"Ha ha," Rodney says sarcastically. "The Stargates are an incredible piece of technology, we're at least decades if not a century from building any ourselves. We do understand a lot of what they do though, even if we're still working on the how."

"The dwarfs would hate it. Maybe not enough to keep them from studying it, but their craftsmen and Engineers are... obsessive, by human standards."

"Unfortunately, we're rather far behind in general so we get by with a mix of gifted tech and things we have either completely or incompletely reverse engineered. Nice as it would be to develop things from scratch our enemies won't wait around for us to do that."

"Humans are willing to do that. The dwarfs have the best technology in the world, but... in an emergency they'll field weapon designs that only had fifty years of testing instead of three hundred. If at least one master of the guild will speak for it."

"I rather doubt we'll get along then."

"Rodney."

"Yes, yes, I'll play nice if it comes to that."

"You'll want to try, eventually." In the optimistic scenario where this is all legitimate and we concede that it is. "If you want to repair, or make more of, your guns and equipment, they look more like dwarf-make than anything else. ...Also they have the only way of manipulating magic mechanically. Runesmiths trap it in metal and stone, and of course it's not complete until it works precisely the same way every time. There are men who approach them in a few endeavors but they're very good at what they do."

"I think Sheppard knows more about servicing our guns and how our ammunition is made but yes. It sounds like if there's any hope of safely getting home it'll need either their cooperation or maybe that of the Elves and you said they might just kill us."

"Well, there's trying to trap some Skaven warlock-engineers, but I think I mentioned how their devices tend to take out dozens of people nearby if they misfire. And corrupt the area with Chaos even when they work."

"I did say safely."

"Indeed. But at least they're not stodgy."

"That may be, but I'll take stodgy over hostile any day."

"Wise man. But yes, likely it would be the dwarfs. They're very resistant to magic and so worry less about hidden Chaos taint; if it's subtle enough to hide, it's usually far too subtle to affect them."

"I suppose that makes sense. I still haven't quite wrapped my head around the idea though."

"Should I give you the very short busy man's summary of how magic flows and pools, or will you just wait for the book?"

"I'm curious even if Rodney would prefer to wait. It sounds like important information for living here."

"Sure. So, magic flows. We call them the Winds because they're more like that than anything else. There are eight winds, each of which is attracted to a different thing - Chamon to metal, weight, and logical thought, Ghur to wild animals and sometimes savagery, Aqshy to fire, heat, and strong active emotions. They all come out of the Realm of Chaos at very high altitude, flowing through the upper atmosphere, but a few hundred miles north of here there's a long ridge, and as the ridge drops, so do they, like a waterfall - though Azyr, which likes the sky among other things, mostly stays up. It is dangerous to use more than one Wind, in your life, because magic used sticks to your soul - you have fainter souls than most people, I think, which probably is metaphysically interesting - and if more than one Wind mix, they turn to Dhar. Dhar does not flow. It pools, and it seeps into everything. It can empower any kind of magic, so it's very seductive, but it seeps into your soul even moreso. And Dhar is the essence of Chaos; it resists being controlled or told what to do. Every type of magic changes the soul, and through it the mind and body, but Dhar can do a great deal more, is much more likely to rip breaches into the Realm of Chaos and cause something entirely unexpected to happen, and generally cause problems for you and everyone nearby. Chaos-sworn sorcerers and beastmen bray-shamans aren't immune, but it's not nearly as bad for them."

"Which is a nice tidy model with four glaring outliers. Divine magic, generally understood to be filtered through the gods and use their own intelligence to protect us, but that's more or less fine. Necromancy, which is a form of Dhar mixed with Shyish, the wind of death, and behaves much like Dhar but not quite. And the Ice Witches. The Ice Witches use two types of magic, the Father's Lore of Storms and the Mother's Lore of Frost, both of which, by means which have certainly never been explained to me, turn the Winds into something else. I understand them to be in some way crystalized or filtered using the connection to the Ancient Widow, but it's quite secret. The main practical impact is that where a bad miscast for a Wind-Wizard might rip a hole into Za, the same thing for an Ice Witch will more often freeze the whole area, and a catastrophic one can freeze a whole battalion to ice instantly, the witch included. And Runesmithing, which traps the Winds and works entirely differently than any other form of enchantment."

"So magic comes from outside, both outside the self and somehow outside the world and then you draw it through yourself to use it. That sounds very different from my experience and the reports Sheppard has shown me. Where we come from such powers always come from within."

"Absolutely. There's an inborn gift some people have for seeing - or other senses - the winds, and if it's strong and trained, to touch and manipulate them, but even the best are just using outside power more flexibly and efficiently."

"Circling back to Runessmithing if it's so much more stable than other ways of using magic is there a reason only the Dwarves use it?"

"It's only permitted to a specific clan, the descendants of the ancestor who invented it, and they swear oaths never to teach it to anyone else when learning. Also it takes their characteristic excess of precision to be safe but we'd probably try anyway if they let us."

"Well that's inconvenient. I might be able to figure something out if I had examples to work from but if that will get them swearing oaths of revenge it might not be worth it."

"If you can actually learn without a teacher... I can't say they'll be happy, but they would be unlikely to declare a grudge. They do sometimes sell or gift runework to men, most of our greatest heirlooms are dwarf runesmiths returning favors owed. Best get one to explain dwarfen religion before trying, though. They worship their oldest ancestors as gods, missing but still out there living in material form somewhere."

"I admit I don't see the connection there but I can learn etiquette if that's what you mean."