Chapter Text
Tsabhi slept on the carriage to Winterhold, with Rumarin dozing while he ran his fingers through her hair; the repetitive motion would have knocked her out if she wasn’t already exhausted and borrowing his lap to eke out any comfort on the rickety wooden cart rolling over uneven rocks. She kept the Staff of Magnus pressed against her chest, afraid to let it out of her sight; gods knew it’d end up on the other side of Nirn guarded by whatever was worse than a dragon.
She woke abruptly to the sound of Rumarin’s half panicked laugh and a strangled oh good! “Namira’s guts, what is it now?” It wasn’t enough that he’d been right and Ancano was slightly more competent than any of them had given him credit for, or that Savos Aren had been the first one to die, or that she’d had to fight magical anomalies while screaming reassurances to the Jarl that no, this time it was the Thalmor not the mages, no don’t call in the Stormcloaks, they won’t help (and probably won’t come either, which will only make you angrier). Now she watched Brelyna, J’zargo, and Onmund rush over to her from the crowd of mages standing, shivering, in the ruins of Winterhold (thankfully at least they were no more ruinous than usual).
“Please tell me you have the staff,” Brelyna said urgently, reaching out to help her down from the carriage. “Is that it?”
“It is.” She handed it over with no small measure of relief. “Things have been going...poorly, I assume?”
“Mirabelle’s dead,” J’zargo reported, not sounding particularly upset about it.
“Ancano’s expanded his barrier and ejected us all from the college grounds,” Onmund added.
“And nobody knows what they’re doing anymore. Nobody’s taken charge, nobody’s done anything. Research on the staff halted entirely, so I hope you know how to use it.”
“Where’s Tolfdir?” Tsabhi asked, looking around the crowd teeming with apprentices.
Onmund rolled his eyes. “Sitting down. Fretting to anyone who’ll listen.”
“Faralda? Drevis? Colette?”
J’zargo snorted. “Wandering. Fretting. Ignoring each other.” Tsabhi groaned, rubbing her hands up and down her face.
“Not to say I told you so—” Rumarin started, and she dropped back into the snow.
“Shut up, that’s the worst part of all this.” He was right and Ancano was evil and the mages were useless sods. All right. You get five more seconds in the snow. Four. Three. Two. “Okay, well. Time to hurt some feelings. Rumarin, to add insult to injury, could I borrow you for a moment?” They struggled through the process of Rumarin lifting her on his shoulders, made longer because her husband apparently had to continuously start and stop short jokes that really stretched the moment. When she was towering over the crowd, she whistled in the sort of way Dro’baad had taught her, to be heard over great distances.
A hundred eyes were suddenly on her.
“Students to the left, faculty to the right. If you’re a working student, group with the students,” she shouted, gesturing for Brelyna and the others to stay back by her side. After a stupidly long time, they finally managed. Another minute or so passed as she shouted for the students to organise themselves by level, until finally she had her options laid out in front of her.
“What an army, general,” Rumarin offered wryly.
“This is an embarrassment of novices,” J’zargo sneered, his tail puffed and twitching. “J’zargo is not filled with confidence.”
Neither was Tsabhi. “Novices and apprentices are in charge of healing services, supervised by Colette and Tolfdir,” she called. No one moved, besides Colette shuffling to the front.
“So I’m just supposed to sit back on your orders to oversee students who can’t do more than a healing spell?” she asked irritably, clearly fishing for insult.
“I don’t recall asking what you thought Colette. You’re the Master Restorationist, so do your fucking job and shut up about it.” Tsabhi hadn’t fought a dragon priest just to get mouthed off to by a Breton. “Tolfdir, you’re handling potions.”
“I won’t argue with that,” the old man declared, obviously relieved to have an indoor job.
“Wise of you. You have authority over Colette, because she obviously has problems following instructions.” There was a short wave of swallowed cackling in the student side, and still nobody moved. “Woodland Man save me, get going! You’re not waiting around to heal Ancano, you’re to tend to the town!” That got them going, all of them headed towards the inn. “Now everyone else is in charge of anomalies and protecting as much life and property as you’re able, headed by Faralda and Enthir. I assume the two of you can figure it out between yourselves?”
“Yes, expert!” they called back, again very wisely, and even more miraculously began to immediately organise themselves. She was relieved to hear them set up patrols and emergency escort services for the stranded and potentially injured, and tapped Rumarin’s head gently.
“Okay, down I go.” It was only extremely awkward, but when she finally hit the ground, she turned to her friends. “And we’re all on cleaning duty. We’re going to get into the college with the staff, murder Ancano, and Brelyna I don’t supposed you know any necromancy?”
“Of course not. That’s for priests and...well, you know, necromancers.”
“Well, then we’ll only kill him once.”
“Dibs on body disposal,” Rumarin said, putting his arm around her shoulders. “I’m thinking something subtle, like using his corpse as an improvised firework.” J’zargo grinned but Tsabhi waved him off: unfortunately to kill Ancano, they would have to actually go inside and kill him, the sooner the better.
Not soon enough, however, to avoid Korir. “Where is Savos Aren?” he yelled at the newly founded patrol, and Tsabhi sighed as an adept stammered something and pointed directly at her. He marched over, flanked by guards. “Where is the archmage?”
“Dead.”
“What about that Breton woman he had at the front doors?” Well, that answered the question as to why a groundskeeper had to be hired in addition to Faralda’s screening questions.
“Also dead.”
“All that done by the Thalmor?” he roared, reaching dangerously for the greatsword on his back. Tsabhi subtly stepped in front of Rumarin. “Why was my guard not informed?”
“The short answer is preservation of life. The Thalmor is pissing with magic, and I’ve been away until now getting what I need to stop him. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll bring you back a head to pike.” She stepped back and nodded deeply enough that it could be misconstrued as a bow, and rushed away before he could suggest he send anyone with her: or worse, try to call the Stormcloaks.
“So...is there a plan we’re meant to be following?” Onmund asked nervously. “This is a little more sophisticated than blasting draugr.”
“I have the staff, so I’ll be the one to use it. Rumarin is melee, and I’ll need someone to keep him and everyone else safe and in one piece: I assume you can handle that, Onmund?” He nodded, looking a little relieved to not have to go toe to toe with a Thalmor agent: she simply didn’t have the heart to tell him that any sensible fighter would move for the healer first. “Try to station yourself somewhere with a vantage point. J’zargo, obviously you’re on destruction duty, and Brelyna can do her best to divert his attention from Rumarin and I.” Besides the healer (and since Ancano gave no real indication that he was at all given to sensibility), the one with the weapon of legend and the one with the weapon of stabbing him a lot would be priority targets. “As much illusion as you think will help.”
“You’ve got it. I’m so glad you’re here, Tsabhi, they wouldn’t listen to us.”
“I’ll take my payment in bodily protection from Colette once she gets it in her head to pay me back for embarrassing her in front of everyone.” Ancano’s barrier really had extended right to the stone’s edge of the college, and more troublingly seemed to be hungry to move farther. “All right, here we go. One barrier-eating barrage of godlike magic.”
To her surprise, the whole thing popped out of existence the second the magic hit it, like a soap bubble. From her side, Rumarin whistled. “How often do these kinds of things go right the first time?” he asked.
She gestured them forward, taking the lead towards campus. “Let’s hope we didn’t waste all our good luck.”
“What do we do if he starts blasting at the college itself?” Brelyna asked as they made their careful way across the eerily silent bridge. The stillness was unnatural, lacking even the near ever-present icy wind trying to blow them into the sea. “It can’t take much more structural damage.”
“Have you ever heard of the Renrijra Krin?” Tsabhi returned, and J’zargo’s ears perked up.
“I have to assume it’s a Khajiiti thing.”
“The Mercenary’s Grin,” J’zargo reported with his own smile. “One of their more controversial tenants is ahzirr traajijazeri: ‘we justly take by force’.”
“Well, obviously, but what does that have to do with keeping the walls standing?”
“The central philosophy behind ahzirr traajijazeri is that if you can’t have what is beloved to you, then you destroy it so that your oppressors cannot possess it either,” Tsabhi explained, once more stepping around the corpse of the archmage, now joined by Mirabelle. “If we can’t get him out of the school, then we’ll destroy it.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Rumarin said, presumably in response to Onmund and Brelyna’s shocked expressions. “So long as he needs a floor to stand on, he’ll keep the floor in one piece.”
“Is that like, a Thalmor principle?” Onmund asked nervously.
“What is wrong with mages? It’s common sense!” Tsabhi laughed as she pushed open the doors to the Hall of Elements; there was no point in trying to employ stealth, as she was the only one with any talent for it and presumably the Eye gave Ancano some sort of heightened sense for people hiding.
“So, you took down my barrier did you?” he shouted, his eyes hypnotically fixed on the Eye. “The power to unmake the world is at my fingertips, and you think you can stop it by making your way to my feet?”
“I think it’s very weird that he’s talking about his feet,” Rumarin said, not bothering to keep his voice down. “If anyone ever comes to cut my head off and pike it at the gates, I hope my last words aren’t anything that can be interpreted as a fetish.” Onmund slipped away from them, heading towards the upper floor to stay the high ground. After a moment of deliberation, Brelyna followed suit while J’zargo slunk around the side of the Eye opposite of Tsabhi.
Ancano was doing something magic, but not attacking. Experimentally, Tsabhi hurled a fireball at him and was unsurprised when it rolled off like water from a guar’s back. “I am beyond your pathetic attempts at magic! You cannot touch me!”
“And now he’s talking about touching. Can we jump to the part where we get to kill him, because I’m afraid to let him keep talking in case I fall in love with him.” Rumarin conjured his sword, and Tsabhi glanced over at the Eye. Ancano seemed invulnerable, but Magnus hadn’t crafted the staff to put morals manipulating the Eye in their place: it was for the orb itself.
So she turned and blasted it, feeling a vibration up her entire arm that was proof enough that she was on the right track, if she didn’t have the visual cue of the whole thing coming apart to reveal its highly unstable magicka core. “You’ve retrieved a paltry stick and now hope to thwart me with it? Very well, mongrel. Come, and see what I have become!”
“Do I even have to mention the dog thing?” Rumarin threw up his ward against a fireball that was clearly thrown in the same spirit as Tsabhi’s: to prod. “I assume you have to do staff magic now.”
“As long as the Eye is closed, he’s invulnerable; wait for me to open it with the staff, then strike.” She fled backwards, throwing herself behind a pillar and crouching low. At the very least, the college was cavernous enough to hide her movements so long as she was careful, and Brelyna held up her end of the plan by casting mirror images of Tsabhi and of phantom magic effects around the Eye as often as possible. Onmund cast in a near constant stream, spending any magicka that wasn’t used for healing Rumarin (who threw himself at Ancano with a concerning fervour) to slow Ancano down.
And then of course, an explosion would rock the walls and Tsabhi would be grateful that J’zargo was not above experimental scroll magic.
Ancano, flagging badly after a prolonged battle, quickly abandoned all tactical movement and indeed, anything to do with the Eye at all. He didn’t surrender, of course, because that would be the least troublesome thing to do, but instead focused all his efforts on killing at least one of them. Luckily, by the time he pivoted to his murder-suicide plan he was already nearly too weak to fight off Rumarin alone, let alone step out of the way of J’zargo’s elemental chaos.
In the end, Rumarin got his wish: Ancano spun as Tsabhi darted by him, turning his back on her husband who stabbed his sword directly through Ancano’s throat. There was an indecent spray of blood and with a choked gurgle, the Thalmor finally slumped indelicately to the ground: at the same time, the Eye gave a roar as it stopped receiving energy from the elf, closing in on itself with a rumble like a stampede of mammoths. She waited until it was absolutely quiet besides the ambient hum of magic, then stepped primly out from behind her pillar while Onmund and Brelyna shakily scaled back down to the ground floor. “I seem to recall someone promising he would clean up if Ancano turned out to be evil,” she said, deeply out of breath from the near sprint she’d maintained.
Rumarin let his sword dissolve, slumping back onto the low staircase. “Later. I want to bask in victory while I’m too tired to care about all the blood.” Tsabhi, unbothered by blood in general, dropped down beside him and laid down heavily on his chest. “Oh, now you’ve done it. I’m going to fall asleep right here on the floor with a corpse two feet away from me.”
Approaching from across the room, Brelyna and the others seemed to have the same idea. The explosive relief of having done what they came in to do was overcome by fatigue, and they laid out flat on the ground, covered in blood and panting. The silence was ringing, but Tsabhira was convinced that she’d drop off right where she sat in Tolfdir hadn’t chosen that exact moment to throw open the doors.
“Sweet merciful aedra, they’ve all died!” he shouted, his tone more appropriate for surprising results of an experiment rather than the gory deaths of the highest ranking students in the school. From beside her, Rumarin snorted, quickly trying to muffle his laugh under his hand and failing miserably. It was infectious, and she dissolved into giggles and buried her face in his bloody, bloody chest. Brelyna unsuccessfully muffled several involuntary snorts, her head rocking on Onmund’s deep belly laughs while J’zargo openly cackled.
It was part hysteria, she understood, because they’d just done the thing that’d killed Savos and Mirabelle. It was the gritty confirmation that their capability wasn’t imagined, and that the college really had underestimated them, paired with the shock of death and a battle that’d been fought for days on both ends. There were worse things to do than laugh.
“We’re fine, Tolfdir!” Tsabhi called, her belly aching from trying to speak clearly. “We were just resting!”
“Oh, thank the Eight. Ancano’s died, then?” He made his way inside very casually for someone who thought he’d walked in on a murder scene, peering around like he expected the advisor to jump out at him. He made it all the way to the body before anyone could stop laughing long enough to answer him.
“He’s dead,” Brelyna wheezed, trying to take deep breaths to pull herself together. “And the Eye stopped responding to anything but the staff.”
A flash of light interrupts whatever Tolfdir was going to respond with, and standing in the middle of the hall with a saucy hand on his hip was Tsabhira’s mentor and probably one of the oldest people not on Nirn, Han’Ilu. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear: see, Tsabhi, I told you it wouldn’t be a problem,” he said breezily, giving Ancano’s corpse a nudge with his toe. Tsabhi thought back to the archmage’s office, where Han had spoken to her after Saarthal. It turns out your actions have led to events that could end the world, but don’t feel too bad little guar: we’re pretty sure it was meant to happen this way, so no harm no foul. Just don’t let the world end and you’ll be fine.
“What happens to the Eye now?” she asked, settling herself back down on Rumarin’s chest.
“I’ll call a bunch of psijics here and we’ll take it, and leave you with a great story about how you met the psijics.”
“Bummer prize, seeing as how she already met you,” Rumarin offered from the floor. Han’Ilu rolled his eyes and ignored Tsabhi’s husband, which so far seemed to be the extent of their relationship; she’d tried to assure Rumarin that it wasn’t him so much as it was a lot of pent up resentment towards Altmer from being a Dunmer psijic, but it was hard to explain that much time to someone who’d never had to conceptualise it before.
“Well, I spoke with the rest of the faculty and we have something we’d like to offer you in recompense for not only retrieving the staff ably and in a tight timeframe, but also through virtue of the impressive leadership skills you showed under pressure,” Tolfdir announced as Han began to set up crystals to channel the magicka of his peers.
Rumarin groaned so quietly that she only heard it because she had her ear pressed to him. “Here it comes.”
“We want to offer you the now-vacant position of archmage, and all associated responsibilities and benefits,” he said with a triumphant smile, as if there were no way that she would guess that they were going to foist their leadership issues onto her. She glanced up at Ru, who had his eyes closed.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I think you’re an exceptional mage, but clearly any idiot could see that. I think the college would benefit from someone with a dose of humility and the good sense to come in from the rain.”
“And?”
“And do you think it’s one of those jobs where you’d have to live in Winterhold full time?”
“Absolutely not.” Brelyna and the others could supervise in her absence, and the faculty had proven that it wasn’t a lack of will that made them flounder, but the lack of a way. Besides, worst case she also had a few psijic tricks up her sleeve, so if she was needed then she could return in a rush without agonising over how far away she was.
“In that case I think you should take it, if you want. They’re definitely not going to find anyone better.” There was a lingering bitterness there, the sort of resentment that she’d seen in him on their trip to Alinor.
“Ru?” He didn’t have to talk to her right away if he didn’t want to, but if there was ever a sign that she should ask, it was both of them covered in a stranger’s blood after an extremely personal kill.
“Oh, just ignore me. I don’t mean to rain on your parade.”
She turned to Tolfdir, who was still simply standing there: he didn’t have anything better to do yet. “I accept your offer, effective tomorrow. For today, everyone should get some rest.” She had big plans for a hold clean-up and repair; the fact that Aren had lived in Winterhold for so long and never made an effort to apply his resources to the crumbling city was nearly perplexingly cruel. Sure, Korir was an asshole, but that wasn’t Birna’s fault.
People began to file out, and Tsabhi turned to Rumarin again. “There, I’ve dispersed my parade. Can we...talk about it, maybe?” Han and the other three were still setting up, but far enough away that they were functionally alone.
“Well there’s not much to say: Ancano just pestles my mortar, you know?” He averted his eyes and she played with the ties on his shirt. “I mean, so what if all I can do is summon weapons? Some people can’t summon anything at all. Otero never could.”
“Was he the one that taught you to fight?” she asked, hoping to divert him to a happier line of thought than my parents were disappointed that I couldn't learn magic.
“No. Maybe he thought it’d make me too serious, but he never really wanted me to pursue adventuring: I think he regretted that he was the one who made me want it in the first place.” Rumarin wiped his mouth, and Tsabhi helped because it was very much covered in blood. “He did end up teaching me to bladebind, though indirectly.”
“I thought you said he couldn’t summon?”
“He couldn’t. It’s a funny story actually.” His face certainly didn’t look like he was setting up a joke. “After he died and I told my parents I was going to Skyrim, I made a quick stop in some scummy little town just before the border. I was doing tricks for a group of children, who all thought it was magic: not that I corrected them on that point.”
“Why not?” Not that there was any meaningful difference between sleight of hand and magic for a run-of-the-mill peasant child with no real potential for either.
“Because children are easy to trick, and it felt good to let them think that my jester’s tricks were actual magic. Unfortunately, one of the children ran in sobbing about how bandits had stolen her mother. All of their little eyes turned right to me, because of course Rumarin the mage could save her! And you try looking at their little faces and telling them that actually you’ve had a long life of disappointing your parents with your lack of magical ability.”
“Oh, no. I mean you could help without magic, right?”
“Wrong, actually. I didn’t know how to bind blades yet, and Otero had refused to teach me how to use a sword. I wasn’t looking to walk into camp with my pathetic little dagger and get laughed at before I died, so that’s why I...I gathered up what little coin I had and paid off the bandits.” He leaned back further, bent at an almost uncomfortable angle. “It worked, but it was humiliating.”
“It was still brave! You still saved the child’s mother.”
“It didn’t really matter. The second I was alone I started throwing out all my props; they were as stupid and useless as I was.” His voice doesn’t change, always light and sort of self-deprecating, but she still felt her jaw clench. Before she could even formulate anything to say, Rumarin grinned. “And at the bottom of my bag, I found the Bound Sword spell tome. One last jester’s trick, from Otero.”
She didn’t ask how he knew it was from him: she didn’t care whether it was or it wasn’t, but he seemed to feel strongly that it had been. “And you didn’t have any trouble with it?”
“Not a whit. I was afraid to try, at first, but it wasn’t like I could be any more disappointed in myself. Imagine my surprise when I understood what it wanted from me right away.” It was actually a fairly common phenomenon: spellcasting was all a scale of conceptuality. Being able to understand very abstract spells made it more difficult to simply reach into Oblivion and pull out a functional weapon, and the same was true in reverse. “But there you go: I hated Ancano because he looked down on me, and now I’m looking down on his corpse. Happy endings all around.”
Han clapped, his perma smile ever-fixed to his face although he’d certainly not been listening to a word they said. “Excellent. If you’re both done chattering, Tsabhi, come help me with this spell.”
She rolled her eyes, casting Rumarin an apologetic look that he merely shrugged at. “Do you mind? I just finished killing someone with a legendary weapon.”
“Sounds like the weapon did the bulk of your work. Come on, before I gag watching you and Auriel’s Chosen.”