The portal takes us away from Nirn, to a place with a starry green sky and floating rocks. Pieces of Khajiit-style architecture dot the surrounding area, put together in no logical way. Ghostly robed Khajiit line the path, heads bowed to us.

  “What is this place?” Khali wonders.

  “Oblivion,” I say. “Probably. Where, specifically, I can’t say, although I can readily rule out Coldharbour, the Deadlands, and such.”

  “The Plane of Jode, it must be,” Khali says. “I never expected it to be like this.”

  “Well, fortunately, I don’t recognize the area,” I say. “I’d rather not have to fight any craters today.”

  “Craters?” Khali wonders.

  “Don’t ask,” I say. “I’ll get a headache trying to pin down the details of something that did/didn’t happen.”

  We head up and explore the temple. The layout of the place doesn’t make much sense, and archways lead off into completely different places. It takes a bit to realize that we’ve emerged into what can only be a vision of a bad potential future.

  It’s Dra’bul, and yet it’s not. The gates are closed tight and Orc archers hold the ramparts. Roku and Grishka are there, weapons in hand, steadfast but haggard. And Roku’s belly is huge, like she has either been gorging on moon sugar biscuits or she’s about to give birth at any moment. I freeze involuntarily at the sight of them.

  “Neri!” Roku cries out when she sees me, running up to hug me.

  “Mauloch’s balls, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” Grishka adds.

  “I told you he would come back,” Roku says. “He always comes back, with some crazy story or another.”

  “I don’t think a crazy story is gonna save us here,” Grishka says. “Who’s the cat?”

  “This is Khali,” I say, and release Roku with a sigh. “She’s going to be the Mane. What’s the situation?” I don’t even know what to say about the obvious fact that, in this vision at least, my hearth-wife is pregnant. None of this is real, and there’s no telling what parts of it could be.

  “That’s good!” Grishka says. “Though… a bit late.”

  “Everything fell apart,” Roku says. “Without a Mane, the Khajiit withdrew from the Dominion.”

  “And the Bosmer lost their shit,” Grishka says. “What the fuck is wrong with these people that they think it’s a great idea to turn themselves into werewolves at the slightest problem? I told them we’d protect their pretty asses from the other guys, but they turned on us instead. Fetchers.”

  “You probably could have convinced them to see reason,” Roku says with a sigh. “But you were missing, and they wouldn’t listen to us.”

  “What about the Wood Orcs?” I ask.

  Grishka shakes her head. “The Wild Hunt destroyed several of our strongholds, and we lost contact with the Pyandonea stronghold. I don’t know if it was lucky or not that I was on this side when the portal mage betrayed us.”

  There’s a cry from the gates. The enemy has been sighted closing in.

  “They’re here,” Grishka breathes, gripping her bow.

  “Who’s here?” I wonder.

  “The Silvenar and the Green Lady,” Grishka says. “They’re mad now. Lost. And now they’re at the gates.”

  The gates of Dra’bul are made of sturdy wood reinforced with spikes and bands of metal, but it’s not enough. The ferocity of the Green Lady as a werewolf is unmatched, and she practically tears down the gates with her own claws. And on top of that, the Silvenar, also a werewolf, is healing her.

  This is possibly the most annoying fight I’ve had since I arrived in Reaper’s March at least. It might have gone on for hours if not for Khali. She manages to slip behind and kill the Silvenar while the Orcs and I have the other werewolves occupied, and only then do they start really dropping.

  “I can’t believe we won,” Grishka says once the last werewolf has fallen.

  “We wouldn’t have, without Neri and Mane Khali,” Roku says, and looks at us. “We need you. We need both of you.”

  “I need to go fix this and make sure this doesn’t happen,” I say.

  Roku nods, and puts a hand on her belly. “Come back to us. Malacath’s wrath be with you.”

  Khali and I step through the gates of Dra’bul, and find ourselves back at the lunar temple we were climbing on Jode’s plane.

  “Your wives are fine Orcs,” Khali says. “You are fortunate to have them, I think. And perhaps congratulations are in order?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I say, looking about the surreal landscape. “Who knows how much of this might actually happen? What’s next?”

  “We keep going,” Khali says. “If this is what happened to the Bosmer and Wood Orcs, what about the Altmer?”

  Another doorway takes us to a twisted version of the Summerset Isles, and we press forward to find out what sort of vision awaits us here.

  We run across Razum-dar, gravely wounded, who tells us what’s going on as I try in vain to heal him. In this world, the racist bandits rose up again and rebelled against Queen Ayrenn’s rule.

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  “What happened?” I ask. “Did they rally around Prince Naemon?”

  “Naemon?” Raz repeats. “No, no. Battlereeve Urcelmo betrayed us! You will find Prince Naemon up the path, if he still lives. He swore his life to defending his sister. And Raz… Raz has failed.” He goes still.

  “Let’s go find Naemon,” Khali urges me away from staring at Raz’s body.

  We fight our way past racist bandits and come upon Naemon holding the line in front of the entrance to an ancient elven ruin. We help him finish off the last of them, but he’s also injured and my healing has no effect.

  “You,” Naemon says, coughing up blood. “Where in Oblivion have you been?”

  I want to tell him that this isn’t real, that it’s just a vision dreamed up by the ritual, but I pause. Is it really? Time is a strange thing, and it had to have pulled these images from somewhere. I’d rather not think about time bullshit though, so moving swiftly on…

  “Stuff happened,” I say. “Sorry. We can still fix this. We’ll make sure this doesn’t happen.”

  “You’d better,” Naemon says. (Apparently no one doubts me even for a moment when I casually proclaim I can do the “impossible”.) “I’d never imagined how much we might need the Khajiit and the Bosmer and the Orcs and even the Goblins. It was shameful watching Goblins die to protect my sister when our own people turned on us but the Goblins love her. Save her, Neri. Stop this.”

  He, too, slumps over and slips rapidly away. I can only be glad that at least these visions did not show me my wives’ deaths.

  We make our way down into the ruin and find Queen Ayrenn locked in deadly combat with the battlereeve. They’ve fought one another to a standstill and seem exhausted, but Ayrenn’s heart doesn’t seem to really be in it any longer, even after Khali and I join the fight. Upon the battlereeve’s defeat, Ayrenn stumbles outside and beckons us to follow to hear her heartbreaking lament about her failed dream.

  “Ayrenn,” I say softly. “Your dream hasn’t failed. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

  “You’re my last hope, Neri,” Ayrenn says, her voice cracking. “You’re the only one who can pull everything together again.”

  “I can’t do this by myself,” I say. “Look, we have a new Mane.” I gesture to Khali. (Wasn’t this ritual supposed to be about her and not me?)

  “A new Mane…” Ayrenn murmurs. “Ah, if only you had come months ago. The Khajiit, and the Dominion, needed your strength and your wisdom.”

  “They will have Khali’s strength and Shazah’s wisdom,” Khali says.

  “Good. Maybe there’s still hope,” Ayrenn whispers as she, too, slips away.

  Another gateway returns Khali and I to the main path again.

  “If this is what might happen should we fail…” Khali says.

  “Then we must not fail,” I finish.

  “There is one more path we must take,” Khali says. “But this one does not know how to find it.”

  “Let’s keep going, then,” I say. “If we are meant to find it, then our feet will take us there. Or paws. Whichever.”

  Khali chuckles. “You may call a Khajiit’s paws ‘feet’ or ‘hands’, you know.”

  We continue to wander up the path, moving ever upwards, and come upon another gateway at the top of the hill. This one leads us into what Khali refers to as the Den of Lorkhaj. Considerably darker and less verdant, purple where the last area was green, and distressing in a deep way as I hear a drumbeat start in around me. I call up my own music in counterpoint, but here of all places, I’m not sure how much I can “chase away”. I play anyway.

  The Dark Mane is here, his voice echoing in a taunt along with Javad Tharn’s. I don’t see any sign of a Tharn here, but this dark thing that has caused so much trouble across Reaper’s March and forced me to pray in front of dozens of lunar shrines to make them stop being swirly? (Okay, that might be an exaggeration.) I’m more than ready to kick his ass, and here, I might just be able to kick his ass hard enough that I can knock him into the depths of Oblivion where he might not find his way back to Nirn for an era.

  “Oh, good, you’re here,” I say. “Fight me!”

  The Dark Mane is much, much stronger than he was when I fought him in Moonmont. There, he was but a shadow (heh) of himself, but here? Here, he’s at full strength, and not being contained or constrained by anything. I don’t have my friends with me here, just Khali, and while that’s appreciated, that also means that we have no healing but my own to rely on. My Blinky Barrier blinks out immediately every time it gets hit with one of the Dark Mane’s shadowy powers.

  “It’s no use!” Khali exclaims. “He’s too strong!”

  “Just don’t die!” I yell back, increasing the volume and energy of my musical aura.

  I manage to lose both Wibbly and Wobbly flying off of the floating island whenever this shadowy fetcher knocks me around, leaving me with Shiny, but Shiny is enough. I charge forward in blazing light, and a nova falls upon him like a fragment of the sun brought down to the dark moon.

  As the Dark Mane staggers to the ground under my assault, the unamused voice of Javad Tharn emerges from the air again, this time attached to a very solid and hittable person.

  “Bah, I thought my Dark Mane would be the end of you for sure, but it seems this stupid cat is weaker than I’d imagined. I shall just have to do this myself, then.”

  “Why the fuck would you think you have a better chance of beating us than this guy did?” I ask, turning my attention have toward him, but keeping one eye on the Dark Mane to make sure he doesn’t get up again and attack me from behind.

  Javad Tharn blusters at me. The worst of this all is that he’s not even a particularly interesting villain. Even Manny had coherent (if insane) plans. Javad can’t even manage a good cliche line.

  The Dark Mane, fortunately, does not come back to bite us in the ass while we’re busy kicking the Tharn’s ass. He might be a powerful mage, but he’s just a mage. Human. Mortal. Perfectly killable. So we kill him.

  Rid-thar appears and congratulates us. I don’t even have it in me to be annoyed at the dead cat any longer.

  “Is it done?” I ask. “Javad’s certainly dead, but what about the Dark Mane?”

  “Look,” Rid-thar says, gesturing to where I’d left the Dark Mane laying while I dealt with Javad Tharn.

  The core of the Khajiit figure is no longer dark, seeming to have absorbed the Aedric light I’d been bombarding him with. Maybe the Prismatic Weapon I’m wielding helped, too. I don’t know, but with each note of the song I’ve been fervently continuing to play, the darkness recedes a little further.

  “This one… is sorry for the things he did while under the control of the Tharn,” the less-dark Mane says. “Thank you. You have saved this one. You have saved the Khajiit.” He offers a weak smile to Khali. “You will be a good Mane, young one. This one is sure of it.”

  By the time he fades away, only light is left.

  “Thank fuck,” I mutter irreverently as I put Shiny away.

  I’m going to need to acquire new backup axes now, because there’s no way I’m going to be able to retrieve Wibbly and Wobbly from here. I suppose the sacrifice of two “moons” was appropriate to the ritual, and battling a dark moon with a light “moon”.

  Rid-thar opens a portal for us, and we return to Dune. There’s all sorts of pomp and ceremony to be done still, but nothing I need to be directly involved in or sober for. I just have to hope the next asshole I have to deal with is less boring than Javad fucking Tharn. The no-longer-dark Mane was not the one truly responsible for all this.

  The moon priests had been relaying what was happening to the important people standing around, so at least we sort of had an audience. Did they do that last time? I guess it would make sense that people were witnessing something and not just boredly waiting for us to get done with everything. I just wish someone had told me I was putting on a show.

  Shazah hugs Khali. “You’re alright! Shazah was worried, but perhaps she should not have been. You fought bravely and made it through. Shazah is proud of you, sister. This one does not think she could have done it in your place.”

  “Ah, I have no doubt you would have found your own way through,” Khali assures her. “But do not fear! I still need you, Shazah. I may be the Mane now, but the Mane needs a Speaker, yes?”