"Yyyes I noticed that."

"It's safe to be in the dream, because I'm in control of it, but I'm not surprised that trying to do magic to it turned out to be unpleasant."

"Well but I'm still curious about it."

"...?"

"I mean, curious from a—metamagic perspective. It's like—magic has this very aesthetic feeling and looking at it the way I am is like looking at a sculpture from below or something and I want to see more of it. Not quite but almost."

"Is there a safer way to do the thing you want?"

"Staring at it for a very long time. Or watching you do things with it."

"I could give you my language, if you like. I imagine that would qualify as doing something."

"Yeah I think it would. Weren't you gonna get mine, too?"

"Yes. I already am. The dream's translation is part of me; I absorb the language for as long as I'm talking to you. To give you mine I have to do something separate."

"Oh. And it's not—doing magic to me or something?"

(Is it?)

(Sort of. It's very - ambient, easy to miss against the backdrop of the dream itself; it transmits meaning between them via the medium of speech, and passively absorbs languages along the way.)

"I don't know what counts as doing magic to you."

"This does. I hadn't noticed it before. Huh."

"Well, here is what giving you a language looks like."

It looks sort of alarming, actually; nothing mundanely visible happens, but magically speaking the dream ripples alarmingly and—doesn't reach for her, exactly, because it's already as close as it needed to be—and touches her, and deposits a language, and withdraws. The mara never makes direct contact; Raiel is - sort of wrapped around it, like a glove, or a skin.

"That was kinda creepy and really cool," she says in the new language.

She smiles.

"What-all can you do with it?"

"With the mara?"

"Yeah."

"Constructed dreams are easiest. They're useful for communication, and as a memory aid, and as a meeting place where violence can be made impossible. But it's also possible to influence the physical world with a mara, although it's an under-studied subject because most people who try doing fancy things with mara get possessed and die."

"And you can do things like translation and language-acquisition in dreams, that's—that'd be terribly expensive with my magic, the second thing."

"Your magic seems to operate on different principles. Translation is a basic feature of dreams, and language acquisition comes along for the ride."

She nods. "What other stuff can you do?"