The Quest That Breaks Skyrim's Unwritten Rules
"I feel the hunger inside of you. Gnawing at you. You see the dead and your mouth grows wet. Your stomach growls,” the voice says, floating from the darkness of the crypt.
The stone Halls of the Dead in the dwarven city of Markarth
“It's all right. I will not shun you for what you are. Stay. I will tell you everything you have forgotten.”
So Eola, leader of a cannibal coven, makes herself known to you in Skyrim’s daedric quest of Namira. Hers is an invitation to corruption and debasement: to sully yourself in ritual murder and feast.
My relationship to Bethesda’s flagship title, regularly repackaged and ported to new platforms, is… complex. For many years, I have used it as a litmus test for how deep a depressive episode I’ve sunken into. When I feel compelled to reinstall it, to sink more hours into its endless generative quests in a vegetative stupor, that is my signal to myself that I have receded to low ebb. On that trajectory, I’ll soon find myself rewatching Devilman Crybaby just to feel something.
This time, I am telling myself, it is different. I haven’t played it in survival mode before, you see, and this veneer of novelty and semblance of verisimilitude will surely paper over the habituated ruts in my behavior. Never mind how deep and well-worn those grooves are; the yawning precipice over which I dangle.
I only installed the game to replay this one quest, but it’s taken me some hours to reach this point. You see, I had to gather and cook myself some meals; to refine my starting equipment; and to delve through the first few dungeons and main mission quests.
The survival mechanics are an interesting wrinkle: after I slay my first dragon for the Jarl of Whiterun and overload myself with its pilfered hide and bone, I spend a long, cold, overburdened night trudging across the plain back to the city. The cold bites away my well-being, and as I grow steadily more exhausted, my vision blurs. By the time I stagger into the Jarl’s mead hall, I truly feel on the verge of collapse after my long and arduous endeavor. It is a grounding decompression, after the heightened glory of a first true battle and victory over the dragons that shall so come to haunt such playthroughs as these.
And in reward? I am assigned Lydia, long-suffering housecarl, that I may never have to bear such a dragonbone burden again. Henceforth, my trusty external inventory will be responsible for such. So long to being a lone pilgrim, trudging wearily across the open heath in the chill night air. It’s time for me to stop larping that I’m in The Long Dark and listen to such eternal barks as the put-upon, “I am sworn to carry your burdens.”
Before, during, between and after I sank uncounted hours into the self-abnegation box that is Skyrim, I devoted myself to other gaming fixations, and reveled in being the focal key to these worlds: the axis around which quest and plot revolved. Commander Shepard, with her band of trusty companions, here to save the galaxy time and time again; Hawke, the Champion of Kirkwall, sassing qunari, templar and mage with equal contempt before cracking their heads together in varying vain attempts to steer them away from self-destruction.
Shepard and Hawke, poster children for Bioware’s own major franchises of the era, are the nearest point of comparison to Skyrim’s Dovahkiin, or Oblivion’s Champion of Cyrodiil, or Morrowind’s Nerevarine. But… we see these characters over the third person shoulder, in combat. They interrogate dialogue wheels with camera shot reverse shot. We see their faces in exaggerated expression and gesticulation. We take ownership and pride in having picked the highlighted dialogue option that will most entertainingly sass/bully/flatter that two-dimensional putz across the cutscene from us.
Commander Shepard, bloodied, slumped next to Anderson
Bioware and Bethesda, titans of an era of the western roleplaying game: each churning out power fantasies of wish fulfillment and instanced liberation from consequence. The first person camera of The Elder Scrolls games highlights a different set of priorities from Betheda’s sibling studio. Dialogue options are for receiving lore dumps and quest objectives even more nakedly. My voice, when I may speak, is only in harsh Shout: a Fus Ro Dah as iconic in its implementation of ragdoll physics as Half Life 2’s gravity gun.
Smaller names haunt me: ghosts from half-finished gaming titles, more vivid than the heroes of Bethesda’s titles frozen in perpetual abeyance. Will Rook or Alette know how their banner’s saga ends? What waits for Conway and Shannon at the end of Route Zero?
I know who my Nerevarine is, when I play Morrowind. If I continue this blog for any length of time, I’m sure you will have difficulty avoiding hearing about Almaia Indoril, outlander returning to the land of her ancestors to discover her fate. I have not returned to Oblivion in a decade or longer: that vein was too heavily tapped, and long since ran dry. But… who is my Dovahkiin?
There are few stories left to discover for me in the world of Skyrim. I could win the war for the racist locals or the corrupt imperial legion. Here, stranger, you walked into my life? Here’s my nephew’s heart’s dream to fulfill: simply bring me a small fortune in alchemy ingredients, and I will reward you with a level-appropriate pittance of gold. I could replay a guild questline, or even pursue a DLC I haven’t seen the end of.
But… why? To what end? Whence springeth my motivation to do so–extrinsic motivation of slightly more gold, slightly better gear, slightly more inventory clutter? To have a guildmaster’s title in a hall full of folk who joined their cause before me, and who might have one or two canned lines acknowledging my change in station?
The Elder Scrolls hero is, by design, a blank cipher. You begin in prison and are released to pursue some fated destiny: to paraphrase another near neighbor-in-games of Bioshock, "There is always a lighthouse, there's always a man, there's always a city."
You might as well be a perfect, glistening sphere as you glide through this land: every crevice and irregularity burnished smooth, every erg and increment of characterization and self-expression sand-blasted away. You are a break in the fabric of reality: a disjoinder; a vessel of linear blade-logic; a singularity that this world contorts itself around to serve up an endless buffet of opportunity. Drown in this surfeit until it renders itself meaningless.
You are not a character inhabiting the world in an Elder Scrolls game, but rather an isekai hero, injected into the world without past or context. There is no question of “you” raised by the text. Every point of friction that you could get hung up on has been pulped into pablum, that you might be spoon fed this homogenous experience all the easier. You went to a place and killed the bandit lord/lich/nature spirit/goblin chief of the week, congratulations.
Every hook and thorn of personhood, of your own stakes and personal motive, has been erased–but one.
"You were young when you first tasted human flesh, weren't you?” Eola cajoles you in the darkness beneath the tombs of Markarth. “A brother or sister had died? An accident, of course. Then the hunger set in. Curiosity. What's the harm in just one bite? It's okay, now. You've found a friend who understands you. You can let go of your guilt."
Eola, in the Halls of the Dead, alluding to repressing memories
For all the horror of what she implies–how does she know this? What grants her and nearly her alone the power to speak to your history? Is she but an unreliable narrator; a cold reading huckster, projecting her own deal onto any likely warm body that wanders into her demesne?
Eola speaks with certainty. She beckons me to the dark altar, where the spell-befuddled priest lies waiting for my dagger’s edge. She watches me in the dark, licking her lips with anticipation.
I have taken her sacrament before, for a gaudy trinket from her dark mistress. I have killed her before; turned, struck her down, and uprooted her little familial coven with righteous indignation.
Who am I? Dragonborn, the world cries out from every direction. Dragonborn, the Greybeards bellow distantly from High Hrothgar–I may yet visit their abode. Millions have sat before their own screens in this very place, to turn left or right. To no great end. Little difference, either way.
Today my knife slices home, and the priest jerks before going limp: from rigidity in a stilted pose of simulated slumber, to a ragged, flopped, drifting doll. It is not for Eola or Namira that I dip my head to the carcass, the red and raw imagined meat, for to wet my lips. It is for the promise of some self that precedes awakening in a wooden cart, rumbling down the road toward an executioner’s block in Helgen.