Good to know. What else is there to learn from this room?

If she wants to know anything about the physiology or abilities of the species on display, now might be a good time to ask. In addition to the demons, drakonids, and trees, there's a giant crocolisk, a beetle bigger than a horse, some kind of snake-fish-elf hybrid, a dog with two heads that looks like it's made out of fire, a flock of ravens...

Once she's over the creepiness of all those eyes staring at her out of the ice, she definitely wants to know things! Like why that beetle is so much bigger than all the other kinds of beetle, and whether the snake-fish-elf is actually a hybrid or just happens to resemble three other creatures, and whether the dog with two heads has two minds or just one and how it manages to be made of fire, and what the thing that looks like a flock of ravens actually is that's so dangerous.

The beetle is a nerubian, an underground insectoid race hostile to all life. They've mostly kept to themselves since the vrykul pushed them back to their citadel deep beneath Northrend the last time they tried to wage war on the surface. The snake-fish-elf is a naga. They first appeared after the Sundering, invading coastlines near some of the remaining elf cities. They've cropped up periodically ever since, usually after some high elf relics. Some speculate that they are in fact the descendants of high elves who survived the Sundering and have adapted to their new life underwater.

The two-headed dog is a core hound, a variety of fire elemental. Elemental minds don't work quite like those of other sorts of creatures. It's debatable how much the lesser ones even have a separate mind. They're sort of a gestalt experience. The ravens are actually kind of the same. A necromancer killed the flock and used their bodies as the basis for a golem.

That is all extremely cool. She's getting such a good education!

That's the Blue Dragonflight way.

And with this, the tour of the vault is finished. Azuregos is very slightly happier as the group heads back out through the portal than at any point thus far. Kharmeena, still holding the box from earlier, congratulates everyone on their good behavior.

That was a really awesome experience, but it's nice not to be being glared at by Azuregos anymore. Maragosa is looking forward to learning more magic. Also more history and biology and geography and everything else, but mostly magic.

She's in luck, because the next thing they're going to learn is more magic. Specifically, they're going to be disenchanting the rocks a previous generation had stored in the vault.

Aww, that's kind of sad, destroying someone else's first project and knowing her own will get destroyed by the next generation. But hey, she gets to learn disenchantment! That's too exciting to worry about whether the method is kind of sad.

Disenchantment is the process of untangling magic from an object. This is a good way to learn more about the enchantment, the magic, and the mindset of the caster. The downside is that the object is destroyed in the process, though the remnants are quite often magically useful in their own right.

That suggests that any new enchantment should first be done on something you don't mind losing, since you might mess up the spell and have to destroy the thing. She'll keep that in mind. What sort of thing do you learn about the mindset of the caster when undoing an enchantment?

Enchantment is a permanent record of mana impressed on the world and mediated by a caster. Part of the caster is left behind, and during disenchantment, one can pick through it. Their overall attitude to the piece, how much care they took, whether this was one of many, if it was an experiment or part of of a process, their level of experience...

That's really neat! You could probably send hidden messages like that. Although, what does it mean that "part of the caster is left behind"? Is it a part that grows back, or is she going to run out of self if she enchants too many things?

It's more like a partial copy. Unworked mana is impressionable and worked mana contains impressions, like fingerprints on clay.

So she can enchant as much as she wants and not worry about losing all her Maragosa-ness, good. She takes a crack at disenchanting the rock she got.

Her rock is shiny. It gets brighter and dimmer over a period of about a minute. The two base components of the enchantment are a light rune and a time rune. The way they're entwined means that the magic available to the light rune is mediated by the time rune. The length of the cycle was determined by the enchanter during the inscription. They were proud of their cleverness at setting up the system.

They should be proud, that's really neat! Pity She's going to take it apart. Maybe she'll make one of her own at some point; a timekeeping device could come in handy. She sets about disentangling the magic and setting it loose.

It's kind of like picking at a patch of dead skin or tearing off a nail. Once you get the initial grip, the rest follows easily. She's left with a small pile of faintly glowing dust.

Fun! She's never had rock dust before, either, that's kind of neat. Do people ever enchant and then immediately disenchant things they want rid of, as an easy way of destroying them?

That can be a useful way of clearing out the bags of odds and ends one accumulates over time, yes. Of course, then you have enough dust to start some of the half dozen projects you've been thinking about and those generate even more detritus... ahem. Not that Kharmeena's speaking from personal experience, here.

"Oh? What do you use the dust for?" She examines it more closely. Does it look like just powdered rock, or something else?

It's a useful reagent for more complicated enchantments. It's already slightly magical so it takes very easily to becoming more magical.

Looking more closely, she can tell that the faintly-glowingness of the dust is, in fact, residual magic.

That's really neat. Does it seem like an equivalent volume to the original rock?

No, there's significantly less.

"Does the amount of dust you get from disenchanting something depend on the size of the thing, or the size of the spell, or is it always the same, or what?"