"It certainly makes you interesting, I'll grant you that. Someone like you seems unlikely to vanish into the depths of history without a mention. Or maybe people like you arrive and fade into history without mention all the time. I'd be fascinated to see what you end up doing, but probably all the interesting bits will be long after I'm gone." 

They show concern. “Do you expect to be gone soon? Are you in poor health? That may be something knowledge from my world could help with, if you’d like.” They pause, considering what to reveal. “My… bloodline, as you put it, is more versatile than it may appear. It could help solve that problem, but it comes with costs.”

They’ll pivot to a more direct approach - they’ve been dancing around the point. “I would be willing to share more details of my magic and my world, if you would be willing to teach me magic in exchange. I don’t expect I’ll need instruction in memorisation, meditation, or introspection.”

"I'm old and frail, it's only a matter of time. I've made my peace with it, no chasing after immortality potions for me." 

"Hmm. Not like I've got anything better to do with my time. Fair warning, if you're a bad apprentice I'll turf you out on your arse, and there will be chores." 

They nod and smile. "I can handle chores."

There are many chores! Her first month consists nearly entirely of chores.  Chopping wood and carrying water while Esme uses magic to make her a crude bed from fallen lumber. (Before it's done, she must sleep on the floor in a pile of furs, and Esme doesn't rush), but also cooking - Esme insists that she learn to cook in the massive cauldron over her open fire, critically pointing out every burnt patch or undercooked morsel and 'suggesting' recipes demanding ever finer temperature control. They also have lessons on Ikosan, both teaching her the language, as well as an unflattering presentation of thier history. (They conquered half the world, ruined it in some magical cataclysm, and then fled to the other half to conquer that too, turning the sisterhood of witches against itself and killing nearly everyone who objected to thier dominion, and then turning on themselves and breaking into the current collection of states in the so-called grand alliance, along the way committing a carefully memorised list of the little and not so little evils of conquest.) She is also asked to memorise endless strings of nonsense, though Esme will give up after a few hours of that when Seliun's memory proves largely perfect, as she will when Seliun's meditation skills prove sufficiently unflappable. There's no equivalent tests for visualisation skill and introspective ability, but Esme assumes they're on par, and if they aren't, then Seliun will simply find the next steps largely impossible.  

Eventually, Esme will acknowledge that Seliun is ready go learn magic. This process will begin by aiding her with potion-making - there are two potions that will greatly aid her later steps, so she should learn to make them herself first. 

Seliun finds Esme to be a pretty reasonable teacher, in line with her expectations. The sleeping situation would have been worse if they could feel sore about it. They're privately satisfied when their mental skills are found to be sufficient. Their introspection is of course excellent, and their visualization is adequate.

Potion-making is tedious, and they're not entirely used to doing detail work like this in this body, but the cooking practice did help with that, as intended.

For their part of the deal, Seliun starts by figuring out what information they have that will be most useful to Esme. Chemistry becomes the first priority, as the potential to improve potion-making seems clear. There is mild success - usefully translating some elements and compounds is difficult, and potion-making is so influenced by magic that not every concept is useful. Additionally, a fair amount of their information is already known by Esme in one form or another. However, some of their information is both new and compatible, and noticeably increases yield, decreases brewing time required, or provides new potential alternate reagents for a few potions. They also share a few recipes for gunpowder, and some informational novelties like optics and how to make daguerreotypes, in case Esme can find some use for them.

They will also demonstrate and explain, with some mental barriers relaxed, the nature of their control over animals. The first essential part is that their mind is stored outside their brain, in a psychic construct that has been improved, optimized, and empowered over time. This gives them much greater psychic ability than a normal human, and allows them to operate other psychic constructs, such as one that forces a connection with a lesser mind, then envelops it within itself.

They don't go as far as to fully reveal their status as a hivemind, but it is clear that their mind works differently from normal minds.

The problem with incorporating chemistry knowledge into potion-making as a field is that potion-making is sort of infrastructurally limited as an art - Esme doesn't have any chemical feedstocks on her, any pure elements or refined magical substances, no beakers or eye-droppers or sophisticated measuring instruments. She has a big cauldron, a fire, a bunch of herbs and rocks of various sorts, and her gut instincts. There are people out there in the world (Alchemists, she calls them, like it's a dirty word) who do have those things, and who would benefit more from the knowledge of chemistry, but Esme's potion-making skills are all about making the limitations of her current setup work at all, before they're about anything else. Gunpowder sounds like a cheap substitute for a fireball (or with a gun, a magic missile) to Esme, but she acknowledges that sometimes a cheap substitute is a very very useful thing. 

Making a magical copy of your brain to enable your soul to do thinking without the meat is supposed to be a powerful and secret art known only by a few necromancers seeking immortality (even if it is strictly speaking mind magic and not necromancy), Esme will relate. That said, she's never heard of someone doing it purely for the sake of it, but she supposes it's possible. She's never heard of that leading to people modifying their mind - as far as she knows, liches (Those necromancers who have achieved immortality by transferring their soul and cognition out of their body) are cognitively as they were in life (that is to say, terrifyingly capable, intelligent and amoral archmagi, now with lifetimes of experience on you). 

It's pretty clear Esme can tell that Seliun isn't giving her all the answers about her mind magic, and that she has a pretty good guess as to what the truth is, after a while, but she seems content to let sleeping dogs lie. She hasn't let down her mind-shield since they first met, though, and neither has her raven, on it's comings and goings, often bringing mail (which Seliun is forbidden to read) with it.