“Have you seen any of the others?” Eran asks.

  I shake my head. “The ‘Tower’ of Lies was the first place I went after coming here. Well, aside from the Hollow City, of course. They could be anywhere.”

  “Then let’s not waste any time,” Eran says.

  “Do you need to rest?” I ask. “Being mindfucked by weird spells can be tiresome.”

  Eran shakes his head. “I’m fine. Let’s get going. What’s our next stop?”

  I don’t know how fine he might actually be after that, but I don’t care to second-guess him. I’ll just have to keep an eye on him like he’s been keeping an eye on me.

  “Let’s hit up that place over there,” I say, pointing to some ruins that look Ayleid. “There’s always something stupid in Ayleid ruins.”

  “Why are there Ayleid ruins in Oblivion?” Eran wonders.

  I shrug. “Dunno. Same reason there’s Imperial ruins?”

  Eran looks off at the horizon. “Yeah… I could swear there’s a tower that looks like the White-Gold Tower over there. I wonder what’s there.”

  “It might not even actually be there,” I say.

  As we approach the ruins, a purple projection of a Dunmer woman (Kireth Vanos, she reminds me that her name is) that I think I recognize from the assembly on Stirk lets us know that the place is called the Library of Dusk and some of the expedition is trapped here. Because the Mages Guild saw something that looked like an Ayleid ruin in Coldharbour and thought it was a fantastic idea to go inside. What did they think was going to happen?

  “The only ones who remained free are me and this Goblin,” Kireth says. “Probably because she can’t read. She’s been helpful in incinerating any Daedra that bother us, though, but we need to get inside to free the others. There are three lenses that you’ll need to destroy to unseal the door.”

  As we smash them, Kireth uses the equipment in the room she’s in to try to figure out what’s going on in the rest of the library. Some sort of spell has entrapped many of the mages and is clouding their minds.

  Smash lenses. Easy enough. There’s plenty of Daedra to hit in the way, and I’m definitely not having flashbacks about fighting Daedra in Coldharbour at all. With the lenses in pieces, we’re able to get inside to meet up with Kireth and Togga.

  Some members of the Mages Guild contingent are being held in rooms on the lower level with books, crystals, and Daedric banners. Including Merry. None of them seem aware of their surroundings, completely engrossed in their books.

  “You know, the worst thing about Molag Bal is how he’s never content to be his own thing,” I comment, looking down at them through bars. “He’s plagiarized on Sheogorath’s schtick enough and now he’s butting in on Hermaeus Mora’s bailiwick.”

  “They call him the God of Schemes, Domination, and Brutality,” Eran says. “But a lot of the Princes seem to dominate with brutal schemes, too. And to be fair, if this were Hermaeus Mora’s library, I’d imagine he’d be more interested in people reading the books for the temptation of forbidden knowledge and not just to trap them and mess with them.”

  “True!” I say, turning to head for the stairs. “That’s why I like Hermaeus Mora more. And also because I have no great desire for forbidden knowledge so it’s not generally much of a temptation.”

  “You read constantly,” Eran says.

  “Mostly I’m reading random non-forbidden books that I happen to find laying around,” I say. “The forbidden ones usually get safely disposed of or given to Sahira-daro.”

  “You also can pretty much instantly read books now and you’re still not opening up any of these to even glance in them,” Eran says. “Which is definitely wiser than I’ve come to expect of you.”

  We reach the bottom of the stairs and set about to freeing the mages. I still have the urge to loot the library for whatever it’s worth, and manage to dump a few shelves worth of books into my pack as Eran tries to keep me from becoming distracted like the mages. Fortunately, I’m not quite as affected as the actual scholars here, perhaps because my taste in books is completely indiscriminate? No idea.

  “Merry!” I exclaim once we’ve found the right room.

  “I am busy reading,” Merry grumbles. “Must you disturb me?”

  “You can take it with you and read somewhere safer,” I say. “In fact, dump the entire shelf into your pack and let’s get out of here.”

  “That is… a good idea, actually,” Merry says. “I do not know why I did not think of it before.”

  “Mindfucks,” I say. “We’ve rescued most of the others who got stuck in here. Let’s go pull Telly’s shiny gold arse out of the fire next.”

  “Why did you need to make me think about Telenger’s buttocks?” Merry groans.

  “I’m going to claim that it was to make sure the reading compulsion was broken, and I’m sticking to that.”

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  The next room contains Tom Gautier, who is even ruder than he was on Stirk. He very nearly attacks us and it’s a good thing I don’t mistake him for a Daedra just pretending to be a Breton. (Am I a Daedra just pretending to be a Chimer pretending to be an Orc? Ugh, I can philosophize at home.)

  “Easy there, Tom,” I say. “We’re here to rescue you guys.”

  “How do I know this isn’t a trick?” Tom demands.

  I shrug. “Does it matter? I’ll happily leave you alone here if you really want, I don’t care, but I do recommend heading out. The stairs are over there. Just follow the corpses.”

  Tom frowns deeply, closes the book he was reading, and shoves an entire shelf worth into his bag before making for the stairs. (I’d lose what little respect I had for him if he didn’t at least have a magic bag. How can you do adventuring without one?)

  Telenger is not actually in the room he’d previously been trapped in and has left a note behind that he cast a spell on to make invisible to Daedra. Might be some variation on the protection enchantments on my ring.

  Merry reads part of it aloud. “‘I hope it is you, Clarisse, or perhaps Thomas, or that promising young Raynor. I’d even settle for Merormo.’ Oh, now he appreciates me, when I could be the one pulling him out of the fire.”

  “I haven’t seen any literal fires here yet, aside from the ones Togga conjured,” Eran says. “Especially not ones that are actually hot.” He pauses thoughtfully. “Neri, I think I’m starting to understand why you like fire so much and I haven’t even been here a day so far as I know.”

  “It’s not even a normal sort of cold,” Merry says. “A trip to Skyrim would not inflict frostbite upon your very soul.” He incinerates the next Daedra that bothers us. “Fortunately, my own fire still works.”

  We head down to the lower level and find Telenger locked behind one of those big, fancy Ayleid gates, not reading anything and considerably more attentive than the others. Aside from the fact that he’s mumbling to himself, but that’s something he normally does even when he’s on Nirn safely in his own camp.

  “Merormo,” Telenger says when we approach the gate.

  “Telenger,” Merry replies. “Do you require assistance?”

  Telenger, of course, is loath to admit that he might need help, but does request our assistance. Yep, completely different things, Telly. (Still not calling him that to his face.) Telenger tells us about a source of power he has detected nearby, and he doesn’t trust himself to resist the compulsion much longer and understandably wants to get out of here.

  “A Light of Meridia, perhaps. I found one of them,” I say, pulling out the one from my pack to show him. “Did it feel like this?”

  “Yes, I do believe that matches what I have detected,” Telenger says.

  “Fascinating,” Merry says. “It reminds me of a welkynd stone, but so much more. We could do much with these. I shall head out with you. I trust Neri and Eranamo are capable of retrieving it without being too badly affected by the mental effects of this place.”

  We head through the portal and grab the shiny rock, which joins the other one inside my pack. I have no idea what we might wind up doing with them, but hey, more shiny rocks. (I greatly prefer blue shiny rocks to red shiny rocks, but they’re not really my favorite color either. My favorite color is, of course, green.)

  The portal closed behind us, so we can’t get back down that way. A projection of a mer I don’t recognize suddenly appears and suggests we jump (speaking in rather archaic language), claiming that we will be safe to do so because he will obviously keep us safe with his powers, whoever he is. He doesn’t bother to even introduce himself before he disappears again.

  “This seems like a terrible idea,” Eran says. “That could easily be another trick to make us go splat. If Merry were here, he’d say ‘Best to use another method to descend.’”

  I snicker. “Almost. Merry’s voice is a bit higher pitched than that. Fortunately, we have another method. Although a potentially less fun one. If it were just me, I would cheerfully jump off this just to see what happens…”

  “Yes, thank you for not doing that and leaving me stranded and having to see how trustworthy a random projection might be,” Eran says with a smirk.

  I reach out to my connection to the wayshrine in the Hollow City. I put a hand on Eran’s arm as I cast just in case. It’s normally not necessary, but under the circumstances, I’m a little bit paranoid.

  It takes longer to get through without the assistance of being next to a wayshrine, but I manage it. Tiny stars and purple haze envelop us. The precarious spire vanishes, to be replaced by the relative safety of the mysterious city. We shortly hook up with the mages who made their own way back.

  “If only we’d known this was here,” Merry says, looking around at the peaceful surroundings.

  “I’m blaming Varen for this one,” Eran says. “If he was able to find three specific people in Coldharbour, but didn’t notice this.”

  I shrug helplessly. “Maybe there was a good reason for that.” I fish out some candy to eat. Everything is better with moon sugar.

  “You have a lot more confidence in him than I do,” Eran says.

  “I… suppose I sympathize with him more,” I say. “We both survived Coldharbour after being betrayed by someone we trusted. He’s fortunate that only one person he trusted really betrayed him. That’s more than could be said of myself. Lyris and Sai are idiots, but they’re loyal idiots trying to stay true to their beliefs.”

  “I cannot comprehend what the desire for godhood makes people do,” Merry says. “And what the world would have been like had Mannimarco succeeded.”

  “The ‘Tribunal’ rewrote reality to pen themselves as stars,” I say. “Reality is weirdly malleable sometimes. Would we need to be worried about the possibility of a universe existing in which Manny were a god? Was the Three’s ascension inevitable so long as it happened in even one possible universe?”

  “Now, I don’t normally suggest this,” Merry says. “But could I try one of your candies?”

  “Sure,” I say, tossing him a moon sugar candy. “Why?”

  “I just got enslaved by a book and now you’re making me think about temporal nonsense and obnoxious people attaining godhood. And I can only think it is merely another Tirdas. It has been rather stressful. Not even just the part about invading Coldharbour and saving the world. That I could accept. That makes sense. And yet we walked across Valenwood and encountered madness at every turn. I have been shot at, stabbed, set on fire, electrocuted, frozen, drowned, bludgeoned, impaled, blinded, infected, and poisoned. I feel that adding ‘drugged’ to that list can only be an achievement.”

  “Understandably,” Eran says.

  “We need to find Gelur and Ilara-daro,” I say with a sigh. “They’re out there, somewhere, probably in situations as bad as the ones you guys were in…”

  “You couldn’t have known what would happen,” Eran says. “At least, if you did, you never mentioned it as a possibility.”

  “I really didn’t consider it,” I say, and shake my head. “Our mistake was that we were so concerned about getting it right that we forgot to ask what could go wrong.” I pause. “By which I mean, the people I trusted to be confident in this were so concerned.”

  “Other people are less inclined to start off with the assumption that something will go wrong,” Eran says. “You don’t need to feel guilty about what others should have had covered, though.”

  I shake my head. “In Oblivion, an important thing to keep in mind is that if you feel bad about anything for any reason, just blame Oblivion for it. It’s what I do. Even if I’m not in Oblivion, because it was obviously the fault of having been in Oblivion. That’s how I maintain my cheerful disposition.”

  “This explains so much,” Eran says.