Maya notes this, and the subjective difference after Theo tells her it.

Juniper writes the Chinese symbol for 'wind,' then.

And does it ripple?

Yep!

"What about French? Just to check that Chinese doesn't have some special exemption, but that it works even if you don't know the language. It's 'vent' – that's vee-ee-en-tee – and if it works for you then it probably doesn't care about language for the written thing?"

It works, too. "So I guess the thing that doesn't work is the actual spell, when you don't know the language, not just the concept you're calling on."

He nods. "Maybe we should test it written in different languages to see if it affects the charge, though, or how much power it gives the spell, that sort of thing."

"Probably a good idea," says Jess. "And you might want to see if you can intentionally only charge it up a small bit, and if that even makes any sense in the system."

"What do you mean?"

"If the paper can be charged when you write it and it improves the power of the spell, can you charge it up halfway and have it do only half the effect, ripple slightly less, that sort of thing?"

"I'm sorta curious about the weird invisible fire," says Tyler.

"I'll try being less, er, meaningful when I do it." And she tries and there fails to be a ripple at all. "I think this didn't work."

She also hands Tyler a charged paper so he can play with the invisible fire.

So he says a phrase for flight and then he tries to see if there's any feeling of heat, if it harms him if he puts his hand where it appears to be burning, if he can hear anything, precisely how invisible it is – does it cause weird ripples in the air or is it literally an invisible effect that just looks like it might be flame-y? – and also if there is anything else obvious of note.

It seems to be literally an invisible effect that just looks flame-y. The paper turns to ash but the ash disappears before reaching the floor.

Looks flamey in that it has similar effects on paper, not looks flamey as in has a flame, since invisible.

Okay, well. Weird. He tells Maya the results.

"So these things are single use, then. I wonder if it would consume the whole paper if it was just a small word on it. And if it's possible to have more than one of these things on the same substrate."

Juniper produces a full notebook page with the word 'wind' written on a corner, which works, and then attempts to embed another page with 'water' and 'wind,' and in that case only the former takes.

Noted. "What about the particular word you use – do breeze and, like, zephyr take?"

She hands Sadde the full notebook page with the tiny 'wind' on a corner, then tries to do breeze and zephyr, neither of which work.

Sadde uses the page to power her flight, and the whole paper is consumed by the not-fire, not just the corner with the word on it.

"I wonder if we can only use this to call on higher concepts or elements or whatever," she muses. "Like, what if we want to make a spell that's specifically supposed to produce a breeze?"

"Mm." Jess shrugs. "Might be that Wind is the whole overarching concept and it works for all the spells related to that? In which case we should probably try to find what the other ones are. Unless it's, like, a magical ability thing how precise you can be or something."

"This all sounds so– complicated. Like, there are a bunch of things it could be."

"Kero did mention there's a sort of hierarchy amongst the cards, right, they're divided amongst the four elements and two attributes, and also divided between Sun and Moon? And this also dictates more magic than just the cards, since I apparently have Sun magic and Theo has Moon magic?"

"Yes, Clow divided the cards according to divisions that already existed in sorcery."

"Yeah, but then where does the hierarchy break down into things that have no power and you can't write out as words? Because we can write 'wind' and get it, so we should probably try some of the things under that, and maybe try 'Sun' or 'moon' at some point…?"