A storm atronach looks like a rockslide that decided to get up and walk. This elemental Daedra is a heap of stones held together by nothing but raw lightning, usually arranged into a hulking, roughly human outline that brings golems or Dwarven centurions to mind. Together with its fiery and icy cousins, the flame atronach and frost atronach, it is one of the three classic atronachs that conjurers across Tamriel call upon, so in Skyrim you will meet them both as hostile guardians of spellcasters and as allies at your own side.
Where to find them
Storm atronachs do not live in Skyrim; they are pulled in from Oblivion. Expect them wherever mages and Conjuration are involved, called up by enemy spellcasters or by you. The source material does not list fixed Skyrim locations for them, so treat any meeting as a sign that a summoner is somewhere nearby.
Summoning one yourself
The player can learn Conjure Storm Atronach to bring one in as a temporary ally. A more powerful option is Storm Thrall, the top-tier version of the spell. Conjured atronachs are handy in many situations, for example tracking down enemies the player cannot see clearly, such as slaughterfish under the water. If you face a hostile one, banishing spells like Banish Daedra or Expel Daedra are designed for exactly this kind of summoned Daedra, and Command Daedra can turn it against its master.
Lore
Storm atronachs come from Levinace, a small pocket realm of Oblivion. Like Infernace, home of the flame atronachs, it is described as a collective realm, one that is essentially an extension of the beings who inhabit it. Credit for bringing storm atronachs into the practice of Conjuration goes to the mage Corvus Direnni, who applied the principles of Koron’s Peremptory Summons to Levinace and fixed the shape conjurers know today. Tweak the smallest detail of that summons, the lore says, and the elemental can appear in other forms entirely, such as a horse, a guar or even a senche-tiger.
When a storm atronach is destroyed, all that is left is a pile of smouldering rubble, and from it come the so-called storm elements. The best known of these is void salts, a grey powdery salt prized in Alchemy.
