This is Hofgrir Horse-Crusher, one of the many NPCs that inhabit the world of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. He keeps the stables outside of the city of Riften, in the southeastern Rift region of the continent of Skyrim, in the world of Tamriel. If you’d like, you can buy a horse from him. There are stables outside of every major city in the game, each run by a separate NPC, many of whom have families and assistants and a whole pre-programmed life.

This is Hofgrir Horse-Crusher

I didn’t buy a horse from Hofgrir. They don’t seem to run any faster than you can run, and I didn’t work out until later that they allow you to fast-travel to areas you’ve visited before, even if you’re overburdened. I’d heard that they were pretty handy against wild animals, even heard tales of horses killing dragons. But I didn’t need a horse.

Hofgrir Horse-Crusher, though, is also a drinker, and a brawler, and when I came across him, he challenged me to a brawl. In taverns all across the land, drunks and mercenaries will challenge you to a fistfight, and bet money on themselves to win, like a bunch of battered Pete Roses. Hofgrir wanted to fight me for a 200 Septim wager, and cocky adventurer that I am, I accepted.

But my purse was running light. I didn’t have the 200 gold to cover the wager. And Skyrim, for all of its beauty and scope and polish, didn’t know how to handle the situation. I got a quest item to defeat Hofgrir Horse-Crusher in an unarmed brawl, but talking to him didn’t give me the option to trigger the fight, and putting my weapons away and punching him in the face started a criminal assault and landed me in the custody of the Riften city watch. I paid my bounty and left town, and started to accept a lot of other quests from a lot of other people.

Seventy gameplay hours later, I was the leader of the Thieves Guild in Riften, a member at the Bard’s College in Solitude, the Archmage at the College of Winterhold, the Harbinger of the Companions in Whiterun, The Listener, leading the shadowy Dark Brotherhood from a Sanctuary north of Dawnstar, Thane in several of the holds of Skyrim, and holder of several Daedric artifacts, and I was thinning out my miscellaneous quests before I started the main story missions. And finally the only quest left to tackle on my active list was to defeat Hofgrir in an unarmed brawl.

So I went back to the stables at Riften, and tried, again and again, to get him to acknowledge our old wager. Sometimes he would taunt me, asking me if I was back to fight as I approached, but the quest was well and thoroughly broken, and I couldn’t get him to fight me the way the game wanted.

But as I sat in my office chair, bleary-eyed with cramping hands, another thought occurred to me, and I made my character crouch behind a horse and wait. A minute later, Hofgrir stretched his arms and headed into the stable building, and I picked the lock behind him and followed.

He didn’t see me, crouching there behind him. I was an accomplished cat-burgler by then. He didn’t hear me draw my Legendary Glass Sword. And he gave only a single choking cry as I struck. I hid in the corner as his assistant came into the room and asked aloud, “Gods, what’s happened?”

The words “Failed: Defeat Hofgrir Horse-Crusher in an unarmed brawl” faded into the loading screen as I stole back out into the Riften night.

Hofgrir Horse-Crusher is dead, and his stables may well go to ruin. And maybe my conscience is cloudy, but my quest log is mercifully clear.