"One thing I'll say for our magic is that it's very obvious when it goes wrong. It's obvious to the caster because you can feel it escaping your control, and even when it doesn't do something blatantly bizarre it's obvious to everyone else present because there's a specific smell when the magic gets loose—I've no idea how to describe it, it's not quite like anything else, and I don't want to show you because deliberately letting a spell run wild is generally a bad idea even in controlled conditions."

"I appreciate it. What sort of problems do people in your homeland typically call on magic to solve?"

"'None' is generally the sensible answer, but some people manage to keep it more useful than otherwise doing things like a little bit of healing, a little bit of encouraging crops, a little bit of nudging the weather around... I used to think I could do better than that. Not so sure anymore. And I wasn't really interested in solving anyone else's problems so much as in making life easier for myself."

"I see."

"As for how I got here..."

...maybe he'll tell her part of the story, at least.

"...there's a thing we call a cursed city. When someone does a lot of magic, and it gets free of them—and it nearly always does, at that kind of scale—it can run so big and so wild that it settles in around wherever they were when they did this foolish thing and stays there, being big and complicated and wild and magic, for hundreds or thousands of years afterward. Mostly people avoid them. Occasionally some idiot disappears into one. Once in a very long while somebody survives one and comes back with wild stories—trees roaming the streets walking on their roots, catching birds out of the sky and crushing them to death—fish swimming through the air, wolves made of broken glass chasing people down and eating them alive—I've never seen any of those myself, but I don't doubt they're the sort of thing that happens, if you pile up enough spellfray in one place. That's what we call loose magic, spellfray."

She silently records the important bits of this in very small lettering on one of her wax tablets.

"So—I was having a bad day for mostly unrelated reasons, and I ran into a cursed city, and it tore apart everything I was wearing and carrying and would've torn me apart too if I hadn't had the magic to put myself back together, and it threw me very very far away and I landed in that forest."

"At this point it's not obvious to me why you've bothered with magic at all."

Well, it kind of is, impulsive pursuit of power even when it's definitely going to cause horrible problems is kind of a familiar concept, but one shouldn't skip asking questions just because they've already made assumptions.

"Why I bother with it or why any of us do? I started doing magic when I was too young to really grasp how bad it could go, and got good at it before the understanding of consequences had time to catch up to me. I guess there's probably other people who do it that way but I think a lot of it is... people who think, maybe they'll just try it once, anybody can get away with it once if they're careful enough, and then the next time it's easier, and maybe they stop after a few more or maybe they manage to keep it small enough but maybe they keep going until it bites them. Oh, and big enough natural disasters will bring out the amateurs a lot of the time—when a lot of people are about to die anyway, in a fire or flood or famine or drought or earthquake or whatever else, usually at least some of them will decide magic can't make the situation that much worse, and they'll try something a hundred times bigger than they would've dreamed of before that point. And then if they're lucky they're right, and if they're not lucky you've got another cursed city on your hands."