Laid to Rest

After A Lovely Letter and the ensuing Faendal fiasco, I completed a number of quests that, while important, offered few moral conflicts apart from the standard issues – accepting versus refusing a quest to help someone, or fighting a monster versus allowing others to do the work.  I traveled to Whiterun, meet Jarl Balgruuf, fought my first dragon, and learned that I was the Dragonborn.  I cleared out a few bandit camps and even ran a few errands for the good people of Whiterun; one of my favorites involved my housecarl Lydia and I hunting mammoths in order to get some tusks for the merchant Ysolda.  I even managed to become a Thane of Whiterun and purchase a house – worthwhile endeavors all, but very few moral dilemmas.

I then travelled to the miasmic town of Morthal in Hjaalmarch Hold on my way to complete the quest The Horn of Jurgen Windcaller for the Greybeards.  As I nosed around the town, I met several townspeople who eagerly shared the gossip about Hroggar shacking up with Alva after the mysterious house fire that killed Hroggar's wife and their daughter, Helgi.  When I approached Jarl Idgrod Ravencrone about the matter (as the townsfolk suggested), she confessed that she suspected Alva of wrongdoing, but could do nothing without solid evidence, so she tasked me with investigating the burned-out house.  Shortly after I got there, Helgi's ghost appeared and asked me to come back to play hide and seek with her after dark, my reward being the identity of the arsonist.

This moment both broke my heart and signed the arsonist's death warrant.

I complied, explored the hillside behind the house, and ended up surprising and killing a vampire at Helgi's exhumed shallow grave.  The vampire, Helgi informed me, was Laelette, a former townsperson.  Apparently, Laelette set the fire intending to kill Helgi and her mother, but at the last minute, decided to try to turn Helgi instead, as a kind of surrogate daughter; she failed, but kept trying anyway -- hence the open grave.  Laelette's husband, Thonnir, showed up almost immediately, but instead of attacking me for killing his wife, he tearfully filled me in on another part of the story; when Alva came to town, she struck up an overbearing relationship with Laelette, who grew more distant from her husband, eventually disappearing to "join the resistance" one night, when she said she was going to meet up with Alva. 

As it turned out, I had already met Alva outside the inn earlier in the evening, as I was waiting to "play hide and seek" with Helgi.  She had initially struck me as a heartless golddigger who felt little more than disdain for the people of this small town; needless to say, I didn't like her.

Alva becomes the prime suspect.

After I heard Thonnir's story, I walked back to town, snuck up on Alva (who was still wandering around in the moonlight) and pickpocketed her house key.  Fortunately, Hroggar was asleep; if Alva was indeed a vampire, Hroggar was most likely enthralled, and I didn't want to have to fight him.  Once in her house, I found her cellar, which featured an unoccupied coffin containing Alva's journal:

Looks like Alva was as much a pawn as Laelette.

I now had the evidence the Jarl needed.  As I was ransacking the rest of the basement lair, Alva returned.  Killing her was a foregone conclusion; she caught me in her lair stealing her journal, so she was hostile, but I would have killed her anyway for what she had done.  The rest of the quest proceeded as one would expect.  I delivered the journal to the Jarl, who then asked me to track down and kill Movarth.  The townspeople wanted to help, but I assured them that my partner Uthgerd and I could handle it ourselves.  In a short raid, we killed Movarth and his little vampire clan.


At first blush, the moral element to this quest seems obvious.  Anyone who murders a child needs to die as soon as possible; someone who would turn that child into a vampire is even more deserving of death, although the fact that all of the vampires in this quest were immediately hostile makes that latter point moot.  Another potential conflict could have been the Jarl's insistence on hard evidence -- a policy I certainly agreed with.  Had the evidence not satisfied her, however, I still would have killed those responsible.

The troubling figure for me in this quest was Hroggar.  While he played a significant role in the death of his family, he was clearly under the influence of something far more powerful than simple lust.  I suppose I would have killed him if he had got in the way of dispatching Alva, but I was happy that I could avoid that circumstance.  He wasn't happy with me after I killed his "girlfriend," but I'm not sure if a full realization of his role in this tragic episode would be the best thing for him to carry in his head.  It's probably best that I didn't have the option of telling him.

This quest also represents my first encounters with vampires.  This point is significant because vampires, unlike other undead, are NPCs; vampirism is treated as a disease, so characters, including the PC, can contract it.  Because vampires are NPCs, they may or may not be hostile at any given time.  Alva, for example, only attacked when I discovered her secret.  The question, therefore, is: what should I do with non-hostile vampires?  They have to feed on NPCs regularly in order to survive, but the feeding process does not kill nor does it transmit the disease.  Some vampires are actively hostile and live in hideouts strewn with dead bodies and other carrion, while some appear to be functional citizens who simply mutter "Get out of my way, meat" when you approach them.

I have decided to adopt a non-aggression policy with vampires; I do not attack them unless they are hostile (unlike the Thalmor), but I also do not step in to save them from peril (unlike other NPCs).  I don't like vampires, and I have yet to encounter a vampire that wasn't "up to something," but I also can't justify wiping them out at every turn.  Perhaps my stance will change with the Dawnguard add-on.

ADDENDUM: Other players have reported that if Alva is not killed before the raid on Movarth, she will show up in Movarth's lair and might actually join the PC in fighting the other vampires.  Another scenario has Alva's body being found with Movarth, presumably killed by him and his clan.  These "alternate endings" for Alva's story might initially seem to have an impact on the moral validity of killing her -- perhaps she is as unwitting a dupe as Hroggar was -- but on closer consideration, my original assessment stands:

1. If Alva was indeed enthralled, she would not have turned on Movarth.
2. Alva's dialogue indicates clear, cold calculation, as opposed to Hroggar's, which is bewildered and dazed.
3. Alternate motives for Alva to turn on Movarth include, but are not limited to, a desire to take over Morthal for herself instead of turning it over to Movarth.
4. If Alva survives the entire quest, she reportedly goes back to her original pattern of sleeping in the coffin and roaming at night; were she truly remorseful, I would expect her to cure her vampirism (which is relatively easy to do).

Therefore, Alva still deserves to die for suborning the murders of Hroggar's wife and child.