"Sounds like a cult or something. Or one of those hidden ninja villages that I'm not sure actually exist."

Eefina starts to respond, pauses. "Wow, I can't even argue with that. We kinda were. Are?"

"Cults, man. I don't go in for religious stuff. Everyone has a different version, what are the odds the one I pick is right? Anyway, I guess that explains my curiosity, more or less. If you're from somewhere above the sky whatever the dhar that means the smells that'll cling to ya are pretty different."

"I bet. You're probably right."

"So anywho. I kinda got this thing," taps badge, "on credit. So I actually need to get in the dungeon for a while. I don't suppose you wanna stick with me for that? Now that your curiosity is satisfied?"

"I'm probably above your level, honestly. But I could maybe be convinced to follow along if you'll keep satisfying my curiosity on matters as they occur to me, yeah? I'll do the same for you if something you've never seen in Silver Shrine pops up."

Aww. He's tryin' to make friends. She thinks? Yeah.

"Thanks! I'd be happy to."

"Say... you wouldn't happen to know anything about a local noble, Julius Salvatore, would you?"

"Heard of him? Yeah. There's a park named after him. Know anything about him? No. Sorry."

Oh well, it was worth asking.

"Oh, there's the gates. And I don't actually know the way to the dungeon, now that I think of it. I was going to ask someone in the Guild building, but." She smiles at him.

"Uh, I'm not exactly a one-man party and I don't know if you are. How deep were you thinking of going? Which one? What do you do, anyway? You seem like a caster of some kind. I'm usually mid-guard when I actually bother to do dungeons."

"Hold that thought."

They pass through the checkpoint, then Eefina leads the way off the road, looking for a private spot in the trees or something.

"I'm a caster, as far as I know, but something weird happened when they did my analysis, so I want to check something."

Even outside the gates there are a fair number of buildings. The city has exceeded its limits.

"Ooh. This way, I know a good spot."

He leads her to an out-of-the-way clearing in a much less manicured park, a bit off one of the footpaths.

"Nifty!"

Alright, gnarliest tree around, sorry, but you're gonna play target.

Eefina raises one hand. An orb of eerie silver light forms at her fingertips, sucking the color out of the world behind it. She aims at the tree, and suddenly sharp spikes of gray, erased space fire out from the light, as fast as a crossbow quarrel.

A dozen spikes of unreality stitch a line up the tree, bursting violently against the bark into a colorless swirl of pure nullification, destroying magic on a fundamental level and even interfering with the progression of mundane causality.

The effect shouldn't be too dramatic, since Eefina didn't put enough power into the casting to halt mundane causality, and some random tree shouldn't have enough actual magic in it to notice, let alone unravel destructively...

He flinches back, staring, as soon as she forms the... Thing.

The tree seems unharmed at first glance but her new wolfy friend is staring at it in alarm, eyes slightly unfocused.

"What did you just do?"

"Oh good! I can still do that. That was 'Eterni'. It... destroys magic by making processes... cease to exist? It's the basic attack spell my people are taught. I also know a silver healing technique, but for, like, curses, or cancer, not wounds."

"You ripped all the energy in the tree loose and it's sort of - scattering and wobbling around crazily. That sounds like a really good way to create dhar explosions!"

"Ooh really?"

"Ahem. Well, it is an attack spell..."

"Dhar explosions are not a good thing!!" His voice can get really shrill apparently! "Dhar is poison magic, corrosive corrupted magic! The Red Waste exists because the cursed dungeon turns the Winds of Magic into dhar!"

"Um... that does sound bad. But... hm. Is there any poisonous magic here, now? How can you tell?"

"You never learned windsight? It's just-" he waves a hand and squints at the tree. "-It's settling down now and I don't think there's enough non-ghyran around to make more than a trickle."

"But there is some? Then..."

Eefina frowns. Then she brightens. She holds out her hand again, the same colorless light as before. Only this time instead of explosive spikes of unreality, soft and gentle waves of glimmering silver silence pulse out and wash over the tree, utterly erasing any troublesome magical forces.

"Did that get rid of the dhar?"

Squint. "Yeah, it's gone. Huh. You are really, really interesting, you know that? What's that called, Silver Shrine magic?"

"The technique is called 'Curia', but we just call the discipline 'silver magic' because... it's silver-colored. It's kind of silly, admittedly."

She beams.

"So! I guess this means I can Eterni things as long as I Curia the area afterwards! That's good. I should have much less trouble with the dungeon than if I was limited to melee. And if dhar is such a problem, I can clean it up anywhere else I find it too!"

He's shaking his head slowly. "That could be big. Might want to test it on larger concentrations of the stuff? But this could be big. Can you teach it?"

"I have no idea, but I could try! Can you teach me 'windsight'? That seems important."

Dungeon-ward! Except she doesn't know the way, still. "And, uh, which way to the Rocky Shores dungeon?"