Okay, yeah, I felt a little guilty about that.
Walking back into my room, I couldn't shake the image of Vignar's face. The guy just got back from fighting a war, probably dreaming of a hero's welcome and a future where he kicked the Thalmor all the way back to their fancy islands.
And then I, the resident kid, had to open my big mouth and dump a bucket of ice-cold reality all over his parade.
It's a flaw I've noticed lately. One I'm pretty sure I didn't have in my last life. Back then, I knew when to keep my head down and my opinions to myself.
If I had to play armchair psychologist, I'd say it's probably a reaction to everyone treating me like I'm a child. Which, to be fair, I am a child—but my brain is definitely paying taxes.
There's this stubborn part of me that just wants to yell, "Hey! I have a fully-formed prefrontal cortex in here! Acknowledge it!"
Which, now that I think about it, is a pretty childish thing to want. Go figure.
Don't get me wrong, I get it. It's weird. A kid talking about troop logistics and political treaties should be unsettling. I tried, for a while, to act my apparent age when I wasn't alone.
It was exhausting. And honestly, it probably came off even weirder.
I don't remember what it was like to be a kid, and I sure didn't hang out with many in my old life. My attempts at "play" were probably more like a badly programmed robot trying to mimic human interaction.
At some point, I just gave up. And you know what? It was a relief. I think Kodlak, the twins, and even Aela have just accepted that I'm a complete freak of nature.
They don't get it, but they've stopped being surprised by it. In a weird way, being the village weirdo is more comfortable than trying to fake being something I'm not.
Shaking my head, I pushed the guilt aside. What's done is done. I had more important things to focus on than an old soldier's bruised pride. I had a universe's worth of rules to learn, and hopefully, break.
Letting out a long breath, I dropped into my chair and picked up Basics of Alteration, flipping it open to the page on the Candlelight spell. The instructions seemed straightforward enough: just will light to coalesce around you while exerting your magicka over it.
Sounds simple, right?
Yeah, except for the part where you're supposed to "meditate on the nature of light." That was the part that kept throwing me. The first time I tried, I went full monk-mode—legs crossed, eyes closed, the whole bit.
I figured since that's how I managed to sense the magicka humming in the air around and inside me, it should work for feeling light, too. Which, in hindsight, might be the dumbest idea I've ever had in either lifetime.
You know, because closing your eyes generally means you can't see any light. Genius.
Shaking my head at the memory, I took a deep breath and pushed the embarrassment aside. "Okay, Torin," I said out loud to the empty room. "What is light?"
I dug around in the dusty archives of my old brain, past project deadlines and municipal code regulations, back to high school physics. The answer came in bits and pieces.
Light is photons. It's electromagnetic waves. It's both, working together to create what our eyes perceive. It's also energy.
A spark of understanding flickered. Unless I was planning to create light from absolute nothing—which sounded like a one-way ticket to blowing myself up—I'd need to transform another form of energy into light.
Looking around my stone-walled room, buried in the heart of Jorrvaskr, the most abundant energy source was… heat. The ambient warmth in the air, the infrared radiation bleeding from my own body.
That had to be it. Since I can't create light from nothing, I just need to convince the thermal energy around me to get excited, to vibrate at a frequency my eyes could see. It was about turning heat into glow.
With that theory solidifying in my mind, I closed my eyes again, but this time I wasn't just blindly feeling around. I focused on radiating my inner magicka out into the air around me, not as a blunt force, but as a specific instruction: Turn the heat into light.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Just the same old dimness of my room. But then, I felt it—a subtle shift in the quality of the silence. I cracked an eye open.
The room was… brighter. Not by much. It was the kind of change you'd miss if you weren't looking for it, like a cloud moving away from the sun on an overcast day. But it was there.
A slow hum of curiosity escaped me. I needed proof. Something measurable. My eyes landed on the book I'd just been reading. Perfect. I propped it upright on the table, its spine casting a faint, defined shadow on the stone wall behind it. Grabbing a piece of charcoal, I carefully marked the tip of the shadow.
Then I waited, holding my breath, watching the mark. It didn't budge. The ambient light in the room was stable.
Holding onto that thread of will, I stopped pushing my magicka out. The room seemed to… sigh, the faint illumination vanishing so completely I wondered if I'd imagined it. I rushed to the wall and checked the shadow against my mark.
Sure enough, it had moved. Only by a centimeter, maybe less, but it was undeniable.
I froze, staring at that tiny, charcoal line of proof.
I'd actually done it.
The shock hit first, a cold wave of disbelief. Then came the excitement, a geyser of pure, unadulterated triumph that shot through me. I let out a choked laugh. If I could find that sorceress Seryne from Breathing Water, I'd probably give her a big, sloppy kiss right on the mouth for pointing me in the right direction.
It took a solid minute of pacing and deep breathing to get my heart rate back under control. "Alright, calm down, you idiot," I muttered to myself, wiping my suddenly sweaty hands on my tunic. "This isn't the big leagues. You haven't even cast the spell properly."
The real Candlelight spell wasn't about making a whole room vaguely less dim. It was about creating a focused, hovering ball of light that could cut through darkness like a torch. Which meant I wasn't done. I had to take this diffuse glow and convince the photons to stop lounging around and get together in one spot.
Taking a steadying breath, I extended my hand, palm up. I began to push my magicka out again, feeling the room's ambient light level rise once more. But this time, I didn't stop there. With a look of intense, almost constipated concentration, I exerted my will, not just to create light, but to gather it.
To pull the scattered photons from the air and herd them into a single, obedient sphere above my palm.
The process was agonizingly slow at first. A single, brilliant speck of light coalesced in the center of my palm, so bright and focused it was almost painful to look at.
It just sat there, a stubborn star refusing to grow. I poured more focus into it, my brow furrowed with the effort of not just creating light, but containing it.
Then, it began to swell. The speck grew to the size of a marble, then a golf ball, drinking in the magicka I fed it. A minute later, a perfect, radiant sphere the size of a baseball hovered serenely above my hand.
I barely stifled the insane urge to start dry-humping the air in celebration.
I was doing it!
Gritting my teeth, I pushed further. I exerted my will again, not on the light itself, but on the space around it. The ball of light drifted upward, detaching from my palm. With a gentle mental nudge, it began a slow, steady orbit around my body.
My brain was practically spasming from a cocktail of excitement, overstimulation, and pure, unadulterated joy. But by sheer force of will, I kept my focus, maintaining the unbroken stream of magicka.
It was beautiful. It was perfect. I was already mentally naming it 'Sparky' and considering if I could teach it to fetch.
And that's when I realized it was getting brighter.
Not just a little brighter. It was intensifying, the gentle glow sharpening into a harsh, actinic glare. The light in the room went from "cozy torch" to "midday sun" in a matter of seconds.
Oh, crap.
The feedback loop. I was too excited, pouring too much power in without the fine control to regulate it. I tried to cut the magicka supply, but it was like trying to shut off a firehose with my bare hands—the flow, once established, had a momentum of its own. Panic surged, cold and sharp.
"Nonononono—"
In a last-ditch effort, I frantically willed the blazing orb away from me, hurling it toward the farthest corner of the room with my mind. I didn't wait to see it land. I dove under my bed, squeezing my eyes shut and clamping my hands over my face for good measure.
For a heartbeat, there was nothing. A deceptive silence.
Then, the world turned white.
It wasn't a sound or a shockwave. It was pure, undiluted light. Even through my eyelids and hands, it was like staring into the heart of a star. My retinas screamed in protest, flooded with a whiteness so absolute it erased everything else.
For what felt like an eternity—probably five full minutes—my entire universe was a featureless, blinding white.
Slowly, agonizingly slowly, blotches of color and shadow began to swim back into my vision, resolving into the familiar, blessedly dark shapes of my room.
Cautiously, heart still hammering against my ribs, I crawled out from under the bed. I blinked, my eyes watering and sore. I looked around, half-expecting to see scorch marks or melted stone.
Nothing. Everything was exactly as I'd left it. The explosion had been one of pure photonic energy, terrifyingly bright but, thankfully, momentary and without heat.
My vision was still speckled, but the only lasting damage seemed to be to my pride, and maybe a few million photoreceptor cells.
Taking a deep, steadying breath, I cracked open my door and peered out into the corridor. Empty. Silent. Thank the Nine. It seemed the mini-supernova in my room had gone completely unnoticed by the rest of Jorrvaskr.
I closed the door as quietly as I could, the latch clicking into place with a sound of finality.
Leaning back against the heavy wood, I finally took stock of my surroundings. And winced.
The room was… bright.
Not spell-bright. Not candle-bright. It was the kind of soft, pervasive glow you'd get from a full moon on a clear night, except there were no windows down here. The light had no obvious source; it simply was, clinging to the stones and furniture like luminous dust.
I wasn't exerting any magicka. This was a leftover. A stain.
With a growing sense of dread, I moved around the room, carefully extinguishing the few actual candles. As each flame died, the room grew dimmer, but it never reached true darkness.
It settled into a deep, twilight gloom, where I could still clearly see the titles on my book spines and the grain of the wooden floor.
I sank onto the edge of my bed, rubbing my temples where a headache was beginning to bloom.
So, let's review the results.
On the bright side (and the phrase had never felt more literal), I had successfully cast my first spell. Not just sensed magicka, but actively used it to alter reality. I had created light from heat. That was a monumental, earth-shattering success.
On a less bright side, I had nearly flash-fried my own retinas, and it seemed I had permanently—or at least semi-permanently—enchanted my own bedroom with a low-level, ever-present glow. I wouldn't be able to sleep in proper darkness until I figured out how to undo… whatever this was.
A triumphant, manic laugh bubbled up in my throat, followed immediately by a groan of pure exasperation.
I was a wizard. A terribly, dangerously amateur wizard who had just learned that the universe's rulebook came with a warning label written in very, very small print.
...
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