Hour 16: What Lies Beneath

After speaking to a few characters, I'm advised to seek out 'The Augur of Dunlain'. I'm also interrupted by a surprise visit from the Psyjic mage who appeared to me in the vision in Saarthal, who has sought me out in person to warn me about the danger of the glowing orb thing or something. Whatever! I'll swallow it and run a mile! My power shall make the orb look like a mere trinket! 

Tolfdir tells me I can find the Augur in something called The Midden, which turns out to be a network of dingy cellars and caverns underneath the College. He warns me that it's "not very nice", which I take to mean that there is a strong risk of death there, and I'm proven right as I discover literal undead warriors and giant spiders roaming around in it, and it's littered with piles of bones and the grisly remains of failed summoning rituals. Um, guys, this sprawling dungeon network crawling with enemies is just accessed through a little trapdoor in one of the College corridors. Maybe you should, I dunno, send some mages down there to clean the place up and then seal it properly so that nightmarish monsters aren't roaming around right beneath your beds as you sleep at night? Just a thought.

This is quite clearly some kind of Daedric summoning chamber. If I get injured down here I'm sueing the College.

The enemies down here are few, though, and are easily dispatched by my skeleton warriors, who now have 100 extra health due to a skill tree perk. I eventually find the Augur, which is a sentient ball of pure energy (?) and it tells me to search for the Staff of Magnus. I return to the Archmage and he tells me to continue looking into the matter. I'm pretty sure that at the start of the quest he outright denied the existence of the Augur, so I'm not sure he's either a) particularly competent, or b) trustworthy.

As an aside, during this quest I noticed an annoying dialogue trend (to be honest it's cropped up in most quests, I just haven't noted it here until now):

That is, both options are basically the same. You might get a slightly differently-worded response, but you can't change the direction or pace of the quest-line. I'm pretty sure this was very different in Oblivion and you got way more options for how you wanted to proceed.

Anyway, exploring the College and the Midden takes the best part of an hour. I was hoping the zip through the College quests and get back to Solstheim ASAP, but the first 3 quests have taken 3 hours so far! I'm enjoying it, though, and to be honest I'm not sure if I even got this far in the College quests before - my previous characters have usually shied away from magic, I think. Also, I loved the atmosphere and design of the Midden - it reminded me of the escape from the Imperial Palace at the start of Oblivion, and it's gave me proper old-school dungeon vibes, like something out of Diablo 1. There should be more dungeons like this in the game!