The red marker is her location. The marker near the lake is a Daedric Shrine which I haven't been to yet, only been told about, so I can't fast-travel there. There is nothing to the south for miles - you can't see that from the map of course. So the nearest location I can travel to is Fort Magia, then it's on foot from there onwards. It's not all that far, of course - part of the wonder of Oblivion is that it makes the continent feel absolutely vast, when in reality you can walk most places in a matter of minutes - but it's still a fair old way, especially considering I am assailed at several points along the way by wolves and bears. In any case, it's a long way for Woodley, so although it only takes a few minutes it feels like an epic journey.
At one point I am attacked by goblins. I summon my skeleton to battle. Look how huge this goblin is:
That's a human skeleton it's fighting, so that makes the goblin at least six feet tall, if not more. I feel it's a bit silly - the larger greenskins should be 'hobgoblins' or something.
When I reach the witch's cabin, she give me a veritable shopping list of ingredients to find for her to make the 'cure vampirism' potion. Blood of an Argonian, ashes of a powerful vampire, and several plants and herbs. I decide to get the vampire ashes first - I must head to an abandoned, sunken fortress far to the east. The distance from the witch's cabin to this fortress makes the distance pictured on the earlier map look tiny. It's easily twice as far, and there are literally no waypoints to fast-travel to on the way. I must never have been to this region of the country before.
Along the way to the fortress I fight several imps. I actually love coming across imps now - I treat them like a mini-game. They always engage from a distance with ranged spells (often fireballs), so
I do likewise and we play a game of 'dodge the fireball' - it's fun to try to land a direct hit on them whilst also strafing to avoid their spells and trying to factor in the imps strafing as well.
On the way to the fortress I see a Daedric Shrine map symbol, so diced to have a look. It's a shrine to Peyrite and the worshippers are stood in a circle in a trance:
What's that,man Argonian? Don't mind if I cut you with this enchanted dagger to collect a blood sample, do you? No? Fortunately neither the Argonian nor any of the other worshippers noticed me stab him, so deep was their trance.
The fortress is a pushover, with just a couple of relatively weak vampires within and a boss vampire at the end. The strangest thing is, once I enter the room with the boss in, he doesn't attack me, but instead runs throughout the whole dungeon back the way I've come. I gave chase, pelting fireballs after him. Eventually he reached a corpse and picked up a dagger from it, and began to attack me. How odd.
The fortress seems to be unique in that it's partially sunken, and it also has some nice vampiric touches like the above candle-lit coffin.
Well, the first two ingredients are done; now for the easy ones right? As it happens, most of the next two hours is taken up with searching for the other ingredients. In the end I resorted to the internet for help, but even then it was still time-consuming. The garlic was easy enough - there are a couple of houses you can break into which have numerous cloves lying around. I also needed nightshade. And blood grass (which is a Daedric plant I suppose). Likewise I bought all the nightshade I needed at The Main Ingredient in the Imperial City. But that shop only had 1 clump of blood grass, and I needed two. As I haven't opened the Oblivion gates yet, I had to rely on vendors. I travelled round many cities looking for blood grass. Sometimes I was simply unable to find an ingredients vendor (even after scouring the Mages Guild), and the rest of the time I found one but they had no blood grass
Bear in mind that all of the aforementioned travelling and faffing was made much more tedious as I frequently could not fast travel due to my vampirism being too advanced - I would then have to wait until nightfall, or break on somewhere and feed on then to rejuvenate myself.
In desperation, I returned to The Main Ingredient, only to find he had restocked on blood grass. Damn you! With all the ingredients gathered, the potion was created and I was cured at last!
The Count also gave some to his wife:
He also rewarded me with 1000 gold for my efforts. I can't believe that lifting the vampire curse has taken four hours. Along the way I also picked up a couple of side quests which I'll pursue at a later date, but for now I'm disease-free and ready to continue with the Mages guild.
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