"Yyyeah no one knows what a mara is, and it would be—people would not be normally okay with using telepathy to talk like we're doing—but it might be safer than this mara thing...?"

"...if I learned your language in a dream then I would have a safe way to communicate with anyone who speaks it. This - telepathy - of yours is not a thing that I have."

"Right I meant I could help you with it but yeah I guess. What exactly is a mara?"

"They're the creatures that live in the nightmare realm. And when they stay in the nightmare realm, and humans stay in the physical world, the worst they can do to us is make our dreams very unpleasant. But sometimes they come out into the physical world, and then things get troublesome. —by which I mean that an unchecked mara will trap people inside itself, and draw on its victims to slowly gain power and intelligence while it searches for more prey, until someone stops it. But 'never unlock my mara' isn't a solution to that, because it will get free when I die, and someone else had better be able to deal with it when it does."

"—okay. Yikes that sounds horrible—how do they get out into the physical world, and how did you trap it?"

And okay now Kaede has some more idea what that terrifying thing in her is, can she maybe get some more detail...?

'Subtle, dormant, immensely powerful' is still the theme. It might be easier to see it if it was doing anything, but then again does she really want it to start doing things?

"Sometimes people call up mara to use them. They are very useful. But people who do that nearly always end up possessed. - if you have a mara and you lose control of it, it possesses you, and it can use your knowledge and experience while it goes on to do what mara do, much more easily than if it had just 'eaten' you; but it has a much harder time 'eating' anyone else, because it's anchored to your physical body; and it's possible, although very difficult, for a possessed person to regain control over the mara possessing them. I did not call this mara. I caught it. It came through on its own; they can do that occasionally, though it's much rarer than being invited."

"If I wake up while the dream thing is going on is that a problem?"

"You won't."

"—because I was thinking of setting an alarm spell to wake me up just in case but I could just be more elaborate and illusion us and muffle sound around us."

"...what?"

"I mean, we're basically in the middle of nowhere and I'm pretty sure nothing is going to disturb you, but the steps I would take if my goal were to minimise the possibility would be creating temporary spells around us that would make it much harder for us to be disturbed and for you to wake up if we are."

"—oh. No. The situation is not 'I will be asleep and it would be bad if I was startled awake'. The situation is 'I will be in control of my mara, and it would be bad if something happened that made me lose hold of it'. I'm very good at maintaining focus but it's still prudent to avoid sudden shocks and extreme stress while holding an unlocked mara. If we were likely to be interrupted by bandits or earthquakes or wildfires or anything of that nature, I would be more reluctant to bring out my mara until we were in a safer location."

"Oh. No nothing like that's gonna happen."

She nods.

"Apart from the inherent dangers of using a mara, a constructed dream is not any more dangerous than the normal kind. Transferring languages shouldn't take longer than a few minutes."

"...okay..."

"Hmm?"

"Unknown foreign magic that looks all menacing and stuff, I'm just—a bit unsure about it."

"I am not in an enormous hurry, if you want more time to consider. But I really do not want to rely on someone else for my ability to communicate in this world."

"...I don't suppose you could do some magic that doesn't involve me—just to—you know—"

"Just to what?"

"—be sure? That may be a bit hypocritical of me."

"...be sure of what...?"

"That it's not terribly dangerous and not going to eat me."

"...I can show you what it looks like when I have my mara unlocked, but I am not sure how that would help..."

"...so you probably don't have any metamagic taboos, do you."