Faralda's teaching was much like her personality, harsh but fair. She let me stumble without any warning and THEN told me what I did wrong. Of course she didn't let me do anything that would actually have severe consequences for me but anything shy of that was fair game. She also only taught destruction magic which when asked she explained that it was her mastered school and the others were barely better than an apprentice level. She justified it however as she also explained that all schools of magic minus three used roughly the same principles all the way up to expert level.-
The exceptions were mysticism, conjuration and enchanting. The first because the school was widely contested about even existing and because the spells for it were mostly pure magicka manipulation to accomplish things the other schools would struggle with like messing with time or gravity. To little surprise the school was also the most difficult to learn and master due to this. Conjuration magic however was more ritual than anything else. She explained that my original idea that magic was like trading magicka for a spells effects was nearly textbook conjuration.-
Each conjuration spell had an extra level of complexity to it as you needed control runes and take serious care not to accidentally get yourself killed by the things you summoned. She even complained quite openly that it was conjuration students at the college who caused the most problems if they made a mistake. She had even seen one try and summon a scamp only for a daedric Churl to show up and kill the summoner and two more nearby students before a teacher managed to banish it back to Oblivion. Nasty stuff to say the least, best learned under supervision of a master.-
She also offhandedly mentioned necromancy but her look of disgust at the topic kept me from pressing for more information there. I couldn't be blamed since thanks to playing the game I knew definitively that Skyrim was crawling with undead, Draugr specifically. What were Draugr you may ask? Mummified ancient nord warriors who through some form of REALLY long lasting necromancy could get up and wreck your shit if you crossed their paths. I don't mean mummified as in with bandages all over either but basically turned into dried jerky mummification. -
Anyways point was I'd like to know a bit about necromancy at least to try and keep them from getting up from their graves to greet me "warmly". Finally was enchantment that Faralda flat out told me was completely alien to her as it was ordering runes, binding them, siphoning soul gem energy into them and hoping the piece didn't explode as far as she was concerned. Nothing that wasn't basically common knowledge. She stayed at the orphanage for the next two years getting my Destruction skill to a quarter and my mysticism to fifteen before she flat out told me I had to figure out the rest on my own like every other mage.-
She told me there was two kinds of mages, the ones who used premade spells and those who created their own. Any master of a school was always the second of the two and that path was one a teacher couldn't guide you along once you had a foundation. I was grateful to her for teaching me at all but she just waved it off as she left. She'd never admit it but Meralda was a little sad to she her sister leave so soon.-
My other skills had not risen much over these two years as Faralda demanded absolute focus and any time I wasn't eating, sleeping or relieving myself was spent learning from her. I wasn't mad about it though as this time had given me a true mages foundation and even filled in a few blanks I had in my information. For example I figured out how ones magicka pool worked. Without magical use it was based off of how strong your soul was for everyone. That was just a mages starting point however as the pool could be refined and expanded with effort and training, like a muscle almost.-
Use more magic and you'll have more magicka, fairly simple. Additionally Faralda revealed to me that when pool size stalls most mages start working on improving the quality of their magicka instead of forcing the pool to get bigger. This process was known as darkening as it involved forcing the magicka in your pool to sort of condense which made it darker and change color. Mages even used the color to determine who was stronger as each color shift was harder than the last and the magicka was equally that much more powerful.-
Faralda bragged that she had reached the light purple stage of darkening that came from condensing her magicka four times. That was to say every single unit of her already massive magicka pool was worth four times more than a single one of my own. There were according to her nine stages to this with the final result being white. It was colorless then light blue, medium blue, deep blue, light purple, medium purple, deep purple, black and finally white. According to her the white stage was technically only achievable by starting to turn ones magicka into a divine energy and there were almost no mages who reached it in history.-
Black was as a result considered the peak of the achievable for even the most talented of mages. Apparently the current Archmage of the college, Fathis Aren, was only a deep purple mage himself if that was any indication how troublesome it was to reach that level. Anyways at seven years old I was allowed to start doing chores around the orphanage or going to look for tasks in Riften to earn money with. The first thing I did however was go and pester Maramal, the head priest of the temple of Mara, for restoration magic lessons.-
The young but soon to be middle aged Redguard helplessly caved in after a few of my best kicked puppy expressions and pitiful toned pleas. He already knew I had solid basics in magic so he tossed me a few beginner restoration spell books and then told me to only come back after learning them all. I put all seventeen of my intelligence to work on that and fully memorized and integrated the spells into my mind within a single afternoon. The twitching of his face the next day when I showed up ready to learn was hilarious.-
The spells he gave me were three of the most common for priests to learn, [Lay on hands], [Cure disease] and [Healing]. the first and last were both the same spell in truth but had been altered to change the target. The first targeted others and the second targeted yourself. [Cure disease] however went both ways but was still counted as a single spell for some stupid reason. The real reason I was pestering the man for lessons however was a fact that was barely touched upon in the game, healers were valuable.