"Time powers sound neat, too."

"Yeah, those are definitely next coolest. They're all pretty amazing. Which is good, it would be sad if only some of the five got good ones."

"I guess the Titans knew what they were doing."

"They knew so many things! We could study for a thousand years and not run out of things, probably."

"That's a long time, wow."

"Uh-huh." She makes two ice lances, fires one, makes two more one of which is misshapen and immediately falls apart.

It's more than her siblings have gotten to so far.

She's less interested in competition than she is in what it feels like for an ice lance to form successfully and what it feels like for one to fail. Does the magic give enough feedback to be useful there?

When it goes right it's like adjusting a telescope into focus. Things line up just so into crystalline clarity. When it fails, what it feels like depends on how it fails. It can be like stepping in an unexpected pile of slush, or slipping on ice, or a bone snapping in half.

Does the same sensation always go with the same unwanted result? Maybe she can learn to feel the magic heading off in the wrong direction faster, and steer it back toward what she wants.

There does seem to be a correlation, yes.

Splitting her attention between all the things she was already thinking about and also introspecting on the sensation of the magic is pretty tricky! Practice practice practice flying around practice.

Expecting this sort of thing from their whelps is part of what sets the blue dragonflight apart from the others. They are the fewest in number, but each and every one of their members is of the elite. So it has been since Neltharion betrayed the other flights shortly before the Sundering and earned the name Deathwing.

That sounds awful. Why did he do it? And why did it make blues in particular the rarest?

When the Burning Legion invaded, he came to the other Aspects with a plan to repel them. They would pool their powers into an artifact known as the Dragon Soul and turn it against the demons. However, Deathwing had been corrupted by the whispers of the Old Gods slumbering deep within the earth that was his charge. He planned to use the Dragon Soul against the other dragonflights in order to become the supreme ruler of Azeroth. His treachery was not discovered until after the Dragon Soul had been imbued, and Malygos, as the Aspect of Magic, was the first to notice. He ordered his blues to attack Deathwing, and they took the brunt of his first attack. With their sacrifice, the other flights had time to rally, and Deathwing was driven off and the Dragon Soul recovered.

Where is the Dragon Soul now? Hopefully it's being kept super safe somewhere!

After Deathwing's defeat, a powerful protective enchantment was placed on it, and it was hidden away where he and his flight would be unable to find it.

Yup, that sounds super safe and not at all a problem. Back to ice lance practice! Eventually she manages to keep one hanging around un-launched while launching a couple more.

Congratulations! That counts as mastery of the spell.

The next topic they're going to learn about is enchantment and runes.

Yay achieving things and double yay for enchanting stuff with runes! Enchantment is the best because you get to make stuff once and then have it for a while.

The process of enchanting is in short, to imbue an object with power such that it permanently alters local mana. In effect, the object will be casting a spell continuously or in response to certain triggers, depending on the exact implementation. As such, most enchantment spells are in the nature of passive enhancements rather than any kind of active effect.

Enchantments can be cast freeform or using runes. Freeform enchants require that the entire desired spell is held in the mind as though it were to be cast without actually casting it. That sort of separation is very hard to achieve reliably. Runes act as a shortcut, a description of part of the spell that the caster then does not need to hold themself.

That makes sense! How many runes are there and what do they all mean and how do you connect them to the part of the spell that's in your head?

There are quite a lot of runes! Some of them are very simple and some are very complicated. If a spell is a sentence, a rune is a word or a series of words. A rune can represent an elemental school, a targeting parameter, a duration, an intensity modifier, a trigger condition, or any number of other aspects involved in spellcraft. Once the rune is inscribed, the spell is cast through it, using the rune as a focus.

Can you have more than one rune in a spell, to specify different parts of it?

You can, but the concatenation of runes is a tricky business, as the new pattern formed might itself be a valid rune which has an undesirable meaning. As blue dragons, they have an instinctive sense for the meaning of a rune, so that simplifies things. Less naturally gifted mages have to make do with tables of rune types and known safe and unsafe combinations.