Where Ludei is quite willing to be taken to the bottom of the world and cured.

"You've caught ialdae too," says Matilda to the rather impressively enormous white dragon. "You might be able to ialdically teleport by yourself now."

Ludei obligingly tries this (after having shapeshifted back to human form). He gets the hang of it presently. Pop.

"No other urgent categories; if I had you starting on the shifted children or something the ones who had to wait for you to come back would complain. Do you have enough time to talk about ialdae? Especially if Ludei has it now too?"

"Yes," she says. "What do you want to know?"

"Apparently it can teleport and cure shrens. This is a diverse skillset," says Jensal dryly. "What else?"

"And conjure water and tell time and change the colours of things and move things and see magic and redundantly do witchcraft and I might be forgetting some stuff," says Matilda. "And it can learn new things, but I'm the best at teaching it. And different people catch it differently. You and Ludei and the babies I saw who caught it, you're all very... shiny with it. You have a lot of magic. The humans I've seen catch it don't have so much."

"What does that let us do, what normally happens if one - runs out?"

"I've never seen anyone actually run out before, but I guess you wouldn't be able to do any more ialdae until you got more. But... have might not be quite right, it might be closer to say you make a lot of magic. It's not just an amount of it that you have until you use it up and then it's gone."

"We're generating more of the stuff? What happens to if if we aren't using it up at the same rate?"

"Well, you keep a bunch - you keep a lot, ialdic dragons particularly I mean - and the rest just..." Matilda makes a handwavy flapping/fanning gesture. "Sort of does the same thing mine was doing when the hole in your magic was throwing it all away. It just gets spilled. And then any ialder nearby can use it, I guess."

"What if they don't do that?"

"Then... I'm not sure," she says. "It just sits there until someone does something with it. But I guess I don't leave obvious trails of ialdae behind me wherever I go, so maybe it... dissipates?"

"Spreads out? Disappears? Sinks into the ground? Magnetizes to other ialdae at greater distances?"

"I don't think it stops existing, and I don't think it cares very much where the ground is," she says. "And if it liked clumping together with other ialdae a lot I'd definitely be followed around by clouds of it. So 'spreads out' is probably closest."

"How did you get here in the first place, anyway?"

"Some people in Linnip summoned me. They said they were exploring for interesting things from other worlds. And they gave me witchcraft lessons and found a dragon to teach me Ertydon and I told them things about ialdae. And they showed me a really big library when I asked - that's where I found the books about shrens."

"It's pretty uncommon to summon people. It's known to be doable, but usually no one does it. I hadn't heard of a project in Linnip, not that anyone would have a reason to tell me or put it in Esmaarlan newspapers."

"Maybe they were just really curious. Oh, and they had me try to give ialdae to some people, and I'm teaching it to the two who caught it."

"Really. Who?"

"Well, their names are Annei and Sarsia... Terali said they're volunteers from a girls' school."