Prologue
He found her just after dusk, standing at highest point of the coastward ramparts. The night was not overly cold, but here in the north that still meant freezing, so he came wearing his full robes, hood up. She smiled when she saw that, and commented just as he knew she would.
"You still haven't gotten used to the weather of Skyrim, have you, Savos?"
Savos Aren shrugged. "It's hard to get used to icicles forming in one's beard, Mirabelle."
Her name was Mirabelle Ervine. She was one of his closest subordinates, a dear friend, and though she had not even a drop of Nord blood in her veins, one would not be able to tell by the way she owned the cold. She wore little more than a light robe of office, and her hair was left free to the night wind.
"Don't be sour," she said, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him closer to the wall, and closer to her. "I brought you up here for a reason."
Aren stopped himself with a hand on the stone wall. He looked down in that moment, down the shear face of the wall, down the cliff face of the rock that the College was perched upon, and into the murky depths of a gorge that the light of the twin moons just didn't reach. He looked away an instant later and caught his breath. Master mage he may have been, but no understanding of arcane arts could help vertigo.
"I don't know how you find the time to dwaddle up here," he said, straightening his robe front. "The novices are likely to detonate themselves without supervision."
"Which is why I dwaddle up here to keep clear of the blast radius. Now hush and look up."
Aren looked at her, but she wasn't looking at him. He huffed and followed her example, craning his neck to gaze into the night sky.
It was beautiful. Strands of green and magenta and a hundred other hues between crisscrossed the northern sky like veins of precious minerals in a dome of black rock. Masser was out and full to the east, with Secunda lurking just below its lower horizon. Both the moons cast a shade of light across the darkened dome of the world, brightening the tips of the webbed aurorae.
The view was breathtaking, sensational. It was also entirely common for a night at the northern edge of the known world, and Savos Aren felt his toes going numb in the cold.
"Mirabelle—" he started.
"Just watch," she said in her 'Savos, I need you to shut up' voice. "Watch and you'll see."
Aren huffed, tucked his hands into his robe, and watched. The aurorae twisted overhead. Far below, he could hear the echoing crack of water refreezing at the bottom of the freshly darkened gorge. The howl of a wolf reached his ears. The wind picked up and tugged at his pant leg, sending a shiver up his thigh.
"Is there something in particular that I'm looking for?" he said, failing to keep irritation from his voice.
Ervine looked at him. "Do you want this spoiled for you?"
"I want to go to bed, Mirabelle. My scholarly inquisitiveness died with the feeling in my extremities."
"Fine, if you want to take the fun out of it." She thrust a finger into the sky. "There."
Aren looked. "I don't see anything."
"Of course not from over there. Look down my arm."
He hesitated, but finally leaned in, sighting down her arm like an archer down an arrow. He focused beyond the tip of her finger and out into the indefinable point in space she was indicating. Besides the darkened sky and a twist of an aurora, he saw nothing.
"Mirabelle—"
"Give your eyes a minute to adjust to it," she said.
"Adjust to what?"
"Keep watching."
He watched, flexing his toes in his moccasins in a vain attempt to keep the blood flowing. He liked Mirabelle Ervine well enough. She was a good teacher, a strong second, and a fantastic bedfellow when no one was looking, but this impromptu stargazing was beginning to make him hate her. And he didn't want to hate her, what with how frequent her role as a bedfellow was becoming.
He opened his mouth to complain again.
And then he saw it.
A distortion in the sky, not unlike the warp lines created in a pane of glass when heated. It twisted and slid in the air, fluid and mercurial, impossible to focus on for more than a second or two at a time. He stared at it out of fascination, but also out of a worry that if he were to look away, he might not be able to find it again.
"What in the Eight…"
Ervine's arm left his cheek. "You see it," she said. It wasn't a question.
He nodded, not taking his eyes off the phenomenon. "And I don't know what it is."
"It cannot be magical," she said.
He didn't reply right away, largely because such a definitive statement went against everything he knew as an Arch-Mage. It was the duty of a good mage to discover the purpose and means behind any phenomenon, and a life spent pursuing the arcane arts—living a life drenched in magic—had taught him to never discount the combined powers of the mind and the forces of creation.
Yet he found himself agreeing with his Second. Ervine was right; if this ripple in the sky were magical in nature he would have felt it. He was too attuned to the world around him not to notice a stable magical event happening a mere thousand feet above his College.
"How long have you been seeing this?" he asked.
"Almost a week. It happens this same hour every night."
"Have you told anyone else about it?"
"Not a soul." He could feel her looking at him, could hear the smile in her words. "I wanted to share it with you."
"That's much appreciated," he said, meaning the words if not feeling them. At this point, he had trouble feeling much of anything, and it had nothing to do with the cold.
Even if this disturbance wasn't magical, the rest of the world around it was, and that world was reacting to the event in a way that Aren was highly perceptive to. The environment was coiling itself in defense, the unseen energies around him preparing for an occurrence like a pugilist bracing against an incoming blow.
Aren drew his hands from the folds of his robe and held them at his side, ready for anything.
"Mirabelle, I think it best if we get inside for the night."
"Is it really that cold?"
There was a crack of thunder, preceded by no lightning and followed by no echo, so loud and forceful that it blew the snow from the wall and knocked Aren's hood from his head. He flinched out of reflex, and Ervine let out a yelp of surprise.
"Inside," he repeated, directly to her.
"Agreed."
They had just begun to move when another crack split the air, followed by another gust of wind. Aren felt the world tense up, coiled tighter than before. A third crack, fourth, fifth. The sixth split just as the two mages made it to the colonnaded doorway that led deeper into the College. He turned then to look back as a flash of white peeled back the night, emanating from that thousand-foot above mark where reality had bent just a few minutes before.
The flash was instantaneous and gone a second later, but it was fast and bright enough to burn an image on Savos Aren's retina: an image of a figure in the sky, arms tucked to its body, legs flailing in mid-fall.
Thankfully, he had the presence of mind to pull Ervine to himself with one hand, and with his other, cast up a masterful ward around the both of them.
The falling body hit his ward like a giant, forcing him onto his knees. The body bounced askance. He heard the sound of a tremendous weight colliding with stone and the crump of the courtyard cobbles shattering.
Ervine looked up at him. "What in the Eight?"
"No idea," Aren replied, breathless. The impact on his ward was so powerful that it had knocked the wind from him, but he was doing his best to hide it. He needed practice.
He was just getting to his feet when doors started opening and shutting in the courtyard below as the entire College reacted to the commotion. Walking to the wall, the sky above him fully repaired, Savos Aren looked down into the main yard of his college for mages. The rock on the wall next to him was gone, blasted away as if beaten by a great hammer. Below, the path leading through the courtyard was shattered. Just beyond the gash, surrounded by scholars and novitiates alike, lay the body that had fallen from the sky.
It was massive, over two meters tall at least, and clad head-to-toe in dull silver plating. A heavily muzzled helm covered the head, and a blackened visor hid any glimpse at the wearer's eyes. It groaned as it lay there, like the mechanical sighing of a Dwemer ruin, and the snow around it turned to steam from the heat emanating off its metallic skin.
But that was all secondary to the eyes of Savos Aren. The thing that caught his gaze immediately, and the focus of all those around the body, was the child it bore, protected against its chest in a closed-arm grip.