I didn't touch my magicka from the moment I understood this when I attempted to shout. Instead I focused on the word of power in a type of meditation and tried to feel what it brought a reaction from within me. It took me two weeks to get lock on the deeply hidden energy in my core as I shouted myself hoarse everyday. It was ironically my mysticism that helped me here as it was my soul, a part of it anyways. Unlike the games would have you believe actual direct soul manipulation was mysticism rather than conjuration.-
[Soul trap] as a spell was a mysticism spell, not a conjuration one. The distinction lay in USING the soul. Conjuration and even enchanting uses souls as secondary things, not the direct aspect. Necromancers traded trapped souls but didn't directly manipulate souls and enchanting used the energy a soul released from a gem when broken, not actually the soul itself. Anyways it was thanks to my own delving, however shallow, into mysticism that allowed me to identify that it was my own soul that reacted when I shouted a word of power.-
This explained SO much about why the dragonborn were so uniquely gifted in the thu'um. According to the lore dragonborn were mortals with the souls of a dragon. Dragons innately held a mastery of language, didn't matter which one, and as a result naturally learned to shout as it was a part of their very essence. The dragonborn were nerfed versions of dragons because they were born unlike dragons who always held that power. For a dragonborn learning to shout was like waking up a part of them they hadn't even realized was sleeping. Like anyone waking up this was a gradual process and this explained why absorbing the soul of a dragon sped it up.-
Not only did it make their souls stronger as they absorbed a literal part of Akatosh but it supposedly gave them all the knowledge of the dragon who they consumed, including the innate usage of the thu'um. This was what separated different dragonborn. Some awoke more of their draconic souls while others were hardly better than anyone else. This explained why so many Septims were so ridiculous in various ways, they were literally all holding the potential of a dragon. Still this only helped me slightly as I finally got an answer to a question I had since I got here, I wasn't the dragonborn.-
My soul didn't seem special at all. Sure it was bright and had my sword in it but nothing about it screamed dragon. It also didn't feel dormant at all but whole and active. I could be wrong of course as I wasn't a master of mysticism and frankly had no dragon souls to compare to my own but this was enough for now. I used this trance state as fuel to develop a new mysticism spell that I named [Soul self] that allowed me to check my own soul at any time.-
With this shortcut in place I finally isolated the part of my soul that resonated with the word of power. Using this focus I began to try and imprint the word there. It was slow going at first, took me three days to get a faint shimmer of the word to appear. The moment it did though I sort of instinctively knew how to use it.
'So this is what Arngeir meant in the game when he said to learn a shout was to take it's very meaning into your essence, making it part of you.' I thought seriously.
This understanding explained why masters of the tongue could shout nearly as well as dragons. They had so many word of power in their soul that they almost had the whole language at their command. It was a type of snowballing effect where the more they learned the easier it got to learn more. I knew if I really focused on it I too might have such a mastery eventually but it would take me a long time. I tested my newly learned shout and very quickly came to regret it.-
As it turned out that "cooldown" between shouts wasn't just a game mechanic. It was because a mortal throat wasn't designed to handle that raw power flowing through it. I lost my voice almost instantly after that rather pathetic wave of force erupted from my mouth and kicked up a cloud of dust. My throat was raw and painful and my vocal cords felt like they were burning. I soothed most of this pain with restoration but didn't dare to make another attempt as my vocal cords were still tender. Helpless I could only stop making any attempts and make a new enchantment to passively toughen my throat, lungs and vocal cords over time.-
The next year would be my final one at the orphanage. At fifteen one was considered mostly grown and needed to find a way to support themselves. My situation was unique in that I already had a way to do so. My pockets had gotten quite deep as I spent all of my fourteenth year in this world slowly learning words of power in my soul while I was free and otherwise spending most of the day in the guild healing people. -
I wasn't exactly rolling in gold but I had a very respectable hoard of forty eight thousand five hundred twenty six gold. More than enough to serve as a starting fund no matter what I chose to do as a profession. My passive enchantments had also made me both taller and more robust than any of my peers by quite a bit. I was a towering six foot eight inches tall with broad shoulders and sturdy athletic muscles. My skin a thick leathery pale layer like ivory stretched over muscle. My face both soft and rugged from my mixed heritage and my eyes always set in a deep piercing silver that matched my shoulder length hair of the same color that I kept braided behind my ears.-
My stature was more than enough to intimidate most men but when I spoke they trembled as my voice was like a deep rumble of thunder from my vocal cords being tempered passively for this entire year. An interesting thing I noted was that my voice sounded VERY similar to the voices of dragons you heard speak in the game. Likely not a coincidence as it made sense that a dragons vocal cords would be much more durable than a mortals normally.-
{Name: Alexan
Age: 15 years, 0 months, 3 days
Race: Nord/Altmer
Strength:15(average adult is 10)
Dexterity:14(average adult is 10)
Constitution:18(average adult is 10)
Intelligence:26(average adult is 10)
Spirit:43(average adult is 10)
Magicka: 530/530
Skills: English(mastered), Tamrielic(mastered), Dovahzul(38/100), Alchemy(50/100), Sneak(52/100), Speechcraft(83/100), Smithing(51/100), Enchantment(60/100) Mysticism(49/100), Destruction(64/100), Restoration(50/100), Medicine(77/100) Alteration(50/100), Illusion(45/100), Conjuration(41/100), Cooking(89/100), Swordsmanship(76/100), Archery(26/100), }