is tempered by my inability to distinguish one color of bloom from another in the dismal grey light. As I pass the farms near Whiterun, I come across a lonely figure standing on the road, lamenting the fact that one of the wheels of his cart has broken and left him stranded. He’s transporting his mother, he tells me—his dead mother, in her coffin—and so he simply cannot go on until his wheel is repaired, and the owner of the nearby farm has refused to help, despite his offering to pay most generously. The man, Cicero, is a curious fellow, and not merely because he talks about himself in third person, has chosen a threadbare jester’s outfit as his traveling costume, and claims to be transporting a deceased relative around; he’s, well, creepy. And no, I don’t think that transporting a corpse is inherently creepy—it’s just that it’s not entirely clear to me that he believes his mother is actually dead. He says she’s dead, but he doesn’t seem entirely convinced—his manner conveys either mild amusement at his mother’s death or a lack of awareness of what that means; I can’t decide which. I pity him, though, waiting alone in the rain (I hope he’s actually alone), so I decide to trudge up to the farmhouse and see whether I can’t convince the owner to help him. In response to my inquiry, the farmer, Loreius, musters his very best arguments against helping Cicero, which are as follows: he’s weird. And he might be carrying anything in that box. But mostly, he’s weird. I can’t disagree, although I suspect that a real smuggler would pose as something less absurd than a mad jester carting his dead (?) mother around. Or maybe not--I’ve never tried to smuggle anything, so no doubt there are tricks of the trade, nuances to the work, that would surprise me. But when I ask Loreius what he thinks should be done, his best suggestion is that I make a false report to a guard, accusing Cicero of committing a crime. Suddenly, Loreius seems like a much bigger creep than Cicero. I’m outraged at his suggestion. I shame him into agreeing to help despite his worst instincts, and tromp back down the hill practically glowing with righteous self-satisfaction to give Cicero the good news. He is ecstatic, and presses 400 septims into my hands as a reward for my intervention—a sum I would find suspicious in itself if other people hadn’t paid me similar amounts on previous occasions for doing even less. I hear shouts of alarm as I continue north—a guard tower is under attack by a ragtag group of bandits. The guards don’t seem to need assistance, which is lucky, because I’m not about to offer any. Vorstag, oddly enough, doesn’t rush to join the fight either: he stands around calling for help until the attackers are dead. Apparently he doesn’t feel any need to intervene personally unless I’m being attacked, which, while a perfectly logical attitude for him to have, nevertheless takes me a little by surprise—people so routinely expect me to take an interest in their problems that I’ve come to assume that a general willingness to interfere is part of Skyrim’s culture. I could have the Nords entirely wrong, I guess: perhaps they only expect Imperials to solve their problems for them. Whatever the truth of the matter, I’ve wasted so much time today that I’ll not be able to reach Dawnstar without hiking well into the night, and the prospect of running into a snowy sabre cat while having to hold a lantern in one hand is not enticing. I turn off the road to the right, therefore, to stay at the Nightgate Inn, where Callen and Moris are sniping at each other in a manner that suggests that they have been doing so without interruption since my last visit. (Moris, speaking past Callen to the innkeeper: “Tell your tavern wench to bring some more ale.” Callen, speaking past Moris in a similar vein: “Tell your dog to do his business outside.”) (As an aside, I have to say that this is the worst day I’ve ever had while playing Nona: to begin with, I had my first-ever crash to desktop—crashes aren’t exactly a rare phenomenon while playing Skyrim, but I am very careful with my Nona saves, and up until now have never had a crash while playing this character—which forced me to replay the first part of the journey. I tried to do everything identically: I took a shot at wolf that I had killed during my previous session, but I missed, and it ran into the river and vanished. When I fought the high elf a little while later—she surprised me, not having been there the first time—and Vorstag didn’t show up, I backtracked to look for him, and found him staring at the spot in the river where the wolf had disappeared. It must have been alive in there somewhere, but I couldn’t see it, so I just took random shots at the water until Vorstag decided it was dead and stopped obsessing over it. Then, during the attack on Whitewatch Tower, he got stuck in sneak mode, which happens to followers sometimes; this was the real reason I couldn’t continue to Dawnstar—it would have been horribly slow and dangerous with Vorstag sneaking everywhere. I’ve been taking a break from Skyrim for some months now, and it really seemed as though the game was making a special effort to parade some of its choicest bugs in front of me just in case I’d forgotten about them.) The following morning is the 8th, so I pay Vorstag 500 septims for the upcoming week. The rest of the journey to Dawnstar goes easily enough; I pass Fort Dunstad by riding around it as fast as possible and hoping that Vorstag doesn’t get into a messy fight. (He doesn’t.) Later, I am attacked by giant spiders, and an Argonian fellow who happens to be loitering nearby decides to help me out. After they’re dead, though, the idiot attempts to rob me at sword-point: I tell him that I won’t hand over anything and watch with mixed emotions as Vorstag beats him to a bloody pulp. I have lunch in Dawnstar—fish soup, to help relieve the case of Rockjoint I’ve gotten from the diseased wolves crowding the roads—and take a walk around the town. There’s no quicksilver for sale at the smithy, but the ingots that I left near the smelter on my previous visit are still there. Strange. I enter the mine and start working, accompanied by Vorstag’s unhappy commentary. “I’ve heard that miners sometimes die from poisonous gases trapped in the ground,” he says pensively. He follows me all around as I attack one vein after another, keeping up a litany of murmuring complaint. I find his gentle dissatisfaction oddly delightful: he would seem a trifle false if he had nothing but admiration for both me and my lifestyle. I return to the open air, much to Vorstag’s relief, and smelt my ore. I leave the new batch of ingots near the smelter and take the ones I left previously—perhaps there’s something wrong with them, and they’re not up to Dawnstar’s exacting standards? They’re good enough for my purposes, I’m sure. At the smithy, I forge a new Elven sword—I’m planning on giving it to Vorstag, but I can’t finish it yet, as there’s no grindstone here—and start work on my Bosmer armor, which is mostly made out of leather. I don’t yet have enough for the full suit, but I make a couple of pieces. Then I pay a visit to the Mortar and Pestle and find it closed. I wait around a bit, wondering whether Frida has gone out for a late lunch, but she doesn’t make an appearance. I walk around town again, looking for her, and check Windpeak Inn. She isn’t there, but the proprietor gives me this charming note: I make several more visits to the Mortar and Pestle, but it remains stubbornly shut, and there’s no sign of Frida, so I waste the rest of the day in aimless, unproductive wandering. I’m starting to run low on funds—by “low,” I mean that I’m down to just over a thousand septims, which sounds like plenty, but doesn’t actually count for much when I can’t buy ingredients and do my work. By nightfall, I’m feeling thoroughly dispirited and lost, as though I’ve been abandoned. Dawnstar is a cold, dark wasteland, and I truly have nothing to do here. I hope I’ll never need any more quicksilver; this place just isn’t worth it.
It’s a beautiful day for our journey back to Falkreath, which turns out to be so thoroughly uneventful that even Nona’s a little starved for action. I’ve been going back and forth along this road so frequently that there’s nothing to gather—no plants or mushrooms of any interest at all—and we meet no-one along the way, save for a few hunters and a very rude orc who tries to pick a fight with me by calling me a milk-drinker. Even if I cared about some random idiot’s opinion, I couldn’t effectively prove myself not a milk-drinker by taking the bait and then watching Vorstag beat her to death, so I leave her be. We arrive in Falkreath in the middle of the afternoon, and I go immediately to see the Jarl. (I’m hoping he won’t notice that I’m wearing the same Radiant Raiment outfit I had on the first time we met; it’s still the only nice set of clothes I own.) Siddgeir is delighted to hear of the Embershard bandits’ demise. “Teach them to stop paying me,” he says with an air of grim pleasure. Then he adopts a confiding, friendly tone that sets my teeth on edge. “I like you,” he says. “You’re not afraid to get your hands dirty.” And he decides then and there to grant me permission to purchase property in Falkreath Hold. Here I was, enjoying a little glow of pleasure, even pride, at having accomplished something worthwhile—I mean, bandits are bandits, even if you’re going after them for the wrong reasons—and two minutes with Siddgeir has made me feel as though I’ve just finished wading through a river of slop and that he will be calling upon my vaunted slop-wading talents the next time he wants a priest blackmailed or an orphanage burned. I end the interview before he can ask me to do anything else. Well, I knew I was going against my principles when I agreed to kill those bandits in the first place: no sense in crying about it now. It takes me a while to find the steward—actually, it takes a stupidly long time: I walk all over the Jarl’s longhouse, and then I suddenly wonder whether she might have stepped over to the tavern for a drink, so I walk over there, and then I walk back to the longhouse and search the place from top to bottom again, before she suddenly steps out of a shadow and introduces herself. She’s an Altmer named Nenya, and she’s surprisingly agreeable for someone who has to deal with Siddgeir’s vagaries on a daily basis. This is most likely because she enjoys being the real power in Falkreath: she tells me that Siddgeir is wholly uninterested in actually running his hold, and so leaves everything to her and Helvard, his housecarl. She offers to sell me a plot of land for five thousand septims, and shows no surprise when I hand over the entire sum without hesitation. I now have the deed to a property called Lakeview, just off the road that runs east out of town. With all my expenses—including Vortag’s fee, the cost of materials for his arms and armor, the expensive scroll I bought from Calcelmo—Lakeview has cost me around seven thousand septims, and I don’t even have a house yet. But I am a landowner! I ride out eagerly to see my new property, but I’m delayed by those trapped watchtowers on the road—two more bandits have moved in, and these new ones aren’t quite stupid enough to kill themselves with their own falling rocks. Fortunately some Imperial soldiers just happen to be wandering by, and the bandits don’t last long against a hail of arrows. As Nenya directed, I turn off the road near a house called Pinewatch—my new neighbors, apparently. I stop by the door in the hopes of getting acquainted with them, but it’s locked and there’s nobody about. The path to the side—it’s not really a path, just an area open enough to ride through—is full of angry mudcrabs and wolves. The inhabitants of Pinewatch, if there are any, must not come out much. It’s getting dark by the time I reach Lakeview; a thorough inspection will have to wait until morning. Vorstag and I spend our first night on my new property camped near the spot where my house will likely be. The morning light reveals everything I could have wished for: the view of Lake Ilinalta is spectacular, and I have all the resources I need at the site to begin building—plenty of clay and stone, as well as a pile of sawn logs. In alarmingly short order I have built an unfurnished cottage that will serve as the entryway for a great hall. The size of the finished building will far exceed my former expectations; indeed Nona would have been perfectly content with a very small house, but Vorstag is staying over, so I need somewhere for him to sleep, and the cottage isn’t large enough for a second bed. I head back to town to buy more logs, passing along the way an extremely unpleasant Khajiit warrior named S’vashni, who can’t seem to open her mouth without saying something viciously insulting, and whose only topic of interest is swordsmanship. When I try to bring the conversation to a more civilized level, she tells me that talk is for cowards whose blades say nothing. I wish I could tell her that the message I’m getting from both her words and her blades is “I am a nasty, violent wanker with a dangerous sword fetish,” but I would most likely be both too polite and too interested in self-preservation to say that, even if the option were there. I leave her, then, to whatever senseless murders and/or diplomatic incidents she has planned for the day, and continue into Falkreath, where I find that I must purchase my lumber from that idiot Bolund who can’t believe that “provincials” like me are allowed to wander Skyrim. I also buy iron and corundum from Lod to make nails and fittings and locks, and, upon returning to the building site, use it all to put my main hall together. More wolves attack us while I’m working, so it’s fortunate that Vorstag is standing around wearing all of his armor with nothing to do. Once again, I’ve used up all of my materials in a burst of uncannily speedy construction, but I haven’t built any furniture yet. Another trip to town is in order, and there’s no way I’m handing any more money to Bolund, so I head down the slope towards Riverwood. Near the bottom of the hill I find a curious tableau: four skeletons stand unsupported and motionless, facing a large stone table with a haphazard collection of bones and soul gem fragments arrayed atop and around it. Leaning thoughtfully over the arrangement is a robed woman named Carmella, who asks me whether I have come to watch the dance of bones, to pay homage, or to learn the craft. I answer very cautiously that I’m not sure what she’s teaching, and learn, to my relief, that she isn’t taking on new students anyway. She introduces herself as a master of the necromantic arts—not a practitioner of necromancy, she is careful to explain, but a necromantic artist creating works that serve to illuminate the human condition. I can’t honestly say that I like this particular piece, but that is almost certainly not the point, and I find Carmella friendly enough, if a bit pretentious. The sun is setting as I get back from Riverwood. Carmella has gone elsewhere, leaving her artistic creation to whatever fate that hungry wolves and the elements might have in store. The skeletons stand as before, their eye-sockets eerily aglow, but they make no move to attack, and I decide that, on the whole, I rather like them. They seem lost and naked and vulnerable in the fading light, and—oh dear Gods, I’m actually standing here admiring the monstrous installation that this woman has left sitting practically on my doorstep. What will the neighbors think? Do the neighbors exist? Will they ever emerge from Pinewatch? I do a bit more work before going to bed—“a bit” meaning that I build a fireplace for the main hall, a washbasin, and two beds—and then fuss around at my property for a couple more days, riding to Riverwood now and again to mix potions and buy materials. (I want to have an alchemy table in my home, but it requires quicksilver and I haven’t any left.) I fish in the lake; I make soup; I put in a little garden and plant vegetables and flowers; and I build more furniture—a bench for the entryway, sconces, barrels to store food and water, shelves, endtables near the beds, a dining table. I build a wardrobe for my room, and inside it I place the Radiant Raiment clothes that I wore for my audiences with Siddgeir. I don’t think I’ll ever wear them again. Then it occurs to me that Vorstag has nowhere to put his things, so I build a dresser for Vorstag’s room. Vorstag’s room. How odd it is that I’ve constructed my house as though he lives here already! (That’s what happens, I suppose, when a single individual working alone is able to build and furnish a large house from scratch in two days with no prior planning.) And is it more peculiar that I have unthinkingly arranged things so that he can live here, or that I have unthinkingly arranged for him to live in a separate room? His interest hasn’t faltered: he still tells me from time to time that he’s surprised that I’m not spoken for. So why am I not spoken for? Now that I have no need to marry for property, Vorstag is everything I could want: he’s human and male, and, if I’m going to be especially picky, also strong and brave; he’s a decent enough fellow who hasn’t killed any of my pets, and he’s quite good-looking if you like a man with facial tattoos and a jaw that can crack walnuts. In fact he’s pretty much out of my league, and the only reason I can think of for his liking me so well is that he has entirely mistaken my character. And who could blame him for getting the wrong idea about a woman who makes him a complete new set of armor and weapons before hauling him off to a bandit-infested mine to slaughter all the bandits so as to collect a reward from the Jarl of Falkreath himself? I hate to admit this, but Vorstag may be under the impression that I’m some sort of hero, someone held in high regard, and not merely a timid, all-too-ordinary woman who needs someone to protect her from bears while she picks mushrooms. There’s only one way to resolve this: well, there’s several, but instead of taking the sensible route of thanking Vorstag for his help and sending him back to Markarth so that I can settle into a peaceful but solitary life of gardening, fishing, and alchemy in my new home at Lakeview, I’m going back on the road. With Vorstag. I’ll need him for protection, and once he’s spent enough time with me to disabuse himself of any silly ideas he might have about my courage or social prominence, I’ll know whether he truly likes me for myself. Maybe we’ll go back to Dawnstar; I’ll need some quicksilver if I’m going to make that alchemy table, and none of the nearby smiths are selling it.
Middas, 1st of Frostfall. Falkreath Hold. 7:30 am. Started secret mission diary. Best to keep this entire proceeding under wraps—wouldn’t want word to get around that I, Nona Plaia, might actually be able to solve the stupid problems people are always bothering me with. Took special care with clothes today: chose new Hammerfell-style outfit—loose trousers and shirt, turban, matching boots. Feel suddenly strange and different—like a character, a woman of mystery! Also, like a perfect fool. Suspect this to be the ideal state of mind for starting an adventure. Also possible side benefit: uncharacteristic behavior may be ascribed to mental derangement rather than foolish, misguided attempt at heroics. Goat cheese: not the breakfast of champions, but will have to do. Feel I should be eating proper adventurer food like iron rations or lembas, but can’t find any for sale and am not entirely sure what either of those things are. 8:01 am. Bought all blisterwort, rock warbler eggs, swamp fungal pods, and wheat for sale at Grave Concoctions. Made 22 restore health potions and several combination fortify-and-retore-health potions, using up everything. Actually starting to run low on blue mountain flowers. Horror! 9:08 am. Starting out towards Markarth on horseback. Marcurio has been silent all morning. Still can’t stand the sight of him. 10:31 am. Attacked by sabre cat. Marcurio too far behind to help. Tried to gallop away on horse, but cat is faster. Dismounted and shot it with poisoned arrow, then managed to finish it off with sword and shield. Gained level. Still feeling shaky; lucky to have so many healing potions on hand. 10:47 am. Still riding far ahead of Marcurio. Would rather take life in my hands than spend time anywhere near him, apparently. Weather awful. 1:19 pm. Arrived in Markarth after pushing Snowberry very hard all morning. Had lunch in Silver-Blood Inn. Much relieved to find Vorstag still there: told me straight out that he’ll join me but first I have to let my comrade go. Could hardly kick Marcurio out the door fast enough. Marcurio brought up Amulet of Mara again while I was telling him to take a hike. Suppose I should be grateful to him for being so disagreeable—might otherwise feel guilty for abandoning him so suddenly, so far from Riften. 2:29 pm. Paid Vorstag his 500 septims and conducted brief, candid inquiry into his strengths and weaknesses as a fighter. Learned that he has no training with the armor he’s wearing: only knows how to use heavy armor. Can’t blame him, I guess—that goat-pauldron thing is pretty stylish—but a little frustrated, as equipping him properly will add greatly to the expense. Must also replace low-quality iron axe and shield he’s carrying. Vorstag responding to examination with insinuating comments about Amulet of Mara. Very pleased to discover that he has such fine powers of observation: Amulet is entirely hidden by current outfit. Wish I could get him to talk about something else, though; may be far less offensive coming from him than from Marcurio, but still inappropriate and distracting and not relevant to subject at hand. Unable to think of correct response to Amulet question owing to sudden attack of giddiness; am therefore ending conversation abruptly while giggling like schoolgirl. 4:39 pm. At smithy, putting final touches on shiny new panoply. Had to buy 22 steel ingots and 6 iron ingots from Ghorza; hope result is worth it. Superior-quality steel armor, full suit, complete with sword and shield. Would have liked to make Elven sword, but Ghorza has no quicksilver in stock. Now spending a few minutes checking handiwork for flaws, which requires minute examination of Vorstag. Can’t be too careful. 4:53 pm. Visited Hag’s Cure. Not much in the way of useful ingredients to be had, but mixed a few random things anyway. Force of habit—too easy to fall back into usual activities. So difficult to stay focused on the mission! Wish I could just get it over with; would love to begin the journey back towards Riverwood, but already too late to start. Waiting around starting to make me nervous. Must be something I can do to improve my chances. 6:34 pm. Talked to Calcelmo in Understone Keep. Suddenly occurred to me to bring magical forces to bear on the problem—not forces contributed by idiot Marcurio, of course; but enchanted items could be very useful. Sadly nothing to be had in the way of a Staff Of Hideous Fiery Death From A Safe Distance, but scroll of Conjure Storm Atronach has intriguing possibilities. Not cheap—634 septims for just one scroll. Bought it anyway after taking a moment to remember who and what I am: for the true hero is one who relies ever on superior skill, clever improvisation, and personal grit; but the NPC prefers to throw money at the problem. 7:43 pm. Silver-Blood Inn. Nothing to do but stare at Vorstag and listen to Frabbi and Kleppr snipe at each other. Could be worse. Fellow named Sam Guevenne wants to have a drinking contest with me. Sounds like fun, but mustn’t get distracted. 9:13 pm. Very bored, antsy. Nobody new in here to talk to. Going to bed early. Turdas, 2nd of Frostfall. The Reach. 5:21 am. Still dark, but am setting out anyway. Have a long way to walk—and I am walking; no more riding ahead. Need to look for ingredients, and will be safer close to Vorstag. Also wouldn’t hurt to get to know him a little better. 11:59 am. Ran into party of Forsworn fighting Imperial soldiers. Arrived too late to help the Imperials—all dead. Forsworn came for us immediately. Vorstag acquitted himself very well—kept them all away from me, plus showed good grace when I accidentally shot him. Have been gathering ingredients, but cannot find a single blue mountain flower growing anywhere. Somebody has already picked them all. 6:15 pm. Arrived at Embershard Mine—the front entrance. Vaguely recall finding a back entrance once with Jade, but can’t remember exactly where it was. Will be dark soon; don’t want to spend a lot of time looking. Front entrance will have to do. Final preparations: Vorstag fully armed and armored? Check. Vorstag ludicrously oversupplied with restore health potions? Check. (Am retaining combination restore-and-fortify-health potions for own use on assumption that Vorstag, like Jade, won’t drink them.) Nona armed and armored, with plenty of arrows? Check. Poisons ready? Check. Scroll of Conjure Storm Atronach ready and within easy reach? Check. Snowberry safely out of the way? Check. Voice of the Emperor ready in case of emergency? Perhaps a little drink of water, just to be safe. Check. That’s it. That’s everything I can think of. Do I feel ready? Not really. In we go! 6:48 pm. Interior very dark—torches in sconces barely adequate. Already starting to feel poorly prepared—need better light but must use both hands for bow. Vorstag says he doesn’t like the look of this. Hoped he would say something reassuring; now feeling even worse. Am scrutinizing tunnel very carefully but can’t see anything dangerous yet—just a very obvious tripwire, easy to avoid. Might make fleeing difficult, though. 7:10 pm. Reached a large chamber with a waterfall and what looks to be an underground lake. Found two bandits here. Wooden walkway passes over their campsite—angle is awkward, and with the poor lighting, was unable to get a good shot at them. Told Vorstag to move to other end of walkway; that got their attention. Killed them easily, although fight was a bit noisy. Doesn’t seem to have attracted any other bandits, though. Several clumps of mushrooms growing here; couldn’t hurt to harvest a few. Can’t get further into the mine without lowering a bridge—have to figure out how. 7:41 pm. Found side passage leading to little room with lever. Don’t like the look of this: lever room is better-lit than the tunnels, and noise of bridge coming down is bound to attract attention. Don’t want to get trapped in this tiny room with bandits coming. Decided to pull lever and immediately jump into water below. Ended up being a pointless maneuver, as nobody noticed the bridge coming down after all. Bandits very inattentive indeed. All to the good, I suppose. Looked very foolish clambering out of water, but Vorstag nice enough to forbear comment. Didn’t expect interior of mine to look like this; would be sort of pretty if I could see it better. Vorstag wonders whether it would be altogether foolish to stop for a bit and build a fire, bless him. 8:42 pm. Was spotted by a bandit while getting in position to shoot, but Vorstag killed him before he could hurt me. Dead man was carrying a key that unlocks the door to what appears to be the bandits’ treasure room. Not that much here, actually; perhaps the bandits stopped paying Siddgeir because they weren’t doing so well themselves. Leaving it all here, in any case; no way to know who it actually belongs to. 9:37 pm. Reached a very large chamber with another waterfall. Quite an impressive sight. Could see only two bandits, but in such a space, with visibility so poor, no telling how many more might be lurking out of sight. Determined this situation to be ideal for releasing storm atronach: a large open area containing an unknown number of foes. Retrieved ordnance from scroll casing without further delay; deployed atronach at bottom of chamber, below entrance walkway. Results were well beyond expectations—received quest update reporting bandit leader’s demise within seconds. Atronach has cleared the chamber of bandits. With leader dead, quest is technically complete: could back out now and leave the way we came. Will continue and secure the entire complex, though: Jarl Siddgeir expressly asked that all the bandits be eliminated. Must not give him any reason to be dissatisfied with my performance. 10:41 pm. Reached back entrance without further incident. All bandits dead—and Vorstag still has entire stock of healing potions! Will retrieve Snowberry and head to Riverwood—very close by; can spend the night there. 11:43 pm. Sleeping Giant Inn, Riverwood. So relieved to be able at last to get a drink and climb into bed. Success! Need to contain my elation—remember that the Jarl made no promises; may have to reconcile myself to having done his dirty work for him while gaining nothing to show for it. If so, must not be despondent. Will head to Falkreath in the morning, and, whether Siddgeir chooses to be generous or not, get back to normal life as soon as possible. Tomorrow will tell.
Having looked through Elgrim’s inventory, dully inattentive to the possibilities, I’m now staring listlessly at his alchemy table. I feel as though my chosen profession is losing its luster; I can’t seem to focus. Elgrim’s irritable, vaguely mean-spirited chatter isn’t helping. Was he always this annoying? Did I really come here every day to practice, back when I first stayed in Riften, and not notice? Somehow I thought there’d be more to do here, but in my alchemy funk, there’s really very little. Jade and I visit the Bee and Barb, of course, but apart from an odd little colloquy taking place between Sapphire and Wander-Lust, everything is just as I remember it--Vulwulf Snow-Shod and the Black-Briars are as unpleasant as ever. I ask Keerava for news, and she hands me a note that she’s been passing out to travelers: I put the thing away. I don’t need yet another notice of derring-do to be done poisoning my mood. It’s not difficult to figure out the reason for my aimlessness, of course: it’s been a hard journey, a journey that I barely survived, and now, having done nothing but work toward its completion for several days, I am faced with the fulfillment of its purpose--to see Jade safely home, and say goodbye, and let her remain here within the relative safety of Riften’s walls when I finally depart. I’m trying, I suppose, to postpone that moment for as long as possible, but its imminence hangs over everything I do. But Jade seems cheerful, and her chatter keeps me smiling despite these sad reflections. “What about Peragorn and Valindor?” she asks as we amble around the marketplace, and I spend a few moments in bewildered incomprehension before realizing that she has turned to matchmaking again. “What, you don’t think they like each other? Or you think they don’t like other males?” As I’m pondering this dilemma, never having considered the romantic preferences of either of them before, a courier comes running up and, to my dismay, delivers another note: This is quite simply the weirdest missive I have seen yet. The Jarl of Falkreath wants to see me--because of the “fame of my exploits across Skyrim”? What could he possibly mean? Have I become known for gathering more armloads of purple mountain flowers than any one alchemist or interior decorator could possibly make use of within a normal lifetime? For occasionally delivering small packages to nearby recipients and being grossly overpaid for that service? For strutting back and forth in front of Jarl Elisif the Fair like a costumed chicken? Wait--is this a standard form letter that Jarl Siddgeir sends to anyone he wants see, for whatever reason? But it wouldn’t do to ignore such a message, would it? It’s from a Jarl, and there’s that tantalizing mention of a “choice parcel of land”--doubtless I would have to do something adventurous to earn it, but you never know; after all, I can’t possibly be famous for doing such things, so maybe I’m wanted for some purpose better suited to my limited capacities--perhaps the Jarl intends that I should dress up like a Penitus Oculatus agent and follow Dengeir around while scribbling meaningless notes and surreptitiously handing them to passers-by. At dusk we head to Haelga’s Bunkhouse to visit Kjoli and Inari, the lovers we met in Shor’s Stone. As fate would have it, we find them in the middle of an argument--Inari, it seems, is not pleased to learn of Kjoli’s intention to adopt a child. She runs up the stairs in a temper, and Kjoli, clearly confused by her vehemence, asks me to talk to her. I do, and at first her objections seem natural enough--she and Kjoli aren’t actually married, it turns out, and she wonders how he could possibly have thought it appropriate for an unmarried couple to adopt. But then she goes on to relate a surpassingly weird tale of meeting him at a temple where she had gone with the intention of committing suicide. He was praying, and as she plunged her dagger into her heart, he tried to save her. Something passed between them, and she has somehow, despite being dead, continued to exist on love alone. Kjoli overhears this, and tells her that she isn’t dead--a healer told him that the dagger missed her heart and she made a full recovery--and that he would gladly marry her in any case: the only reason that he never asked is that his own parents were unmarried and perfectly happy, so it never struck him as being terribly important. Inari is so moved by his words that she agrees to marry him immediately, and they ask me to help with the arrangements. Jade has been silent during the entire exchange. As we enter the temple of Mara, I decide to ask her to perform the ceremony. She tries earnestly to persuade me to ask Maramal instead, for the couple’s own good. I don’t know--I think it’s silly for her to be so worried about this curse; I would hope that she sees that any weirdness in Inari and Kjoli’s relationship was there long before she met them and has nothing to do with her. So I tell her to go ahead with it, and it actually goes off rather well. (You can watch the entire scene on YouTube.) I’m not sure I understand this stuff about Inari’s being dead or not being dead, but she’s happy, and Kjoli is happy, and that’s what counts, not some trivial detail about whether one is married to a corpse. The following morning, I say goodbye to Jade. Delaying the inevitable is just making me feel worse, and I don’t want to keep the Jarl of Falkreath waiting. It’s impossible for us to say anything adequate to the occasion--our hearts are too full, and the dialog options too limited. To protect me on my journey, I hire an arrogant young wizard named Marcurio. He promises to be a tedious companion, full of his own importance, but he’s eager to take my money and confident that he can blow my enemies to smithereens. Outside the tavern, I meet someone new--her name is Caylene, and she is either a beggar who does street performances or a very low-paid bard, depending on your perspective. For the price of a single septim, she performs a one-woman play for me called “The Jarl and the Jarless.” It’s truly dreadful; I feel thoroughly guilty for being so vastly entertained by it. I turn to Marcurio to learn his opinion, but he only observes slyly that I’m wearing an Amulet of Mara, and wonders that someone like me isn’t taken. I am grossly offended--someone like me, indeed! Someone who paid him five hundred septims not ten minutes ago and clearly has more where that came from--is that it? Does he really have no better sense than to propose to a woman he has just started working for? Is this his idea of professionalism? I tell him flatly that I’m not interested, and he says he’s sorry he brought it up. I should hope so! We depart Riften in mutual dissatisfaction, start heading north, and soon hear the tiresome noise of a bear up ahead. Then I notice another bear off to the side. I jump on my horse and gallop away in vexation, leaving Marcurio to deal with the angry wildlife as he chooses. He catches up with me at around lunchtime, as I’m devouring an experimental new dish that I think I’ll call Nona’s Rabbity Reagent Salad (I’ve recently picked up the Experimenter perk, which allows me to figure out two properties of any alchemy ingredient I swallow instead of just one, and I have a lot of ingredients to get through, as well as a nice bit of rabbit). Once my vision has cleared and I’m well enough to walk again, we go on with our journey, and I’m just starting to think that it might not be so bad traveling with Marcurio after all--he’s annoying, but that and the fact that he’s a hired mercenary combine refreshingly to remove any sense of responsibility I might otherwise feel for his welfare--when disaster strikes. It starts with a couple of wolves--nothing to worry about, as Vigilance and I are perfectly capable of killing such beasts as these without assistance. But Marcurio insists on showing off his skills, and his dodging this way and that while projecting bolts of flame from his fingers would make for a fine display if his aim weren’t so terrible. He fails to hit any appropriate target, and an errant blast finally catches Vigilance, whose fur bursts into flame. Vigilance turns on his attacker, Marcurio hits him with yet another firebolt, and I watch helplessly as my two companions, the animal understandably panicked by being set on fire, and the man who ought to know better than to torment such an animal, have at each other relentlessly, ignoring my attempts to calm them, until Vigilance, thoroughly outmatched, burns to death. I’m horrified--utterly dumbstruck. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I almost dismiss Marcurio on the spot, a mere four hours or so after paying his fee up front. And yet I know I can’t do without him--the roads are simply too dangerous, now, for me to travel alone. I’m trapped. I need protection, and being forced to receive it from the odious man who killed my dog makes me want to weep. Poor Vigilance! I hate leaving him here like this, his sad, furry corpse stretched out on the road, but I can’t pick him up and carry him, I can’t bury him--so here he will have to stay. I move on, numbly, with Marcurio following and at least having the decency to keep his ugly stupid mouth shut. The sun goes down, and although I was hoping to pass Valtheim Towers before making camp--the road leading up to them is so steep that I can’t find a clear, flat camping spot of any size--I tire of walking through the dark and set up my fire and my tent in the limited space available, leaving Marcurio to shift for himself. He knows where I keep the camping gear. Let him put up his own damn tent. The following morning, we pass the Towers and the turnoff to Whitrerun, taking the road that runs through Riverwood and along Lake Ilinalta. This is one of the most beautiful travel routes I know, but it brings me no joy; I feel stupid and miserable without my loyal, brave, incessantly-barking dog and my timid, self-doubting friend. And it’s a shame, because Marcurio is an astonishingly effective bodyguard--hostile beings are frequently burned to a crisp before I’m fully aware of their presence. (At least, I hope they’re hostile beings, and not just innocent passers-by or their pets.) With the security he affords me, I can walk all day without ever having to stop brooding about how much I loathe him. We arrive in Falkreath before 6 pm--not a bad time to present myself to the Jarl. I step behind a cart and change into my best clothes, the outfit that Taarie gave me to show to Jarl Elisif. We pass the general store and I can’t resist buying a couple of those scrumptious wheels of cheese. (Perhaps it is not the best idea to see Jarl Siddgeir while smelling strongly of cheese, but that thought only occurs to me after I’ve handed over my money.) Siddgeir turns out to be a pampered, self-satisfied young man, little more than a youth; any hope I might have entertained of his having a task for me that accords with my inclinations and competencies is quickly blown. “We’ll see if the stories about you are true,” he says, before describing his problem: there’s a group of bandits in his hold that he wants killed--not because of their crimes, but because they’re no longer paying him a cut of their proceeds. I don’t have any good way to respond. I can accept, I can flatly refuse, or I can turn away without answering. The latter options strike me not only as rude but as potentially risky: Siddgeir may be too great a coxcomb to think anything of telling a stranger about his chummy relationships with bandits, but there might be others looking out for his interests who have a grain of sense. I tell him I’ll do it. And not, I’m sorry to say, with the intention of appeasing him so that I can quietly leave Falkreath and forget the whole thing--I actually want to do it. I know how bad that is; I’ve willingly accepted a quest that goes against the basic principle under which I live my life: I am not a hero. I don’t kill bandits. (Well, I do, but only if they insist on attacking me as I’m going about my non-adventuring-related business.) But I want that land--that parcel of land that I can receive only through service to this silly young man. I thought I could marry my way into homeownership, but I’m too picky--I simply cannot find the house I want attached to the spouse I want. I would never have predicted that my dreams of domesticity would lead me down the slippery slope of adventure, but there it is; Nona Plaia will be a fallen woman. Best not to dwell on it--there will be plenty of time for self-recrimination when I’m done, if I survive. I need to focus on planning. I’m going to want some help, and not from Marcurio: the bandits are based in Embershard Mine, and narrow mine tunnels will make it difficult for a wizard to get clear shots at the enemy; plus there’s the more pressing fact that I absolutely detest the smug, soul-patch-sporting little creep. I want someone who will take the lead--someone with armor and weapons and courage and bulk. Someone like--just to pick an entirely random example that has nothing to do with my personal inclinations--that big, handsome fellow in Markarth with the goat on his shoulder. Vorstag? This needs to happen soon, before I can talk myself out of it. First thing tomorrow, I start breaking the rules.
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.
It’s morning in Solitude, and I find Atar, the executioner, standing next to my bed. Before I can get over my natural terror at waking up to see a man hovering over me with an enormous double-handed axe, he starts talking. “You wouldn’t be a sellsword, would you? I have a little problem you could solve.” It’s time to go. But first there’s the matter of poor old Angeline: she’s the local alchemist, and she is desperate for news of her daughter, who joined the Imperial Legion and hasn’t been heard from since being posted to Whiterun. I offer to speak to Captain Aldis for her, and he reluctantly tells me that the daughter was killed on a scouting mission. I feel terrible--not just bad for Angeline, but angry at Captain Aldis for being too much of a coward to inform a mother about the death of her daughter. Angeline is understandably heartbroken at the news, but she warms up to me quite a bit, telling me that my parents must be proud of me. I don’t know about that, but her glowing regard makes me feel better about using her cookpot to boil water. Then there’s Svari, Roggvir’s little niece, who is upset because her mother Greta has become very withdrawn since her brother was executed--she doesn’t even go to temple anymore. I find Greta at home; she tells me that she would feel bad about attending temple without a little religious keepsake from Roggvir--his amulet of Talos. This object proves challenging to acquire--challenging to my beliefs, that is: Roggvir has been placed in a coffin in the Solitude Catacombs, and reaching into that box feels ... ghoulish. (It doesn’t help that the game regards it as stealing.) I hesitate over this for a long time--but I promised Greta, and I promised Svari, and I’m not taking the amulet for myself, so I eventually do it. On the way out of the catacombs I bump into a crazy Breton woman named Gwyvane who talks in rhyming riddles about the end of the world--at least, I think that’s what she’s talking about; I can’t make any sense of it at all--but she doesn’t seem to want anything connected to any reality I’m familiar with, so I leave her be. I make a final round of the shops, visiting Radiant Raiment, where I buy a lot of clothes, including some Hammerfell-style garb (I have no qualms about culturally appropriating something with trousers). At the smithy, I find that my skill has progressed to the point where I can learn Elven smithing, so I take that perk, buy all of the available moonstone, and fashion myself a suit of Elven armor. Three-quarters of one, anyway; there isn’t enough moonstone to make the helmet. I’m immensely proud of my new armor: it’s wonderfully light, even lighter than leather, and I don’t care that it makes me look like a Thalmor agent who left her helmet in a tavern during a night of carousing and is now wearing a cheap hide substitute that she hopes her superiors won’t notice. I spend the rest of the afternoon at Angeline’s, preparing for my journey through the frozen north. I am very much afraid of the wild beasts that are said to inhabit the colder regions of Skyrim--snow bears, snow cats, snow wolves, snow trolls, you get the idea--and, lacking any sort of fighting prowess, I have turned to my one real area of expertise for something to keep me alive. I buy a recipe for paralysis poison from Angeline, but it calls for something called “briar heart,” which I have never yet seen. All is not lost, though: the other ingredient in the recipe, swamp fungal pod, is something I do have, and so I start mixing it with other ingredients at random, hoping to find another way to produce the paralysis effect. The first alternative that works--swamp fungal pod mixed with an imp stool mushroom--gives me a concoction that will not only paralyze my enemy, but heal its injuries; the very last thing I want in a poison. I keep trying, and find yet another combining ingredient: canis root. There are no unwanted side effects here, but there is the problem that canis root seems to be rather uncommon; it doesn’t often show up in shops, and I’ve never encountered it in the wild--or perhaps I have encountered it and failed to recognize it as anything special. I’ll have to keep an eye out. As I begin my journey the next day, I have reached level 12, learned another Alchemy perk, and, I hope, am ready to paralyze and then run away from anything that threatens me. I ride to Dragon Bridge, passing a pair of Redguard warriors harrassing a random woman while M’aiq watches impassively, then dismount and turn east towards Morthal. During the first hour or two I encounter nothing more alarming than a friendly dog that runs off into the woods to a shack in which his owner lies dead. A journal lying nearby informs me of the dog’s name--Meeko. I feel sorry for poor Meeko, living in a cold shack with only his dead master for company, but I can’t have a second dog, and so we go on without him. In the early afternoon the road brings us to one of those semi-ruined fortresses that are so often occupied by bandits; despite the steepness of the terrain, I have some hope of keeping enough distance to avoid provoking the inhabitants--the fort sits a little way off the road--and so we pass by, staying as far from the walls as possible. My caution turns out to be more than justified: the inhabitants aren’t bandits, they’re mages, and as I’m watching, one of them takes the opportunity to express his world view by shooting magic icicles at a bunny. I’m a little shocked by this display, not to mention the animated skeletons that I’m pretty sure I can see milling around in the courtyard, and only too happy to put this place behind me. As we enter Morthal, a little crowd is gathered outside the Jarl’s hall to complain about the Jarl--something about letting mages into their midst. I don’t know about their midst; I think they should be more concerned about those bunny-hating necromancers in the fort to the west, but what do I know? I talk to a Redguard smith named Al’Hassan who’s set up shop here--he claims to be a maker of those nifty curved swords, but he doesn’t have any for sale yet--and then head off to search for ingredients in the marsh. I find swamp fungal pods, deathbells, and giant lichen, and I’m not nearly done exploring by the time the light starts to fail and I feel it necessary to return to town. In the Moorside Inn, a salty tavern wench named Ingarte speaks loudly in support of the detested local bard, an orc named Lurbuk. She acknowledges that he has a terrible voice, but maintains that the harshness of his singing is highly appropriate for certain kinds of material. I don’t mind Lurbuk at all, actually; he’s very friendly, and he doesn’t sing anything for the entire duration of my stay, which puts him ahead of most other Skyrim bards. I ask Ingarte how long she’s worked here, and she tells me it’s been a while. “Ain’t a chair or stool hasn’t felt me bottom. Could say the same for the men,” she tells me merrily. But she is adamant in declaring the rumors about her spending all of her time “on her back” to be scandalous lies, insisting that she much prefers being on top. Also in the inn is an Argonian woman named Anum-La, dressed in black and carrying a sword. She tells me that she always wanted to be a warrior, but only males were ever recruited as soldiers in her Black Marsh village. She taught herself to fight and eventually joined a mercenary company, telling them that she wanted to become a knight. (She says she had no idea at the time what a knight actually was; she had heard the word used respectfully and thought that it sounded very grand.) Her fellows dubbed her “The Swamp Knight,” a nickname that has stuck with her ever since. As much as I’d like to stay a while in Morthal, gathering reagents and getting to know the locals--I like both Ingarte and Anum-La--I don’t want to delay Jade’s return to Riften, and so we set off again the next morning. We haven’t had to do any serious fighting since leaving Solitude--there’s been nothing worse than a few frostbite spiders, easily dispatched by Vigilance--but the road from Morthal to Dawnstar proves to be far more dangerous. Past the Stonehills mine, we run into bandits--only two of them this time, but these are much tougher than any previous bandits we’ve fought: one of them knocks Jade down almost immediately, and after I shoot him with a poisoned arrow, he pursues me relentlessly despite the best efforts of my dog. I eventually resort to calming them both down with the Voice of the Emperor and we all run away before they come to their senses. We get only a brief respite before a creature that I would have given a great deal not to see, a snowy sabre cat, comes charging out of the snow. Tawny sabre cats are bad enough--they’re fast, tough, determined, and their attacks are extremely quick and damaging--but the snowy variety is worse (snowy anything is worse in Skyrim). Jade once again is knocked down within a fraction of a second, and I immediately coat an arrow with my new paralytic poison and fire. The great beast falls over, stiff as a board, and I start fleeing--but I’m already out of breath as it recovers and catches up with me. I coat another arrow, with a slowing poison this time--this effect lasts much longer than the paralysis--but it doesn’t seem to help; even with the cat slowed, I can’t seem to put any real distance between us, despite Vigilance’s efforts to engage its attention. I turn to face it with sword and shield, and it takes off nearly all of my health with a couple of quick swipes. I backpedal, chugging potions, trying frantically to find something else in my inventory that may help--but by this time the creature has been injured heavily by poisons and dog bites and wild sword slashes, so I risk engaging it once more, and it finally goes down. On the move again after we feel calm enough, we chat with a genial fellow bringing a cow to a giants’ camp as a sort of peace offering, return yet another stolen object thrust into my hands by a random stranger to its owner, and finally arrive in Dawnstar, a mining town on the frigid northern coast of Skyrim. My first tour of the place is dispiriting: almost everyone I meet complains of recurring nightmares, and I see the Jarl badgering a pair of ex-Legionnaires with what amounts to accusations of treachery. The one object of interest is Quicksilver Mine: quicksilver is rare, and I’d very much like to acquire some, as it’s useful in Elven smithing. I go in, therefore, and chip away at the veins with a borrowed pick. But I run into a difficulty--I can’t find the person I’m supposed to give the ore to. I end up smelting it all, taking a couple of ingots for myself, and then leaving the rest near the smelter, where the presence of a stationed guard offers me some assurance that it will end up in the right hands. It’s getting late, and I enter the inn, which is mostly occupied by discontented miners. One man, a dreamily poetical fellow named Jaspar Gaerston, tells me all about his efforts at writing fiction. This seems at first to be an interesting change from the endless talk of nightmares, but Jaspar has a slow, whispery way of speaking, without much inflection, that renders his conversation insufferably dull to my ears. I wonder if a general cure for the local people’s restless nights might be found in listening to him; I find a few minutes more than adequate to induce a gently soporific state, and I soon retire to my room to enjoy its effects.
[Aside: Someone recently asked me the name of the mod that adds all of the extra NPCs that Nona meets--Jade, Hjoromir, and so forth. I could have sworn that I’d mentioned this mod, but somehow I neglected to. The name of the mod is Interesting NPCs, and I’ve added a description of it to my mod summary page.] “I wonder if there’s a potion for my curse,” Jade says pensively. I am in mid-stoop, reaching for yet another clump of mountain flowers, as she goes on to speculate that her problem might be curable with drugs, like a disease. I’ve never heard this from her before; I would like to think that it’s an indication of her confidence in my alchemical expertise, or perhaps just a random musing, but I can’t help but suspect that she might be growing a little discontented--not with me, I hope, but with the constant travel and danger. She doesn’t keep me in suspense for long. “Fredas!” she says brightly the next day, as we head down to Solitude’s docks on an errand for Evette San, who makes spiced wine and sells it in the city. “The Bee and Barb will be bustling.” Wistfully, she tells me that we should go back there and see how everyone is doing; I never cared for the Bee and Barb crowd myself, but I know she’s fond of Sapphire, her former Guildmate, and I can’t blame her for being homesick, even if it is for a hole like Riften. I was hoping to find someone to marry while in her company--I still don’t think there’s any substance to this curse she keeps referring to--but I decide then and there that we’ll be returning to Riften after I’ve had a good look around Solitude, whether I’ve become engaged or not. I persuade Vittoria Vici to release Evette’s spice shipment, and return to the city, where Roggvir’s body has been taken away. I’m sorry to say that Solitude did not make a good first impression: the execution happened yesterday, just as we were arriving. Roggvir’s crime was facilitating Ulfric Stormcloak’s escape after killing King Torygg; for that, he publicly lost his head. After that unpleasant spectacle, I was a little afraid to learn what else might be happening around here, for so often it seems in Skyrim that bad only leads to worse. But Corpulus, the owner of the Winking Skeever, had nothing more alarming to divulge than that a fellow from Dragon Bridge had come seeking the Jarl’s aid; that a deranged man was walking about in the streets; that a certain Jaree-Ra was looking to hire someone for an unknown purpose; and that the Bards’ College wanted new trainees. I heard nothing at all in this list to excite me, which was a great relief--exactly the reassurance I had hoped for. Corpulus even threw in a story about how the inn got its name: he used to have a pet skeever, and ... it winked. He’s a surpassingly dull man; I like him tremendously. I spent the rest of that first day just getting my bearings; the city was abuzz with talk of the execution, and after hearing the opinions of numerous inn patrons and passers-by I found a pleasant distraction across the street, in the form of Radiant Raiment, a clothing store. Although the ladies who run it seem to have adopted a business model under which their customers must be disparaged at every opportunity, that didn’t stop me from buying a dress and a hat and a new pair of boots and then vowing to return as soon as possible. Today, though, there’s much to be done in the form of little, innocuous favors for the locals. On my way back to inform Evette San of my success with her spice shipment, I meet Sorex Vinius, who claims to own the Winking Skeever. It turns out that he’s Corpulus’s son; the inn may not technically belong to him at present, but “it’ll be mine when he kicks off,” Sorex informs me with cheerful callousness. Like everyone else, he has an opinion on the execution, but his is personal, not political: “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,” he sneers, explaining that, when they were younger, Roggvir discovered that Sorex had a crush on a girl named Vivienne, and thereafter used that knowledge to torment and humiliate him at every opportunity. Sorex is thoroughly uninterested in the rightness or wrongness of Roggvir’s actions in regard to Ulfric; as far as he’s concerned, Roggvir was an ass in his youth and maturity didn’t do much for him. I have just agreed to help Sorex out by delivering some rum to Falk Firebeard in the palace, when I bump into Taarie, one of the proprietors of Radiant Raiment, who tells me that if I’m going to the palace, I might want to rethink my outfit. She’s probably right; I’m wearing my brown, stained tunic, the one I like to do alchemy in, so I ask her for suggestions. “You’re really going to the Blue Palace?” she asks, pleasantly surprised, and immediately offers me a free new set of clothes if I’ll wear them in front of the Jarl and, if she likes them, tell her that they came from Radiant Raiment. This actually seems like a very silly thing to do, for two reasons: first, I’ve noticed that when I enter a Jarl’s hall, it is often the case that a very large, armed person will loom up in front of me and tell me in a menacing tone to stay away from the Jarl; bothering one of the most important people in Skyrim for the sole purpose of advertising a clothing shop seems like an excellent way to get myself tossed out on my ear. Second, I can’t help but doubt the sanity of anyone who would choose Nona to model their clothes, and I’d have to doubt my own sanity if I were to follow the suggestions of a crazy person. But I agree nevertheless, because: new clothes. My trip to the palace goes better than expected: I’m a little embarrassed by Vigilance’s constant barking--I really should have left him outside--but happily it escapes remark. As I arrive, the fellow from Dragon Bridge is petitioning Jarl Elisif for aid--something about unnatural magic and a cave; he gets less than he hoped for, owing to the skepticism of the court wizard, but Elisif herself seems nice enough--definitely not the sort to throw a stranger in prison for foolishly parading back and forth in front of her in an overly fancy outfit. So, after handing Falk Firebeard his rum, I screw up my courage and ask the Jarl whether she likes my clothes, and she actually responds positively, telling me that Radiant Raiment can expect to receive her order for some dresses in the near future. I chat with Nythriel, the court gossip--that’s not her official title, but it might as well be--who has all of the latest news on such lofty subjects as Thane Erikur’s sex life: she’s seen him leaving the dungeons carrying clanking bags of stuff--shackles and torture equipment, she has no doubt--and tells me conspiratorially that he’s not the one doling out the punishment, if I catch her drift. My desire to hear more is at odds with the feeling that the longer I listen to her, the harder I’ll have to scrub myself clean in the bath afterward. I’m enjoying Solitude, and there’s still a great deal to do here, but over the following days I become increasingly frustrated. My waterskins are empty, and in the morning I ride all the way back to Dragon Bridge to refill them. Seawater won’t do, and although Solitude has a well, Realistic Needs and Diseases won’t allow me to draw water from it. Then I spend the rest of the day searching the city for a cooking pot to boil my water in, and find nothing--not in the inn, not in the Bards’ College or Blue Palace kitchens, not in Castle Dour. (It’s a hazard of realism mods, and one I don’t know quite what to do with, that in their efforts to improve immersion, they create yet more absurdity. Why can’t I draw water from a well? Because having to drink water wasn’t a feature of the original game, and so a mod author who wanted it to be a necessity would have had to think of that specific possibility. There is, I have only now discovered, a mod that specifically allows users of Realistic Needs and Diseases to draw water from wells, but I’m reluctant to install yet another mod every time I come across some minor shortcoming in one of those I have already. Absurdity is a basic condition of Skyrim, and one I’m trying to embrace. And it is very, very trying.) Defeated, I return to the Winking Skeever, where Sorex notices that I’m wearing an Amulet of Mara and asks me quite plainly whether I’d be interested in having a life together. Having just spent several hours searching this stupid city for a cookpot, I am honestly flummoxed--not just by Sorex, whose tone even as he proposes leaves me in doubt as to whether he really likes me all that much, but by Solitude itself. I abandon the conversation with the question still hanging and head grumpily to bed. Tomorrow, I will do what my predecessor Nordrick thought best in these cases: I will stalk Sorex like some odious pervert and find out everything about him. I find out precisely nothing: Sorex spends the whole morning and most of the afternoon in the Skeever, either sweeping the floor, sitting at a table, or listening to Lisette’s singing. He doesn’t speak to anyone, except very briefly to me when I happen to get close to him. At around 4 pm, I follow him out of the inn and into the marketplace, where, for the next few hours, he hovers around the stalls, still without engaging anyone in conversation. Now, my travels through Skyrim have not exactly been a thrill a minute--in fact, I’ve avoided excitement rather assiduously--but I can honestly say that I’ve never had a duller, stupider day than this. Learning nothing new about Sorex, I spend the hours mulling over what I already do know: he’s a gruff, unvarnished fellow, even crass; a man of no invention, the sort who contentedly makes the same lame joke over and over (“The Winking Skeever isn’t just the best inn in Solitude. It’s also the only inn in Solitude!”); a man with no interesting opinions, but honest with himself, aware of his own resentments, as his story about Roggvir shows--a quality I find appealing for its very plainness. In fact, I’m struck by Sorex’s very ordinariness; I could almost believe that we were made for each other. But oh, Solitude, you were not made for me, nor I for you. It’s getting late as I break off my conversation with K’avald, a homeless Redguard whom I started talking to out of sheer boredom (he’s a happily deluded fellow who believes himself to be a wealthy nobleman, though he cheerfully accepts the coins of passers-by as “investments” in business projects which have yet to materialize) in order to follow Sorex back to the inn, where I eat fish soup for dinner as a cure for the mild case of Rattles that I’ve contracted from drinking dirty river water all day. Could I live in the Skeever, where there’s no room large enough to accommodate us both, save for that belonging to Corpulus, who seems unlikely to “kick off,” as his son delicately puts it, any time soon? Living in Solitude would force me to buy all of my food and drink, or light campfires in the street, or else cook in someone else’s home (someone in this city must have a cookpot), which all seems perfectly wretched; certainly I can afford to stop making my own food--alchemy is nothing if not remunerative--but living as a permanent hotel guest isn’t what I want. I just can’t do it. I’ve carelessly allowed myself to hope and dream, and in so doing have perhaps become overly choosy. But I can’t help it, now. I feel a terrible determination starting to take hold: I must have my own place. Somehow, I must become a homeowner--and maybe then I will marry Sorex Vinius, maybe not--but I will never be happy, Sorex or no Sorex, without a house of my own. I don’t like where this is going, what it’s likely to lead me to do. And I know that my friend Jade will likely blame my dissatisfaction on her mysterious curse. But I can look her in the eye and say this with total conviction: it’s not you--it’s Skyrim.
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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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