"My people use the word Space to refer to the sum total of all the places you could get to if you could fly forever. We know there's an extremely large number of these spaces and we can travel between them. That's what I did when I came here from where I was before."

"... huh."

The villagers look at each other for a moment.

"... maybe some kind of improved technique?" Oskeli ventures.

"You mentioned, ah, spirits," Ðani says, forcing herself not to use a circumlocution in case those didn't come across in the language packet. "We know about spirits because sometimes people are sent visions or premonitions from their world ­— or, rarely, because an entire spirit manages to cross the divide between worlds. But the technique is hard, or dangerous, or the barrier is just really thick because in order to come across they have to shed their bodies. Even their minds are often stressed by the crossing, and they need to be nursed back to health."

"But we know they want to help, because they frequently come when people are most distressed, and they bring something that will help — a skill, or a piece of knowledge, or just comfort and understanding. If someone developed an improved world-hopping technique, that lets you venture bodily between worlds, that would be ... huge."

"If your people don't know exactly where magic comes from, you must have had it for a long time, yes?" Penþa asks. "Because that means it's probably just a matter of there being so many spaces."

"Sometimes very rarely, and by very rarely I mean maybe once across six sixes of generations and many more worlds than that, someone gets my sort of magic for no clear reason. As far as anyone I've spoken to knows, there have been very few cases where we're certain it's happened. One of those cases was the foundation for a lot of what we've built together. We're reasonably certain that magic gets its power from something we call the Maelstrom, which is for lack of a better way to describe it the space which contains all the other spaces. That doesn't suffice to explain why magic works the way it does though or why people sometimes come to have it.

"I used your word for Spirits but different spaces have different rules. In many spaces people believe in something like your Spirits and we've found that common pattern is explained by many different things."

Penþa scratches their head. "It sounds like we have a lot to learn. Do people ... travel between spaces a lot, once they're able?"

Ðani frowns. "That could still match what we know — if one of the other people has figured out how to send packets of magic across, but they can't aim it, they could still be trying to help by spreading it around," she suggests, but she doesn't sound very sure.

"There are many different ways to travel. The way I use is only used by people who do it a lot. I'm bound to the other people in my group and a few specific places and I can either travel specifically to one of the people or places I'm bound to or as I did to come here trust in my magic to take me somewhere new somewhere I've never been before.

"Generally most people don't like my form of travel because you can't bring very much with you. The most common way to travel, at least measured by volume is to build something of a bridge between two spaces or even two places within the same space and then travel across it. The next most common after that involves crafting a small space and moving that space around the Maelstrom to get between larger spaces."

"So you go out exploring and sharing magic a lot?" Ðani asks. "That sounds really important."

"I do, and yes I agree that it's important. Magic is an incredible thing and I want everyone to have it. I also like meeting new people and learning about their lives."

"We don't exactly get many new people around here, but I can certainly see the appeal!" she agrees. "Do you know roughly how long you'd like to stay? We have the fall festival in ... six sixes and five days, I think, which is probably our biggest celebration. But of course we wouldn't want to delay you."

"Yes, six sixes and five," Penþa confirms. "And this year it's two days, because of the shifting sun."

"I'll be on your world at least that long. I don't know if I'll be in your village that whole time but I can absolutely come back for it if I've travelled somewhere else."

"A lot of places celebrate the fall festival on the same day, so unless you travel through the eastern mountains, or south past the warm sea, you'll probably be able to enjoy the festivities wherever you are at the time," Penþa notes. "But, of course, we'd be happy to have you here."

"If you're going to stay here at least a few days though, do you think you'd be able to spend some more time teaching me?" Ðani asks. "I feel like there must be some basic things about how to ... texture the magic that would be easier to learn instead of recreating. Maybe tonight I could try to share magic with more people while you get to know everyone, and tomorrow you could teach several of us, for efficiency?"

"I'd be happy to. To get you started though, I think the most important trick is to learn to see the Fractal." She switches languages. "You focus some of your magic in your eyes and then pull the world in to meet your magic."

Ðani isn't quite sure what to make of that instruction, but it can't hurt to try. Focusing magic in her eyes is relatively easy. Then she gropes around, trying to figure out how to pull the world in.

After a moment, she realizes that there's a natural way to pull the world in: to breathe. So she tries to ... breathe in magic with her eyes.

It's not as easy as it sounds.

But after a few moments concentration, she manages to pull in something.

Before her eyes unfamiliar symbols unfold across the whole of her vision. They don't obscure so much as intermingle like suddenly seeing the colors of daylight after spending a long time in the low light of the stars and a crescent moon. The language she got from Maenik lets her understand many of the symbols but not all of them. Among the ones she can interpret, she see the composition of the air (made of things she might not have had words for before), the temperature of the ground, and the frequencies of the light bouncing off of Osekli. And there's much more to see, the symbols only get more detailed wherever she focuses; she can feel small bits of her magic reaching out to get a better look when she does. Those bits of magic have their own symbols explaining that they're observing the world and translating what they see into these symbols.

Looking at Maenik she can see the bits of magic that are set to kill anything below a certain size (smaller than a grain of sand) that touches her skin and other bits meant to slow anything that approaches her at speeds above how fast an arrow flies and still other bits she can't entirely understand.

Her first thought is "aaargh". Her second thought is that Anþasta needs to see this.

She can see why Maenik calls it 'the Fractal', though. It feels like she could look closer and closer forever, falling into a pit of infinite detail.

She closes her eyelids, and when this just results in information about their internal surface, she pulls the magic away from her eyes.

She takes a deep breath.

"Why do you have magic to kill small things that touch you?" she asks, because having an anti-arrow protection makes perfect sense if you might suddenly appear in the path of a hunting party while exploring. "... very tiny monsters?" she guesses.

"It's a precaution to stop sickness from spreading. Many illnesses are caused by such tiny things. It's actually why people get feverish when they're sick, their body is trying to get hot enough to kill the small things inside it that are hurting it."

"... huh. Does that mean that antipyretics, like willow bark, are actually harmful?" Ðani asks. "Or ... maybe you wouldn't know, if your people do everything with magic. Or just don't get sick in the first place, I suppose."

Penþa leans forward, looking interested in the answer as well.

"It depends, bodies are smart but they aren't always correct; fevers hurt your body as well as the things it's trying to kill and sometimes your body's attempt to heal itself just hurts it more. My people do just use magic for the most part but we talk to people without magic quite a lot and they've generally found that medicine designed to kill the small life that's hurting the person works better than trying to address the fever. We still use medicines like that sometimes when people are badly hurt and their magic is focused on other things."

Ðani nods. "I guess that makes sense," she agrees. Medicine is certainly complicated enough, and it sounds like there's a lot more to learn about it, so it probably only gets more complicated.

She feels as though she's led them a bit off-topic, though.

"So ... the fractal. Is there anything more I should ... do with it? Practice, maybe? Or is it just useful for seeing magic, so it's important to be able to see it before learning other things?"