She begins to construct a spell layout with eight points. Four wooden rooks and four metal rooks in an inner ring, each with its corresponding bishop holding a spot in the outer ring. A lot of those clear glass pebbles. Four glass bishops and four glass knights, on points between the inner and outer rings; numerous glass pebbles covering other places in the diagram. Promise is directed to sit in a particular spot between the inner and outer rings; Castle sits in the corresponding spot on the opposite side; Tea gets the center spot.
Castle begins describing a spell-narrative.
Here is a far-seeing traveller, knowledgeable and wise, with sharp senses and a keen mind. Here is an invisible landscape, its existence known to few, its features understood by fewer. But that can change. He can learn a new kind of sight.
Visions take shape around them, showing the harmonics of the room as they currently stand...
...and then flaring and warping into a spiky crystalline structure. Castle keeps talking, but frowns slightly. The structure shifts faster and faster as she speaks, blurring and warping in places. She offers a diplomatic suggestion that seeing and changing should not be the same, but the spell is having none of it; after a few more sentences she thanks the glass pieces for their help and ends the spell. The sharp-planed tangle of visible harmonics fades from the air.
"Well?"
"I'm definitely seeing something," he says. "If what we saw at the start of the spell was drunk harmonics, I think these harmonics have taken regrettable doses of hallucinogens."
"I'm starting to feel a little like I've taken regrettable doses of hallucinogens," Tea says dryly.
"Worth a shot," says Castle. She cleans up the spell layout, reinstates the simple one for flattening harmonics, and says a quick version of the flattening narrative.
"That certainly flattened some harmonics," says Tea. "And yet I continue to fuck them up dramatically."
"It's sort of entertaining to watch, actually. But I wouldn't want to try learning sorcery in this state."
"You might actually be able to - enough attention to other factors can let you completely ignore harmonics, and it's not bad enough to shred established lights - but yeah."
Shrug. "And now you know. And I suppose you'll need a second test subject if Castle goes for another try."
"It's possible I could fix your problem somehow, but I wouldn't want to try it immediately," says Castle. "It's always possible that the effect will settle down if we give it some time, and if that does happen it'll be easier all round than trying to cast more spells to fix what the first one broke."
Nod. "I wonder if you're going to disturb all the harmonics in your place until I can't use my map anymore. Oh well."
"If my bizarre harmonic aura has a particularly energetic moment while I'm passing through the ground level of the crypt, you might have to amend your map of the roof."
"Then maybe I'll just map part of the graveyard you don't tend to pass through."
Promise watches her lights flicker, then clears them away. "Well, you'd certainly throw off any sorcerers you got near if it came to that."
"But I don't think you can defeat the entire queenscourt in one fell swoop with nothing but an aura of inconvenience."