"I mean, nothing on quite the scale of the Vallorn - recently there's the Cold Sun, that's why we've got half a dozen Thorns pacing us in the treeline, they might attack First Voice as they're going after cultural institutions and it's a music college. Day heralds, implacable insectoid fighters on suicide-mission orders. But they're very new and the Empire will probably roll them up in a few seasons.

None of the Empire's neighbours are particularly pleasant; you've got the Druj to the east, whose entire society is built around using fear and torture to keep people in line; the Thule to the north, who use magic to control their people, sometimes extremely directly; the Jotun to the west, whose society is built around achieving great deeds in combat; then the Faraden, who are obsessed with vengeance, the Suranni, who hate magic, imprison or kill all mages, and previously enslaved orc janissaries - I think they have now slaughtered them all, which isn't exactly an improvement; and to the south the Grendel, who have a society built heavily on slavery and the threat of sending your opponents to the salt mines.

Oh, and the Dry Patricians in the Brass Coast, I suppose, although those are also a pretty recent phenomenon they'll probably work out how to fix soon - that's the kind of thing that happens all the time though, an ancient group of immortal constructs got displaced by a big magical flood and is now causing a huge problem where they washed up."

"All of your neighbors sound thoroughly unpleasant as described. What exactly is a Thorn, what's the Cold Sun, what's the deal with Day heralds?"

"Oh, Thorn is just what we call our fighters - Navarr fighters, that is, they swear a specific oath and take after one of our historical figures, who was called Thorn.

The Cold Sun is an Eternal - its thing is 'purity', which it's taken to mean 'destroy all that messy squishy life form stuff that has cluttered up the world'.

Day heralds are just one of the kinds of heralds, usually mostly they're not very fighty - you get a lot of librarians and theorists - but Zakalwe has myrmidons and the Cold Sun apparently has myrmidons too. If you see something approaching with a blue insect-y face, yell loudly and try to make sure the Thorns are between you and it."

"Say more about Eternals? What's Zakalwe?"

"Another Day eternal, I'm not actually sure what he looks like, his thing is war and strategy? He's actually pretty helpful, he likes the Empire because we run our military planning out of a tent with a big map in the middle and do a lot of maths about it, and mostly at least someone is trying to do the efficient thing rather than the flashy one at any given time.

Eternals are very much concepts that sort of pretend to be people; they often have lots of different names and present themselves differently to different people. They can't actually come out here into the material world, same as we can't go into the Realms, so they have to work through heralds they send out to us. It's possible to meet them in in-between places, we call those 'regio pockets' because they are generally attached to a regio, a place of magical power, by a portal. One of the first things I thought of when seeing you is that the stream might have finally turned into an autumn regio and popped out a herald, but as I said, you're not acting quite as limited as heralds tend to.

I suspect, if you've never heard of them, that your world just doesn't have any regios."

"It indeed doesn't have any of those. I'm not even sure I can pronounce it."

"It's kind of like 'regions' but someone decided to make it fancy and magical by stripping some letters out - but that might not help..." Allegra very briefly trails off, and looks sad and unfocused - as if remembering a wistful kind of memory - before it smooths back away under her exterior projection of confidence. "Anyway, hopefully Eternals will not be very relevant to you - they're useful sometimes, they give out magical boons and they can sponsor rituals to do things that they can't otherwise do... possibly we should do basic magic theory, I don't even know if you'll be able to refine more mana, but if you can it would actually be useful."

"I would like to learn magic."

"Okay, yes, I should start with - usually how I teach magic to someone in an, uh, field-expedient way.

Ideally you'd have a range of magic items around and that would be much easier, but you ought to be able to do it with the mana crystal and the vital honey.

First you need some kind of casting paradigm. Runes should do, but any kind of symbol / concept mapping that makes sense to you can be made to work, as long as it covers roughly the same - concept-area. You need to be able to hold at least one of the symbols in your mind, and work out how you would relate it to the task of detecting magic. The more intuitive it feels, the more likely it will actually work. Once you've got it then you can get it down to a thirty second incantation, or a couple of seconds if you're over-powering it, but when you start out you'll probably be slower. Rituals take at least two minutes and you have to expend crystal mana to do them, you can't just cast out of your own power, they might actually be easier to invent but not with that little supply of mana.

Then you need to be able to reach out with that and feel that there is magic in an item. Mana crystals project the general idea that there is magic in them all the time, so you should be able to get the correct feeling by handling them, but they're no good for learning the right mental motion to detect it in other things because they're too loud - pretty much anyone can feel they're magic without the need to actually cast the spell correctly. 

That's where the vital honey comes in - it's not ideal because you already know it's magic and Spring magic, so you can fool yourself into thinking you've got it when you haven't. The glowstones should also be detectable but they're very faint, sometimes even I have trouble picking them up, so not ideal to start on.

Generally if someone doesn't get it immediately, I recommend meditation - do you have that? Breathing meditation to get started, mantra meditation if breathing doesn't work for some reason, then mindfulness meditation focused on the mana crystal. That often gets people who are going to get it spontaneously to work it out, although often they then come up with their own paradigm and are a pain to re-teach in one of the standard ones so they can cast with a coven - but you won't have that problem, you can establish whatever you get hold of.

You also don't have the resources to do the other basic motions - creating a bond with a magic item or between egregore-bonded people, operating a portal.

Other standard spells, other than the weird ones, basically come in healing and fighting, and then of course lots of complicated edge cases but those are probably going to be harder to find from first principles. Fighting ones need an implement, basically whack a crystal onto a stick and it will probably do the job; spent mana crystals are ideal, but anything that is vaguely similar should work. Putting energy through an implement can throw people away, stop them in their tracks, break an object or mess up someone's body, either to stop them doing anything complicated or make them die much more quickly if they get injured.

Healing comes in your standard 'accelerate what the body was doing anyway', fixing limbs, fixing poisonings, and I guess speaking to recently dead people is a similar thing.

I'm hoping by having an idea of what is possible, you might be able to get there one day, even if you don't spontaneously generate the ability to do magic in the next half hour. Which is possible, and if you think you're going to manage it, aim it at me - either you'll pick up the magical effect on me, which will probably be easier to spot than anything else we have on hand, or I'll be able to let you know what you are doing."

"My ability to take notes longhand while also walking is almost nil so I am probably going to need you to repeat most of that. What kind of concept space does my paradigm need? Is there a reason it can't just be, like, words?"

"Words have meanings. Generally an individual word has too many or too few. Words are an important part of shaping magic, but it needs a very strong, very - itself - kind of concept set to work with.

So the runes all have one very resonant quality - Weakness, for instance, or Revelation - and then can also stand in for a wide variety of concepts tangentially related to that quality.

The constellations are all linked to a fundamental law of the universe - things bleed, things reproduce, things change and transform...

The dramaturgical personae and stages are all concepts that have been etched on the world through centuries of playwrights - the Fool, the Beast, the Captain, in the Counting-house, the Battlefield...

I'm hoping some examples will help tease out what I mean, I'm normally working with someone who has at least heard of one of them.

You can just invoke the Eternals directly by name as a set of concepts; the Highborn use paragons and exemplars; and there are a variety of musical methods," her tone wavers very slightly, as if she does not have good associations with musical methods, "that I've never been musical or mathematical enough to understand, I'm afraid.

And there's blood magic, which is the closest to really just directly asserting your will over the whole process without a fixed concept set, but you do absolutely have to be bleeding at the time, which puts a lot of people off it."

"How many concepts are we talking about here?"

"Runes are... twenty-six, I think, although there are a couple of edge cases like the empty rune.

Constellations, less than twenty in the common set, some people add a few more.

The others I'm less sure of, but generally less than thirty and more than a dozen? Some of the... musical methods... are more continuous, like blood magic is."

"So there's not a specific set of concepts underlying the magical reality that you have to use, you just - impose one?"

"Essentially, yes. It appears to help if it lines up with, I suppose, the well worn paths in reality that other people have put together, but there's nothing stopping you from devising a new paradigm.

This is just for the structure, though - what you can do with it is much more well defined.

Mostly that's along the lines of the resonances and dissonances of the Realms - once you're trying to do anything complicated or that you want to be more than instantaneous, it has to be aligned with a Realm.

There are also fundamental rules of magic, which I haven't had to think about for a while now... The rule of essence is possibly the most annoying, things have a essential nature and it's very hard to go against it. You can't change a person into a frog, or make something from nothing, or return a dead person to life.

There are also laws of scale and boundaries - regions of the world have set magical boundaries, they're often conveniently following rivers or so on but they are very hard to shift, even if you shift the river - and magical workings have a natural size and duration, which you can push around a bit but it becomes increasingly expensive."

"...so, uh, I'm not actually sure what's different in kind between making something out of nothing or turning a person into a frog and any of the things magic can do, please elaborate? Also what's up with Realms and alignment therewith."

"A few things magic can do: Turn a corpse into a pile of leaves or mushrooms. Enable an army to cross the entire Empire in one season. Let someone with no training use a bow effectively. Change what lineage someone looks like. Improve the luck of a trading fleet. Cause the local vegetation to go on the rampage and attempt to tear down fortifications and kill people. Erase a memory of your choice. Entirely rewrite your personality, with your consent.

I don't know if that's a useful list? Each Realm has its resonances, things it's good at, and dissonances, things it's bad at, I could go through them next? I'm not convinced I can remember them all but I can give you the general idea."

"Enabling the army in terms of supply or travel speed or just combat utility enough that they can cut down obstacles...?"

"I believe it helps logistics, navigation, little coincidences that make everything go more smoothly, which add up to better travel speed - they fight slightly worse at the other end because they've over exerted themselves a bit getting there, but unlike if an army that doesn't specialise in that tried to do it, they don't miscalculate and get stuck or arrive late."

"Is that many applications of magic or somehow all one thing?"

"That is one thing - it is a very large Autumn ritual. Autumn has resonances with travel and subtle manipulation of probabilities, especially around logistics and business, so it draws on those."

"And the other seasons?"

"Spring is life, in a very literal natural sense - growth and plants and diseases and poisons, predation and savagery, healing.

Summer is - strength and glory? Martial strength, endurance, very straightforward or at least very dramatic and flamboyant.

Autumn is travel, and commerce, and business dealings - including the kind of treachery where it's nothing personal.

Winter is hunger, and sacrifice, and the last resort, the desperate hanging on kind of endurance, and death and endings.

Day is knowledge, revelation, information, being a giant nerd...

Night is emotion, intuition, most of the complicated mind affecting stuff and illusions, trickery for the sake of it, mysteries.

Obviously there's a lot more to it than that, but that's what springs to mind immediately."

"Interesting. And the runes are more specific than those?"

"Kind of, mostly just because there's more of them. Some of them are more usually associated with some realms than others, like Weakness is very likely to be used with Winter. 

The paradigm - like the runes - is how you control the magic. The Realm is how you power it. Both of them together turn into the effect - although it's very difficult to just do it off the cuff, most rituals take a couple of months work and burn through a significant amount of mana crystals to get an inefficient first draft version, then a whole college of magic takes at least a season to turn that into a polished, repeatable version.

Once that has been put together you can use any paradigm to cast the same ritual, though."