“Why did it have to be vampires?” complains more than one member of the expedition.

  We’ve emerged from the chasm gatehouse into an orchard full of bloodfiends, because of course we did. At least one strain of vampirism is Molag Bal’s fault, and this is probably their own hell. Poor fetchers.

  Molag Bal is controlling the vampires in the Orchard with something called a Harvest Heart, whatever that means. Conflating bloodsuckers with trees seems like a bit of a stretch even for him, but whatever. Vanus wants to perform some sort of weird blood ritual to disable the vampires. It won’t actually control them, but turn their minds to jelly so they won’t attack anyone.

  Theryn and Tom are here, too, and they have some opinions to interject. Theryn thinks the vampires should simply be destroyed, while Tom wants to try controlling them to fight for us rather than to merely not hinder us. Fortunately, their arguments kind of cancel one another out and I speak with Vanus while they’re yelling at one another.

  “You know vampires are people too, don’t you?” I say. “Most people don’t become infected deliberately. It’s always polite to go ask people first before charging in slaughtering them.”

  “A strange suggestion from someone with your reputation,” Vanus says.

  “My reputation is asking people to submit before hitting them until they submit,” I say. “And then stopping hitting them once they do. You might be surprised how many groups suddenly become a lot more reasonable once you kill their leader and everyone who happens to be standing nearby.”

  “Orc diplomacy,” Vanus says with a smirk. “Vampires are monsters. Perhaps unwitting ones, but monsters nonetheless. My ritual has the best chance of getting us safely through the Orchard.”

  “I won’t count on turning them into mindless, drooling husks improving the chances of that,” I say. “You said you haven’t actually tested your ritual yet. I would recommend doing that under controlled conditions and not in a situation where a bunch of vampires turning berserk instead of passing out won’t hurt anything important.”

  “Ugh,” Vanus says. “Fine. Go try some Orc diplomacy, if you must. But if this goes poorly and our world is doomed, I’ll never speak to you again.”

  “What, you wouldn’t visit me in the Ashpit?” I ask cheekily.

  I gesture to my friends, and we head into the Orchard. I deliberately keep my axe lowered and set myself in an “I want to talk” stance rather than an “I want to fight” stance. A few bloodfiends rush forward to try to attack us, but they–somewhat embarrassingly on their part–just kind of bounce off when I put up a Blinky Barrier in lieu of dodging. Honestly, it’s a bit of showing off, but sometimes showing off is the best way to get the point across of “no, you really don’t stand a chance against me.”

  I’d have to actually dodge if they keep attacking, though. That shield only lasts for a few seconds and I don’t have a huge pool of magicka available.

  “Hey,” I say. “Hey! Any of you folks want to actually talk to me, or do I have to start knocking heads?”

  One of them actually shows up to talk to me without attacking me first. A woman who introduces herself as Virgar the Red. A Nord, I think, or maybe she’s old enough to be a Nede. She says that she’s also known as the Crimson Matron and the Concubine of Coldharbour.

  “Nice to meet you,” I say. “I’m Neri, King of the Wood Orcs. How do you feel about Molag Bal?”

  “He is the real enemy here!” Virgar says. “Not my children. Do not blame them for attacking you. Molag Bal has them under his thrall.”

  “Great,” I say. “If I free your children, can you get them to not attack my expedition? I’ll even give you the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be treated like people and not monsters.”

  Virgar thinks that sounds absolutely fantastic and starts going on about a ritual she needs to perform to fix them. I hold up a hand to interrupt and call over Vanus and explain the situation to him.

  “I don’t know anything about rituals,” I say. “Well, I mean, I do but nothing relevant. I don’t think she’s trying to deceive us, but if you notice anything weird about this, please let me know and I will separate her head from her body.”

  Vanus isn’t entirely happy about working with the elder vampire, but it seems more that he really wanted to test his spell than anything else. My request mollifies him, though. It’s not like I’m blindly trusting random vampires I met in Coldharbour. Just giving them the chance to talk and see whether they’re assholes or not, like everyone else.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  We protect Virgar from angry Daedra while she performs her ritual. It needs to be done in several locations around the Orchard, and the Daedra aren’t going to let us just do that without challenge. Molag Bal even forces some of Virgar’s “children” to attack us. Merry immobilizes them so that we don’t have to upset Virgar by turning her beloved progeny into blood pudding.

  I disable some evil totems that are swirling blue-black and make them no longer swirl blue-black. A decrease in the amount of menacing swirls in the universe is always a good thing.

  With that done, Virgar and Vanus can do their part. The ritual is completed and the Harvest Heart is destroyed. I was really hoping for a bigger explosion, but I suppose the Great Shackle is going to be hard to top in that matter.

  The vampires are calmer now and Merry releases them. They do not impede our exploration of the area, and it’s damned well time to explore the area. My small army is still distrustful of them, but they’re quickly becoming used to strange allies. That might stop being the case once we’ve succeeded here should our strange new allies decide to try to live among them in peacetime, once we actually manage to get to a peacetime, but that’s a problem I’ll need to consider once we acquire anything resembling peacetime. I’m sure there’s a place on Nirn even for them.

  Not far from the Orchard, there’s a larger-than-usual Harvester along with a few (normal-sized) Dremora, who make for a fun fight. The Harvester, mostly. The Dremora just kind of die immediately.

  We come upon what looks like somebody’s tomb that got pulled into Coldharbour. A book titled Protocols of the Court of Contempt lays outside the tomb. (Summary: They don’t even pretend that their court is fair.) I feel like it should eventually get tiresome to be “evil for the sake of evil” all the time.

  “What do you think we’ll find inside?” Eran asks.

  “Daedra,” Gelur says with a smirk.

  “We can’t just guess ‘Daedra’ here,” Eran says. “I’m going to guess Dremora.”

  “Cultists,” Merry says.

  “Hmm,” Gelur hmms. “It’s a tomb, innit? It’s prolly got undead in it.”

  “This one will put her moon sugar candy down for ‘something weird’,” Ilara says.

  “You guys are betting over what horrible things might be waiting for you inside?” Farry asks incredulously.

  “It’s not really about the stakes,” Eran says. “A part of it is considering what sort of enemies we might need to be prepared for.”

  “I’m going to guess the trifecta of cultists, undead, and Daedra,” I say. “What do you think, Farry?”

  “I… have no idea.”

  “Well, let’s head inside and find out, then,” I say, hefting my axe.

  “Why are we going in here again?” Farry asks. “Shouldn’t we be securing safe passage through the Reaver Citadel to stop the planar vortex from destroying Nirn?”

  “Our allies might have gotten trapped in here and/or we might find something or someone that might help us in our current objective,” Merry says with a shrug. “I have quickly learned to justify every detour Neri insists on making. To be fair, he never finds boring places. Very often, he stumbles upon important things completely by accident.”

  We head in and soon determine that the place is, in fact, full of undead. Sometimes the obvious answer is obvious for a reason, I suppose.

  Further in, we find a more recent corpse, a dead Nord woman with a journal at her side that indicates her name was Nettira and she was a member of the Fighters Guild contingent. According to that, she thought it was a great idea to go inside and explore it but was surprised to find that it was full of skeletons.

  I sigh and put my hand on my helmet. “Was I not clear enough in my briefing that everything will try to kill you here?”

  “Honestly, any random tomb on Nirn is also likely to be full of undead,” Eran says. “Neri, you can’t be responsible for everyone else’s poor decisions. You gave them the relevant information. That they chose to be stupid with it is their own doing.”

  “It’s just frustrating. I want to shake them and tell them stupidity won’t get them into Sovngarde.” I pause. “I mean, it might. Nords never struck me as the sort to be picky about that sort of thing and I’m sure whoever’s in charge of their afterlife knows what Nords are like.”

  The tomb is full of skeletons of various types, and wraiths. The guy the tomb was built for (at least I think it was a guy) was named Mal Sorra, who is now a slightly tougher than usual wraith. A book elsewhere in the tomb notes that this was actually a female Dunmer, and the way it always lists her name as Mal Sorra would seem to indicate that either her name simply had a space in it or that she was quite insistent about using both names like Sotha Sil.

  According to the book, she was banished to Oblivion by her own mother, who thought she was being too much of a crazy bitch even for her house to tolerate. Which, admittedly, doesn’t explain the tomb or the rest of the undead. I’m quite sure it’s just that Molag Bal really likes tombs.

  The Nord woman’s journal mentioned a cousin named Grundskar. I find him with the expedition near the Orchard, having been healed up and pressing on, and let him know what happened to his cousin, trying very hard not to berate him–even he thinks going into that tomb would have been a great idea. Treasure hunting. Here, now? Seriously?

  There’s nothing inherently wrong with exploring and going treasure hunting in Oblivion. I’m sure there’s plenty of great stuff to be found somewhere. But nothing is worth the risk when you’re going into a tomb you don’t even consider might be dangerous.

  I don’t know why I’m so frustrated with this. It’s not like people aren’t incredibly silly on Nirn, too. Probably because these are my people and I did my best to try to warn them to avoid this sort of shit, so I feel some amount of responsibility for it. They’re adults, technically speaking, and can make their own stupid decisions, but it doesn’t help that humans (and Orcs…) tend to die by the time mer would consider them to really be adults. Children should be taught and protected.

  No sense in dwelling on it, though, especially since her cousin isn’t dwelling on it and she herself is probably having a mead in Sovngarde lamenting about how she almost got rich. There are times I almost wish I could pop in at Sovngarde for a drink. It sounds like a fun place.