When we return to the Hollow City, Colors informs us that she’s heard word of a settlement of Argonians that was pulled into Coldharbour. She wants to go out there and check it out herself, but she’s got to stay and organize the Fighters Guild, so she sends us instead. There’s also a Dunmer woman at the inn who mentions losing a lute in someplace called the Grotto of Depravity, which is near there. She seems pretty well otherwise for having been here from when the city originally fell into Coldharbour.

  I, along with Eran, Merry, and Farry, set out from the Hollow City in search of signs of Argonians, but come upon the cave first and head inside. There are Soul-Shriven here relaxing. Fishing. Dancing. And otherwise not acknowledging our presence in the slightest. The Daedra, on the other hand, don’t take kindly to our crashing the party and attack us on sight.

  Eran waves a hand in front of the face of a dancing Soul-Shriven. “Okay, seeing people like this is beyond creepy. I can’t imagine that they did anything in life to deserve this sort of hell.”

  “Even if they were cultists?” Merry asks.

  “Let’s just find this lute,” Eran says with a sigh. “And attempt to rescue anyone that notices we’re here.”

  Unfortunately, no one seems inclined to be rescued, and I don’t spot anyone that still looks un-shriven. Maybe it’s just as well none of the expedition members wound up in here. We do eventually find the lute, and we don’t even need to kill anyone for it. (Although we do anyway.) I shove it in my pack and leave to go find this Argonian settlement.

  We don’t have to search for long. An Argonian in a robe finds us just outside of town and mentions that the place is called Haj Uxith. Spelled with an X that Argonians pronounce as a Z for some reason. They want to help our expedition but we have to pass their trials, et cetera, Body and Spirit, et cetera. Ceremonial shit. As you do. Hopefully it will involve hallucinogens.

  There’s something of a debate in the village about the fate of their Hist tree. They actually have a Hist tree here? There’s something wrong with it, though, which isn’t terribly surprising considering where it is. Everything in this realm is dead or dying, some things just slower to die than others.

  Anyway the Trial of Spirit turns out to be pointless and stupid but I go along with it. Sadly, there are no hallucinogens involved, just answering some really obvious trivia questions.

  From what I’m told, the Argonians got here because they made a dumb deal, like the Shadow Walkers. This deal was to supply the Daedra with Hist sap. And it was the Hist tree who had this dumb idea, too. It’s likely none of the Argonians here today had anything to do with that decision. All that in order to avoid the world changing. I really hate to think of the notion of anyone being born in Coldharbour, and yet they seem intent upon keeping their traditions sacred even here. Was this really an improvement?

  I find a book titled Chaotic Creatia: The Azure Plasm. (Summary: Blue slime turns into Daedra and Vestiges.) This would probably be more interesting to someone who didn’t already intimately know how respawning in Oblivion works, but I’m definitely going to plagiarize this so I don’t have to keep explaining it to people. I still had to get word across to some of the more stupidly-enthusiastic members of the Fighters Guild that no, you can’t simply kill every Daedra in Oblivion. The notion of “it dies for real if you kill it in its home realm” is a folk tale that needs to be stamped out.

  Their agreement with Molag Bal prohibits their interference with the Daedra who collect the Hist sap. My friends and I, however, are not bound by that agreement, so we’re free to go in and slaughter them all. The shaman faction had me doing pointless cultural lessons but the warriors want me to go do something useful. Kill the Dremora and wreck their Hist-sap-processing equipment. I’m good at that sort of thing.

  The agreement implied that they would be offering up a “little bit” of Hist sap. This is not a little bit. The Dremora have a massive processing facility here. Also, once we start wrecking shit, the place fills up with fumes. Overheated sap tickles my nostrils and stings my eyes.

  “This cannot be the most efficient way to have done this,” Merry grouses as he incinerates another Dremora.

  “Nothing like hot flames to make a good cleansing!” I exclaim with a laugh.

  “I thought I saw my life pass before my eyes,” Eran says. “But I think I’m just hallucinating.”

  “Hist sap does that,” I say.

  “It is good to know that you are an expert on Tamrielic hallucinogens,” Merry comments dryly.

  I also take the opportunity to confiscate any Hist sap they have that’s still usable. With the Dremora temporarily inconvenienced by being violently sent to the depths of Oblivion and their equipment destroyed, we return to the Argonian warrior guy to report on our successfully passing their “Trial of Body”.

  And now we’re treated to this great debate. The scholar faction wants to euthanize their Hist tree. The warriors want to keep it alive because life is precious. They can’t ask the Hist itself for its opinion (do sentient trees have genders?) since it has effectively been “unconscious” for some time and hasn’t spoken with them recently.

  “Why does it have to be one or the other?” I say. “The least you can do is see if it can recover once the source of the infection is gone, like you’d do with another Argonian who had gotten sick.”

  “True enough,” the Treeminder (I think that’s his position, anyway) says. “I do not know whether the Hist will be able to recover in this poisoned land, or if it will merely continue to live on in suffering.”

  “Give it a chance, at least,” I say. “And if it can’t recover here, there’s got to be a way to return it to Nirn.”

  “We came here to practice our traditions in peace and avoid the changes taking place on Nirn,” the scholar complains.

  “And that has worked out so well for you,” Eran mutters.

  “The outsiders are right,” the fighter says. “If there is a chance to survive rather than wither away, then we must take it.”

  “I’ll admit that I’ve never tried to teleport a tree before,” I say. “And I don’t have an anchor point in Black Marsh. But I do have a link to an Argonian community in Valenwood who would be happy to take you in. They might not be ‘traditional’ enough for you, though.”

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  This sparks another debate with the two Argonians talking over one another, until I raise a hand to interject.

  “Before I try to do anything, though, I’m going to try to contact your Hist,” I say.

  “Have you ever spoken with a Hist before?” the Treeminder asks.

  “I have not,” I say. “I’ve never even seen one before.”

  “Then how did you intend to communicate with it?”

  I shrug. “Well, I was just going to do what I usually do. Starting with going over to it and then overdosing on Hist sap.”

  “That’s what you usually do?” the Treeminder wonders incredulously.

  “Moon sugar is frequently involved, too,” I say. “I have done a surprising amount of Khajiit vision questing lately.”

  The Treeminder sighs and erects the spine of whatever emotion that’s meant to convey. (I haven’t spent nearly as much time around Argonians as I have Khajiit in order to learn their body language, but a trip to Black Marsh might be fun sometime.)

  “If you wish to make the attempt, I cannot stop you,” the Treeminder says. “You have passed our trials. You are welcome to try.”

  Farry comes up to me and asks quietly, “Are you sure you’ll be alright? This sounds dangerous.”

  “I’m never sure about anything,” I say with a chuckle. “But I’m already mad and the risk is worth taking.”

  The hapless village is full of mutters about the outsiders who drove off the Dremora and the insane Orc who wants to try communing with the Hist. It doesn’t seem right to see an Argonian village underneath Coldharbour’s hard skies. There should be greenery around, but nothing is green here aside from the scales of some of the inhabitants. Moving an entire village is almost certainly beyond me, however. (Aside from, you know, turning them all to stone and putting them in a bag, but I doubt that would work on the Hist tree.)

  With all the pipes sticking out of the trunk of the tree, I have to wonder exactly how much it has produced over the course of its time in Coldharbour, not to mention what in Oblivion the Daedra are using it for. At the base of the tree sits a crystal swirling red-black. The vampiric crystal the Argonians said was keeping the Hist alive. Is it an undead tree, then? I wouldn’t put it past the Dremora. Empty nests are scattered about the roots. How many generations of Argonians have been born into this hell?

  “If my soul explodes or something, give Ilara-daro my stuff,” I say sifting through my pack and fishing out bottles.

  “What, not your wives?” Eran wonders.

  “No, no, they’re not as good at fencing things,” I say. “And some of that stuff is really illegal.”

  “Why do I hang out with you again?” Eran wonders.

  “Because you’re incredibly fond of me and I have blackmail material on you?”

  “Anyway, how is something illegal when you’re the king?” Eran asks.

  “I made it illegal for unauthorized travelers to transport certain goods,” I say. “All the smuggling groups paid me for authorization and ensure that their products matched certain quality standards and weren’t tainted.”

  “Wait,” Eran says. “You double-tricked the criminals in your own drug empire into thinking tariffs and licenses were a bribe for a protection racket?”

  “What’s the difference, really?” I say with a shrug.

  “Actual guards tend to be less brutal than annoying you personally,” Eran says.

  “Thanks,” I say, holding up the bottle I finally find. “Bottoms up.”

  I down the liquid, and settle in against the tree. The item finding enchantment on this bag would probably be less confused if I labeled my illegal goods properly. (But they’re labeled in Dwemeris, and it’s traditional for Dwemer to mislabel things in ways that are dangerously wrong if you’re not supposed to be using them. I doubt anyone in this place/time would be able to read Dwemeris well enough to know the difference.)

  (At least, they’re illegal to have in half of Tamriel, technically speaking. You never know when you might need a really exotic poison. There’s only so far you can get away with an excuse like “I’m trying to kill a really big cat monster that seems to be immune to everything but this unholy concoction of skooma and catnip.”)

  (We did not fight such a monster. The one we did fight was immune to everything but narrow, intense beams of light. Pinpoint spotlights usually aren’t illegal.)

  I don’t need to wait long for the concoction to take effect–that’s the Hist sap temporal dissociation. My mind clouds and I feel myself falling. No, not falling. Weightless, but not going down. Time and space no longer have meaning.

  A terrible cacophony surrounds me. Voices–screaming, screeching, howling. Daedra. It suddenly strikes me that this may have been a bad idea. I almost forgot about the Daedra. And I don’t quite remember what all I put in that mixture. I might have been experimenting with mixing Oblivion foliage with Hist sap or something and that might actually be reaaallly bad–

  Something pulls me away and engulfs me, and the voices go quiet.

  “Thanks,” I think. “I think. I think I think.”

  A weak chuckling sound, and a voice whispers inside my mind, “You are like sunlight. The only warmth we have ever felt in this realm.”

  “I can give you more of it.” I start pouring magicka into Restoring Light.

  “Ahhh… that light. It makes us feel like…”

  A rush of images and feelings flood my head. The possibility of hope. The notion that change may be less-bad than the current situation. Simple gratitude. Regret. Mourning. Revenge.

  I feel like I made a small mistake in thinking of the Hist as an “it”. As it turns out, it’s very much a they. (Although they don’t mind being called “it”.) Even with this singular tree. In a flash, I suddenly understand more about the Argonian life cycle than I ever wanted to know.

  The Hist, apologetically trying to focus despite strong emotion over the first successful contact in a long time, believed this was a sacrifice they were making for the sake of their Argonians. The Hist originated from outside of Mundus, and Coldharbour is more similar to Nirn than either is to their home realm. And in a flash, I suddenly understand more about the Hist than I ever wanted to know.

  The over-excited attention-starved extradimensional sentient tree apologizes again for accidentally mindraping me.

  “It’s… alright,” I say. I am probably going to have a splitting headache later and my physical body is probably laying on the ground twitching with a nosebleed because this sort of thing always results in a nosebleed for some reason.

  “We had drifted into deep slumber,” the Hist whispers, more coherently now. “It was the only way to endure the pain. The Daedra took more than we agreed on. We were already in their power and could not refuse their increasing demands. We did not imagine their deception. They took as much as they could to keep us weak but not to actually kill us because they needed us alive. That crystal… the final shackle. Destroy it, sun-bearer!”

  I imagine that red crystal outside is shattering under my light.

  “We are free…” the Hist murmurs, voice quickly growing stronger and steadier. “But where do we go? The land that was once ours no longer exists on Nirn.”

  “Where do you wish to go?” I ask. “If you don’t leave now, the Dremora will just return soon enough, and they’ll be quite miffed.”

  “Somewhere warm and sunny. Moist summers and mild winters. Wildlife that can challenge our egg-children.”

  “I could offer you a place in Valenwood,” I say.

  “Is this land yours to offer?” the Hist asks. “Will those who dwell there accept all of us there?”

  “Well, I’m a king, so yes. There’s lots of talking trees there and the Bosmer are forbidden from harming trees by their own traditions. And the Wood Orcs will do whatever I tell them.”

  “You believe you could convince your people to accept ours so easily?”

  “I’d probably need to give a big speech about it and get them fired up and probably offer free alcohol and get into at least three fistfights, but yeah.”

  “We feel the truth in your words,” the Hist replies. “Which god do you serve?”

  “Malacath.”

  “Why? No, do not reply in your words. Let us feel it.”

  “That’s awfully personal,” I say. “But alright.”

  “You feel…” The Hist disorients me again as a rush of images flashes through my head. “Ah. Ahh…”

  I don’t remember much else after that but for some faint words, not spoken to me.

  “You seek revenge for your betrayal?”

  “No,” the Hist replies. “We seek release from this realm. We will take our revenge for ourselves.”