"Well, I could say 'with magic', but that doesn't seem like a very satisfying explanation... it would be a pretty trivial test, though. Approximately as easy as holding something up to a flame to see if it catches."

"Is magic just that inexplicable to nomages or does it just seem like a waste of time?"

"I could explain a more complex process more easily by listing the steps and explaining what it was meant to accomplish. For example, I could tell you that casting a spell with a staff involves channeling power through the staff. With this... well, imagine trying to explain how interacting with the material world works to someone who doesn't have a body. The explanation references senses and capabilities that the listener doesn't have, and there just isn't a way to get across what you really mean by 'picking up a rock', however much detail you go into about moving your limbs around. Except that in the case of magic I also have to explain it in a language mostly used by people who don't have magic either, so most of the ways mages talk about magic even to each other are limited by our insufficient vocabulary."

"Fair enough."

"It sounds like a depressing place to me. If no doubt full of otherwise hard-to-obtain information."

"I didn't find it so bad, growing up there," says Metella. "The problems are... less overt than they might sound. And the library is very nice."

"How do you not notice being kidnapped, that sounds pretty overt."

"Being kidnapped was actually a step up for me, but that's not a story I'm comfortable sharing."

"...Oh."

"In general, though, many children find their lives are more comfortable at the Circle than they would have been otherwise. Despite its many flaws."

"Materially comfortable or in some other way?"

"Materially, and - well, there's a sort of person who likes being governed by clear rules, however annoying it can be to the rest of us."

"How old are children when they're found? How do they avoid missing any?"

"It's usually possible to find them before anything too awful happens, but not always. Most commonly they're between six and ten when they first start showing signs."

"Signs like...?"

"Either they start doing uncontrolled magic - moving things around without touching them, creating localized temperature and weather effects, sometimes other things - or someone finds them using magic. But mage-finding spells like that are unfortunately not very reliable. There are a handful of children every year who get possessed by demons because the demons noticed them before anyone else did."

"Can spirits tell mages where to find mage children? I'd assume they were in as good a position as demons to notice."

"The nature of spirits and the Fade makes that more difficult than you might think. A spirit could tell me they saw a mage nearby, if they remembered, but they might not know whether the mage was a child, and they almost certainly wouldn't be able to give me any useful information about the physical location of the mage in the material world. And 'nearby' in the Fade is loosely related to physical location, but the correspondence is nowhere near close enough to navigate by."

"Oh."

"What would be the danger?"

"I'm not sure. I just expect that if it were safe and easy, I would have heard of someone else having done it."

"I have the impression that there are a lot of interspecies-cooperation-related opportunities that have been completely ignored."

"Still. I have an impression of how I might send someone, a dwarf or just a non-mage, into the Fade in waking life. I don't know if it would work, and if it failed it might be harmful, and if it succeeded I would expect it to be less dangerous than entering the Fade as a mage because non-mages can't be possessed by demons, but more dangerous than dreaming because it would be... less imaginary. Someone who dies in a dream wakes up again. Someone who died in this kind of trip to the Fade might not."