"I expect the magic thought the process of looking at pages was part of reading?"

"Silly magic."

She giggles. "It likely got that definition by extrapolating from my head."

"Silly Kaede, then."

"Not my fault the only thing the magic found in common between all things I'd call 'reading' was that."

"Is that how it works? How does it know?"

"It's not exactly how it works but it's the best metaphor for it. Magic is—really personalised, it's a property of the mage more than a property of the world. It just has native access to their mind, and sometimes to objective truth in a certain sense—I'm certainly not doing all my detail work when I cast the gender-swap spell, magic's just looking at what I want to look like and filling the gaps with details it knows are acceptable to me."

"Huh. It's - not like that with my magic. Well, you've been a Wood mage for a while now, you'd know."

"Yyyyyeah, I was hoping it'd do better with the genderswap thing but nope."

"Lifeshaping is like that."

"But on the bright side I think I might be able to use the life sense to make my gender swap spell cheaper."

"Good!"

She gets them some food again and looks at the eggs while she prepares it.

"Figured anything out yet?"

"I figured out that they definitely have a purpose other than 'be baffling.'"

"Oh good! I'd hate to think they were put here just to mess with us."

"Wouldn't actually put it past the ancients, they apparently had a lot of power to throw around."

"I wonder why. Because they didn't hate metas, or something else?"

"Yeah. Religious types say it's because we used to be much more powerful but lost something, especially when the gods left the mortal realm, but honestly, a lot of these things—like golems—are totally possible with a meta around to help."

"Ha. The benefits of not being terrible!"

"Yeah. I mean, objectively speaking I can appreciate some of the logic, what with the whole thing about how a meta almost singlehandedly took over the continent. If someone had designed this religious taboo to avoid that I could almost respect them."

"It still seems... like there has to be a better solution."

"Thus the 'almost.'"

"Yeah."

Food!