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... 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.

"A pleasure to meet you, Ruby. Come." Nelacar walks over to the counter and asks the barkeep for a room and a bath, on his tab. Then he leads the way past a back door through a corridor and out the other side, where a large tub awaits. There's a roof over it but it's otherwise open to the elements. It's already filled with water, but "Don't get in yet. I usually ask to not get heating because I can provide that myself so unless someone just used it the water will be cold." He puts a hand inside the water and starts heating it up.

Ruby watches this quietly for a bit, but then starts looking for somewhere to put the dagger and book. There's a little table over there, which seems good enough.

There isn't enough time for him to get cold again, because the water is soon hot enough there's steam fogging up the place. "Get in," says Nelacar, offering a hand to take Ruby's furs.

He gratefully goes up the wooden steps to the tub then into it, and there's just something different about getting a warm bath that just being in a warm room lacks. He grabs a scrubbing stone from a nearby shelf and starts getting rid of all the grime on his skin.

Nelacar vanishes the furs and then vanishes (what passes for) his clothes to follow Ruby in. At Ruby's questioning look he says, "You mind? I'm paying for it so might as well use it."

He shrugs. "Sure, suit yourself."

So he sits down and grabs another scrubbing stone. "So, ready to satisfy an old man's curiosity?"