"The same being who let have me the ability to copy magic also promised that I was immortal so I have time to spare. Could you tell me about the magic of turtles?"

It's an extraordinary claim, but sometimes the world is extraordinary. It's an interesting story, at least.

"Well, there's some debate about what is our magic and what is our physiology," he begins. "As is often the case for species with more physically focused magic. But the core of it is our ability to grow without suffering ill effects. I eat about twice what I did when I was half this length — but if you think about it, I carry four times the weight of city and eight times the weight of flesh that I once did. The new weight troubles me no more than the old weight did."

"The magic also clearly does something to my footprints — I do leave footprints, but they're only a meter or two deep, when you might reasonably expect my feet to go all the way down to the bedrock. The dragons, for all that they also grow throughout their lives, don't have the same advantages at it that we turtles do."

"I hadn't thought of the footprints part that's amazing. I don't think I want to grow forever but I already have an ability that lets me change size so I don't think that would impact me."

"Ah, well. If you can already change size on your own, perhaps turtle magic won't be much help to you," Terrance muses. "I had foolishly assumed that you would need to copy people to get any magic — but I take it that your benefactor gave you some already to start with?"

"They did, there's honestly enough little things that it's hard to remember all the specifics. I remember the important ones though and I have it all written down."

"How extraordinary," he remarks.

The sunlight slants into the pagoda in silence, the sounds of the city rising from behind.

"Well, I think we may have wandered a bit from the topic that brought you to me originally. Remind me, did you have any other questions about wizards — or other matters on which an old turtle may share his wisdom, for that matter?"

"Is becoming a wizard something that anyone can just choose to do? If they're willing to invest enough time?"

"Hmm. It's a curious word, 'enough'. There are plenty of people who have tried to be wizards, and failed. Who's to say whether they could not do it, or whether they didn't spend enough time on it?"

"I think that answers my question. There's isn't a way to tell if someone can become a wizard except them trying. And also there isn't a guaranteed path anyone can follow."

"I believe those are both true, yes," Terrance agrees. "The college in Kingsport does prefer applications from people who are good at rhetoric, logic, and mental arithmetic — they supposedly have a higher success rate. Dragon Mountain accepts any student who can make it there, but it's not a journey for the faint of heart."

"Why is it hard to get to Dragon Mountain?"

"Just the desert. I've never been through it myself, but my wanderings occasionally take me past the border where the grasses fade to scrub and the scrub to sand. It's a harsh place. Cold enough at night to freeze your shell off, and hot enough during the day to turn you into soup, as my mother once said. The few people who call it home aren't terribly welcoming either, and you hear stories about the landmarks moving around of their own accord, but it's hard to know whether that's just because the storytellers suck at navigation."

She laughs at that. "Maybe I'll find out some day."

"It's a good deal easier to cross if one can fly, I'm told," Terrance adds. "I'm not sure if that's among your many talents, but what trade I have with Dragon Mountain is usually done via Whirl-the-wind caravans."

"It's not something I can do right now but maybe one day. Where I come from we had flying machines that anyone could pay to ride. It'll be a bit of an adjustment, how much more time travelling takes here."

"Like the Magic Mail, but large enough to carry people? Goodness! No wonder you have so much magic yourself, when your world has so much available."

"Where I come from we don't see that as magic. It's using the same principles that birds use to fly and sailing ships use to catch the wind just with a lot of effort and cleverness."

"Hmm. I would quite like to see one," Terrance admits. "Because I can't quite picture the thing, myself."

"If I had illusion magic I would show you but I don't have that yet. Maybe with enough time I could make one or explain the ideas well enough that someone else could. The ones I'm used to are very big and complicated but they weren't always that big or complicated. Some of the first ones were made by two brothers working on their own."

"What goes into making one? I don't like to boast, but I have some fairly fine artisans who might be interested in the project."

"I know the ones I flew in were made of a very light metal but the first ones were mostly made out of wood and canvas. The simpler ones spin a propeller which is a little like a windmill very fast. And then they have a fixed wing that works like a sail to help keep it in the air."

"Hmm."

Below her feet comes the sound of a turtle pondering hard. It doesn't sound like much.

"I don't have any shipwrights, for obvious reasons, but we aren't that far from the coast — probably another three or four days. The propeller might be harder, but I do have some clock makers that should be able to design a gearbox. Do you know how the first ones powered the propeller?"

"I'm not actually sure what fuel they were using back then but it was probably a kind of refined oil in an internal combustion engine. I kinda understand how those work but they're a bit dangerous to experiment with because they run on small explosions and if you do them wrong instead you get bigger explosions."

"... ah. That might be why we haven't discovered them. It's not the kind of experiment I'd want to permit on my back."

"I fully support that choice. I think I'm making it sound more dangerous than it is but I haven't actually read a lot about the history. I know once you figure them out they're actually very stable and almost never explode in a way that's dangerous but almost never isn't never and I have to believe that figuring out how they work is more dangerous than following a set of precise instructions."