That sparks a round of questions about the Ayleids! (Most of what's left is ruins, now.)

Oh, what a shame. Presumably to do with this new Cyrodiilic Empire she's heard about?

The Ayleid Empire fell in the early First Era to the Alessian Empire, yes - a different empire than the current one, though. Some of the buildings remain - the Temple of the Ancestors actually became the Imperial Palace, which has just barely finished being reconstructed after being sacked by the Thalmor - though many of the cities are ruins. She's been to a few, they're even more impressive than the Dwemeri ruins. 

The Dwemer as well? All things fade, it seems.

The Dwemer especially were a weird case. They didn't fade, they literally vanished overnight. 

What happened to their Snow Elf servants?

It's unclear. Most figure they're extinct. 

It was delayed, at least.

Yeah. She's not sure what sort of catastrophe would get the Dwemer but not their servants.

The Dwemer were always fiddling with something. Perhaps it was not a catastrophe.

One theory is it was some kind of spell gone wrong. Or right.

"That would not surprise me."

"Yeah. The ruins are amazing, I can't imagine what they must have looked like intact..."

"Unfortunately, the Deep Elves were much shyer about visitors than the Wild Elves."

"I've been trying to reconstruct some of their technology. It's a bit of a wild goose chase, but it's fun."

"What sorts of things are you working on?"

"My specialty is the dwemer, but I'm also working on reconstructing some old Nordic pieces. I recently got a lead while exploring a dwemer ruin on some of the technology that I'm pretty sure used to power some of their artifacts. I do a lot of running around on the side - just got back from a trip to Elsweyr to recover a staff."

"Mother used to say that the only people who knew more about soul gems than she did were the Dwemer."

"Ooo, I did a lot of research on soul gems when I was at the College. Still don't know as much as I would like. Your mother must be incredibly smart to have a good understanding of them."

"And willing to perform whatever experiment was necessary to obtain the next piece of data."

"Point. Most of the advances I've heard of haven't been... Incredibly ethical. Like that one guy who decided it'd be a good idea to experiment with Azura's Star, ended up killing an apprentice."

"Death is part of the nature of the subject."

"Yeah, but it's fairly easy to restrict the death to bandits and criminals and scum like that."

"Mother would call that an artificial and unnecessary restriction of experimental parameters."

"I don't know that I'm the best one to be explaining this, but... Okay, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, 'killing apprentices' is not how you get good apprentices, because good apprentices with lots of options won't work for someone who might kill them. And with students, you generally get out what you put in. Put in murder and betrayal, get out 'killed by apprentice' on tombstone.

"From a moral standpoint... Now, I'm not good at morals, but - bandits and criminals have broken social rules in such a way that the agreed upon and widely expected punishment is 'death.' They knew that before they became outlaws, so killing them is by most interpretations fair. Also they're often continuously dangerous to society, so killing them will on average better the world. Apprentices have presumably not broken those rules, at least if you're recruiting good apprentices who won't steal from or murder you, and they're usually supposed to trust you at least some, because the master-apprentice relationship runs smoother when there's trust involved. Breaking that trust and killing someone who is within the law is not only cruel, it contributes to disorder. ...Contributing to disorder is bad, because if everyone did, society would collapse and nothing would get done because specialization and division of labor exist for a reason, and not even vampires have infinite time to do everything in."