"Man, that just makes me wanna hug you more."

"—what, without caring what I did to deserve it?"

"Enh, I've probably seen worse."

He is having trouble articulating his confusion.

"--I'm immortal. And very old. And cursed. I have seen some shit."

"—immortal? How'd you manage that?"

"The god who cursed me didn't want me to be able to escape the curse with a dagger."

"...???"

"What part of that confuses you?"

"...gods don't curse people, heartwrights do. Curses don't make people immortal. Making people immortal... isn't... a thing. If magic could make people immortal I'd've tried it by now."

"What's a heartwright?"

"...Aren't you a heartwright? You did magic!"

"The word for what I am is 'wizard,' but that's a strict subset of the people who can do magic, which is generally 'casters'--unless you count naturalist magic, those don't cast--uh, sorry, this is something of a tangent, but I've never wrought a heart in my life and don't know how one would even do that."

"Not heart," he says, "Heartland—do you really not know what I'm talking about—what's a wizard??? What's any of the rest of that?"

"A wizard is the most common type of non-innate arcane caster. A caster is someone who uses spells. Naturalist magic is power that enhances natural abilities instead of producing unnatural effects. I've never heard of a heartland."

"...Heartlands are... where... magic comes from," he says. "None of that makes any sense."

"Mm, I'm not familiar with magic coming from places--but there are a lot of planes, and magic is weird in some of them."

If he is not careful his face is going to get stuck like that.

"...what's... a plane."

"Plane of reality? Dimension? Universe?"

"...before just now I hadn't heard there might be more than one of those."

"Oh. Well, here they're common knowledge. We summon stuff from them."

"...a Heartland isn't a place, anyway. It's... like the idea of a place. I'm not gonna explain it right if you've never heard of them. But the only magic where I'm from is heartwrights."

"Well...that's not true, here."

"I guess that explains why you don't know what a Stonestrider is."

"I do not. What's a Stonestrider?"