"'Cannot be fetched by magic' would be good."

"I'd classify that as a curse! What if you drop it somewhere inconvenient?"

"'Cannot be fetched by magic except Isabella's'?"

"Way more difficult."

"Yeah, makes sense that it would be."

"I'm glad that you find magic so sensible."

"It's just, what's it called, that thing where more complicated things are less likely to be true, it makes sense that they'd be harder to make a spell for."

"Occam's razor?"

"That must be it."

"It doesn't always apply very straightforwardly - witch magic treats living things as more basic than they are."

"Does it map more neatly to, like, mental concepts, maybe?"

"Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it."

"That seems like a good aesthetic fit, at least. And should still hold that putting more conditions together would make stuff harder."

"A good aesthetic fit for what?"

He gestures vaguely. "The way witch magic kind of looks like?"

That is kind of way hotter than it has any right to be. He should not flirt with her.

"There's a way it looks like, right, it has a whole thing going for it, with cloud-pine and sugar runes and herbs and stuff."

"I'm used to that all existing as a matter of fact rather than aesthetic!"

Sadde grins and shrugs. "But it does have an aesthetic!"

"You could say county fairs have an aesthetic, but there's not a fundamental reason why Ferris wheels and cotton candy and guess-my-weight games should have anything to do with each other. They just appear together often enough that they appear to have an aesthetic, without that aesthetic being constructive in the sense that you can make predictions about what other things would suit county fairs."

"Then maybe the aesthetic is just me pattern-matching various vague memories about descriptions of witchcraft I've encountered in my life."

"Which is legit but not a constructive aesthetic so don't lean on it too hard."

"Fair, fair, I'll try not to make any predictions."

"Or bet me on them if you do."

"I thought witches didn't use money."