"Oh, ask away," replies Aelea, "everyone here is used to curiosity. 'Seer' is kind of a technical term - they do have some divination magic, but mostly what they do is - find things out? Most of our research here is Spring, of course, but there's also some Day - less than there used to be, though."

". . . What do Spring and Day mean, to you? Maybe this chain is being obfuscatory; Spring and Day are just a season and an angle of the sun, to me."

"Ah, you probably have different words for the Realms of Magic? I know the Grendel call them something different. Spring is the magic of life - growth, decay, healing, poison, all that good stuff. Day is more, hmm, logic, cleanliness, purification, facts? We'll be using a little Day magic for the decontamination, we have a special room we've constructed that lets us do it cheaply rather than having to run everything through a ritual on the regular. Much more pleasant, too - Day can be a bit... harsh."

"Ah.   . . . I'm really not versed in magic under any convention. My people were recently conquered. Our conquerers physically destroyed all our historical records that they could find, and stamped out our practice of teaching children to read - very successfully. I didn't start learning to read until this year. Actually, until a few months ago I didn't know - " she stutters to a halt " - a lot of things."

Tollee forces down a twitching leg, the phantom of an urge to buck and run. Please let Tuvien's bloviating about the relationship between human magic and symbol be basically correct.

"Oh no!" Aelea seems genuinely, heartbrokenly distressed about that. "We will find a way to help your people. Can your friend bring some of us back with you? Our people taught the Imperial Orcs how to read and do magic - we'd be very happy to do the same for you! At least if your people can, like, promise not to be actively hostile to the Empire, I guess. And I think we'd come teach you to read anyway."

. . .

"My friend could very easily do that. We still have adults who remember how to read and write in our tongue from before the war - it's those younger than fifteen or so who have been forbidden to hear a word about it - but we would be grateful to learn yours, too."  

". . . I actually came here to offer the renewed allyship of the ferryshaft with any humans who would return and help us throw off our conquerors. There were humans on our island, not so many generations ago. We were their prized - steeds - and the beneficiaries of many of their crafts, and - well. My friend and I have made what we could of the histories we found, and ferryshaft seem to have performed other magical functions to the humans, too. We just haven't been able to figure out what they were. I doubt my people would remember how to do any of that, now, but with your help and more time to study the histories - and there are likely other histories we haven't uncovered yet, too, buried all over the island, and we've hardly cracked most of the runes in the ones we have - we might be able to learn how to do those things, again."

"There is a military fortress on our island - extremely secure - that used to be the humans' stronghold. My people used it in the last war, but since, it has been locked, and the key - assuming you know what that is? - has been lost. It would be your exclusive province if we could find the key, or if you could find another way to get in."

"Oh... Virtues, you grow study enough to ride? You would make an awful lot of people extremely happy... I can just see the entire expeditionary strength of Highguard lining up to do whatever you want them to do, so long as you'd send some of your kind as mounts when it was done.

We used to have horses, you see - I don't know if you know what that is, they're a bit like zebra but much sturdier, or oxen but much more fleet of foot. But they died out centuries ago, and the Highborn haven't quite recovered from it since.

Archaeology and the unlocking of strange magical powers, as well as a people eager to learn to read, and a mysterious fortress that needs to be studied to unlock? We might just leave Zenith to the Varushkans and emigrate.

I must get you to the magi, and they will probably want to get you to Anvil, if you can stay that long; then the generals will curse our names as we take half the force they needed for the season's campaigns, but I can't see how anyone could deny you, with such temptations on offer!"

Tollee -

- is a little crestfallen (how scrawny do I look?), and supposes she will just have to bulk up, then -

- doesn't sense any insincerity. She feels like she's just run the whole way from Groth to the summer feeding grounds. Thoughts tumble over each other in her head like Volontaro storm clouds, racing to verbalization.

"I . . . express wholehearted enthusiasm for this plan. Are these magi at the - Shatterspire - too? I've never heard of a horse, or a zebra, or an ox. What were they like? Were they intelligent?"

(She decides that this is not the exact particular moment to clarify that she is full-grown, and pretty bulky for a female, and males aren't much bigger. She knows her kind are stronger than they look, and anyway, she's seen the human drawings of ferryshaft carrying humans easily.)

"Oh, sorry, I suppose this must be a bit much for you, too!

Yes, we have a couple of magi left - they're the politicians, rather than the discoverers. I'm afraid this sounds like you are going to end up dealing with politics...

It's, uh, people argue about how intelligent the horses were; zebra and oxen are animals. Both are hoofed quadrupeds; zebra are black-and-white striped and rather fast and skittish, oxen are large, strong, relatively slow and mostly brown-ish. Neither of them do very well around here, I'm afraid."

The glimmering tower on the higher slopes is intermittently visible through the trees.

Tollee eyes the approaching tower with furtive interest.

Politics. So she has a fight. Not a victory, not necessarily a possible victory, but a fight, here. A searing glow of terrible contingency injects her.

She supposes it's no wonder Lidian's former human population preferred ferryshaft, if they were used to being carried around by slow or stupid creatures. Only -

"And the horses, physically?"

She reminds herself that she doesn't actually know what other mounts Lidian's humans had access to, formerly, or whether they came from this place at all. Say -

"And say, what is the name of this place? Whatever nested set of domains it seems appropriate to name to someone from another world. My world is called Lidian - my friend, who is more traveled than me" - understatement, and Tuvien's hardly even been anywhere - "tells me that it is an island, that it is small relative to all the other places he's been. There are political domains within it, but my people are seasonal migrants who don't have any particular name for the territories where we live. Or, at least," - it occurs to her, and she chooses to mention - partly for the benefit of her new possible-allies, impeccably projecting the impression of simply happening to realize a fact - and wincing internally at the who-knows-how-long of this stony-faced not-wheedling ahead - "they haven't called the places we live anything except the Summer and Winter Feeding Grounds as long as I've been alive to listen."

"Everyone has their own theory about the horses," replies Aelea cheerfully. "Some say they were just stronger, faster, sleeker oxen; some that they were fully people, and spoke just as we do, and were perhaps more Virtuous; there are some ludicrously over-muscled caricatures that can't be right, and quite a lot of pictures that are clearly bad reconstructions from skeletons, of which we have a few.

You are in the lands of Shatterspire - the Spire of Shattered Art Reforged, to give it its full name - in the region of Tomari, the territory of Redoubt, the nation of Urizen, the Empire known elsewhere as the Casinean or Catazzari Empire.

We don't actually have a name for the whole continent, although we know of several others, nor for the entire world."

After a few rounds of verbal rehearsal and confirmation, Tollee is confident that her memory has retained all the names. Her eyes flick to the tower ahead with increasing frequency.

"Why name the region of Tomari? Some geographical separation?

The reasons for the rest seem clear to me - the Shatterspire seems more or less the domain of one organization, and 'territory', 'nation', and 'Empire' the chain is translating to me well enough -  those are political."

"Oh, don't you have magical boundaries? Region boundaries don't mean all that much, but controlling a region is part of controlling dominion over the territory as a whole. And there used to be a bunch of rituals that targeted regions, but the Halls of Knowledge found out how to make them all target full territories instead."

The tower is made primarily of stone, and mostly white-ish stone at that. The great crystal array near its top seems to move from time to time, although it's still hard to tell exactly what is happening with that at this distance. There's the beginnings of a lower curtain wall just starting to be evident through the trees.

-

Shit. Tollee has entirely forgotten almost all of the region names and their associated class-valences. 

She somewhat more-than-sheepishly asks for another round of repetition. She resolves to be less stupid with the priceless treasures this time and begins a process of consistent background rehearsal.

(

Shatterspire - Group of people living and working together.

Tomari - Region. Magically drawn somehow.

Redoubt - low-hierarchy political domain.

Urizen - high-hierarchy political domain.

Casinean - (Can it be called Casinea? Whatever.) apex political domain.

)

(Shatterspire - working-people-group. Tomari - magical-region (?). Redoubt - relatively-subservient-political-domain. Urizen - relatively-dominant-political-domain. Casinea...n...apex-political-domain.)

Before she and Tuvien began hardcore studying the ancient telshee and ferryshaft history fragments together, Tollee had no experience memorizing things like this. Everyone in her herd, she'd either known well enough that her mind recalled their name without noticing an effort, or not known well enough that she needed bother learning their name at all. Memorization is, Tollee thinks, a bitch.

(Shatterspire - working-people-group. Tomari - magical-region (?). Redoubt - relatively-subservient-political-domain. Urizen - relatively-dominant-political-domain. Casinea...n(??? no way does she have the conversational normalcy points to ask at this point, she's just gonna have to stay confused about this one for a while)...apex-political-domain.)

It is a couple of minutes before Tollee works up the balls to pry the obvious burning line of inquiry, and she stutters a little bit when she does it. She is no longer paying any attention to the tower.

"When y- you say magical region - would you, er, would you amuse yourself to answer a naïve foreigner - what the hell does that mean?"

She can't think of any other way to phrase it. Where do you start? But she realizes the orientation of her state of confusion, relative to a native here, may not have thusly been made obvious.

"Like, what does the magic do? What can you do across the - little magical region boundaries that you can't do across the big ones? What can't you do across them that you can do within them - in, in general? Physically -  not just by convention. Did you say there was some relationship, actually, between convention and physical barriers, here? What?" 

If these questions are social-dissonance-producing in any way, Tollee is, in this moment, utterly insensible to that. Ah, shit -

(Shatterspire - working-people-group - )

"So, uh, basically, it's all about ritual - targeting? Uh. I am not equipped to give a lecture on ritual theory. Domicia?" Aelea looks hopefully at one of the staff-wielders.

"Okay, basic ritual targeting. You can target a ritual in - lots of different ways, but two of the most common are - presence, and dominion. If I'm right there in a region, I can cast a region-affecting ritual on that region. If there were any, any more. If I'm in a territory, I can cast a territory-affecting ritual on that territory. If we had nation-affecting rituals that'd work the same way - although actually I think you target those through the egregore - except that might be on the people, not the place - it's complicated, sorry. Oh, and we can cast Empire-affecting rituals on the Empire in the same way, I think - although maybe you have to be in the Imperial Regio for that? I'll get to that later.

You can also cast by dominion. If you want to cast a ritual on a territory, but you're not in that territory, you can cast it on the Senator for the territory, if you've got one - that's targeting by Dominion, rather than Presence.

But you can only have an effective Senator for the territory if the Empire controls enough of the regions in that territory - control enough regions, and we have magical Dominion over the territory as an Empire, and then can delegate that to a Senator, and then people can cast through them.

And then there's the Imperial Regio, which is a specific special place in Casinea, in Anvil - from there you can cast on any territory that the Empire has Dominion over, whether you have the Senator there or not. Or region, I guess, if you had something that targeted a region. But nobody does that any more because it's no more expensive to target the whole territory.

That... probably wasn't a great explanation, sorry. Not only am I not a teacher, I'm barely even a ritualist, I'm mostly a battlemage," Domicia apologises.

(Tollee does not miss that apparently it is valid to call it Casinea!)

"Do you know how the regions got there? Expensive? What do you pay with? And why do your - shared symbolic routines - do - what exactly do these targeted rituals, do to the regions, mostly?" The strangers seem quite happy to answer frank questions frankly so far, so Tollee drops the verbal appeasements. Only, wait, the mage, Domicia, seems to have implied -

"Feel free to leave any of this for your own exposition, if you're planning on one, you said you'd get to something later."

"And - no, I've barged in on your sleeping quarters, essentially, and asked you to make me a bed here, and it's very comfortable! The explanations, I mean. They're - I admittedly don't understand them, but they're much better than nothing and anyway I'm a beggar until I do find out some way to help Shatterspire. I know I'll need to know, to help, but it's still true."

"I'm sure the stargazers have endless theories about why the boundaries are how they are, but as far as I know they've always been like that; even when we sunk half of Apulus into the sea, it didn't change the region boundary. They do tend to follow rivers and so on, but whether that's the region boundaries causing the geographical features to be like that or the geographical features causing the boundaries - a lot of arguments, not much information," Domicia shrugs.

"Do you - not have rituals? Rituals are a kind of magic that we do with crystal mana, which is generally in short supply. Some of the most popular geographical target rituals are the Rivers - they bring healing or poisonous rain, or clear it up if the opposite's already been cast - mostly for their effects on military campaigns, but I think Life also gets used for disease outbreaks, since Reikos?

I'm sure the magi will attempt to brief you, but frankly we don't have any good teachers of the basics here - we now have some children who are starting to be of age to learn more than just anyone can impart, but that's a fairly recent development."

Aelea smiles in what she hopes is a reassuring fashion. "We don't exactly have anything else to do on the walk back, the trees seem to have settled and nothing else was out of place on our patrol down. It's good to stretch our minds as well as our legs, occasionally." Domicia looks a little exhausted and like she perhaps doesn't quite agree with this statement, but isn't starting an argument.

The part of Tollee that stores potentially relevant things about peoples' personalities finally finds something to dig into, w.r.t. Domicia-the-weary-mage and Aelea-the-unperturbable-and-peacemaking-or-possibly-just-unusually-high-stamina-leader.

"Ah, well, thank you! I'm not sure I understand yet", (another gargantuan understatement) "but it doesn't seem like a thing that's at all trivial to teach - especially not if you need specialists to teach native children of it." If they're giving her any later chances to talk with people who know this stuff, that might lead to a chain of further and deeper chances to investigate and she'll forego the reputation hit of pressing Domicia for a however-likelier shot at that.

She shuts up and tries to enjoy the rest of the walk. And, on the low, to find any useful clues buried in the appearance of the forest or her new companions' gear. She almost certainly won't actually understand the true meaning of anything she sees, having no context, but it would feel sillier *not* to use the empty time that way.

The party speeds up a bit once they're no longer trying to talk as well as walk, as it's clear Tollee can keep up.

The forest is rather tangled and swampy, even quite a way up the hill; they do eventually get off the boardwalk and onto a dry, packed dirt road, edged in lumps of white stone which is carved sporadically with a symbol - two horizontal lines, slightly curved, one above the other, with the lower slightly pointed down at one end. There doesn't seem to be much sign of animal life in it, although there are plenty of insects and some of the plants distinctly appear to be more mobile than one might normally expect - especially, the ever-present vines curl and uncurl around things perceptibly.

Most of the gear that the Gardeners are wearing is fairly self-explanatory, it's just light armour and big pole weapons that look like they double as, well, gardening tools; as well as the poles they all have a sturdy machete at their belts. The fancier, lower-coverage armour is a bit weird, but presumably that's magic, as are the long sticks - which have green gems inset in the end, matching the gems on the armour.  Under all that, they're wearing matching green over-robes and beige under-robes, and each also has a beige sash or belt tag with a green design - three stylised horizontal strokes leading into two downstrokes.

As they head towards the Spire, it's clearer that there is a high wall around an extensive compound surrounding the central tower; there is one heavily-reinforced gate in the wall, which has both big double doors and a smaller inset door.

As they approach, there is a low note from the wall, like some kind of brass instrument; Aelea responds with a shout, "Aelea and Gardeners returning early from patrol, friendly stranger accompanying, request decontamination and meeting with the Arbiter."

There is no obvious reply, but after a couple of moments Aelea starts to lead everyone forwards again towards the small door.

Did they. Build all this.

Tollee thinks she picks up on - in those plants that seem to curl of their own will - a distinct sense of Doom, or Disease, that would not have been out of place in Groth - not just that they made her remember the same emotions she had been feeling when she saw the Groth plants, but that they actually created the same sense-impression. It could have been just that they smelled the same, or looked the same, except that they definitely weren't Lidian species. 

Tollee wonders if she has a magic-sense. Or, more creepily, if magic somehow invades the senses of its perceivers no matter what that set of senses happens to be, to create a distinct impression of itself regardless.

Yeah, Tollee has no idea about any of the human artifacts - except those green gems, those resemble what she and Tuvien has pretty well figured were magical artifacts in the Lidian drawings. And the symbols! Human magic, symbols are always important. Tollee wonders if perhaps they focus something that shoots from the crystals. That was one hypothesis she and Tuvien had come up with, to explain one weird and fragmented depiction of a human sitting on its strange backward bent knees before a rune and what looked like a radiant crystal.

Tollee looks up as Aelea leads the way through the folding-wall. How. How could the humans build something like this! Those little sharp metal parts are way too small and too regular and too identical to each other, what cut those? Do the humans have some kind of special sense of, and muscle-memory for, perfectly straight lines, or is that magic? And where the hell does metal even come from? And - no, that big different-in-color part of the monumental wall-circle surrounding the folding wall doesn't also swing in, it might look similar but c'mon, it's huge, get a footing, Tollee.

She follows Aelea into the artificial forest that pulses with alien human purpose and cannot exist.

Part of her is wondering if she should have just tried chatting up the walking trees.

The door leads directly into a deeply unnatural environment. The walls are a pale translucent white stone; everything is spotless and smooth. There are more doors at the end of a short section of this.

"You might want to close your eyes for this bit," Aelea warns her. "The light won't actually blind you - well, it wouldn't if you were human - but it's not very pleasant."

The Gardeners array themselves in the empty white space, not being particularly careful to avoid traipsing mud and leaves into it. Aelea hangs back, ready to close the outside door behind Tollee.

?????, but Tollee obliges. If she sings a song to herself in her head while she does it, a song that mother ferryshaft sing to comfort their foals, about how if you close your eyes it can almost seem like nothing's different, well, no one will ever know.

There is a tremendous flash of light, which washes over her almost like a physical force; the places her paws felt wrong in the mud flare very briefly with a burning pain, like something is searing the poison from them; when it has passed, the remnants of mud and leaves fall off as greyish dust.