Lokir got the feeling that Lydia didn't like him very much.

The housecarl didn't even try to hide it. After Rayla left to go have her talk with the Jarl, he tried to focus on finishing the tomato soup that she had made—with plenty of hesitation and passive-aggressive grumbling—a few minutes beforehand. He kept the pouch of five thousand coins close to his breast, suddenly aware that this single sum was more gold than he had ever owned. Lydia glared at him the whole time. It was quite unnerving, especially because her hand seemed to stray toward her sword every time he so much as breathed in her direction.

Eventually, Lokir decided to just cut his losses and try and get some sleep while Rayla dealt with the favor to the Riverwood blacksmith. The moment he stood up, Lydia straightened, and this time her hand was very clearly on her sword. Oh, yes, she did not like him.

"Steady on," Lokir said, hands in the air. His tactic of surrender was somewhat lessened by the pouch of money in his left hand. "I'm just going to go to sleep now. Is there an extra bed around here somewhere?"

Lydia glared at him, blatant distrust on her face. "In the basement, thief."

Lokir winced. He knew he should have left that part of the story out! Rayla probably would have mentioned it to the housecarl eventually, though, so at least they were getting the hostilities out of the way now.

"...and where is the basement?" Lokir asked, when Lydia did not volunteer any more information.

Lydia made a face, then sighed and took her hand off of her sword. "This way."

Lokir held the pouch of septims close to him as he followed the housecarl to a small area underneath the stairs that led up. Lydia kneeled down, moved a few empty baskets out of the way, and opened a small trapdoor in the floor.

Lokir gulped as she handed him a lantern and some flint and steel. He felt like a prisoner being forced to sleep with the skeevers.

Wait. There weren't any skeevers down there, were there?

Lydia smirked when she sensed Lokir's discomfort. "Rayla had this put in after a thief broke in last year."

Ah. No wonder this housecarl didn't like him. Lokir glanced down into the darkness and tried not to balk at it. Rayla seemed like a sensible, moral-driven woman. It would be completely unlike what he had seen so far from her to put some kind of monster in her basement.

Idiot, he told himself. How old are you, ten? Do you want sleep or not?

"And there's a bed down here somewhere, I presume?" Lokir said, opening the lid of the lantern and trying his best to light the wick with the flint and steel. He was forced to tie the bag of money to his belt.

Lydia nodded, still smirking. With a sigh, Lokir hooked the handle of the lantern around his wrist and stepped onto the creaky wooden ladder. Wouldn't it just be easier to haul the bed up to the first floor, rather than having Lokir sleep down there?

One look at Lydia's face, and he knew that suggesting that was out of the question. Resigned to his fate, Lokir frowned and began to descend into the basement.

From what he could see as the ladder swayed dangerously underneath him, the basement was a small room underneath the house, made entirely of cold stone. If not for the lantern in his hands, the room would have been entirely dark. The closer he got to the floor, the more he could see of the room. The walls were lined with multiple chests with large locks on them, and there was a small cot in the corner.

"Wonderful," Lokir said as he reached the bottom. He grabbed the handle of the lantern and held it up around him to look at the dreary room underneath Breezehome. If he squinted his eyes, it wasn't half-bad.

There was a thud as Lydia closed the trapdoor above him, and then he was alone in the creepy basement. What could possibly go wrong?

Lokir sighed. The first thing he did was drag the cot to the center of the room and wrap himself in the blankets. The mage's robes were comfy, but they weren't great for warmth. Then he sat cross-legged on the cot and emptied out the contents of his knapsack.

For the moment, he pushed aside the two books from Helgen and the single bottle of mead he had managed to swipe from Lucan's shop, and grabbed the four lockpicks and knife. After all, he was a thief, wasn't he? What did they expect, placing him in a room full of valuables?

He did feel a little prick on his conscience, however. He'd struck a deal with Rayla that, even though he didn't fully understand it, meant that it was a sort of contract. The first rule of thieving was to never do anything to violate the contract. And if he violated Rayla's trust, she might just decide to get rid of him and be done with it—or worse, turn him in to the guards.

Lokir dismissed the notion as best he could. Thieves didn't worry about morals, did they? If the others could hear what he was thinking, they'd scoff and tell him that he was soft.

He fisted the lockpicks and his knife and told himself to stop being such a wuss. Wrapping the blankets more tightly around himself, he stood from off his cot and brought the lantern over to one of the chests with the smallest locks. Since he had a limited amount of lockpicks, he'd have to pick the easiest lock first.

Carefully, he inserted the knife and lockpick and began to twist his right hand. Almost immediately, the lockpick broke.

"Bloody hell," Lokir muttered. Only the toughest locks broke picks that easily. Now he was down to three. No wonder Lydia hadn't been threatened by placing him in a room of valuables.

Appearances can be deceiving, his father had once told him, referring to locks and picking pockets. Lokir cursed his idiocy and moved on to the next lock, only to experience the same thing.

Moving on to the third chest, Lokir took time to examine the lock. This one was particularly large, and had many scratches on the inside—it took him a painstaking amount of time to arrange the lantern in order to squint inside the lock. There were two possible explanations for the scratches on the inside of the lock: either someone had tried to pick the lock before, or the chest was opened so often that the key had left scratches on the inside. And if the key had left scratches on the inside, it was also likely that the lock was tough, and the key had been twisted roughly and quickly.

That was one of the more obscure lessons about lockpicking that Lokir had received from his father. He tried his best to take deep breaths to slow his frustrated heartbeat. He could pick the easier locks without difficulty, but harder locks often took multiple tries, and he just couldn't do that with the two lockpicks that he had left. Angrily, he kicked the shards of the broken lockpicks across the room and sat back down on his cot.

Shivering, he tied the blankets around his shoulders and stuffed the lockpicks back in his bag for a later time. He doubted that, wherever they went next (if they went anywhere at all), Rayla would allow him to buy more lockpicks.

He pulled the lantern closer to him and starting putting his belongings back inside his meager bag. He took extra care with the sack of coins and placed it at the very bottom of the pack for safekeeping. Then he picked up the black book with the symbol of the dragon on it—titled The Book of the Dragonborn—and half-heartedly flipped through some of the pages. He physically felt his eyes gloss over when he read some of the historical statistics and closed the book. He'd never been much of a history nut, but maybe he could find one and sell the book to them.

Lokir paid even less attention to the book the mage had been holding as he let the pages flip under his thumb. He knew that non-magic wielders—AKA most Nords—wouldn't be able to read a spell tome unless they had some kind of magicka in them. He was mostly thinking about who he could possibly sell a spell tome to, since he didn't know any mages. Perhaps a prospective student to the College of Winterhold, if he came across one?

Zap!

Lokir cursed and dropped the book, nursing his thumb. It stung like someone had just struck it with a whip, and was as red as a tomato.

Had the book just…shocked him?

He gulped and looked over the side of the cot, where the book waited on the floor. When he'd dropped it, the book had landed face down, so that the spine was facing up. Carefully, he brought the lantern closer to the book as he squinted at it. Magic was unpredictable, as all Nords knew. But Lokir was ignorant to the more…volatile claims involving magic, though he knew there were ones. However, he'd always been too curious for his own good. Any other Nord would have burned the book, but he wanted answers.

As he squinted at the book cautiously, he could suddenly make out several characters written on the spine, just like any other book. When he looked closer—almost falling off of the cot in the process—he just saw a bunch of squiggly lines.

And then the lines began to move.

His eyes widened as he watched the characters on the side of the spine rearrange themselves into a written language that he could comprehend, until the words very clearly spelled "Sparks."

"What in the name of Talos…?" Lokir muttered. There was only one way to find out what was happening, or if he was going crazy.

Carefully, he reached out his hand and grabbed the book. He flinched away almost immediately, but he felt no pain. Had the first shock been just a fluke? Swallowing his apprehension, Lokir steeled himself. Then he grabbed the book firmly.

Still no pain. His curiosity was practically suffocating him now, like a giant sabre cat had just sat on his chest. Holding the lantern in one hand and the spell tome in the other, Lokir peered at the book cover.

The book was wrapped in a dark gray cover, and was emblazoned with the silver image of what looked like a fireball, or possibly a hand. Perhaps both.

The strangest part was when Lokir actually opened the book. It was dead silent in the basement, so the sound of the pages rustling seemed as deafening as a Giant's footsteps. With the lantern sitting at his side, and clutching the book with both hands, Lokir peered at the first page.

Immediately, he felt a jolt throughout his entire body. It was almost as if he had been struck by lightning, but lessened by a thousand times. And his eyes were glued to the page. He could do nothing but read.

Later, he wouldn't be able to recall what was in the book. But in that moment, it made perfect sense to him. It was as if someone had added a missing piece to his mind, and the image it made was suddenly complete. He was alive with energy as he furiously read the book, his eyes consuming the pages hungrily.

And then, all of a sudden, it was gone. Lokir blinked in confusion as he realized that he had miraculously finished the book, despite the fact that it was as thick as an iron ingot. As soon as he realized that, the spell tome collapsed into ash, as if it had never been there in the first place.

For a full minute, Lokir just sat there, in an utterly confused state. The knowledge of what he had just read was there, in his mind, but the words themselves were fading as quickly as daylight at dusk.

Then he realized that there was a buzz in his hands. It felt rather like what he'd experienced as he'd read the spell tome. And when he looked down, he felt his eyes nearly fall out of his head.

Most of the room's illumination was no longer coming from the lantern. Instead, the room was cast in a blue-purple light that originated from Lokir's hands. Because, crackling on his fingers like a miniature storm, were dozens of tongues of lightning.

Lokir was so surprised that he fell right off the cot. In his distress, he felt a pull in his gut, and the lightning on his hands burst outward, crashing into the ceiling of the basement with an incredibly loud sizzling sound.

He cried out with no small amount of fright as he sat up—because the lightning didn't stop. It kept pouring out of his hands like some sort of electrical fountain, slamming into the walls with a deafening thud-sizzzzzle. Underneath it all, he felt a strange sort of energy fading from him, like he was draining a well that he hadn't known was full.

"Stop it!" Lokir shouted, and a small voice in the back of his head berated him for talking to his own hands.

But it worked. The moment he uttered the words, he felt the pull in his gut cease. The lightning pouring out of his fingers stopped suddenly, though it still flowed over his fingers and palms.

He heard a sudden clank overhead and some shouts, and then the trapdoor above slammed open. A moment later, someone dropped down to the floor, a Elven dagger held at the ready. In the light from the lightning on Lokir's hands, her facial scar seemed immeasurably more eerie.

Rayla's confused face flicked from the lightning in Lokir's fingers, to his puzzled and frightened face, to the deep gouges that his lightning had made in the wall, to the ashes of the spell tome on the floor. Then her brow furrowed, and she relaxed, sheathing the dagger she held.

"Well," she eventually said, looking just as bewildered as he felt, "Congratulations, Lokir. You're a mage."

Someone wanna hit me up with a review? Thanks. :)