No One Escapes Cidhna Mine

This quest, which is the follow-up to The Forsworn Conspiracy, presents a number of moral dilemmas and questions that extend well beyond the confines of the game.  Along with In My Time of Need, it stands as one of the best opportunities for robust consideration of moral agency in Skyrim, and gaming in general.

After my arrest in the Shrine of Talos, I found myself in a cell deep within Cidhna Mine:

This is one of the few quests that, once started, must be completed.

The Orc jailer informed me that I would have to mine in order to earn my freedom, so I got to work.  Having learned that the best way to deal with an unfamiliar situation was to talk to people, I began speaking to the various inmate miners in my area.  As it turned out, I happened to be in very close proximity to Madanach, the "King of Rags" and leader of the Forsworn.  I jumped through the prerequisite hoops, and was eventually granted an audience with Madanach in his private cell.

Neither my readings nor my various encounters with the Forsworn had prepared me for what happened next.  Madanach, far from being a madman or savage, articulately recounted his history of the Forsworn. Taken together, the history books and Madanach's lectures paint a tragic picture of a complex people:

Madanach the noble savage.

Long ago, there was a group of indigenous people who inhabited the land between High Rock (Bretons) and Skyrim (Nords).  While Breton by ethnicity, these people called themselves "The Reachmen" to distinguish their culture from that of their neighbors on either side.  What divided them from their Breton kin was their worship of the "Old Gods" -- an animistic religion that predates Divine worship.  Being a small ethnic group, the Reachmen often found themselves used as pawns in the struggles between High Rock and Skyrim for control of the silver mines in their mountainous homeland. At the time of the Great War, the Empire considered The Reach to be one of Skyrim's holds -- a fact that the Reachmen begrudgingly accepted. When the Empire "abandoned" The Reach in order to focus on fighting the Aldmeri Dominion, the Reachmen saw their opportunity to take back their land.  They ruled Markarth relatively peacefully for two years under the leadership of their king, Madanach.   

The Empire, now under the peace provided by the terms of the White-Gold Concordat, decided to take The Reach back from the Reachmen.  The deposed Jarl offered Ulfric Stormcloak and his men an exchange: retake The Reach for Skyrim, and Talos worship would be be permitted in Markarth again, in spite of the Concordat. Ulfric's brutal tactics, including torture and the killing of non-combatants, drove the Reachmen from the city; thus the Forsworn were born.
  ["The Markarth Incident", as the uprising and its end at Ulfric's hand have come to be known, was also the ember that sparked the Stormcloak Rebellion. Once the Thalmor discovered Talos worship in Markarth, they cracked down on anyone who violated the terms of the Concordat.  The Jarl was forced to arrest Ulfric ("The Bear of Markarth") and his men -- an act the Stormcloaks saw as the worst kind of betrayal.]

Madanach himself was captured and sentenced to die, but Thonar Silver-Blood, seeing a unique opportunity, intervened.  In exchange for allowing him to live out his life as a prisoner in Cidhna Mine, Madanach agreed to use the Forsworn as Thonar's personal strike force.  Thonar allowed Madanach to communicate with Forsworn operatives in order to eliminate Thonar's enemies and business rivals.  The King in Rags agreed to the deal; Thonar could protect himself from Nord rivals and Imperial curiosity, and the Forsworn could still  launch "terrorist" attacks against a select group of their Nord and Imperial oppressors.  Furthermore, Madanach would be alive to plan his eventual betrayal of the Silver-Bloods.  Such was the arrangement I had disrupted by helping Eltrys uncover the truth.

As part of my education, Madanach instructed me to find and speak to another Forsworn prisoner, Braig.  Briag's story was very hard to listen to:

You don't want to hear the rest of this story.

I was now faced with a twofold dilemma, the first part of which concerned my association with the Forsworn.  Now that I had heard more of the story, I could not dismiss these men and women as just another group of bandits or necromancers.  Even if their tactics could not be excused, their case still had merit.  If I could make a case for them with the Emperor, I would -- but that was not where we were.  Still, I wasn't ready to throw my lot in with a group of terrorists.  Moreover, I suspected that, as a Nord, the Forsworn weren't going to do me any favors once we completed our escape; this was a temporary alliance for a common goal, and nothing more.  It also occurred to me that Madanach's revenge was not going to end with Thonar; he would most likely continue his campaign of terror against the people of Skyrim, and I would most likely have to kill him at some point in the future, my sympathies be damned.

The second part of my dilemma was the "price of admission";  in order to prove myself to Madanach, I had to kill Grisvar the Unlucky, a thief and skooma addict that Madanach had identified as a snitch.  While I had killed quite a few bandits and necromancers by this point, Grisvar seemed more like a cowardly low-life than a threat, so I didn't feel justified in killing him.  Once Madanach ordered me to assassinate him, I began to look for alternatives.

The entrance to the only escape route could not be picked; even if I still had my lockpicks (along with the other gear the guards took from me), the gate required a key, which Madanach alone held, or so I gathered from the note I successfully pickpocketed from him.  The key itself was nowhere to be found -- not in Madanach's personal inventory nor anywhere in his cell.  Therefore, even if I wanted to try the route alone, I couldn't.  I was, quite literally, stuck:

Sorry, Grisvar.

I followed Madanach's orders, joined the escape and together the Forsworn and I fought through giant spiders and long-forgotten Dwemer automatons to a secret exit into Markarth.  Before we emerged into the city, not only did I get all of my gear back from one of Madanach's followers, but I also received enchanted Forsworn armor from the man himself, in thanks for assisting the escape.  Once we got outside, Thonar and several of the Markarth city guard were on hand to greet us.  A fight quickly broke out, and before long, Thonar and his men were dead.  Fortunately, the battle took place in the wee hours of the morning, while most of the citizens were still in bed. 

 

From a moral perspective, I had a great deal of trouble with this quest.  While I sympathize with the Forsworn, I cannot abide their practices, neither military nor religious.  The best possible scenario would most likely be for the Empire to negotiate with the Forsworn to establish a secure homeland for them while fairly compensating the Nords who probably be displaced by such a move.  I don't normally think it wise or just to haggle with terrorists, but it seems clear in this case that the Empire in general, and the Jarl of Markarth in particular, created the Forsworn through their inexcusable treatment of the Reachmen.  I have also not forgotten that Madanach ordered me to kill a non-violent man in order to prove myself to him; I might agree with his condemnation of the power structure in The Reach, but I resent him using my relatively powerless situation in order to manipulate me as he had been by Thonar.

My ambiguity became most obvious during the battle between Madanach and Thonar.  Because I could not fully support either side, I did not participate in this battle at all, preferring to stay on the sidelines and make sure no innocent Markarth citizens got pulled into the fray.  Although I hated Thonar for his callous and deadly manipulation of the Forsworn, I could not tell if his guards were crooked men in the employ of a corrupt buisnessman (like those in the Shrine of Talos) or honest peacekeepers protecting what they thought was an important citizen, and so I did not want to engage them.  Furthermore, while I hated Thonar enough to kill him, I was not keen on helping the Forsworn spill more blood in Markarth.  While this particular Forsworn "cell" might continue to see me as friendly, I wanted nothing to do with terrorists after we broke out.

After completing  No One Escapes Cidhna Mine, I did some research on other approaches, and I discovered a few disconcerting facts about the way Bethesda set up this quest:

1. Madanach's key does not spawn as an inventory item unless you kill him.  In other words, the only way for me avoid killing Grisvar would be to kill Madanach and take his key.  One problem with that scenario is that Madanach's crimes, as grievous as they are, seem to be a direct result of Ulfric's (and, by extension, the Empire's) injustice toward the Reachmen.  Like Ulfric, Madanach comes across as an honorable leader making unjust decisions on behalf of his people, rather than as a self-serving criminal.  I will kill him in the future if I have to, but I'd rather not.
2. An additional concern is that, had I killed Madanach at any point before we exited the mine, Thonar would have rewarded me with an enchanted item of his own.  I would not have enjoyed receiving anything, be it equipment or thanks, from such a scumbag.  Although I did not wish to help the Forsworn in their fight, I was glad that they killed Thonar.

In this quest, Bethesda forces the moral agent to make some unpalatable decisions.  Even if the player sides with the Forsworn completely, they will never stop attacking the PC in random encounters, and they are not a joinable faction.  Even if the player sides with the Silver-Bloods completely, the PC still has to break out of their prison.  Moreover, there is no peaceable solution to this quest; the only way to avoid killing Madanach or Grisvar is to stay stuck in the mine, thus suspending the game indefinitely.  Therefore, the situation presented in this quest incorporates many of the features of a true Kohlbergian dilemma: it is dichotomous, and there is no creative way out; the player is forced to violate at least some moral precepts in order to complete the quest.

By now, the parallels between this quest and current issues in geopolitics should be readily apparent.  The Forsworn's physical appearance reflects some stereotypes of Native American garb, which only highlights the similarity of their plight ("foreigners in our own land") and religious practices ("the Old Ways") to those of their real-world counterparts:

The Forsworn of No One Escapes Cidhna Mine

Their tactics and rationale raise the question of the legitimacy of terrorism -- a very present debate in the Middle East, where some governments are considering bringing members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban to the negotiating table.  Another facet are the obviously Celtic names of the Forsworn characters, which evoke the Troubles of Ireland and tentative reconciliation between the IRA with England.  Because the Forsworn feel familiar but only exist as fictional constructs in a computer game, the player can engage with them and fully consider them without all of the baggage of the player's own real-world political views -- a remarkable achievement for a game.