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SPOILER INFO
This fanfic novel is largely based on the events that occurred in an actual game of Skyrim I played. Therefore, it's inevitably a spoiler.
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previous day
4-202-03-17 11:19
Snowstone Rest, Bruma County, Cyrodiil
This inn doesn't have a bath. Strangely enough, there isn't one in the Fort Pale Pass either. How is it possible? Some of the soldiers are even women.
I learn that Bjarni was taken away by the Penis Occultus agents in the early morning. Precilius – Legate Varro – is not happy about it. He repeats what he told me yesterday – even the worst criminal in the world doesn't deserve to be subjected to the torture methods used by the Penitus Oc... the Empire's secret police.
I must say I'm getting a little fed up with his whinging. It's not like Bjarni is going to be tortured for worshipping a forbidden god. The secret police just need him to answer their questions. If he doesn't want to get tortured, all he needs to do is to stop being so damned stubborn. I try to change the subject and ask Precilius if he knows where Harran Iron-Heart is. He gets kind of wary and says: "Why? Do you?" I tell him I haven't got a clue, I was just asked to find him by his wife who is going insane with worry. Precilius seems to believe me and tells me they've lost some men recently, but he doesn't know what's happened to them, and it's very bad, because he feels responsible for having failed in keeping his soldiers safe, as well as being in control of the area he has been trusted with keeping law and order in. And that damned cold! Nord soldiers don't seem to mind, but he's feeling he can't take it much longer.
Right. I'll try asking some soldiers.
As for the weather, I find it refreshing, even though I'm dying to get into a warm bath. But I have a job to do, so I approach the first female soldier I see. Should have started with that. I learn there has been some trouble with some kind of undesirable people who have entered illegally from Skyrim, and that Harran was a member of a patrol that went south. I have the feeling she doesn't like the topic and neither do a few other soldiers I ask.
Now, I've already seen trouble with renegade Stormcloaks around here, and when people cross the border illegally – why, the only place suitable for that I know about is Serpent's Trail. And that is south of here. And there are bandits in there. That's why you'll surely agree it's not the wrongest place where to start our search, dark and uninviting as it may be.
Its entrance is, as you may remember, a little way to the south from the inn, the Snow...stone, was it? So we run past the inn and find the place where we entered Bruma six days ago. We descend the staircase and walk forward slowly, looking for any signs of Imperial soldiers having been here.
We can occasionally hear a faint echo of men's voices, but there's no one in the range of my Sense of Smell power.
There's a side passage. I leave Jenassa standing guard in the main passage while the rest of us turn left. Not too far from the junction is the dead body of a man whose name was Harran Iron-Heart. I can't believe it was this easy.
He has a letter on him in a closed envelope without an address. I open it. It's obviously written to his wife Lassinia. He explains that he and the other members of his patrol happened to see a group of thalmors apparently coming from the other side of the border with some people they had captured, and they were treating them with unspeakable cruelty. The patrol commander decided they will quietly walk the other way, but the thalmors attacked them. Only Harran and one other soldier succeeded in escaping under the cover of darkness. Back in Fort Pale Pass, they reported to Legate Varro what they had seen. He ordered them not to tell anyone about it. At night, Harran woke up and saw that the other soldier had disappeared. Harran was sure he had been taken to the prison or even killed as an inconvenient witness, and feared that he himself would be next. That's why he decided to escape to Skyrim through Serpent's Trail. He felt deeply betrayed by the way the thalmors were still allowed to do their dirty deeds in Cyrodiil and he saw no future for himself here.
I don't know how Harran intended to deliver the letter. Maybe he had tried to find someone at the Snowstone Rest, like Avar had. At any rate, he's dead now.
Now, we have things to do further south and east. First, we'll return to Bruma. I have to have a bath.
Wait, there's something called Northfringe Cave quite near, east of the road. Someone's told us about it, I can no longer remember who. Let's check that out first. I've no idea what might be in there, but it's only a small detour.
A pretty comfortable path takes us uphill through a fabulous spruce forest and past several nice elks.
Then there's a stone staircase, or rather remains thereof. On top of it, we see an ogre. He's like 40 or 50 meters away from us, standing in the middle of the path. We stop, unsure what to do. Then he raises his club threateningly. He makes no sign of charging at us, and we already know they move very slowly. I decide not to disturb him. We return to the main road and run towards Bruma.
My thoughts wander back to the sad sight of Harran's corpse and I ask the girls what they think why the Empire is tolerating such obvious thalmor presence like we saw in Bruma. Lydia suggests that letting the people see how arrogant and nasty the thalmors are makes the people appreciate the Empire as their protector, so they'll be less likely to protest against possible injustice, corruption and such.
At the Eastern Watchtower (see picture above), we tell Ereia about the killed bandits and she asks me to give her the leader's sword. It's somehow very special and all the guards have been eager to get their hands on it. Well, yeah, she can have it for all I care. She didn't participate in killing the bandits, but she was the first to ask me, and it doesn't mean anything to me anyway. It never hurts to have a city guard indebted to me.
Now we can finally run into the city and I can wash all that filth off. I think my period has ended today, so we'll be less, um, water-dependent from now on.
After a little chat with Stantus at the bar, I take a deep breath and give Lassinia the sad news. I won't tell her he deserted, though. Her father is such a fanatical supporter of the Empire that if he knew the truth, he would make her life a hell reminding her every day how she made a mistake marrying such a despicable traitor.
Without giving Lassinia her husband's letter, I tell her Harran was killed in a skirmish with Stormcloak extremists who rejected the peace treaty and tried to infiltrate Cyrodiil to continue the war, and that's the reason why no one wanted to tell her what had happened. The authorities want to keep that rebellion a secret, so she'd better keep it a secret as well, or she and her family might get in trouble. She ought to tell people her husband lost his life in a battle against smugglers. Everyone will believe it, and I'm going to confirm that story whenever needed.
Lassinia is grief-stricken, not because of that rebels affair but simply because she has lost her husband and her daughter has lost her father. She talks with bitterness about her father who pushed Harran into joining the Legion. I try to console her, but I don't seem very successful. Life looks indeed very bleak for her. I must go and tell that old oaf that his son-in-law died a hero and he needs to stop vilifying him and start being a support to Lassinia for a change.
I find him at his house and give him a piece of my mind and then some. I look him in the eye with my angriest expression and tell him with my iciest voice that he's an embittered old jerk and is partially to blame for her daughter's and granddaughter's lives being ruined. I tell him the same lie I told Lassinia about Harran's having met her death fighting the Stormcloak rebels and the authorities' wanting to keep their existence a secret from the public. I tell him he'd better show appreciation for his son-in-law's sacrifice and stop making her daughter miserable the way he's done so far.
Sellus ends up screaming at me to get out of his house, but I think I got my message through. He may be seething for a few days or weeks, but unless he'll get a heart attack from rage (which is not necessarily a bad thing), my words will remain in his memory and he won't be able to avoid reflecting upon them and realizing he's indeed been a bad parent.
I'm not in the mood of meeting Dumrag, that Breton-hating Orc. He can go on thinking I haven't yet been to Simund's country house. Instead, I deliver Avar's letter to Hulgard.
After that, me and my followers head for the stables. We've been told they're just outside the city wall. Only now do I remember to ask the girls what did the Lusty Argonian Maid do.
Stuffed a dildo into his anus while jerking him off, they enlighten me.
Wow. I can see how this might have been embarrassing for Cerendil.
She possibly even moved it back and forth when the man had gotten really aroused, says Jenassa. That point is disputed.
Our laughter echoes back from the city wall. Beyond the next corner are the stables. I give Ila the news about the horses we found. Turns out one of them was indeed Ila's. The intelligent animal returned to her yesterday. Today she got word from nearby Applewatch that two missing horses from there, suspected to be stolen, had come back. I hope the others found their way home too.
By then it's a quarter past six in the evening, but there's still perfect daylight. Winter days are much longer here in the south compared to Skyrim.
My general plan is to go and discover Greenwood in the south-southeast, but we can just as well check out the Plundered Mine in the east not far from Bruma, and proceed to the south from there.
Now, as you know, this is a mountainous area. We soon find that in order to get to Plundered Mine, we need to cross a river and then somehow ascend the very high mountains on the eastern bank. Too bad we can't follow the example of those birds:
After more than an hour of very hard climbing, we find ourselves just a little way to the north from where we started, close to Bruma Eastern Watchtower and not any closer to Plundered Mine. Fortunately, though, we now succeed in finding a road that goes eastwards:
In the next picture, an undead whose name is Snorre is sluggishly getting up from his massive metal coffin:
After killing him, we descend a steep slope to a small lake, cross it and reach Plundered Mine a little before 9 o'clock. It's completely dark by now, save starlight.
There is indeed a copper mine and in fact something like a little village of bandits with many tents in the large caves inhabited by men and women of the most cruel kind I've ever seen. The amount of skeletons lying about and human skulls put up on spikes is unbelievable.
We also see some tortured corpses of soldiers. Obviously, Harran Iron-Heart wasn't among the unluckiest.
I'd rather not sleep on those bedmats with plentiful stains that look very much like sperm, but it's too late to travel anywhere today in this unknown terrain. So we will spend the night here.
My thoughts wander back to that Argonian-despising elf Cerendil. I wonder if we're any better.
"Better than who?" asks Lydia. I hadn't realized I had spoken the last sentence out loud.
"I was thinking about Cerendil," I explain, "and then I remembered how we... not you, Jenassa, obviously, but I often find myself saying or at least thinking that the world would be a better place if there were fewer High Elves. So, do I have any right to condemn Cerendil's attitude towards Argonians if I hate High Elves in turn?"
"You don't hate Tusamircil, do you?" says Jenassa.
"No, but that's different."
"We hate aggressive High Elves, those who invade our country and want to subject us to their rules," explains Lydia. "When we say the world would better if there were fewer High Elves, we really mean "fewer such High Elves who think they ought to rule the world". That's the same as saying the world would be a better place with fewer thieves and assassins."
I guess she's right. One just has to remind oneself occasionally not to project one's hatred of the thalmor religion police onto the entire High Elven race. Running into people like Cerendil occasionally is a useful reminder.
Good night.
next awakening
