Ky has so much reading to do. She's going to be trying to lead an entire crusade and right now she's still routinely caught off guard if someone mentions a species that lives over there and has strategic relevance, she doesn't know what spells exist, she doesn't know enough about how religion is practiced here. She's skipping between books in her range so fast it's almost like she's reading six of them at once, though it looks like she's just sitting in the aisle with her eyes shut.

One common misunderstanding, even among people who have lived their life on Golarion, is that only certain types of people can interact with magic; Clerics, aided by their god, wizards, after long years of careful study, sorcerers, drawing upon the power of their blood, and so forth, as though not interacting with magic is the default and each individual ability must be explained and justified. For most purposes this intuition functions fine, but it falls apart on sufficiently close examination. For instance - if the difference between a wizard and a commoner is training, does that not imply that they were previously just insufficiently skilled at using magic?

The truth is that to some extent or another, every living being on Golarion interacts with magic. The problem is getting it to do something useful, and it's this that practice can solve; practice carefully hanging arbitrary spellforms for later... or practice taking on the correct cadence of information to coax magic into the proper patterns. For some this takes the form of singing ballads, others chanting poetic histories, or for a rare few... well, the written word has a poetry of its own.


It's not really a new sense, not like her domain offers - casting a spell has a rather more subdued feedback. That doesn't mean magic responding to your will isn't noticeable.

- startling!

...well, her first instinct is to see if this matches up with anything written or drawn in the library.

There's not really any great correlation among scholarly works, since it doesn't match up at all with how wizards hang spells, or clerics or even paladins pray. What it does match most closely is the description of using song-sorcery in the gothic romance novels (of disputed factual accuracy) by Ustulavan author Ailson Kindler; once she has a hint of where to look, she'll find more references in collections of epics that relay the experiences of their cantor or interviews with opera singers about the feelings associated with a particularly brilliant performance that seem reminiscent.

- fucking awesome.

What does her new spell feel like? Can she correlate it with any shapes recorded here? She can also just cast it but so many possible spells aren't the sort of thing you'd wanna do in a library.

With any other spell, the details of its functioning might not be intuitively obvious, but for Kybele a spell for reading would be hard to mistake for anything else. It doesn't offer understanding, but perhaps that's just the kind of thing you have to figure out the hard way.

Eeeeeeee!

Is there... any magic to read... in this library, or does she have to go windowshop for scrolls. Oh, or she could ask Nenio. "Hey Nenio!"

Nenio looks up from their work, and there's a moment of blank incomprehension before something seems to resolve.

"Oh. Hello girl!"

"You have a spellbook, right? Can I see it?"

Asking a wizard, especially one who does spell development, to share their spellbook is a major faux pass. A spellbook represents a major outlay of capital to fill out and the source of all their power; if you want to see it, you usually carefully negotiate to pay for copying specific spells.

This is why it only takes a few seconds for Nenio to reply.

”Sure!”

"Thanks! I think I have a reading-spells spell. I think I'm some kind of song-sorcerer without the singing."

"Wait. Wouldn't that just make you a sorcerer?"

"That depends entirely on which model of sorcery best reflect reality! Classically, of course, that answer is correct, but it hasn't been the mainstream academic consensus since relatively shortly after Camellia of Eldir's theory of quintessence. Under that model, it should be possible to have someone with the same quintessence as a prototypical song sorcerer but with a variant method of channeling it, much like how some sorcerers can effectively use their magic even in the fits of rage. Such a person would still be 'just a sorcerer,' but only to the extent that song sorcerers are already 'just a sorcerer.' However, a number of more recent studies have found methodological flaws in her work-"

"Yes, yes. But given that sorcerer is already a really wide description and as a practical matter song sorcerer mostly just implies that you can do battle songs, that just seems needlessly confusing."

"Well, right now I only have the one spell, but I think I have to talk to do it. Talking I can do, but I'm no great shakes as a singer." She flips through the spellbook gently, without touching it except for the covers, and picks a spell that looks - friendly. "They say that dark Welexi's wings are crafted out of light," she murmurs.

The experience is quite similar to her sudden ability to read any language; one moment, the diagram seems like so much gibberish, and the next she can see it refers to twisting magic into a specific twisted loop that lets the resulting spell repair things. She can still see the actual markings and how they relate to the spell, which suggests that identifying a spell like this from it's diagram can be done without magic, but she gets to skip over that entire hassle and grasp the general use details at a glance. Once cast, it doesn't require any particular effort on Kybele's part to maintain, but it doesn't feel like the change to her perception is permanent.

"Eeee this is awesome. I should get some scrolls when I have more cash to hand."

"You could also make them yourself! Usually only wizards bother to pick it up, but anyone who can cast spells can learn if they try."

"Can you teach me?"

"That doesn't sound very interesting compared to doing science or using magic."

"You can't do science while you teach me to make scrolls?"

"I also thought that I could make scrolls while doing science, but it turns out to get good results on the most interesting experiments you actually have to pay attention."

"Well, what if the teaching was the science? You measured a lot of Iskander's physical abilities, but the only magic involved was his unique powers. Since Kybele can actually cast spells, wouldn't this be a good way to expand your research?"

"I've never taught anyone to make scrolls, so it wouldn't exactly be very useful information without a point of comparison. Capabilities data points in isolation are hardly science. Hmm, that would work though. I'd just need to teach you at the same time, other girl, and compare your progress."

"My name is Camellia."