As Torin and the twins reached the Hall of Elements, everyone noticed their arrival.
Even within this college full of mages who were allergic to the outside air—who spent their days in musty libraries and cramped laboratories, who flinched at the touch of sunlight and complained about the cold—many had known of Torin.
Even before he'd begun to study here, his reputation had preceded him. The boy who'd taught himself magic in a cave. The Companion who'd hunted bandits across Skyrim. The Nord who wasn't afraid of books.
Now, almost everyone in the College knew him. The Falkreath incident had seen to that—the stories had spread like wildfire, growing taller with each retelling, until Torin barely recognized himself in the rumors. But it wasn't just the harvester or the mountain that drew their attention.
It was the dwarven spiders—the small army of brass constructs that now clattered through the halls, carrying books and components, making themselves useful in ways that annoyed the custodians and fascinated the students.
And it was the spear. Skaldrfong. Dragonbone, carved by the First Tongues, enchanted by Shalidor himself.
The sight of Torin walking in with the twin nobles from High Rock—Malin and Melina Bontain, their dark hair gleaming in the magelight, their matching blue robes swishing with each step—and that same spear in his hand was enough to make everyone stop what they were doing and gawk.
Torin sighed internally at the reaction, but only smiled outwardly. He'd learned long ago that showing annoyance only encouraged people to stare longer.
He kept walking until he reached one of the training dummies used by the students for spell practice. It was a battered thing—straw and burlap, wrapped in old armor, scorched and scarred by countless firebolts and ice spikes.
Half its side was singed, the burlap blackened and cracked, but even as he watched, the damage began to slowly repair itself. The enchantments on the dummies were old but effective, designed to withstand years of abuse from novice mages.
Torin turned to the twins.
"So I just have to drip some of my blood on the spear?" He raised an eyebrow. "Any spot in particular?"
Malin let out a thoughtful hum, his hand stroking his chin.
"I wonder," he said.
Melina mirrored her brother's pose, her head tilted.
"I wonder indeed," she added. "Like we said, we only know that blood is needed to reveal what is hidden. Where the blood goes, and how much is required..." She shrugged. "Those details remain a mystery."
Torin sighed. This time, it wasn't internal.
He raised his thumb to the tip of the spear—the leaf-shaped point, sharp as a razor, still gleaming from its last cleaning—and pressed. The blade bit into his skin, clean and deep, and a bead of blood welled up almost instantly.
The cold followed a moment later, ice crystals forming on his fingers, spreading from the point of contact outward.
He shook his hand, scattering the frost, and watched as the blood dripped onto the aged bone.
Logically speaking, Torin had to admit that using his own blood to test the second, unknown enchantment was not the smartest idea. There were a thousand things that could go wrong—curses, possession, soul-trapping, spontaneous combustion—and he was volunteering himself as the test subject.
Then again, he was most likely the single most durable mage in the entire College. His mastery of Alteration had thickened his skin to the point where sword blows glanced off. His Restoration could heal wounds that would kill lesser men. He'd stopped the charge of a mammoth barehanded and walked away with nothing but bruises.
If anyone could handle... whatever the enchantment was, it was him.
A more cautious approach would have been to grab a bandit—there was never any shortage of those in Skyrim's holds—and experiment on him. Let some wicked idiot who'd chosen the wrong path in life serve as a guinea pig.The College, however, forbade that kind of thing. And Torin certainly wasn't going to do the same to some helpless animal.
Fortunately, the second enchantment didn't seem to be offensive in nature.
The spear began to glow.
Soft at first, a pale blue light that pulsed from the runes carved into the aged bone. Then brighter, stronger, spreading from the shaft to the tip, from the tip to the spike at the base. The leather wrappings shimmered, the old Nordic script on their surface seeming to writhe and shift.
Torin frowned as he observed the weapon, trying to make sense of what was happening. The twins oohed and aahed behind him, their voices a distant murmur, their excitement barely registering.
The arcane inscriptions on the spear's shaft were changing—rearranging themselves, new symbols appearing where old ones had been, the ancient magic responding to the blood in ways that neither Torin nor the twins had anticipated.
Suddenly, Torin's eyes widened.
He could sense Skaldrfong.
Not through touch—his hand was still wrapped around the shaft, but that wasn't it. It was almost like how he perceived his lost axe, even without seeing it or touching it, the way he could detect the magnetic field emitted by the lodestone within the axe head.
That connection had been born of years of use, of channeling his magicka through the weapon, of learning its weight and balance and quirks until it felt like an extension of his arm.
But this was different. Deeper. More personal.
It was as if the spear was an extension of his own body—not just his arm, but something more fundamental, something that went beyond flesh and bone.
His hand, wrapped around the shaft, felt exactly where Skaldrfong belonged. It was part of him that had been temporarily detached and was now being reunited, not a weapon he was simply holding.
Torin stared at the spear, his heartbeat getting faster.
What did Shalidor do to this thing?
Suddenly, he began to realize something—as if the spear itself was communicating it to him. Something deeper than words and images, a sense of understanding that flowed from the aged bone into his fingers, up his arm, into his chest.
The weapon was waiting for someone to claim it.
He snapped to attention.
Without thinking, he raised the spear and tossed it into the air—a short, sharp motion—and caught it in a reverse grip. The shaft spun once, twice, then settled against his forearm, the tip pointing backward, the spike pointing forward.
His actions startled the twins. They stepped back quickly, their eyes wide, their hands raised as if to ward off a blow. They'd been around magical accidents before—had caused a few themselves—and they knew the signs of someone about to do something unpredictable.
The gathered students also held their breaths. The Hall of Elements, which had been buzzing with quiet conversation just moments ago, fell into absolute silence. Every eye was on Torin. Every ear strained to hear what would come next.
Torin didn't pay attention to anyone. His focus was entirely on the spear and the training dummy in front of him.
His grip tightened over the shaft—not the leather wrappings, but the bone itself, smooth and warm beneath his palm. He could feel the runes pulsing, the magic building, the second enchantment responding to his blood, his intent, his will.
He took a step forward.
And chucked Skaldrfong like a javelin.
The spear flew at an incredible speed—faster than anything that size had any right to move. It crossed the distance between Torin and the dummy in the span of a heartbeat, a blur of aged bone and glowing runes, and embedded itself into the dummy's chest with a solid thunk.
Ice exploded outward. The dummy was instantly encased—not just a thin layer of frost this time, but a thick shell of crystalline ice that spread from the point of impact and covered the entire target. The wooden stand groaned under the sudden weight. The chains holding the dummy creaked.
Everyone blinked.
A few students exchanged confused glances. Some shrugged. Others let out disappointed sighs, having expected something more dramatic—an explosion, maybe, or a burst of lightning, or the dummy being reduced to splinters.
Torin, however, was still completely focused on Skaldrfong.
He raised his hand. Reached for the spear. And as if waiting for this exact gesture, the ancient weapon dissipated—fading into a shower of purple magic particles, the same color as the runes carved into its shaft. The particles swirled in the air for a moment, dancing like fireflies, and then shot across the room.
They appeared around Torin's waiting palm—swirling, coalescing, reforming—and materialized into the shape of Skaldrfong. The spear dropped into his grip, solid and real, as if it had never left.
The Hall of Elements was dead silent.
Torin turned the spear over in his hands, examining the runes, the leather, the black cloth. He flexed his fingers, feeling the weight, the balance, the strange sense of connection that pulsed through his arm.
"Huh," he said. "Neat."
...
If you asked Mirabelle Ervine what the strangest thing she'd ever seen in this college of magic... many examples would come to her mind.
It was already commonplace to see students walking around with pink skin for a week after a botched alteration spell, and on occasion, you can hear the wrathful cries of Dremora summoned by mistake, uttering profanities in different languages, hoping to find their summoner would understand and be offended by before banishing them back to Oblivion.
The scene before her, however, might just be the strangest...
Two big Nords—who weren't Tolfdir, as if that old fellow wasn't an anomaly in and of himself—were standing in the courtyard. Each was tall enough to give people trying to look them in the eye neck cramps. One of them, with his grey eyes and dark hair and the spear made of dragonbone, was already a familiar figure in the College.
Students had grown accustomed to seeing Torin in the halls, in the library, in his workshop on the roof. They'd stopped staring at the dwarven spiders. They'd even stopped whispering about the Falkreath incident.
The other, however, was a new sight.
He was dressed from head to toe in steel and fur—heavy armor, the kind that clanked when you walked, the kind that made mages wince just looking at it. His face was broad, his jaw was square, and his expression was one of simple, honest contentment.
He was holding a massive two-handed greatsword, the blade resting across his shoulder, and he was looking around the courtyard with the wide-eyed curiosity of a child visiting a museum.
His name was Farkas. He was a Companion of Jorrvaskr, and Torin's shield-brother. He'd been completing a contract nearby—Falmer kidnapping travelers—and had decided to visit the College on his way back to Whiterun.
He had a tendency to call everyone "milk-drinker." It was his highest insult, his lowest praise, and his default mode of address for anyone who wasn't a Companion.
Luckily, most students didn't even understand the term—they rarely ventured out of the College and had never heard a Nord use it as a slur. They just thought Farkas was offering them a beverage recommendation.
Still, as strange a scene as two big Nords in the College's courtyard made, it wasn't the strangest.
What made it the strangest was that said two Nords were going at each other. With real weapons, and what she perceived as the intent to tear each other to shreds.
Torin and Farkas circled each other in the yard, their boots crunching on the frost-covered stone. The crowd of students had grown larger, spilling out of doorways and windows, their breath misting in the cold air.
Even a few of the masters had come to watch—Tolfdir with his curious, half-squinting gaze, and Colette Marence, who looked like she was already preparing healing spells in case things went wrong.
Farkas was the first to make a move.
He closed the distance with a grace and speed that contrasted sharply with his size—the kind of speed that only came from years of training, from hundreds of battles fought and survived.
His massive sword rose, then fell, and with a battlecry that caused one dunmer student to flinch and drop her notes, he brought the blade down.
Torin didn't flinch.
Much to Mirabelle's horror, he raised his arm to block the attack.
She knew he specialized in Alteration. She'd seen him cast Ebonyflesh, had watched him shrug off blows that would have broken lesser mages. But she didn't sense any magic—no shimmer of protective energy, no thickening of the skin, no telltale glow of magicka being channeled.
And it looked like he was trying to block with his bare arm and the thin bracer he wore on his wrist, both of which he would snap in half in the process.
She opened her mouth to shout—to interfere, to stop the madness—but before she could utter a sound, something happened.
Metallic sheets sprang forth from the bracer.
They unfolded with a series of sharp clicks, panels sliding over panels, segments locking into place. In the span of a heartbeat, the thin bracer had transformed into a thin circular shield—barely thicker than a stack of paper, its surface gleaming in the pale sunlight.
The shield was unadorned, practical, with a slight curve that would deflect blows rather than absorb them head-on.
Farkas's sword connected.
Mirabelle winced, expecting the shield to shatter, to buckle, to offer no more protection than a sheet of parchment. Much to her surprise, it held. The blade struck the metal, sparks flew, and the shield seemed to push back—deflecting the massive weapon with enough force to make Farkas take a few stumbling steps backward.
The big Nord's eyes widened. He looked at his sword, then at the shield, then at Torin.
"Interesting," he said.
Torin didn't respond. He took advantage of the opening, his spear's length allowing him to strike from a distance that Farkas couldn't match. He jabbed the tip at Farkas's head—a quick, precise thrust that would have impaled a lesser fighter.
Farkas tilted his head, the spear tip whistling past his ear. Then he ducked under the following swipe, his sword dragging behind him as he closed the distance once more.
"Your sense for distance control is still lacking, brother," he said with a grin, swinging his sword sideways. "You should take a break from your books and practice for once."
Torin returned the grin.
"Or so you think." He raised his shield, deflecting the sword again. "But if you read any books, you'd understand the concept of bait."
Farkas's sword bounced off the shield—and this time, the big Nord didn't hold on to it. He let it go, the massive blade spinning through the air and clattering to the ground several feet away.
He opted for a weapon more suitable for close-range engagement.
His fist.
Torin's grin widened.
...
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