"Then so shall it be."

She spends a moment recovering from the declaration.

"I believe next on the agenda is discussing a code with the Marshal, having supplies for two fists' travel, and then finally heading out to find the missing Earthshakers.  I'm inclined to have you work with Colus's squad on making sure we're supplied, Verse, while I take Barik - and possibly Lantry - to the Marshal to discuss the results of our experiment and what we might want to communicate."

"Sure, I'll talk with them," she says, then turns to the camp wall and raises her voice a bit, "You hear that, Ears? Meet me by the merchant stall."

Ophelia can't help but smile, in a way that would have been exasperation if it wasn't the fondness it was, as she takes Barik Marshal-wards, collecting Lantry on the way.

"How'd the meditation go? Movement work better?"

"Went reasonably well, though we're going to have to improvise a bit on the communications front.  I'm expecting it to be possible to encode enough concepts into martial drill that we won't need to contemplate injury code, which is good - and Stasis has a very distinct feel to it, which should allow signalling that it's time for otherwise-unscheduled communications, especially if both ends have someone who can cast it.  I don't know if there's anyone else in this camp who does Illusion or Preservation, though."

"It's not the hardest of tricks, but it's an obscure one dabblers wouldn't have studied, so that cuts down on those who could do it. I've never gotten it reliably, though I'm sure I could fix that with some dedicated practice. Well, some signal is vastly better than none. And no worries that it might be intercepted, either."

She nods.  "I find myself upon the horns of a dilemma as regards whether to bring you on this adventure, as another somewhat field-capable mage - but we should see if the Marshal has someone who can reliably cast Illusions, before seriously contemplating distribution of forces."

"I doubt she will. Even if they have some unguilded mages or imaginative Earthshakers, Illusion doesn't suit their style of war. Now, Force, on the other hand, that I can see a clever Earthshaker picking up, but if you're using Force-stasis, you might as well resort to simple injury, Force is a point-at-enemy sigil as I recall."

"Between a dagger to my leg and an equally harmful blunt impact that left me in stasis... Yes, I think I'd prefer the dagger."

"There's beneficial spells in that Sigil, too.  ...I wonder how it interacts with Haste, actually.  Assuming that it works at all; this is the first time I've heard you can do Stasis as a rider on Force spells, though you're the Sage."

"Is there? Huh. Well, I'm fairly sure they're compatible. Stasis doesn't actually work with Preservation, for some Kyros-forsaken reason, but there was some experimentation with it in the School, and that was with Illusion and Force. Well, we can ask the shakers here if any of them knows a beneficial Force spell and see if they can be taught."

"Haste is a very useful spell; if someone's the sort to study on their own initiative I'd hope they've learnt it.  Then again that's the first you're hearing of it...I bet they learn the spell that makes you not fall over, if anyone does.  Earthshakers would really have particular reason to do that, given, well, the difficulty of standing up in an earthquake."

"Huh, I missed that those existed. I remember hearing specifically that there's no Focused Intent Force spell, so... Guarded Form and Influential Domain? Those are usually tricky ones, but I can ask around."

"They are pretty tricky; I just think it's likely that a motivated Earthshaker would appreciate the synergy if they knew the latter spell existed.  Unfortunately that's driven by Proximate Action, for some reason - at least, the one I know of.  I have to imagine it's possible to get a similar effect in other forms somehow; there's enough - seemingly random things that are part of certain spells... - that make me think the sigil-form combination could be more a matter of custom than of particular necessity.

"I wish I could have brought some of my staff from my prior postings; I selected for keen minds.  The auditors even made particular use of what little Illusion I could teach them.  But those postings needed them more than I did - and furthermore, I had no right to ask of them their lives on this seemingly fatal errand.  To be a citizen of the Empire is to be entitled to freedom from hunger, hostility, and most importantly hopelessness, no matter Kyros's Right of Destruction."

"Yeah, that would've been shit morale, given the givens. Maybe we can peel off some Choristers, they're more likely to try magic that doesn't fit in a shieldwall. I've always assumed the narrative resonance makes it hard to split effect and form once they're a known pair. Like... what's the metaphor, trying to guess which weapon is most expensive. If it looks expensive and most people can't tell it's fool's gold, you should guess that one even if it's actually cheap. Once the spell exists, stories will be seen as close to it, even if they'd really better fit some other expression form."

"Not just shit morale, but - shitty as a person.  Anyway, the thing is, expensive by whose definition?  Notwithstanding that apparently fool's gold has iron in it.  But I've always thought of spellforms as - tapping a broad source of a myth, and then channeling that weight to a sharp point.  Narrowing the focus of the work, narratively speaking.  Haven't you ever tried invoking just a domain sigil by itself?  It's never felt, to me, like that does nothing.  Just that it's..."

She might need a second to think of a proper metaphor for this one.  It's - a pretty complicated intuition.

"The difference between...throwing a bucket of water at someone, and punching them.  Same sort of motion, really, but the water goes everywhere, while the punch is - more focused."

"Once or twice, yeah." (Mostly when he was stoned.) "That sounds right, but I don't see where you're going with it."

"Neither am I, but I think it's something like - no matter whether you're punching or kicking or using a blade, you can always choose where you're trying to hit.  And that's what most people don't bother with in effect determination.  I think.  Who knows, maybe it's Archon Weirdness.  I wouldn't be surprised, at this point."

"I've always suspected that there's a unified theory of magic, hiding somewhere, that connects Archons and Edicts and sigils and artifacts. Hell, maybe even Beastmen and the weird locks and keys you find in the Oldwalls. But everyone who looks too hard for it goes kooky before they get there."

"Or runs into Forbidden Knowledge, or Bleden Mark in a dark alley.  He does that.

"I'm not sure what would do Beastmen except some sort of - absurd husbandry program with the Orphan Midwife's Sigil or its ancient Oldwalls-era equivalent, really.  But what's always been the most confusing thing to me is the way sigils all have unique shapes.  How do they happen?  What makes the Orphan Midwife's sigil this," she swipes a pointing finger through it with a demonstrative poke to finish it off, "and not, say, this?", she waves the same finger through a lazy depiction of a womb, and pokes that too.  In case it does do something interesting.

"That one I've had a dozen arguments about. None of them remotely conclusive. They're all composed of very simple parts - straight lines, angles that are neat fractions of a turn, occasionally a circle or an arc of one, again in neat fractions. You never see, I don't know, a double-curve wave sign, even for the Tidecasting sigils. But why? There's a thousand explanations, and none of them seem the least bit convincing."

"Maybe it's something about how they can be validly constructed - maybe it's defined by something.  We know so little about the Spires, but they are the only inanimate objects associated with a freestanding Sigil, judging by how everyone and their brother independently discovered Force by studying them!  ...Huh.  I wonder if Kyros has anything to do with it.  And furthermore if there's - anything whatsoever - to do with how Cairn was struck with the Edict of specifically Stone.  Though that falls a bit flat with the Edict of Fire, and I'm not sure how you'd tie it to the Bladegrave - maybe to do with Stalwart having that famous sword; there wasn't an Archon.  ...But then why didn't he use Sirin?  Surely not fear...  I swear, I've more insight than I ought to into how Edicts work, and I still don't understand a lick of why."

"Kyros knows more than the rest of us, I'd bet heavily on it. Whether he knows the theory of everything... well, I wouldn't bet heavily, but better than even odds. I've done some research into Edicts and I never saw any pattern like that, though I do think Kyros picks them to be appropriate punishments, or at least ironic ones. I did find one fascinating fact about them, though. First, they get stronger over time. Ignoring the first burst of power, like the storm surge that crushed our friend Barikonen, the longer an Edict lasts, the stronger it gets. And - here's the kicker - the more that is written about it, the more strength they gain. I posit - and I can't think of any alternate explanation - that our fear fuels them. The more people tell the stories of Kyros's fearsome punishments, the worse those punishments become."

"...I am incredibly unsurprised by that claim.  I wonder if that's going to be true of the Edict of Stone?  Especially given that - it wasn't used as a hammer to break an impossible stalemate, so much as to slit the throat of a man dying a painful death before his death throes took out the rest of us.  If I might embellish dramatically, somewhat."

"I don't think there were enough samples of writing about the Edict that ignored the inciting offense to judge - even if I still had those to hand, which of course I don't - but I'd guess no. The Burning Library is probably a prototypical case - even if all the Sages die out, it will keep burning for centuries, and gain strength from that. I'd guess the majority of still-active Edicts are like that; the ones like Storms that expire when the target does don't last as long."