When I eventually woke up Nocturnal was gone without so much as a word or note left behind. I wasn't surprised by this as frankly it was her way. I also wasn't going to look any deeper into the WHY of what happened last night because Nocturnal was all about obfuscation and I wasn't some master detective that could put together the thinking process of a literal goddess. It was just better to be happy it happened and move on. That said I was pretty sure she had a reason for doing this, mostly because I literally felt different and opened my status panel to understand why.-
{Name: Alexan
Age: 15 years, 10 months, 17 days
Race: Nord/Altmer
Blessing: Shadow marked
Strength:24(average adult is 10)
Dexterity:25(average adult is 10)
Constitution:33(average adult is 10)
Intelligence:30(average adult is 10)
Spirit:64(average adult is 10)
Magicka: 1,521/1,521(first darkening)
Skills: English(mastered), Tamrielic(mastered), Dovahzul(63/100), Alchemy(68/100), Sneak(52/100), Speechcraft(85/100), Smithing(83/100), Enchantment(74/100) Mysticism(79/100), Destruction(75/100), Restoration(66/100), Medicine(79/100) Alteration(74/100), Illusion(60/100), Conjuration(60/100), Cooking(95/100), Swordsmanship(99/100), Archery(26/100), Tonal architecture(36/100) }
'She gave me a spiritual hickie!?' I thought dumbfounded as I looked at the panel.
This was ridiculous. Not impossible in the grand scheme of things as Molag Bal basically did the same thing when he violates someone. It was how they turned into purest blooded vampires in fact. The first time he did it he went overboard and basically created a pseudoprince in the form of Lamae Bal who is a ridiculously powerful being. Apparently by fucking Nocturnal I allowed her to imbue me with some of her own essence thus causing a few changes that I was staring at.-
The first thing I spotted was that my dexterity had overtaken my strength in a small leap of change. The second was that my spirit stat had gone from fifty seven to sixty three, a not insignificant jump given how ridiculously strong my soul already was. Then came the biggest change, my magicka pool having undergone darkening for the first time. The result was impressive looking but not terribly surprising. The first darkening of ones magicka always effectively doubled the amount the mage had. It was actually why most mages tended to do it between the novice and journeyman skill levels.-
Altmer or those born with larger pools could do it later as they didn't actually NEED the boost to cast higher level spells. I was even more of an anomaly as my magicka pool had the amount of magicka in it that the average mage had only after two darkenings. This was why I was in no hurry to darken my magicka. I could already cast most expert level spells with the amount I had. I was frankly MORE speechless at how easy I got my darkening. The usual process for darkening isn't complicated. If anything it was brutally straightforward.
It was compression.
Through a ritual publicly available in many books a mage forces the magicka in their pool to get squished to roughly half it's original volume. While it is squished through this external pressure the pool is filled to the brim again. Then the pressure is released and you are in for a painful and wild ride. That squished magicka expands, or rather tries to but can't because that space is full. This state is know as the darkening state and is HELL on the mage. You can't use any magic or you'll give the magicka a path to release pressure. Nor could you engage in any strenuous activities as you constantly felt like you were painfully going to burst.-
The mage undergoing the process had to wait. Yes wait. Over time the magicka in the pool would be forced to become denser by exactly twice the original amount. Technically this didn't actually make the amount of magicka available to you bigger. What it DID do however was make each unit you used count as two of your previous metric. Effectively doubling the upper limit of what you could afford to cast.-
Or apparently as I just learned you could skip all that nonsense by railing the goddess of darkness.
I also finally got to see what happened when I got my stuff yesterday. My Dovahzul went up a bit, likely from the three word thu'um Mephala stuffed in my head. Then there was my smithing skill that took a goliath leap all the way up to eighty three. The reason for this jump was two fold. The first was that Aetherium forging was one of the Dwemers crown jewels of smithing. Getting that methodology from Mora meant I also got stuffed with all of the prerequisite smithing knowledge of the Dwemer. A bulk sale on Dwemer metal working as it were.-
The second reason was surprisingly because of the knowledge on dawn magic I got from Mora. One of it's branches was a method of forging aetherial energies into metal. Frankly I was pretty sure the only reason my skill hadn't jumped higher was because this was all knowledge. Like knowing how to do all the things a master smith could but lacking the experience that usually accompanies such a thing. Then came the magic skills themselves.
Enchantment, mysticism, destruction and alteration were all shoved brutally past my bottle neck and into expert levels from the sheer amount of knowledge that went into dawn magic. I found it a little odd that the magic had no spells in any other school besides these but that was the way of it apparently. It was especially heavy in mysticism so that was now my highest leveled magic skill. The final change was that I got a new skill for the tonal architecture that the Dwemer had mastered. Not even Mora had the entirety of that field however as I spotted quite a few gaps in the knowledge I had versus what I KNEW it could accomplish. -
For example the tools of Kagrenac. The knowledge he had passed to me had the foundational knowledge needed to understand it was possible but not the knowledge of what exactly was done. To put it bluntly I got a solid foundation of knowledge on the subject but none of the higher end uses. I'd still need to experiment and chart my own course forward. All in all I really had to admit that going on this trip was a very good idea.