"It's kind of hard to explain. It's like, being able to control the things that everything else is made of? It feels very close to the center of magic, the fundamentals. To me, anyway."

"No, I think that makes sense. And it's an interesting thing to focus on, it seems like it'll have very versatile results."

"Yeah, something like that. I find Conjuration interesting, too, though. Mostly where it touches extraplanar entities."

"Fancy words, Mr. Wizard."

He smiles then pauses. "You don't know what Daedra are."

"I do not."

"Gods, I... I guess I should maybe start from the beginning? This is a lot."

"You don't need to help me catch up with existence, you know, I can figure it out."

"I know, but..." He looks down at the cup of mulled wine he grabbed and brings it to his lips. "If that means I get to see your pretty face more often than otherwise I don't mind," he says with a small smile.

"Careful, you keep saying these things and I'll start thinking you mean them."

Onmund just smiles and sips from his wine.

Ruby grins and drinks his own wine.

Onmund spends a few more moments in silence before breaking it. "Before Time, there was Chaos and Order."

"—when you said you were gonna start from the beginning I didn't think you meant it that literally!"

"Well, it's important context. Wanna hear it or not?"

"Sure, sure, sounds interesting."

"Order birthed Time, and Chaos birthed Action. Not a very nice parallel, I admit. Other divinities came to be, then, with Time allowing them to get... you know. Organised.

"Anyway. The spirit of Action, Shor, convinced many divinities to create Mundus, our realm, and they invested their power and existence into it. Some of them died to be the bones of the world; some fled, the sun and the stars are the holes in the Firmament they tore on their way out. Some remained inside Mundus, the Eight Divines, including Time, who is named Auri-El, or Akatosh. The Arcanaeum has an orrery with all of them, as well as our planet. Order and Chaos stepped out of Time, and Shor was sundered and became our moons.

"The spirits who helped make the world are the Aedra. The ones that didn't are the Daedra. Their realm is Oblivion, and it surrounds Mundus, in the blackness of the sky. And most of the Daedra don't care about Mundus, but the ones who do often want to control it, or destroy it, or manipulate it.

"But that's just the powerful ones. The smaller ones, elemental spirits barely capable of thinking, those don't care. And we offer them a payment in Magicka to bind them to us, to Mundus, for a short time, to help us. That's a part of Conjuration magic."

"And that's the extraplanar entities you were talking about."

"Yeah. They're really Daedra, but if we say it out loud many non-mages are terrified. They think we make deals—which, well, we do, but they're well-understood, safe deals, with safe bounds to what can happen. So I just call them extraplanar entities."

"Can you summon one?"

He shakes his head. "Haven't learned how, couldn't study it while I lived with my family because it'd scare them."

"Makes sense. So, the fundamentals of reality and access to other realities. That's a pretty cool set of interests."

"...you know, if anyone else said that I'd have thought they were making fun of me."

"I mean it!"

"I know."