Because they know he is fucked and don ' t care . <| sep |> I was playing skyrim , doing the dawnguard dlc , stop at the part where you find arieel ' s bow and do a few other quests . Well I go to the cave and the snow elf is there . Gives his exposition and then the portal opens , except there ' s no other tidbit of progression revealed to me , so I thought this was a quest glitch so I left the area and went back in . Nothing changed , so I looked up a list of glitches in the quest and one of them was a scripting area where the portal would not appear because Serena hadn ' t finished her conversation with the elf . Told me to reload and let them do there thing . So I did . Didn ' t work . So I starting looking deeper into it and then I found a forum where the guy said the portal wasn ' t appearing and the top comment was to reload to a previous save before that quest triggered . Well my only save point was at the previous dawnguard quest before I had completed THE REST OF THE QUESTS BETWEEN THEM . I was pissed , but anyway I went through that dawnguard quest and then immediately went back to the cave and it STILL DIDNT WORK . So I went back to the forum and after reading it a bit , realized the portal was on the wall , so I walked up to the wall and it said press x to travel to the vale . THE WHOLE TIME I COULD HAVE TRAVELED THROUGH . IT WAS A TEXTURE GLITCH THAT THE PORTAL DID NOT SHOW UP , SO I WENT BACK IN TIME FOR NOTHING . 7 LEVELS WERE LOST AND HOURS OF GAMEPLAY ALL OVER A TEXTURE GLITCH ! !!