Ilsabet's Headcanon (Quest Spoilers; Outline in First Post)

Ilsabet

How would I like to be part of a hive mind, with no real responsibilities besides thinking thoughts and dreaming dreams? I could just snooze the years away, while other people handled the world-saving and existential crises and figuring out what to have for lunch every day.

Of course, that would mean entrusting my body to a bunch of ciphers and having no control over what happened to it while I was conked out, which was nerve-wracking enough when it was only for a little while and I knew Bastian would be vigilantly monitoring my caretaker's every move. But apparently plenty of people don't mind that little stipulation, and whatever boons they get must be worth the years of subliminal service.

At least until a serial killer hijacks their bodies because he's decided he's done dreaming, and they never get the chance to wake up. But that hardly ever happens. Maybe that would be my real calling within the hive mind, patrolling the mean streets of Sleepytown and "encouraging" any would-be miscreants to play nice. Not sure how well I'd do at emotional counseling though, in the event a dozing denizen got homesick or started to rethink their contract with Mora. But I'd do my best, probably, assuming lucidity was a thing there.

Or maybe I'd just drift through the Chorus like a leaf on the cognitive breeze, unfettered by notions of doing or being. I wonder what brilliant insights Mora would glean from my uninhibited subconscious. An ongoing litany of life experiences and associated angst, maybe, or any number of pulp fiction adventure serial plots playing out. Hopefully nothing too embarrassing involving musclebound men or being worshipped as the Empress of Tamriel, although if you're going to have your own manharem or become an evil overlord it might as well be in the comfort of an ephemeral dreamscape where you're not really responsible for whatever your brain conjures up.

Might make for some awkward meetings with the Eye afterward, though. Of course I'm sure he's seen weirder...

Ilsabet

For the Knight Who Moves Like the Flash of a Sword

I know not when or where we may meet again

In this life or in realms beyond

Ephemeral your light may have been

But the spark it kindled will never fade

Ilsabet

Well... so much for keeping secrets.

Leramil's inevitable summons came, and we were once again set on Torvesard's trail as he sought to gain access to the third forbidden glyphic. The NO TORVESARDS ALLOWED sign should have been enough to keep him out of the Mythos, but we saw how well that worked before, so Mora didn't want to take any chances.

Fortunately Torvesard's movements had resonated with the threads of fate, so we had some idea where to look. Leramil identified three different areas of Tamriel as points of interest, and so it was time for another round of "eenie meenie miney moe, catch a senche-raht by the toe" with her portals.

My first pick sent us to the home of the Two-Moons Dance in Reaper's March, where one of many possible futures had played out before me and the future Mane. There we sought the blessings of Jone and Jode, which an old senche-raht assured me would be most beneficial on the long journey ahead. (I did not attempt to catch him by the toe, and thus he had no reason to holler and we remain on good terms.)

The history revealed to us by Mora's magical memory-vision device had more to do with Boethiah than Mora himself. Back in the day when Rid-Thar-ri'Datta became First Mane and declared the Riddle'Thar law of the land, Boethra's followers were understandably peeved about being pushed aside to make way for the new belief system. (And by pushed aside, I mostly mean murdered.) They held out as long as they could, but the old eventually gave way to the new, leaving only ruins and isolated sects behind.

The ancient faithful also left behind a relic of Boethiah, a super special sword that just happened to be one of the magical doodads Torvesard apparently needed to resurrect his Prince. And surprising absolutely no one, we got there just in time to watch him scoop it up and go on his merry way. Leramil reckoned it might just not have been fate's will for us to stop him at that point, but I've heard that one before.

In Grahtwood we ran into Eveli's brother Beragon and a shrine to Azura that was being ransacked by the same group of Wood Elves who made off with that staff from that Orcish training facility. I suppose I should consider it a good thing that the magical lamp doodad Torvesard wanted had already been relocated by its ancient caretakers, but I do have to wonder why Leramil didn't think it was worth checking out that cave to see if we could grab it ourselves. Whatever, I just go where the portals take me.

A book I found in Stonefalls put the Daedric connections more in perspective. Boethiah, Azura, and Mephala, along with being considered the Anticipations of the Tribunal that supplanted them much as the Riddle'Thar usurped Boethiah in Elsweyr, are known to Dunmer as the Good Daedra, because apparently they're better than the other Daedra, especially the Bad Daedra. I'm not going to get into another discussion of whether you can truly call any Daedric Prince "good," but people will believe what they believe, and these particular believers were determined to keep faith with their goddesses no matter what persecution might befall them.

Mephala's doodad was a magical skein that her faithful had once used to free their imprisoned brethren. Once again the relic was nowhere to be seen, which is good because once again Torvesard had beaten us to its former resting place.

This time he at least stuck around long enough for me to make one more attempt to reason with him. It went about the same way as all the others: He means to undo the wrong done to his Prince, no matter what, and he scoffed at my gullible belief in Mora's claims about the threat to reality. And then he was gone again, with only one Daedric doodad in hand, but that would be enough.

With the connection to the Good Daedra more clearly established, we consulted our resident expert on ancient Dunmer religion for clues on where Torvesard might be headed with Boethiah's sword. Curate Gadayn didn't actually know that much about the Daedric Princes, but he was strangely unfazed when Leramil namedropped the Forgotten Prince of Paths. So I guess all of that overcautious safeguarding of fate's secrets doesn't apply to dishing over current events with your crush. Sigh.

This of course means Bastian knows now too, since if we're not caring about preserving secrets anymore there wasn't much reason to keep him out of the loop. At least now he has a better understanding of why I've been so easily annoyed lately. And now he gets to share my concern about how screwed we might be, although he seems to be in the "well, we're not totally screwed yet so there's technically still hope" camp of reassuring platitudes.

And this is where we might as well jump ahead to how screwed we are. We're screwed. We were screwed from the moment that first glyphic became not-unknown. It didn't matter how many Daedric doodads Torvesard did or didn't find. It didn't matter that Mora forgot to close the backdoor to the Mythos that he'd made available to his Good Daedric allies so long ago. It didn't matter that I wasn't more critical of Torvesard's alliance proposal, or that I didn't try to stop him from watching the second vision, or that I blabbed to Leramil and she blabbed to Gadayn and he (sort of) blabbed to Bastian.

Once Torvesard's memories began to stir, once some sliver of awareness had come back into being, Prince Ithelia became real again. And as the bonds of her obscurity weakened, she gained the strength she needed to break free from her prison. Torvesard didn't even need to resurrect his Prince. That had already been done for him.

On one hand, this means the only thing anyone could really blame me for was not noticing the invisible Dremora tagging along when Mora had me check on that first glyphic. On the other hand... well actually there are multiple hands we could consider here. For one thing, would we have been similarly screwed if it had just been me and Mora watching that first vision? Or was Torvesard the only one who could have connected that vision to his lost Prince? Either way, why would Mora have told me to open the forbidden memory cache if that was all it took to undo his ancient safeguards?

But this also means that ever since that moment, we've just been going through the motions thinking we had any chance of stopping the inevitable. I suppose we did do some good work along the way, like preventing the takeover of Apocrypha and saving a bunch of people (and Daedra) from a noxious blight, but my job was to preserve reality, when the entity who supposedly has the power to undo said reality was already alive and awake and in the process of figuring out how to unleash herself on the world.

We have yet to see how that unleashing will manifest. Ithelia's not in her prison, but there's no telling where she might have gone since smashing her way out, and wherever she is she's been quiet about it. Torvesard seemed to think she'd be drawn to familiar places from her past, but he's the only one who would know what that means.

And so once again we're playing catch-up, waiting to see where things will blow up next so we can run over and heroically flail around. But hey, maybe Ithelia will turn out to be super chill, and whenever we finally meet we can just sit around and chat about how not mad she is that she was unfairly locked up for eons.

At least Mora still believes in me, for whatever that's worth. His whole deal has always been that mortals have the potential to influence the outcome of events in ways that he cannot. He can observe the threads of fate and track all the possible ways things could go, but he can't control what happens or even nudge us too far in any given direction. Which means, for better or worse, those of us here on the ground still have agency to make our own choices and deal with our own fallout, even if things conveniently line up perfectly with Mora's predictions in the end.

I guess that's a good thing, since as annoyed as I get about being treated like a tool, it would be infinitely worse if I literally had no choice but to obey orders. And as long as I have a choice, we have a chance. Which... hey, that could be a good battle slogan. I'll need to have that one ready when things go predictably haywire.