The swimming does help. Frigid waters can only do so much to counteract high internal temperature. Or so he surmises, seeing as how he's still alive when he gets to something that's nominally a shore.

It's covered in snow, though, which makes him feel very betrayed. The point of swimming was to stop feeling cold; instead, he's colder, the air burning his skin and his lungs. His lungs, and his muscles, and his bones. All of him is burning, and not in a way that helps with the chill. It just makes it worse, everything worse, freezing and burning singing together in shrill disharmony.

He's so, so tired.

Fire. What he needs is a fire. But there's nothing to make a fire with, a couple of dead dry shrubs here and there but no flint, nothing—fire. He can... he can make fire. He's sure of it. He's not sure how, but he doesn't need to be, he can just follow muscle memory. Or a sort of muscle memory that's in his mind. He holds his palm out and up and...

...makes fire.

The fist-sized ball of flame floats lazily above his hand, unaffected by the chill and the wind. It's warm, it's warm enough he can feel it, he holds it close to his face and basks in it... but... it's not warm enough to dispel the cold. It's worse, actually, because he's stopped moving and the chill has started to seep deeper into his bones. His feet are numb and freezing, and the word "frostbite" pops into his mind with a terrifying mental image of toes growing blue and black and falling off.

He almost trips when he resumes walking, his feet moving more sluggishly than they should. Now that he's not swimming for his life anymore the adrenaline is starting to leave his body and he's just exhausted.

But first, more fire. He looks around and, ah, the shrubs. He has vague memories about burning shrubs being bad for some reason, but he doesn't know what the reason is, and right now he really needs a bigger fire.

He soon finds out what is bad about shrubs. It's the smoke. There's barely any fire, barely any warmth, but he's soon getting black from the soot and feeling his lungs start to complain from more than just the cold.

...smoke.

He can see smoke in the distance. And it's less smoke than his shrubs', he only found it because he was thinking to look for it, so it must be a more useful kind of fire. Right? He's pretty sure that's how this works.

But he's been swimming for so long, and he's so tired, and his muscles ache and burn, he could just... curl up... and sleep... He doesn't need the fire that much, does he, if he can just... sleep...

NO

The warning comes unbidden from the back of his mind. If he sleeps he will die. This is the cold trying to seduce him, trying to freeze him, to make him still. The snow and the ice, the water still on his skin sapping him of what little leftover warmth he does have. No. He needs the fire.

He walks. Then he jogs. Then he runs. Then he sprints.

Then he... slows.

He's burning again, panting heavily, drawing in large, ragged, heaving breaths to try to soothe his lungs and convince his body he's still alive. But he doesn't still, and doesn't relax, because the scene in front of him is... not... safe.

The ground here is a lot less frozen than by the the shore, probably because of the presumably explosive fire that happened here: he can see the packed earth, and even some dry burnt grass. But the thing that catches the eye, in the middle of the scorched circle, is a corpse.

Now he remembers what being dead means. He agrees with his past self, this is worse than being cold. The corpse's shrunk into itself, hugging itself, on its knees with its face bowed down. This person's flesh has been completely charred away, melted off their bones and consumed by whatever foul magic they must have been performing shortly before their demise.

And they smell delicious, a feeling that is soon followed by pure revulsion. He's not going to eat a person. Not now, not unless he grows so hungry it's a choice between that and dying. It's not, yet, a choice between that and dying.

More importantly, though, there's an unlit campfire next to them, as well as some of their belongings, somehow entirely unburnt. A book, a dagger, a necklace. He knows without thinking that they are magical. He doesn't know what they could possibly do, and why they'd be here, but they are, and they're resources.

Fire first, though.

It's easy to get it started, with his magicka; the fuel hadn't been entirely consumed, the fire had just been spent by whatever spell went wrong here. And once it's started, he can feed it a steady stream of more magicka to make it grow, make it bigger and stronger. Make it hotter.

He falls asleep without noticing, after his limbs have all recovered feeling and he's let himself relax. It just happens, unbidden but welcome, and he embraces sweet oblivion from his suffering, knowing it to be temporary.

More temporary than he'd have hoped. He wakes up not knowing why, but he leaps to a crouching position out of instinct, completely sure that something's wrong.

He's right. Two seconds after that two scraggly skinny snow wolves leap at him. He manages to dodge them, but his reflexes are not good enough to dodge again when they immediately turn and jump so he raises his arms to defend himself and... a circular, nearly-invisible barrier with fading glowing edges appears between them and him. It shatters shortly after impact, but holds long enough for the wolf to bounce off it instead of reaching him.

Okay! He has defensive spells! Not just fire! This is good. And now that he thinks about it, there's other magic he has in that vein. He keeps an eye on the wolves, who have started circling him warily, while he funnels magicka into a specific shape, but he loses the cast when he has to raise another barrier in the middle of that. He feels the magicka he'd been funnelling rebound into him and he staggers a few steps back, but he's more on the ball now and can start throwing fire at the wolves.

They're not perfect at dodging it, but they're good enough that he doesn't instantly burn them to death. He resumes the cast of whatever spell he'd been trying before while he quickly sprints towards the corpse again to grab the dagger; that might be useful. Two more physical dodges and then his cast is ready and goes off, at which point he can feel a thin layer of magicka cover his entire skin, accompanied by a strange faintly-glowing sheen that moves like liquid across its surface. The surprise at that distracts him badly enough that he fails to even raise the ward in the direction of an attacking wolf, and he's immediately made aware of what the spell does: the wolf's claws scratch him, but only that. No deeper cuts, definitely not the mauling he was expecting.

Useful.

He's no longer nearly-freezing, but the fire's gone out while he was sleeping and he's still cold enough that his body is still feeling very sluggish, and the muscle aches from all the swimming and running don't help matters. He can tell that his reflexes would be doing better if he were in better physical condition, that he'd have been able to kill the wolves with just the fire.

But he isn't, and he can't, so the killing is somewhat drawn out—not objectively, only a minute or so if that—and involves a lot of using fire with one hand and stabbing with the other. By the time the wolves are dead he's half-covered in blood, theirs and his own. His wounds were definitely not as deep as they could've been, but they are still numerous, and he's just overall physically miserable. It's not as bad as the cold that was threatening to consume him before, but it's still bad.

...

...and he is hungry enough to consider eating the wolves.

Unlike for magic and combat, he doesn't have muscle memory for how to skin and cook wolves. He makes do, probably wastes a lot of useful fat in doing it, and he definitely isn't sure what to do with the organs, but he's got some meat in his stomach after a while of getting the fire back up and cooking.

Now, he can't just... stay here. He needs to go somewhere. And given that someone got here, presumably they followed some path that can be traced back. The corpse isn't that old, so it must have been recent. A snowstorm could've erased some of it but if he can find a beaten bit...

Aha. There it is. He wears the necklace/amulet around his neck, grabs the dagger with one hand and the book with another, renews his armoured skin spell, and starts walking.

He loses track of time, again. He doesn't just walk, he tries to keep a pretty steady faster clip to stay warm. His armour spell also helps; his feet aren't directly touching the ground, and his skin isn't directly touching the air, so it's somewhat insulating. Not enough that he will definitely not die of exposure, but enough that the occasional further wolves that attack him are providing him with sufficient exercise to keep him... mostly... warm.

Mostly.

He doesn't want to stop again, and try to find a way to get a fire going. He'll figure it out if he needs to, but he can see the walls of a city, now, catch glimpses of it between the hills and mountains. He's close, and the path is bringing him closer. At some point he transfers the dagger to the same hand that's holding the book and starts a fire in his hand again for what meagre heat it provides.

By the time he reaches the bridge into the walled city the blood he's covered in is dry and crusted, his extremities are once again numb, and he's misjudged the level of psychological impairment he'd suffer at the hands of the cold because he's no longer having thoughts. Just one foot after the other. One foot after the other. Cross the bridge, one foot after the other. Reach the gate, one foot after the other.

Then he's at the city and the last thought he has is that he achieved the goal he said he was going to achieve so he can surrender to unconsciousness.

Picture this:

You're a Winterhold guard. Winterhold, which is barely a hamlet anymore, its former glory washed away by The Great Collapse, the only hints of that glory being the ruined state of its walls, while most of the few buildings still left standing are boarded shut as their owners left for Dawnstar or Windhelm. It pains you, as it would pain any Nord, to know that now the only thing keeping the city you were born and raised in from being taken by the snow is the thrice-damned College.

And it's salt in the wound, really, to know that it's the wizards' fault. They claim it's not, they say it was a volcano, or it's a mystery. Even though the only structure left completely intact was the College itself. How convenient.

You're a Winterhold guard, wondering if you did the right thing by staying, wondering if you should have gone south with your ex-fiancé before he gave up on you in disgust and left, guarding the gates that no one's assaulted in years, when you see a lone mage walking down the beaten path towards the city. And he's certainly a mage, you know this even before he's close enough for you to see the shimmer of a spell on his skin, because only mages would be walking in the nude in the snow like that, not needing even enchanted clothes and armour to shrug off the cold.

But as he gets closer more and more things seem strange about him. One, he's carrying a book and a dagger in his hand, rather than in a bag or hidden away in a mage's magical storage; two, he's a human but not an ethnicity you've ever seen before, his shoulder-length hair a silky wave of pure black and his skin tinted bronze where it's not gleaming with magicka or blue from the cold; three, he's blue from the cold, his spell clearly not enough to ward off the temperature, so even if you were right that he was a mage it turns out that the nudity may not have anything to do with that.

"Halt!" you cry once he's close enough, because this is really fishy. "State your business!"

But he ignores you. In fact, you're pretty sure he didn't even hear you. His eyes have a glazed over, frozen look to them, staring directly at the entrance to the city. His steps are stiff and stilted. His grip on the book and the dagger is deadly tight, you'd more easily cut off his hand than take his possessions from him.

And none of that is reassuring. You're reminded of stories of mages going insane you've heard from your dad and friends at the tavern, of them doing too much magic and losing some part of themselves in the process, slaughtering villages for necromantic experiments, making contracts with Daedra, devils and worse. Of the times growing up when you saw or heard or heard tell of mages right here in Winterhold going crazy, the spectacular lights in the night sky above the College followed by silence. If you ask the mages themselves—they are as avid patrons of The Frozen Hearth as anyone, especially the handful of Nords who have not shaken off their cultural heritage and still enjoy a flagon of mead in the evening—they say that it was nothing, just someone being a bit too excited with their research.

Honestly, thinking about it all like this, you think you probably should have left this land forsaken by the Nine.

So it is with that in mind that you prepare for a fight, maybe a hopeless one that'll barely delay the inevitable, because you're still of Winterhold and you'd rather die than live knowing you didn't even try to protect your home.

This is of course all moot when the man promptly passes out on you as soon as he gets close enough.

He wakes up to the feeling of pain in his extremities that is the inevitable result of being near a fire again. But it's not just the fire; everything is warm. Toasty, even. His still groggy mind takes a few moments to properly come to and understand his surroundings.

It's a building, wooden and rectangular. One end is blocked off by a counter, behind which stands a man in an apron of sorts. The other end has a window, and next to it a door. The center has a cooking fire, a good quarter of the total length of the room and about a fifth of the width. Also that's where he is, sitting on a bench, wrapped in a blanket or cape or cloak or something, thick fur touching his bare skin. There are tables around, some of them occupied by drinkers, as well as some other doors and some stairs leading up.

A tavern, then.

Reconstructing the events before he passed out, a lot of it is lost in a fog. He remembers walking towards a city, vaguely; he remembers walking, before he reached the city; he remembers the wolves; he remembers the fire, and the corpse; he remembers the dagger, and the book, and the amulet, which makes him immediately sit at attention—they're not exactly his belongings but they belonged to someone and it's probably a bad idea to lose them. He should at minimum give them to guards or something.

"At ease, fella," says someone behind him, leaning against a wall. He's wearing thigh-high boots, long gloves, a hood that wraps itself around his shoulders, a cloth-and-leather belt around his waist holding a satchel, and little else. His skin has a greenish tint, and his features are long, thin, sharp, and austere.

An elf, he immediately realises. He doesn't know how he knows that, but he knows that he's right. But now that he thinks about this, he looks around at everyone else, and finds them all to be humans. They're all of them of very similar ethnicity, and for some reason he finds it surprising, and especially that their skin is so white. He doesn't know why it's surprising—it's not like he remembers ever having met literally anyone else—but that's the gut reaction he has, is surprise. He turns back around to face the elf.

"Who are you?"

"Nelacar," he replies with no further comments. "And you?"

He looks down at himself—still covered in dried blood and dirt and sweat—then back up at Nelacar. "I do not know."

"A mage, though," he observes.

"...yes. Yes, I am."

"Not from the College?"

The word sounds a bell in the back of his mind. "The College?"

"The College of Winterhold, the only officially recognised school of magic in Skyrim. You're in Winterhold. You don't know of it?"

"N... Yes? Maybe? I think I remember... something. I... need to go there. For some reason?"

"Not complete amnesia, then, I see," Nelacar says, nodding. "Any idea why you showed up at the gates in the buff with only a book, a dagger, an amulet, and Oakflesh?"

Oakflesh, another word he—doesn't exactly recognise, because that's not what the armour spell is known as where he's from, but he knows the man is referring to it.

He also doesn't feel like answering the question. Certainly not in public; he has noticed other patrons surreptitiously or not-so-surreptitiously paying attention to their conversation. One of the more blatant ones is a woman in what must be a guard's getup, a blue tunic attached to her by belts that also hold a scabbard and a sword next to her hip and a shield on her back, metal gauntlets and greaves, and a metal helmet lined with fur for warmth.

"Is there somewhere to get cleaned? And where are my belongings?" He notes that he's still wearing the amulet, so they're probably not being kept from him.

Nelacar raises an eyebrow then stands up straighter and offers them to him. Even though the elf had not been holding them before. "Get you a name, and I'll rent you a room and access to the bath."

He accepts the book and dagger and says, "Thank you." It cannot have escaped the elf that he has no means to pay him back, so he focuses on the first half of the sentence. What will he call himself? He's got nothing. He's got a book and a dagger and an amulet and magic and the blood and sweat and dirt on his skin. The furs around his shoulder are probably only being lent.

"I'll be Ruby," he decides, out of pure free association. Blood, red, ruby. It's a nice enough name.