Wystan had been gone long enough for them to worry.

"I think I know what he's been up to," Raynu said.

"What's that," Azuyia asked.

"He's pursuing something a novice should only do when forced into a corner, on a world scale, a craft both beyond his current abilities and a waste of time. Dangerous, too."

"Why? What's he doing, you think?"

Raynu stared off.

"Follow me," she said, getting up from the table and gathering a canvas forage sack, raising it over her head and slinging it across her body with the pleated wool pad on her left shoulder and the scabbard-width thick muslin strap running down to her right hip, the grommeted and tied opening in the middle of her back. "We don't need scared citizens or pissed guards showing up because of scared citizens. We're going for a short ride to the fields in front of Wind Face." Raynu buckled her blade.

Azuyia was not unaware the adept was arming herself with ebony. Wind Face was known for the number of hikers, trysting lovers, and wanderers from out of town whose partial corpses turned up with the marks of either live animals or else whose names she had to force out of her thoughts.

"That spot? Why such a grim location, and at least, what, an hour or two on horseback at that?"

"Because it's far enough away from town not to attract attention for my casting, and you're right, most people here are too aware of its reputation to have any business anywhere nearby. I need to show you what I think Wystan is doing. That way you can advise him. Maybe he will listen to you. Besides," and here she sounded every bit the highborn," I do not have the time or the patience for intramural squabbles."

On another day Azuyia would have been amused at her mistress's sniffing. This time, however, she felt the tingle in her stomach that she remembered walking in to her first healing demonstration, facing the domina who had walked the battlefields of the Aldmeri war to triage legates and jarls' firstborn between possible crafted cures, excruciating spot surgeries, and slow inevitable death, not having slept a minute the night before while sorting and triple checking her notes on the volume that would be presented to her in a full audience of seniors, consumed instantaneously whether she retained the spell or not. What do I say? Uh, I forgot that curlicued Alik'r letter at the end of the fourth recitation? That 'suture' and 'sever' look almost identical in Redguard script? She was about to get a lesson and had to take a backside bruising ride in the wilds just to get it.

They got down and walked through face-high wild sorghum and winter wheat to a mostly bare expanse of rubble in front of Wind Face, a vertical sheet of smooth diorite blasted to the appearance of dark metal by the air currents across the partial grotto. How Raynu planned on using any material for this demonstration or incorporate normal flame in their process was a mystery to Azuyia. She wondered what time of year this place would actually be the right combination of warm, dry, and calm enough to attract vistors. People actually want to ... here? Anyway. Raynu was right, though. They had not seen anybody walking or riding for much of the trip there. The horses shifted and twitched their heads.

"Alright," Raynu said, raising the last part of the word in that way where one might hear an exasperated finality, the kind when someone might say, Al-right, I'll answer your question. She turned to Azuyia with her hands down by her sides, fingers together and thumbs up slightly. "Now I will show you something that hopefully illustrates why duffers like me don't want you novas fooling with dangerous syntheses before your time. Face me, but stand way, way back. Over there, by that boulder." She raised both forearms up stiffly and balled both fists.

Azuyia half ran backwards, stumbling and sitting down hard on a chair-sized rock many paces away. Raynu spoke a phrase with a jagged sort of vowel. She blurred, and a sheet of force draped over her body and stayed there in a slow shimmer. It sounded like, wait, no, the stones in a circle around her feet were really splitting in small pieces, popping up a bit and settling. Then they melted. The chips and pebbles turned to droplets of lava before they sank back down, and Raynu's blurry outline expanded upward and outward. The lava bits turned from red-orange to a lapis blue bright enough to stand out even in the midday sun under a clear sky. Her form kept expanding. The illusion of falling force then vanished.

Up until now the most frightened Azuyia had ever been, after leaving her home in Valenwood, was the time she was stopped by a detachment of Thalmor in full moonstone plate checking passage writs and documents, extorting the usual payments for not hauling a Bosmer in to their officer for more questions. She had gotten to Cyrodiil safely and happily, and there lived the city life. That was easy.

Travel, then, to Skyrim had had its tense moments on occasion. There was a situation in the train between the northern Colovian highlands and the pass at Fletchersgate on the Falkreath border when all were told to either get under the wagon or behind someone with a shield. All she heard that time was some of the shouting and a high scream out in Breton, and then after an hour or so one of the armed Khajiit escorts leaned under her wagon and told her to come out. There were so many people in that trading caravan train of wagons, horses, and mules, and those on foot that the entire production came to a confused stop, and would camp right there for two days just to reorganize. That evening in the circus she walked to the head of the train to find the horse-sized body of a dead saber cat. Yowza, she thought, and they're supposedly as quiet as a house pet until they jump from a perch three stories up.

"Buhloody tehroor," the Khajiit leader mumbled, sitting there in a striped camp chair, drinking straight out of a Colovian bottle. "Rest assuured," he laughed sardonically, "we weren't couzinz."

Azuyia had been shown drawings in her school books growing up, but seeing an animal with fangs as long as her forearm was something else. As she walked back to her wagon where she had laid out a blanket bedding, she also passed the surgeons talking quietly next to a fire.

"What happened," she asked, I mean, yeah, there was an attack, but ..."

"It got seven out in front," a middle-aged, hard looking Breton answered. He had his hood thrown back on his shoulders, and wore riding boots with steel guards on the shins. From the faint metallic red threading visible on his knee-length robes, Azuyia guessed he was a mage of some sort. "And no, you don't want to see the results."

A tent, expansive for a temporary train camp in a mountain pass with its military canvas and intricate tapestry draping, had been pitched with full iron braziers burning on either side of the entrance. She could smell some sort of herb in their smoke. Best not to ask questions, she thought, but my guess is that this is a funeral.

That had been the closest she had gotten to a really dangerous situation. Everything else about Valenwood, Cyrodiil, and now Skyrim had been just theoretical. Lots of midnight oil, lots of stories (that she listened to) from this or that barkeep or local out by a fountain, and of course the novitiate here lately. She was a scribe and a traveler at this point, and was quite pleased to be such. Azuyia, now, was looking at the most terrifying live appearance of anything she had yet been anywhere near. The figure that had been Raynu, a typically statuesque Bosmer all arms and legs, was now an apparition that could easily reach over the roof ledge of any one-story house there in the village. It was eight or nine feet tall, surfaces the off white of the ivory she had seen carved out of mammoth and horker tusks, and its entire body from the sides of what looked like a head all down its arms, torso, and legs had tusklike protrusions that ended in points as fine as a butcher blade. The thing moved one foot forward and then another, walking towards where Azuyia sat with hands behind her, propping herself up and feeling the shake in her elbows and lips. The damn thing looked like it weighed half a ton.

The eyes gleamed the same lapis lazuli as the transforming lava that Raynu's spell had produced as she took this form. Not pretty gems, these were ghost gleams, phantasm. Its face looked like the sort of helmets on display in the Imperial City collections. She had seen one or two made out of dragon bone locked in crystal cases, works hundreds of years old that had spiky faceplates similar to this thing walking toward her.

What in the world? Does Raynu channel or something? What sort of power have I been studying with her?

"Relax," the thing said in a tone lower than any living being she had ever heard speak Bosmer. Relax, oh, right, just what I was thinking. When it spoke, the timbre of the sound forced its way through her ribcage and drummed on her heart, a mallet thumping her viscera with that one word.

"Wwwwh ... aat is this?" Azuyia stuttered. "What are you?!"

"Do we need to play questions? I'm Raynu, and this is the spell."

"What?!"

"The spell that I think Wystan is preparing. He's been inquiring in Dragonsreach, and that's not a place you go expecting to hide."

"Asking about ... ?"

"Scripts," Raynu answered, the amplified tone so low and hard to follow that it took Azuyia a moment, "He wants to cast what you see before you."

"But what is this thing you've done to yourself?" Azuyia sputtered.

"Before I switch back, take a good look. Watch." Raynu walked over to a boulder like the one serving as Azuyia's chair, raised one arm with an enormous, clawed fist balled, bringing it down to a smack on its surface. This embedded the various protrusions on the fist into the surface of the boulder which Raynu then raised up with the single arm, and then flung a couple bodies' length off onto the gravelled expanse in front of the Wind Face grotto. She then kicked with one foot of the carapace at the ground, bringing up enough rocks and earth underneath to fill a large cauldron, the air carrying in the younger woman's direction. Azuyia blinked her eyes and spat some dirt and dust. When she blinked again Raynu had changed back to her taut self and walked up close, not the slightest bit phased. She stood with her hands on her hips as Azuyia managed to get up and brush herself off, fiddling with the strands of hair that had blown in her eyes.

"That," she told the confused novice, "is the truuk-jall. Translated from the Orsimer, we call it killing machine."

"Wystan is learning this one?

"I believe so. The questions he's been asking point in that direction. From my contacts in the lower courts of Dragonsreach and a few scribenda, I think he wants a flesh chant to combine with that handheld fire you all learn in the basics."

"Is that how you got the ... "

"Don't ask such questions!" Raynu snapped. "You've seen enough! Flesh and energy can produce a powerful, if crude, way of dealing with close combat. It's Orsimer design. Go figure, they love to cleave their way into everything."

"Orcs," Azuyia said meekly.

"Yes, Orcs. They know how to fight. This spell, still and though, is not for novices with an axe to grind in that sense of the phrase. It's for use in place of axes and on real battlefields, and by those who have any business getting themselves into fistfights with armed opponents." Raynu sighed. "This would not be the first time I've heard of a magic student wanting to go toe to toe with a bravo recruit. Not good, sister."