#Phinis

[wouldntyoulichentoknow]

bald men. you agree

[graveofcalaxes]

WIP Wednesday! 📜🖋️

(Gonna be away from a computer for the next few days, so I made this post at midnight and scheduled it to post early in the morning! I will be asleep when it goes up. Hope it's not too early for some of you 😅 If it is, sorry!)

Tagged by @labskeever! Consider this your no-pressure tagback, Vin!

Also I'm feeling a bit brave today, so I'll be taking the initiative to no-pressure tag some (just some! I'm still too shy to tag more ><) of the other tesblr folks whose works I've seen around here and I've always wanted to say hello to: @skyrim-forever @falmerbrook @madam-whim @moriche @umbracirrus

This week, I finally have some writing to show you all! I was hoping to get something Oblivion-related up in time for its anniversary, but wellll :/ So instead, here's a little (read: big) excerpt I was able to type up for my Skyrim fic featuring one of my favorite OCs, Elelil Heart-Eater.

It is worth noting that she is not my dragonborn OC, she's just the OC centered at the College of Winterhold. Anyways, enjoy!

It is in the evening when Elelil Heart-Eater returns to the College, abruptly dropping by the Arcanaeum with her heavy cloak covered in both snow and… scorch marks? The half-Bosmer swiftly brushes past the many precariously balanced bookstacks, her short stature seeming even smaller against the backdrop of tall shelves. Not that he would ever say it aloud, but Phinis is somewhat thankful at her arrival, what with her mere presence shooing a hovering Arniel away. Her overall reputation both inside and out of the College aside, the unusual wooden mask she always covers her face with outside of the premises does nothing to help with how others view her. But in cases like this, Phinis personally thinks it's quite helpful. The relief he feels at finally having some peace to read immediately leaves him when she drops four small but recognizable objects—a necklace, a ring, and two daggers—onto the table before him, the loud clunking drawing a sharp glare her way from the ever gruff Urag. Elelil ignores him, falling heavily into the seat across from Phinis. "I got your letter on my way back. I looked into it," she says, her voice muffled by the mask. She leans back in her seat and pulls the hood of her cloak down. "Unfortunately, I found them." "…It seems you have. A shame." Closing his book, he reaches forward to pick Yisra's necklace up, the intricately engraved silver pendant in his palm now warped and discolored. "So, all four of them have…?" "Died, yes." She sighs before shaking her head. She tugs the wooden mask off, letting it clatter onto the table as she rubs her deathly pale, gaunt face in exhaustion. "I told them not to do their field research alone, but of course none of them listened. What a waste." "I hate to say it, but those apprentices may have been too afraid of you to have even heard you." He offers. "Of course they were." Elelil scoffs, her yellow-orange eyes flashing dangerously. She crosses her arms and grits her teeth, her sharp canines reflecting the light of the nearby candelabra. "If even the Archmage's word, along with my decade of being here with no incidents whatsoever, isn't enough to assuage students' fears, nothing will." "What's done is done, I suppose." Phinis reasons, carefully laying the necklace back onto the table's wooden surface. "In any case, thank you for looking into it. I'll let the Archmage and Mirabelle know what happened to them tomorrow morning." "Of course," Elelil nods her head. She runs a hand under her hair to free it from the confines of her cloak, the ends of some of her frizzy brown locks clearly singed. "It was no issue at all since it was on the way back. Speaking of," Elelil turns in her chair, finally acknowledging the orc librarian standing behind the counter. "Urag, I lost the book." Urag bristles lightly, his fists clenching on the counter. "I… see. I'm assuming there's a reason." "You are usually more meticulous about that." Phinis agrees, unconsciously fiddling with Ilas-Tei's ring. "If anything, you tend to overprepare." "You know me, I care just as much as Urag does when it comes to growing the Arcanaeum's collection. I wouldn't lose something like that without a good reason." She sighs, letting her head loll over the backrest of her chair. "It burned to ashes, along with the rest of my pack. I had to get a new bag." Urag raises a brow. "How? Did you run through a fire on the way here?" "In a sense. I was passing through Helgen." Elelil breathes heavily through her nose as she rubs her forehead in irritation, leveling Urag with a grimace. "The surprise executions the Legion decided to hold there were one thing. The dragon was an entire other one."

In addition to my writing just noooot happening last week, I was also too busy in general to participate last Wednesday 😭 But I'm here now!

I wanted to mix things up with the College story by implementing one of the unused quests as a way to introduce Elelil somewhat early in the fic. Not that the fic is gonna see the light of day anytime soon, I have two other fics that need to come out first, but unfortunately, I can only really write whatever and whenever the mood strikes.

Just like last time, if anyone reading this is like me and has been wanting an excuse to post your own WIP, feel free to use this post to consider yourself tagged! Just be sure to tag me in your own post cuz I wanna see your stuff!

And please let me know if any of you want to be tagged by me for these in the future!

[jiubilant]

4.E. 170

They unload the young Ervine at the Vetring docks along with twelve tuns of wine—which she counts as they bob down the wharf on the dockers’ backs, two by two—and four thin, shivering pigs. She’s not sure where to go. She’s standing dazed with sunlight on the loading-plank, flanked by squealing livestock and the rank, seasick steam of their breath, when two youths hurrying down the boardwalk smile and wave: a lanky young mage, his cloak dyed adept’s blue, and a boy her age with a skeletal face.

“For the Kynesdag feast in town,” says the mage in breathless introduction, divesting her of books and bundles both. He means the pigs, she realizes. He darts a look over his shoulder, another at the ship, then gives her a gentle shake: half-friendly, half-impatient. “We were told to meet you. What’s your name?”

She frowns at him, suspecting a joke at her expense, then recalls how far she is from Betony and her father’s rotting lands. He’s never cursed an Ervine, this mage with busy eyes.

“Mirabelle,” she says, her voice salt-hoarse. She’s eaten nothing but hardtack for two months.

He doesn’t even ask for the rest of it—just glances behind him again and marches her down the frost-chewed wharf. Wizards, of course, always have somewhere else to be.

“Falion of Conjuration,” he replies with a hasty grin, pulling her out of the way of some rickety gibbet for fish. The cod dangling from it like gallows-fruit watch her pass with baleful eyes, as does the woman stringing them up. “That’s Phinis, also of Conjuration. Phin,” he says to the boy, who’s casting nervous looks about him like wards, “you’ll have to get used to it.”

Phinis pulls a death’s-head face. “I don’t want to get used to it—”

One of the pigs blunders with a shriek into their path. The biggest of the men dragging it down the docks stumbles, swearing in some Nordic tongue—then, with a snarling glance at Mirabelle and her companions, spits at them.

“Happy Kynesdag,” croaks Phinis, cringing sideways. Falion, with an inscrutable look, lays a steadying hand on his shoulder.

“You’ll have to get used to it, too,” he says to Mirabelle, who stares at him. He clears his throat and, with a playful flourish of his cloak, raises his voice like a mummer on the stage. “Pay the ignorant masses no mind. You are now a student of Mystery”—he grips her shoulder with jovial force, steering her away—“a novitiate of the Secret Fire!”

“A witch,” says Mirabelle, her voice steady and soft.

Falion’s grin, swift as a warning, bounds again across his face. “A scholar!”

Mirabelle glances behind her. The man with the pig, staring after them, shivers and looks away.

* * *

“They hate us in the village,” Phinis confides in her over supper: a bowl of pale and wobbly fish, glistening like glue in the sheen of the wandering lights. “Falion says they’re afraid of what they don’t understand, and that we should be”—he makes a grim little face at his bowl—“understanding.”

“Oh,” says Mirabelle through a mouthful of fishpaste. It tastes like jellied steam. She’s discovered, in her ravenous journey to the bottom of the bowl, that she can swallow it without chewing. “Why?”

Phinis scowls. “That’s what I want to know—”

“No.” Mirabelle, in the spirit of scholarly inquiry, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. No one snaps at her for it. She dares a quick, gleeful lick at the back of her spoon. “Why are they afraid?”

“Falion says—” A pallid light kindles in Phinis’s eyes. “No. I’ll show you.”

They slip out of the refectory, accompanied by a bobbing light and a few incurious looks from the adepts’ table. Their footsteps echo in the corridor like cracking ice. Mirabelle, in her scratchy new College robes that smell of mothballs and musty spells, resists an unthinkable urge to dance up and down the hall until it resounds with noise. It would be unscholarly, she thinks. She hugs herself hard instead.

“If you think this is cold,” says Phinis sagely, misunderstanding her, “wait until end-of-term. Falion says we’ll have to crack the ice in our basins every morning.”

The giddiness, despite her best efforts to restrain it, wriggles up from her toes to her face. “What else does Falion say?”

Phinis gives her a wounded look. “You’re making fun.”

The rush of warmth she feels for the little cadaver—and for the supper-sludge, the itchy clothes, Falion who knows so much—threatens to knock her over. “I’m not.”

“It’s all right,” he says, his face funereal. She has to bite down on a laugh. “I’m used to it. We’ll go up those stairs to the ramparts.”

They wrestle with the door at the stairtop, which is frozen or rusted shut; it bangs open at last, and they tumble out into a blast of wind that nearly blows them over the parapet. Mirabelle, with a delighted shriek, grabs Phinis—poor bag of bones, he all but rattles—and staggers with him away from the crenellated wall.

The wind whips his scandalized yell past her ears. “Are you laughing?”

She is. Something in her has come unstuck. “Have you ever been up here before, or did Falion tell you about it?”

“You’re making fun!” He stomps ineffectually on her foot. “The wind comes and goes, you’ll see—”

“I’m not making fun!”

By the time they struggle arm-in-arm to the far parapet, the wind’s died down. They sag against the wall. Phinis, breathing hard, glowers so peevishly at Mirabelle that she bursts into laughter again—which makes his lips twitch, and his eyes gleam, and something almost like life flush in his face.

“What are you so happy about?” he demands, fighting a smile. Mirabelle can tell by the way he’s twisting his mouth. “Here we are at the frozen edge of the world—”

“I didn’t think they’d let me come,” Mirabelle gasps, rubbing her eyes. The tears in them sting like grains of salt. “What—what’d you want to show me?”

“Oh.” Phinis tugs her up, then points over the parapet. “Out there.”

What he had wanted to show her, Mirabelle realizes after a long, staring moment, is the sea. Gulls circle and cry over the gray mirror of the water. Glaciers—smaller, now, than they’ll be in midwinter—slouch in the shallows. The sun on the horizon breaks the surface like a drowned face.

It’s nothing that she hadn’t seen from the deck of the ship. She looks sidelong at Phinis.

“It wasn’t always a village,” he says.

A gull dips in the sky. The water shimmers, changeless and cold, over the roofs of the city of the dead.

[traveling-vessels-revisited]

I was experimenting with rendering and drew Phinys but extra textured lol

In both dark and light background for your viewing pleasure!

[jonthackery]

Phinis Gestor

" Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein "

A Breton preset

Soft Requirements :

_ BnP CoTR Faces

_ Vanilla Hair Remake + Superior Lore-friendly textures

_ Improved Eyes + CoTR Patch

_ Vanilla scars CoTR Patch

_ CoTR Beards

_ Koralina's Face details for CoTR (for bushier brows)

_ Koralina's Makeup for CoTR (eyeshadow)

_ Charmers of The Reach Racemenu Warpaints etc... (Oblivion warpaint)

Preset link :

[milomeri]

Foini Village

[bellmo15-blog]

Dam, Assassin's Creed Shadows is looking peak yall!

[monkeyssalad-blog]

Miezelientje en Kakeline de Kip-1941-ill p 53 by janwillemsen

[the-capricious-one]

fic asks; 😈🧐🦅

😈- Has there been a point in a story where you did something just to be playfully mean to your readers?

lmao all the time, To Live a Memory has several cliffhanger chapter endings (it's a weekly posting schedule so not TOO mean). And as an angstfic, any time people cry I'm winning 😇

🧐 - Do you spend much time researching for your stories?

I'm pretty lax with oneshots, but I definitely do research for everything else. Honestly it's one of my favorite parts of writing because it lets me go down interesting rabbit holes. That said, I'm someone who keeps a close eye on how long I'm spending on it-- if I'm doing research for a single sentence, it's just not worth spending two hours on!!! Research for me is primarily to make a story feel grounded and generate some genuine details I can weave in later. It's to assist with writing, not be used to procrastinate on it or be a perfectionist about it. It's better just to rewrite the paragraph to leave those hyperspecific details out and keep going.

🦅 Do you outline fics or fly by the seat of your pants?

I've done both! For oneshots it's not worth it to me to outline, I just mentally come up with a few tentpoles of where I'm planning to go and end up and then get started. To Live a Memory was outlined for sure-- it's a 200k monster with complicated themes and arcs and I am NOT gonna pants that lol. I actually spent a year and a half on it behind the scenes before I started publishing, and it had gone through almost two super rough drafts at that point. That said, there were significant portions of the outline that were underdeveloped and got significantly revised, developed, and fleshed out when I got to them. The entire final arc has been pantsed tbh-- it was super underdeveloped and I needed to really understand what the previous arcs had said thematically before I could start wrapping it all up in a pretty bow.

[helgiafterdark]

[traveling-vessels-revisited]

Decided to do more experimental art :D

It's nice revisiting old ocs, especially when I can redesign them!

Backgrounds are going to be the end of me </3

[uesp]

"I beg your pardon? Necromancy? I am a member of the College of Winterhold, in good standing! They haven't allowed necromancy for hundreds of years!"

--Wuunferth the Unliving

"By Sheor, no. Those archaic policies died out with the Mages Guild, and were never enforced here."

--Phinis Gestor

[jiubilant]

Ao3 (2800 words)

In Betony, she had flown goshawks with eyes like coins of fire. In the frozen north, she flies stranger birds. When the enormous sea-eagle beats its beak thrice against her windowpane, insistent as a door-to-door peddler, she stands calmly from her desk to let it in.

“Well?” she asks, unsmiling.

The barbarian of air wings in on a gust of wind and snow that whips through her papers, scattering some Synod tract and an adept’s treatise on runestones. Its talons clack on the back of her chair. Beneath the fierce, hoary brows of old men and birds of prey, its mismatched eyes—one brown, the other bluish-green—flash with a question of their own.

She gestures, eyebrows raised, to the cloak hung by the door. Then she turns to close the window. When the click of claws on tile becomes the slap of bare feet, she repeats herself. “Well?”

“He’s as stubborn as ever,” a querulous voice grumbles at her back. Cloth rustles. Her spare chair scrapes across the floor, then creaks. “Heard me out and sent me off. It can’t be done, Mirabelle.”

“If it couldn’t be done, Tolfdir, I wouldn’t ask it of you.” Mirabelle Ervine, Master Wizard of the College of Winterhold, thumbs a smudge from the stained glass. It squeaks. “I would do it myself.”

She would have harsh words, under any other circumstances, for a mage foolish enough to alter his own shape—but her Master of Alteration has walked the world as wolf and otter, elk and wild boar, since she was a child struggling to cast colored lights. When she turns from the window, she almost smiles to see him hunched hawkish in the cloak: a frail old man who, in three days, has flown a journey that would take her several sennights.

“You ought to have gone yourself,” he says anyway, patting his windswept beard back into place. He seldom looks weary after his adventures. The light in his eyes—one brown, the other bluish-green—is the light of one who has outraced clouds. “He never listened to old men. But to old friends, my dear, he may yet unbar his door.”

Mirabelle waves a hand. The sheafs of strewn paper stack themselves on her desk, probably out of order. “I’m needed here. I can’t be long away.”

“Phinis could.” Tolfdir helps himself to her tea. Miraculous, she thinks, that all his flapping hadn’t sent the cup skidding to Atmora. “I remember the three of you knocking about as prentices. Couldn’t separate you.”

Mirabelle tries to picture poor Phinis, who pales when asked to venture into town, on the next karve to the Hjaal. When she surfaces from the fancy, less plausible by far than the Synod’s treasure-maps, the old man’s welkin eyes are watching her.

“Why now, Master Wizard?” he asks, not ungently.

His tea, now, Mirabelle thinks. She goes to the shelf for another cup. “Pardon?”

“Falion left us years ago.” The eagle looks out at her from Tolfdir’s face. “You let him go. Why ask him back now?”

Mirabelle’s fingers pause in midair. Most of her clayware is chipped. Ancano, when she’d interviewed him last, had lifted the cup she’d set out for him with near-imperceptible amusement—as if, she’d thought then, he were indulging thoughts of dropping it.

“It seems to me,” she says, her voice hard for all its softness, “that we have invited enemies into our house, and shut friends outside.”

“Ah.” Tolfdir’s cup clinks on her desk. “I saw a knarr sailing this way, you know, while I was up.” He pauses, then clears his throat. “East Empire Company, I thought.”

* * *

When she takes the stairs of the Archmage’s tower two by two, wound tight with the news, Ancano is already in yarak. Perhaps he has his own eyes in the air.

“No good will come of a Haafing ship testing these waters,” he’s saying when she slips into the Archmage’s study. She’s come to know Ancano better than she’d like; whenever he’s pressing a point, as he’s doing now, his voice takes on the high, humming urgency of a kite’s whistle. “We must signal at once for it to turn about.”

“Turn about?” Savos Aren’s hand is already tangled in his beard. The bewildered crease in his brow unbends when he sees Mirabelle, but does not disappear. “The College of Winterhold is not a port authority, Emissary. Nor is it a lighthouse.”

“Indeed,” says Mirabelle crisply, taking a stand beside his chair, “I should think that much good will come of a merchant ship, under the circumstances—this is the first,” she points out, “since the leads opened in spring.” They’d lasted the winter, as usual, on lutefisk. Even she is beginning to tire. “Our stores are running low.”

Savos, heartened, tries weakly for a joke. “Much goods?”

Ancano’s golden eyes glint up at Mirabelle. He and the Archmage are at table, lit blue by the drifting magelights: Ancano leaning forward, Savos huddled in his robe of office like an old man in his shawl. He never drinks anything stronger than the watered-milk tea favored so far north, where vegetal life is scant. His cup sits untouched. Ancano has supplied, from some shelf of his own stores, a jug of wine.

“Mistress Ervine,” he says with a courteous smile. The magelights chase a shadow across his narrow face. “You must sit.”

She must do nothing. She holds her face immobile.

“I was sharing my concerns with the Archmage.” If Ancano sees the pack-ice in her eyes, he gives no sign of it. He waves a black-gloved hand. His servant, an ancient elf with a blotch like a winestain on his cheek, hastens forward to fill a third cup. “I fear that this vessel, if it persists in its course, will be seized by the Jarl as a prize for the Stormcloak fleet.”

Mirabelle ignores both the wine and the servant, who always smiles in terror when acknowledged. “Korir lacks the men.”

“Then the ship will blunder into Ulfric’s blockade.” Ancano’s smiling again, close-lipped and motionless as an Aldmeri bust. “That it hasn’t already is miraculous.”

“The College is not party to the recent—rising tensions, shall we say, between Haafingar and Eastmarch,” says Savos, who has as many euphemisms for civil war as a skald has kennings. “I fail to see how the requisition of a knarr—by either fleet, Emissary—is a matter in which we have any right to intervene.”

Ancano’s face falls into a prim, prudent frown. “You must see, Archmage, how a disturbance in Winterhold’s waters would endanger the College’s neutral position—”

* * *

“—and on it went, like that,” Mirabelle finishes, stoic. “The Archmage remains undecided.”

“Of course he does,” says Faralda, reaching for the pitcher. “More blaand?”

She’d come to Faralda’s gatehouse to compare admission records—and, she admits, to cool a headache in the courtyard’s frigid wind. She’s stayed for supper. Her Master of Destruction is the terror and delight of the village’s braver children, who rattle her gate and barter foodstuffs for feats of witchery: fountains of sparks, sky-whales shaped of smoke, magefires juggled from hand to hand. One small petitioner had traded a fat square of blubber, now cubed and salted in Faralda’s only bowl, for a field of ice on which she and her siblings could play stickball.

Faralda refills their cups with the Vetrings’ creamy whey-wine, then takes another morsel from the bowl—with finger and thumb, as the villagers do. Her elbows brace the table like an old salt’s. “Company knarr, Tolfdir said?”

“Yes.” Faralda had been a ship’s mage, once. Mirabelle studies her for a moment—her hair that musses in all weather, the rigging-lines of laughter in her face—then rubs her forehead, resolving to drink no more blaand. “This ship. Why would it—”

Faralda, looking pained, says, “She.”

“—why would she sail into Stormcloak waters?”

A pause.

“You seek counsel,” says Faralda, a slow smile sharpening her face, “from your future Master Wizard—”

“Faralda.”

“East Empire Company,” says Faralda, as if that explains everything. She waves a hand that shines with grease in the firelight. “The Imperial Fleet can fit in a puddle. Mede could float out his toy ships to be rammed to flinders by Ulfric’s drekar—or,” she says, longships burning in her eyes, “he could let Cousin Vici and her mercenaries defend their searoads.”

Mirabelle frowns. “With one knarr?”

“A maiden to lure out the dragons, perhaps.”

Always evocative, Faralda’s fancies. Mirabelle pictures a line of dragon-headed longships gliding to the knarr, their oars churning, their painted snarls crusted with ice—and their hulls splintering, brittle as kindling, beneath the bolts and prows of a host of Company ships.

“Let us not speak of dragons,” she says, reaching wearily into the bowl. Since the recent news from Helgen, she’s caught herself eyeing the sky every time she crosses the quadrangle. “Ancano has the right of it, then, that this ship is likely to stir trouble.”

Faralda sniffs. “You ought to do the very opposite of whatever he suggests.”

“His counsel is often sound. That’s the trouble. If it weren’t, Savos—the Archmage,” Mirabelle corrects herself, “would not entertain him.” She thinks of dragons settling on the ramparts, crushing the crenels between their toes. “What can he want with us?”

“Remember how he tried to cram that monstrous desk up the stairwell? The one he brought out of Valenwood?”

“Solid graht-oak.” Enthir, pacing her office, had almost wept with rage. She can’t laugh, now, recalling how the thing had rained drawers on several Aldmeri attachés.

“He wants what that knarr wants.” Faralda’s smile is thin and taut. “Something costly to bring home.”

* * *

Evening creeps early, on misty feet, into the lumber-town of Morthal. The watchmen have been jumpy, of late, as well they should; their torchlights bob past the wizard’s window in twos, like great eyes gleaming in the dark, as they creak up and down the bridge. The fog muffles their steps. The wizard, going about his evening chores, smiles and listens.

“Is he in there?” asks one of the watchmen.

“Aye,” says another, and spits.

If he were out, they’d spit at that, too. The wizard raises his eyebrows, nonplussed, and scrubs a crust of pottage from a pewter plate—

Falion.

The plate clatters to the floor. When the wizard whirls with a spell on his lips and a washrag in his hand—anticipating fiends, fire, fool neighbors with pitchforks—he finds his hearthroom empty.

He stares about him at what his sister, with twinkling eyes, calls his instruments of sorcery: the great cookpot, the garlic-strings, the besom and staff by the door. Then he sighs and flicks the rag aside. “You would bespeak me while I’m scouring dishes.”

The voice, cool and familiar, rises in his mind like a wry notion of his own. I trust I did not catch you unawares.

“I will tell you what I told Tolfdir, and no more.” Things stranger than Mirabelle Ervine have spoken into Falion’s mind. He stoops for the plate. “My talents are much needed here. Much maligned, as well, but no matter—I have found in the marshes of Morthal my masters, my mystic tomes, my métier.” His own stern, seamed face frowns back at him from the pewter. “If Aren himself groveled at my feet, I would not return.”

Apprentices had been awed, once, by his dire proclamations: heed my words, and meddle not with each other's summoning-circles, and so. Never Mirabelle. Perhaps I wished only to speak to you.

“Speak to me, then, of the sorcery of Winterhold.” The face reflected in the plate would make a bitter meal. He sets it aside. “Of the marvels its mages have wrought. Of Mirabelle Ervine”—his voice gentles, then—“and her miracles.”

He can almost see her desk, cluttered with distractions of all description, and her terse smile. She strikes back. How is Agni?

“My young ward,” says Falion, after a pause, “shows some promise.”

To clasp one's mind with the mind of another mage—master, pupil, friend—is to do more than converse. He’s known Mirabelle since she was a prentice; the keen and steady stare that had followed him in his youth passes through him now, insubstantial, searching his mind for the child. The byre in which he’d found her—the reek of damp, the rotting straw. The murrain she’d spelled from Eivor’s cattle. Her first magelight, bright and startled as her smile. His terror that he’ll teach her ill, that she’ll end like his last pupil—

That, says Mirabelle softly, was not your fault.

“I know.” Falion flicks a taut hand. The fire in his hearth bursts up; the dishes, clattering like a draugr’s mail, stack themselves on the shelf. “And you know. And the rest of you, chasing shadows and squabbling over chairs—Mirabelle,” he murmurs with ferocity, sweeping his arm in an arc that rattles every shutter, “how can you stay?”

A pause.

These are tempestuous times. Mirabelle’s voice, to his surprise, is tinged with weary humor. If a dragon lands in the forecourt, who will remind it that we wizards are beyond worldly affairs?

Falion blinks. Then, despite everything, he smiles.

“If you need me,” he says to the empty room, “truly need me, my old friend—I will come.” He shakes his head. “But not before.”

“Falion,” calls a small voice from the doorway, “are you talking to dwarves?”

He turns. The child, picking sprigs of heather from her hair, greets him with a hesitant smile; she’s been in the marshes again, loosing coneys from his snares. The presence in his mind, with mingled frustration and warmth, flickers out.

“Agni.” He’ll scold her later. He raises an eyebrow and plucks a twig from behind her ear. “I was speaking with—a former colleague.”

“A wizard?” Her grin has a gap in it; the loose tooth must have come out. “A College wizard?”

“Were the snares empty again?”

“A College wizard, Falion?”

She’d been baking bread with Jonna when Tolfdir arrived. Small mercies. “Perhaps not for much longer.”

His apprentice still believes, somehow, in wonders: need-fires and marshfires, fish that grant wishes, wizards in the north that make the skylights dance. She frowns as if betrayed. “Why?”

“If you saw the College, child,” says Falion, kneeling to help her with her boots, “you would know.”

* * *

On the deck of the Valravn, the knarr creaking through the ice off the Vetring coast, a man in shabby furs smiles in surprise. His eyes have frozen shut.

“Sten, lad,” he calls to the steersman who’s been kind to him, kinder than he deserves, on the long, careful journey through the leads: a young man, quick to laugh, whose brothers have all gone south to war. They could be in his daughter’s centuria, he thinks, joking with her over a supper of mashed grain. They could be heads on spears. The wind saws his face like a carving-knife. “My pipe’s out.”

“Here you are, then, Master Clerk,” says a good-natured voice by his ear, followed by the mineral clack of struck flint. A hand swathed in fishskin turns his face for inspection. “Kyne caught you a nip, has she?”

“Don’t fuss.” His face is nearly too stiff to force a smile. “It’s only the lashes.”

“Well”—the hand tugs gently at his sleeve—“come away from the side. You’ll have your last cold bath, sir, if we meet a floe and pitch. And I want to watch you sell snow to those Vetrings.”

Lumber, in fact, and gruit, meal, mead. None are why the clerk is here; someone else will get rid of them, in due course. He doesn’t move. “In a moment. I want to see the school.”

Sten brushes the snow from his shoulders—fuss—and bustles off to haul some line or other. The wind that freezes men solid in their sleep closes around the clerk, whirling away the creak of rigging, the grumble of ice, the boatswain’s busy shouts. He’s alone with it again. When he breathes in deep, it burns on the way down like a clean, destroying flame; when he holds his pipe-bowl to his eye and waits for the lashes to thaw, the warmth is no different than the chill.

The dead in their doorways of fire, he thinks, must feel this way: blind, bright, with all that they love behind them. He leans forward a little. Let this sermon be consolation to those—

Something trickles down his face. His eye unsticks.

“Ai, cardehni,” he says, appalled. A great grin cracks the ice of his face. He steps back, leaning on his cane, and cranes his head to better see. “Sten, lad—what happens if a wizard sneezes?”

The boy’s laugh bursts over the ice. High above them, rearing out of a screaming cloud of kittiwakes, towers the wizards’ school: a fortress leaning, on its chunk of frozen rock, as though a sudden noise might knock it over.

[overthattwilight]

Random Phineas and Ferb fact

In Korea, Phineas's name is changed to "Phiny"(피니). The show's title in Korea is also "Phiny and Ferb". Possibly it was due to the how long Phineas's name was in Korean syallables

[coolcataetheryte]

Just Phini flirting talking to Estinien and getting flustered. Did he say something witty? Did she get embarrassed about going on about tea or exploring?

[bellmo15-blog]

I'm sorry! I was watching this episode today and I got an urge!!!