The wayshrine in the Hollow City welcomes me back (figuratively speaking) without randomly sending me to the far reaches of Coldharbour. I don’t know why it feels reassuring to be able to go to Coldharbour at will, but there you have it.

  It’s impossible to tell where my friends and allies might be and who might most urgently need rescuing, so I just pick one of the gates leading out of the city near the wayshrine and get going. Not that they’re especially good at being gates, without any actual gates on them. Just empty archways leading out into the fields of scraggly trees and jagged rocks, swarming with Daedra that for the most part avoid the place. I step outside and walk past a stable, fountain, and watchtower that look like they were part of the city as well.

  In an old pavilion, a worried Bosmer man turns from the pit he was gazing over. He introduces himself as Gwilir and says he was with the Fighters Guild contingent, but he’s a scout without great combat prowess. His comrades were captured and taken into the pit before us, and the only way in is by portal or jumping.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “I have a lot of practice with jumping off cliffs. Oh, and killing Daedra.”

  “I just wish I were somewhere safe and warm right now,” Gwilir laments.

  I point in the general direction I came. “There’s a safe place not too far in that direction. The Hollow City. Long story that I wasn’t paying much attention to. You should be able to warm up and get some food and drink there. It might even be made of meat but I wouldn’t ask where the meat came from.”

  I jump off the ledge into the ironically named Tower of Lies. By which I mean I slip off the ledge, but at least there’s plenty of plasm at the bottom to break my fall. I swim to the shore and start exploring.

  A shirtless Orc by the name of Skordo is incredulous at how brave or stupid I must be to jump down into a place like this voluntarily.

  “Hey, jumping off of things is a hobby of mine,” I say. “In any case, I have a means of teleporting out and if that doesn’t work, I have a rope. I’m confident that we can get you guys out of here if I find the right Daedra to put an axe into, though.”

  He tells me a bit about how the Daedra split them up and are making them work in different places, just uselessly chipping at rocks in between torture sessions.

  “How long have you been down here?” I wonder. “I literally just arrived in Coldharbour.”

  “Dunno,” Skordo says. “Time’s weird around here and the jailers are using some sort of magic to cloud everyone’s minds.”

  I nod. Yeah, they’re right about that. I know I must have spent thousands of years in Coldharbour, but it’s all fuzzy and at times it felt like I’d just gotten there and at others it felt like I’d been there forever. I’d just hoped, perhaps foolishly, that the expedition would not have had problems like that. We weren’t supposed to be separated. We weren’t supposed to be captured.

  On one edge of the plasm pool, I find a familiar shaft of blue light, and go over to take a closer look. A Skyshard, here? Weird. I swim over and absorb it and… clarity. Coldharbour has been affecting me too, amplifying any feelings of doubt and guilt I might have, and I have plenty to begin with. I have to focus.

  A Dremora by the name of Lyranth also seems to be a prisoner here, although if she is she doesn’t seem terribly concerned about it. They aren’t forcing her to work, but there’s something she’s not telling me. That’s an easy thing to figure when she’s not telling me much at all, so there’s probably quite a lot of things she’s not telling me.

  I kill some unfriendly ogrims and rescue Skordo’s friends who are chained up in caves along the walls of the “tower”. (That might a bit redundant as I haven’t encountered many friendly ogrims, but I won’t rule out the possibility.)

  I meet up with Skordo outside the overseer’s office in order to retrieve a key to the upper level (not the top, but a ledge a bit up the cliff face) where more prisoners are being kept. I am not cringing at every stockade, every hanging cage, I am not at all bothered by any of this. Nope nope nope.

  We kill the overseer and take his key. Skordo bids me to locate Captain Eilram.

  Skordo blames Gwilir for getting them captured by stumbling upon a Dremora patrol and leading them right to the fighters. I find it hard to believe that this many fighters could have been overwhelmed by a few Dremora when they’ve been breaking Dark Anchors multiple times a day for months. There had to be some mind-affecting magic involved to weaken them.

  I fight my way past a tunnel full of ogrims. On the other side, a number of tents have been set up, most likely from the Fighters Guild’s supplies. A number of other prisoners sit or stand or lay around in various states of madness or listlessness. And in one of the tents, I find a familiar face.

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  “Eran?” I ask, poking him to try to get his attention. He’s just sitting there. “Eranamo? It’s me. Neri. I had to jump off a cliff to get in here.”

  He stares blankly in my general direction. I tug him to his feet and lead him over to the edge of the ledge. He doesn’t resist, still quite confused.

  “Hey, Eran! Let’s jump off this cliff! It will be fun!” I make a dramatic show of dancing precariously near the edge.

  “Ahh!” Eran exclaims, almost causing me to actually fall off the cliff. He grabs my arm and drags me back. “By the Divines, what’s going on? What are you doing?”

  “Eran!” I hug him. “You’re alright!”

  “I’m fine,” he says, not protesting the sudden hug. “I think. I’m… not quite sure where I am or how I got here, though.”

  “It might be for the best. They’ve been torturing and mindfucking people here. I’m told this place is called the Tower of Lies, and there’s a number of Fighters Guild members who got captured here. You must have been brought here with them.” I pause. “Oh, I forgot to mention, the portal fucked up when we came through and scattered everyone all over Coldharbour. Molag Bal’s defenses. My wayshrine travel seems to still work fine, though. Er, forgot to mention the Hollow City too. There’s a wayshrine there and it’s a safer–”

  Eran holds up his hands. “Okay, okay, I apparently missed a lot. We should probably be rescuing these people. You can catch me up on the way.”

  “I haven’t actually been in Coldharbour for very long,” I say, moving on to look for the captain Skordo mentioned. “But the place messes with your perception of time. And there’s plenty of Daedra that can fuck with your mind. Let me know if you start going insane.”

  “How would I even know?” Eran wonders.

  “I dunno, when you start thinking jumping off cliffs is a good idea?”

  I encounter Lyranth again. She seems to be watching me for fun. That happens a lot.

  “What’s with the Dremora?” Eran asks me quietly.

  “Dunno,” I say with a shrug. “She doesn’t seem inclined to tell her life story to strangers and I’m too busy saving people to pry.”

  “Do you think she might attack us?”

  “Probably not,” I say. “She would have done so immediately, or helped us so that she could betray us later, if she were planning on doing so.”

  “But she’s a Daedra.”

  I chuckle. “Eran, you’ve got to remember, this is Oblivion. There’s just Daedra here. Everywhere, all the time. It’s no weirder than going to Skyrim and seeing Nords everywhere. Some of them are assholes. Some of them would attack us just for being mer. Some just don’t give a fuck.”

  “Are you talking about Nords or Dremora?” Eran wonders.

  “Both, I guess,” I say. “I even ran across a Dremora in the Hollow City who tried to sell me a tree.”

  “A… tree?”

  I come upon a prisoner’s journal. It seems to have been written by a member of the Fighters Guild, but rambles on as the writer quickly goes mad. How long does it take to go mad here? It’s not like I wasted a lot of time before coming here. They can’t have actually been here for days.

  I find a Redguard on a ledge looking over the pit. He’s Captain Eilram, and he doesn’t seem to be doing too good on the mental health side himself. He’s paranoid and thinks everyone is a spy or assassin.

  “You know, if you’d really rather stay here, we could just leave you here,” I say. “But seriously, let’s stop fucking around and get the fuck out of here, alright? I don’t care what you think, but it’s not any other mortal that’s the enemy here. We’re all united against the Daedra.”

  I retrieve Eilram’s sword and return it to him. Hopefully now he’ll believe I’m real and here to help.

  And for the next bit of this mess, I also have to retrieve the helmet of Captain Arakh to stop the voices in her head. It is hanging from a hook on a crane over the pit. Eran looks incredibly nervous while I’m retrieving it, and notably does not even slightly volunteer to get it himself. (Not that I blame him. I respawn when I die. I don’t imagine that he’d want to die here and take the chance of his soul not being able to get away.) (Shit, I need to find my other friends.)

  There’s a Dremora by the name of Ifriz who is maintaining a barrier that keeps people from leaving the pit. Lyranth wants him destroyed too so she can also leave. She removes the illusions concealing him and, naturally, stands by to watch me work. I don’t know if there’s some reason she doesn’t want to attack the Dremora, she’s lazy and arrogant, or just enjoys watching me fight, and I’m not terribly concerned about which it is.

  Ifriz stands on a roofed platform (one might even call it a gazebo) overlooking the pit, along with a tentacled Watcher. Eran and I kill both of them in short order. However scrambled his mind might have gotten during the short time he was actually here, he falls readily back into fighting and trying to keep me from falling to my death. With the Dremora dead and the barrier broken, Lyranth thanks me offhandedly and leaves.

  The guild finds one of the Lights of Meridia hidden on the other side of where the barrier was. It’s a blue crystal, brighter than any Ayleid rock I’ve seen, a color closer to sky-blue and with a golden aura like the sun. I shove it in my pack. This will probably be useful for… something.

  The portal opens near the stable outside of the Hollow City. The prisoners come through and make their way to relative safety. I escort them the rest of the way just in case.

  I’m just glad the Hollow City isn’t called something including the words Haven or Sanctuary. Those sorts of names seem to invite trouble. Clearly, if that town in Grahtwood had been named differently, pirates might have been more inclined to go, “Hmm, maybe let’s pass on raiding a place named Stranglevine.”

  “I can’t believe this is here,” Eran says, looking around at the city. “What was it you were saying about where it came from?”

  “This weird lady gave me a whole tour and a history lesson,” I say. “And all I took away from it was that it was a city of Meridia worshippers. And something about an Ayleid king although the city wasn’t Ayleid, or at least he wasn’t the king of this city. He’s trapped here too. Also, don’t ask me to repeat his name. I wrote it down but I can’t actually pronounce it.”