Hour 9: The Hidden Twilight

I enter the foreboding, inky plane of Oblivion once more. Progressing through this dungeon is similar to the last one, but takes quite a bit longer - the best part of an hour, in fact, as there's more to it (8 chapters, vs 5 previously), with a bit of backtracking required, and a few point-blank ambushes by Seekers which cause me to have to reload a fair bit. Essentially there are a few chapters which load up with a Seeker already attacking you. Since one of their spells kills me in one it, this then relies on me dodging out of the way instantly, which is sometimes literally impossible - I die as soon as the area loads - and sometimes a skin-of-my-teeth thing. I then have to spam summons in the desperate hope that the Seeker shifts its attention on to them.

Still, I progress bit-by-bit, and make my way to the final reward, picking up an obscene amount of arcane loot along the way, which I eagerly sell off to my on-demand Dremora merchant from the previous Black Book:

It's pretty weird to see what essentially seems to be a Dremora civilian. In Oblivion they seemed to basically be crazed beserkers, literal demons which were analogous to Bloodletters from 40k.  They are Daedra, but they must have some kind of society as well. I'm nit sure whether it makes much sense, but it's incredibly useful having this guy around to buy all my stuff whenever I need it.

The reward at the end is, like all the others, a choice between three options: some kind of tentacle attack, freezing an enemy for 30 seconds, or fully healing health, mana, and stamina. The last one seems kind of useless for me, since I either have full health or am dead - there's usually not much in-between - and I have a large pool of mana which recharges very quickly. I don't know how good the tentacle attack is, but being able to freeze someone sound like it could be useful if I need to get away from a powerful enemy, so I choose that for now.

On leaving Tel Mithrin, a courier arrives with two messages - one from the Dunmer carrying out that dig I funded, and one from the Jarl of Falkreath inviting me to visit. I wanted to make a brief visit to the mainland anyway to train in Alteration (I need to improve my feeble defences), so a visit to Falkreath sounds like a good idea. Before I leave, though, I'll see how that Dunmer's getting on with the dig.