The Dockworker 13: Mother Nature's Recipes for Disaster

• Posted by Clement Bilhorn June 30, 2012 - 499 views

  Melancholy hangs in the air as I leave the slain dragon's bones and return to the mill. Its inhabitants being dead, I suppose the least I can do is loot the citizens' homes and make sure that stuff doesn't go to waste.

  

  Burdened with the meager spoils of victory--the millers only had about a hundred septims between them--I continue on my way toward the swamp where the Eldergleam lies. While passing south of Windhelm, I stumble upon a large group of skeevers.

  

  I help myself to their souls and consider dumping them into the waterway, with Windhelm being downstream and all, but I decide against it. My friends of weeks past at the dock won't appreciate it, however amusing the sick and dying Noses are. Not everyone is as singularly entertained by the suffering of Noses as I am.

  Just then, a ghostly roar echoes from all around me, floating in the cold air. I climb a hill to try to spot the dragon, glad to maybe get the drop on one for once. I see it lazily circling a nearby hill, and prepare to make my attack.

  

  Not that one can be sneaky on a flying lizard with eyes the size of my fists, but at least it won't be a complete ambush like it's been in the past.

  Nope, no surprises here.

  

  Oh, COME ON!

  I ready myself for battle, when I'm suddenly sent unceremoniously tumbling over the nearest ridge by a stampeding mountain of muscle and fur. The mammoth barrels into the first dragon to land, tearing it apart. The second dragon lands beside its fallen ally and lets loose a blast of fire, torching a nearby bear, but the mammoth simply annihilates him as well. 

  I feel very small, suddenly.

  

  Can I be Mammothborn now? They seem to be higher up on the foodchain. 

  Although they could just be holding a grudge against them. Maybe there's a city, far far away, where dragons rule over a snow-bitten pile of bricks and despairing, shabby mammoths work the docks. Maybe one of them decided, one day, to rise up and fight back against his oppressors, utilizing previously undiscovered talents of stealth and trickery.

  But more likely, the mammoths just don't like being hunted.

  

  That being the case, the Whiterun cult had better watch its back. Those mammoths'll get you.

  

  Anyways, dragon-mammoth interactions aside, I find myself to the Eldergleam's sanctuary in short order. As I gaze, slack-jawed, at its splendor, I can't help but think maybe it wasn't worth losing Assfalloff for this. The trees are pretty, but so what? I want my horsey back.

  

  I traipse up to the three and plunge Nettlebane into its bark, perhaps a bit vindictively. Tree spirits of some brand emerge from all over the place and slay the nature-lovers camping out at the bottom. I fell the spriggans with my fiery bow, but I'm too late. 

  

  For once, I feel genuinely bad for a portion of the substantial trail of bodies I've left in my wake. These people didn't attack me. Half of them weren't even Noses. Because of something I did, they're dead. The total death toll for this ridiculous tree sap? One. Well, five, if you count the four people who died in addition to Assfalloff.

  To my surprise, I meet some more nature-lovers outside. I think they're a bit exposed in more ways than one, but I reckon my hanging around isn't going to make them any safer. I need to get away from people for a while. Especially the weird ones.

  

  I turn to the south, toward Riften, feeling a need to return to where I'm most comfortable. Riften's always been good to me, its Stormcloak affiliation, skeever-infested sewers, and psychotic orphans notwithstanding. But man, that's quite a climb ahead of me.

  

  Halfway up the rise, I stop to enjoy the view, as I am wont to do. Yes, Windhelm threatens to spoil it for me, but it's pretty much drowned out by everything else.

  

  I'm jumped by a bear while my back is turned, so I suppose it's time to keep moving.

  I crest the mountain after a few more minutes, only to be confronted by another thieving Khajit.

  

  Several waves of deja vu crash over me--that fateful day when I first set off for the Eldergleam is replaying itself. Highway robbery, dragons near Riften...it's all happening again. 

  Once more, I feel listless and purposeless, adrift in a world that cares more for old trees and angry mammoths than it does for people like me. All my work for the Legion, so important yesterday, now seems so far away.

  

  Good thing Riften's closer. Time to get my thief on again.