The doors to the Hall of the Elements closed behind us with a deep, comforting thud, and just like that, the screaming wind outside stopped trying to kill me.
Warmth sank into my bones. Real warmth. The kind that made my shoulders finally drop.
Okay. Still alive. Still in Winterhold. Still not dreaming.
"I need to try something," I said, almost immediately.
Tolfdir smiled like he'd been expecting that the whole walk back. "Of course you do."
We stopped at one of the long side tables—scarred wood, burn marks, old alchemical stains that never quite came out. I set my bag down and shrugged off my damp clothes, hands already moving before my brain caught up.
I talked a lot earlier, I admit. About fixing things. About rebuilding Winterhold. But if the basics don't work here… none of that matters.
Tolfdir didn't rush me. He just stepped aside, hands folded, watching the way professors do when they're letting you fail on purpose.
I laid out what I had: two thin metal strips—copper and iron, not perfect but close enough. A small ceramic dish. A vial of sharply sour liquid the alchemists swore was "purified frost-sap."
Electrolyte-adjacent, I decided.
My heart started pounding.
"This," I said softly, mostly to myself, "is supposed to be simple."
I placed the metals into the dish, careful they didn't touch. Poured the liquid between them. Ran thin silver wire from one strip to the other, completing the loop. A circuit.
I stared at it.
Nothing happened.
No warmth. No glow. No spark. Not even a pathetic flicker.
I frowned.
"…Okay. That's not right."
I adjusted the wires. Repositioned the metals. Checked spacing like I was back in a first-year lab, half-expecting someone to dock me points for improper setup.
Still nothing.
Tolfdir leaned closer. "Does it require spoken magicka?"
"No," I said quickly. "It shouldn't."
I exhaled through my nose, frustration creeping in. "Back home, the reaction alone is enough. Chemical difference creates potential. Potential makes charge move. Charge moving is electricity."
He blinked. "Charge?"
"Tiny carriers," I said, waving a hand. "They move when there's a difference. Like water flowing downhill."
I waited again.
The candles didn't care. The wards didn't react. The wire stayed cold and dead in my fingers.
My chest tightened.
"This setup is correct," I muttered. "It should be generating something. Even a little."
Out of desperation, I make Tolfdir feed a tiny whisper of magicka into the wire—barely anything, just to see if it would respond.
For half a second, the metal glimmered.
Then it went dull again.
Tolfdir's brow furrowed. "We are supplying it with power."
"I know," I said, more sharply than I meant to. "But that's not how it's supposed to work. It's supposed to make its own."
Silence stretched.
Finally, he said carefully, "You believe magicka and electricity are the same."
I hesitated. "…I believe they behave the same."
He nodded slowly. "Behavior and nature are not always identical."
I sat down hard on the bench, staring at the useless mess of wire and metal.
Did I mess up?
No.
Then why isn't it working?
A thought brushed the edge of my mind, uncomfortable and unwelcome.
What if magicka isn't charge?
What if it doesn't want to move like this at all?
I shoved the thought away.
"No," I said aloud, forcing my voice steady. "This just means I need better materials. Or different conditions. This place runs on magicka—I just need to translate it properly."
Tolfdir didn't argue. Which somehow felt worse.
"Failure," he said gently, "is a familiar teacher to mages."
I huffed a weak laugh. "Yeah. Engineers too."
It didn't work.
And somehow… that scared me more than if it had exploded.
Because if Winterhold rejected my ideas outright, that would've been easy.
But it didn't. It just… ignored them.
The circuit stayed on the table.
The copper strip was still half-submerged, the iron dull and stubborn, the wire looped between them like it was waiting for permission to exist. I stood there staring at it, arms crossed, chewing on the inside of my cheek like that might magically fix physics.
That was when I felt it.
Not magicka.
Attention.
Boots crossed the threshold behind me—measured, confident, not the shuffling curiosity of apprentices. I turned just as he stopped beside the table.
He was young. Not much older than me, if at all. Dark hair, wind-tossed like he'd actually fought the blizzard outside instead of politely losing to it. His clothes weren't College robes—leather, layered, practical. Snow still clung to his boots. A sword rested easily at his back, like an afterthought rather than a statement.
But what caught my eye wasn't the weapon.
It was the bag.
Thick leather. Reinforced seams. Bulging in that specific way that meant tools, not supplies.
His gaze dropped to the table.
To the wire.
To the metal plates.
To the dish.
His breath hitched. At the exact same time mine did. We spoke together.
"You're not from this world too?"
Silence slammed into the room.
I stared at him.
He stared at me.
Then—slowly—he smiled. Relieved.
Without saying another word, he reached into his bag and pulled something out.
It was crude. Ugly. Copper wrapped around a dark core, sealed with resin, runes etched along the side like someone had tried to translate schematics into enchantment by sheer stubbornness.
He set it down beside my circuit.
My heart actually skipped after seeing what he brought out.
"It's a prototype," he said casually. "But back home, this was supposed to be a battery."
"You—" I swallowed. "You know what that is?"
He finally looked at me instead of the table. His eyes were sharp, focused in a way I recognized immediately.
Lab eyes.
"I know what it's supposed to do," he said. "And I know why yours isn't working."
I laughed, short and breathless. "Please tell me you're about to say 'because magicka messes with the potential difference,' because I am five seconds away from rewriting reality."
He shook his head.
"That's the trap."
He tapped the circuit gently with one finger. "You're treating magicka like charge."
My chest tightened.
"…It's not?"
"It's energy," he said simply. "It doesn't flow unless something tells it how."
He lifted his prototype. "Electricity isn't just energy. It's organized energy. Directional. Conditional. It needs a gradient that exists whether you believe in it or not."
I stared at the device like it had personally offended me.
"So you're saying I didn't fail," I said slowly.
"You failed correctly," he replied.
That did it.
Something warm and stupid sparked in my chest, completely unrelated to magicka.
I looked at him again—really looked this time. The confidence. The way he talked like physics was a shared language instead of a flex. The fact that he hadn't once questioned my logic. Just… engaged.
I felt my lips curve up before I could stop them.
"…Wow," I said. "You sound like an Electrical Engineering student."
His grin widened, just a fraction.
"Funny," he said. "I was about to say the same thing about you."
The young man crouched beside the table like it was an altar.
Not a ritual circle. Not a summoning glyph.
A workbench.
"I didn't invent it," he said, before I could even ask. "I just… translated it."
He loosened the straps of his bag and pulled out more pieces. Thin metal discs. Some copper. Some iron. A dull gray one I didn't recognize at first.
"Zinc?" I asked, hopeful.
He looked up at me, surprised.
"…Close. Not zinc. But it behaves like it. Reactive. Gives up energy easily." He set it down. "Tamriel doesn't have the same materials, so you improvise."
I felt my grin spread. "Story of my life."
He stacked the metals carefully. Copper. Reactive metal. A thin cloth soaked in a faintly glowing solution.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Salt water," he said. "With a weak magicka suspension. Not to power it—just to let things move."
My breath caught.
An electrolyte.
Of course it was.
"I tried fire salts first," he continued, grimacing. "Bad idea. Turns out uncontrolled energy plus impatience equals missing eyebrows."
I snorted before I could stop myself.
He glanced at me, smirked, then went back to work.
"This is the key part," he said, tapping the soaked cloth. "Back home, electricity happens because charges want to move. Here, magicka just… sits there. You have to give it a path and a reason."
He finished stacking the discs.
Copper. Reactive metal. Cloth.
Again.
And again.
"A pile," I whispered.
He nodded. "Volta's pile. Or at least… what it becomes here."
He wrapped the whole thing in leather and resin, leaving only two metal ends exposed.
"Okay," I said, suddenly nervous. "So what happens when we connect it?"
"Nothing dramatic," he said. "Which is the point."
He took a thin wire—actual metal, not enchanted—and pressed one end to the copper terminal. The other end, he lowered toward a small crystal lamp on the table. One of the College's weaker ones. Barely glowing.
"Ready?" he asked.
I swallowed. "Do it."
The moment the wire touched—
The crystal brightened.
Not flared. Not surged.
It brightened.
Steady. Calm. Controlled.
I froze.
"…That's not a spell," I whispered.
"No," he said quietly. "That's work being done."
He lifted the wire. The light dimmed.
Touched it again. Light returned.
On. Off.
On.
Off.
I felt something crack open inside my chest.
"So the magicka isn't the electricity," I said slowly. "It's just the fuel."
"Yes."
"And the circuit—" I gestured wildly. "—that's what decides how it behaves."
He finally looked at me fully then.
"That's the mistake everyone makes," he said. "They think electricity is energy. But it's not."
He tapped the wire.
"It's discipline."
I laughed under my breath, half hysterical.
"God," I muttered. "If my professors could see this…"
He tilted his head. "You had professors?"
"Yeah. And labs. And warnings about not licking batteries."
His eyebrows shot up. "You licked them?"
"Once," I said defensively. "For science."
He laughed. Actually laughed. Warm, surprised, real.
And just like that, the frozen stone walls of Winterhold faded.
There was just the table.
The pile.
The light.
And the quiet, impossible certainty that we were standing at the edge of something dangerous and brilliant.
Electricity hadn't been lost in this world.
It had just been misunderstood.
And now?
Now it was awake.
"I… I don't even know how to introduce myself," I stammered, my voice barely above the wind. "I can't remember anything—my own name, nothing."
The young man tilted his head, studying me with calm curiosity. "Then you'd better pick a name for yourself," he said, a hint of a smile tugging at his lips. "That's what I did when I first arrived. But from the way you're talking… it seems like you still remember things. At least what you know about our world—I assume we're from the same world, right?"
He extended his hand toward me. Hesitant, I reached out, and the moment our palms met, a strange warmth spread through me, threading along my arm and pooling somewhere deep in my chest.
It was fleeting—just a heartbeat—but enough to make me catch my breath. My fingers lingered a little longer than necessary. I wasn't sure if it was the cold, the magic of the place, or something about him—but a curious, unexplainable flutter settled in my stomach.
"I… okay," I said softly, finally letting go, though my mind lingered on that brief, electric touch.
A name, huh? I wondered, letting the thought drift through my mind like snowflakes on the wind. What would I call myself in this world…?
The question lingered, both strange and exciting, as if the answer might shape not just who I was, but who I could become here.