The next day, Skyl announced that he was putting Brelyna in charge of all the work involved in founding the society.
Thinking about it now was almost funny. Not long ago he had perched on his high horse and vetoed the idea of a seminar, dismissing it as a boring little club. Yet the secret society he himself had founded still had to be run by Brelyna. Skyl, who had once fancied himself some wise leader, clearly wasn't cut out for that role at all.
"It's the same at the College. The Arch-Mage is always busy with experiments. Most of the actual work is handled by Mistress Mirabelle," Onmund said, not surprised in the least, only finding the outcome reasonable.
"Making Master Skyl waste time on administration would be a shameful betrayal of magic," J'zargo agreed.
Skyl's research had reached a critical phase. The magic system he had been working on all this time drew its inspiration from a game called "Noita." In that game, the protagonist is a witch pursuing alchemical secrets. She collects wands and rearranges the spells slotted into them, combining spell effects in interesting ways to help her overcome powerful enemies and explore a world choked with magical hazards.
The most refined part of Noita is its spell-editing system. The spells in the game are wildly varied in effect, and can be sorted into several categories. The two most basic categories are "projectiles" and "projectile modifiers."
If you think of the spells in a wand as a complete sentence, then projectile spells are the nouns, and the projectile modifiers are the adjectives.
For example, a Fireball is a projectile. The modifiers then grant that Fireball extra traits such as "more damage," "longer lifetime," "faster," "homing," and so on.
The reason Skyl wanted to recreate this magic system was simple: once you stack a huge number of projectile modifiers and similar special effects on top of one another, even the most basic spell that deals single-digit damage can end up spewing out damage numbers in the tens of millions—hundreds of millions—per second.
The Elder Scrolls–style magic could serve as the projectiles, and Harry Potter–style magic could serve as the modifiers. For instance, if he applied a Copying Charm to Ice Spike, Skyl could fire off over a hundred icicles in an instant—turning a sniper rifle into a Gatling gun. Who wouldn't be left speechless watching that?
It sounded like pure fantasy, of course. As Skyl himself had said, these two magic systems obeyed different fundamental rules: one was a fairly rigorous "because therefore, here's the underlying principle," while the other was more of a green-skin logic of "I reckon this charm will work." There was a gulf between them.
But Skyl had slowly begun to feel out a path across that gulf.
Combining "spells" and "charms" was not impossible. It was like solving two polynomials for common roots. Some solutions were obvious at a glance. For example, "Ice Spike" and the Summoning Charm: have the Summoning Charm give the spike a greater initial velocity, and you very intuitively boost its killing power. Or "Fireball" paired with the Engorgement Charm—blowing the fireball's blast radius up to four or five times its original size is no problem at all.
But if that were all, it wouldn't be worth Skyl burying himself so deeply in the research. He wanted more solutions—he wanted a final, universal solution. If he could combine the Killing Curse with Chain Lightning, letting Avada Kedavra jump through enemy ranks at lightning speed, turning a single shot into an area-of-effect barrage… even Voldemort would have to flop on the ground and respectfully call you Dark Lord.
On the pure spell side of things, Skyl learned extremely fast. What he really lacked now was time for it all to settle in. In The Elder Scrolls' world, learning magic meant two things: accumulating theoretical knowledge, and soaking in magical energy.
The sunlight and starlight coming from the divine realm were, in truth, nothing more than diluted divine power. The realm of the gods represented, in myth, a collection of all possibilities; divine power was energy that could do anything and permit anything, carrying the property of eternity. As mages communed with magicka, their souls grew stronger, and a strong soul could support more complex spell structures.
For that reason, a caster's power—besides raw talent—also correlated with age.
Skyl had no idea how strong his own soul was. All he knew was that he had never once hit a wall in his magical studies, and even casting expert-level spells one after another didn't leave his mind feeling drained.
But whenever he used Harry Potter–style magic, he often felt he was pushing up against his limits.
That, too, came down to the difference between the systems themselves. One drew on the omnipresent magicka in the natural world; the other depended entirely on the caster's own inner magic.
Unfortunately, immersion in Elder Scrolls–style magicka did little to raise his internal magic reserves. It would be wrong to say it had no effect at all, but the effect was so weak it was practically negligible—far less than the natural growth of his magic as his body matured. Skyl suspected this might be due to his body being from another world and not fully "compatible."
Magical energy did have another use: replenishing his own spent magic. A very obvious example was that when he ran himself dry in the Harry Potter world, he needed much longer to recover to full strength than he did in the Elder Scrolls world.
Since his total magic capacity refused to grow much, his work on the new system naturally took a hit.
Maybe it was time to make a move on the Eye of Magnus. If he could obtain an inexhaustible source of magicka, that would be equivalent to having infinite magic.
Skyl went to find the other three and told them he was planning to explore the ruins of Saarthal, within the hold of Winterhold.
Onmund raised his eyebrows. "So this counts as the High Tower Covenant's first group operation, right? Ha, I'll stand in front as the warrior."
J'zargo said with a broad, pleased grin, "J'zargo will be the thief who explores every corner of the ruins, dealing with those monsters hiding in the dark for Master Skyl."
Brelyna's smile turned strange. In an elegant Elven lilt, she sang out, "Then I, the brave archer Brelyna Maryon, shall clear the path ahead for the great Master Skyl with my bow!"
Skyl's expression immediately soured. "Can we please not bring that up again?"
The Tower of Tomes was full of cheerful energy.
After the live-combat trial in the Midden, everyone had gained a very straightforward understanding of their own combat strength. Skyl could one-shot the lot of them. Among the remaining three, Brelyna was undoubtedly the strongest spellcaster; J'zargo could hide all the way to the ends of the earth; and Onmund was a pure spell-barbarian, basically a berserker who happened to know how to throw Fireballs with both hands.
Exploring Saarthal was something Skyl had planned even before coming to Winterhold, and he'd put it off this long for his own reasons.
First was his own combat power. When he'd first arrived in The Elder Scrolls world, his fighting ability relied entirely on the Transfiguration spell. Only after he learned a whole array of powerful, varied spells at the College could he face significantly more dangerous situations on his own.
Second was the unknown enemy numbers. Skyl had very quickly discovered that the game's "presentation" and reality were quite different. In the game, Riverwood had maybe a dozen people; in reality, the number was more than ten times that. In the game, Whiterun had thirty or forty residents; in reality, it was a big city with a population in the tens of thousands.
Saarthal was the first colony the Nords established after coming to the continent of Tamriel, ancient in history and complicated in layout. That meant there had to be a huge number of ancient Nord draugr down there—very possibly a Resident Evil–level undead catastrophe.
Third was interference from unknown parties. In the game's story, when the player explores Saarthal, they encounter an Altmer mage claiming to be from the Psijic Order, who tells the player that the world is not yet ready to receive the Eye of Magnus. In Elder Scrolls lore, the Psijic Order is one of the oldest mage organizations in existence, its strength unfathomable. At the end of the College questline, they take the Eye of Magnus away, leaving the player with nothing for all their trouble.
What Skyl needed to do was seize the Eye of Magnus for the Tower of Tomes, while under pressure from the Psijic Order.
Fourth—and this was the key point—Skyl had to find a way to actually get the Eye of Magnus into the Tower of Tomes.
The portal's size was fixed by default; there was no way you could stuff something as big as the Eye of Magnus through it by brute force. The only option left was to construct a teleportation circle and send the artifact directly into the Tower. And the method for constructing such a circle was one of the core topics of his research at the College—he already knew it like the back of his hand.
"Before we set out, we need to build a summoning array inside the Tower of Tomes," Skyl said, laying out the broad strokes of his plan: they would charge into Saarthal, slaughter everything in their way, then send the unknown artifact buried deep within the ruins into the Tower of Tomes. As for what the artifact was called, he told them he didn't know. He said it was a mission from the god above their heads, passed to him in a dream.
Once Onmund thought about it, he found the plan suited his tastes perfectly, and agreed without a moment's hesitation.
J'zargo had no objections. He immediately whipped out a dagger, ran through a flashy little routine with it, and declared his confidence.
Brelyna said nothing at all. She simply went back to her room and quietly prepared every alchemical potion and spell scroll they might need.
//Check out my P@tre0n for 20 extra chapters on all my fanfics //[email protected]/Razeil0810