"I saw the daggers you had hanging off the rack back at the Academy. That was money."

"Nothing gets past you, huh?"

"If you really wanted to be stealthy about it I'm sure you could've."

"I do have a lot of money, yes," he admits with a shrug of his own. "But—well, I guess I want to say that my family has money. I don't use it very much. The daggers were heirlooms."

Aaaand he's from Morroc so the topic of family cannot be that comfortable. "Sorry."

"It's fine. Bottom line is, yes I can in fact pay for food."

"Good! I'm - well, not hungry, but excited to try the local cuisine. And I haven't found the conversation that goes worse over food, though admittedly I've rarely had conversations about the Maybe Sword."

"I'll do my best not to disappoint." He starts to lead the way down the hallway.

"So where were we, right, you'd just explained how your bizarre Light works. Are there any other Skills you haven't mentioned yet?"

"No, I funnel most of my potential into the channel for the Art."

"Right. Okay. Sure. Alright. That thing. Okay." He takes a deep breath. "Arik, tell me about the Art."

"So, how much do you know about koan? Like, 'if a tree falls and no one hears it, does it make a sound', that's the easiest one I know."

"Not. Or, I mean, I've heard that one before, but not the word koan, I'm not sure what the category refers to."

"They're... aids to understanding things that aren't meant to be understood. Generally the answer can't be expressed per se - 'yes' and 'no' are both wrong, about the tree question, even though it's one of the ones you can actually answer if you try, and they only get more complicated. Thinking about the question that's being asked leads you into an understanding of the truth it's gesturing at. In this case, I express it as 'it almost certainly makes a sound, but the sound doesn't matter in any real way to the rest of the world, and if it didn't make a sound we wouldn't know about it so we can't be sure, and thus both answers are meaningfully correct, which is almost always true of everything.' Which is one of the fundamentals of the Art. Nothing is really true and nothing is really false."

"...in retrospect this reaction was obvious."

"No, no, I'm not going to argue with the premise," he says, to himself more than anyone else, "it's magic, if it works it works. But, like, what, exactly, is it that works?"

"If it was true that I didn't have a knife," Arik says, flipping a knife into the air and catching it point-down, "I couldn't do this. On the other hand, if it was true that I had a knife," he says, plunging it into his chest and leaving the hilt in place despite the lack of any wound or blood, "then this would not be at all comfortable. The principle holds for other objects - I can be wearing armor, or boots, or iron knuckles - but a blade is one of the simplest things you can imagine. It cuts. Or, as you prefer, it doesn't."

He breathes in and out, and steps left to walk along the wall for a while. "If it were unconditionally true that down is that way," he says, pointing rightwards with his eyes closed, "I could obviously not do this. If I were definitely a solid object, I would be leaving footprints all over this wall and whatever paintings or other decorations it might have." (He isn't.) He hops back to the floor without missing a beat. "And there's some other tricks I think I might be able to manage at some point. I think I could grow or shrink, if I worked on the perspective issues that mess with me when I shift gravity. I could jump from unobserved place to unobserved place, if I were a little better at ignoring the evidence of my own perceptions. ...if I were really good, I could cut a mountain in half. I don't know that I'd want to. But I could."

"No, okay, hang on, I can't not argue with the premise here, whatever your mental states may be to do whatever it is you're doing mountains are big, they're not a matter of perspective, the amount of mana—"

"Oh, I'm not spending mana."

"What!!!!!!!!!!!!"

"Would you spend two decades perfecting a technique that lets you do half a dozen simple tricks the same way everyone else does them? My repertoire is not, objectively, that impressive. In most areas."

"Yes! Yes I would!!!! If it let me cut mountains in half through a trick of perspective—can you believe you can kill Surt? Can you believe that really, really hard? Hang on I'm sure there are books on mind control in the library maybe we could make you really really believe it—"

...okay that. Had. Not occurred to him at all as a possibility? It's probably not possible, but.

"Not how this works. I know I'm not doing a very good job of explaining it, but... not how this works. If it was, you'd know my mother by name, because she'd rule the continent."

"...right. Okay. But. Why is this not how it works, then? How is Surt different than a mountain?"