Temperance composes a letter to send home explaining the concept of a printing press and then goes to sleep. She wakes up early and starts doing magic research on her own. Comparing what she knows and what the book tells her. She has a late lunch and then remembers to actually send her letter.
That done she sits in the library and proceeds with her research. She ate enough at lunch that she decides to skip dinner and wait for Kaede while reading.
"How does that thing keep running? Shouldn't it be expending an absurd amount of mana?"
"If it's extremely well-made and efficient, it wouldn't actually need that much maintenance mana after it had kicked off the storm, just keep the appropriate wind and temperature and pressure patterns more-or-less stable, but that'd require knowledge of magic and fluid dynamics way beyond what we've ever had."
"Are you sure there is no way to recycle mana? Or that maybe there was a second predecessor civilization..."
"Let me rephrase: it's entirely possible the civilisation before the War who built all those insane artefacts had such knowledge, it just did not survive if so. And yes I'm quite certain, mana is finite, and if I'm wrong that will be—no, I'm just not wrong, the world would be too different if that were the case."
Snuggleflight. Terrible, bitter cold.
Night falls, but it's not like the sun was ever visible at all from within that storm anyway.
There are more of them! And they're converging!
It soon becomes obvious the magic is something like an enormous magic tree, only visible to the two metamancers. There are tendrils in all directions, directly manipulating and feeding the storm; they witness one of them dissipate into nothingness, and another one extending in a different direction. This might be the single most efficient piece of magic they have ever seen by an order of magnitude.
"Well, should you two study it then? Also, any chance it's hiding something else? That looks like a lot of work for such a massive effect."
"Well, granted, then it'd take less time, but I'd have to spend mana to fuel my lifeforce or sleep a lot and—I don't want to spend more mana than I strictly have to. Because. We don't know when we'll see Sadde again."
"If we are going to destroy it... Can I have a few minutes to look at it... it is... it is gorgeous."
"—I don't think we should destroy it. Not yet. I want to—to understand it, to learn everything about it. We have time, these wards let us just cross the Storm, it's just boring not murderous—"
Felix puts an arm around both of them and rests his head on Kaede's shoulder and waits.
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