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.
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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.
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.
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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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