She takes it he doesn't consider her country an exception to the rule. It's not the time, though. Some future dinner. "I will look forward to hearing about how."

And to Alfirin, as she departs, there's just the necessary acknowledgement for when Alfirin has intervened on an error of hers, that Alfirin is clever and Iomedae grateful. It's wordless, by now; they can read each other well. 

Iomedae does not usually get a smile, for that, but Alfirin has been in an uncharacteristically good mood for the last sidereal day and it shows.

He's very confused about where in their relationship trajectory these two are but it would be much too awkward to ask. 

The two of them can plane shift to the secret demiplane, then, to keep sharing braindead-god plans and start thinking of ways to shatter prophecy.

"...So, do you have the spells? Minor prophecy, et cetera? Do they give different results in your time or just not at all?"

"They don't stabilize. That was something I wanted to test, actually. I'm curious if there's something structurally different about minor prophecy when prophecy obtains – that is, if the spell is interacting with some feature of the metaphysical world we can identify and study." 

"They don't stabilize? That's fascinating. I would have expected that they'd stabilize and then just - not give any results, or give useless or garbage results - Can you prepare one from your spellbook while I watch? Just to confirm that that's what's going on, and not just that you got a defective version or something - "

He can do that! And – 

"It works! Oh, that is interesting."

"How incredible.

- So with spells we can make prophecies but I don't currently know of a way to directly observe Prophecy as a whole, see how different prophecies interact with each other or with underlying conditions - It is true that this plane interferes with prophecy, the spells make much much worse predictions here, and can't prophesy events outside of the plane, nor have I been able to prophesy anything happening inside this plane from outside it - but it was very slow figuring that much out, so maybe our first order of business should be developing more spells that can, perhaps, observe Prophecy without tapping into it?"

"Oh – hmmm – yes, I think I see how we'd begin to go about it. It's a good thing that prophecy works here, just – isolated from everywhere else. It might make it easier to identify what we're looking at. But, here give me something to predict, I want to see it working." 

"It's hard, it doesn't like little things, but - here, prophesy the ultimate fate of this rabbit." She pulls one out of her pocket and sets it in the air.

"Do I really need prophecy to predict the fate of you and rabbits?"

"Oh am I still using rabbits eight hundred years from now? Uh - the spell should give you some specificity, about how I'm going to kill it."

"...I don't kill all of them, you know, but it's hard and a little cruel for a rabbit's terminal fate to be determined in this plane if it's not dying quickly."

(The rabbit, who is presumably used to experiencing "gravity", is pretty freaked out at the moment.)

"How minor is minor, exactly? Could I use to predict research outcomes?"

"I haven't tested extensively myself, since you can't Prophesy your own fate and I've done most of my research alone. My understanding is that it's sometimes useful for ruling out entirely fruitless avenues of investigation, but results more specific than 'This person will labor hard and find the answer they seek' are rare. Possibly because most wizards are fools who wouldn't actually do the research once the prophecy has told them what result to expect."

"Alright. Rabbit it is, then." 

And an image coalesces – like flipping through the pages of a book – like waking up from a dream – like weaving – 

"You're going to wring its neck. Oh, that feels strange." 

"Mm." she says, doing so.

"I'd not quite finished forming the intention yet, so that one might've been a bit self-fulfilling. Wasn't expecting you to tell me, and I was curious how well it would predict choices I was going to make, instead of ones I'd already made."

"Say more about the strangeness?"

"It's not like any other divination I've cast. It felt like touching something – larger. Deeper. I do think there's an underlying structure, there, and I think we can get at it."

"Anything else?"

"I see why people wondered act of predicting the future causes it to be set – yes, I know that's a live debate, and no, we never did settle it." 

"Not totally set, prophecies can be broken, but yes, it's a live debate the extent to which they predict vs. enforce events."

" I was curious if there would be anything that stood out to you more, being from a time without prophecy, but it sounds like you were mostly noticing - normal, known features of prophecy. Does augury still work, in the future? There's a bit of prophecy in that but I think there's more to it -"

"Augury works. Though it might work differently, it's hard to say."

"Yes, I expect it does work differently, but - it still stabilizes? Can you describe how it works, maybe we can infer something from what's different - I suppose you'd never have cast it - "

"No, but I know what it looks like – here, I can show you – "

"Aha, that's - very good, my own illusions are kind of garbage - well, relatively." She will sit back and watch Élie's demonstration.

"...Huh, look, go back a bit - so this is where the prophecy component would be and it's just - not there - but then this whole part which isn't even directly prophecy-related is just - hanging there - and it looks like it doesn't do anything anymore just because it's not attached to the rest of the spell right - and this bit's changed, I'm used to seeing it with another prophecy hook here but now it looks a bit more like a... commune? Let's get this recorded, I want to show you the version we have now, it's different from this, but I want a record of what the future version looks like before I bias it any more - "

"Huh! Did it not always look like commune, it essentially is a poor man's commune – at least the modern version – and I think I see why prophecy spells don't stabilize. It's – so, a hook is a good metaphor here, you can see the same structure in minor prophecy, like so, and I think it wants a a counterbalance. There's something it's hooking into, and without it, it can't hang."