"It is related! It's really weird actually, but light changes direction when it goes through anything that's not air! If you could hold water utterly still in just the right shape, you could make a lens just like my looking glass. Unfortunately, actual glass tends to be a bit more cooperative, and even then it takes extremely careful work and lots of polishing."

"...I will have to try that. Fine control is hard, but-" she traces a quick sigil, and (most of) the beer in an idle mug rises into a perfect sphere, shifting but only slowly. "This was a standard training exercise in the School of Tides - keep it as still as you can."

"Amazing! I'll make you a guide for some neat shapes to try later! Maybe you can start fires with water, make the sun 'look' bigger to a piece of wood basically, that would be positively elegant."

"Huh. That's a strange thought." She drops the ball into her own mug, and takes a sip.

She jots down the ideas so far- Lens shapes for Eb's water (what's the refractive index of water??? -test this) And glass-making to make spyglasses for people. Teach optics.

"Well, a lot of these things will probably be easier somewhere I can make my workspace. I can also alloy iron into better forms of iron- Steel, if you get things just right, and with other things adulterating it with other things to get desirable properties. Especially if you have any cast iron, which you might not, the forge-bound are really good at their work actually."

"They're fascinating. I asked one, and he said they can feel the impurities in the ore while it's molten, and simply - push them aside, like a winemaker would filter the seeds out of his crushed grapes. No one else has worked out how to get a block which is pure enough iron to be usable, and I'd have won quite a few bets back in the Citadel if I'd had your proof it was possible without magic."

"I ought to learn how magic - not how it works necessarily, but what it looks like, the shape of it, like I know the vague shape of weather and water and the sea and politics, so I can think around it usefully. Right now I'd be approximately as surprised if you said you could - conjure water from nothing or turn someone into a toad or lay a curse upon their bloodline or make a plant bloom in winter or make yourself invisible..."

"Oh, the Forge-Bound are strange even as magic goes. Well, not as strange as Archons, but they're a whole school focused on a specific type of ritual magic, and barely any sigils involved. Most magic is - invoke a concept that comes from a past Archon, trace their sigil in the air, add a second sigil for the type of effect you want, maybe one or two other accents to modify it, and if you have the right idea in mind, it comes out roughly the same as every other time you invoke that set of sigils. Specialize in one or two sigils and you get an intuition for them, and can work out rituals that are bigger, broader effects, maybe cover a whole town and last a whole fist. I don't have many of those tricks, my school were generalists, though I have one or two healing and repair spells that aren't strictly the pure sigils. I could list sigils I've seen?"

"-So mostly personal effects and short-term unless you're an Archon or an expert?"

"Almost exclusively. A big group working can put something a little larger together with a bit of research - when Kyros was besieging Ascension Hall most recently, the Sages they'd recruited worked out how to cover a whole wall with a Preservation effect even against constant Earthshaker opposition, and that's beyond what normal sigils can do, and they weren't very senior Sages. But pushing the limits is tricky even then - one of them died and the spell failed, and the rest died from the energies lashing back on them. Even Forge-Bound get that, actually, if they strike their hammers wrong they can immolate from losing control of the ritual; they consider it a good death, like warriors dying in battle."

She pinches the bridge of her nose. "A 'good death'. Bah. Meaning deaths that occurred during socially-recognized-as-virtuous situations. Dead is dead, the only difference is whether we think they were a hero or a coward afterward."

"While I will certainly sing the praises of cowardice, I admit that starting to fall apart in my old age has made me a bit more sympathetic to the 'go out with a bang' argument."

"Dammit, now I'm thinking about this shit again. How most everyone I knew is dead and all, and I can't even- Religiousify about it because it was all lies! Well, is leaving a good reputation worth losing five years, ten? I guess? There OUGHT to be a way to keep it, some snails and crabs and sharks supposedly live for centuries but I've never been much of a DOCTOR at all even if medicine gets lumped into 'engineering'! More a 'replace it with iron' kind of doctor than an actually useful one!"

"Oof. I lost my family, and then again, but... Not that bad." Archons don't die of old age, or any other peaceful way, but this doesn't seem like the time to say so.

"I have not missed the implication," she says in Kohl's direction. "Also, the last of my appetite is now gone. I'm done here if you all are, since I'm sure I'll be able to buy better armor later than here and now."

"You surely will. Fine, let's get going."

Everyone gets back on the road, looking fairly calm; this is a peaceful corner of the Tiers, for the time being, armies deployed elsewhere and Court protection nominally just on the Spire and hall but loosely around the backwoods as well.

It's about a full day's march, so they'll probably stop on one of the villages along the Matani River, which rings the valley. Plenty of places will rent rooms.

Waltana stoically does not complain but will definitely collapse into her room almost immediately if nothing stops her.

Then she will miss some evening conversations, and then they will be back on the road in the morning.

"Sleep well?"

"Tolerably. As you can guess, I'm not used to marching. And then I wake in the night with an Idea."

She hands Eb a curved disk of wood. "If you can hold water in this shape precisely, it ought to slightly magnify what you see through it. Hopefully."

She turns it over in her hands. "Well, I'll have to try it. Won't get it right while we're on the march, too much jostling, but I'll see how close I've got when we stop."

"We can slow the pace if you'd rather, we're not in any great rush."

"Do you suppose being a tad grumpy affects my work when we get there enough that I ought to value my comfort over speed, considering that getting used to marching is also valuable? The greatest crime of optimization is not thinking about it, so I'm actually not sure, I'm genuinely wondering. Good first impressions are certainly a thing to make..."

"I doubt it will do any good to push hard on speed if you're not used to walking this long. Maybe not ever; drilling quick march is worth it for armies, but Lantry slows us down on the march and that's not worth trying to change."