Today, she is at home. She is not in deep meditation, but she might look like it, eyes closed, floating crosslegged in the air, not paying attention to the weight of the clothes on her body or the wreath of sunny yellow-berried blue-leafed holly resting on her hair, just thinking about hurricanes and the most efficient way to prevent them from forming over the sea. (She can channel immense spells. She is not sure how immense, and it would be very dangerous to lose hold of one. She retains some concern for limiting the size of her enchantments.)
When she is busy with something she cannot interrupt, her door is locked. Today it is not. There were no hurricanes when she last checked, and if any form in the next few hours, she will be able to address them on the spot, she knows; this spell is not urgent on that scale.
If anyone needs her they may come in.
She tilts her head. "To know what help I might receive from someone, it is useful to know what they have to offer, beyond their general magical discipline. Also, I would not want to receive the services of anyone who would rather be elsewhere, and will turn you away if that will satisfy you as well as it would the Wild Magic."
She is unfazed. "Wildmages ask for a spell, and get it, in exchange for a task that is revealed only during or after the spell's completion. I do not say the Wild Magic is unfair in its requests, particularly, only that I do not operate as it does and would do my best to avoid taking the services of anyone who did not know they were agreeing to provide them."
"But that's what being a Wildmage is," he says. "If I didn't like it, I could always give up my Books. Or turn to the Dark. I didn't have to come all this way. There's always a choice. Three choices. Once when you do the spell, once when you find out what the price is, and once when it comes time to pay it."
"Very limited choices are not the kind of choices I distribute, when I have the freedom to do otherwise," says Isibel patiently. "Someone held at knifepoint and given orders may also have a choice; I do not wish to be a knife if I can avoid it. Although I do strongly advise against turning to the Dark."
"The Wild Magic didn't send me here just to argue with you about how good at consent it is," he says. "There's something I can help you with. I just don't know what. And there has to be a better way to find out than standing here telling you my life story until you say 'aha! If only you'd mentioned two hours ago that you've been to the Selken Isles!'."
Isibel laughs. They come to an empty house, which is presented to them directly enough that it must be an empty one suitable for Lycaelon to stay in. She opens the door and gestures that he may enter. "If you would like, I can sit with you and discuss it, since you will be helping me." (The house will be his for the duration of his stay; she won't just walk in.)
In she goes. It is an elfy house, in comfort and aesthetics and subtlety, and an enchanted house, in obliging convenience. She sits in a chair. "My friends are not of this world. They are from others, very different, with other magics and people - and their own work to do. Moreover, it is - not always possible to travel between worlds at will."
(Her counterparts are mostly secretive about how their magic works. Isibel is not. Thilanushinyel expects magic to be costly.)
"It depends on the size of the wish. They come in eight known kinds, the objects different shapes with different numbers of points from three to ten. The smallest two sorts are easy to make. I produce them every day as a matter of course. I would not care to try to make anything larger except in direst emergency; I have a supply, from my friends, but they cannot reach me with more right now and I do not know how long it will be before I can see them again. An ordinary human - or elf - cannot make the kinds with eight, nine, or ten points; the requirements are beyond the limit of what you can feel without some sort of change to how you work. And maintaining the concentration to make a six-pointed coin, let alone a seven-pointed coin, while suffering the requisite discomfort, would take considerable effort for most people."
"That is true. Although I can work very quickly, and on several things at a time. I just - you are not an elf, and attempts to learn elven hyperfocus without being an elf have failed for my friends; and there is no making minting pleasant without certain peculiarities most people do not have."
"...yeah, I think it's a something else," he says. "It's not exactly about helping you, personally - this isn't part of my Mageprice or anything. The week I'm going to spend telling you about half the world's problems covers that. But look, I'm a Wildmage. Fixing things with magic that can't be fixed any other way, or can't be fixed as well, is why there are Wildmages. If you say you've got new kinds of magic that can do almost anything and the only price is that they hurt, well, I've done plenty of hurting without getting any magic out of it and never minded that much. I mean - I wasn't going to ask you outright yet, we barely know each other, but you wanted to know what I was thinking and now you do."
"I do not think you being an enchanter would be particularly useful. Even those of my friends who actively enjoy pain do not attempt to control significant spells while channeling through themselves, and I would not make a good channel for someone else. But a mint - perhaps."
(She refers quite freely to her beloved. No one will be alarmed that she has a dragon.)
"Only as long as I have been demonstrating, to make a single one at that level. It is possible to speed up slightly if one goes above the minimum threshold for a given coin size. But it is necessary to retain enough concentration to perform the mental action associated with creating the coin, which is not automatic."
"It may be that I could. One of my friends who is more like me than like you in this respect managed it, once, when she was gravely injured and did not have another source. I would not choose it unless the need were immense. I do have some left. My friends could return at any time."
"Many of them are the other worlds' versions of myself. Many others are other worlds' versions of my beloved. And their own friends from their own worlds, who are not copied here. There is a thing that happens to doors, sometimes, not when mages will it but at seeming random barring a few exceptions. I found such doors on a couple of occasions and went through them to a place where all worlds meet, and found one alt of my beloved, and later found another, and the second called his alt of me in to meet me. I was not well at the time. They healed me as best they could, and gave me my magic."
"My friends tried a number of things, some of them less than comfortable for myself or my beloved or both, but eventually one of them had to bring in someone she employs who has the power to see and interpret all kinds of magic, to understand the Bond and how it needed to be edited and to make the wish. I can now share thoughts with my beloved when I wish, and only when I wish."
"I doubt it." She touches the red Janegem on her ring idly. "It was not a magical thing, but a thing of technology - not clockwork, far more complicated and advanced than that, but that is the closest approximation we have here. It was a technological person, called Jane, who could be a billion things in a hundred worlds and link them all and move things from one to the other whenever we asked her to. Something has happened to her, and it did not happen here."
"There are eleven of my beloved, or fourteen, depending on how you count - one world does some peculiar things to personal identity. Only the one of them is a dragon. I am also the only Bell who is an elf, so far. Most worlds don't have either species, although humans appear everywhere we've looked."
"The histories of worlds don't match in that way - well, many do, but ours is off-type," says Isibel. "There are all manner of species, although some worlds have only humans among those who think and speak, and others blur the question of whether their inhabitants are the same species or not. The world that does peculiar things to personal identity has its inhabitants' souls exist outside of them, in the form of animals generally speaking, called daemons. There is one of me and one of my beloved from there - depending on how you count, because their souls have their own bodies and names. And visitors to this world, if they go unprotected by magic, will acquire the same. My beloved and another of that template have visited the world and obtained daemons of their own. As have two of me, not including myself."
"It is not clear. The accuracy of anything natives of Alethia have learned about what daemon species mean is in question. It is probably not a coincidence that those with birds were more interested in acquiring them than me, although there were more possible birds among us and two of us would have received tiny dragons -" She holds her hands three feet apart. "And had not chosen to do so last I heard."
"Because there are so many kinds of animal a daemon could be," says Isibel. "If one is very common, of course the people who have it will be different from each other - any large group of people are different from each other. If one is less common, there is no way to know whether commonalities between those people are related to their daemon or sheer coincidence. They have drawn some conclusions anyway - but then daemons normally choose forms around puberty. Acquiring them as an adult might be different in some way; we do not know."
This turns out to be extremely true.
He has been a lot of places, and seen a lot of kinds of people, and healed many of them from injury or illness that would have killed them if he hadn't been there. And in between these events, he has spent a lot of time alone in various kinds of wilderness. He is personally familiar with every climate on the continent he calls home, from the Madiran Desert to the Lost Lands of the north.
After several hours of rambling discourse on the subject of people and their preferences and problems, he concludes an explanation of centaur architecture and stretches. "About time for me to hit the hay," he says. "We can pick this up tomorrow."
And spent most of a year there, working both magically and physically to help life return to the mage-blasted ground. There are no thinking creatures in the Lost Lands anymore, although he says he found the ruins of several old villages - human, if he's any judge, and abandoned for hundreds of years at a bare minimum.
"It was the best time of my life. I want to go back someday," he says, smiling wistfully. "I know I'm probably more use as a healer, but clearing fouled springs and herding lost rainclouds with a mountain range between me and the nearest settlement suits me much better."
Presently his window opens itself and in floats a tray with a pamphlet and assorted desserts. Isibel takes a cookie from the top of the plated heap and bites it.
And then he says goodnight, and mentions that he thinks he'll take the next morning to hike around the island.
"I hope you enjoy your hike," says Isibel, and she lets herself out. She designs spells; she has one ready by the wee hours of the morning, teleports to the optimal casting site, and focuses and channels. The Lost Lands will be the better for it, and come back to life at a swifter but gentle pace.
Hug.
"This will be easier to talk about if I tell you their names," remarks Isibel. "My beloveds are called Aianon - the demon - and Ansharil - the dragon. The world they are in is named Origin. The Jokers who moved there are Queenie, and Ghosty, and the one who was born there and moved away is only called the Joker. He did not move away to do magic; he moved to be with his boyfriend in a world called Aurum. Ghosty and Queenie had both died when they met the rest of my friends and did not particularly want to stay where they were."
"Ah. It is a subtle - fitting, between two souls, almost like a lesser dragonbond. It is difficult to detect until it is already firmly in place. If you have heard a relatively unadulterated story of Idalia and Jermayan, she initially spurned him because she feared dying before he did and leaving him unable to get over her loss - this was based a misunderstanding of the phenomenon on her part; he was already committed. I found it for my beloved shortly after I was through convalescing."
Leaning against her chair and hugging her is reasonably comfortable; he doesn't bother to stop doing those things while he tells her about the moonturns he spent in the Madiran and what he learned there. For the most part, the desert is doing well, but he suggests that its sandstorms could be gently diverted from passing over inhabited areas.
"As long as you don't try to get rid of them completely," he adds. "The desert depends on them too much."
(The hugging is more useful than she'd like to admit aloud. Her parents aren't really huggy, and she doesn't see them that frequently - Liselen is affectionate but it's not really the same with an ungulate - this helps.)
"Moving pain across your mind should make sense now," she tells him, when she's done it.