...Sometimes, she almost forgets that Alicia isn't more than an unbearably (adorably) precocious changeling-child who has had a vision of a future that won't happen.

Then, Alicia does something like this and reminds her that the woman who sits before her could be said to be a creator god, albeit one at the whims of greater forces still, and she thanks anyone who's listening that the woman who defined their world is not the same person as the Princess ever was.

It sounds really poetic.

It doesn't sound like anything more.

It doesn't sound like something you can pick up and do something with - though apparently you can somehow do magic with it?

"That... I'm sorry, but that feels like the sort of pastel story children tell and feel profound.  Maybe there's something meaningful in it, but I still don't understand what any of those terms really mean.

"Because you can't.  Because I can't and I do things with them.  Magic is not going to neatly settle itself into comprehensibility just because we think it should!"

"I don't know how else to explain this.  It's just something that is.  Or is Not, as the case may be."

"Do you have - I don't know.  Anybody that goes around posing seemingly absurd questions like 'what is the sound of one hand clapping'?  Where you're from."

Oh.  She's never encountered any magic like this.

"So... meditate on the uncomprehensibility.  Or something.  Or - yeah, the Alnessites have a few stories about absurdities like that.  I never liked them, but..."

"More of an or something, but we may be getting somewhere."  Thank goodness.  "...Really, almost everything has meditation involved at some point in the learning, though.  You need to have - a very sharp will.  If that makes sense."

"But yeah.  Void magic is the absurd."

Magic shouldn't work that way.  It's just preposterous.

"That's really not how any magic works that I've ever heard of before."

"Well.  Yes, because you're not from around here and your magic is all Order-shaped.  But trust me, somewhere in the multiverse are things stranger still."

"I'm not really sure I'm explaining this properly, to be honest.  I just know how it works, but I don't really know the words.

"Though, I suppose, if you wanted a practical demonstration, I could try saying them anyway."

Aeslin likes Order.  She never really realized how much she likes it until she ended up here, where she's suddenly being bewildered yet again at how her body can be holding together.

"I don't think I want to cast this one... I don't think I'll be able to cast it.  At least not for a while.  If I was trying, I'd be saying something like 'the heaviness of air and wisdom of birds' - but that wouldn't even work; my mind's already been searching out how that might make sense."

"I mean.  Even I do prefer to pull on Order as a... filter layer, to keep things from working their way in at the edges.  But those things could work, as λ-things."

(λ, of course, being pronounced most similarly to 'not', but clearly meaning something not just not but instead Not.)

"It's all in how you think about it, I guess.  But I'll take your word for it that you'd have trouble."

She shakes herself.

"But before we got on this, we were talking about Death magic?  Or - what do you work with most yourself?"

"Myself?  Order, and Void.  I'm halfway sure I'm going to pick up Spirit out of self-defense at this point - or Decay, more likely, because I'm not good at, negotiating cooperation, and suchlike; enough of what I do touches on the edges of what those do.  Ciara works Death magic."

"Negotiating cooperation?  That's decay?  I guess I can see the analogy... it's chewing down their original adamant positions... but 'decay' feels like it has bad connotations there."

"No, uh, negotiating cooperation is spirit magic, decay is more of a 'whack the universe with a big stick until it gives up' sort of thing.

"Or...Well, that's not a good explanation either, so let me just...

"You may recall that I showed you that diagram with the three axes of magic and their interactions?  Spirit and Decay are kind of special, in those terms, because they're composites - like, but not-like, the elements.  Spirit magic is Life-Light-Order.  Decay is Void-Chaos-Death."

"Oh - I guess I misunderstood what you were saying there -  Does that mean our souls are related to life, light, and order; or is that just a coincidence of the naming?"

"Spirit magic is not actually directly related to souls; souls are composite Light/Order/Death."

"Oh wow!"

They do know souls; and they know them so well that they even know what they're made of!

... At least, that's what they're made of here.  In this universe.

"... But that magic only works in this universe, right?  Do you know anything about what souls are made of outside this universe?"

Like hers.

"I have absolutely no idea and indeed live in a state of perpetual existential uncertainty on the matter."

"...Would Lila -"

"I really don't think so.  And it's not like we can ask her right now."

"Did my soul change?" she wonders aloud.  "That'd make the most sense - except how could the spell that sent me here change my soul?  That's impossible for any magic in my world to do!  Well, any known magic -"

Her musing drops to a murmur.  "- and there are those annoying claims from the Days of Wonder that we all dismissed as the Fay bragging, but if they weren't --  Or it would make more sense for this universe to have rewritten my soul; it's already stated that it can do magic with souls -- Or would it make more sense for it to have rewritten my soul, or just made a new soul --

"-- a new soul, new body made from magic like everything in this universe --"

She freezes dead-still for a moment, and then slowly, gingerly, raises her hand.

Who is she now?

"...Ah.  And we arrive at the existential questions.  I'm sorry about that.  I think you're still you, if that matters.  You think, therefore you are, you know?"

She half-automatically answers, breaking through her existential doubt, "That's silly; even golems can think!"

But when she first showed up and heard this universe was all magical, she was wondering if she was a golem...

"... am I a golem?...  If my soul's like yours now, then by my own universe's standards, I would be..."

"... but now... that isn't really what matters.  What matters is, am I the same Aeslin as was existing before?"

She has a tiny doubt whether that is what matters, but she can't put her finger on any better question.

"I think you are, or else I'm not me.  And that would just be silly."