"No problem. That was great, you'd be a good combat dancer!"

"Oh, is that what that style is called?" 

"The style is called Seventh Ring but the hobby is combat dance."

"Oh! So it's - not really intended for actually fighting? I guess you probably don't need to do any fighting. If Sing solves all the problems in your world." 

"Yeah, it would be so weird to get into a serious fight back home. I do sometimes injure people because we have healing stuff and some people don't mind! But yeah."

"It turned out to work fine when you got in a fight with the Shin'a'in, though? That's honestly pretty impressive. They're supposed to be really good." 

:Generally not recommended to pick fights with them. But I suppose you had no way of knowing that. And it turned out all right: 

"They shot at me first! Then I was going to steal a horse and run away, I can't outrun a fast horse. The horse objected though."

:Oh, yes, their horses are very clever and they're best friends with their riders, they wouldn't approve of being stolen: 

"The Shin'a'in are a little excessive about guarding the Plains," Vanyel, still watching them, admits. "Though - knowing what we do now about what's underground, it makes more sense that their Goddess ordered that." 

"Oh?"

Vanyel glances at Dara, seems to think for a moment. "Can you promise that you are not going to go around telling anyone else about this?" 

"Who would I tell? I'd... tell Sing I guess if it wanted to know?"

Vanyel nods, slowly. "If we - do build Sing, and it's in fact a good idea and doesn't eat the world or something, that seems fine." He takes a deep breath. "The Shin'a'in guard the remains of Urtho's Tower. Urtho was a very powerful mage who lived eighteen hundred years ago - his tower was a hub of magical scholarship, his era was more advanced in magic they we are even now. He - got into a war. Er, with Ma'ar, who was the same person as Leareth, his first incarnation. Can tell you more about that after. Anyway, Urtho had for some reason built a lot of magical superweapons, in secret. One of them got set off right at the end of the war and caused the Cataclysm." 

He pauses for a moment. "...There are fifteen more. Still buried underground, in the basement of the tower which is somehow intact, the shields on it must've kept them from being set off too by all the magic flying around. I'm sure you can understand why it'd be really, really bad if more people knew that. I think even the Shin'a'in didn't know what they were guarding." 

"Wow! Okay, yeah, I won't tell anyone but Sing."

Vanyel nods. "Thank you. Anyway, the Star-Eyed Goddess ordered the Shin'a'in very firmly to keep outsiders off the Plains, using lethal force if necessary, and that's why they reacted the way they did when you turned up out of nowhere." 

"I wish one of 'em had been telepathic enough to talk to me, I could've explained!"

"Would've been really nice, right! I'm not sure how many of them are Mindspeakers. They outlaw all magic on the Plains - anyone born mage-gifted has to either become a shaman, or leave and go join the Tayledras, Gifts tend to correlate so probably they've got fewer Mindspeakers than us just because their Mindspeakers often leave as teenagers." 

"So only the one kind of Gift is called 'magic'?"

"I think it varies, but - yes, in a lot of places only mage-gift is considered true magic. The other Gifts are called mind-Gifts in Valdemar." 

"Which is dumb because they're not all about minds," Dara points out. "Fetching shouldn't be a 'mind-Gift', I don't think." 

"In Lineas they called everything magic, including Fetching. They had outlawed it even more thoroughly, though, so it might've just been that they didn't know much about there even being different kinds of Gift." 

"Interesting! We use the word Page is translating as 'magic' for basically anything that isn't possible with just plain physics so all the Gifts would qualify but it can be more precise when it's feeding me lines if that's customary."

"Oh, that makes sense - they are all magic, really. My theoretical understanding here is that the ones other than mage-gift are - more specific applications of magic, that are really good at some particular aspect but can't do any of the others. You can use a spell to communicate like Mindspeech, for example, it's just not as good and more tiring." 

"Huh! Does that mean you could get it as good and not more tiring if you were doing it more exactly somehow?"