Every spell of the Wild Magic comes with a price. Where the High Magick is precise and formulaic, each spell a careful construction of well-defined symbols and ingredients with a mathematically predictable result, the Wild Magic is more like an ongoing exchange of favours with a vast and distant force. A Wildmage doesn't do magic so much as ask for it. All their rituals and formulas are just fancy ways to make requests.

Alcarian sits down with all the tools of her calling - the Book of Sun, the Book of Moon, the Book of Stars, the herbs and candles and incense - and she makes a demand.

"The world shouldn't be the sort of place where this can happen," she says, setting down a bowl of seawater and stabbing tall candles into the soft sand of the beach. "She didn't deserve that. Almost no one ever does. I can't think of a purpose this could serve that would be worth it." Strikes sparks onto tinder, lights the candles. Snaps a rope of pearls and pours them into the bowl, last year's birthday gift from Kala. "I don't care what you take from me. I want my best friend back even if I won't be here to see her."

A knife scores her fingertip, and blood drips down into the water, each drop a plume of curling wisps like ink or smoke, ringed by ripples that glitter in the candlelight. The tears running down her face fall beside the blood, and the mingled waves turn the surface of the water into a fractured landscape of wavering lights.

"Fix it," she hisses—expecting nothing, expecting silence, expecting to cry into a bowl of seawater for an hour and then go home unsatisfied.

Instead, she feels a Mageprice settle into place, the heaviest she's ever borne, a pressure so intense that for a moment she wonders if the spirit can be crushed like the body, if the reason why no one ever brings back the dead is because the effort of even trying is enough to kill you before you have time to finish.

When, a scant few heartbeats afterward, she is abruptly swallowed by an all-consuming darkness, her first thought is that this must be what death is like, and if so she's glad she got Kala out of it—

But the burden of Mageprice still weighs on her soul. She's not finished yet. Whatever the Wild Magic wants from her, this is not the end of it - this is the beginning.

So when she feels the void nibbling at her edges, feels the cold making her slow and numb, feels the indescribable sensation of her mind and body coming apart into individual layers that twist and writhe and spiral out into the nothing until they start to become nothing themselves... she clings to that heavy Mageprice, and holds together by sheer force of will. Her mind is hers, her body is hers, and she has need of both for urgent practical purposes. She will not give them up.

The void has her for long enough that time loses all meaning. It never ceases in its attempts to eat her, tugging incessantly at her skin and her hair and the cold frightened fringes of her thoughts. She holds fast through all of it.

And then she lands in a place that is not the void, and experiences sensations that aren't cold or numbness or the constant fight to stop herself unraveling into the dark.

It takes her a few minutes to begin to organize the reports of her senses. There is light, though she can't tell how bright; warmth, though she can't tell how much; pressure, in a pattern she eventually deciphers as representing the ground she is lying on. At some point she must have remembered how to breathe, because she's doing that.

She makes a hesitant effort to move, curling her fingers and then relaxing them again. It seems to work fine.

Next, she tries opening her eyes.

She's on a platform of wooden planks. A giant one. On either side of her, at the bottom of depressions in the platform, pieces of metal lie carefully arranged in the shapes of ... ladders? ... which each extend into a tunnel under a stone bridge. Further out from the arranged metal on the ground she can see metal columns and supports holding giant glass overhangs aloft. Opposite the bridge, these overhangs join into a glass roof.

If it even counts as a building, it's probably one of the largest she's seen.

She sits up, slowly. Her clothes are gone but all her skin appears to be intact, which is really the important thing here. And of course her Three Books are stacked neatly on the platform next to her right hand, innocent as ever.

Her new Mageprice isn't asking anything of her. It's just... sitting there. Waiting.

Well. When you don't know what to do, do the job in front of you. At the moment, that means focusing on the basic survival necessities: food, clothing, shelter. Along the way maybe she can figure out where in the world she is, if indeed she is still in the world.

She blinks her blurry eyes and rubs her chilly arms and looks around some more.

She's naked. Well. She won't be feeling too cold, at least. It's reasonably warm.

It's also very early in the morning. The sun is just peaking over the horizon. The few people she can see are under the overhangs, sitting on benches and reading or looking at their wrists.

Showing up out of nowhere naked in public is the stuff of minor nightmares, but although she feels awkward, she's not going to solve anything by curling up in a ball and waiting for something nicer to happen. The warmth of the sun slowly banishes her lingering chills as she squints at the people, trying to figure out who if anyone she should approach for help. It might be better to just pick up her Books and run off, except that she has no idea where to go.

After a short while the platform crowds with more people. Everyone mostly keeps a wide berth. Someone in a large hat tosses her a coin. 

That's useful. She picks up the coin and smiles awkwardly at the hat.

Probably, whatever these people are doing here, not many of them have any spare clothing actually on hand. The weather seems warm enough to discourage extra layers. She should probably leave and go somewhere else. But without a concrete plan in mind, it's hard to make herself get up, and without the most basic understanding of what kind of place she is currently in and how she might get to a better one it's hard to form a concrete plan. It seems clear that all these people are waiting for something, but she has no idea what. It's certainly not obvious from the architecture.

Several minutes pass. If if she's looking in the direction of the glass structure she can see a woman with a child at her side talking to another woman in a blue uniform. She can't make out the words from this distance, but the first woman is definitely pointing at her.

Unlikely to be a good sign, that. But she doesn't know what things might help...

It is probably a bad time to try to do magic, just on the principle that when the world is very strange to you you should probably try not to be strange right back. But she opens the Book of Stars to see if the Wild Magic has any useful advice.

The War Magic is wielded most usefully by one who understands the nature and function of the world.

...that wasn't helpful at all. She sighs and closes the book.

A head peaks out from over her book. "Miss? I'm going to have to ask you to come to the train office. You're disturbing people."

The woman in the blue uniform is crouched inches away from her. On closer inspection she's carrying a bag full of papers.

Well, that's better than some ways this could have gone.

"Okay," she says hesitantly. "Do you, um, have something I can wear? I don't - I don't know where I am. Or how I got here. Or..."

She trails off. (It might be most expedient to just act like she took a blow to the head and has forgotten everything she ever knew. Assuming no one has lie detection magic it's probably going to be a lot more believable than the truth, and if they do have lie detection magic then she can tell the truth and explain her reasoning.)

"Got some underwear at the office. Let's go quickly, there's a train coming by soon." She moves to help her with her books.

The books are small, each about the size of a day planner, and leatherbound. One has a sun motif engraved into the cover, one a crescent moon, and one a cluster of three twinkling stars.

She lets the stranger take them, keeps the thrown coin in her hand, and follows her to - the train office, wherever and whatever that is.

(It took her until the word 'train' to notice, but this isn't the language she grew up speaking. It feels every bit as familiar. What is going on?)

Rebecca strides forward through a growing crowd and eyes a leering man with distaste, looking back periodically to make sure Ms. Naked In The Middle Of A Train Station is still following. They aren't quite at the office yet when the train whistle cuts through the muttered conversations on the platform.

She jumps slightly, startled by the sudden noise. Everyone else seems to have been expecting it, though. What...?

"Gosh, you're spooked. You're safe now, alright?" Agh, Rebecca is very very not police, what's policy even supposed to be for flashbacks? 

She tries for orientating information first. "You're -- hm -- you're standing on the train station platform for East City, it's early morning on a Sunday in August -- damn, what's the date today --"

She blinks confusedly, absorbing this information. 'Sunday', 'August' - she recognizes that those are a day of the week and the name of a month, but can't place them in her mental calendar.

They enter the office and the door shuts over a fleeting image of a vast moving object the size of a small building slowing to a stop.

"Phew. Alright, I know a guy doing police work who knows the people who trick in this city, so you should really tell us anything you can remember about what happened to you last night --" Rebecca faces forward and hears, oh damn, footsteps.

"Buuuuut first let's get you into clothing okay come on bathroom is this way --" 

.... Alcarian is being dragged. Before she knows it another door clicks behind her. 

She goes where she's pulled. It seems the thing to do.

She's left there for a while. She can hear Rebecca gossiping with another voice -- male.

The door quickly open and a hand tosses her some underthings, a loose shirt, and some blue pants, before slamming shut again. A muffled, sunny "anyway, you should really look at the second one from the top --" can be heard from beyond the door. 

She puts on the clothes, tucking her coin into a pocket and her Three Books into a different one. She has to roll up the pants a slightly ridiculous amount to stop them dragging on the floor, but she feels much better with clothes on even if they fit badly. As soon as she's dressed she pokes her head out of the bathroom.

Rebecca grins at her. "All done?"

"Yes. Thank you," she murmurs.