"As you said... you cannot walk away. And it seems like there are powers greater than us that are paying attention to you. I believe that... you may yet do big things, good things, and it would honour me to accompany you."

Oh. Oh wow. Okay that's pretty flattering and also when Erandur puts it like that Ruby can kind of see it.

He has no idea who he is, or why the powers that be think he's special, but... if that means he'll be able to do big things, good things, then, well...

Yeah. He wants that.

"It would be a pleasure to have you with me.

"...uh, though I should mention that I'm not planning anything big soon, this fight with—this last fight really drove home that there is much I have yet to learn and improve at, and I want to do it before going out and going things. Which in practice means I'll be spending a while in Winterhold."

"Then I can find myself lodgings there, and you will know where to find me."

"...yeah, sure, that would work."

They make their way back upstairs, and there's still no sign of their equipment anywhere.

But when they step outside the tower into the bitter cold, there is a small package barely concealed by however much snowfall happened while they were inside, and it does indeed contain their equipment.

Plus a note:

You continue to be very entertaining. Hope you enjoyed your time in there!

- Uncle Sanguine

...this fucking guy.

They ride back to Dawnstar and once they get there Adara wants to know everything that happened. Ruby regales her with the tales of adventure which in his opinion aren't that adventuresome but which she nevertheless finds fascinating—especially the bit involving Vaermina's Torpor—and in the meantime Erandur talks to people in the city to let them know that the source of the nightmares has been dealt with. Then they sleep and set off to Winterhold in the morning.

At the end of the first day on the road they spot an enormous bonfire and an elephantine silhouette which turns out to be a giant's camp occupied by a couple of friendly giants who agree to let the three of them sleep at their camp. On the second night they camp, and on the third night they spot some ruins by the mountain but upon approach someone shoots an arrow into the ground right in front of them and calls that they're not welcome so they have to camp again instead. On the fourth night they sleep at the village of Heljarchen and on the fifth night they camp again.

Erandur and Ruby sleep in shifts; three people is enough to cross over into a tempting target for bandits even as wild animals are more scared of them.

On the sixth day they're on the road north to Winterhold from Windhelm, and there they pass by a fort. They don't ride close enough to it to be attacked, but in the distance they can clearly see that it's guarded by skeletons.

Ruby slows down to a place more conducive to conversation and points. "Do you see those?" he asks Adara.

She squints. "Are those skeletons?" she asks, voice full of wonder and marvel.

Nnnnot the right reaction.

"That's a fort that's been left in disrepair and been taken over by mages. A lot of the time, this happens with mages who lost a little bit too much control and damaged their own souls, and now they've fallen into the depths of paranoid delusions and can no longer be integrated into society."

"...oh."

"This happens especially often with necromancers, who are dealing with the boundary between life and death regularly, or conjurers, who break more fundamental barriers of reality itself in order to summon forth their minions," he continues. "The example Master Faralda gave us, for one of our first lectures, was of a mage who goes crazy, kills their entire village, then goes to live in a cave eating frogs and drinking the blood of skeevers.

"I don't want to say you were anywhere near that; clearly you're still in full possession of your mental faculties. But summoning Atronachs is Conjuring, and you are piercing the veil into Oblivion and messing with reality. Without proper instruction on control, that was a risk you were running."

She swallows dryly and looks at the skeletons again, this time with fear. "And there's no way to—help them? Make them not be crazy anymore?"

"No," Erandur answers. "The damage is to the soul, and is irreversible."

"Or to be more precise, whenever you do magic you are risking doing small amounts of damage to your soul. Whenever you consume all of your magicka, that in itself damages your soul, and if you try to drain even more magicka than that then you are doing that even more. And it's possible to recover, if you spend a while not doing any magic at all. But the people who have gone as far as damaging their minds... that's beyond recovery. The soul has been warped. It's like missing limbs, magic cannot regenerate limbs, just as it cannot regenerate missing parts of the soul."

She nods minutely and shivers.

"You'll learn to recognise it," Ruby says, shifting to a more reassuring tone. "The amount of magicka you have left, the cost of magicka in a spell. Analysing spells for how expensive they are so you can know whether you can cast them, having more control over them and making them more efficient so that they only consume exactly as much magicka as is strictly necessary and nothing goes to waste, and even learning to use ambient magic in the world to help scaffold them—those are all skills the College will teach you. And practising magic is like exercising a muscle—except with less of an upper bound. You gain the ability to store more magicka over time, and your regeneration of magicka will increase. At this point, I can cast some simple spells for basically zero cost, between their efficiency, my regeneration, and my knowing when to judiciously use ambient magic for help."

"And you're still just an apprentice?"

"With a capital A," he explains. "It's an official rank at the college, and it's a little bit about skill but it's also about how much the College trusts you, and the teachers have to decide to promote you."

"They don't trust you?"

"Eh. I think they just haven't gotten around to promoting any of the Apprentices in my group. Staff at the College are notoriously busy—and lazy," he says, adding that last bit with a wink.