Author's note: for those who celebrate Eid, I wish you a happy and blessed Eid. For those who don't, well, I also wish you a happy and blessed Eid. I don't care.
May these blessed days find you once more in good health and spirits next year, and countless years after it.
May all your wishes come true and may you be blessed and stay blessed, my brothers and sisters.
I'm always grateful for your support.
...
"…and if you bring back a book you've borrowed with so much as a single frayed page, a suspicious stain, or—Mara preserve us—a folded corner," the Orc librarian finished, his voice a low, gravelly threat, "then I'll personally starve the skeletons in the Midden and feed you to them. Piece by noisy piece. Do I make myself clear?"
Torin slowly blinked. He'd just endured roughly two minutes of rapidly-fired decrees, delivered with the cadence of a siege engine.
The essence had been simple:
Don't damage the books. Don't take out books without permission. Return them on time. Don't wander into the Restricted Sections. Don't eat, drink, sing, or cast unauthorized experimental spells near the shelves. Treat every volume as if it were the last copy in Tamriel.
A small, amused smile touched Torin's lips. "Skeletons don't get hungry," he observed, his tone politely curious. "So how would you starve them?"
Urag's eyes narrowed behind his spectacles until they were twin slits of green fury. The air around the desk seemed to grow colder. "Then I'll have Phinis Gestor summon some that do," he hissed, leaning forward so Torin could see the fine lines of old battle scars around his eyes. "And I will feed you to them. Do. I. Make. Myself. Clear?"
Torin just chuckled, a quiet, rumbling sound. "Crystal."
He reached into a pocket and carefully retrieved the enchanted parchment Tolfdir had given him. "Now that I'm properly acquainted with the rules," he said, his voice diplomatic, "am I permitted to make use of this great Arcanaeum?" He presented the paper.
Urag snatched it from his hand, his frown deepening as he scanned Tolfdir's script and the glowing College seal. His lips moved soundlessly as he read. Finally, with a faint huff, he held the parchment flat on his palm.
A wisp of smoke curled from its edges, then a small, controlled flame consumed it entirely, leaving not a single ash on his green skin.
He looked back at Torin, his expression not a fraction warmer.
"The Transmute Ore spell tome is catalogued in the Alteration section for Active Spells, sub-section 'Essence Transference: Mineral.' You may sign it out for one week. Not a day more."
Torin nodded. "And where would that section be?"
Urag said nothing. He simply picked up another heavy ledger, opened it with a thud, and began to read. His other hand, however, lifted and pointed a thick finger imperiously back the way Torin had come, toward the seemingly endless, towering maze of shelves.
Torin let out a quiet, long-suffering sigh. He turned, his gaze sweeping over the vertical city of books. The sheer, silent magnitude of the task settled on his shoulders.
Finding that book, he thought, his earlier good humor souring slightly, is going to suck.
...
Navigating the Arcanaeum was less like browsing a library and more like mapping a silent, vertical jungle. Torin moved through a section labeled "Necromancy - Conjurative Subgradients." The air here felt heavier, cooler, and smelled faintly of loam and old incense.
He couldn't help but notice the tomes here wore thicker coats of dust than in the bustling sections of other schools of magic.
The shelves seemed to brood, and the only other soul in the aisle was a gaunt, pale Breton youth perched high on a ladder, his nose almost touching the spine of a book titled "Mortis Praecepta: Vol. VII." He didn't look up.
Torin gave the gloomy subsection no further thought and turned the corner, his eyes already scanning the next set of towering shelves for the "Essence Transference" marker.
He nearly walked right into Auri.
She was walking toward him with the same focused, slightly lost expression he probably wore, a similar slip of authorized parchment in her hand. Her sharp green eyes were methodically scanning the shelf labels, her hunter's patience applied to the pursuit of knowledge.
He raised a hand in a brief, quiet wave. "You too?"
Auri turned, and a small, genuine smile broke through her concentration. "Yes. It seems our tests continue, just in a quieter format." She gestured vaguely with the parchment. "The magic I practice is… different. Less formalized. More instinctive and ritualistic. Rooted in nature, unlike these stone towers."
She glanced down at the note. "I was told that if I wish to be taken seriously here, I need to at least familiarize myself with the foundational theory they use."
Torin let out a low hum of understanding. Her magic was definitely an outlier. Infusing Destruction spells directly into an arrow in the moment of firing was certainly unconventional. What's more, it felt ancient, almost shamanistic.
He'd never encountered anything like it, not in the half-remembered lore of his past life nor in the countless books he'd devoured in this one. Enchanting achieved a similar result, sure, but that was a permanent, pre-set bond between object and effect. What she did was alive, immediate, a fleeting marriage of will, weapon, and element.
He was deeply curious about the mechanics, but the dusty, silent grandeur of the Arcanaeum was neither the time nor the place for that discussion.
Torin cleared his throat softly, mindful of the oppressive silence. "Which book did they send you to fetch, then? Might save you some trouble if you tell me. I've been wandering this maze long enough to start recognizing the landmarks."
Auri simply shrugged, unfurling her parchment again. "Magicka Channeling: Principles of Elemental Conduits."
Torin nodded, a flicker of recognition in his eyes.
"Lucky you. The theoretical Destruction section is actually close by. If you keep going straight down this aisle," he pointed the way she'd been heading, "make a left at the giant statue of what looks like a very unhappy guar holding a book, then another left at the shelf labeled 'Pyroclastic Flow Charts, Pre-Second Era.' You're there."
He grinned. "But you'll have to go see the grumpy Orc at the desk first to get it logged. Can't just pluck it off the shelf."
Auri raised an eyebrow. "The master of the Arcanaeum? How was he? I was warned he'd be… difficult."
Torin put on the most sincerely surprised face he could muster, his eyes wide with mock innocence. "Difficult? Of course not. Why, he's the 126th most charming Orc I've ever met."
Auri's lips twitched into an amused grin. "For reference, how many Orcs have you met before him?"
"Exactly 125," Torin replied, his tone bone-dry.
Auri let out a sharp chuckle that seemed to explode in the sacred quiet. It was immediately too loud. Across the library, several studious heads snapped up, faces pinched with disapproval.
Worse, one of the hovering storm atronachs—a crackling mass of blue energy and floating rock—detached from its patrol near the ceiling. It drifted down toward them with silent, ominous purpose, coming to a stop directly above their heads.
Jagged lightning flickered within its stony torso, and the hollow pits of its eyes fixed on them, radiating a sense of profound, elemental annoyance.
Torin winced. He sheepishly raised a placating hand toward the construct. "Our apologies," he whispered, his voice suddenly very small. "We'll be more careful. Much more careful. Companion's honor."
The atronach didn't move. It just hovered, the air around it buzzing with contained static, as if contemplating whether to turn them both into lightly toasted library offenders. After a tense few seconds that felt much longer, it gave a final, dismissive crackle and floated back upward to resume its slow, silent circuits.
Torin let out a long, relieved sigh, his shoulders slumping. He turned back to Auri, who was watching him with undiminished amusement, her green eyes sparkling.
"Right," he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. "So. You wouldn't happen to have, in all your wandering, accidentally spotted the 'Active Spells' section for the Alteration school, would you? Before we get permanently banned for disturbing the peace?"
Auri's smile widened. Without a word, she simply jerked her thumb over her shoulder, pointing to the aisle directly behind her. There, on a neatly carved wooden placard, were the words: ALTERATION - PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS / ACTIVE SPELLS.
Torin stared at the sign, then at Auri's smug face. He closed his eyes for a second, shook his head, and let out a quiet, defeated laugh.
...
Sitting on the very edge of the great bridge, his legs dangling over a drop that plunged into mist and memory, Torin took a deep, deliberate breath.
The air here was a frozen blade, scoured clean by the sea wind, and it filled his lungs with a purity that the closed, book-dust air of the Arcanaeum could never match.
Like Echo, he now preferred the open sky to stone walls and wooden ceilings crowded with people. Give him a bedroll under the stars or a campfire in a mountain pass any day.
The only exception was his workshop—a space of purposeful creation, not confinment.
And when that open sky came with a view like this—the jagged, snow-veiled ruins of the old city clawing at the cliffs to his left, and the vast, heaving grey expanse of the Sea of Ghosts stretching to the edge of the world on his right—well, that was more than just preference.
It was a necessity.
It reminded him of scale, of his own small place in a vast, ancient, and often indifferent world.
A content, quiet smile touched his lips. He reached into the worn satchel at his side and retrieved the book he'd spent the better part of an hour tracking down: a thick, leather-bound volume titled The Transmute Ore Spell & Its Derivations.
He opened it, the stiff spine cracking pleasantly. The cold wind tried to snatch at the pages, but he shielded it with his body, settling in to read.
The introduction was what he expected: flowery language about "unlocking the divine potential within the bones of Nirn" and "conversing with the elemental spirits of metal."
He skimmed past the mystical fluff, his engineer's mind seeking the underlying blueprint.
Put in less poetic, more practical terms, the spell's intended result was to impose a new atomic and energetic blueprint onto existing matter. To rewrite a material's fundamental signature according to the caster's will.
The book laid out the core law governing the process: the more drastic the change, the greater the cost.
It wasn't just about mass. Turning a lump of crude iron into an equal mass of refined steel was cited as a "minor feat." The molecular structures were cousins; the spell was more of a forceful edit, a purification and realignment.
A competent caster with decent reserves could manage a fist-sized amount in an hour or so.
But turning that steel into silver? That was a different beast entirely. That was beyond simple editing. You had to dismantle one elemental identity and rebuild another from the scraps, forcing iron atoms to forget they were iron and become silver.
The book stated plainly that such a transmutation on even a dagger's worth of material could become a week-long ritual of sustained, meticulous magical effort, demanding not just vast reserves of magicka but an exquisite, unbreaking focus.
The weave of the spell needed to be infinitely more intricate, a tapestry of command rather than a simple push.
Torin didn't linger on the introduction. He'd skimmed the basics long ago in a dusty compendium—a heavy tome that did little more than list names and descriptions of hundreds of spells.
Transmute Ore: alters base metals. High magicka cost. Not for beginners. He already knew the crude outline.
He flipped past the foundational theory, his eyes scanning for the real meat. The book quickly moved past simple mechanics into stranger, more profound territory.
Mastering the spell, it argued, didn't just give you a universal "make stuff different" button. To truly transform one substance into another, you needed a deep, almost intimate understanding of both things involved.
First came the factual, measurable knowledge: melting points, crystalline structures, tensile strength, density. The physics of the material. That was straightforward, the kind of thing you could learn from a smithing manual or a Dwemer schematic.
But then the text delved into the conceptual, the symbolic. Every substance, it claimed, carried a metaphysical weight, a resonance in the fabric of Nirn.
Gold wasn't just soft and shiny; it was wealth, permanence, kingship. Silver was purity, moonlight, clarity. Malachite (glass ore) represented refinement, sophistication, the trapping of light.
Iron and steel, on the other hand, represented a great many things: strength, stubbornness, industry, warfare, mortality. This very multiplicity, the book suggested, made them the most "malleable" to the spell's influence.
Their identity was less fixed, more open to suggestion.
The difficulty of a transformation was directly tied to this conceptual gap. Trying to turn something that embodied "purity" (silver) into something that symbolized "filth" or "corruption" (the book gave no polite examples, but Torin's mind went to substances like void salts or certain daedric residues) wouldn't just be hard—it would be a battle of opposing cosmic principles.
In some cases, the book stated bluntly, certain transmutations were not just difficult, but outright impossible for mortal mages, their wills insufficient to bridge the spiritual chasm between essences.
Now this, Torin thought, his fingers resting on the page, is interesting.
It wasn't just mystical fluff. It intersected perfectly with his own breakthrough on the Ebonyflesh spell.
He'd spent months with the physical ore from Dushnikh Yal, charting every measurable property, and hit a wall. The spell matrix kept collapsing.
It was only after the dream—the vision of the feathered woman and the understanding of ebony as memory, as divine blood solidified under the weight of eons—that the pieces clicked. He hadn't just learned its hardness; he'd understood its story. The conceptual key had turned the physical lock.
He looked up from the book, his gaze lost in the rolling fog of the chasm below. So magic, at least this kind, wasn't a simple science. It was a dialogue. You had to know the name, the history, and the song of the thing you wished to change.
As expected, Tolfdir wasn't sending him on a fool's errand with a parlor trick. He was giving him the first lesson in speaking the world's true language.
A slow, eager smile spread across Torin's face. He had a lot of reading to do. And then, he'd need to find some iron ore and have a very long, very one-sided conversation with it.
...
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