"The first five are almost certainly dead of old age by now but--the youngest one's still a baby--I have antimagic--"

"...antimagic?"

"Yeah?"

"That's - not a concept, here, I'm not sure what'd happen if you tried it. I can visit the old capital just fine, anyway, but the youth water works a dose at a time, I'd have to keep going back every half-century or so."

"She's half-Elf half-dragon, is a half-century how often you'd have to do it if she were human? Because elves and dragons both live a lot longer than humans."

"Yeah. Well, I suppose we don't know if our humans are your humans any more than our sorcerers are your sorcerers."

"How long do humans live, here?"

"A hundred years or so at the outside, without help?"

"Sounds about right. Elves live about five hundred years, and dragons--actually vary by subtype, but silver dragons can live up to two millenia if they don't force seventeenth-tier wizards to involuntarily experience the miracle of childbirth."

—snort.

"When I said he was an ongoing problem it wasn't actually the keeping me captive thing."

"...mm. Yeah."

"So now I get to hope one of the spellbooks I looted from his hoard both is decipherable and contains plane shift, I guess."

"Mm?"

"I don't actually have that one and would need it to find her."

"...that's not exactly the answer to my question..."

"...My magic comes in discrete spells that you have to prepare from spellbooks?" she tries.

"There we go. Mine - not exactly. D'you want the basics of magical theory? Luar seems to have gotten as far as 'sometimes there's torture' but I bet she didn't get into the details."

"She got as far as 'you can do tiny stuff without but need torture for anything bigger than I'm assuming the equivalent of a cantrip.' I would love the basics of magical theory."

"So - there isn't a word here for 'someone who can do magic' any more than there's a word for 'someone who has a nose'. Everyone can do the tiny stuff. You have to put in a little time if you want to figure out how, but you don't need to learn it out of a book or anything, it's safe and reasonably easy to figure out by yourself, just a little tedious. Light a candle, heal a pinprick, make a tiny ball of light - that general scope of thing. The other thing you can do with ordinary magic is make artifacts, like a magelight - " he gestures at one of the floating lamps hovering by the walls. "They usually don't float, that's just me showing off. One of those would take somebody between a week and a month to make, depending how good they were and how fancy they wanted it and how much time they put in per day. More than one person can work on the same artifact, though, and that's where things really start getting exciting. It took thousands of people almost a hundred years to build the first fountains, back in my grandfather's day. They built a lot of excellent things that way, but the fountains were the really important part. And then I came along and ruined everything, of course, which brings me to the subject of pain magic."

"Very different from what I'm familiar with," she nods.

"Normal magic is very safe and static. You'd have to get pretty clever to do any major damage with it on purpose; it's almost inconceivable that somebody might manage it by accident. Pain magic, on the hand - the most common result of learning how to do it is accidentally setting yourself on fire. Much more than a candle's worth. It's - active, it moves, if you don't keep on top of it it'll jump out and do something, and the thing it does is usually explode."

"I think wizardry is more like nonpain magic than pain magic. All my explosions are deliberate."

"Yeah. Well. I happen to be really good at handling power. Which means I'm really good at pain magic, probably better at it than anyone else in history, and I figured out how to do structured pain magic - things like spells and artifacts. 'Spell' is barely even a word anywhere but this mountain, because you can't really build one with ordinary magic, it won't hold still long enough without something to attach to. I was still figuring out the concept when I built my immortality, which is why a lot of the pieces are tied to the mountain when they don't strictly have to be. Pain magic is way more powerful than ordinary magic, but structures made with it tend to come loose after a while and start shifting around, or unravel completely and explode, and I really didn't want either of those things happening with my immortality. The best I could manage at the time was something that'll be fine as long as I keep feeding it more power. Since I was planning to torture people anyway, it didn't seem much of a hardship. All my other stable spells are built on the same foundation, more or less."

"...Wow."

I kinda wanna see if my antimagic works against your magic."