"Please don't force-march yourself to death, Findekáno."

"I know my limitations and am not going to die of this."

"If you say so." Sigh. She shifts and flies forward to find Irissë.

Who is also walking, albeit at a more reasonable pace.

Loki "lands". "Tyelcormo says to tell you that you're on."

She nods. "Thanks. And thanks for playing messenger pigeon."

"Swift," says Loki. "A pigeon would be slower."

"You are indeed extremely fast. Did you get to choose which animal, when designing the spell?"

"Yes. Swifts have the best overland flight speed - falcons can dive much faster, but not sustain anything like that velocity point to point. And swifts can sleep on the wing. Swifts can't walk, take off from the ground, or do much of anything that isn't flying; but I can change in midair and I already had serviceable feet for walking so it seemed the right choice, given that what I wanted was to fly."

She nods. "I'm wildly envious."

"Does it help if I mention that it took me weeks to learn to fly and the intervening attempts looked like me changing, yea high, and then plopping unceremoniously to the ground?" Loki asks, hovering a hand at about chin level. "Swifts can do it on the first try - they have to - but swifts have instincts I did not."

"Are there any that don't make it? Just fall, and can't get it sorted out in time, and whoosh, it's over? In Valinor I'd ask Vána that and she'd say "silly girl, I lift them back up again', but here..."

"Well, I don't know about here, I have no idea why there are plants that have clearly been around in advance of the existence of a sun and this isn't even Valinor, but in other realms yes, I imagine some swifts do not manage on their first try, and they land on the ground, and something eats them or they starve; and the ones who do pull it off are the ones who have the next generation, so in theory swifts as a group are getting better at flight-with-no-trial-and-error all the time."

"Right, but that isn't much comfort to a swift that only gets one try." She shakes her head. "Could you have chosen to be able to turn into a dinosaur?"

"I could have learned to turn into anything if I had enough information about the thing to fold into the spell. Still could."

"A Vala? No, I guess that's not really a physical thing in the same way. Still." She pauses. "When you say everyone can learn magic, do you mean any Asgardian or anyone at all?"

"The tradition of sorcery I consider standard is, as far as I know, only practiced on Asgard; my way of doing it is only practiced by me; but I am not aware of some actual feature of Asgardians which enables it where other races would fail."

"Maybe once we've won the war, then. I suppose I wouldn't be able to hop to Asgard and ask, but there's got to be another way."

"No one on Asgard would be likely to teach you. When I wanted to sneak into a magic lecture I had to disguise myself as a boy. I may eventually try to teach someone the way I do it but it could be a complete waste of time without Tesseract-granted knowledge."

"I can make one of my brothers go take notes for me, if I still have them all by the time the war ends. What's a Tesseract?"

"It's the artifact I touched. It does not usually give people who touch it a magical alphabet; and I was not supposed to be in a room with it."

"You led an interesting life."

"Occasionally, yes."

"Why do you think it worked for you? Innate aptitude? Were you trying something not typically tried?"

"I just walked in and thought it was pretty and wanted to pick it up. It wasn't a totally pleasant experience but I liked what I got out of it enough that I tried to do it again after it had knocked me off my feet - not that this was difficult to do, when I was that age - and then my mother swooped in and seized me and sent me to my father to be checked for arcane ailments. He didn't find any. And no one paid attention to my clumsily babbling that all it had done was teach me things."