"But would it be safer to try turning off friction on this table...?"

...Huh.  She never explicitly implemented friction.  That said, she didn't think that she'd need to do that, but now she's wondering how it does work.  Probably something to do with probabilistic entanglements...

Ciara nudges her charge, before Alicia can get too distracted by whatever question she just asked herself.  Probably some bit of physics minutiae, knowing her.

"- ah - uh, yes, you should be fine attempting to make the table arbitrarily smooth?  And - spells that you're not strong enough for, some will just come out less strong, and others just won't work to begin with, fizzling out.  Sometimes there can be backlash, but that happens when you really try to push it to the point of - well, accidentally calling on chaos instead."

"...As for your other question..."

"I am not a practitioner of death magic; that's Ciara's thing and I do not have the knack.  But...

"No, it's not like that, because - judging from what you said there, you might be trying to treat death magic like you would order magic, and doing that just gets you order magic.  Other than that, though..."

"Hm.  Ciara, would you mind...?"

"Oh! And there are - ways to extend your reach that you can build in to spellwork to begin with, anyway."

Ciara lets out a fondly exasperated huff as Alicia's brain catches up to something five seconds after she was done with it once again.

"If this is something you wish to learn of, I could speak of what it feels like, to touch primordial death."

... does she want to touch primordial death?

Well, yes, she wants to learn all sorts of magic.  This new world is built on a tension between things including Death.

(down, existential weirdness, down, she is here with a body that is built on this, and she can't change it.  At least not today.)

...So she wants to learn Death too.

"Yes, tell me!"

She saw that.

...but, someone should tell her.

Goodness knows that blind fumbling will not work, is indeed actively antithetical - and that Aeslin might try and have who-knows-what happen if she doesn't.  (Probably Decay, if she's guessing.  She might still reach that anyway.  Death and Decay are, despite the crucial differences, all too easy to confuse, for the novice without any particular insight.)

"Listen carefully, and do not attempt to do anything with the information I am about to tell you until I say you have reached sufficient comprehension of it that you probably won't lose your grip, or even worse, grab hold of entirely the wrong thing.  Death magic is not Decay magic, just as Spirit magic is not Life magic, but to those uninitiated in either, it is sufficiently difficult to distinguish the two that precautions are necessary."

Aeslin nods emphatically.  She doesn't want to grasp out blindly here at all.

"The concepts are different at home too.  You can keep decay at bay from your body any number of individual ways, but the quest for immortality is still futile for humans - proverbially futile, even in the tales from the Days of Wonder.  Of course there're always a few people who've tried even though they should know better.  But what's the difference here?"

"I think you have misunderstood something far more fundamental than I thought we would be having problems with - Decay, the process, is not strictly analogous to Decay, the magical force.  And mistaking the magic for the base linguistic label we put on it is not a good thing to do.  Even as these are the generally agreed-upon names for a reason, you will find important differences.  Alicia, this is really better suited for you, I should think."

"...I think you explained that better than I would have, my burning desire to go on a tangent about immortality aside."

Do they have immortality?

She's learned enough new things about souls in the last hour that she can't rule it out.

(She stares at Alicia for a moment.)

(And then turns back to Ciara.)

Of course the force Decay isn't the same as the naive meaning of the term.

"Now I'm wondering if I'm missing something about 'order' too, even though it's seemed similar enough so far," she says tentatively.  "What is the magical force of Decay, if you want to start there?  Or Death?  Either one?"

"The force of Decay is not something I consider myself to practice, for all that there are senses in which I could do so if I wished.  I practice Death magic near-exclusively.  And on that note..."

"Death magic is a magic of endings, of inevitabilities, of dooms.  Of the silence at the end of time.  It is also a critical component of soulstuff."

"It is not a magic of grasping for endings.  It is a magic of that which will end.  To cast it requires a fundamental certainty that is beyond many."

"But - what if you don't know what your doom is?  Or, I guess, the doom of what you're casting on?"

She pauses, checking if she can tell whether the thoughts connect - no, best to ask.  "Does this come from the narrative this universe was made with?"

"...I'm not sure I know what you're asking, but as far as your first two questions go 'the silence at the end of time' is usually sufficient."

"...The physics isn't particularly narrativized, Aeslin, except for a couple of just-so stories about why there is a universe built in."

"And to fend off a followup question I'm expecting in advance, there wasn't anything to be true about how the universe came to be, before it did, so any or all of them might be true or false and we can't know - but I'm partial to the Light/Void one."