"Oh. We do have sky islands," she says. "Some of them are pretty large; I'm not sure how much you mean by very. Is your 'planet' geometrically square, with straight sides, or is it just lumpily four-sided in a squarish way?"

"It's ten miles thick. The top has - texture, terrain, but the sides and the bottom are flat and meet at right angles," says Ehail. "It's - I don't remember exactly, something like fifteen thousand miles on a side."

"...That's huge," she says. "I'm not even sure I've heard of an alucine big enough to hold something like that."

"Alucine..." Ehail blinks. "Oh. We - don't have those, or only have one very large one, depending on how you think about it. I suppose unless you count - here - but I'm not sure if this is the same thing."

"...How do you not...? Just one? How big is it?"

"There are a lot of planets in it," says Ehail. "And the planets are many hundreds of thousands of planet lengths apart from each other."

"If it has edges no one has found them," says Ehail. "I think currently the thinking is that it doesn't. But it was a while ago that I was in school."

"...So it's just... infinitely big? Or is it like - there's a lake outside that door," she gestures to it, "and if you travel far enough away from the lake you find yourself coming back toward it. Your super-alucine could be like that, I guess."

"I don't know about the lake," says Ehail, glancing towards the door. "I would be a little surprised if my world wrapped around like that, but I don't know for sure that it doesn't."

"I'm going to have to rethink how I understand people talking about their worlds," she says thoughtfully. "Until now I thought they meant, well, worlds. Collections of alucines, or networks of them linked by portals. But I guess they come in more configurations than that."

"I don't know a lot about other worlds," says Ehail. "I think I probably would have heard about it at least once or twice if most of the ones my world's people know about aren't at least sort of like ours, though."

"Your world knows about a lot of others?"

"Sort of? It isn't my field," says Ehail apologetically. "We know that there are a lot of others. There isn't much ongoing contact with any of them."

"And what is your field?"

"Er, most of the time I just do householdy magic," says Ehail. "But research-wise I am working on, um, a cure for something. I'm not really getting anywhere."

"Oh? A cure for what?"

"...Something. You can't get it. Unless that's not your natural hair color." Ehail shuffles her feet a little. "I don't think you can possibly have heard of it."

"Maybe not," she says, "but I'm curious."

"Well," says Ehail with a small sigh, "it's called being a 'shren'."

"You're right, I haven't heard of it."

Ehail nods. "So, in my spare time, I work on that. But not very effectively."

"I have an interest in solving difficult problems," she says.

"What else can you tell me?"

"We're -" There is a moment of guilty pause, as Ehail had not actually quite admitted up until this point that she has the thing she wishes to cure. "Something that happens to dragons. Very like dragons, just not quite. We can't fly, in our natural forms." Pause. "We're contagious. In our natural forms, though, not like this."

"We don't have dragons where I'm from," she says. "We do have a lot of interesting kinds of magic that don't seem to be common anywhere else. What have you found out so far about your problem?"

"Not very much. I think we don't have enough magic, that it's a - survival mechanism. A lot of baby dragons just die. But no one is going to let me near a baby dragon to compare."

"...Not enough magic?" she repeats. "What kind of magic is this, exactly?"

"Dragon magic. The same kind that's letting me speak your language, and turn into a human."

Judging by the way Ehail flinches and contracts towards herself, no!

"I am not a very usual tephramancer," she says. "I have a nice stable empire and no intention of expanding it into strange worlds I find in bars. And it seems to me that if insufficient magic is your problem, I have an obvious solution."

"It would have to be the right kind," says Ehail, half-uncurling. "If I could do it with wizard magic I would have managed it years ago."

"Well, I don't know yet if tephramancy works on outworld magic at all. But I don't see any harm in trying."

"...My language magic doesn't tell me, um, everything there is to know about unfamiliar words' meanings."

"Tephramancers can... improve things about people," she says. "Particularly magical things. I can give a lithomancer better range, or let an ostimancer make more portals in a day. It's somewhat more difficult to improve actual skill, but it doesn't sound like that's relevant. If it's purely a quantity problem, then if I can learn to increase your magic at all, I don't expect it to be difficult or complicated to do once I figure it out."

"Does the extra magic - come from somewhere?"

"No. Well, you could say it comes from me, or from the magic that's already there, but only in the sense that an oneiromancer's conjurations come from people's minds. It isn't moved from somewhere, it's created in an existing pattern."

"So it wouldn't just - cannibalize other dragons, or other shrens for that matter?"

"I would be extremely surprised if that happened. It would contradict the foundations of tephramancy."

"What would you have to do?"

"When I meet someone with a new discipline and I'm getting a feel for it I usually ask them to tell me about it. What they can do, what it's like to work with. We could start there. Making the improvements doesn't look like much from the outside; I just sit nearby for a while and maybe some ash appears while I'm working on it."

"Dragon magic does - all different things. Shapeshifting. I can turn into a bluejay, if that would help. Languages. If I changed to my natural form - but I can't, I won't, if you need to see a shren in natural form you'll have to come to one of the houses and look at a baby - but if I did, I could breathe fire. There are a couple things about what happens if a dragon or shren decides to have children - we can decide not to, for one thing, and if we do on purpose we can choose the children's sexes - but not how many there are, or what they are specieswise because there's always more than one possibility there and no one would have a shren on purpose. A little extra something that depends on color. Silver is in the blue group, so I can learn more forms than I could if I were - gold, emerald, whatever."

"That's an... interesting set of properties," she says. "What's it look like when you turn into a bluejay?"

"Just, me being a bluejay," shrugs Ehail. She rests her hand on the table and then there is a shiny-bellied bluejay sitting there instead. "Like that."

"I see," she says. "There you are, being a bluejay. It's not very flashy, your magic."

"No," agrees Ehail. "Probably the 'flashiest' thing would be the fire. It matches color."