"It often is!"

"If I wanted to slow down and see if I can do magic how would I do that?"

"I could slow you down. It takes a long time staying in one place and you'd have to explain a lot of things to me first for us to be even at the end of it but I wouldn't mind."

"How would I speed up again?"

"The easiest way would probably be to fly to the ring nearest here. Fairy rings speed people up, it's how we get mortals sometimes."

"But they don't work in reverse?"

"They don't, no."

"How do they work?"

"People have different theories. There are no paths inside a fairy ring and all the paths in the area typically lead up to it, some people think that's part of the explanation."

"How do paths work?"

"So the best way I've encountered to think about it is that at every place in the universe there is a size people are supposed to be, and whenever the set of sizes people are supposed to be is continuous that ends up looking like a fairy path, and when an area has lots of life in it then the ...tracking of what size things are supposed to be... gets eroded like sand on a beach, and so you get more places where the set of sizes people are supposed to be is continuous, and so you get paths. This implies eventually maybe it'll all be eroded down until it's all flat, and there's some reason to think that's right. There are stories where fairies used to be smaller."

"What happens where it's discontinuous?"

"Well, you can walk around at whatever size you were at but there's no path."

"I don't think I understand."

"Maybe you'll get an instinct for it with practice?"

"Maybe."

"If you try to interact destructively with a path - say, if you're big and try to destroy a tree that has a small path up it - you destroy the path and incur misfortune. You can also trap people at the end of the path as their current size that way, though. It's been done in wars."

"Can they fix it if they find another path and enter it from the side?"

"Yes, it's not permanent but it can delay reacting to things substantially."

"I guess it's good I haven't tried flying off paths while small."

"I would very much not recommend it."

"Some kinds are very small, it's just a coincidence I'm not too far off from your size."

"Huh! That seems like it'd make living together inconvenient."

"There are basically two kinds of courts, breeder courts that are all one kind and mixed courts. I suppose if someone found it very inconvenient to have larger or smaller members in their mixed court they wouldn't add any."

"I guess that makes sense."