In Which Merawen Clears Benkongerike and Slays the Dragon Viinturuth

This was a shorter session than expected for a play session on a Saturday night–in no small part because I’d had to work Saturday afternoon, and I was pretty fried. If I’m yawning my damn fool head off every couple of minutes, no matter how much I want to, I can’t really effectively stay up until stupid-o’clock playing Skyrim!

So I only stayed up until slightly-foolish-o’clock. 😉

Highlights

• Play date: 10/2/2021
• Session number in this run: 63
• Cleared chest outside Benkongerike
• Cleared Benkongerike itself; got word for Cyclone Shout
• Read Untold Legends Black Book, and took the Secret Servant power
• Fast traveled back to Raven Rock via potion of Fortify Carry Weight because overloaded (though lol next time I should remember I can call that Secret Servant)
• Crafting break! Made a lot of potions to burn through stock of ingredients
• Leveled up to 64
• Grabbed a bunch of stuff to bring back to the mainland for mage college training trip and checking in with the family
• Arvak’d my way to Windhelm
• Got repro of the weird voice in Windhelm! Dialogue line seems to include name of the dragon Viinturuth
• Sold a bunch of stuff to Niranye, Oengul, Quintus, also to Revyn in the Gray Quarter
• That whittled down the inventory enough I could potion my way to Heljarchen
• Dropped off a bunch of books there, which let me get back down to a point of being able to fast travel
• Next stop: Honningbrew Meadery, where I sold more things
• Stopped in Whiterun and made some ebony and elven arrows with the ebony I had, and also with moonstone bought at Warmaiden’s
• Sold potions to Arcadia
• Boinged to Solitude
• Played with the girls
• Sold stuff to Sayma, Angeline, Radiant Raiment
• Also bought some more Hammerfell style things
• Boinged to mage college; got training and sold stuff
• Boinged back down to Windhelm to investigate this Viinturuth question
• Did not repro the voice inside Windhelm, but did find the dragon mound west of Anga’s Mill and oh hey look Alduin was resurrecting Viinturuth
• Hi dragon, welcome back to life for the next five minutes! I brought you a present, they’re arrows!
• And fucking Miraak took Viinturuth’s soul
• Boinged back to Raven Rock from there
• Did a bit more crafting of potions but also just cooking of foods to see what I could make
• Saved for the night because exhausted

Commentary

Normally for a Saturday play session I’m at liberty to stay up until the wee hours of the morning playing Skyrim. This time, not so much. Which is what happens when your day job asks you to work on a Saturday, after a week that had already been stressful and exhausting!

Close to 1am I was yawning my damn fool head off every couple of minutes, which made me reluctantly admit that no matter how much I wanted to stay up and play, it just wasn’t going to happen.

So I only had time to do a few things in this session. I did at least clear the Benkongerike dungeon, and read the Black Book in there–the Untold Legends one, the one which lets you get the snarky Dremora butler to summon and carry stuff for you for 15 seconds, which I have got to try this game because I never did try it with Alarrah. This may be helpful next time I get myself overloaded clearing a dungeon!

And clearing Benkongerike did pretty much mean, taking out a bunch of rieklings. I continue to feel vaguely guilty about that, as they’re small and kind of cute, and it’s really like poking puppies with my sword! On the other hand, they’re also vicious little fighters, particularly in groups. They may be cute, but they are not harmless.

The other big interesting thing I managed to pull off in this session was solving the mystery of the weird booming voice I’d heard in Windhelm–because this time, it happened again.

I’d turned on subtitles in my game for the express purpose of seeing if I could get the actual text of the line I heard, so I could search for it. I didn’t actually get a subtitle for this though–but this time I also realized that the first few syllables of it totally sounded like a dragon name. And I managed to figure out from searching that the name I was hearing, Viinturuth, was absolutely an in-game dragon.

Moreover, he was a dragon Alduin resurrects from a mound west of Anga’s Mill, which is the mill a little ways west of Windhelm.

This Reddit thread here let me actually figure out the exact line I was hearing:

“Viinturuth zil gro dovah ulse!”

Now the weird parts of this are:

1. The dragon mound in question isn’t exactly right outside of Windhelm, you do need to go a little ways west to get to it, and you have to go past Anga’s Mill first. So it seems buggy behavior to me that I was picking up on this line of Alduin’s from that far away.
2. It also seems weird to me that I heard it twice? Unless that particular dragon resurrection can’t finish cleanly unless the player is actually there?

Dara and Paul both agreed that Windhelm clearly has great acoustics. ;D

Dara also proposed to me that you could hand-wave this in-character by the Dragonborn hearing this line from as far away as Windhelm as a psychic thing, not an actually audible thing. Which I could kind of buy, being that the player is after all supposed to be a legendary dragon hunter. It would also explain why nobody in Windhelm freaked the fuck out at this voice booming all over the city!

It does raise the interesting question though as to whether I could hear a similar line if I’m close enough to other dragon mounds when Alduin resurrects the dragons in them. I’ve only caught him doing it for one other dragon–Vuljotnaak, the one near Rorikstead. I do not remember if Alduin uttered a similar line at that point, but it certainly seems probable he did.

I will have to look out for this in my third playthrough (because there will be a third playthrough). I’ve encountered almost all the named dragons in the game with Merawen’s run, at this point, minus the one down in Blackreach. So I don’t think I’ll be able to look out for this again with her.

Miraak sniped me on the dragon soul absorption, as he often does when you’re running the Dragonborn plot. Fucking Miraak. But I do like the line he threw me when he did that:

“Do you ever wonder if it hurts? To have one’s soul ripped out like that?”

Which… legit question, actually! And while the game does expect you to go around killing all the dragons, I like that the question gets raised. Even if it’s raised by the bad guy of this plot. It’s a question worth asking, and I think it’ll be additional argument for why Merawen won’t be down with killing Paarthurnax when I return to the main plot finally.

Last thing I want to mention is, when I popped over to Solitude, I took the time to buy a Hammerfell garb outfit, in the more standard colors, just to see what it looked like on Merawen with the two examples of hoods I have (the red one and the gray one). Bought a pair of Redguard boots as well. I have decided I really like the look on her.

I’m going to keep the Redguard-style clothes around, with an eye to possibly enchanting them up and having them as an option in sessions where I feel like trying to go armorless and see if I can throw magic around for both offense and defense. But before I do that, I gotta get my Enchanting perks up to the point of being able to do double enchantments!

Next time

The final phase of the Kolbjorn Barrow plot (and its Black Book) are still pending. So is Vahlok’s Tomb. I do want to hit both places, just because there is good action to be had!

As my next session will be a Sunday session, it’ll probably also be short. So I’ll probably hit Kolbjorn Barrow. Anything past that will be bonus!

Screenshots

Editing to add

• 11/17/2023: Fixed missing gallery, and added a session number.
• 10/4/2024: Added play date to the highlights section. Converted gallery to a native WordPress one.