Always Lost, Always Hopeful (210) Savage Civilization

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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 an eastward road:

In the next picture, an undead whose name is Snorre is sluggishly getting up from his massive metal coffin:

After helping him to death, we descend a steep slope to a small lake, cross its frozen surface 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 of various colors, 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 be 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






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Always Lost, Always Hopeful (205) View from the Other Side

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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






4-202-03-12 05:57
The Restful Watchman, Bruma, Bruma County, Cyrodiil


On the street in front of the inn, me and my followers are approached by a Nord man with brown hair and a jolly mustache. He introduces himself as Olaf Cold-Heart, and after our conversation I can even believe it.

I'm not sure what I should answer. I just try to get by, and fight when I have to. I reply we fight for what we believe to be right.

Olaf seems pleased with my answer and says he could use our help freeing a friend of his from a place near a settlement called Sedor somewhere in the east. He shows me where it is on his map and asks us to meet up with him there.

Well, where can I get a map of Bruma?

Ask in a shop or something, he replies with a shrug.

I have nothing against helping to liberate that friend of Olaf's. I mean, as long as we won't have to break into a town prison or something. But his attitude is hilarious. "Do you fight for ideals? Oh, how lucky you are to have met me! I have a great ideal here for you to fight for."

Apart from which, the man is generally a jerk. So we might look him up when we happen to be in that area someday, but until then he can just wait.

I tell the girls to walk around alone. I myself saunter to the central square. There's a temple, in front of which two thalmors are talking to a priest.

The thalmors insist that it's against the spirit of the White-Gold Concordate to worship people as gods. The priest Neremus counters that the White-Gold Concordate bans the worship of Talos aka Tiber Septim. It says nothing about the worship of Martin Septim. The thalmors leave, gnashing their teeth almost audibly.

It would appear that the people of Bruma have invented their own Talos and built this very large temple to worship him.

Tiber Septim was the founder of the Septim Dynasty who established the Empire. Martin Septim (or Saint Martin as he's called here) was the last Septim emperor. He sacrificed his life defeating the daedras who tried to destroy the world. Something like that. I've never cared much for history. The future is much more interesting, because you actually get to see it when you live long enough. But the point is, I realize I had practically forgotten about the thalmors' monumental arrogance in the meantime.

I follow the two and address the one named Armion. To my astonishment, he immediately recognizes me as Laura the Dragonborn.

Far from raising alarm, he treats me like an insect not even worth a second look. His haughtiness and self-importance is unimaginable. I'm going to kill him one day – when I have figured out a sufficiently slow and painful way of doing it.

My mood is somewhat improved by a talk with a Nord woman Rilja who specializes in selling Ancient Nord weapons. She offers me a good price for any I bring her.

Then I'm stopped by a very old man Ralgar who insists on telling me how he killed "the most monstrous grizzly in all of Cyrodiil". (I'm not sure what a "grizzly" is. Sounds like a big animal.) I excuse myself hastily and escape into the nearest building. It's a... wow!

It's a large, beautiful inn. Probably an expensive one, but I don't mind. I walk around marveling at the clean, spacious, well-lit rooms.

This is just a corridor.

The only downside I can find is a man named Renod who thinks he's a bard. He wears a ludicrous pot-shaped hat of ghastly brownish-green color, and produces screeching, squealing noises that eventually prompt the proprietor Stantus to tell him to stop. Indignant like ten thalmors about to be sacrificed to Talos, Renod storms out swearing never to return. I walk up to Stantus and thank him. He replies that he and his wife Hjotra are committed to providing impeccable service to their guests.

In that case, can he help me find a map of Bruma County?

Sure, he says, he'll get one for me by tomorrow morning.

I thank Stantus and continue my tour. In one of the lounges, an elven woman Alammu is sitting in front of a fireplace.

She seems cold and distant at first, but then I learn she is grieving because a veil, an extremely valuable heirloom, has been stolen. I promise I'll ask around.
Alammu says she already has. Someone said something about a Frozen Grotto. But she has no idea where it is.
All right. I'll see what I can do.

Stantus's serving girl Lassinia is sad for a different reason. His husband Harran is a soldier and has gone missing, or at least she hasn't heard from him for months and his superiors won't tell her what's happened or where he is. He used to be stationed at a place called Fort Pale Pass on the border of Skyrim.

From left: Hjotra, Stantus, Lassinia.

I shall make this matter one of my highest priorities. Not only is Lassinia such a nice girl – by locating her husband, we may coincidentally find a way to get back to Skyrim. I'd hate to return to Serpent's Trail and start looking for other exits.

Not that I'm in a hurry to leave Cyrodiil. Not by a long shot. Especially not after I exit the inn and can't help smiling to a Khajiit man. He introduces himself as Dar'taqto, a hunter and fur trader. Now, I find myself... how should I put it... utterly reluctant to stop talking to him and to walk away. So I keep asking him questions about everything I can think of. He ends up revealing to me that he is also a thief and is in fact currently in real trouble, being falsely accused of having stolen from the local store called Ice-Wind Traders.

Referring to oneself in the third person is a widespread Khajiit habit (just in case you didn't know).

With anyone else in the world, I would laugh in his face and say that when someone has gotten away with stealing and then gets punished for a theft he didn't commit, it only serves him right. With Dar'taqto, though, I feel I'd really like to go and talk to that Adius Vilius, captain of the guards he mentioned, and see if there's a way to settle this matter somehow.

But right now, I'm looking slightly upwards into the eyes of a handsome man, and I feel I like his cool attitude, and he's entertaining to talk to, and he's a Khajiit, and my period is due in only two days from now and I haven't had sex for ages. Which means I have to change the topic of our conversation. I tell Dar'taqto I was just in that Jerall View Inn behind me, and it had very nice rooms and the beds seemed really comfortable.

He gets the hint and suggests we go and try one out together. I agree it's a good idea.

I let him pay for the room, of course. I may be a millionaire, but I'm still a woman and he's a man.

Dar'taqto is fascinating in his somewhat cynical and crass way, and you'll be glad to know that by taking off his clothes he doesn't get any less handsome.

I get to thoroughly enjoy myself, after which Dar'taqto hurries back to his business while I stay behind in the taproom. A Breton man Ambric asks me if I fancy a song. He's the new bard here. I'm never been too crazy about bards in the first place, but Ambric is really fascinating to talk to, because he tells me how there is such a great atmosphere of arts and music in High Rock. They seem to have an entirely different mentality there.

Speaking of which... now I can actually remember vaguely having heard very beautiful music in High Rock.

To tell you the truth, until now I've paid very little attention to Breton men, but Ambric makes me even regret I gave myself to Dar'taqto. Well, it's not really that tragic. I can enjoy Ambric's telling me about home even without sleeping with him. And for that matter, nothing horrible will happen if I should change boyfriends once.

Right now, though, Ambric doesn't want to spend too much time talking on his first day at work, so I let him get back to singing, while I listen briefly to a grumpy elf (Dark, I think) man Cerendil. Then I make conversation with a woman Afanna who has really beautiful makeup.

She says she's a courtier, but she talks to me like to a normal person, without rubbing it in how she's so important. That's something you rarely see in Skyrim, and so I instantly take a liking in her. On the odd chance she'll be able to tell me something that'll help me look for that missing Orc woman, I bring the conversation to fighting bandits and hiring mercenaries, and she mentions a man named Simund who organized a raid against bandits sometime in the past.

She saw  it in his journal! Just happened to be where the journal was, right? I like this woman increasingly more.

We keep chatting and seem to hit it off quite well, and Afanna ends up agreeing to steal the said journal for me and I insist she take 500 septims for her trouble, even though she says she's rich enough as it is. Having cordially said goodbye to this fascinating woman, I go out. I wouldn't mind finding some shops and it's past 4 in the afternoon already. But this city is overwhelming. There are so many people and so many interesting things going on.

I visit the Fighters' Guild which isn't quite as grand as the name might make you think, and then the building of the Synod (the local branch of it, that is) where something highly mysterious is going on. I strike up conversations with three mages. The boss, Cadius, is very busy and grumpy. Roland is a relatively new member and looks greatly worried about something. Maybe he's troubled by various difficult assignments he can't quite handle. An experienced mage Elintius is cheerful and obviously likes me. From those three men, I hear three quite different accounts of the weird phenomena, but the gist of it is apparently that strange objects keep popping up here and there. Elintius says while some of them are of no value, such as an old boot, some others are rare antique objects of Ayleid origin, not something anyone would just leave lying around. He's eager to tell me a lot more, but I don't particularly care about it, so I find an excuse to leave.

My encounters with the members of a family called Jucani are much more intriguing. I first strike up a conversation with a middle-aged woman Ruccia Jucani who is having a snack on the street. She says the Jucanis are an old and respected family, but they wield practically no power anymore, no matter how much her husband Albecius likes to imagine otherwise. A little later, I run into the man himself. Now, he has the kind of confident modesty one gets only from growing up in a very noble house. Not many people manage to be benevolent without talking down to you. A nice man, yet he has the air about him that makes it clear he's not to be had for trivial gossip. If I hadn't talked to his wife a little earlier, I would have indeed taken him for someone who is so aware of his powerfulness that he doesn't feel the need to brag about it. Or maybe Albecius was not acting at all. Maybe Ruccia had a reason to play down their social status. I'll be curious to find out more about them in the future.

Oh, well, it's getting dark already and the shops will have closed, so I can just as well tell you about the Fighters' Guild – as well as to my followers who joined me a little while ago. We are strolling and looking at wonderful snowy house roofs. One has a good view of them, because this city has streets on higher and lower levels.

Now, the Guild consisted of no more and now less than three people. Two of them were young pretty women.

Svenja was an expert on two-handed weapons, Ionalla on archery. Svenja was the leader of the group and she told me very inspiredly and captivatingly about how she relished the gratification of helping the people in need – as long, of course, as they had good money to pay for it. She was sad that her two companions were not serious about their mission. Ionalla, a Dark Elf if I'm not greatly mistaken, told me fervently and vivaciously how she is going to be world-famous, and Bruma Fighters' Guild is where it's all going to have started. Both were, however, very respectful of me, noticing in me a warrior superior to themselves and not trying to pretend otherwise. That was more than could be said about their third member, a Wood Elf man Eranir, coincidentally Ionalla's boyfriend. He treated me like a complete nothingness.

At any rate, the Guild seemed to be struggling commercially. Why else would Svenja have asked me to spread their leaflets around? I took the leaflets, but I'm certainly not going to do any advertising for this obscure group of unknown ability and spirit. Why can't they spread the word themselves? They didn't look exactly busy. Maybe this kind of public advertising is not approved of here, suggests Jordis, so they want someone from the outside to do the dirty work and potentially get in trouble with the authorities in their stead? I don't know. If spreading of leaflets is illegal or undesired then surely the Guild would get in trouble along with the person doing the advertising. Well, at least they're doing well enough to afford their own house, says Lydia. Which may well be inherited by one of them, counters Jenassa. Yeah, but what to make of the guy, I wonder. My best guess is he's not really a good fighter and is only in it because of Ionassa, and he's not at all keen on risking life and limb (to say nothing of his sweetheart's body) fighting hardened criminals somewhere in snowy mountains, hence his bad mood and general hostility. My girls agree that it seems terribly risky business for a small group like that. I mean, we've all seen the Companions of Hviterun, and there's really no comparison. Even Bujold's gang in Solstheim would have better survival chances, if you're interested in my opinion.

Walking unhurriedly towards the Jerall View Inn where we're going to spend this night and probably many others, we happen to run into Cedus Perusius who is none other than the merchant who is accusing my boyfriend Dar'taqto of theft. Not mentioning that I know anything about him, I casually ask some innocent questions.

After Cedus, we end up talking to a young woman whose name is Eddvia Jucani. I walk alone with her to her home and coax it out of her that she's to be married to a diplomat in Imperial City. Her parents want to increase the family's wealth and influence. Too bad Eddvia is attracted to someone named Hulgard. Even worse, we reach the Jucani house before I can find out who exactly it is. She realizes she has maybe talked more than she should have. I assure her she has nothing to fear from me and promise to visit her shop. (She works at the blacksmith's.) Then I hurry to the inn to share the news with my followers.

I can't wait to bring this topic up with Eddvia's parents tomorrow, should I succeed in seeing them about town. Jenassa thinks that I shouldn't meddle. She points out that from what I've learned from Eddvia, she apparently doesn't even have a relationship with that Hulgard dude. Well, maybe so, but I still think there's no harm in talking to her parents about her reluctance to marry a man she doesn't love. The question whether or not the family's needs outweigh their daughter's loss of happiness is her parents', not my responsibility. My job is to bring to their attention arguments from the other side. If her parents let me change their mind, then this marriage wasn't all that important for the family to start with. I mean, yes, it's possible that Eddvia is being irresponsible, but it's also possible that it simply hasn't yet occured to her parents that their "child" is a human being whose opinion should also be taken into consideration. I should at least find out what each of the parties thinks about this matter.

Well, something we all agree about is that this inn is a delightful place to be, especially now that they've got themselves a proper bard. The girls and I discuss this amazing country until midnight and then we rent two of those adorable double bedrooms like the one where I was with Dar'taqto earlier today.



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