"Close Your Eyes," Says Drevis Neloren, His Mild Voice Echoing Through The Small Lecture-hall. He Steps

"Close your eyes," says Drevis Neloren, his mild voice echoing through the small lecture-hall. He steps around the lectern. "Don't open them. Sit where you are, please, as still as you can."

Fifteen first-years, sitting sprawled or cross-legged on the floor, stare back at him. Unfortunate, thinks Drevis, that they'd dismembered half the benches for firewood last year—and unjust that the halls with surviving seats have been snatched up, for two semesters now, by Sergius. He resolves to take the matter up with Mirabelle. If he remembers.

"Eyes," he says again, milder still. "Every one of you—you too, er, whatsit. In the back. Thank you." He clears his throat. "Now, then."

He's given this speech more times than he can recollect—at the Conclave, first, and now in Winterhold's cold and barren halls. He always pauses here. His students shiver and shift. For a deliberate moment, he lets them sit and listen to the room: the hum of the magelights, their breathing, the muffled wail of the wind outside. That which is sensible. That which is real.

"What do you suppose," he says at last, with a smile they cannot see, "is the deadliest school of magic?"

He's met with the blushing silence of a roomful of clever youths—clever indeed, or they might have enrolled at the Conclave—reluctant to risk a less-than-clever answer. Whatsit-In-The-Back, a stout young man with a farmhand's suntanned nape, is the first to contribute a guess. "Destruction."

A few other first-years titter on instinct. Drevis clears his throat again, sternly, to silence them. "What's your name?"

The boy's face is flaming—but his peers, eyes still shut, can't see it. He answers with convincing nonchalance. "Onmund."

"Onmund," Drevis murmurs. "I'll forget a few times, Onmund, I'm sorry. Would you elaborate, please?"

"You can kill a man with a thunderbolt," says Onmund, committing with commendable stubbornness to his course; a useful quality in a mage, Drevis thinks. The boy will probably do well. "You can't kill him with an—an enchantment, or an illusion."

"You can't?"

"Enchantments are cast on things." Onmund's still a bit pink. "Not men. And illusions aren't real. So—destruction."

"Thank you, Onmund," says Drevis. A few young mouths open in protest. Before anyone can counter the claim in favor of dremoras unbound, or souls trapped, or apocryphal relatives transmuted into rice-pudding, he changes tack. "How many of you have cast an illusion? A shadow to startle your friend? Fall of stars for your little sister?"

A flurry of hands go up.

"Phantasms," says Drevis, shaking his head. "Tricks of the light, achieved through its transformation. Alteration, in other words, not illusion." As the hands sink, abashed, he smiles. "Are you all quite comfortable?"

Nods all around.

"Fortunate, isn't it," says Drevis, smiling still, "that we met in a room furnished with benches?"

He’s given this speech more times than he can recollect. It’s disconcerting, even so, to watch his students nod again.

"Open your eyes,” he says.

Fifteen first-years, sitting sprawled or cross-legged on the floor, blink down at the tiled stone. Then they stare. A few jerk backward or sideways, startled, and catch themselves with their hands.

He’ll never again cast on them without their knowledge—but it had to be done, just the once. They’ll never forget.

"An illusionist," he says, his voice echoing in the stunned silence of the room, "can make you find him charming. A good illusionist can induce you to believe that he's your childhood friend, or your mother, or the owner of your coinpurse. A master illusionist can convince you that you're a bird"—he pauses for the nervous laughter that he knows, through long experience, will come—"and compel you, consequently, to take flight from a balcony."

The laughter stops.

"You will not learn, this semester, to cast an illusion," says Drevis. "You will learn to ward your thoughts against suggestion, and compulsion, and to break even the strongest spell that seeks to steer you wrong. And for the first time in your lives," he adds, unsmiling, "you’ll know that you can trust your own mind—”

* * *

“—vis,” shouts a voice in his face. “Drevis. Drevis!”

Drevis Neloren, with an apologetic smile, reaches to brace himself on the lectern. He leans on empty air. Someone catches him, staggers, sinks with him into the snow.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, “I forget what I was—where was I?” His ears ring. Snowflakes sting his face. His brow, after a moment’s baffled thought, furrows. “Where am—”

“Did it work?” A hand, rough and urgent, shakes him. “Drevis! Did you hit him?”

Drevis curls his hands, raking up two burning fistfuls of snow. Clarity seeps into him with the cold. He’s on the ground, he understands with slow bewilderment, in the College courtyard, and the Eye—

“He’s—Ancano,” he gasps at whoever’s holding him, “he’s still drawing from the Eye, I couldn’t reach—I thought—”

His head throbs as though it might burst. He grinds a sob of pain between his teeth.

“All right,” the gruff, familiar voice grumbles overhead. The hands that had caught him—thin and coarse, nails gnawed to the quick—half-lift him out of the snow. “Worth a try. Take a moment.”

He’s never liked Enthir, thinks Drevis, lolling his head on his colleague’s knee. It pricks his professional pride that he’s never seen through the man until today.

“Savos?” he rasps, squeezing his eyes shut. Searing spots like magefire dance across the dark.

“Uh—” Enthir sighs through his teeth. “Someone covered him up.”

He crooks his fingers in a shivering sign of prayer, willing himself not to be sick. The falling snow cools his brow. “I’ll—I’ll try again. In a moment.”

“Did your brain melt out your ears?” snaps Enthir, sounding more like himself. He calls across the quadrangle, raising his voice above the cries of prentices and gulls. “No mindspeech in this! No seemings, no sendings!”

A shout of assent echoes back. Drevis grits his teeth and sits up. He watches the quadrangle spin. He watches Faralda bend to confer with Mirabelle, who’s sitting white-faced and bruised on a chunk of fallen masonry, then stride out to call the milling, crying crowd of students to order: prentices, to Tolfdir! To me, adepts! Masters, to me!

Something sours in Enthir’s face. He stands.

“Don’t tell the bosun,” he says under his breath, nodding to Faralda, “but I think it’s high time to abandon ship.”

The snow gnaws Drevis’s hands. He feels beneath it, for a moment, the cool stone of the lecture-hall floor.