“A messenger arrived for you from one King Kurog up in Orsinium,” Roku says.


    I groan. “Let me guess. He wants me to bow down to him or something?”


    “Probably,” Roku says, pointing me at an antsy-looking Orc woman.


    “Do you know how long I’ve been looking for you?” the messenger says.


    “Waiting in Dra’bul for me to come back was a more sensible choice than trying to figure out where in Cyrodiil I might be at any given time.”


    The invitation is light on details. Something about negotiations, and an offer of opening up a Wood Orc embassy. Seems like a good opportunity to check the place out, and I’m sure there will be plenty to do and things to hit.


    “I’ll head for Orsinium,” I say. “You guys can start taking bets on how long it will be before I wind up killing him.”


    “Come back with a few more wives!” Roku says.


    I speak with Louna to give me anything she can see about Orsinium, but my prophet (who is much more attractive than Varen) mostly sees snow and stone. And Dwemer constructs, lots of Dwemer constructs.


    “Do not trust King Kurog,” Louna warns.


    “I really wasn’t planning on it,” I say.


    “Especially do not trust his mother!” Louna continues. “You will save yourself a great deal of trouble if you murder his mother as soon as possible.”


    I would probably take this more seriously if murder hasn’t always been her first resort.


    I’ve got some new medium armor for the trip. Well-made but not ostentatious. I don’t really need armor that screams “I’m a king!” I need armor that keeps me from losing my arms. No self-respecting Orc needs fancy armor for the sake of having fancy armor.


    I have a retinue along with me this time, or an entourage, or whatever these Orcs feel like calling it because none of them want to call it a ‘retinue’ or an ‘entourage’ because they’re stupid fancy Breton words. Some of my Orcs travel with me, along with Ilara as usual, and Merry. Eran is done with his family visit and also accompanies us.


    “I think I’ll stay here in Brackenleaf Village for now and spend some time with my husband,” Gelur says when I visit to ask her. “Saving the world from Molag Bal was quite the adventure, but also pretty exhausting. This is an Orc thing, and my joints will kill me if I visit somewhere so far north when it’s almost winter.”


    “I’ll be sure to let you know if we visit Summerset or Elsweyr, then,” I say with a grin.


    “Or Black Marsh,” Gelur adds. “Or Hammerfell, for that matter. I wonder if we’ll ever be able to visit Hammerfell.”


    “Maybe eventually,” I say lightly.


    “And if there’s some existential threat, be sure to come get me,” Gelur says. “Not that I’m hoping for another cataclysm along the lines of the Planemeld or something, but we live in interesting times.”


    We meet up with Captain Jimila at the new Dra’bul docks we built on top of the old dolmen. She’s more than happy that Anvil is now in Dominion hands.


    “You charge less in tariffs and fees than the pirates, and don’t randomly search holds or confiscate cargo,” Captain Jimila says. “The paperwork is murder, though. Altmer and Imperials are each bad enough with paperwork, but putting them together… I spent more time on filling out paperwork than I did unloading my cargo. I like the new Dra’bul port. Nobody makes me do paperwork there.”


    “How was your family, Eran?” Ilara asks once we’re underway.


    Eran chuckles. “My father refused to believe that I’d been to Oblivion and helped stop the Planemeld. At least up until someone from the Fighters Guild showed up with a commendation and more gold than he had ever seen in one place. Which was still, admittedly, less money than I’ve seen Neri spend on a whim on something stupid.”


    “My ‘something stupid’ purchases usually wind up making me more money,” I grouse. “Eventually. I’ve made some very sound investments.”


    “Still, whatever else might be said about her, Meridia is apparently wealthy and not afraid to throw gold around,” Eran says. “My father still wasn’t sure, at least until someone from the Mages Guild and then someone from the Dominion military showed up to commend me too. At that point he was starting to think I’d arranged this all as a prank, if the gold and royal seals hadn’t looked genuine. Whatever you were doing during the interim had to have been more fun than listening to my sister incessantly praise me and watching my father sulk.”


    “I accidentally became Emperor of Cyrodiil,” I say offhandedly.


    “Of course you did,” Eran says flatly. “How was your family, Ilara-daro?”


    “Oh, fantastic,” Ilara says. “Raz was quite willing to provide an alibi.”


    Eran sighs and rolls his eyes. “Of course he was. Merry?”


    “I do not have a family,” Merry says. “I mostly stayed at Dra’bul.”


    “You can share mine,” I say.


    “I do not wish to be your mage-husband,” Merry says dryly.


    “I missed you guys,” Eran says.


    The Prowler puts us down in Evermore, and I make a quick detour to light the wayshrine in the graveyard. The Bretons there can’t even seem to tell a Wood Orc from a non-Wood Orc. (What do you even call them to differentiate them? Frost Orcs? Mountain Orcs? High Orcs?) We make our way across to the Merchant’s Gate, where someone had once felt the need to build a big door in a narrow gap through the mountains. Decorative red banners depicting fists adorn the thick stone wall.


    Not far past the gate, we come upon a caravan that appears to have been attacked. They don’t look like they’re still being attacked, so I immediately rush forward to start healing the survivors.


    A Bosmer woman who introduces herself as Eveli Sharp-Arrow explains what happened. The caravan was carrying supplies to the clans for winter, and some Reachfolk (folk from somewhere called the Reach, I think, and not folk with unusually long arms) attacked it and took the supplies. And some peasants decided to chase after the guys who had just slaughtered some other peasants. A chief named Bazrag showed up to help, too.


    “Those were not sensible Orcs,” mumbles Nagra, one of the Orcs who came along with me.


    I wave to my entourage. “You guys stay here and defend the survivors. My friends and I are going after them.”


    “They went that-a-way,” Eveli says, pointing, and we head off that-a-way.


    “I’m so excited about fighting Reachfolk,” I say, excitedly fighting Reachfolk. “I’ve never fought Reachfolk before.”


    Eran snorts in amusement. “By the time we’re done here, I’ll probably be as sick of fighting them as I am of fighting Sea Elves.”


    “I already hate snow,” Merry mutters. “My feet are melting into the snow from my warmth spell.”


    “Why don’t you use water walking enchantments?” Eran says. “I picked up sabatons enchanted with water walking before we came here, since snow is just very cold water.”


    “My shoes are already enchanted to expand my magicka pool,” Merry says. “And I can just cast water walking. Which I did. Which is why I’m not sinking into the snow before my warmth spell makes it start melting.” He incinerates another Reachwoman who was in the midst of swinging an axe at him, melting quite a bit of snow around her.


    If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    We save one group of peasants, then find another group frozen to death quite thoroughly where they’d taken refuge in a nearby cave. Considering the state of them, I expect that trying to thaw and heal them will only result in slightly warmer corpses. Some of them were shattered and broken to pieces, showing they were frozen all the way through.


    “I hate ice magic, too,” Merry says, making a face when he sees that.


    “At least it smells better than fire magic,” Eran says. “Roast human smells far worse than roast mer.”


    “This one is glad Gelur is not here to interject how it smells delicious,” Ilara comments.


    Eran groans. “Did you have to mention that?”


    We encounter an Orc woman who introduces herself as Ulsha, Chief Bazrag’s shield-wife. She says that a Reachman named Urfon Ice-Heart of the Winterborn clan did this. Urfon already made off with the supplies, and to find out where he took them, I wind up discovering another fun new foe that Wrothgar has to offer me: Harpies!


    “Do you capitalize ‘harpies’?” I wonder.


    “Does it matter?” Merry says, incinerating said harpies. “They are attempting to kill us and not even saying anything coherent whilst doing so.”


    Amid empty crates and barrels, I come upon an incriminating note written by someone who was working with the Reachfolk clan.


    “Hey, is that a wayshrine down there?” I wonder, peering over a nearby ledge.


    “Please don’t jump off this cliff,” Eran says. “If we go the long way around, there might be more Reachfolk to kill.”


    “Good argument!” I say brightly.


    We make our way back down and around the cliff. Wrothgar wayshrines are built of heavy, sturdy stone, with rough steps leading up to an ornate bronze brazier in the middle. I light it, and head for the sturdy stone bridge. It seems like the building philosophy of Wrothgar Orcs is to build everything from sturdy stone and make sure you really need to mean it if you want to knock it down.


    On the other side of the bridge, we run across Ulsha, Eveli, an Altmer mage, the rest of my entourage, and an armored Orc man with a battle axe. They’re mid-conversation as we approach.


    Nagra is saying, “Maybe in another generation or two, we’ll have forgotten why we ever fought with the Wood Elves.”


    “How can you forgive a former enemy and let go of a grudge?” says the Orc (probably Chief Bazrag). “We certainly haven’t forgiven the Bretons and Redguards for sacking Orsinium.”


    “King Neri made sure every debt was satisfied, on both sides,” Nagra says. “It’s not like the conflict was one-sided or anything. We gave as good as we got a lot of the time. And some of our former chiefs had done some really stupid things not so very long ago.”


    “Doesn’t it rankle, having a High Elf lead you?”


    Nagra shakes his head. “Queen Ayrenn is not at all what you would expect of a High Elf.”


    “Not her.” He glances aside to me as I walk up. “Him.”


    “Don’t be ridiculous,” Nagra says. “He’s an Orc, just as much as you or me. That the High Elves think he looks like them only helps us, but he’d have been our chieftain either way.”


    “Why do you think that?”


    Nagra snorts. “Spend five minutes around him and you can see for yourself.”


    The other Orc turns his attention to me. “I’m Bazrag, chief of Fharun clan. I’m grateful for your help, even if I hate that you’re here. A High Elf who pretends to be an Orc winning over some Wood Orcs who don’t know any better.”


    Nagra growls, but I wave him down.


    “Talk is cheap,” I say. “I’ll let my actions speak for me. I killed all the Reachfolk I could spot near here, and their harpy pets. Found an interesting note, too.” I pass it over to Bazrag.


    “What’s this?” Bazrag says, reading it over. “We were betrayed? By one of our own? For gold?”


    “So it seems,” I say. “And they might know where the Reachfolk took the supplies. So I’ll head to Orsinium and ask a few questions. Maybe hit a few people until they feel like answering questions. Can’t imagine there’s all that many Khajiit in Orsinium and I also can’t imagine that they’ll refuse to tell me who they dealt with.”


    Bazrag grunts. “Only a fool turns down help when offered freely, but don’t think I’m going to bow down to you just because you killed a few Reachfolk.”


    I giggle. “I’m going to kill so many Reachfolk. This is going to be fun. Are there giants here too? I’m looking for some good fights while I’m here, the bigger the better. I mean, it’s going to be hard to top the size of that sea serpent the annoying Sea Elves summoned that one time. Do Reachfolk summon big annoying things too? Oh, I hope so.”


    Bazrag blinks. “Is this just a game to you? This is our home, and many of our people have been killed by Reachfolk.”


    “And that’s why I’m going to kill them,” I say. “I love problems that can be solved by hitting things. And this Urfon Ice-Heart fetcher sounds like he needs his head on a pike.”


    “I think you’re trying too hard to sound like an Orc,” Bazrag says. “Once you see what Wrothgar is really like, you’ll be running back to Valenwood with your tail between your legs.”


    I look behind me to make sure I didn’t accidentally attach my prosthetic tail to my Orc armor.


    “Very funny,” Bazrag says.


    “He’s always like this,” Eran says with a sigh.


    “And who are you?” Bazrag asks. “His shield-wife?”


    “I’m a man,” Eran says in a strained voice.


    “Eh, hard to tell with Elves.”


    Our trip to Orsinium takes a quick detour when I run across a Redguard (Nammadin) sitting amid scattered books and the remnants of a broken cart. They, too, were attacked by Reachfolk. They were planning on opening up a bookshop in the city, and got separated and lost their merchant’s permit. (Kurog clearly borrowed a love of paperwork from the Bretons.)


    Naturally, I do the sensible thing and don’t ask him to spell everyone’s names (I’ll do it later), leap off the cliff that the Redguard man fears his partners fell off of, leaving my entourage to guard the Redguard. One of them (Travofia) is on the bank of a river near a waterfall, and tells us about how the harpies took the other, lamenting that there’s too many harpies to do anything for her. We head across an incredibly rickety bridge clearly built by someone who really needed to get across this river fast and didn’t care if anyone was going to be able to get across next week.


    Once we get up to the harpy’s nest, we find the other woman (Jaeloreh) near death and bleeding from dozens of talon marks, but I can tell she’s still alive (if barely) because my Restoring Light works. (At least, I’m pretty sure I can’t bring the dead back to life. With this spell at least. Probably. If it were necessary for whatever reason for me to bring the dead to life, there’s plenty of other ways to do so.) Fortunately, while her cuts are numerous, they’re not deep. I look up to see if I need to deal with the harpies, but Ilara and Merry have already shot them out of the air. They smell like roast chicken.


    The Redguard woman regains consciousness and immediately panics for a moment.


    “Shh, it’s alright,” I say. “You’re safe now. Here, drink this.”


    I give her a mostly-non-poisonous potion mislabeled in Dwemeris as “cowardice #18”. (The calming and numbing effects from the blue entoloma are technically a poison, and really not advisable to drink when intending on fighting immediately after. These potions are for other people, not me, obviously.) Those long, boring rides lately were good for making alchemy notes and experimenting at camp because nobody let me run off to fight anything or poke my head into every ruin I spotted, and nobody could honestly complain of me doing alchemy experiments at some patch of sand or snow in the middle of nowhere.


    The woman drinks the potion, and is now probably feeling quite chill. Both emotionally and psychically, considering what harpy talons did to her clothes. I cast a cleaning spell on her to get off some of the blood and dirt, pull a cloak from my bag and throw it over her shoulders. We lead her back to the main road and meet up with Travofia, Nammadin, and my Wood Orcs.


    “You have saved the light of my heart!” Nammadin says. “We are to be married in the spring. We shall name our firstborn after you!” Nammadin pauses. “What is your name?”


    “Neri,” I say.


    “Neri?” Travofia says. “King of the Wood Orcs and Emperor of Cyrodiil?”


    “You’ve heard of me out here?”


    “Of course we’ve heard of you!” Nammadin says. “To think one such as you stopped to help us hapless wayfarers upon the road. Surely you are in a hurry to somewhere important.”


    “I was here and able to help,” I say. “What kind of a king or emperor or warrior would ignore you and keep walking?”


    “High King Emeric,” Jael slurs, giggling.


    “Jaeloreh, are you alright?” Nammadin says.


    “The potion I gave her has a calming effect,” I say. “If you drink too much, it can also make you a little… high. She drank the whole bottle.”


    “Never been better,” Jael says cheerfully. “You should sell these.”


    I don’t tell them that she’s the first person other than me to try that particular batch and the proportions probably still need tweaking. No need for anyone to think this king peddles experimental drugs on the side of the road. No, the funny thing is that Nammadin isn’t even questioning it because I made and sold quite a few of the previous iterations.


    You know, I’ve gotten surprisingly good at alchemy, and the weird side effects are mostly deliberate now since I carefully documented what happened and can do it intentionally. What separates my “work” from what a mer with centuries of experience would produce? That I’m completely insane, deliberately put in weird side effects, drink my own potions even though I know they’re poisonous and self-aware enough to calculate how high they’re getting me? Or maybe just that I can afford to be wasteful and reckless in my experimentation?


    The thing is, though, I make shitty potions. Alchemists are supposed to make potions slowly and carefully. They’re afraid of missteps causing explosions or toxic fumes, and I can tell you from experience that not as many missteps cause explosions as you would expect. I make potions quickly. The few times experienced alchemists have glanced at my work area, they’ve been horrified. I don’t have the time or patience to sit around watching a cauldron, so I figured out the best ways to mix things up as fast as possible. It’s often more useful to have ten good enough items than one perfect item.


    The thing is, you get good at what you do. All my careful documentation (assisted by a mental organization scheme that I will forgive Shalidor being annoying for) was about the effects from my shitty method of potion making. So I paradoxically got good at making shitty potions. Which means I’m selling quite a lot of shitty potions with weird side effects through that merchant guild I technically joined back when I first arrived in Vulkhel Guard who still have no idea who I actually am because I only ever show up dressed as a nondescript Altmer peddling technically-not-illegal drugs. You can show someone your face but all they will ever see is your hat.