Ira shrugs and asks with a somewhat joking tone, "Are they magic wish-granting ovens?"

"No, we don't have any magic wish-granters!  This's so exciting!

"Hey, Bar, what're you?  Are you a golem crafted by magic?"

Another napkin:  "I am Bar.  I do not know how I was made."

"Do you know anything about it?"

"I know I am a bar, and that is enough."

Ira sighs in commiseration. "I was awfully curious too, and still am. Bar is not the type to talk about themself too much, unfortunately."

She'll take another sip of eggnog, gingerly stroke her hand, and ask, "So, what does having magic like this mean? For learning magic, I mean. If you know, with the queen being the last elf I can imagine there might be a lot of lost knowledge about how the process could be different?"

"At least this isn't really something that's been lost - there's so much we've lost from the Days of Wonder, but the Queen would know how this affects learning magic because she had to learn it herself!  It'd be some really archaic methods of teaching, of course - but I learned in an unusual way myself too; Svarendar has his own unique ideas - anyway, I'm afraid I don't know much about how it'd affect you.  The Queen hasn't shared much, just a few bits for abstract comparative studies... and I'm afraid I only studied them in the context of trying to understand golemcrafting."

Ira nods. "Another thing to look into, if the door is cooperative tomorrow. And I think you've mentioned that name a couple times now, Svarendar. Who is he?"

"Svarendar!  The Headmaster of my school; one of my first real teachers.  He helped me learn so much.  He's a dragon, probably the last dragon - the Queen raised him from an egg, back before she was Queen.  They worked together for several hundred years, but he eventually left her to found a school... I know they argued around that and they're still not fully made up, but they still aren't telling why."

Ira eye's practically sparkle with wonder. "A dragon! Wow! What does he look like? What does he sound like? What was learning from him like? What--" Her mood crashes into another case of (probably) 'the last', "Oh. Do you know what happened to the other dragons? Is it related to what happened to the elves?"

"He's so large, with sparkling green scales all over.  His foot's half as broad as his desk.  He puffs smoke from his nose when he's thinking..."

As she speaks, she sketches an illusion of him in the air with her magic, sitting back with his mouth half-open showing large teeth, and one forepaw raised in the air as if gesturing to explain some point.

"... We met in his office, usually; he'd hardly fit in half the classrooms.  He taught me so much about magic, and guided me through so much in the library that I don't think any other teacher really knew.  I thought he had so many advanced books in the library for himself, but he said they were really there for people like me - and he would always be there even when all the human mages were doing other things they thought were more important than teaching."  She chuckles a little.  "He never said they weren't more important; he didn't try to keep me when Queen Elethy accepted me as a Research Mage.  But then he never said they were either...  Toward the end, he was getting cryptic with me sometimes, but then he had his reasons.  I really did need to learn to work with other people more and explain myself better."

Her smile dips.  "What happened to the Elves... was the Last War.  They fought, with magic probably stronger and more intricate than anything we know today.  We don't know how; we don't know for a fact they killed all of each other at once then - Elethy and her brother was young at the time, and she was hidden away in the wilderness, or else she probably wouldn't have survived.  And what she did see of the war, she hasn't shared."

(Aeslin did see in the Queen's dreams once, an image of mountains blasted away while whole forests are twisted into weird geometry the eye can't grasp - but she knows better than to tell that to anyone.)

"So we have the tales of the surviving humans, passed down through generations.  Nobody we know of saw an Elf after that, save Queen Elethy, and her brother who died some time later.  We don't even have rumors.  Maybe some people saw a few dragons after that - but not much after, save Svarendar.  Of course, the world is large and magic travel isn't fast enough or common enough, so maybe somewhere far away?  But the Queen and Svarendar aren't even hoping anymore."

Ira nods once more. "He sounds like a wonderful teacher, and a wonderful person in general. I hope I get to meet him, and, if I do I look forward to hearing what he has to say."

She gets a distinctly thoughtful look on her face as Aeslin describes the Last War. "How long ago was the Last War?"

"About five hundred years.  It was about a hundred years after that before the Queen founded Suinel, depending on how you count the founding."

"I ask because, going from what stories my mother and grandma told, the Last War sounds a lot like how things were when they fled to the Pines? So, I'm wondering if it's possible some of them may have passed through it all that time ago. They're almost certainly not still there-- unless, maybe if they're in the cave-sleeper's cave? I don't know. But even if they're not, if they did leave, maybe they're still alive out there, and maybe the hearth could remember them, maybe even reach out and contact them?"

"Oh wow!  But - five hundred years?  How old are they?  Time would need to be different in your world - or the Hearth would need to be really good at healing magic and our theories about life-webs would have to be wrong - but wait!  You've got magic in your body!  That would change your life-web so much!  So if they have that too, maybe?"

"Who? The elves who maybe-- oh, my mother and grandma? My mother was a bit older than I am now when she died, I think, so maybe her early thirties? And grandma is in her seventies. But, I don't think either of them came from your world. But they came from different worlds from each other, so, maybe your world could have reached the Pines too, in the right conditions?"

"Maybe?  I wish I knew more about traveling between worlds.  I wish I knew anything about it."

Ira nods with a sigh. "Yeah."

She takes another sip of her eggnog and is quiet for a while. "I don't know if there's anything else you'd like to talk about? This all feels a bit sad." She considers it for a moment. "You mentioned that you discovered some kind of magic, I think? Something related to dreams?"

"Dreamwalking!  I cast spells on myself before I go to sleep, and then I can recognize I'm dreaming and walk into other people's dreams and change the dreams around and wake them up within the dream and talk with them!  I don't think you can do it yourself - it takes a lot of practice; I'm still the only person who can do it besides the Queen and Svarendar - but if we're still here tonight I could walk into your dreams...

"...and hey, why not stay here all day and finish studying this book?"

She thumps the large book she carried in, and then takes another large swallow of tea.

Ira nods with a bit of a smile. "It's not taking time from anything else! Do you think I could read along with you? I understand if that'd be weird."

Aeslin shrugs.  "Not sure if it'd work, but sure.  I can start again at the beginning if you want; I've got the time to study it again now..."

She takes a small notebook and pen out of a pocket in her skirt that didn't appear to be there till she put her hand there, and flips it open.

Ooh, magic pockets! But, Ira will resist asking about that now since there's a New Book to consume. She might order some food to snack on and maybe a glass of water once she finished her eggnog.

She won't be able to help herself asking questions as they read, but she will at least try and limit her questions to things relevant to the apparent topic of the book, rather than for endless background details and context. She'll just try and figure that out from what she knows and what the text itself says.

The book is A Comparative Analysis of Stored Enchantments, by a Finn Tirmorgan.  He's comparing various methods of storing magic and setting it to be released, with different techniques and in different substances and with different levels of initial magic over different lengths of time and in different circumstances.  Crystals are usually best in isolation, but under these circumstances different metals can do better, which (even apart from cost) is why the spellwagon trails are usually not made out of crystal...

If Ira's careful, she can also learn a decent amount from this about how the magic flows through your wand, and how much you can influence it in different ways. 

Aeslin is usually taking careful notes, but every so often she flips through several pages looking for something else, or ignores the book for a minute to stare at her notebook.

After a while, she orders some egg pie, and keeps reading while eating with her other hand.

Is there much difference between, uh, stationary and moving magic? Going from what Aeslin said about the spellwagons, it sounds like they're as much about moving magic around as they about storing it in any given location. Maybe that's one of the circumstances that makes metal better for them.

Ira will definitely be paying close attention for anything that seems even potentially relevant to her actual practice of magic, and might occasionally ask Aeslin to turn back a page if she happens to flip while Ira is focused on something she think might have some personal applicability.

Overall, it's a reasonably productive study session, probably, certainly so by Ira's standards at least. Even if time is frozen in their worlds, though, it's not frozen for them, so even if they aren't doing a lot of physical work, time passing will eventually encourage one or both to get some sleep.