Okay. So what was that thing with the bridge that they mentioned?

After a while, she goes home. The next little while is pretty uneventful - she takes a day to catch up on things around the Quendi cities, and spends an afternoon with Tirinquo and the humans, but mostly keeps on working with the Dwarves.

He goes to visit the Dwarves.

She goes with him, of course. She's been keeping track of particularly pretty places and interesting people, she can play tour guide reasonably well.

And he will happily sit himself down and talk trade policy minutia for about eight hours, even if he is disguising some exhaustion.

She hangs out nearby; the Dwarves can bring her things to enspell, but she mostly keeps an eye on everything, and when she notices he's flagging a little she asks if he'd like to go home.

He takes it as a cue to perk up and be less visibly tired and keep going.

I promise they won't mind, she sends, fondly amused, but okay.

Eventually he will go home.

She's kind of running out of steam herself, by then, but she hangs out for a little bit. Seems like that was a nice change of pace.

Meeting people is always nice.

Mmhmm. Well, if you'd like to go out again, just let me know.

I will!

Have a good night.

A few days later, Nidela reports that the translation of the book on her world's spell forms is done.

People are grateful and eager to read it!

It serves as a pretty good overview of the world, in addition to talking about the magic forms and where to find them, albeit from the author's distinctly elven viewpoint: dwarves and humans cut down trees and are therefore awful, goblins take slaves but use mushrooms for their woodlike-material needs and are therefore less awful, animalfolk aren't really people but are generally pretty inoffensive (though they sometimes also cut down trees, why is everyone who's not an elf so horrible). Rána's type of kobold is barely mentioned, but there are also desert kobolds, who are nearly as elusive but use magical traps, so they get a section; the author also speculates that they have a form that lets them detect things at a distance, which, if it's true, is unique among known spell forms.

All in all there are a couple dozen spell forms mentioned; the most interesting one, which the author was more or less able to confirm the existence of but only able to give vague detail about where to find, is the animal-and-person version of the elves' plant modification spell.

That is interesting. Possibly very unethical but still interesting. Quendi wouldn't be using it, obviously, that involves having children, but it does sound of interest. No one anywhere has healing?

If that's really the animal-and-person equivalent of the plant manipulation form, it does healing. And will work just fine on people who already exist - they'd have to actually get it and look at it to figure out the scope of what it can do in adults, but the plant one can do most of the things it does to seeds to grown plants.

It's still possibly very unethical. Hexes with that form: yowch.

Well, you can do unethical things with anything at all that's remotely useful. Where can that spell be found?

The book has maps! It's kind of out in the middle of nowhere; it's definitely in this one forest that has a bunch of really weird animals, but there aren't any cities or anything nearby, just a couple of little human towns.

Rána can work with that, though. The description isn't good enough for her to target it directly, but an afternoon's work with the help of someone with better eyes gets the job done anyway.

Then they will go through and osanwë-listen for mages.

Those sure are some weird animals. An unusual proportion of them are variations on the theme of 'large and aggressive'.

...okay, they'll make sure to send people who have teleport-deflection of threats.

Some of the creatures look like they might not be all that inconvenienced by finding themselves suddenly falling down a cliff, but they can all be teleported.

It's a big forest. As they get closer to the middle of it, the creatures get bigger and meaner and tougher, and are more often camouflaged or venomous or similarly dangerous above and beyond just being big and mean.