"I knew of them, at least - though I would attribute my success to... having immediately understood why the Midwife thought the prices Kyros could make her pay would be worth the consequences of wilfully neglecting to actively prevent her disciples from teaching outside the Empire, despite a treaty saying that she would ensure Life didn't spread to enemies of Kyros."

"Hmm, interesting, I wouldn't generally expect that to help," he says, scribbling a short note, "There's certainly correlation between sharing the attitude of the Archon and the use of their sigil, but all my data suggests that the causation goes the other way - mages become like their archons by using the sigils heavily."

"That's - odd.  I've noticed the same trend with other casters, but the way I approach getting my mind in the right state to cast a sigil has always been -

"Have you ever picked a lock?"

"From time to time." Hundreds of times, probably, but that's not something you just admit out loud.

The similarities between the two of them continue to be uncanny.

"I've always thought of casting as - not just finding the key, the moment where an Archon does something that ought to be impossible, but instead -

"Learning to understand the Archon-shaped lock well enough that you can trick the universe itself into believing you are one - in a somewhat-limited way."

"That's an unorthodox view of it, but it sounds like a plausible approach. That could definitely lend itself to developing more intuition than most generalists get... conversely, I'd expect it to make a lot of the more complex enhancements and accents harder to integrate. Has that seemed true?"

"I'm not sure I've any basis for comparison; I do - find that I have to lean on possible Archons, sometimes, rather than working with some known event, but that's an extension of the same principles that allow us to derive sigils from widely-believed myths.  And there's some accents that practically leap to the uses I put them - Lightning loves to carry effects like a knockback strike, that's an accent."

"Hmm. Inconclusive. In any case, there's plenty else to try once you've got Renewal more reliable."

She nods.  "Do you have a particular Archon who - mm, backs - this Sigil, or is it more like...Well, the Forge-Bound use the composite experience of craftsfolk as their Archon; is there something similar for Sages?"

"A composite of Archons, though the most basic ritual we teach - taught - the novices first invokes primarily the Oldwalls, and sometimes the Chronicle, to protect a book or shelf from time and decay. It's all consistent with Preservation not being an independent sigil, just a strange accent on top of Life and Vigor. It's not the simplest explanation, in isolation, but until we learned of the Forge-Bound's methods it was the accepted one in light of how everything else works that way."

"Teach," she gently corrects.  "Teach the novices."

"I'm not going to let the Sages die out if I can help it; the guild as was may have thought themselves to have more entitlement to power than they should have, at least under the laws of Kyros, but - I can't bear to see the things people more like you have made, all burn down merely because Rhogalus is a cynical ass and your leadership was blind and stubborn both.  I'll admit, I'm not sure what I can do that shall make a solution to the forbidden knowledge problem that lasts under Kyros' attention, but I do intend to try, when I can."

"...Had you not considered the theory of the Sigil of Force being the sigil of the Spires?"

"I doubt whatever survives will be more the Sages continued than it is reestablished. We could have bent to limit forbidden knowledge, but we didn't, and most of the survivors will be too stubborn to change now. We taught the novices that way; the new group will teach them some way, but probably not the same way."

"I had my Spire theory, but stretching to 'no Archon at all' was more than anyone thought plausible."

"Well, I hardly think 'limiting forbidden knowledge' is the route that would be worth walking anyway, compared to...

"Not...limiting the knowledge itself, so much as shaping the way it is generated and-or accessed.  ...For example, Fatebinders are given special dispensation to know some things; equally, there's holes a mile wide in the so-called Oldwalls ban, because the commonly propagated understanding isn't at all the text of the law."

"Anyway, enough thinking about things that absolutely aren't treason - The Spires are hardly Archons; I'm surprised the Oldwalls, being so greatly attended to, weren't also considered possible sources of Sigils."

"I've heard that in other parts of the continent, Spires have fallen, but not around here. Oldwalls wearing down and breaking, though, has happened in a number of places. And they form the boundaries of nations, lines between Tiers; the Spires are majestic mysteries. It makes them... still respected, but not as significant as an Archon. Also, of course, the Sigil of Force looks like a Spire."

"Yes, why is that?  ...Really, the question of how and why Sigils are the shape they are is one for the ages.  Especially with the Sigil of Stone breaking the rules we thought we knew - there was the precedent of Chaotic Descent for arcs, but a filled circle?  I'm not sure how that normally works."

"Not that surprising, there are accents that add a similar shape to the sigil - the difference between Stone and the greatest known version of the Accent of Limitless Boundaries is very subtle, they're both a solid circle within a ring. And of course the accents for accuracy and making targeted spells chain onward use small filled circles connected to lines. I think our sigil-discovery people have been using both as common potential elements for ages, even before any of us saw Earthshakers fight."

"In terms of why... well, they're not all obvious, but there's distinct similarities between sign and signified in many cases. Lightning, Stone, Frost looks a bit like a snowflake and I can sort of see a campfire in Fire. The Sigil of Terratus Grave looks a lot like a moonrise from further east, I'm told, which is odd considering that all its experts lived here. But other than the very abstract there's always some connection, if not necessarily one that you would have predicted in advance of learning it."

"Accent sigils are - fundamentally different in their construction, though.  You have grades of accent sigil.  You do not have anything similar for colors or expressions."

"Ah, details. There's a lot more accents and fiddly modifications than there are base sigils, it stands to reason they use more elements and have more variety. Even the colors are only mostly not confusing - Force, Frost, and Terratus are fairly close together. There's clearly a vastly larger space of potential sigils than there are ones we've actually discovered."

She waves that aside.  "I suppose that's true enough, though I think it's not particularly meaningful.  And - the colors aren't confusing, they're uniquely colored!"

"I won't say they're easy to mistake at night, but in full sun, it's three different shades of white and there's no way to tell which is which easier than checking the details of sigil and recognizing the core sigil underneath the shape and the accents. Or guessing based on who it is casting."

...This bemuses her.  "I have, admittedly, not encountered casters of that third sigil before - but I really wouldn't say I've ever had trouble with - even potentially confusing the other two.  Neither Force nor Frost are shades of white, to begin with, and - they feel different."

"Aren't they? Bluish white and grayish, certainly, but Frost is much closer to the white of daylight than it is to the pure blue Lightning makes. I imagine it's not confusing while using them, but identifying them from the visual display is far from straightforward."

"...Well if you're only looking at the color, I guess, but...

"It's not the whole picture even when you're only looking at a picture, let alone the admittedly relatively subtle feel of things when they're being cast.  ...Surely you can't mean to say that nobody else actually tries to pay attention to magic they didn't cast themselves...  Let alone the secondary resonances of those sigils, which - well they're also harder to spot from a distance, but I think the difference between sudden fog and - whatever it is that Force does, like looking through a raindrop - is still distinctive, even if the color qua color is still in theory hard to distinguish."

"Usually there's something more urgent to be watching. Not that you're wrong, there are other signs, but outside a classroom, if I'm seeing magic cast, generally I'm also evading some violence being inflicted on me, and often also trying to follow the movement and words of people around me to Chronicle it. Gaining a split second more to react before the spell fires isn't the priority often enough to practice recognizing those secondary signs."