Kind of a lot of resources to divert just to make Maitimo feel better, but I guess if it's what it'll take.

Shrug. I consider that a pretty high priority. And I can do at least the one idea that I had on my own, it'll just take a few days.

Your time's pretty valuable. But okay.

She shrugs and offers her hand again.

He takes it.

And here they are in the same clearing as before. The tribe's Speaker is in just the same place as well.

...I forgot to bring breakfast, be right back, she sends, and disappears.

And he waits and listens for magic being practiced.

She's only gone for a minute - and in fact she's never out of osanwë range - and then there's oatmeal, cooked in a pumpkin and sweetened with dried berries.

After about half an hour, the mage starts practicing. They start with a light spell.

Got it. Okay. Can I relay it to you without doing it myself?

Yeah, it should be pretty obvious how to use it, but if you just trance and go to use it without actually doing anything, I can get it from you.

Okay, I'm trying that.

And she stays cuddled up against him, and after a moment: Wow, that's really worn down compared to mine - I knew mine was an artifact but the difference is striking. No wonder I've never seen anyone do anything really useful with it.

What's the difference?

The more detail there is the more choices you have about how it works. This has hardly any - color, a tiny bit of brightness, that's it, I think. I don't think you could even see by this, or at least I couldn't.

Huh. I don't have anything to compare to, I guess.

Yeah. It's still useful, anyway, people can learn with it and I suspect a mage with only this form wouldn't even be dangerous.

It's good to learn with something safe. But it means we might not have the flexibility with any of the other forms that we've seen you use with yours.

Of course not, mine's an artifact. But I expect the others will be better than this one, it's a pretty huge difference.

Are there other artifact ones anywhere?

I have no idea. I'd never heard of magic being a Gift before it happened to me, but that doesn't mean very much, we don't get much news from outside the tribes.

So might be worth looking for.

Mmhmm. And even forms that aren't artifacts will let us do more things - I couldn't do light at all before today.

And light's the best to practice with, you said.

Yup. For the first while, all your spells will be miscasts, and for a while after that a lot of them will be, and when you have a miscast you need to break it before it breaks itself. But you won't know it's a miscast until it starts acting strange, and when it starts acting strange it'll do something that you could've cast a spell to do, but not what you did cast it to do. So for teleportation, it could teleport itself away, and then if you don't find it again in time it breaks itself and you die. But light spells can't do anything directly dangerous at all - a spell on a person could be dangerous under the wrong circumstances but you shouldn't be casting on people anyway until you're sure you won't have miscasts, you can't break spells on people - so the only danger is that you might forget to check, not that something bad might happen when a miscast goes unstable.

I'll remember to check, he says gravely. How exactly does it cause you to die?