"Healing spells. A suite of them, I think jointly comprehensive. All-purpose visual and auditory illusions. And the first one - when I was little I tripped, a lot. I couldn't learn to fight, I'd have impaled myself on something before a week had gone by. So -" She waves a hand, perfectly graceful. "I fixed it."
"Oh, well done," he says admiringly. "And of course I am very grateful for your healing spells."
"I'm proud of them. They don't see very much use. It varies how often I can get away. The illusions help, of course."
"The illusion spell's usable in pieces, even," she remarks, "I could turn invisible or make simple lights before I could do fully animated images."
He doesn't sound alarmed; he sounds delighted.
"I am not at all sure that I can teach the alphabet," she mentions. "I have symbols for the atomic concepts but they are fairly indescribable. And my notation doesn't at all resemble any of the lectures on conventional magic theory I've snuck into, so I doubt I could work backwards from a typical spell and break it down from there either."
"Maybe. I don't know. They snap together in my head from pieces. I write words and then I have them forever, same as the letters. Sentences paragraphs chapters books encylopedias spells. How does one usually learn a spell without the pieces?"
"I mean, I can show you what they look like written down, if you like." She kisses him again, then rolls out of bed to pad towards the bookshelves. "Which one do you want to see?"
They are full of densely packed symbols. Two hundred and nine of them.
"Less maddening than the other way around," is his conclusion. "Maybe not quite unmaddening enough. What exactly was it that you touched, to get all this?"
"The Tesseract. I doubt very much you can expect the same result. If it always did that then it would not be so forbidden."
"I don't expect the same result. I do expect that there must be some reason why it taught you the sorcerous alphabet instead of doing whatever it normally does to people, and I wonder if it is possible to find out what that reason is."
"I'm not sure. I'm lucky that no one listened to me when I said I was fine and all it did was tell me things and don't care to jeopardize that success."
"Well. I'll think about it. And I'll think about how to learn the alphabet and whether it will be worth the number of centuries I'd have to put into it."
"True. But there's a way I get with certain kinds of puzzle, and a way I get when I spend too long doing just one thing, and I would rather not be caught between the two for a very long time."