hamlet13

I love the sea.  Well, truthfully, I love most places except perhaps for the deep swamp, which tends to have too many of the small bugs that get in under your fur to feed and the itching can drive you mad.  My Argonian friends are welcome to their swamps, their scales do not suffer from such things.  But forests, mountains, plains, deserts, all have their beauty.  The sea, however,… its fresh scent fills the nostrils, clean and clear. It speaks of life unconstrained. Forests are rich in scents, and lush, and a forest glade with a waterfall and a spring on a summer afternoon is a happy thing, but it is the happiness of being surrounded and enclosed, supported and cared for. The sea is the happiness of freedom, of not being surrounded by people and society and constraints and manners, of not having to constantly think of strangers and conventions and how every comment of yours might be taken, and the delicate feelings of those with chips on their shoulders so large that you wonder how they bear up under the weight of them.  You do not have to be careful, on the sea, except in the cut and dried matters of survival, and if you decide you no longer like where you are, you simply move on.  I like people too much, men and mer, Khajiit and Argonian, Hist and spirit, to live apart from them, but we are all crazy in our various ways.  The sea is always a welcome reprieve.

Trading caravans typically travel by land.  You may be going from point A to point K, but at least half your profit comes from the small places in between, especially if you can get off the main roads and visit the smaller towns that are starved for the less common materials, and that will buy from you simply because you’re a novelty.  Never underestimate the effect of a fur coat and a tail has on your profits, when you’re stopped in a place like Rorikstead in the wilds of Skyrim, where the locals rarely even see an elf.  If you have a few crew members who can juggle, even better.  My cousin Elf-Eater took a vacation with us once, and we raked in the loot simply by letting him speak!  The locals simply couldn’t get that a great battle-cat like him was also a Khajiit, though he walked on 4 legs instead of 2; he was simply a trained tiger, until he opened his mouth and then he was the 12th wonder of the world.  He gave the children rides, and made enough gold from the trip that he returned to his troop with a fancy new set of armor made from dwarven ore!

But I digress.  Where was I? Oh, yes… so we traveled mostly by land.  But there were a few ocean trips, where my father had a mission somewhere best reached quickly by sea, and my parents decided to move the caravan there rather than part for so long.  That was how we ended up in Solitude, of all places — meeting the envoys of Skyrim and Hammerfell to discuss some trading issue that I was too young to understand — and then traveled the roads through Skyrim to Riften and into Morrowind, where we took another ship back to Elsweyr.  I learned a lot on those voyages — mostly about knots, and how to stay out of the way of the crew, true, but a young khajiit can be a great help scampering about the rigging, and I think my family and caravan mates were relieved to have someone else answering my incessant questions for a change.

So, as I say, I love the sea.  This trip with Sugar-Claws, however, on her sloop probably packed to the gills with contraband and smuggled goods, was barely a day in duration and could not have been over quickly enough.  A hurricane had just passed through, and it seemed as though we rode in on its tail end, and the boat I was on was far too small to be out on those waves.  The first few hours were fine, but the closer we got to Khenarthi’s Roost the rougher the seas got, and by 4 in the morning there wasn’t a moment that the deck didn’t have some wave or another crashing across it.  Sugar-Claws and I were both tied to the deck, me mostly bailing and her at the wheel making the most gallant of pretenses at imparting any vague sense of direction to our motion.  After some indefinite, nightmarish period, I realized that she wasn’t setting our course as much as she was simply keeping the boat pointed in a way that let us ride with the waves rather than against them.  I bet sailors have a term for that; “not dying” is the only one that I can apply.  I spent the last 8 hours questioning my judgement and all of my life decisions since I decided not to stay in Dune  and study smithing with my Uncle Patchwork, and I’m pretty sure the Divines were ready to give up on me as a bad bet and pick some other Coldharbour escapee to sic their Prophet on.

After an infinity of soaking and bailing and wretched, bitter, daedra-cursed battering brine, the storm seemed to pass almost in an instant, as though it were a dwarven mechanism that had run out of steam and simply given up. (Beating me to that end by 10 minutes, at the most.) One moment, we were doomed, and then, in the next pause between waves, nothing.  The next wave never came, the sun’s rays penetrated my brain’s haze, and when I looked up there was blue sky to the east and the storm was not so much passing as it was dissolving.  I’d never seen anything like it.  Sugar-Claws looked around, exhausted, and then shook her head and began clucking to herself.  Storms do not pass like that, she said, there is something not right about it.  But, what that was, she couldn’t say.  We could see land in the distance, and Sugar-Claws continued steering east; after a couple of hours, and a couple of island sightings and course corrections, she was able to assure me that we were not too horribly far off course, and we arrived at the island by mid-day.

I was not surprised that we did not head to the port, in Mistral.  Instead, Sugar-Claws dropped anchor on a southern beach already filled with boats — although those boats were mostly in pieces.  From the look of it, a small fleet of ships had been torn up by the same hurricane we’d weathered, not at all aided by their greater size.  Sugar-Claws said something about it being a great tragedy, but I could see her thinking of the cover it gave her to land without dealing with the authorities, and calculating how much she could salvage from the wreckage before us.  I thanked her for the trip — the bad weather was hardly her fault — and she thanked me for my aid.  She also told me to stop by again, if I needed a ride back, and I assured her that I’d keep her in mind.  Which was true, though perhaps only in my nightmares.

When I got out onto the beach, my main goal was to find a place to sit down, and just let my world settle down into the calm, peaceful, restful, unmoving, unshifting, unheaving state that it was accustomed to.  This turned out to be delightfully easy, for land, by and large, generally resides in this state without interruption, and even the turmoil of my recent life had not exempted me from the benefits of this condition.  I found a boulder up away from the surf, settled down on it, and had a good 20 minutes of just drinking from my water bottle, eating a bit of hard tack and some kind of fish jerky, and just taking stock of my environment.  As I mentioned, the beach was strewn with wreckage, and also with people moving about the wreckage or, less fortunately, being dragged from it.  After a time, I realized that there was a theme to this: locals, mostly my people, helping (and scavenging); and Dominion marines, mostly Bosmer and Altmer, whose ships that wreckage had been.  From the look of it, a modest-sized Dominion fleet had been wrecked on these shores; I couldn’t guess at how many ships, since it extended far up the coast from me.  I seemed to be on the southern end of the island, and the wreckage ran mostly up the western coastline.

After a time, I decided I felt safe to move, and so I started to walk about a bit and poke around the wreckage. (You cannot ask a Khajiit to sit still when so much perfectly useful gear is at risk of going to waste.  Surely, the tide could come in at any moment, and carry it all away!  Someone must rescue it!)  I also took the opportunity to hunt mudcrabs; while vicious creatures, they make excellent eating, and they have a kind of hide that can be turned into some decent leather armor, with a bit of crafting.  I needed that.  I also needed to regain my combat skills, still a shadow of themselves thanks to a certain Daedric Prince who will remain nameless.  I must confess, I needed this break.  A bit of simple exertion and exploration, with little or no risk of mortality, was really my idea of an afternoon idyll.  I know there are warriors who love to charge from one life-threatening situation to another, and I am not one of them.  High risk of immediate death is a numbers game, and the odds are in favor of the house.  I prefer that condition to be the exception, rather than the rule.

After a couple of hours of this, it came to me that I was here for a reason.  To find someone named Razum-dar, and perhaps I should get on with that.  If the state of my part of the island was any indication, were this Razum-dar still here (and not killed by the storm), he’d be stuck here for a while longer, but there was little point in delay.

As it turned out, the delay was minor.

I moved around often as a child, traveling in my mother’s trading caravan, normally in concert with my father’s diplomatic missions.  Usually, we slept in tents, large enough in their own right but enormous to a child, and filled with fascinating things picked up for cheap in one place and sold as expensive exotics in another.  Sometimes the crew would stay with the camp while my family would stay in embassies — our own, or those of host nations — or in the homes of trading partners. Once we camped in a rather terrifying Nordic ruin, where you were certain that ancient dragon priests would crawl from the pits and pull you down to join them (as my brother insisted would happen that very night).  When I was older… well, let us simply say that the beds that I awoke in were not always my own, as is the way of such things.  Nirn is a vast world, Tamriel a great continent upon it, and the many lands across Tamriel provide a traveler with a vast array of opportunities to wake in unfamiliar surroundings.

So, feeling my way towards consciousness, rested and content but with the vague sense of something that perhaps needed doing at some point, I was hardly perturbed by the awareness of being in a strange bed.  The sheets beneath me were rough but wholesome, and the room smelt of good things: of wood, and fish, and moon sugar, a trace of pitch and smoke, and of people nearby.  I could hear a creaking of timbers, and felt a shift in the room, and the word boat formed in my mind, and with that word my stomach growled at me and the world around me started to become real and worthy of attention.  I pulled myself up onto my elbows and looked a bit blearily across the bunk-room of a ship’s hold… to the glowing blue visage of the Prophet’s projection looking back at me.  Jolting backwards, I banged my head against the bunk above me and swore like a sailor — which seems appropriate in retrospect.

{The Vestige awakens, once again.  Come here, we must speak.}

While my bruised head throbbed, my heart sank into my stomach.  Coldharbour, soul stealing, Ferals, Lyris, Prophet, Molag Bal, all came rushing back.  Well, the brief forgetfulness was a gift of S’rendarr’s mercy, and I would take it with thanks.  I pulled myself out of the bunk, carefully avoiding another impact, and looked down at myself: worn but clean drawstring pants (far too short for me). To the side of the bunk was a pile of the pathetic things I’d been wearing and carrying in Coldharbour, also clean but not any more impressive because of it.  So, wherever I was, it was not hostile territory — a change of fortunes so great that I praised S’rendarr yet again and vowed a considerable sacrifice when next I found his shrine.  I looked at the Prophet’s image, and asked where we were.

{As I feared, we arrived in different locations.  I am in a city near the sea, in a land of eternal spring.  The air smells of the ocean, and of markets, and gardens.  It matters not.  You have awakened once again, and we must set you on your path….}

“How long was I unconscious?”

{Days? Weeks? I cannot tell. The voyage between worlds disrupted all sense of time and space.  I know only that you were deposited into the sea, and some charitable soul fished you out and brought you to dry land.}

Someone else that I owed a debt to, beyond S’rendarr.  Khajiit repay their debts, and if our paths crossed again I would be sure to.  Well, the Prophet had said that I must be set on my path, and seeing him here (or his ghost) made it unlikely that I’d be getting rid of him easily, so I had best get this out of the way: “What should I do now?”

{I’m afraid you will have to decide that for yourself.  I must focus on searching for a way to repay Lyris’s bold sacrifice.  I cannot simply abandon her to the wrath of Molag Bal.}

So, I’d have a breather then?  Sweet. Though what was coming was as inevitable as a sea squall when the wind changes: he was going to send me back in.  You know he was, Divines curse him.  And I was going to go, Divines curse me, because while this seemed more their fight than mine, still, I’d gotten pulled in and their machinations had — as a side effect of being their tool, if nothing else — gotten me out.  I owed them, and I owed the Prophet for the Skyshard, which I had not forgotten.  And, to leave anyone to Molag Bal’s tortures who was not an absolute villain… how could I not try to rescue them?  How could I look myself in the mirror for the rest of my life if I turned away? Such a thing could not be born, though returning terrified me.  Well, when the meat must be eaten, don’t waste time chewing it before it’s cooked. (Aunt Leaf, again.)  Hopefully, I’d have a little time as a free man again before I doomed myself.  “When will I see you again?” (Next year, perhaps?)

{I cannot foresee that.  Not yet.  But we will meet again.  There is still much we need to accomplish.  Be wary, Vestige.  Our very plane of existence is in peril.  The threat of Molag Bal looms across all Tamriel, and chaos spreads in its shadow.  Danger roams the land and will assume many forms.  Do not let it catch you off guard.}

This is why no one invites you to parties, Prophet.  My Uncle Man-Fisher used to say that growing up was a process of dreading steadily larger things, and I was feeling like a bit of a prodigy.  I had the feeling our conversation was soon to end, and so I asked if he had any advice.  Where to go, perhaps, given that I still didn’t know where I was?

 {You must find your own path.  But perhaps there is a reason for the place in which you find yourself.}

That resonated. If I was to trust to the Divines (good advice in all the heroic tales, when facing a Daedric Prince), then where I’d been deposited by Alkosh’s help would be significant.  Though, I still didn’t know where that was…

{Explore. Search for a cause to lend your hand. Join with others.  You might even seek out those who rescued you from the sea.  The choice is yours.}

Ah, good, back to that point: “How do I find whoever rescued me from the sea?”

{You were dragged ashore on an island beach, but I sense that you are now aboard a ship in port. Go ashore and seek out the captain of the vessel.  Perhaps he or she can point you toward the charitable spirit who was responsible for your rescue.}

If he knew that the captain was ashore, surely he could tell what shore that was.  But the person who’d pulled me from the drink… my instincts said to seek him out (or her).  Indeed, if the old tales were true, I was rather surprised to have awoken anywhere else than in their care.  But perhaps the Divines were like Lyris, and expected me to prove myself by way of making the effort.  A Khajiiti seer once said, “Do not expect to attain the Moon Fields without such trials as have come to those before you.”  I would expect no less (and would likely get no more).  As I was pondering my fate, I suddenly realized that the Prophet had continued speaking, going on about others in these lands facing their own trials, fighting the oncoming darkness in their own ways, who could do with my help and could offer me theirs.  That we were not alone in our fight, and others of courage and valor would rise up as well.  I think it might have been quite inspirational, and regretted not paying better attention.  But he ended his speech with finality, and was gone without giving me a chance to ask any more.

I changed into my clean but shabby gear — better boots were high on my list of upgrades, as a Khajiit’s clawed feet are ill suited to the shoes of the monkey-folk — and wandered out of the bunkroom.  (Where, I noticed, there had in fact been a crew member asleep through that whole exchange, a Bosmer woman showing a soundness of slumber that I don’t normally associate with Wood Elves.)  There was another Bosmer crewman sweeping, which cheered me immediately, though he seemed disinterested in conversation and merely grunted when I hailed him.  More cheery was a Khajiit crewman playing the lute for two more Bosmer; they smiled at me, and I touched my heart to them, but it would have been rude to interrupt and I did not.  I did eat and drink from the stores that I could see laid out, a bit reluctant to rummage but now too hungry not to.  When I felt a bit more whole, I headed out onto the deck.

Miracle of miracles, I knew where I was!  This was Vulkhel Guard, a port city on the southern tip of Auridon, the Tamriel-facing eastern island of the Summerset Isles of the Altmer, the High Elves.  My family had been here once for about a month, when I was maybe 14, no, 15 years of age.  It was where I’d learned to ride a horse properly, and I remembered it as a wondrous, magical place, not the least because of all of the magicians.  I also remember my mother saying that the High Elves of Auridon were amongst the least pretentious of all the Summerset Isles.

(A note: As I prepare to give these pages to the courier, to be copied and sent to my editor, it occurs to me that the High Elves amongst the readership of his paper may well find that statement upsetting.  For this I am sorry.  But I promised not to edit my thoughts here, and you Altmer simply cannot expect to declare the superiority of your people over all others and not expect a reputation for, at best, pretension, and, at worst, outright racism.  However, many of your kindred races, from man to mer, share such viewpoints in varying degrees.  Argonians and Khajiit are less inclined to such things, for the Argonians live in partnership with the Hist, and the Khajiit come in a hundred forms, so thinking one sentient being better than another purely based on shape is more alien to our peoples. If it is equally alien to you, then my mother’s generalization does not apply to you, and you are my comrade no matter who or where you come from.)

So, this was Vulkhel Guard. But, surely this was not where I’d washed ashore, or they’d have taken me into town and not put me on a ship.  Unless a sailor had found me, I suppose, but even then…. Well, as the Prophet had suggested, the captain would know.  A bit of asking around revealed him to be still on deck, a stocky Breton man of middle years named Tremouille, who was pleased to see me up. “You slept all the way from Khenarthi’s Roost.  Right through the hurricane!”

Well, escaping torturous demonic realms does take it out of you, but there was already a lot to parse here.  Khenarthi’s Roost rang a bell: an island inhabited mostly by my people, off the southern tip of Elsweyr and while it was not terribly far from the Summerset Isles (if the wind was good), it was not especially close, either.  I couldn’t think of a reason for someone to put me on a ship bound for here, unless it was the only ship departing and they really wanted me gone.  This was puzzling.  I wanted to explore that further, but with no sense of who wanted what, it might be better to stalk these questions for a bit, rather than leap upon them precipitously.  So I circled, nonchalantly: “Hurricane? What hurricane?”

“You don’t remember? A Khajiit named Razum-dar fished you out of the ocean.  He paid me a small fortune to bring you here. We barely made it out of Khenarthi’s Roost before the hurricane hit!”  (A small amusement, that Khenarthi is the wind goddess, and a hurricane hits when I arrive there. One should be careful not to overread the signs, but this one tempts a “divine message” interpretation.)  But now I had a name: “Where is Razum-dar now?”

“He was headed to Eagle’s Strand, an old fort on Khenarthi’s Roost.  My ship won’t return there for some time, but a boatswain on the far dock can take you.  Look for Sugar-Claws.”  He pointed eastward along the docks, and I said I might do that. In fact, I wanted to do nothing else, but in uncertain terrain it never hurts to downplay your interest in things.

I wandered down the gangplank to the docks, and eastward almost to their end.  The city was bustling with life and energy, and I was sorely tempted to stay, find an inn, maybe even look for a bit of work, or a caravan to join — a Khajiit of my skills never lacks for gainful employment — until I could regain the wherewithal to return to my original travel plans.  But you know the Prophet would come calling (or sending) as soon as I’d settled in, and then I’d have to be off to Coldharbour again, and who knows where else if I survived that?  I could refuse, of course, but I’d covered that ground already: not gonna happen. So, best to use what time I had to get whatever answers I could, and if I was ever going to speak to this Razum-dar fellow, best to track him down now, while I knew where he was.

I found Sugar-Claws by her boat, and she seemed slightly alarmed by asking if that was her name. “What is it? Is this about the fish? I took what I paid for!”  When I begged her pardon, she looked at me more closely (my sorry gear suddenly seemed even pathetic), and relaxed.  “Um, never mind. What do you want?”

“I want to travel the Khenarthi’s Roost.”  “Good, I have business on Khenarthi’s Roos.  Passage is free!  The inspectors won’t be looking for two of us.”  Oh, great.  So it would be that kind of trip.  Well, beggars couldn’t be choosers, and I was maybe 40 pieces of scavenged gold from being a beggar — not in bad shape, all things considered, but any cruises I booked would be as crew, not as passenger.  So, if this was a bit shady, I’d live with it. As if realizing she’d been a bit indiscreet with a complete stranger, she coughed, and said, “Whenever you’re ready.”  Comforting. The willingness to depart at a moment’s notice is the sign of all the best cruise lines.  But I knew what this was already, best to get on with it.  (And perhaps the tide and wind was particularly suited to a speedy departure. Yeah. Sure. That’s it.)  I paused to buy some ale and a bit of fish and fresh fruit from a dock stall, and Sugar-Claws quickly stored the last crates on the small sloop (or was it a cog? I’m no expert, but it was single-mast coast-hugger, maybe 40 feet long, and had more room below decks for cargo than was readily visible), and we cast off.

The Prophet in person was much like his projection, but less transparent. Thankfully. His eyes were white, in keeping with the blindness attributed to him, but it was a slightly unsettling white. People who are born blind don’t usually focus their eyes on you when they talk — they have never had a reason to. People who go blind in later life generally focus on where they think you are, out of muscle habit. The Prophet’s irises weren’t even visible in that whiteness, so it was hard to tell if he was focusing anywhere or not.  But you had the sense that he looking through you to things that you didn’t know existed, of which you were just the ice floes’ tip. And he did not seem pleased with what he saw — although I imagine anyone coming out of a Molag Bal custom-built cell would probably look grumpy. Nonetheless, I felt a bit as though my very existence was provisional, at best, and we would have to wait and see if he would sign off on its continuance.

If the Prophet was at all disoriented by being teleported from mid-air suspension in a glowy blue cage to solid ground, he didn’t show it. He turned to me, as comfortably as if he’d just stepped out of a carriage, and said, “Thank the Divines, you are safe! There is that, at least. Lyris sacrificed everything, that we might go free. Her sacrifice must not be in vain.” I could not argue with that, though a little voice in my head thought it a wonderfully convenient thing to be able to praise the sacrifice of others when it benefits yourself.

[Sorry, I’m a bit of a cynic. Didn’t mean to say that aloud.]

That’s all right, we agree on this one. Again, this was not my struggle, but it seemed only reasonable to ask, “Can we find a way to take her with us?” The Prophet shook his head. “I wish that were possible. But I promise you, once we escape Coldharbour we will find a way to rescue her together, Vestige.”

Oh, sure. ‘Cause people waltz into planes of Oblivion all the time, no problem. We’ll just come in with a tour group then, shall we, and slip away when they’re at lunch, find Lyris, and sneak her out in our luggage? They do that sort of thing all the time in pantomimes. Nip, tuck, 4 o’clock, and we’ll be out. I like it. (Harrumph.) Well, I didn’t think we could spring her, and there was no point in kidding ourselves about it. Best to turn the attention to something useful. “Vestige?” I asked.

“This is the name I have given you.” Oh, have you then? Ok, back to “Mad Rug Merchant” for you, if we’re doing the whole cute nicknames thing. Maybe a blind man can’t be expected to see my race or gender, and must address me as if I might be any one of millions of possible people who might be filling my role in this little drama. But it does seem like he could ask my name, once he met me. I suppose that I shouldn’t expect too much from a Mad Rug Merchant. But he went on: “You are but a trace of your former self. A soulless one. An empty vessel that longs to be filled.” Ok, this was getting creepy. Was he hitting on me? ‘Cause it sounded like he was hitting on me. Look, Rug Merchant, you’re not my type, what with being old, and human, and stark raving bonkers. (A little bonkers is healthy, but I was half certain that the dust of ‘a little bonkers’ passing had long ago settled, for this guy.) “It is as the Scrolls foretold, but not exactly as I imagined.”

What, the Scrolls are setting him up on blind dates, are they? Did they say I’d be taller? Putting “blind”, “Prophet”, and “Scrolls” together, I assumed he meant the Elder Scrolls, the fabled oracles read by the Moth priests, whose arcane study yielded both insights and physical blindness. But however powerful the Scrolls’ insights, I’d never heard them recommended for dating advice. Sorry to disappoint, old human. Best to distract him. Again. “Why does Lyris call you the Prophet?” (Since we were on the subject of names.)

“This is what I have come to be called. My true name is lost, even to me. Years of torment have taken their toll.” Fine, I’d cut him some slack: you can’t count on an old man who can’t remember his own name to be good at remembering yours. Let’s just stay away from the vessel-filling talk, though, shall we? “Quickly now, we must make haste to the Anchor!”

I asked, quite reasonably, what anchor?  If I was going to make haste towards something, knowing what it was seemed like a useful thing.  “The Anchors are Daedric machines of the darkest magic. Their chains bind our world and pull it towards Coldharbour. I can use one of these Anchors to return us to Tamriel, but you must lead me to it.” That did indeed sound like a useful thing to hasten towards. “All right. Stay close then,” I warned. I wasn’t sure that my current skills were up to defending a bystander, as well as myself, if we were attacked; but hopefully the blind man would have the sense to drop and cover if anything came at us.

As I’d roamed the hall during Lyris’s inspection, I’d seen an open archway up a set of stairs on the other side. I led us that way, and was pleasantly surprised by the Prophet’s ability to navigate, despite his blindness. His staff was clearly helpful — though I wasn’t sure why he’d been left with it in the cell. Contempt for its usefulness? Some enchantment on it that made it inseparable from him? A question for another time, perhaps. (You must be careful asking the aged questions: they always have a story, and this was not the place to pause for one.)

The tunnel ended in a door, which opened into another vast chamber, one filled with more machinery, surrounding a large pit, over which was suspended a series of huge rings, creating the sense of a vertical tunnel or archway along which something (light? weapons? people?) might travel. It was guarded by two skeletons, who rushed towards us the moment we entered. Before I could warn the Prophet to drop, he’d charged past me at them, emitting bolts of energy from his staff. The people who’d been describing him as blind had not been telling me the whole story, but I wasn’t going back to harangue them for it. We dispatched the skeletons quickly, to my relief.

But the moment the second of them went down, the space over the pit filled with a huge, crackling, translucent, daedric-looking form, and a voice boomed through the cavern, proclaiming angrily, “I am the face of pain! The souls of the damned are my weapons! You will know eons of suffering!” If I’d eaten more than rancid cheese that day, I might have soiled my makeshift armor, but thankfully cheese is binding. “Molag Bal,” I thought. These rabbits are caught, and that’s the end of it.

Instead, the figure faded, and a large-but-not-nearly-so-vast form heaved itself from the ground before us, a behemoth of discarded bones cobbled together into the shape of a great ogre and bound together by seething dark energy. As it lunged towards us, with more speed than I expected for something that looked so lumbery, the Prophet danced aside with equal deftness and cried to me, “Come, I will protect you!” This sounded like an invitation to run away, which I’d have happily accepted. However, the Prophet only moved so far, and I knew that what he meant to say was, “You get up in that thing’s face, and I’ll do something magical from a safe distance.” It is in the nature of the old to send their young into wars for them, and if we’d had the time I’d have taken him to task for it. But the beast before me was a more pressing matter.

This battle was not so short as the others, and I did not expect it to be. I spent most of my time dodging the behemoth’s blows; thankfully, as unexpectedly fast as it was, and as slow as I felt, the thing was still slower than I. Which was good, as even its glancing blows nearly knocked me off my feet. I kept circling, trying to stay behind it as much as possible, and gradually wore it down, aided after all by the Prophet, who sent a steady stream of healing energy to me from that staff of his. So, not quite the armchair commander I’d accused him of being in my thoughts. After what seemed like a eternity of dodging and hitting and trying not to get ribs broken, the thing went down, with an earth shaking thud and a clatter of now-unbound remains.  No new phantom arose from the pit to swear to our destruction, so perhaps the previous one had not, in fact, been Molag Bal; perhaps it had merely been his shade, left to the defense of the Anchor and now defeated?

Good, for the shade had been quite enough.  As I wheezed like an asthmatic, hunched over, my heart pounding fit to explode from my chest, the Prophet calmly said, “The Dark Anchor’s portal is high above us. I will prepare a spell to lift us to it. But first, you must re-attune yourself to Nirn in order to regain your physical form. To do this, you will need a Skyshard.”

If my pounding heart had, in fact, exploded out my chest and all over this damnable Prophet, would this have corrected this idea that I had no physical form? At this point, I was almost willing to accept that fate. “Dead”, “soulless”, “vestige”,… Khajiit are a generally phlegmatic race, but having just beaten a creature 3 times my size into the ground I was finding it hard to keep my temper in check in the face of what seemed a constant level of condescension. After a few moments of struggling on the knife’s edge, I finally caught a decent breath of air and started to unwind a little. “A Skyshard?” I growled, without nearly as much hostility as I had been feeling a moment before.

“A shard of Aetherial magicka,” he replied, unaware of my receding desire to continue rending something, “that carries the essence of Nirn. Some link them to Lorkhan, the missing god of creation. If you collect and absorb its power, it should restore your corporeal form. I will summon one of these shards for you to absorb.”

All right, I thought, let me see if I can parse this out a little better. Let’s say that my magicka soul has been cut out to power Molag Bal’s machines, which fits what I have experienced so far. Without the magicka soul to connect my higher soul and body, I should be dead — and yet, here in Coldharbour, an unnatural realm, I still live (despite Lyris and the Prophet’s views on the subject). So, perhaps I am attuned to this realm now, and the remnants of the magicka soul are enough to sustain me in such a place. But, in order to survive in my own world, in Nirn, I need something to replace the magicka I have lost, and to re-attune me to my own world instead of this one — to restore my form to a state in which it can survive there. He says that his Skyshard thing that he is going to summon is a big chunk of magicka that is connected to Nirn and will serve the purpose. That sounds plausible… if only because my standards for “plausible” have gotten very low since I woke up this morning.

Aunt Leaf always said that I lived in my head too much. While I was working through all of this, frustrated scholar that I am, the Prophet was off incanting something that I was barely aware of until a blinding glow distracted me in time to see a brilliant crystalline formation materializing in mid-air. A cluster of rock shards maybe three feet high and half that across, almost too bright to look at and humming with contained energies. The Prophet directed me to them, and as I reached out, their energies leapt across the gap between us and flooded through me.  I was pulled up off of my feet into mid-air and enveloped, by a surge of warmth, and joy, and autumn days, and home cooked meals, and tender moments, and a voice breathing gently through my soul saying that all of this had a purpose and I should trust in the Divines to carry me through it.

The energy faded, and I nearly wept from its passing; thankfully, the Prophet was no longer looking as I regained my composure. But I could feel something had changed; those connections that I’d felt myself struggling to rebuild now felt… well, not restored, not yet. But no longer raw edged and painful, just sore, and perhaps healing in a way that they hadn’t been before. It felt good. Conversely, the space around me now felt not simply menacing to look at but wrong. I should not be here, this was not a place for beings like myself. I needed to be gone.

The Skyshards were fading, and the Prophet was already moving towards the central pit with the giant rings overhead. Facing up to a platform that extended out over the void, he cried, “Great Akatosh, Dragon God of Time! Your children are lost in the fog between worlds! They cry out for mercy! Hear my voice, Akatosh! I require your strength!” I moved up behind him, properly grateful to him for the first time since I’d seen him in the cell. “Let the way be opened! Let these wandering souls return home! Let the will of Molag Bal be denied!” As he spoke, a glowing column of light formed in the center of the space above the pit, rising up through the rings. When it reached its brightest, the Prophet yelled, “Hurry, we must go now!” He ran straight up the stairs and leapt from the platform into the light; empowered by desperation, fully expecting to fall to my true death in the pit below, I leapt after him. The light overwhelmed me as I fell not downwards but up, and I passed out as I fell.

The Undercroft was a windy maze of damp cavern tunnels, with glowing fungus, pools of water, and, as promised, Ferals and spiky traps. Map Guy?

Thanks.

[No problem.]

It also had so many crates and pots that I began to wonder if Molag Bal was a hoarder. Monsters often are, and surely Daedric Princes are the ultimate monsters. It’s that insecurity that comes with being all scaly and evil; you’re sure nobody loves you, so you try to fill the void with acquisition: gold, maidens, knick-knacks, parallel worlds, souls, etc. I’m not a big fan of hoarding, myself. I sympathize with the thrill of “getting” as much as the next Khajiit, but the “keeping”? Largely useless and simply more madness. But madness that at least provided me with some replacement armor; the condition of the bits I’d found had not been helped by the fights we’d been in.

The tunnels had the virtue of being out of the valley’s wind, and the flaw of being out of the valley’s wind, and hence richly overfilled with the smell of dank decay and rust. And maybe sulfur. At this point, my normally sensitive nose was entirely overwhelmed, and if anyone snuck up on us I would not smell them coming — a paranoia-inducing condition for a Khajiit to be in. It made me even slower and more sneaky, and we took out all of the Ferals we encountered before they even knew we were there. So, perhaps the paranoia was helpful. (I am certain that this is the conclusion of all paranoids.) The spiky traps were about as obvious as they were dangerous — they call Molag Bal the God of Brutality and Domination, not the God of Subtlety, but I was starting to wonder if he’d delegated this realm (or this part of it) to a particularly blunt and simplistic underling. Perhaps delegating to simpletons, and then abusing and torturing them when they inevitably failed, was part of MB’s thing. You go with what you know. At any rate, the traps were easy to spot, and generally easy to walk around or jump over or disarm, and eventually we found the ladder that Cadwell had promised and nipped up it into a vast and noisy space.

My father always said that you could tell the important prisoners in any civilized jail because they had the suites, and the Prophet was clearly the most important person that we’d seen so far. And yet I could not bring myself to envy him his status. In the center of a vast hall filled with as much clanking machinery as any Dwemer ruin was a giant floating cage, spinning slowly, with a small floating person inside of it who was suspended in a blue glow. I’ll confess that my first thought was that this must be really good for his back — prison beds are really terrible if you have any back problems at all. But there were probably downsides also, and few prison cells are worth their fringe benefits.

However the giant floaty thing worked, it was unlikely to open to a simple key, and Lyris ran forward and began searching for controls. I did my usual thing, searching through containers for useful things. Areas of expertise and all. Plus who knew, the key could be in one of these pots. You would hate to fail the world because you did not exercise due diligence, and my due diligence has always been well exercised, lithe and muscular.

I got back to Lyris at about the same time she’d reached some conclusions. “All right. The good news is, we made it here in one piece and the Prophet looks unharmed.” I braced myself for the other half of that statement; if Lyris was about to call something bad news, it must be truly terrible. “Now, the bad news. It’s going to be up to you to keep him safe and get him back to Tamriel. I’m not going with you.” I tried to conceal my relief; I liked Lyris, but when you’re expecting terrible news, and all you get is, “Hey, good to meet you, we’ve had a great couple of hours killing things, but I’m going to have to be on my way now,” the urge to do the happy dance is difficult to resist. Out of politeness, I asked her where she was going. (As one does in such situations.)

“I probably should have mentioned this before, but it never seemed like the right time. There’s a trick to opening the cell. The only way for a prisoner to leave is for another living soul to take their place. I need to swap places with the Prophet.” Ah, well then the “bad news” part makes sense; for her, this would be quite unpleasant. Particularly when the exchange was discovered. A part of me thought, “Do what you must,” because these people were not my people; they were all strangers and they’ve swept me along in their affairs and I have no inclination to say yay or nay to any peril that they wish to bring upon themselves. But I did not dislike Lyris, and, again, out of courtesy if nothing more, I asked if there was not another way.

“Believe me, I wish there was. But… I don’t see anyone else here with a beating heart, do you?” I did, for mine had nearly leapt out of my chest several times since I awoke in my cell. But this was clearly not the time to expound upon the nature of souls and death — and I certainly wasn’t volunteering to go in her stead, even if my stolen magicka soul wouldn’t disqualify me. “If Molag Bal isn’t stopped he’ll destroy everyone and everything we’ve ever loved. The Prophet chose you for a reason.” (Gullability, I was starting to suspect.) “Get him to safety. I’ll be fine.”

She would not be fine, but I respected the lie and left it at that, as she clearly preferred. I promised to keep the Prophet safe (returning a lie for a lie, since my ability to do that was more in S’Rendarr’s hands than mine, and my tally of gods to thank if I made it out of here was growing long), and Lyris then pointed to two glowing obelisks on opposite sides of the cage, with beams of blue light shooting at it. “There are magical locking devices on either side of cage. You need to deactivate both of them so I can begin the transfer. Once it’s done, get moving. The Prophet will know where to go, but he’ll need your eyes and your protection.”

I nodded and wished her luck. I feared that the locks would be as inscrutable as a Dark Brotherhood assassin, but in fact they were as simple as an Imperial baker, and a twist to their housing yielded a satisfying thunk and the beam shut off. I turned off both in this manner, and by the time I returned to Lyris she was floating in mid-air intoning something that I couldn’t make out (though I caught the words “Prophet” and “free”, so it cannot have been too arcane). A blue glow enveloped her, extended up and over to the cage, and she and the Prophet both blinked out in the glare and reappeared in each others’ places. “Baan Dar protect her,” I thought. (What’s one more god to thank, at this point?)