I myself don't need a weathervane to tell which way the wind blows

The Helseth questline is ridiculous. The man continues to make transparent attempts to kill me, and there's nothing I can do but pretend I don't notice. "Assassins are coming to kill the queen," he says, "and since I can't trust my guards, I want you to be the only one there to defend her." Fine, I say. Just so I can get the stupid piece of the legendary weapon that one of his guards has in his possession. So the assassins come, big surprise, they really came after me. This king is an idiot who thinks that three Dark Brotherhood assassins will be enough to take care of me after I fought through their entire lair and killed their leader. My only handicap in this fight was that I couldn't use my wide-spread attack spells, because Barenziah was in the next room, and she would die too.

Helseth drops his guard a little in his surprise at my return safe and sound from the assassin attack, again, as if he forgot that I came straight from the DB lair at the beginning of this ridiculous plot. So then he tells me that I need to prove my worth by dueling his champion, who no one has ever beaten. You've got to be kidding me. What's next? He'll pull out a shotgun and tell me he just wants to test the quality of my robes?

Happily, as far as I can tell, there won't need to be a "next", after I beat his champion and obtained the blade fragment I needed. Helseth of course seemed more dismayed and shaken at my success than anything, but he pressed on in preparation for his grand speech about his plans for me, at which point I said "goodbye" and left before he had a chance to add any crap to my journal that I didn't intend on completing.

This is not to say that I have any more love for Almalexia than I do for Helseth. After I got all the blade pieces and left them with the smith to reforge the weapon, I checked back with Almalexia to see if she was as tired of the ash storms as I was. In fact, she stated in no uncertain terms that she planned to continue the ash storms until she was fully satisfied that the poor people of Mournhold had suffered enough and feared her divine power again.

Yay. Of course, it wasn't her divine power that started the ash storms, it was me pushing a few levers on a dwarven weather control device. Just in case, I made a trip back down into the ruins to see if I could just turn it off again, but no luck. The levers were "held in place by a mysterious force". Mysterious? I think not.

At this point I installed Yellowdude's Amulet of Weather, and brought back the clear skies for my own personal comfort, main quest be damned.

I think I need to get away from all these nasty politics and paranoia for a while. I'm going to take a trip to the land of the ice and snow, and...werewolves?

Addendum: Although the aforementioned weather-control amulet worked as advertised, it seems to interfere with the scripting on my purchasable alchemy lab, which is unacceptable. When I attempted to access my alchemy materials after installing this weather mod, nothing happened. I uninstalled the weather mod, and my alchemy lab returned to normal. So caveat emptor.