Shrug. "That suits me as well as traveling with the rest of the group, I suppose."

"Thank you," he says as they head out. "Really. And, uh, sorry about your mother. I can't be sorry you're here, but I wish it'd been for a more reasonable - do you want to talk about this?"

"I have no desperate need to unburden myself, but nor is the topic deeply sensitive at this stage in this setting. Ask whatever you like."

"Your mother might be trying to kill you?? Is there a chance she'll show up here, if that's what she intended and it failed? Is she competent? What the hell is wrong with her? What kind of person doesn't give you a glowing medal? Does she want your father dead?

"As far as I know she likes my father perfectly well. The trouble is that it is socially unacceptable on Asgard for women to learn magic, and by demonstrating the ability I revealed that I had been doing so in secret. If she tried to kill me in this way it is because she assumed I would sow some sort of chaos or destruction with magic she does not understand if she confronted me directly; so I do not much expect to be chased down here, at least not by her personally. She is... competent at some things. I do not actually think I could defeat her in combat, especially since she has her own, non-sorcery magic which is culturally different enough that it's all right for her."

"Socially unacceptable for women to learn magic." He shakes his head. "....how does one learn magic?"

"One normally does it in some unbearably tedious and not particularly effective manner that I was obviously never exposed to. I learned by touching a dangerous magical artifact and being imprinted with a sort of sorcerous alphabet with which I composed my own spells from the smallest parts."

"Can you teach it to others?"

"I haven't tried. I don't think it is impossible in principle, but I cannot imprint the sorcerous alphabet in anyone else's head and I fear the characters would be all but meaningless without that."

"Right, fair enough. It'll get dark in a few hours, so we shouldn't stay out for long, but if you weren't here I'd be scouting the ridge you can see on your left, we're going to try to hug that for a couple days."

"Yes. It falls in the sky and then sinks below the horizon, but it's come back every time so far. Usually about twelve hours later. We've been pushing on as quickly as possible while it's around - makes the cold more bearable."

"That is the moon, yes, and not some sort of oddly silver sun...?"

Neither of those words translate properly. He looks at her oddly. "It's - we don't know what it is. It's probably the Valar's latest effort to light the world. How is the world lit where you're from?"

"How do they stay up?"

"...That is not a meaningful question. 'Up' means 'away from one of these round objects' and 'down' means toward one. They stay down, by being spherical."

"If I hold a spherical object, and drop it, it'll fall. Down. Unless they're absurdly big, but then they'd take up the whole sky..."

"They're far away. I compressed this model so you could see all of it." She spreads it out to actual scale.

He stares at it silently for a long time. Then- "I wish you could have met my sister-in-law. She was an extraordinarily gifted mathematician and, even rarer, gifted at explaining mathematics, and she could probably have convinced me that that kind of world would hold itself together."

"It does, and quite well. It's a customary sort of arrangement for realms I'm acquainted with."

"Well, not this one. It was lit for a time by great globes on the edges, but the Enemy knocked them down; then there were two magical Trees, taller than mountains, that lit half the world and waxed and waned for the days and nights. But the Enemy killed them, too.Since then we've been managing by starlight, until the Valar got that working. What is the distinction between a Sun and a Moon?"

"A sun is fire and a moon is stone. And suns are much, much bigger and farther away."

"Then that's neither. How would we go about getting a Sun, if we need one?"

"...One does not normally get them. One comes to exist under one that has already been there for quite a while. It may be that you do not, in fact, need one, especially if most parts of your world are not this cold."