"The third word on the legend of the diagram on the fifty-first page of one of them means 'structure,' and I could identify which one if you showed me the diagram," she shrugs. "I'll let you know if I get any other words."

"...There aren't that many books with diagrams, I can show you page fifty-one of all of them when we get back to the hill," says Tiro.

"That'll work," she agrees.

"Thanks."

"Did Aduva explain Oracles to you?"

"Not really!"

"My species--Oracles--we're pretty rare, but we have incredibly valuable magic. We just--know things, out of nowhere, and they're always objectively true. You can't steer it, though--I could tell you the exact number of eyelashes you have, for example."

"I don't need to know my number of eyelashes, but thank you," he says. "How are you rare?"

"People frequently try to abduct Oracles to force us to use our magic for them, so most of us find powerful people who aren't coercive to work for instead of forming communities composed primarily of ourselves like most species."

"I'm not sure which part of what I just said is causing that reaction."

"If I had to put the reaction into words, it would be something like 'things work so differently from what I'm used to where you're from, but people are apparently still people everywhere'."

"Ha. That much is certainly true."

"People are always people. Except when they're athrai. But I think athrai are people too, in their own way, they're just so strange it's impossible to tell what they're thinking."

"They don't sound like a normal sort of species at all. I mean. You don't either, for our values of normal, but you're closer."

"I can tell human from athra pretty reliably, and you all seem human to me, that way. You're different but you're not different the way athrai are different."

"Amalta and I are half frost giant elves, I think I mentioned, Kaleith's a full elf, we've established that Delsmiar's an oracle, Leuska's a siren, Luvei's a full frost giant, Yttren is an orc, and Mirrin, Panga, Fondai and Proust are halflings."

"Athrai can take whatever shape they please. Sometimes they pretend to be human. They're usually not very good at it."

"Not good at it like how?"

"The really easy mistakes to pick up on are when they give themselves glowing eyes or bright green hair or make themselves eight feet tall. Sometimes they're a little subtler and it's just... you can tell their bodies don't quite work? And the really good ones don't make either of those mistakes, but they still sound like athrai when they talk."

"I mean, one of my mothers is taller than eight feet, and she's of the shorter local frost giant ethnicity. Someone eight feet tall with green hair would just be pegged for a locally obscure species, most likely. How do Athrai talk?"

"...Weirdly. It's hard to explain. If you ever meet one I can say 'see, like that, that's what I was talking about' and you'll probably say 'oh, I see exactly what you mean now'. Different athrai get different things wrong, but... they're drawing from a different set of errors than humans?"

"Fascinating. Can you quote an example or something?"

"It might get lost in translation."

"Right. You're learning this language really well, I'm impressed by your magic."