"Metaphorically?"

"She's probably existed at least as long as the world but I don't know if that's forever or just a really long time," he says. "But I'm not sure there could be a world without the Moon Queen and the Sun King. Maybe a world, I guess, but not this one."

"My world, to my knowledge, has neither."

"What's the sky like?"

"We have a sun and a moon. They rise and set, and the moon has phases. There are stars. The sun is the same kind of thing as the stars, just closer, and the moon is the same kind of thing as the planet, just smaller and less lively."

"Weird!" he says, impressed. "What's a planet?"

"A very large ball of rock, with stuff on the surface. My species lives on one; it's called Earth. What are we standing on?"

"We're standing on the ground! The ground's not ball-shaped, it's just flat. It goes all the way to the edge of the world, only in most places it's under the ocean when it gets there."

"I see. How does the edge of the world work if you sail that far?"

"It sort of fades out slowly and if you go out too far you disappear."

"Oh dear."

"People go out to the edge sometimes - just sort of to see what it's like, you know - there's places where the land goes that far and somebody's dug a line in the ground where you're safe if you don't step over it. It's weird. Real quiet. Like there just stops being sound."

"You've gone?"

"Yeah." He shuffles slightly on his perch. "Once or twice. - Hey, what is this contraption, anyway?"

"It's a wheelchair. I'm not very good at walking, so on surfaces suitable for rolling I do that instead. This isn't really such a surface."

"Oh, neat. Kind of like Charm's wings. - Charm's one of my squadmates, she's a fox, and she was tired of not being able to fly, so we made her some wings."

"Cool! How did you do that?"

"Oh, you know, when a spider weaves something for you personally it's got some magic in it - I collected up a bunch of shed feathers and Snowfall used her silk to weave them together into wings that Charm can put on and take off whenever she wants, and when she has them on she can fly like a proper owl, it's amazing."

"I actually don't know, where I'm from humans are the only species of person."

"Wow! Well, okay, now you know the thing about spidersilk!"

"Now I do! What other things have magic?"

"Oh, lots, I wouldn't even know where to start - starmoss glows but you've probably noticed that - owls don't have a thing like spiders do but we get little things of our own sometimes, mine is always knowing exactly where I am, it's real useful. Um. The fey all have stuff, obviously, but I guess that's not obvious to you if you don't have fey, even though you look sort of fey yourself. More fey than anything else, at any rate. Do humans have a thing?"

"To my knowledge no humans have any magic! In fact, as far as I'm aware, Earth doesn't have any anywhere, not even moss! What do you know about where you are, exactly?"

"- I'm not sure how to explain it besides 'where'. Like... if your friends put you in a bag and dragged you around for hours, you'd come out lost, right? But I come out just as un-lost as ever. It works even if I'm asleep. I always know which way and how far to anyplace I've ever been."

"So relative to places where you already have your bearings," she says, "not, some coordinate system, or the name of the location, or something like that."