Ira nods. "And, where is it coming from? Am I catching it from the air, like, floating raindrops, or drawing it up from the ground, or somewhere else? And, I assume I'm directing through the wand and up to its tip, where I'm imagining the light is coming from?"

"From... the earth or the air, either one; I'm realizing I've thought of them pretty interchangeably myself...  Either of your images should work fine.  And yes, through the wand to its tip; the light appears at the tip or maybe a little ways out from it.  Don't imagine it going through your arm; that usually doesn't work - we're not Elves - and if it does it might hurt your arm."

Ira nods once more, stands from her chair despite not being instructed to do so (perhaps out of some sense of gravitas), and closes her eyes to aid in visualization. She imagines the magic as a semi-gelid fluid permeating the air, maybe more like slush than mud, that melts into water as she impels it to flow, spiraling like a vortex flowing down a drain towards the base of the wand then up and through it, shirking its pseudo-aqueous form and becoming light as soon as it emerges from the wind's tip. Without letting go of the visual, she opens her eyes to see if it's worked.

Just before she opens her eyes, she feels in her hand and wrist the ghost of some movement, sort of as if some slush was being sucked up all around her hand and through her fingers - except she's not actually feeling it with her senses; it's sort of like she's imagining it but her imagination has gained life and is continuing without her meaning to.

And then she opens her eyes, and she can see a faint shining light on the tip of the wand.

"Wow!  You did it on your first try!"

Ira beams and giggles a bit. She's no longer devoting her focus entirely to the visualization but that may not mean it stops? "This is incredible! Is doing it on your first try extraordinary?" She asks this with some poorly hidden hopeful pride. "Oh, and you mentioned something a moment ago, about your queen being the last elf. Does that mean that people can stop being elves? Or, were they killed by something you can't bring them back from?" She frowns a moment as she realizes something. "Oh, you might not have a way to bring people back at all! I'm sorry if that was insensitive."

(As long as she's keeping it in the back of her mind, it keeps going.)

"Yes it is!  And it's even more unusual that you can keep it going even while you're talking - maybe it's something to do with your world or some magic there? --"

Aeslin suddenly stops.

"You - can - bring people back?  From being dead?"

Ira promptly stops trying to hide her pride, which redoubles under Aislin's praise. "Well, Bran- that's my uncle, I don't think I introduced him yet, Bran is certain we can, he says he revived my grandma when he was just a boy, when she fell ill and died, but for as long as I've existed the only person we know well enough to bring back who is dead is my mom, who was killed by the cave-sleeper, which is means we can't bring her back. But we bring the chickens back whenever they die."

"You can bring back people - or animals - as long as you know them well enough?  How well do you need to know them?  And how do you cast the spell!?"

Ira tilts her head back and forth uncertainly. "Maybe that isn't the right phrasing. We need to, sort of, prove that they were real? We usually use one of the chicken's bones or feathers, which seems to be enough for them, and uncle says he just told the hearth about grandma's body in the bedroom. And, I don't know if it's a spell really? It's the same as any other wish on Wishing Night, aside from the proof thing. We give our gifts to the hearth, we ask the hearth to bring them back, we tell it our proof, and then it does its weird little spirits thing, and in the morning the wish is granted if the hearth could manage it, or else it does the best it can manage."

"So if I come to your world - if I can do that - after getting someone's bone - if I can do that and come back here - tell me more about this hearth and what it does?"

"Can other people go to the Pines? Bar?" Ira asks as she sits back down, still holding onto the wand and sustaining the light spell. "And, I don't know exactly? I've only stayed up to watch the answering once, and that was a few years ago and I'm still not entirely sure what parts of it were real and what parts were dreams. I know that light and dark get all weird, and then it sort of, splits up into a bunch little person-shaped spirits that float around and sort of turn into the answers to our wishes? It's hard to explain. Other than that, the hearth is just the fire in our fireplace. Or, actually I think Bran says that it makes the Sun during the day, too? But I've never seen it do anything to make the Sun, Bran figured it out some other way."

Another napkin appears on the bar.

"I do not control the door.  Unfortunately, the Landlords will not let the door bring people into worlds not their own today. It will likely be different tomorrow."

"Who are these Landlords, and how does the door work?...  Also, may I have a mug of tea?"  She takes a silver coin out of a pocket in her skirt.

The coin vanishes, to be replaced with several brass coins and a large steaming mug of tea.  There's also another napkin:

"I do not know, and the clues I do know, I cannot express in your language."

Ira takes another sip of eggnog, and thinks to hand Aeslin her wand back, the light spell presumably terminating when it leaves Ira's hand. "It's frustrating, when there's just a dead end like that. I'm sorry if I got your hopes up about bringing people back right now. We can always ask again tomorrow, if you can afford to stay the night?"

"People are expecting me back home... but no, for this, I can stay.

"I don't know anything like your hearth magic - it sounds almost like dream symbolism!  But you saw it in your waking life?  What sort of wishes can it answer?"

Another napkin appears.

"While you are in here, time is stopped in your home world, except while you are holding open the door to your home world."

(The door shut behind Aeslin once she entered.)

"Oh, yes, sorry I forgot to mention the time-thing. And, most sorts of wishes I think? Not quite all of them, I know that it can't send us to other worlds, or at least it can't reach the worlds that my mother or grandma came from, and can't take us to worlds we don't know. Bran hasn't figured out how exactly it does most of what it does yet, and we usually need two or sometimes all three of our wishes each year to keep the house running, bring back the chickens, heal any injuries or illnesses we can't fix with medicine, so we don't have the option to experiment much. I don't have a list of everything we've ever wished for memorized or anything, but if you give me a wish I can probably tell whether it's like something one of us has wished for?"

Now that Aeslin knows she has all the time she wants to ask questions and talk, she has even more questions than before!   

"Your mother and grandmother are from other worlds?  How'd they get there - did they come through this bar too?  How're those other worlds different?  And do other people in your world have other wish-granting fires too - it sounds like you don't have any schools about them at least; do you know if anyone's tried anything like that?"

Ira nods. "Mhm. Uh, well the people and places were different between them, and neither of them were anything like the Pines. Neither of them had the hearth or anything like the hearth, though they both had places that had similar plants and animals and terrain as around the house. They both had humans, but nobody like uncle, and neither of them had elves, or at least not as far as my mother or grandma knew about. My mother and grandma both were fleeing from big, like really massive destruction, catastrophe on a global scale or bigger. They needed desperately to be somewhere else, somewhere safer, and I guess they were lucky and the hearth managed to reach them and bring them into the Pines. Neither of them mentioned anything like Milliways existing, though they both had stories of places like it, just, fictional ones. And, I don't know if there's much point of starting a school, at least in the Pines? It's just me, grandma, and uncle. Bran probably knows enough to teach about it, at least a bit, but I can already talk with him about it whenever I want and grandma always says that her 'curiosity about the hearth has been more than satisfied'."

"Wait, you're the only people in your whole world!?  Or at least the only people you've seen?"

Ira nods again. "Or, well, the cave-sleeper might be a person too, but it's never talked to us or anything, it attacks us or runs away whenever we see it, so if it is a person it's an awfully nasty one."

"You don't know how - were there ever any more people in your world?  Or might there be some somewhere else in the world?  And what's the cave-sleeper?"

"Grandma says there weren't any other people when she first came. If there were people there before her who left, they didn't leave anything behind. I guess there might be some people out in the Grass? But with how weird it is I don't know if I'd believe they were real people until they came out to the Pines. I haven't ever actually seen anything that looks like a person out there, though." She takes another sip of eggnog. "The cave-sleeper's a big scary shadow-monster that lives in a cave on the other side of the Pines from the house. Bran says that under all the shadow-stuff it's some kind of bear, though."