In Which Kendis Heads to Solstheim

Side questing for some of this pair of Kendis sessions, and then heading to Solstheim to start the Dragonborn plot!

Play by play

• Play dates: 8/16, 8/19/2023
• Session numbers in this run: 77-78

Wednesday the 16th

• Did a lot of boinging around to clear the slate for going to Solstheim, so going to do this by place rather than chronological order

Riften

• Started here
• Got courier with quest to bring Viriya her building materials
• Came back later with those and gave them to Viriya to build her stall
• Sold a bunch of things to various merchants, to get rid of building materials I knew I wasn’t going to use
• Checked outside the gate for Khajiit
• Yngvi and guards fought a frostbite spider and immediately after that, a bear
• We also got a flyby dragon

Built houses

• Gathered all my supplies and did a building check in all three houses
• Made materials to bring to Viriya for her stall in the Riften market

Whiterun

• Sold stuff to assorted merchants
• Stopped in Breezehome and saw the kids fighting again
• HI RULNIK, I gotta go to Solstheim and kick Miraak’s ass, please take care of this place and the kids while I’m gone, be back as soon as there has been an ass-kicking love you baaaaaaaaaai

Windhelm

• Sold things to assorted merchants, then came back later to go to Solstheim!

College of Winterhold

• Since I leveled up to 60 in the midst of boinging around, came in to get a round of training: 1 round from Faralda, 3 from Colette, 1 from Tolfdir
• Sold Urag the Dragon Elder Scroll
• Made a bunch of frost, fire, and void salts at the Atronach Forge just because I could, and to burn through a bunch of unused petty soul gems
• Okay so y’all I gotta leave Yngvi here for a while please take care of the unicorn, and consider building him a stable mmkay? It IS cold as balls outside

Fort Dawnguard

• Boinged here mostly to give Dexion the other two Elder Scrolls, but also sold assorted items to Gunnar and Sorine
• Hi, love you guys, please don’t get killed by vampires while I go kick Miraak’s ass
• HI SERANA I would take you with me, but Lydia has dibs and there won’t be room for three on the boat, baaaaaaai

Ysgramor’s Tomb

• Still couldn’t get a quest out of Farkas to de-wolf him so fuck it, I guess the boys are going to stay wolfy
• I, on the other hand, took Lyds to Ysgramor’s tomb to de-wolf myself; ducked in there and chucked a witch head into the fire
• Lyds and I took out my wolf spirit, and I think it’s kinda hilarious that I soul-trapped it, more on this below

Level ups

• Leveled up to 60, took Health bump and Dwarven Smithing perk, so I could work my way back up to Ebony (which i’ll need for stalhrim)

Solstheim

• Headed to Solstheim with Lydia; landed in the evening, early enough to shop with Glover, Milore, and Fethis
• Investigated the Earth Stone and had initial conversation with Neloth
• Also went over to investigate the dead jeweler to get that done; killed one of the reavers myself, Lyds took out the other one
• Went to the Retching Netch to rent a room and get the whole “get transported to one of the stones” thing done–but this took three tries :/
• First try, got dumped at the Wind Stone where the Skaal were working
• Hoofed it out of there, and stopped at the Skaal Village
• Discovered that I cannot interact with Storn until I come back with Frea; he just throws a line about not speaking because focus is needed to keep the barrier up around the village
• Hoofed it from there past Bujold’s Retreat; made it to the Sun Stone and Tel Mithryn
• Revered Dragon showed up just as I was trying to listen in on the convo between Talvas and Varona
• Then my game crashed, and I was thrown back to the Netch >_<
• Tried to sleep again; this time landed at the Sun Stone
• Revered Dragon showed up again as I went over to discover Tel Mithryn
• But this time as i was fighting it, something pissed off Talvas and made him start throwing fireballs at me :O
• The dragon killed Tel Mithryn’s cook Ulves, and I saw Varona in bleedout pose not far away
• Saw Lyds getting into it with Talvas
• And since this was generally fucked, I rolled back to the Netch again, this time on purpose
• Attempt number three landed me at the Beast Stone where the rieklings were
• Some rieklings actually killed one of the cultists!
• This also put me just down the hill from Miraak’s temple, so started running it, and had the initial meeting with Frea
• Stopped partway through and saved until next time

Saturday the 19th

• Picked up again in the middle of running the Temple of Miraak
• Killed once by large herd of draugr shortly after that
• Switched out of mage mode and back into dragonscale armor
• That got me through the rest of the temple okay, played pretty much as per previous playthroughs
• Oh hey look, a mysterious Black Boo, imma read this, what could possibly go wrong?
• OH SHIT that’s what could go wrong, um, yeah, HI MIRAAK
• So uh hey Frea and Lyds, funny thing just happened, guess who I saw!
• Yeah we probably better go ask your dad WTF, Frea, good idea
• Returned to Skaal Village with Frea and talked to her father
• Got directive to go to Saering’s Watch, which I proceeded to do
• Killed Deathbrand pirates on the way
• Did not hit the adjacent camp to start the netch leather armor quest, may or may not do that later
• Also killed a couple of trolls, some horkers, and a random lurker guardian
• Had to backtrack a bit to find the way up to Saering’s Watch
• Got ahead of Lydia, but she caught up as I started fighting the dragon
• It got some fire breath right up in my face but i was heavily laden with resist fire potions, so threw some arrows in its face till it died
• Miraak sniped the soul but kind of delayed, I saw a subtitle of him throwing a Shout, but no sign of the dragon burning?
• Went oh well and went up to get the word for Bend Will off the word wall
• Heard a draugr in the distance still throwing Shouts, but not sure what exactly it was fighting since the dragon was dead and Lydia was with me; maybe it was fighting ethereal Miraak?
• Started heading back towards the Wind Stone
• A few minutes later, as I was crossing the river, finally got the message that Miraak had taken the dragon’s soul–so some script or other clearly got delayed somehow (P.S. Fucking Miraak!)
• Reached the Wind Stone and Bend-Will’d it
• HI SKAAL please go home now, because making you build this shrine is bullshit, and I’m here to put a stop to it
• Went back to the village to check in; it was very late, but I woke up Storn anyway to tell him I’d done it
• Got directive to go talk to Neloth
• For now though boinged back to Raven Rock to prepare for other local plots
• Did a lot of smithing and improved several weapons and pieces of armor I was carrying
• Did some alchemy to clear out a bunch of ingredients
• Waited a couple of hours until the merchants were out, and then sold all three of them a bunch of things
• Got Fethis’ quest for the East Empire pendants
• Saved there until next time

Pre-Solstheim

On the 16th, I did a whole bunch of boinging around to various places to try to clear the slate as much as possible before heading off to Solstheim to run Dragonborn. And I didn’t quite clear out everything as much as I wanted.

I’ve run out of fucks to give, though, about de-wolfing Vilkas and Farkas. I never did get Farkas into a state where he’d give me the quest to de-wolf him, since I have to do him first. But I don’t like the Companion side quests enough to keep doing them. But I did want to de-wolf myself, so went ahead and did that. I’m not interested enough in what interaction I could get with the werewolves on Solstheim to make her hold out as a werewolf any longer.

De-wolfing me did result in one little bit of LOL, though. When Lydia and I killed Kendis’ wolf spirit, I saw that I explicitly soul-trapped it! The lore about lycanthropy says that it is an affliction of the spirit, but up until now, I hadn’t really taken it to literally mean a wolf-spirit is shoved into your body along with your actual soul. I’d more thought it to mean, at least when doing the “toss the witch head into the fire” ritual, that your lycanthropy was magically pulled out of your body in the form of a wolf-spirit you could then kill.

But then I soul-trapped Kendis’ wolf-spirit! Which implies that either she was carrying around a literal wolf-spirit in her, or else the ritual made her lycanthropy into a close enough facsimile of a “soul” that it could be shoved into a soul gem. Option one seems simpler here, though I could see either being within the abilities of Hircine. Either one, too, would raise the question of where exactly the wolf-spirit comes from. Does Hircine spin up a new wolf-spirit every time a lycanthrope is made? Where does the essence of that spirit come from? Is it spun off of Hircine himself? Are all lycanthropes in Tamriel carrying around little bits of Hircine in them?

And is Kendis now carrying around a bit of Hircine in one of her soul gems? It’s an interesting thought to ponder!

I also didn’t make it back to Viriya to resolve her “building a stall” quest, but I should swing back to say hi to her, just to pick up that enchanted Crabber’s Charm she’ll give me. That is useful. But now that I have a couple of enchanted items that give me Waterbreathing, it’s not a high priority. So this’ll probably wait until the next time I explicitly need to return to the mainland, maybe when Neloth might send me off to get him the briar heart he wants?

And, Solstheim

Since i wasn’t really giving much of a fuck about what leftover side quests I had in the journal, I decided to head on over to Raven Rock towards the end of the session on the 16th.

And that proved unexpectedly challenging! Because it took me three tries to do the thing where I sleep and then get transported out to one of the All-Maker Stones.

First time through, I actually learned something new: that if I go to the Skaal Village before I run Miraak’s temple with Frea, I cannot interact with her father by the fire. I can try to talk to him, but he just throws a line about needing to focus in order to maintain the barrier around the village. Good to know!

Second time through I learned that getting into a dragon fight while Talvas and Varona are having their initial conversation by Tel Mithryn is highly problematic. Particularly if I summon a storm atronach, and/or Lydia is using something that can do fire damage, and/or I’m trying to do ranged magic. Because something happened to piss off Talvas and make him start attacking me. I don’t know whether I hit him, my atronach did, or Lydia did. All I know is, he started chucking fireballs at me, and yikes.

And since I really didn’t want to piss off the entire population of Tel Mithryn, I had to roll back from that on purpose. Probably a good thing Neloth wasn’t outside, he probably would have killed me.

Had a bit of oddness with Miraak sniping the soul of the dragon at Saering’s Watch, as I noted above. I didn’t actually see confirmation of this, but I kind of suspect that the last surviving draugr at Saering’s Watch may have attacked Ethereal Miraak. Which may have delayed the swiping of the dragon soul? It took a few minutes after I left Saering’s Watch to actually get the message about that happening!

And later, once I finally cleared the Wind Stone and returned to the Skaal Village, I had to wake Storn up to report in. I always feel a little guilty about waking up NPCs in the middle of the night! And in this particular case, more so. I kind of figure Storn probably did in fact clue in that I’d been successful. He likely felt it when the Wind Stone was cleared, which is why Frea was probably able to convince him to go to bed. The man had to be exhausted after an unknown number of days on end keeping that barrier up around the village.

But that said, I also figure he’d probably want my confirmation! So I woke him up anyway. Especially since the Skaal Village has nowhere for me to sleep and I didn’t have any camping supplies!

(I’ll need to fix that problem once I get custody of Severin Manor, if not before.)

Next time

Time to hit the Raven Rock Mine and Bloodskal Barrow, and get myself into a position to queue up the assassination plot after that!

Currently not feeling like Kendis will do the cult of Almalexia plot. I’m kind of feeling like I may just do the most critical stuff for the Dragonborn plotline with her, plus the most critical side plots (like, say, the assassination plot just so I can get Severin Manor). Since I have three playthroughs in progress right now, I’m kind of wanting to get Kendis’ over with just to clear the slate.

But we’ll see. I reserve the right to change my mind!

Screenshots

No screenshots this time.