#phinis gestor

[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.

[skyrimtournaments]

Best College of Winterhold NPC Tournament: Round 1

Phinis Gestor vs Ancano

Phinis Gestor

Ancano

Voting ended onDec 4, 2025

Phinis Gestor is the College's conjuration expert. However, he's not the conjuration master trainer- that honour goes to his former mentor, Falion. Phinis is still the one who sells you the highest-level conjuration spells, though. He's also the one who would have started that missing apprentices quest, if it hadn't been cut. Ancano is a... unique member of the College; he lives on the grounds and serves as an advisor to the Arch-Mage, but his true allegiance is to the Thalmor, which is obvious even before he starts doing the villainous things that mark him as the questline's main antagonist.

[hvarra]

today is my 19th birthday and i decided to draw all members of College of Winterhold! вот они слева направо

[neofolk-telvanni-wizard]

Summer finally melted Winterhold. Swimming season in our beloved College is open!

[uesp]

TES Memory: The time you ruined the life of a Dremora. To gain access to the master-level conjuration spells, Phinis Gestor has you summon an unbound Dremora to beat into submission and steal a Sigil Stone for you. The third time you summon him he will submit, and he will have the Sigil Stone the fourth time you summon him. As he gives you your prize, he will meekly hint that he is now in hot water with Mehrunes Dagon for helping you.

"Your sigil stone. Lord Dagon is... less than pleased at its loss."

[nazumorim]

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