In Which Gyllerah Quests through Shadowfen for the Ebonheart Pact

Finally, reaching 2024 with my backlog of ESO posts! This is another one where I’m splitting my usual habit of covering a week’s worth of action in a single ESO post, just because Gyllerah did a lot in the first week of January and I don’t want this post to be enormous. So here we go with the first three days of January, for a much shorter and quicker post.

Main action here: running Shadowfen as part of Cadwell’s Silver, and starting the House of Histories mural hunting plot in Northern Elsweyr.

Play by play

• Play dates: 1/1-1/3/2024
• Session numbers in this run: 321-323

January 1st

• Tried to go to Cyrodiil to buy Symphony of Blades shoulders, but realized I was getting in there too late to shop with the Golden, dang
• Did some antiquities hunting in Coldharbour and Hew’s Bane
• Tried running Karnwasten again to get more pieces of the Big-Eared Ginger Kitten
• Briefly grouped with another player but the damn game crashed on me in combat 😛
• But I did at least get another piece for the kitten pet, and another level up for Ember
• Took Gyllerah and Ember into Stormhold to run the first part of the overall Shadowfen leg of the Ebonheart Pact
• Played through to clearing Ten-Maur-Wolk
• This time through I did the ruins in favor of Lyranth
• Took out the main boss before he could kill any of the prisoners though
• Got a skill point off of that and used it to morph Dawnbreaker for the current solo build I’m using for Gyllerah
• Also rearranged her armor a little to make sure she’s wearing 5 pieces of Winter’s Respite

January 2nd

• Regular writ and master writ action
• Cleared an Alchemy writ, and also boinged around to various places to buy poultry and beets for a Provisioning writ
• Had to boing around some for poultry though
• Hunted a few fellrunners on Summerset, and then boinged to Northern Elsweyr to hunt more of them
• Fought a dragon and died a lot, but got loot! \0/
• Found Vastarie again at the place where her Northern Elsweyr plot occurs, but didn’t want to run that quite yet
• Killed a lot of undead though, and revved up some more of Gyllerah’s current damage skills
• Will swing back later for the Vastarie plot though!
• Did a bunch of fishing on Artaeum, and got two Perfect Roe, which I then sold \0/
• Made nearly 120K fuck yeah

January 3rd

• Writs and antiquities hunting
• Ran quest in Northern Elsweyr in Riverhold to launch bringing the fragments back to the House of Histories, since I wanted the Verkarth fragment out of my inventory
• Spoke with the Khajiit siblings Iraya and Izanji at the House of Histories to take the quest
• On the way out found Mizzik Thunderboots who needed my help for an investigation; took that quest too
• Headed over to a nearby delve though to get the fragment from there
• Discovered Rajhin’s Shadow, who agreed to give me a book of clues to seek the other fragments
• Had to kill a bunch of hostiles and was able to take out the delve boss, anyway
• And realized while in there that I’d already gotten the skyshard in the place
• Returned to the House of Histories to turn in the fragment I’d gotten from the delve, and the Verkarth fragment from before

Commentary

This set of sessions saw Gyllerah making a hard push through the Shadowfen leg of the Ebonheart Pact plotline. And this time through, since this was the second time I did this section of the plot, I decided to run the ruins at Ten-Maur-Wolk in favor of Lyranth–just because Gyllerah, unlike Marwyth, had actually met Lyranth before and gotten her help in Coldharbour. So she was a little more willing to trust this particular dremora… to a point.

That said, Lyranth’s dialogue was rather unsettling. She seemed a trifle obsessed with making off with me! Also, she wanted to kill the prisoners. o.O

Takeaway here: definitely trust a dremora only to a point. And keep in mind that they are not going to be thinking along the same lines as mortals. Even Vestiges who are arguably no longer entirely mortal. Aheh.

I knew before this point about the quest to hunt down the pieces of the mural in Northern Elsweyr; Paul had picked this up and mentioned it to me. But I only just as of these sessions started it myself! Glad I finally did so, this will be a nice excuse to explore more of Northern Elsweyr.

And I think I do like the general category of “go find X number of thing and bring them back to location Y” type quests. Just because so far, the story around each of them has been interesting. Northern Elsweyr’s got the murals one, there’s one in Murkmire with tablets, there’s one in Clockwork City with construct parts, and there’s one in Orsinium with the relics. And I’m sure there are others I don’t know about yet! Lots of reasons to go wandering all over the world.

I’m wryly amused, though, that the murals one came with an encounter with Rajhin’s Shadow. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that an Elsweyr quest is going to involve Rajhin somehow! Though I’d expect actual Khajiit to be even less surprised, and yet. Iraya and Izanji seemed rather shocked when I told them Rajhin’s Shadow claimed he’d hidden all the pieces well. Snerk. So I guess I’ll see eventually how this plays out!

I’ll have more to say about Mizzik Thunderboots in a forthcoming post, but for now I’ll say that his name is kind of awesome, and so is his dress sense. Clearly Razum-dar has some competition in the general category of Stylish Khajiit. 😀

Next time

Gyllerah’s next post will feature fighting pirates on Auridon, more Ebonheart Pact action (including Gyllerah setting to see firsthand what her own alliance is doing in Shadowfen), more of the Necrom plot, and some Undaunted pledge fun.

Screenshots

Editing to add

• 10/21/2024: Converted gallery to native WordPress one.