Yeah, can't beat yourself up for doing the best you could with what you had. I don't like that they were thinking about hexes first, though.

Yeah, that's surprising. I'd have expected them to run through hundreds of infrastructure and engineering applications. 

That, they have done. I mean - even if you know about a hex, you should be trying to think of everything else you can do to solve the problem it might be useful for first. Even if it's a gentle one.

That sounds like a cultural thing. Quendi think about oaths that way.

I don't think it's completely cultural. Some, I'm sure - we had a really rough time with hexes not that long ago - but being hexed really is a bigger deal than just running into a dangerous trap spell or something.

I should probably know more about the oath they made before I try to tell them that hexes should be taken seriously the same way.

I'd be happy to talk to you about the oath but I'm not sure I understand myself why they ought to be taken seriously the same way. What is it that makes a hex a bigger deal than a dangerous trap spell?

She sits back up and leans on him. Well, they can't be broken, that's part of it. You can't get away from them. And - have you tried using your new sense on another person, yet? You see all the same things about them that you see about yourself, and you have to do that to cast on someone; it's always intimate. And - this might be more important for kobolds than Eldar - A spell on you can affect the people around you in ways that a trap spell can't. You've seen how I teleport people by touching them; imagine having that happen against your will, sometimes or always. There's just so much more you can do to someone, casting on them instead of casting on their surroundings.

It makes sense to have a taboo on using mage sense on other people, then. A spell affecting the people around you would be just as important to us, but it'd matter whether the spell actually did that, not whether it was in a category of spells that includes ones that do that. 

When you say it can't be broken, do you mean that if you pinned someone with a hex they'd be pinned forever?

If I pinned someone with a hex it'd be entirely up to me how long they were pinned, and 'forever' is definitely a possibility; it'd be the easiest way to do it, in fact. But what I mean is, for spells that aren't on living things, you can break the spell by breaking the thing, even if you're not a mage at all; for spells that are on living things, you can't do that. So whatever the mage has the spell set up to do - and we can do some pretty complicated things with triggers - that's what it'll do, there's nothing anyone can do about it.

That makes sense.

Yeah. My tribe was wrong about whether I'd been hexed, but they weren't wrong about how they reacted to the idea.

I understand how if the only information you have is that someone's been hexed, you'd be pretty frightened. Why did they think that? Is there a way to tell?

Something like that? I haven't figured out what exactly the magic detection form can tell me about other spells from my world yet. It seems like it lets a mage see if someone they're familiar with has any unexpected spells on them but not what those spells do, though.

Oh. That sounds like a problem, then. Should we start looking at our people, make sure nothing's happened to any of them?

What do you mean?

I don't think there are any other casters with your magic in this world. But I didn't realize there was a way to check. Should we be doing that?

Oh. I'm pretty sure you and I are the only mages here, I've been pretty careful about that, but I can check anyway once I have a magic-vision spell worked out for myself. Which I can do now, if you'd like, something simple should only take a few minutes.

I'd love to see the process.

Sure - warn everybody else not to watch?

Still working on keeping your thoughts private?

If there's a way to do that and still let you see I don't know it yet.

There is, it's just a little trickier and the exact how depends on which mental metaphor you're using...

It is in fact tricky given the metaphor she's using, but she figures it out in pretty short order, and then goes on to design and cast a magic-vision spell. The detection form allows her to use nearby magic as a trigger, and she maps that in the most simple and straightforward way possible to the light form, so that looking at a magical thing will generate very dim lights on the surface of her eyes to correspond with what she's seeing.

Oh, cool, I get the idea. 

Yup. Not how I thought it'd work, but actually better, we'll be able to make spells that react to magic things.

She looks at her hands - yeah, that sure is some magic she's been casting on herself. Then she looks up, to see what she can see of the camp from here.