Silence. The window-glass shimmers with subtle rainbows.

This door leads to a smallish, round chamber, lit without even an obvious artifact involved, with no other doors and no furniture.

How. Nice? He looks around. Why would an artificer waste their time on lighting up a pointless room?

The ceiling is just sort of glowing all by itself. And the silver columns decorating the curved walls, those are also glowing.

She doesn't react to being shoved. Just moves with his hand, then settles back into place, breathing steady and soft.

She is still asleep.

Pretty wide selection. Histories of countries he's never heard of. Novels. Cookbooks. Cryptography and architecture and gardening and 101 Fun Flying Tricks. Atlases of continents that don't look right. There's a large section devoted to what appear to be handwritten personal notes.

So you're a new sorcerer! After you've notified your local government and given them something to contact you with so they can have you on call in the event of sorcery-needing eventualities, you'll want to have fun with flying. It's mostly instinct, but instinct won't show you these thrilling stunts! (Note: Tricks 50-101 require momentum beyond that required for basic flying, or help from a more advanced sorcerer.)

There's a Sorcerers' Directory of the Continent, and 10 Great Sorcerer Profiles, and Dozens Of Things To Do With Sorcery On A Rainy Day Besides Make It Stop Raining.

Well he's actually kind of curious about that last one. What can one do with sorcery on a rainy day? Besides, assumingly, flying tricks.

Play with lightning! Sculpt clouds. Make the rain fall upwards ("try this in isolated areas first"). Prevent rain from falling on you personally. Make tiny indoor dioramas of the landscape complete with weather. Fuck around with the wind. Dramatic timing with thunderclaps. Dissolving nearby drops into thick mist.

So, so asleep.

"A magical -? I'm sorry. The local sorceress is - indisposed - but there's another a few days' downriver if you take a barge or just want to walk. How lost are you exactly, do you know what country you're in...?"

"I do not know what country I'm in. I arrived up," he waves towards the palace, "there, maybe an hour or two ago, at the most."

"Oh. You're in Tanree. Sunlit Satrapy. How did you get into her palace?"

"... This is going to sound crazy? There was um. A giant snake, with a mirror for a head. It ate me, and then I was in her palace. Uh, I don't recognize those places, do you know how I could get to Casasha? Or Antaurb?"

"Nnno, I've never heard of them."

"Oh. Well. There's probably a map I could check, I might have lingered in the library a while longer but I sort of felt like I was intruding..."

"She - won't mind if you look at her maps," says the woman, shaking her head, continuing up the stairs. "I'll help you, I may as well."

"She's - she's not likely to wake up," murmurs the woman.

"She made another sorceress angry, and now she's under a curse. There've already been a couple of friendly sorcerers through trying to help, but they haven't been able to undo it."

"I'm sorry. Um. - I'm sorry, I'm missing some terminology, what do you mean by curse exactly?"

"The other sorceress magicked her asleep. I had thought that maybe she'd wake up on her own, after it had been long enough to drain her momentum - but she hasn't."

"Yes, that could have potentially satisfied the other sorceress - Kithabel would have been livid but -" They approach the top of the stairs, the tunnel under the river. "But awake. Only apparently the other sorceress was angrier than that."

"... No, I mean - I don't understand what you mean by drain her momentum."

"Prevent her from doing any magic, so she's not a sorceress anymore." Through the tunnel. "My poor girl, it was the only thing she ever wanted."

"I'm sorry. I hope she wakes up and recovers." Adarin frowns. "How can you be prevented from doing magic? I - don't understand. I'm a - mage, raveler, I don't lose it because I've slept a while."

"She can't do magic while she's asleep. You're some kind of specialist?"

"That's. That isn't how magic works," says the woman, as they enter the palace proper.

"How does magic work, then?"

"You decide what you want, more or less consciously - and you want it hard enough, and it happens," shrugs the woman, heading for the ex-sorceress's bedroom. "I can dust, or mince an onion - but Kithabel could - she was a real sorceress, if only just, she'd learned to fly."

"... Um? That sounds like everybody gets magic?"

"Well, yes." She lets herself into the bedroom. She goes and sits on the bed beside the sleeping girl, brushes her hair from her face. "But most of us don't work at it enough to do much with it."

"And if you don't use it for a while you lose the ability to and need to - start over? Lose it forever?"

"I really don't know how to explain you," apologizes the woman. "Or explain normal things to you. I'm only here to visit my daughter."

"Is there a way I could help?"

"Oh. I don't think so. She's not dead, but her sorceress friend said that, well, it would take a fairly traditional breaking..."

"I have no idea what that means."

"When sheer momentum force isn't enough - and Dianira tried - sometimes curses can be broken by people who are in love with the victims, but." Mother kisses daughter's forehead. "It requires quite a bit of specificity, and she's not - out meeting people, at the moment, and wasn't seeing anyone before."

"Sometimes, anyway. Dianira thinks it should here - the other sorceress wasn't powerful enough to beat Dianira in a fight. But, well. Kithabel's asleep."

"Okay," says Adarin. "Could Dianira, given enough time, go with the sheer momentum force thing? Eventually?"

"I was going to show you the maps in her library. But I'm not sure it would help," she says, standing up. "It doesn't sound like you're from - well, anywhere."

"I don't think she'd mind if you stayed in the castle. There's room, and it doesn't sound like you have anywhere else to go. Although you'd need to stock the kitchen. It's only there because she knew she might lose her momentum and need to go back to actually cooking."

"I'm not sure, what is it that you do?"

"I protect people from getting hurt. I could probably fling myself off of the waterfall and land on sharp rocks at the bottom and be fine, if a little tired. I can protect other people, too. It's harder with more, especially if they're far apart, and I can only have one shield up at a time. Though I can move it as I like."

"I can ask around. How long can you do it?"

"Depends on the shield and how much stress it's under. If it's a precautionary measure for a person - hours. Probably all day if they avoid sharp objects and running into things. If someone's being constantly attacked, or I'm protecting a larger group of people, the time gets shorter and shorter. It makes me tired - if I'm stubborn and drink a lot of tea I can fend it off, but I have to sleep sometime."

"I can ask some people. Especially without a sorceress around there's probably a market for that. I'll have to describe you as a type of specialist."

"Sure. Uh. A specialist does only one thing with magic, while a sorcerer does everything? Or am I wrong there?"

"Specialists wear a sort of pattern in their magic so it'll keep longer without exercise but they don't have general applicability - a specialist architect can't heal or fly or control the weather."

"Ah. Yeah, then, calling me a specialist is about right."

"In the meantime if you don't mind the walk you can come down to the village and have dinner with me. What did you say your name was?"

"Adarin. It's nice to meet you; that would be great, thanks."

"I'm Rhana."

"Let me know if there's any way I can repay you for helping me out. Or er, repay your daughter, for - borrowing a room to stay in."

"She won't mind. There's more rooms in that castle than she'd ever have used herself."

He shrugs. "Still. It's a beautiful castle, anyway. She has good taste."

"I mean..." He shrugs helplessly. "I don't want to just leave her there."

Rhana nods.

"I'll give it a shot, if I can't - well. I'll write a sincere apology."

"They're color-coded - the notebooks. The blue ones are personal notes, the rest of it is things like grocery lists and ideas for magic to do."

"Okay. So. I guess I should probably uh. Read those."

Nod.

The personal notes are in tidy chronological order, labeled in local dates (the first few also say things like "Kithabel, Age 6, Keep Out This Means YOU" on the covers).

Wow, age six? Age six. That's absurdly early. Well. Okay. Probably not super relevant, and he can skip a few books, but let's see what she was like at age six.

Huh. Interesting. In a - weird way. He'll skip a few sets of books, though, it's especially creepy to read a six year old's diary, he thinks.

When Kithabel is twelve, she has already left school so that she can prowl around looking for magic to do. She can walk, now, and if she concentrates really hard first, she can even run for a minute, sometimes two, before she falls. (And she can fix her scrapes.) She has managed to wrangle a volunteer position under a healer-specialist, but with partial hours compared to if she were going to be a healer-specialist herself; she doesn't want to fall into a rut. She still reads a lot of books. She visits her father, who lives in another city; she is looking forward to being able to fly there but for the time being she has to take an autonomous carriage (there's a sorcerer who makes those sometimes) to and fro. She has been experimenting with her sleep schedule since she managed to get her hands on an enchanted alarm clock: it will reliably wake her up however deeply she's sleeping so she's trying to do it in smaller chunks. She doesn't like losing progress overnight.

Is there anything about why she wants magic so badly? It's pretty obvious that she wants magic badly, but he feels like he's missing something, here.

She doesn't write about her love life; it seems she never had one. She observes the aesthetics of boys, systematically concludes when she's fourteen that it is in fact just boys, maps in an idle-cataloguing fashion the subset of boys (Adarin is comfortably within it). Mostly she seems too introverted to bother for anyone less than overwhelmingly worth the tradeoff to her momentum that going on dates would take. It's not that she doesn't like people, it's that they interfere with a lot of the things she would most like to be doing to relax (writing, stretching her sorcery, curling up with a good book). The source material Adarin is reading definitely isn't optimized for courting suitors.

Kithabel kept grocery lists for her household from fairly young. She likes chocolate and noodles and lemon sauce. She is supposed to visit that neighbor about his broken fence to see if she can fix it. Her apprenticeship with the specialist healer has different hours this week because he's acquired a real apprentice with a less flexible schedule. Her appointment with the history tutor her father hired because he's worried about gaps in her school-less education has been rescheduled. On this randomly chosen day at age fifteen she needs to buy eggs (check), clean the rug (check), substitute for her mother's teaching assistant at the kindergarten when they go on their apple-picking field trip (check), provide special effects for a puppet show downtown (check), and weed her mother's friends' lawn (check).

Records of that are a little spotty. Apparently there was some sorceress who lived in a flying castle (not uncommon) and visited a nearby satrapy therein, but her momentum-maintaining strategy was less "do well-liked public works projects" and more "by opposing lots of lesser wills, comparatively small effects can count as doing a lot of magic, and then I don't have to be as creative". Kithabel was called in when everyone in the area started getting sick, was concerned when it was harder than it should have been to heal them, and noticed the flying castle. She asked the nomad for help, got turned away (highly suspicious), figured out the rest, and, rather than provide a strong opposed will for the sorceress's unneighborliness to push against, called in a more powerful sorcerer from farther away to directly stomp on the nasty one first. The nasty sorceress moved on before he arrived, but was chased; there was a brief battle when she convinced a town that she was being persecuted and they should help her, and she won, though the sorcerer escaped; and while Kithabel was still helping the healing specialists mop up her damage in the first town -

Kithabel was friends with another sorceress who she met while they were cleaning up flood damage together. Kithabel noted about a month after her first flight that she no longer had residual resentment about not being able to sleep late, because she no longer has to feel tired and real life is about as good as dreams on all axes with sorcerer-caliber magic. Kithabel was toying with designing an objective measurement system for momentum but found it difficult. Kithabel loved watching the planetary rings at night and was thinking of taking a trip to someplace on the other hemisphere for a new view of them, as long as she could be sure she wouldn't be trespassing on any sorcerer territories who would object to her doing momentum maintenance in their space.

Zzz.

He winces. "... Yeah. You were - cursed. To sleep. About a year ago."

"Is she here -? Is she okay? Who cursed me - nevermind, I can guess, is she still loose?"

"She's not here right now, she's at her house. She's fine. And, nope, Dianira got her."

"Good for Dianira. Did it take Dianira a year to get her?"

"... No. Apparently she got her within a week or two."

"...That is really interesting if true but not what I was getting at. How did I wake up if it didn't happen by itself as soon as Dianira got the other sorceress?"

"You're, welcome," he murmurs, to his feet. "Couldn't just leave you there..."

"No, you could've, but - you didn't, so, thanks, my life is a catastrophe but it's not over."

"I mean, your - mother held out hope Dianira could get you in a century or two, it just. Would have. Kind of sucked. A lot."

"Yeah. All things considered I stand by my thank you."

"I assume Rhana likes you, if she okayed it." She swings her legs out over the edge of her bed, sighs, "This is going to suck," stands, and immediately overbalances and falls on her face.

Adarin blinks, flings his shield over her, and then goes to offer her a helping hand up.

She leans on him heavily. "Ugh. I haven't tried to walk without substantial magical boost since I was, what, eight, nine, I think that's when I started tripping less."

"Well, good news. I have magic from my other world. So I can keep you from getting hurt. I - didn't catch it earlier, sorry, but you're protected now."

"That's convenient. Do tell about the other world."

"We don't all have magic, for one. Sometimes lucky people, when they're at a certain age, get a choice of different magic types to choose from. Those are ravelers, or mages, if you prefer, we haven't standardized it. I picked protection magic. So I can protect people."

Kithabel manages to stand without leaning on Adarin, and stops leaning. "I'd say I like your choice but I don't know what it was competing with."

"Its major competitor was weather magic," he sighs, forlorn. "But I took too long trying to figure out if it was large scale or just," handwave, "little trick showers or something, and I lost the option. I couldn't have lost animal communication, no, it had to be weather. Ugh."

"And because magic is scarce it would be a fairly big deal to have weather?"

"Oh, yes. If it was at the scale I wanted, anyway, where I could prevent floods and water crops and such."

"Well, you picked something good, anyway. I should talk to my mother. How did you say you got here? Magic otherworldly snake or something?" Kithabel minces her way carefully to her bedroom door.

She touches the wall and goes to the pointless little room. "Do you know if my lift still works? Because that would be a heck of a way to test your protection, if it doesn't."

"Is that what that was? I have no idea, I didn't know what it did, so I left it alone."

"And Rhana didn't show you? Huh. Well, if she didn't show you maybe she thought it was too risky, I'll defer to her judgment on that for now. Stairs it is. Great." She heads for the exit.

"I can't quite - you seem very nice and the circumstantial evidence heavily favors you being on the level, but I can't fly or heal myself on zilch momentum and I have never seen your thing in action, so."

"No offense taken," he agrees. "I can shield myself and I'm leery of flinging myself off of things. And I have proof that it works."

"But you know what I should actually do, before going to see Rhana, is be less - having been in bed for a year," says Kithabel, pausing, looking down at herself, and turning around. "At least she didn't decide to put me in a nightgown or something, but still. I'll see if the plumbing works, if it doesn't zilch momentum might be enough to get me spruced up a little, my clothes at least aren't magic - do you have pressing engagements I'm keeping you from or can you wait?"

"No, it's fine. I can wait."

"Okay." She closes herself in a bedroom. There is the sound of a thump and a "thank youuu" and then silence and then the door opens and she's in a different pair of pants and shirt with her hair brushed and her general expression less groggy. "Plumbing's busted, which doesn't bode well for the lift, although the lights still work."

"How much is a bit?"

"About five month's worth."

"I don't think you can fix my plumbing like that, and I managed virtually socially acceptable levels of hygeine from a cold start, but thanks."

"Sure."

"So you like my palace, huh?"

"It's very nice," he says, a little shyly. "You have good taste."

"I'm proud of my design."

"Good! Well, shall we go tell your mother you're all right?"

"Mm-hm." To the stairs she carefully carefully goes.

Adarin follows, absently creating little trails of sparkles to maintain his momentum.

She winces, the first time he does it; but doesn't say anything.

"Sorry," he murmurs. "I'd um, stop. But. I'm really sorry."

"No, don't stop, I get it. I remember."

"I mean, I wasn't... really going to stop, but I am sorry that circumstances mean I have to keep," handwave, "in front of you."

"It's all right. I don't want to go the next several years twitching whenever anyone does magic, I'd go insane. I'll fix it."

"Which I assume you know lots about."

"Yeah?"

"I mean, um. Yes, who wouldn't? There are times that I'm annoyed with myself for - stuff that I feel. When it's incorrect or unfair or even inconvenient. And it's - really quite cool that you can correctly identify the right things to do and then, er, go do them. And I don't mean that in a, a - patronizing fashion? I have seen how people don't manage to actually do things and it's impressive that you can just. Tweak yourself, figure out what needs to be done, go do it. It's a nice set of qualities." He shuffles his feet. "But um. My opinion of you should probably be obvious. Aheh."

"Just a little. But the exact breakdown wasn't. One hears repulsive little stories about curses broken by people who were impressed by the cursed person's beauty or something."

"I mean. You are beautiful, but that's - really not why, I couldn't have done it without the book-reading. And uh. I felt like a creep the entire time."

"Rhana wasn't wrong to suggest you read them."

"What I didn't want to happen was to read them, think you were pretty great, and then - not manage to break the curse. That would have been awkward and upsetting."

"Well, I wouldn't have been awake and making it extra awkward."

"Yeah but when you woke up in a hundred years I would feel obligated to let you know that I tried to break the curse and failed. So it would have still been awkward, the awkward would have just been postponed."

"Fair enough."

"It would probably be worse than just getting the awkward all out of the way, actually. I would have had a hundred years to freak out about it first. 'Oh no what if she hates me.'"

"You didn't learn enough to guess that I wouldn't hate you?"

"I mean. There's - reading about a woman who is likely to not hate you, and then seeing her in front of you, not hating you. Sort of. Different things, psychologically. And sometimes I'm stupid."

"Alas, I didn't think ahead enough to write a how-to section on the mental tweaking thing. I've never taught anyone to do it."

"It's okay. I get by all right."

"Good."

"I don't think it's pessimistic," argues Adarin. "Preparing for the worst isn't pessimistic. Just careful."

"Whatever you'd like to call it. I thought I might need stairs, as abhorrent as stair-needing would be. I was right."

Hug.

"When either of us has momentum to throw around, leave me room? I don't mean, fuck off into somewhere else, you can hang out, but I got used to being the only serious candidate and then the only actual sorceress attached to the place and it'd be hard to collide with a neighbor."

"Sure," he agrees. Only slightly wistfully.

"I mean, I don't think the territory has anybody immediately adjoining. You can have a castle a short hop upriver," she shrugs, "cover the northeast. I won't mind."

"Sounds good. We can get into a castle contest. I can try to make a prettier one."

"You can try."

"See, now I feel obligated to make a stupidly fantastic castle."

"You'll overshoot. It'll be gaudy."

"You underestimate my aesthetic abilities," he sniffs. "I'll just have to show you otherwise, won't I."

"Yes. Yes you will."

Adarin carefully stays out of the way and will leave them to their reunion until they require him.

"Kithabel, you're - oh sweetheart - Adarin, was it... did you...?"

"Aheh. Um. Yep."

Rhana hugs her daughter, who hugs her right back.

Adarin smiles to himself and is generally pleased he made the world a bit better.

Eventually Kithabel extricates herself, which just causes Rhana to hug Adarin instead.

Well, Adarin is fine with being hugged!

Good, because he's getting super hugged!

Kithabel giggles.

Rhana chatters happily about what-all there is for Kithabel to catch up on, and apologizes for the necessity of inviting Adarin to read her notebooks (which Kithabel writes off as nothing, obvious, definitely the right call).

Adarin's naturally rather quiet, but will answer direct questions and occasionally add comments.

"Hm? Yeah, sure. There's plenty of room."

"Oh, okay, good."

"Also wow, did you think I was going to get uncursed and then immediately evict you from the place you've been living?"

"I mean, it is your castle? I'd understand!"

"You'd understand that I was an ungrateful jerk who didn't understand the ramifications of homelessness, I hope."

"I actually have savings, so I wouldn't be homeless for very long."

"And in the meantime you would be out under the rain with a few months' momentum. Pff."

"It might not rain! Possibly! Maybe! ... Okay yeah please don't evict me."

"I won't. Consider yourself at home in my castle."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."