Sheogorath's Queen

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Through A Nightmare, Darkly

The guards told me that if I was heading out for a walk then by the Nine Divines, stay on the road. I did stay on the road, for the most part, but that didn’t stop me from bumping into three trolls on my way to Bravil. I tried shooting arrows at them, but their health regenerated quikly so I ran my arse off until I came to the city and a few of the guards helped me deal with them.

Inside, I heard some murmurings about an Argonian named Kud-Ei who was looking for someone to help her find her friend, Henantier. It turns out that Henantier has been experimenting with magic and got himself stuck inside his own nightmares. Guess who has to go inside his head and help him wake up?

His dream is like the house he’s sleeping in excepted twisted up and mashed together with cave and Ayleid ruin entrances. We need to go through each of these doors, find a piece of his essence, and once we return them to him he’ll be able to escape. The first three doors are the test of patience, in which you have to figure out the safe way across a series of traps (spoiler: you can just run over them), the test of perception, in which you have you watch out for pressure plates on the floor, and the test of courage, n which we have to do a lot of swimming underwater.

Imperial city

“Ah ha!” I said while playing Oblivion in research for this article, “That’s what I call a basin!”.  This was of course a lie.  It’s 2020 as I write this and I still don’t really know what a basin is.  I sure as hell don’t know what “The Nibenay Basin” is either, but it’s pretty nonetheless.  Okay so I’m mostly joking, I know what a basin is, but like the Nibenay Valley before it, this “Basin” doesn’t really have a ton of defining features that you could identity it by.  If anything it’s mostly dominated by small lakes and thick woods, both of which I always assumed weren’t exactly “Basin” material. It’s becoming a cliche for these posts to just be a more confused version of me reminiscing about a world I already spent thousands of hours exploring and therefore know well to begin with, but hey I’m not gonna stop.  There’s a ton of fun areas to explore and things to see in The Nibenay Basin.  As I mentioned before, much of it is light woods snaked by rivers and dotted with small lakes (my favorite being Lake Popped, which I’ve actually written a whole thing about before!).  There’s not a ton in the way of civilization, Cheydinhal is further to the north and Bravil is….well it’s Bravil.  There is Cropsford!  Which is a favorite location of mine in the game.  As part of a quest, Cropsford is the only town you see built right in front of your eyes present in the game.  Usually thing’s are just destroyed or torn down, so it’s really nice to be able to see someone be built up from nowhere.

Cropsford isn’t exactly a bustling metropolis, but it is yours!

I mentioned Lake Popped before but it’s another highlight for me for sure.  It’s just a small lake, barely deep enough to swim in even, but it holds a lot of significance for me.  It helps that on it’s shores is a deadric shrine and therefore a great quest!  The Reed River criss-crosses through one half of the Basin, which it iself is split from the Nibenay Valley by the Niben river (which will become a less common thing from this point I promise).  I feel like I’m doing a piss poor job communicating that Cyrodiil is a lot more than a generic fantasy forest with these posts, but we just aren’t there yet I swear.  That said, even if it was i’d write about every section of it anyway.  If there’s one generic fantasy forest that deserves to have it’s stories told, it’s this one.

So because quarantine, I started to play Oblivion again, to finally have a good save of my HoK Elyn Vien! She used to be called Corva Vesco, first made when I was 12, and more edgy looking, but her concept is more or less the same!

“What’s this? The White-Gold Tower rendered in miniature? Odd that it doesn’t include the city itself. Doubly odd that it’s giving off such a strong magical aura. What function did this serve? And what’s this light radiating from the top?”