I got dressed and went to wash up for the day when I froze as there was something VERY out of place in my reflection on the water. A small top hat with moving mud crab pincers rested atop my head. I hurriedly swatted it off and stared at it without blinking for a good five minutes as I ran every diagnostic spell I knew through my body. I checked my soul and everything because while I probably looked paranoid you can never be too careful when Sheogorath was involved.-
Sheogorath, daedric prince of madness, cheese, art and the uncanny. Of all the princes he alone is the most troublesome for a single reason, he was literal madness. It wasn't just a state of mind for him but his entire existence. This made him random and unpredictable. As if that wasn't bad enough in terms of pure power he was also one of the most powerful of the daedric princes if not the most powerful. He's shown more than once that he had the power to do things that the others couldn't. Interactions with him could at any time turn violent or plain bizarre.-
Because of this I wanted to be absolutely sure that that hat wasn't some sort of cursed thing that he chose to leave me out of a passing whim. So far I failed to find anything out of the usual even after effectively parsing through my body and soul grain by grain like a handful of sand. That left the hat itself to consider. I used [telekinesis] to lift it and bring it over to my enchanting setup. Resting my palms on the slate I pulsed my magicka into it carefully and gently to probe the item resting there.-
Immediately a vast and ridiculously messy enchantment filled my minds eye. It was a mish mash of runes, lines and concepts that I could see barely any cohesion to. I fetched some parchment and a charcoal pencil and began to piece by piece copy down the enchantment. I might not be able to make sense of it but the college had a master enchanter who probably could. It ended up taking me no less than fifty five sheets of parchment to full copy each and every part of the enchantment. I might not know what the enchantment did but I did know one thing, it was MASSIVE.-
Most enchantments were a few lines and at most a dozen or two runes. Those enchantments cost anywhere between a petty soul gem all the way up to a grand one depending on what they did and how strong they were. This monstrosity of an enchantment had HUNDREDS of lines and runes. The worst part was that I could tell that the hat was fucking ALIVE and not even because of the enchantment but in spite of it. You might be wondering why that's important? The answer was that you weren't SUPPOSED to be able to enchant a living thing.-
See enchanting worked by drawing out the trapped souls within the gems as pure energy and using it to give form and permanence to a piece of magic. Living things had their own souls however so when you tried to use a foreign soul to enchant a living thing the soul energy just plain won't stick. The original soul repels it away. You couldn't use the original soul either as you kill whatever the thing is when you strip the soul out of it. Using the soul at that point is just enchanting a corpse which is basically pointless.-
I found a basket in the end and moved the hat into it before collecting Lokjun and heading out of my room to find Sergius Turrianus, the master enchanter. He taught the art as well but only once every two weeks I'm told. Usually he was too busy with his own research or adding enchantments to things at the behest of people all over Skyrim. Ironically it was the taxes applied to the goods coming and going from his work that Winterhold was earning the most money. -
As I left my room and from there the hall of attainment I barely noticed Ancano lurking nearby. Like the slimy bastard he was he was in the shadows as I stepped out of the hall.
"You there, we must speak." he said making me pause and immediately throw my mental guard up.
"I'll listen but expect no more from me." I said calmly.
"Of course. I would like to ... apologize. My behavior before was unbecoming of me, that is all." he said concisely before walking away leaving me on HIGH alert.
Everything I knew about him said that he ABSOLUTELY wouldn't apologize willingly. He was far too entrenched in the Thalmors Altmer supremacy doctrine for that. No everything about this screamed "conspiracy" and I didn't like it. There was more going on here that I wasn't seeing.-
'That's just another thing on the long list of things I need to do now.' I thought with a sigh as I continued on my way.
I headed for the Arcanaeum because even if he didn't know exactly where Sergius was Urag definitely had an idea roughly. There was a reason the Orc was the librarian here after all, he not only knew the books like the back of his hands but the people too.-
Like always he was sitting behind his wrap around desk as an enchanted light floated over his shoulder giving him the perfect amount of light for reading.
"Aren't you supposed to be practicing the spells Phineas gave you?" he asked gruffly as he looked up from the tome he was reading.
"I had a rough night, need to find Sergius. For multiple reasons." I said flatly.
He raised an eyebrow "That bad huh? He should be in his chambers in the hall of enlightenment, big rune covered barrier where the door is supposed to be. Can't miss it." he said gruffly.
I thanked him before hurrying over that way. The hall of enlightenment was located opposite the hall of attainment and was where most of the senior members of the college resided. Walking into the tower I immediately felt the difference from the hall of attainment. I meant that literally by the way as the very air in this tower was much more dense with magicka. This made sense as the law of density is quite clear that magicka will always try to move from an area of high density to one of lower density, like air really. -
Unfortunately this also applied to the magicka inside a mage. The more condensed the magicka in a mage was the more pressure from both inside and outside they experienced. It was the reason Mina and my classmates were so shocked by my magicka pool being as large as it was. Anyone else who tried to forcibly hold in that much magicka would pop as the pressure ripped them apart from within. My situation was unique in that my magicka pool was naturally this large and thus my body was naturally attuned to carrying it harmlessly.