One year later, Torin sat in a quiet corner of Jorrvaskr's mead hall, the usual clamor of training and camaraderie a distant backdrop to his focus.
His brow was furrowed in a mixture of concentration and frustration as he stared at the book in his hands: Breathing Water.
He had, once again, slammed into a wall in his studies. The problem, as always, was a fundamental lack of understanding. He had devoured The Basics of Alteration, memorizing the gestures and incantations for spells like Candlelight, Oakflesh, and a minor Haste spell.
But the book spoke of something more, something crucial: a special state of mind, a deep, intuitive understanding of the spell's nature that went beyond mere words and motions.
It was the difference between reciting a recipe and truly understanding how ingredients transform under heat. Torin could recite the recipe, but the meal refused to cook.
In desperation, he had turned to the other Alteration text he had "borrowed" from Farengar's collection. Breathing Water had seemed promising by its title, but to his initial dismay, it wasn't a spell tome at all.
It was a storybook, its pages filled with the tale of a dockside thug.
The man's life was a cycle of petty extortion; he strong-armed a percentage from the smugglers' profits, which he then presented to his gang leader, who in turn gave him a cut of that percentage.
The math was as depressing as his existence, leaving him with just enough gold to stay alive and miserable.
He was resigned to this life, until word spread of a treasure-laden ship that had sunk in the deep, treacherous waters of the Abecean Sea.
A gold rush ensued. Treasure hunters, rival smugglers, and adventurous sorts flooded the docks, armed with expensive waterbreathing potions and scrolls acquired from the Mages Guild.
Yet, one by one, they all failed.
The ship had gone down in an abyssal trench, far deeper than any common magic could reach. Their potions expired, their scrolls fizzled, and the treasure remained a taunting dream at the bottom of the sea.
It was then the thug remembered a rumor, a tavern tale whispered over cheap ale: a sorceress, an old mistress of the Alteration school, who had reached such a profound mastery that her magic did not merely create a bubble of air around her head.
She had learned to transmute the very substance of water itself, to make it breathable. The rumors said she could breathe water, and that she could live beneath the waves indefinitely if she so desired.
Torin's frustration began to melt away, replaced by a dawning realization. This might not be just a story.
The difference between a novice's Waterbreathing spell and what this sorceress could do was the difference between holding your breath and learning to breathe a new element.
The book had been an easy, almost simplistic read until the thug's first meeting with the sorceress. He found her not in a tower of crystal and spell-dust, but as a plain, weathered old woman drawing water from a public well.
"I have gold for you," the thug declared, cutting straight to the point, "if you teach me the secret of breathing water."
The old woman turned, water dripping from her chin, and fixed him with a grin that was all gaps and wrinkles. "I ain't breathing it, boy. I'm just having a drink."
"Don't mock me," he said, his voice stiff with a thug's pride and impatience. "Either you're Seryne Relas and you will teach me the spell for breathing water, or you aren't. Those are the only possibilities."
And this was the moment the text began to twist, becoming a labyrinth of thought that captivated Torin. The old woman wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, her eyes glinting with a deep, unsettling wisdom.
"If you're going to learn to breathe water," she said, her tone shifting from rustic to oracular, "you're going to have to learn there are more possibilities than that, boy. The School of Alteration is all about possibilities. It's about changing patterns, making things be what they could be, not just what they are."
She leaned forward slightly. "So, let's alter the possibilities. Maybe I ain't Seryne Relas, but I can teach you how to breathe water. Or maybe I am Seryne Relas and I won't. Or maybe I can teach you to breathe water, but you can't learn."
Torin paused, his finger resting on the paragraph. He was deeply intrigued. He tried to break it down logically, to map her words into a coherent structure, but they resisted.
They were a paradox.
It reminded him of Schrödinger's cat, a thought experiment from his old world. The old woman was the cat, and her deliberate vagueness was the box. To the thug, she both was and was not Seryne Relas until the moment she chose to confirm or deny her identity.
Her very existence was a superposition of states, and the power she held over the man seemed to stem from embracing that uncertainty.
He wrestled with the concept, feeling the familiar frustration of a mind used to engineering solutions hitting a wall of pure philosophy. After several minutes of mental strain, he read on.
The thug, much like Torin himself in that moment, chose not to overthink the philosophical quagmire. He cut through the paradox with a simple, unwavering declaration of intent.
"I'll learn."
It wasn't an argument. It wasn't a request for clarification. It was a statement of fact, a commitment that bypassed the "if" and "maybe" and went straight to the outcome.
After a brief, terse back-and-forth where the thug's stubbornness seemed to amuse her more than annoy her, the sorceress finally relented. She led him away from the city, down to a low, windswept sandbank along the sea.
The air was thick with the smell of salt and decay.
"I will teach you a powerful spell for breathing water, boy," she began, her voice now carrying the weight of an instructor. "You must become a master of it. As with all spells and all skills, the more you practice, the better you get."
She held up a gnarled finger. "But even that ain't enough. To achieve true mastery, you must understand what it is you're doing. It ain't simply enough to perform a perfect thrust of a blade—you must also know what you are doing and why."
Like Torin, the thug had only one thought at her words: That's common sense. He gave voice to his thought, a grunt of agreement.
"Yes, it is," said Seryne, closing her eyes as if listening to the rhythm of the waves. "But the spells of Alteration are all about uncommon sense. The infinite possibilities. Breaking the sky. Swallowing space. Dancing with time. Setting ice on fire. Believing the unreal may become real."
She opened her eyes, and they seemed to hold the deep, dark blue of the ocean depths. "You must learn the rules of the cosmos... and then you must learn to break them."
Torin paused, the book resting in his lap. Her last statement echoed in his mind. Learn the rules... and break them. It was a sentiment that resonated with the engineer in him.
To innovate, you first had to master the established principles, and only then could you see where they could be bent or rewritten. This wasn't just magic; it was the very process of discovery.
He read on.
"That sounds... very difficult," replied the man, trying and failing to keep the skepticism from his face.
Seryne didn't answer directly. Instead, she pointed a bony finger toward the water's edge, where a school of small silver fish darted in the shallows, their scales flashing in the sun. "They don't find it so," she observed. "They breathe water just fine."
"But that's not magic," the thug countered, confused by the non-sequitur. "That's just... what they do."
Seryne turned her piercing gaze back to him. "What I'm saying to you, boy," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper that was almost carried away by the wind, "is that it is magic."
Torin finally found himself unable to continue reading. The words had ceased to be ink on a page and had become a tangled knot of concepts in his mind, demanding to be unraveled.
He closed the book first, the soft thud a period at the end of the sorceress's cryptic lesson. Then he closed his eyes, shutting out the familiar sight of Jorrvaskr's hall.
The back-and-forth between the dockside thug and the sorceress began to replay in his mind, a loop of deepening inquiry. Alteration is the art of bending the rules of the world. To bend the rules, you must first understand them.
But what were the rules of the world?
His first, instinctive answers felt childish and insufficient. The sun dawns in the east and sets in the west. Heatwaves precede clouds; clouds and cold fronts precede rain or snow.
But these were observations, outcomes, facts. They were the what, not the why. They were the final equation, not the underlying formula.
If he had to point at something and declare, "Yes, that is a rule of the world," it would have to be the process, not the outcome. For example, the process of rain: heat from the sun turns water into vapor that rises into the sky.
As it rises, it faces decreasing air pressure and cooler temperatures. Cool air cannot hold as much water vapor, so the vapor condenses around microscopic particles, forming droplets that eventually fall as precipitation.
He chewed on that for a moment. It was closer, a fundamental principle of meteorology. But was it a rule, or just another, more detailed, description of an effect?
Perhaps the true rules were even more fundamental.
Perhaps they were the changes that happened within the water molecules themselves during the process—the breaking and forming of hydrogen bonds, the shifts in kinetic energy.
A slow, dawning realization settled over him, as profound as it was simple. In that essence, stripped of all mysticism and viewed through the lens of his old world's knowledge, wouldn't the "rules of the world" that Alteration sought to bend be...
"...just physics?" he whispered to the empty air.
The thought was staggering. The School of Alteration wasn't about reciting incantations; it was about attaining such a deep, intuitive understanding of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and molecular biology that you could, with a focused application of magicka, convince reality to temporarily adopt a new set of variables.
The fish didn't need magic to breathe water because their biology was built within those rules. A master of Alteration, however, could rewrite their own biology, or the properties of the water itself, to achieve the same result.
It wasn't a violation of nature, but a supreme mastery of it.
He had been trying to learn spells. What he needed to learn was the underlying science of this universe.
Torin felt his own mind twitching with a scholar's eagerness to test this new theory, but an even stronger curiosity pulled him back to the page. He needed to see how the story ended. He took a steadying breath and opened the book once more.
The narrative resumed, detailing weeks of grueling, frustrating lessons on the sandbank. Finally, the day came when the thug, through sheer force of will and a glimmer of understanding, learned to breathe water as he had desired. The sea, once a barrier, became his domain.
On the day of his departure, Seryne fixed him with a final, solemn gaze. "There is one last lesson I have to teach you," she said, her voice devoid of its earlier whimsy. "You must learn that desire is not enough. The world will end your spell no matter how good you are, and no matter how much you want it. All things return to their true nature."
"That's a lesson I'm happy not to learn," he replied with a confident smirk, and left at once for the short journey back to the wharfs of Tear.
He wasted no time. He dove into the choppy waters, his new power flowing through him.
He swam deeper than any potion or scroll could have taken him, past the failing point of other treasure hunters, until he saw the dark, skeletal silhouette of the sunken ship, the Morodrung, resting on the abyssal plain.
On his first dive, the pressure and fading concentration forced him back.
A second attempt brought him closer. On the third, he reached the deck.
It was everything he had dreamed of and more. Shattered chests spilled golden coins across the silt, gleaming in the faint, filtered light.
It was a fortune. His first instinct was to scoop up as much as he could carry and surface a rich man.
But then he saw it: a heavy, iron-bound strongbox clutched in the bloated, rigid arms of a dead sailor. What could be so precious that a man would hold onto it in death when surrounded by a king's ransom in gold?
He tried to pry the box open, but the lock held fast. Frustrated, he searched the nearby debris and found the key, held just as tightly in the grip of another corpse.
With a sense of triumph, he took the key and opened the box.
It was filled with shards of broken glass. Puzzled, he rummaged through the pieces until his fingers closed around something solid. He pulled out two intact flasks of what appeared to be cheap, unlabeled wine. A slow, condescending smile spread across his face.
This was what was so important? The poor fool was an alcoholic, clutching his last comfort even as he drowned.
It was in that moment of disdainful distraction that he felt it—a sudden, violent lurch in his being. He had not been paying attention to the grim, tireless advance of the world.
His concentration, fractured by greed and contempt, had wavered. The magic was fading, the altered state of his lungs unraveling back to their mortal nature.
There was no time to surface. There was no time to do anything.
As he reflexively sucked in a panicked breath, his lungs filled not with life-giving magicka, but with the cold, burning brine of the sea.
Days later, his corpse washed back into the wharf. Such a sight was not unusual in a port city.
What sparked endless, hushed debate in the local taverns for years to come was the fact that in his dead, cold hands, he clutched two perfectly sealed potions of waterbreathing.
...
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