They've left him alone in his cell.
He can't really be said to be lucid but he has very acute instincts for when there's someone and when he's alone - it's the last of his senses to depart him - and he's alone.
And then suddenly he isn't.
Good.
I'm probably going to take that day off soon. Not tomorrow, I need to tell your siblings about Findekáno, but maybe the day after.
I haven't been pushing myself that hard. But I'm going to be helping build a couple cities before too long, I want to be in good shape for that.
Seems like, yeah. And building in magical defenses from the start can't hurt anything, either.
Yup. I don't get the feeling that's going to stop them from fighting, though, just makes it so they can do it more on their terms.
I'll keep them as safe as I can, anyway. I should really find someone to help me figure out how that spell to teleport injured fighters home should be designed soon.
I need to know what kinds of injuries should trigger it - I could just do one that triggers when the spellbearer goes unconscious, but at least for kobolds that wouldn't be enough, we can definitely take deadly injuries and keep going for a while anyway.
We can too. Though if it's an actually deadly injury there's no point in bringing them home just to die -
If your healers are good enough there might still be a chance, if they can get to them quickly enough. But yeah, I'm not going to be able to save everyone; I need to know who should be brought back. And even if the answer was the same for Eldar and kobolds - and I'm sure it's not - I don't know enough to figure it out myself.
Is there healing magic? I know you don't have any or - he waves a slowly healing hand - it'd have come up, but does it exist somewhere?
It might, it seems like the kind of thing my world's magic could do. I don't know who has it if it does, though.
Worth looking around for, at least. Our healers will have seen a lot of injuries and might be able to help you.
Yeah, at some point we're definitely going to want to figure out a good way to send people to get spell forms - if all new forms work like mine I bet a lot of them aren't even available in cities, it'd mostly be explorers finding them, but asking in cities is probably a good way to start at least. I'm not sure how to prioritize that, though, or talking to the healers.
Getting new spell forms seems like a good idea because there could be higher upside than we know - something we haven't even thought of yet.
Me being the only mage who can cast stable spells puts some limits on that, but yes.
Yeah. I'm kind of worried about that, though - I don't think I've been able to do a very good job of explaining why it's important to be careful about who gets to learn.
I think it's a bit of a bind. On the one hand, people who have this magic have a lot of power, and that means that if the wrong person gets it or someone who falls into Enemy hands they could do a lot of harm. On the other hand, the way the Quendi tend to think about power is that if something is powerful, the worst thing you can do is hand it only to a few deserving people, because if everyone has the chance to be powerful then we are all growing together and can combat problems together. We think of keeping some people from hurting others by keeping them powerless to be a very unstable situation.
We also trust each other quite a lot. The fear that the more people have it, the likelier someone with it is captured by the Enemy is a reasonable fear. Most people would say that fearing one of us will hurt people is unreasonable. They would be almost perfectly right - Quendi have almost never hurt innocent people.
Mm. I still don't like it, but if it has worked for you it'll probably keep working, I guess.
I think we should keep it to few people. We just need to be thoughtful about not explaining it in a way that sounds like 'we will protect you from each other by keeping anyone from growing and having magic and being able to protect themselves'