Vanyel glances around. "All right. I can...try and move some sand? I sort of want to know the best place to move it, though, so I might see if my mage-sight or other magical senses can get down there and figure out where the buildings are." 

"That would be useful. I can turn into an earth elemental and do a bit of reconnaissance but I can only do that once and not for very long so if you can do a bit of figuring things out first that'd be useful."

"...You can what?" 

" - since we were doing this today I prepared a spell that allows me to turn into an earth elemental. For about nine minutes."

"That does not at all seem like the sort of thing that should be possible! You can't do anything like that in my world! Er, do you mean projecting your mind to the Plane of Earth and perceiving from there - no, you wouldn't mean that... How?" 

"It's transmutation; giving things the attributes of other things. Fly is too. - we may have not gotten to transmutation when we were discussing arcane magic schools. I apologize. There are also spells to project your mind to the Plane of Earth but that wouldn't help us excavate here at all. - didn't you see that incident last night where Fazil had to rescue someone from being a frog -"

"I was confused about that too! I'd meant to ask later, it was too loud at the time. I missed the original spell with mage-sight, but I can try to watch you do it later. I wish I'd looked at Fly with mage-sight now. Anyway, I'll poke around now." 

He tries extending his mage-sight below the ground. It'll be subtle, unless there are magical artifacts down there, in which case it'll be very blatant where things are. 

There are some magical artifacts down there! A ways down.

"Found something! Deep, though. I'm going to walk around a bit and see if I can find any that are closer at hand." 

If he wanders the whole area he can find some magic that's closer to the surface.

He stops. "Here might be a good bet to start out? I can dig for it just from mage-sight but some earth elemental scouting would help, and then I can watch that spell." 

"Sure."

The spell is weird to watch; it's tapping on something that isn't right here where the spell is being cast, though it's kind of unclear where it is; another plane, maybe? 

And then Mahdi is an odd misshapen thing of earth and stone and magic, and burrows beneath the ground to go exploring. 

Vanyel watches him with mage-sight, and something like awe. 

"Your magic can't do that?"

"No! We can't - turn people into other things, or even non-people, not when it's complicated like that - it's like your magic knew how. I don't think our magic knows how to do complex things, ever, unless it's actually just calling on intelligent elemental spirits who know things." 

"Druids just turn into all kindsa animals constantly, it's their whole thing. - they're also divine casters like Fazil but it's most of their thing. You can't do anything with your magic that you don't know how to do? It seems like that'd make healing practically impossible..."

"Our Healers have Sight as well - I have it, actually, I just have barely any Healing-Gift so I can't do much. They can sense what's going on inside bodies, and they need years and years of training to interpret and use it. Most magical advances in my world are - getting better at training people to do a complex technique? Also you can use artifacts to do part or all of it, sometimes." 

"Huh. So to turn into an animal you'd need - the whole body plan and the whole concept of what the soul is doing -"

"I think pretty much that. Or to cheat, somehow, but something would have to know. Oh, and you'd also need to remember your original body, or you couldn't turn back..."

He is gobsmacked by an area of magic that's mostly about turning into animals. What. 

- giggle. "I dunno how one becomes a druid, sorry, I think there are secret druidic orders but we can't pick up a textbook in Sothis. A transmutation-focused wizard will take at least a decade to get capable of that kind of thing and - Mahdi mostly doesn't make a fuss about it but nine hundred ninety nine in a thousand wizards won't get as good as he is even if they spend their whole life at it."

"Wow! I guess what it takes to end up being that good as a wizard is - just being smart? And practicing a lot?" 

"Being really smart and practicing a lot will get you to third circle, pretty reliably, in ten years if you're good and in fifteen years even if you're just pretty good. Past that - it seems to matter how you use it, there are limits to how much power you can channel which you can't just get around by being a genius and what gets you to those limits seems to be - high-stakes magic? Combat, travel on dangerous planes or in dangerous places, really complicated workings that'll explode on you if you get them wrong. I met a woman once who was a genius with forty years of experience but never allowed out of her fancy well-protected house and she could draw the spellforms for sixth-circle spells but couldn't cast past third. Mahdi thinks it's - some skill you train when your heart is pounding and the world feels like it's barely moving at all - but no one knows for sure, not well enough to replicate it under controlled conditions -"

"Huh, that's fascinating! ...Why wasn't she allowed to leave her house?" All he can think of is 'some sort of weird chronic illness' or 'heir to a throne, with lots of assassins after her', both of which would seem to push against ending up with forty years of experience as a wizard. 

He looks startled at the question. "Her husband wouldn't've tolerated it. - I was a kid, they gave up on trying to wizard me by the time I was twelve or so."

Vanyel is now visibly taken aback. 

"Is it, um, common here. For women's husbands to not tolerate them leaving the house?"