Still one at a time, but I think I should be pushing the pace more, if this is real my brothers need to know sooner...

All right. If I add individual triggers to them you can just go at your own pace, that should work okay. I still want a little more practice before I try to add triggers, but I can do that without actually finishing the spell, it just means a bit of a delay before the first real one.

Okay. Can also explain your magic system to my brothers, I don't understand it and I think it's because I'm not able to concentrate well yet.

Sure. I haven't actually told you much about it, though, and it seems like yours is very different so I'd be surprised if you could guess much; I can tell you more about it in between spells if you'd like.

If it's convenient.

Sure, no problem. Let me get started first, though.

She spends ten minutes practicing, and then takes a break.

So, I'm not really sure where to start, is there anything you'd particularly like to know about?

How it is learned, what limits in terms of range and usage it has, what can be done with it...

Okay. My kind of magic comes in forms, which are sort of... mental objects, kind of. They act mostly like memories, but they're more solid, they don't degrade with time, and each form is used to do a specific kind of thing. I only have one form, teleportation, but there are others - kobolds have one that makes an effect that makes whatever it's cast on invisible to other magic, and one that makes very dim light, and one that detects magic; other cultures have different ones, tigerfolk have one that makes them stronger and elves have ones that make fire and water, and I'm sure there are more than that out there. My form was my Gift, but usually they're learned by touching a mage while they're in a casting state - they don't have to be actually casting a spell at the time, but they do have to have a form out and ready to use, and then if you touch them you can see whatever part they have out, and you get your own copy of it. If they're just trancing, you get the ability to do that, but no form; if they are in a casting state and you can't already trance you get that along with the form... trancing is the first step of casting; my kind of magic comes with an extra sense that replaces your regular ones that you have to use to do anything with the magic, and going into the trance activates it and leaving the trance deactivates it. When you're in the trance, everything is kind of a jumble; it's made up of normal sense things but nothing means what it usually does and it's hard to figure out what things mean what; there are things in it that mean just about everything, the hard part is finding them. You start out just being aware of yourself, your body, and it's not very hard to figure out the patterns for things like your breathing and your emotions, usually, since those are already familiar. The sense can be extended outward, too - there's a limit to how big that extension can be, and it doesn't seem like it can get any bigger than that, but it can be any shape, so if you just want a thin little rope of it it can go pretty far away, and you get that jumbled sense of what things are within that whole space and can cast on anything in it. It takes practice to make it go where you want, though - there's a sense of what the shape is, but you can't look at where you are without dropping the trance and stating over, and it's easy to get disoriented.

And how can you do so many different things with teleportation? Moving, making portals, making mirrors...

Well, it's my Gift. I think I could teach anyone to do simple portals that someone could walk through, but being able to make portals you can look through is probably because my personal copy of the form is an artifact, the bit I use for that is very delicate.

And what's a gift?

...oh, maybe that's just this world. There's a thing where every so often someone will go into a creative fugue and make something, and the thing they make will be ridiculously nice for whatever it is and have a few special properties - indestructible, even if that doesn't make sense for what it's made of, is the most obvious one - and the person who made it comes out of it with knowledge of how to make that kind of thing as if they'd spent their whole life learning how. It only ever happens to anyone once, and it doesn't happen to everyone, but it's common enough not to be unusual, usually. The thing is an artifact and the skill is their Gift. Magic's a little different - it seems like people don't get magic Gifts usually, I've never heard of someone getting one before, and I didn't have the creative fugue part, just got startled by a crystal teleporting out of nowhere and falling on me, but it's otherwise the same. That's why I'm so scattered about what I can do - I technically have all this knowledge about magic, but it's like I learned it years and years ago and never used it, I have to actually sit down and think about what I know and until I do that I don't quite really know it.

That might just be this world. It's not our world, to be sure.

Nod. Anyway, yeah, I'm kind of ridiculously good at magic in general because of that, even before you count that it's only been two seasons. Usually at two seasons people still take an hour or more for even simple spells, and sometimes it takes that long for someone to be able to reliably cast stable ones.

How long is a season?

About a hundred days; a quarter of a year.

Okay. It's fine if it takes many years to get as good at magic as you are.

Nod. Okay. I'm not sure I'll be able to share the part about making portals you can see through, though - the way it's usually transmitted isn't good enough, I think. Maybe if osanwe works that'll allow it.

Also, with how learning to cast works, nobody should be trying to learn it with just my teleportation form. But I think I'm ready to do a couple spells now, I'll explain that after.

All right.

The first one takes about as long as the last one she did; the second, she gives a frustrated little hiss partway through and has to start over, but she gets it the second time. When she's done, she excuses herself to get a piece of fruit to eat.

So, learning my kind of magic. In one sense it's really intuitive - you don't actually have to be taught how to trance or use a spell form, they come with a kind of instinct for the basics - but there's a catch. For the first while - I think it must be based on how many spells you cast, but I don't think anyone's ever counted and it doesn't seem to be exactly the same from one person to the next anyway - but, for the first while, all the spells you cast will be unstable, and it takes a while after that to be able to reliably get stable spells. And unstable spells are dangerous. They're not obvious at first - the pattern is that for the first day they seem normal, and then sometime on the second day they start acting strange, and then if they're not broken, sometime on the third day they break on their own, and if they break on their own the caster dies when they do. The usual form to learn with is the light form, and 'acting strange' means the color changes, or they get brighter or darker, or things like that that make it pretty obvious - things that you could do with the form, if you wanted to, just not what the caster actually did. And I've never seen an unstable teleportation spell, but I expect that one of the things that could happen is that it could teleport itself someplace where it couldn't be found, which would obviously be fatal. 

That makes sense.

...do the dead here go to Mandos, do you know?

I don't know what that is, so I'd guess not. We get ghosts, sometimes, if someone isn't memorialized, but they don't seem to be people as such, I don't know if that answers your question.

It means if I die here I might just stop existing. He sounds absurdly hopeful.

...that's kind of what I assume happens, yes. I don't know, I don't know how you even would know something like that.

If I die in my home universe I go to Mandos. If I die outside it my soul might persist and wander, but maybe somehow it wouldn't.