"Then you can probably be a wizard, at least a little. You might be able to prepare spells out of my spellbook, which is good because ink is pricey. It will be... odd... for someone occupying the social position of a slave to be able to cast spells but if you really want to I think it would be a tolerable amount of odd. It will probably take you months and might easily take you years before you can even sometimes hang a spell and get it to go off, especially considering that I cannot leave my spellbook here with you while I'm off doing stuff."

Nod nod nod nod.

"Is it Prestidigitation you want to start with or Light?"

"Will they both take about the same amount of time or will I get faster?"

"Light is simpler. This means you might get it slightly faster but it is worse practice for other spells. The two of them sequentially will probably take about the same amount of time whichever you do first."

"If I'm already going to be bothering you for both of them on the regular... things stay clean but the light runs out.  ...Unless you get a permanent one."

"We actually used to have a Continual Flame but sold it once Sovi was old enough that she didn't need a nursemaid any more. They're around. But you need a fair amount of ground up ruby to cast one. I'll start you on Light and see how quick you seem with it."

She gets out her spellbook. A halfling comes in with stew for the both of them. Mushrooms and bacon this time.

It's nice that there's meat sometimes.  "Thank you," he tells the halfling.  ...Probably he shouldn't go very near the spellbook while he has food, but he can shovel it down pretty quickly.

Indeed, omnomnom.

She sits on the floor when she's done eating; she only has the one bone chair. Flips to the page on Light.

"Light is a cantrip, that is a 'zeroth'-circle spell. That means that its shape does not have any complete perforations. Fundamentally, it is a blob - a blob that has been poked and pulled and pinched but never punctured. If it had one puncture, it would be first-circle; two, second-circle; and so on."

"Okay.  Like a 2-D blob or a 3-D one or neither?"

"3-D, or it'd be a lot easier to draw. Everybody draws it differently; you're going to learn my notation to save on ink but if you wind up seriously pursuing wizardry you'll come up with your own idiosyncrasies. Now, if you got to build this thing out of clay, that would be pretty easy - you'd probably start here, it's flat enough to set on a work counter, you'd poke in that divot and then you'd start smoothing the rest of it into all this nonsense over here. But you do not get to build this thing out of clay, you have to build it out of magic, and in order for it to stabilize - do the thing that wizard spells do so they sit waiting patiently to be cast, instead of the thing sorcerer spells do where you pull them out of your ass on no notice - you have to do it in a way that respects its internal dependencies. In the case of Light, that means you have to do these three parts simultaneously, first, and then they'll hold tension on each other while you tie this knot and stretch out this wiggly bit. Take a wild guess what you do next."

"Um... hold the wiggly bit and press this twist in to meet it?"

"That's what you'd think, yep! But since you've got the first three bits all in place already and not this one, doing that actually pulls too hard over here, you'll rupture it. So first you have to invert this here stemmed-glass-shaped business, everything beyond the crosshatching, this bit is the reverse view of that step - and then tuck the wiggly bit in there, wrapped around the stem of the resulting mushroomy thing and squeezed in very gently under the cap. That holds it still while you pinch the base of the twist, invert these nubbins all the way on the other side to add slack to the main bulk of the structure so that you can then freely move the twist without wrecking anything, and then, yes, you bring the twist over to the mushroomy thing too. We're now at this step over here. With me so far?"

"Um..."  He stares at the spellbook for a good twenty seconds, his eyes flitting between the diagrams.  "I guess I'm confused about how inverting works?  Like, why does it make sense to do that instead of just forming it the right way in the first place?"

"That's a detour from the most direct path to actually casting it, do you want to bone up on theory and accept some delay or nah?"

"Umm, I'm interested but I think I want to get to the part where I try and cast something, in case humans in my world are different from the ones here and I just can't interact with magic at all.  From the doing-it side."

"Right. So, next step, you press here - getting the hang of exactly where was for me the biggest sticking point when I was first learning and had trouble with cantrips - and you push this way, careful not to touch this part nor to puncture the structure over here in this tight spot, and you get it nested with this protrusion. That sets you up for braiding these long parts together. You can practice the braid with string to help visualize the pattern but you cannot become attached to any - somatic mnemonics, because you are going to be braiding magic with your mind, not your hands."

"And you're doing something else with your hands at the same time?"

"Yeah. The ink is magic and you draw that out while you perform the transformations. It's the same stuff they use for magic items but much less of it; you provide most of the power for the spell from your self, not the spellsilver."

"...How bad is it if I make a mistake while trying this?"

"Most possible mistakes will just make it not work. At a high level of mistake making you could make your eyeball glow or something, I saw that happen once."

"Oh geez!  Just for as long as the spell would last?"

"Yeah, you're not working with enough power to do worse than that. Yours will also start out much briefer than mine and plateau at about ten minutes."

"Oh, okay."  He glances over at the diagrams and winds up staring at them some more.

"Once it's braided, you will try to hook the spell onto your scaffold, which for most people emanates from their dominant hand but is pretty polite about moving if you lose the arm or something. A complete first circle scaffold looks kind of like this, when you can see it, which you will not be able to," she sketches a sort of spiderweb-crossed-with-electron-orbital situation on the slate in chalk. "You will fail at this upwards of a hundred times, letting it go at the wrong moment and permitting it all to unravel and pop back into its step-one shape or, more likely, disintegrate entirely. If you were lowballing your cunning maybe you will get away with failing at it only thirty or forty times. Each attempt will have some substantial chance of wiping out your ability to practice until you next have a restful full eight hours of sleep, that being what replenishes arcane power. Once you hang it on the scaffold, you can attempt to cast it, with a combination of purely mental concentration, the spoken word 'light', and, in your case, a dried glowworm, I can do it without but they're cheap, once you need them I'll get you a sackful. Then, once you've gotten the spell to go off, you can try to catch it back onto your scaffold before it evaporates; you'll have a window of less than a second to do this. If you fail you'll have to sleep and start over."