We arrive at Moonmont, and I light the wayshrine just north of it on the way in. This would be a splendid opportunity to go rest somewhere, as we’ve been traveling all day, but first I’d best make sure there’s no crises immediately unfolding that need to be stopped.

  Shazah and Khali are standing next to a small pile of dead mathra. Naturally, the place is full of dark spirits that have probably killed most of the priests, and the Dark Mane is inside.

  “Nice to see you guys,” I say. “I hope I haven’t arrived so much in the nick of time that I can’t take a nap first. And by a nap I mean I need to go buy more moon sugar because I accidentally used it all at Thormar because we may have stopped to get high at a great party we mostly don’t remember on the way here.”

  Khali snickers softly. “Khali hardly blames you. Maybe Baan Dar’s blessing is just what we need here.”

  “I didn’t actually find him but I’ll bet he was just taking a nap on a rock the whole time.”

  “Let us rest,” Shazah says. “You have had a… hard journey.”

  “We killed a large number of cultists too,” Eran says, feeling the need to slightly defensively add that we didn’t spend the entire time partying.

  “It might be best not to go in there at night regardless, yes?” Shazah says.

  I look to the sky. It was difficult enough to keep track of day cycles when I first arrived here, and it hasn’t stopped being disorienting, with how my eyes had become used to Oblivion. It doesn’t help with how bright the moons usually are. Only when they’re dark does it ever truly get dark. I look up at the moons, hanging in the sky next to one another, both crescents.

  Sometimes I wonder if I even actually need sleep. I get tired, sure, but it’s probably more mental fatigue than anything else. The Daedra don’t sleep, normally. Dealing with one annoying thing after another is exhausting, which is why I make sure to take breaks. I still feel like I’ve hardly had a real break since I escaped from Coldharbour, though. One crisis after another keeps cropping up. At least I haven’t been bored.

  I take a bit to restock on moon sugar (I feel like I’m going to need it for dealing with Khajiit weirdness) and check back in at Dra’bul to make sure no crises have erupted there in the meantime (and that nobody else has shown up wanting to be my wife).

  I return to Moonmont well-rested, with no additional family members, and hopefully having consumed enough moon sugar to deal with Khajiit bullshit.

  A set of beacons around the temple have been corrupted and used to power a dark ward, as usual. We go purify them one by one in order to get inside. The beacons are only surrounded in dark swirly bits, at least, and aren’t glowing dark purple. Glowing dark purple would be even more worrisome, because things aren’t supposed to glow dark and it just looks wrong.

  Once we’ve made the black swirlies go away by praying at the moons, we meet up at the temple entrance. Shazah breaks the ward and we head inside.

  Just like the outside, the inside is full of mathra. If the twins hadn’t told me that the place had recently been occupied, I’d have thought it was another ruin. The first cavernous room is dim and vines hang from the broken masonry. There’s scaffolding along some of the walls, so maybe they were doing restoration work?

  The next room is a little more intact. Three altars with images of the two moons lay in the center of the room, and moon phase decor lines the walls. Although now that I’ve noticed it, it’s bothering me.

  “Shazah, maybe you know,” I say. “Why do depictions of the moons always show them in the same phase?”

  “This hardly seems important right now,” Khali scoffs.

  I don’t receive an answer. Rid’thar’s ghost appears again in front of the door that’s blocked by a glowing dark purple ward. He informs us that we must do a stupid moon puzzle in order to break through the ward, so I get Ilara to do the stupid moon puzzle while I bring out more moon sugar.

  Once the moon puzzle is done, Shazah glows brightly in front of the door, and the ward dissolves into a cloud of azure motes that fade and vanish.

  The next room is empty. Khali and Shazah look very confused, until they scream and are trapped in rings of blue flames. I react quickly, and set my music to start playing the Chase Away song. I will not let these two become corrupted on my watch. The rings of flames disperse, freeing the Lunar Champions from their grasp.

  The Dark Mane appears, screaming in rage directed straight at me.

  I grin widely at him and increase the volume and tempo. “You feel like stopping being a dick?”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  A large number of shadowy panthers emerge from the shadows and converge upon us. The Dark Mane lunges at us like a blight-inflicted alit, eyes blazing with unnatural dark purple flames. We beat them all up. The Dark Mane makes more threats, and intends to go back to Tharn (presumably Javad, although it probably barely matters which one aside from Abnur). Rid-thar appears and chains him in purple light.

  Rid-thar explains how one of the Lunar Champions will become the next Mane, and the other must sacrifice herself to seal the Dark Mane away in the darkness alone forever. Did I say sacrifice? That implies dying, which would be considerably kinder than locking up a girl in a dungeon to be tortured forever and have her own mind twisted against her. I’m starting to really dislike this obnoxious dead cat.

  “Okay, having someone contain a dark thing in their own body sounds like a terrible idea,” I say.

  “There is no other choice,” Rid-thar insists. “A being of this nature cannot truly be destroyed.”

  “For one thing, what’s to stop Javad Tharn from freeing whoever has the Dark Mane in her and controlling her like he did Akkhuz-ri?”

  They both want to take on the burden of containing the dark spirit. Shazah thinks the Khajiit will need Khali’s strength. Khali thinks that the Khajiit will need Shazah’s wisdom.

  “No,” I say. “There has to be a better way. I refuse to sacrifice a girl to trap this spirit in her body.”

  “You must choose!” Rid-thar insists. “He’s struggling against his bonds and there’s only so long that this one can contain him!”

  I hesitate.

  The Dark Mane screams incoherently, and shatters his bonds. He turns into a stream of shadow and vanishes into the ceiling like he did before, all the while calling us fools.

  “You fool!” Rid-thar agrees with him. “He’s gotten away! Now he will continue to cause trouble across the countryside!”

  “That would have happened regardless,” I say. “While I appreciate their talents, I do not believe either of these girls would have been capable of fully containing something Akkhuz-ri could not. I don’t think I would be strong enough to contain such a thing.”

  Rid-thar isn’t listening to me. “Your hesitation will be your doom. You cannot always find a perfect solution.”

  “Can’t I?”

  “Sometimes sacrifices must be made,” Rid-thar continues.

  “Do they?”

  “Your idealism is touching, but you shall see how many more will perish because of it,” Rid-thar says, and vanishes.

  “Ugh, I hate when people do that,” I mutter.

  Khali and Shazah look confused and despondent. They’d been set on this path, each of them insisting that the other would have been the best choice for Mane, and now they’re looking at me accusingly.

  “You shouldn’t have worried about us,” Khali says. “We could have handled it!”

  “Could we?” Shazah says. “This one thinks Neri has a point. But what do we do now? The Dark Mane has left, and who knows where he might have gone?”

  “Pfah!” Khali exclaims. “Then we hunt him down again and destroy him properly this time!”

  “We’d need to find a way to destroy or banish him to do that,” Shazah says. “And which of us is to be Mane after all this?”

  “I suppose it’s pointless to get into another argument about that, too,” Khali says. “Neri? It’s still your decision. Even if you didn’t want us to throw ourselves at containing that creature, one of us still must become Mane.”

  “Right,” I say. “Khali, you’ll be Mane. Shazah, you’ll need to support her as best as you can. Because the Khajiit still need both of you.”

  They both seem happy enough with that decision. Unlike Prince Naemon, neither of them is greatly offended by the thought of being overshadowed by her sister. And my reasoning is simple. I need Khali’s decisiveness with a blade. I need a warrior. Shazah’s gentle wisdom might have served the Khajiit well in peacetime, but there is nothing but hardship ahead and I need the Khajiit to be hard enough to face it.

  “Khali will make a fine Mane,” says Shazah.

  “Well, she’ll be a fine Mane if she has Shazah around to make sense of the weird magic,” Khali says with a faint grin. “Otherwise she’ll be a very lost and confused Mane trying to solve weird magic with a sword.”

  Also, Khali reminds me of me. If I can’t have an army of mes, I won’t mind having a few more who are a little like me on my side.

  Our next destination is the city of Dune for the next bit of all the rituals and ceremonies that go into the ascension of a new Mane. Something about the moons again, I don’t know. Hopefully that dark spirit will quickly make his way to Javad Tharn’s side so that I can find them and kick both of their asses.

  Even if it’s immortal like a Daedra, there are still ways to deal with Daedra. You bind them or banish them. You don’t stick them in the bodies of girls and think anything good is going to come of it. If he weren’t a ghost, I’d smack Rid-thar for even suggesting it.

  “Are you angry at Rid-thar?” Ilara asks as we’re heading for the wayshrine.

  “Was it that obvious?” I ask.

  Eran nods. “You’re practically seething, and considering I saw how much moon sugar you ate, that’s not a good sign.”

  I sigh. “I’ll spare you a continued rant. I’m sure you’ve already heard enough.”

  We get back to the wayshrine. It’s still early and there’s plenty of time to get some miles under our feet, but I think I’d best take a moment to check in on some of the various projects I have going.

  Like the Pyandonea portal project. The portal mage successfully opened a portal to Pyandonea and went through enough to get a more solid target destination visualization. There had been a concern about whether they could get a portal open due to the reputation of Pyandonea being hard to find and “shrouded in mist”, but that hadn’t stopped the Green Lady from simply swimming there and definitely didn’t stop a long-distance portal from being opened. It’s probably just their weather magic that they use to misdirect ships. Or rumors by High Elves who never leave their pretty Summerset shores.

  I have Grishka arrange for a survey team, but initial reports indicate that Pyandonea is heavily forested. Which shouldn’t be any great surprise given how many ships they keep hurling in the general direction of Tamriel to harass anyone within sight of the ocean. Significantly impacting their supply of wood would take a serious effort, but in the meantime, just having a steady supply of wood for construction and weapons will be invaluable.

  As insane as the idea of bringing wood from another continent sounds, it still feels like a problem more reasonable to tackle than immortal dark spirits or time bullshit.