"You're in the Forest—how did you get here? I wouldn't have thought it was possible to get in without passing the border and if you'd passed the border you'd have been given a translation spell and told where you were."

"I was—I was home and then the window disappeared and I fell through it and landed here, and none of that makes any sense and I am making a terrible first impression, I apologize for my lack of composure but this is all very confusing and alarming."

"That's confusing and alarming, all right!" he agrees. "I'm sorry, I'm really not sure what to do—I don't at all know how to put people back through windows they fell out of into the middle of the Forest—maybe someone in Manafall could help—?"

"Maybe they could," the fairy says thoughtfully. "This seems like a Manafall sort of thing."

"I don't know where that is. I—I am very far from home. We don't have any of this. Wings or little translating shoulder lights or talking horned—I don't actually know what you are, I'm sorry."

"Oh—I'm a unicorn," he says, with an anxious little toss of his head. "My name's Sunpatch." Eiefalain, in the language he's speaking.

"Lady Annaveth Kaldwin," she says, with a polite little curtsy that is entirely the product of too much practice.

The winged girl looks slightly surprised at the 'lady' part; her wings flutter, moving her hovering form an inch or so away.

"And I'm Starshine—" Karistea "—and that's a translation spell on your shoulder."

"Okay," she says, a little helplessly. "Thank you, I appreciate it, it's very helpful."

"Manafall is a country," she adds. "Here—" and she pulls out another bit of glowing mist and fiddles with it until it's a net of glowing threads outlining a rudimentary map, rippling and wavering as it floats in midair.

"We're here," she says, pointing at a place just above the middle of the not-quite-easternmost country, "in the Forest. East of us is Manafall, and north is Faessaya—don't go there, it's terrible—and just west is the Dragonlands, and southwest is the Blessed Lands, and farther west is the Pit. Don't go there either."

Annaveth blinks at the map. Well. She can certainly now assert that she's not on Pandyssia. While there are no guarantees that the coastlines in the maps she's seen are particularly accurate, they'd have to be inaccurate to sheer absurdity to be of the landmasses shown in Starshine's (Karistea's?) map.

"All right. I won't go to either of those places if I can help it. Uh, what makes them terrible?"

"The Pit has demons in it," says Sunpatch, shivering slightly. "Demons are - bad."

"And the Faessayan nobility aren't much good either."

"So if I go there I will probably never be heard from again. Got it. Yep, avoiding those."

"Good idea."

"How—" She waves at the translation spell on her shoulder, then at the road. "How do you have magic, where do you get it from? Is it just. Around?"

"That's a Manafall question if I ever heard one—they study it there," she explains. "Because there's a big fountain of mana pouring from the sky in the middle of the country. Hence the name. Everywhere else," she collects her map and unweaves its strands and tucks it away again, "people have to trade for it or grow it or dig it out of the ground, depending. I grow mine, of course, but I'm a fae—we are living spells, so of course we find them easiest to work with."

"There's one kind of magic that has to do with mana, and one that has to do with lifeforce, and one that has to do with demons and one that has to do with angels, and I have no idea what's going on with dragons but I don't think it's any of those exactly," Sunpatch adds. "Unicorns are more like the angel kind of magic than like any of the other kinds."

"So there are... kinds of magic. And none of those kinds of magic have anything to do with anyone called the Outsider?"

"Who?" says Sunpatch blankly.

"He's a, a god that only the desperate actually believe in. Allegedly he sometimes bestows dark magic on people that catch his attention. The ability to drive men mad, or possess them, or summon a swarm of rats, or the like. He's not a very nice god."

"...That sounds more demonish than anything," he says, sounding rather worried by this possibility.

"I'm not really an expert in Outsider lore, I'm mostly just parroting things I've heard from the religious group that wants people to stop worshiping the Outsider. He is however my going theory for the window incident, mostly because I don't have a better idea."

"He doesn't sound very demonish. ...but a little bit yes."

"Well, if I ever have a conversation with him I'll let him know that he needs to work on his image."