The Hall of Attainment's second floor was, as always, a controlled disaster.
Torin navigated the narrow corridor, sidestepping a young Dunmer woman who was muttering over a bubbling beaker balanced precariously on a stack of books.
Further down, two Breton apprentices were having a heated, hushed argument over whose turn it was to clean what looked suspiciously like frost spider residue from their shared workbench.
The air smelled of ozone, singed hair, and something faintly reminiscent of burnt cabbage.
Dorm life, Torin thought wryly. Some things are universal.
He was heading toward Arniel Gane's private quarters at the far end of the hall.
He'd spent the better part of two days learning the Waterbreathing tome, and while he hadn't quite mastered the spell to his satisfaction, he understood it well enough to put it to use.
Time to see what this Dwemer enthusiast was all about.
Then he heard it.
BANG.
Not a spell-pop or an alchemical fizzle. This was a sharp, percussive clang of metal, something like a spring escaping its housing and ricocheting off something hollow.
It cut through the ambient chaos like a hammer on an anvil. Torin paused mid-step. That had come from Arniel's quarters.
He approached the door, which was slightly ajar, and knocked firmly. The sound of his knuckles against the old wood briefly silenced the frantic mechanical whirring from within.
A pause. Then a harried, distracted voice: "Come in! Door's open!"
Torin pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The room was a controlled explosion of Dwemer artifacts. Gears, cogs, and metal plates covered every flat surface—and some vertical ones. Blueprints covered the walls, pinned with what looked like enchanted nails that glowed faintly.
In the center of it all stood Arniel Gane, a short, wiry Breton with thinning brown hair and the intense, slightly manic look of a man who hadn't slept in days.
He was hunched over what appeared to be a cylindrical Dwemer container, its bronze surface etched with intricate, spiraling patterns. Both of his hands were extended toward it, projecting steady, concentrated streams of flame that licked at the device's base.
The whirring intensified as the metal heated, rising to a high-pitched keen. Arniel's brow was furrowed in concentration, his lips moving silently—counting seconds, perhaps, or reciting a prayer to whatever god watched over mad tinkerers.
BANG-CLATTER.
A louder report than before. The whirring died. Arniel let out a long, defeated sigh and withdrew his hands, the flames extinguishing with a whuff. He unlatched the container's lid with practiced resignation and reached inside.
What he withdrew made Torin's eyes narrow.
A soul gem. Black.
It was jagged, its facets uneven and rough, far larger than any common black soul gem Torin had ever seen—it rivaled the size of a grand soul gem, maybe bigger. And the color wasn't the deep, polished obsidian of a properly cut gem. It was mottled, uneven, charred.
The surface was webbed with fine cracks, and a faint, greasy smoke curled up from its apex.
It's not a black soul gem, Torin realized. Just a regular soul gem that was burnt to a crisp.
Arniel held the scorched crystal up to the light, turning it this way and that, his expression one of profound disappointment. The greasy smoke from its surface coiled lazily toward the ceiling.
"Another experiment, another failure," he muttered, his voice hollow with familiar defeat. He shook his head once, a sharp, dismissive motion, and tossed the gem carelessly toward the corner.
It landed with a dull clink in a growing pile of its brethren—a small cairn of burnt, cracked, utterly useless soul gems, each one a monument to hours of painstaking work and the particular cruelty of Dwemer metallurgy.
Then Arniel flinched.
His shoulders tensed as the fog of concentration cleared, and he seemed to register, with dawning awareness, that the very tall, very solid figure standing in his doorway was not, in fact, a piece of furniture.
He turned, blinking rapidly, his eyes taking on that unfocused, slightly panicked quality of a scholar abruptly yanked from the depths of his own mind.
"I haven't seen you before," Arniel said slowly, his gaze traveling upward. And upward. "You're very… tall." He gave Torin a thorough, almost clinical once-over, as if cataloguing an unfamiliar species of Dwemer construct. "Who are you?"
Torin offered a calm, disarming smile. "Torin Kodlaksson. Master Tolfdir sent me. Said you could use some help with your research."
Arniel's eyebrows shot up. "He did? In what wa—"
"Hey." Torin didn't raise his voice, but the single word cut cleanly through Arniel's sentence. He was already pointing at the sad heap of charred crystals in the corner. "What's all this?"
Arniel blinked, thrown off balance by the sudden shift in focus. He let out a long, weary sigh, his shoulders slumping. "A monument to my own inadequacy. A stack of failures, nothing more. I've been attempting to heat the Convector until it reached the required temperature without damaging the soul gems. So far, the gems have been… less than cooperative."
He gestured vaguely at the pile. "As you can see."
Torin let out a low, thoughtful hum. Without waiting for an invitation, he stepped past the bewildered Breton and knelt beside the heap of discarded gems, his leather armor creaking softly. He picked one up, turning it over in his large hands with surprising delicacy.
Arniel opened his mouth—perhaps to protest this casual handling of his failed specimens, perhaps to demand answers—but no words came out. He just watched, oscillating between confusion and faint irritation.
After a moment of close inspection, Torin raised the gem toward the lamplight. "All of them are broken and completely empty. Did the soul energy leak out during the heating process?"
Arniel's irritation flickered. "If they were filled, that would certainly be a concern. But I only ever use empty gems for this stage. They must be empty. A filled soul gem behaves very differently under thermal stress—the trapped essence acts as a buffer, a stabilizer. It would defeat the entire purpose."
He rubbed his temples, a headache clearly brewing. "Not that it matters. Empty, filled, grand, petty—they all seem to crack well before reaching the required temperature. I've tried everything. Slower heating, faster heating, pulsed thermal loads, enchanted crucibles…"
His voice trailed off into muttered technical jargon as Torin continued to sift through the pile, setting aside some gems, discarding others. The Breton mage watched, his annoyance slowly giving way to something else—curiosity, perhaps, or the desperate hope of a man who'd been banging his head against the same wall for months.
"What exactly are you looking for?" Arniel finally asked, his tone carefully neutral.
Torin scooped three soul gems from the pile, cradling them in his broad palm like a collector displaying prized specimens. Each was a different size—petty, lesser, common—their jagged, burnt surfaces catching the dim lamplight.
"Patterns," he repeated, raising his hand to demonstrate. "These, for example. They tell me you've been acquiring progressively larger soul gems, hoping greater mass would better withstand higher temperatures."
Arniel Gane's eyes, previously glazed with exhaustion and frustration, abruptly sharpened. The unfocused scholar vanished; in his place stood a man suddenly, intensely interested. This lumbering Nord had just read his experimental methodology from a handful of broken rocks.
"Indeed," Arniel said slowly, his voice losing its distracted edge. "For all the good it did me—and the considerable coin I've sunk into acquiring larger and larger specimens."
He gestured bitterly at the pile. "Grand soul gems are not inexpensive, you understand. And they fail just as spectacularly as the petty ones, only with more noise."
Torin tossed the gems back onto the heap with casual finality. He rose to his full height, dusting off his hands. "You're going about it wrong."
Arniel's eyebrow twitched. "I am?"
"Size doesn't equate to heat resistance. Not in brittle materials like soul gems." Torin's grin was easy, confident—the look of a man who'd spent years watching Eorlund coax impossible strength from metal. "The right shape, however? That works wonders. What you need isn't more mass. It's more surface area."
Arniel crossed his arms, all traces of his earlier irritation now focused into keen, skeptical curiosity. "Elaborate."
Torin cleared his throat, shifting into the patient, explanatory tone he usually reserved for breaking down combat tactics for new whelps.
"Think of it like a cooling fin on a smelter. A solid block of metal left in the sun will absorb heat until it's too hot to touch, and stay that way for hours. But take that same block and carve it into thin, spreading fins? The heat disperses into the air between the fins. It breathes. It no longer holds the temperature, but moves it."
He picked up another cracked gem, tracing its fractured surface with his thumb. "Same principle applies here. A wavy, ridged, or fluted structure—something with peaks and valleys—allows the material to expand and contract without concentrating stress in one weak point. It flexes. Gives. Doesn't just sit there and take the heat until it shatters."
Arniel was silent for a long moment, his gaze fixed on the gem in Torin's hand. When he spoke, his voice was thoughtful, measured. "That is… a rather interesting concept. The thermal dynamics are sound, and the stress distribution model aligns with certain Dwemer metallurgical principles I've studied."
He paused, his brow furrowing. "Except I have no practical means to shape soul gems in such a manner. They are not ingots to be hammered on an anvil. One cannot simply file a soul gem into a cooling fin without catastrophic structural failure."
He looked up at Torin, his expression a complex mixture of frustration and reluctant intrigue. "So, while your insight is appreciated, it merely identifies the problem without solving it. I need a method, not a theory."
Torin shrugged, the motion easy and unhurried. "Even if there isn't a known way to shape soul gems to your will, I'm sure one could be found. Given enough time, coin, and willingness to annoy the right people." He grinned, a flash of white teeth. "Not that you'd need to go through all that trouble. There's a much simpler, more effective solution sitting right under your nose."
Arniel's eyes, already sharp with interest, went wide. "There is?"
"Aye." Torin crossed his arms, leaning against the edge of a cluttered workbench. "They're called warped soul gems. Ever heard of them?"
Arniel's brow furrowed. "Vaguely. Anomalous formations, aren't they? Irregular crystallization, unpredictable magical properties… I recall reading that they're flawed... in some way."
"Can't hold souls," Torin confirmed.
"Makes them useless for enchanting. But what they lack in function, they make up for in form. Warped soul gems come in all shapes and sizes naturally—twisted, ridged, fluted. All that extra surface area you need, already grown into the crystal structure. You wouldn't have to shape a thing. Just find the right one with the right geometry for your heat dispersion needs."
Arniel stared at him. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"I…" He swallowed, his scholarly composure cracking to reveal something almost manic beneath.
"I must go to the Arcanaeum at once. Urag will have texts on anomalous soul gem formations. Geological surveys, perhaps mining records—there must be documentation on where they're commonly found!"
He spun in place, snatching a worn leather satchel from a hook and slinging it over his shoulder with frantic, jerky movements. "This changes everything. Everything."
He was already jogging toward the door, his earlier exhaustion seemingly forgotten. At the threshold, he paused and glanced back at Torin, his expression one of barely-contained gratitude.
"Come find me tomorrow! We'll discuss this further—I'll have preliminary research by then, and we can narrow down the most promising specimens!" And then he was gone, his footsteps echoing rapidly down the hall.
Torin watched him vanish around the corner, an amused smile tugging at his lips. Well. That went better than expected.
He began to exit the room himself, though at a considerably more relaxed pace. His hand dipped into his satchel and emerged with the Waterbreathing spell tome, its leather cover worn soft from a week of near-constant handling.
He flipped it open to a marked page, his eyes already scanning the familiar text as he walked.
More time to study, he mused, falling into the easy rhythm of reading while navigating. Not a bad trade.
The corridor stretched before him, still humming with the ambient chaos of apprentice life. A passing Altmer student shot him a curious look—a giant Nord reading while walking was apparently an unusual sight—but Torin paid it no mind. His attention drifted between the arcane symbols on the page and the cold, grey sky visible through a window slit.
Wonder how Echo's doing out there.
He pictured her, somewhere in the frozen wastes beyond the College's protective wards. A dark shape against endless white, hunting, roaming, waiting. She'd be fine. She always was. But the familiar warmth of her presence at his side was something he couldn't help but miss.
He turned another page, shook off the thought, and kept walking.
...
The snow fell in silence, thick and unhurried, blanketing the jagged shoreline in fresh white. The Sea of Ghosts churned restlessly against the ice-crusted rocks, its grey waves chewing at the frozen earth with endless, mindless hunger.
Echo stood over her kill.
The horker was a decent size—blubbery, thick-hided, slow. It had been basking on a rock, stupid and content, when she'd broken its neck with a single swipe. Now its blood steamed in the cold, painting the snow a vivid, shocking red.
Echo lowered her massive head and tore into the blubber, the rich, fatty meat warming her from within.
The wind shifted.
Her jaws stopped moving. Her ears swiveled. The scent hit her nose a moment later—thick, musky, familiar. Predator. Male. Close.
She raised her head slowly, blood dripping from her muzzle.
It stood at the edge of the tree line, a mountain of pale fur and coiled muscle. A snow bear, its coat the color of frost and bone, its shoulders rising a full head higher than her own. Its breath plumed in great, steady clouds, and its small, dark eyes were fixed not on her, but on the steaming carcass at her feet.
Echo's lip curled. A low, guttural growl rumbled from deep in her chest, a vibration that trembled through her entire frame. Mine. Go.
The snow bear's gaze shifted to her. It blinked slowly, deliberately—the calm before violence. Then it opened its massive jaws and roared.
The sound crashed against the cliffs, scattering gulls from their perches.
It was a declaration of dominance, of hunger, of absolute certainty in its own strength. It took a step forward. Then another.
Echo lowered her head, shoulders bunching, claws digging into the frozen earth. The warm-stone feeling in her chest—the memory of the man-that-was-pack, of warmth and steel and the promise of return—did not waver.
It hardened into something cold and absolute.
This is my territory. My kill. My wait.
The snow bear charged.
Echo charged to meet it.
Their collision was thunder. Fur and flesh and furious roars tangled into a single, savage knot of violence. Snow erupted around them in a blinding spray. The sea crashed against the shore, indifferent. The storm continued its slow, patient fall.
And in the College, high above the frozen chasm, a tall Nord paused mid-stride, his hand drifting unconsciously to his chest.
He didn't know why. He just felt something. A distant echo.
...
I'm motivated by praise and interaction, so be sure to leave a like, power stone, or whatever kind of shendig this site uses, and more importantly do share you thoughts on the chapter in the comment section!
Want more chapters? Then consider subscribing to my pat rēon. You can read ahead for as little as $1 and it helps me a lot! -> (pat rēon..com / wicked132)
You can also always come and say hi on my discord server -> (disc ord..gg / sEtqmRs5y7)- or hit me up at - Wicked132#5511 - and I'll add you myself)