Aww. He follows.

"It's... a bit like getting more and more resolution out of a picture, and noticing more and more details. In practice, I start discovering small things like whether a bit of the magic is voluntary and to what sorts of thoughts and emotions it's tied and which bit of the magic is doing which part of the effect—this bit interprets that, this bit translates it into the actual mechanics of the effect—things like that."

"In what sense is part of a light's magic 'missing'? There isn't a complete version for it to be a degenerate case of."

"That's where the metaphor breaks down. It isn't missing, really, that's just the best way I've found to describe the general feeling around it, that there was an aspect of its generalisation it didn't quite... have."

"Rephrase?"

"If I looked at a bit of that magic, and tried to extrapolate from it to its most general form, being able to affect any living thing and fix anything, then the way it looked like, for lack of a better verb, was not the same way the thing I was actually looking at was, but it was almost."

"- hm. Do you have an analogy with any other senses?"

"Vision is the best analogy I have for what I can passively perceive with the sense, touch is the best analogy for what I can actively perceive while manipulating it. Hearing, too, for some specific reactions."

"Yes, I mean, is there some visual thing that you can perform an analogous thought process with."

"Oh. I guess the best one would be if I saw a bit of a sphere I'd imagine a whole sphere and then the thing I actually saw was a sphere with a dent? But that's way more blatant than what it actually was, and needs less context—perhaps, hmm, seeing a picture of a dog's nose and being told it's a dog, and then it turns out the dog doesn't have its tail?"

"In this analogy you are not even previously familiar with dogs? Which I assume are animals with noses?"

"You don't have dogs...? Well no reason to expect all animals to be the same, they're like small wolves—do you have those?—that are kept as pets... Anyway, no, in this analogy I've an idea of what dogs are like—I'd been told that the light magic was meant to heal and to be very general and I'd seen healing magic back in my world which doesn't automatically translate but gives some idea, and I saw her using light so I saw it—flexing, in a way."

"We haven't domesticated wolves, no, why would anyone do that -? What did you see of the magic before you were told it was healing?"

"I saw the same thing, but I didn't know it was supposed to be a dog's nose—could've been a wolf's or a bear's or anything else."

"But not, uh, a beak." He's flipping distractedly through his book.

"Not a beak," Kaede agrees. The cute dragon looks cuter while flipping distractedly through his book.

"What would a metaphorical beak be?"

"I don't have a one-to-one mapping in my head between pieces of magic and pieces of anatomy, it was just a metaphor," he shrugs. "Could be a bit of magic that does invisibility or flight or stoneshaping or telekinesis or enhanced cognition..."

"Could you reasonably draw a chart or something of what broad categories of magic are similar to others or is it too multidimensional or too fuzzy or -?"

"It is very multidimensional and very fuzzy but if given three broad categories I could probably give you a guess of which is more similar to which. Without looking at it, though, it'd be a guess; magic is very personal where I'm from and here it really isn't so that might affect things somehow."

"Personal meaning?"

"All magical effects, with potentially one huge exception, are caused by mages, and are not permanent and require mage upkeep. The way magic happens depends very heavily on mental architecture and how people organise their thoughts, and relates deeply with their psychology and personality."

"So no standard effects, all idiosyncratic?"

"Yeah. There are standard—descriptions of effects, books on arcanism teach what kind of thing someone should think of to bind a spell for example, but since the way people think of concepts is different these spells always end up not the same."

"Example of differences?"

"Differences in mana cost are the most obvious, and differences in specific implementation vary. For example, I once cast an invisibility spell on me and stuff I was holding that would still let me read invisible books I was holding. What that turned out to do was that when I was looking at the page I would be able to know the shape of the letters and their positions on the page without actually seeing them, but nothing like their colour or the letters on the back of any pages. Someone else doing the same spell might have been able to see colour, or to not need to see the letters themselves and only the words as indivisible concepts, or stuff like that."