"You will not survive. You are weak. We will kill you and you will become our servant."

"Man, hanging out in your tower must be fun."

Rather than responding she leans forward and starts casting—

...he really, really hoped he wouldn't have to do this.

She has Oakflesh up, so the blades don't pierce her immediately—but they're relentless and Ruby can couple them with disorienting illusions and she's not, actually, that strong after all. She starts to bleed, and she doesn't cast a heal on herself.

Okay, okay, actually he needs to go get some air and not be near the smell of blood, his stomach is rolling and he thinks probably if he'd had the benefit of adrenaline in a fight he wouldn't be feeling so bad but that was not a fight, that was an execution, plain and simple.

He doesn't throw up but it's a near thing, and he needs time to recover his mental bearings.

That conversation was... upsetting. It gave him no clarity, but most of all it felt broken, it felt like the mage's responses were only vaguely related to what he was saying, like...

...Faralda said that the most popular theory about why mages go crazy so often was abuse of magic beyond their means damaging their soul. Ruby thinks that... this could, actually, be what a damaged soul looks like. Whole pieces of cognition missing, an inability to change one's mind, strong emotional dysregulation. It's not a normal kind of going crazy (so to speak), it's literal pieces missing in their ability to reason about the world.

Holy crap that's depressing.

What's extra depressing is that it might just... not... be fixable? At all? How do you fix someone's soul, if they die do they just go wherever it was they'd go afterwards but damaged? Can he use this reasoning to convince himself that this is a mercy and he's preventing them from getting even more damaged?

Apparently he cannot.

He does not want to kill a dozen mages.

...he could, in fact, just decide to not kill a dozen mages. That's a thing he could do. He could move on with his life, never solve the mystery of Sam Guevenne, and...

...he couldn't. Not really. Not because of the mystery, he'd be upset about the mystery but that by itself would not motivate him to kill a dozen mages.

What motivates him to kill a dozen mages is that they attacked him without giving him a chance to say anything, their souls are damaged beyond repair, and anyone else who comes to this fort will probably also be attacked. Now, he could go to Windhelm and inform the jarl of this issue but—something tells him the jarl is not prioritising mages taking over any forts, if the Valtheim Towers are anything to go by. Even if this one is much closer to the capital, it's out of the way enough that Ruby fully expects it to just be ignored.

It's still early and the sun is only just starting to rise, but there's no point in delaying another day; it'll just give them a chance to notice their missing comrade and prepare for him. He goes invisible again and walks back to Morvunskar.

What follows is not, exactly, an massacre, but it's not much of a fight either. After he's inside the camp and has killed a few sleeping mages he summons a Flame Atronach and sends it to wreak merry hell on them. He's still invisible—transparent, really, but you do need to know to look—and although now the mages are sufficiently on their guard to in fact be looking for whoever summoned the Atronach, it's not enough. By the time he's been revealed there are only two mages left, and he can in fact straightforwardly overpower them.

The lack of tactics is uncanny and very unsettling. From the perspective of someone trying to kill them, the fact that they basically throw themselves at him with little to no concern for their own safety means that they're very recklessly dangerous, but it also means they're just straightforwardly reckless and not that hard to kill. And in the end it just feels like a hot knife cutting through butter.

The mages inside the fort are not much different. They've been alerted that something weird is going on, but Ruby was quick enough that they haven't managed to mount up a good enough defence. In the end, there is one mage that is a proper challenge, a wizard who despite also not having anything that looks like "tactics" can make really fucking big explosions. Ruby is not specced to survive those, so he has to dodge a lot, keep moving, heal all the time, and draw the fire while his Flame Atronach hurts the mage.

In the end, what decides the battle is the fact that Ruby has more magicka capacity than that mage, which is a much closer thing than it should be, though Ruby was always making sure that if he ran low enough he had a plan to escape. It didn't get to that, but he wants to think he could've dealt, if it had.

Now he throws up.

That was horrible. He feels like a monster. He's sure he'll eventually get used to it, if he makes a habit of clearing forts of mages, but he does not, actually, look forward to that ever becoming a habit. He'd much rather not, actually.

Now Ruby needs to find out what's special about this place. Why did he want to, uh, "get married" here, exactly?

He hadn't formed a mental image of what to expect a fort held by insane mages to look like, but everything he's seeing here is unsurprising. Everything is in a state of disrepair, no one's gone through the trouble of cleaning anything anywhere (okay that's not strictly true but the place still definitely needs a scrubbing), the dungeons have the skeletons of any prisoners unlucky enough to have been forgotten by the mages and the piles of dust of all the undead who got destroyed when Ruby killed their masters, there are enchanters and cauldrons and alembics all over everywhere, and bunches of books on a myriad topics.

The College library probably already has copies of all of these books, but out of general principle and to prevent others from coming here and resuming the "work" of the people he just killed he'll try to collect as many as he can carry into his pouches.

It's while doing that that he finds it: a surreptitious flicker of magic in a corner, out of the way and almost invisible, which expands and becomes something Ruby has never seen upon examination. It looks... like a portal.

Well, he'll continue exploring the place before he steps into the unknown because he has no idea what's gonna happen, but at this point it's pure curiosity that drives him to do it.

There's a feeling of timelessness, of weightlessness, of not existing for a non-stretch of untime...

...and then he's in a grove.

There is no sun, and there are no stars. The light comes from everywhere, and coupled with the misty air it lends the grove a mystical, ethereal quality. There is a path ahead of Ruby, delineated by unevently-spaced lanterns hanging from trees or attached to wooden posts, between some trees and over and past a babbling brook, going well into the grove beyond where the mist allows him to see.

Something tells Ruby he's not in Mundus anymore.

Well, what's he gonna do about it, not follow the path? Be reasonable.

It's not a very long walk before he starts hearing the sound of conversation, a faint murmur suggesting a small crowd milling together and chatting cheerfully. He supposes that if this is where he said he planned to marry the hagraven he can see how Ysolda would've been interested. He can't bring himself to feel afraid, even though he thinks he should, because it's too... pretty. And peaceful. It doesn't feel like the sort of place where anything bad can happen to you.

Eventually he turns around a corner and finds the party: about three dozen people around a feast table, variously sitting or standing, chatting to each other or just drinking contentedly, and—in the case of one couple and one group of four people—fucking.

And next to a wall, lying on a long flat slab of stone covered by a blanket, being fed grapes by a man and having her feet massaged by two women, totally nude, is Sam Guevenne. She's the first to notice Ruby's arrival and she grins enormously. "Oh, our guest of honour is finally here!" she calls, and then everyone else turns to look at him and cheer.

...man, what the fuck.

"Hey, Sam," he says, walking up to her.

"Hey yourself! I was starting to think you wouldn't make it." She is notably a lot more sober, today.

"Where—are we?"

"Oh, this is one of my myriad realms of revelry, the Misty Grove. It's beautiful, isn't it? Such a shame your engagement fell through, it would've been a beautiful wedding."

"Your myriad realms of revelry."