"Anyway, yeah, map. Weird map, have to charge it to understand it, but pretty sure it's a map sort of thing."

"Why? What does a magic map do that a regular one can't?"

"Change as it's used, can only be accessed by the right people, can fuel other artefacts with the appropriate magic making them point to the right direction... Plus, you know, grandeur. Half the stuff that's ever been enchanted was that only because it's cool, I'm pretty sure."

She giggles.

"I mean... look." She scoots over to the wall again, closes her eyes, touches it with a hand... and it starts glowing.

It is very pretty.

It is very grand. The etchings start emitting blue-and-red light in intricate patterns, with some flashes of green. Holographic bits emerge from the symbols, mere echoes of the symbols themselves, dissolving into the air, but it's certainly very pretty.

Ruava watches in fascination.

Soon the holograms coalesce into a vertical representation of the place they're standing... and zooms out. It shows grass around and to the east, steppes to the west, and starts panning north, over rivers and forests and castles and farms, fast and far, north north until it reaches an extensive mountain chain and starts zooming back in, to a specific cave of a specific mountain, covered in snow and blocked by rockfall.

Ooooooooooh.

"Okay, that's a very impressive map," she concedes.

"Yeah. Except I have no idea what it's a map for."

"Anything special about that cave?"

"I've never actually visited the mountains so I don't know. I do know the language these things are written in was spoken there, before it went extinct, so it makes sense."

"Should we go look at the cave to see if the map people left any cool stuff there? Or play with the map to see if it'll do the same thing to any old location and the cave's not special?"

"The cave's special, the map's enchanted to show exactly that one place, I checked... and that one place is like across the continent from here."

"So let's go have a look!"

She blinks. And grins. "Oh, fine, why not, it's what I'd've done if I were on my own anyway. Help me find a rock?"

"What kind of rock?"

"Any kind, just need something to enchant a compass with the coordinates."

"Okay."

She looks for rocks.

The river contains some.

Handful of pebbles. "How about these?"

"Those work!" she grins, taking them. She gets the largest one, then closes her eyes, holding it.

And what does a magic compass end up looking like...?

...a pebble.

At first, anyway. Then Kaede opens her eyes and holds the pebble in her hand up towards the wall, and the holographic picture is drawn towards the pebble, wrapping itself around it.

And then it's just a pebble again.

"People usually make compasses and stuff like this out of fancier objects, half because it makes it easier and cheaper to contain, half because it's prettier, but this will do. I bound a sentence to it, if you say 'guide me'..." And the pebble glows and shows a little holographic map of their environs with an arrow pointing towards their destination. She runs a finger through the arrow, and the same zoom-out-then-pan-then-zoom-in effect the larger map displayed is displayed there, ending up at the cave again. "Usually compasses are made to be flexible and be able to take coordinates from a large variety of maps, but this one I made specifically for this one map so it's way cheaper."

"Cool!"

"Yeah!" She touches the wall, and all the leftover glow disappears. "How about you, figure out anything cool?"