"Not quite, I don't think. I'd probably want to work out some kind of ward to make the area where the briar'd spring up really, really cold anyway, the berries are better the colder it is where they're growing. Or maybe you could do something like your hotspot, if it'd be easier. They don't go bad for ages, though, so there's no real rush."

"I can make a coldspot. You get to do the planting and harvesting, though."

"Hell yeah I do. For one thing, I love it. For another thing, it'd eat you, and I'm sure it'd be unpleasant."

"Then we are agreed."

"Will it grow high up enough that you'll have trouble reaching them?"

"It'll be a challenge, but I like those. Plus, it's climbable if you don't mind it stabbing your hands to pieces, which is how I'll be feeding it anyway."

"If you say so. It sounds like it'll be prettier and harder to accidentally stumble into on the glacier. I'll go babysit the other plants and figure out the glacier's harmonics and let you know when I've coldspotted it."

"Sure!" Ari ambles back into the house to continue his work on his million and one projects.

After a bit, he pokes his head out again. "Does the babysitting allow for listening to me ramble about magic? In which case would you like me to ramble at you about magic?"

"I can listen and cast spells on the plants at the same time as long as you don't get too distractingly techincal. Go for it."

Promise absorbs what information she can and asks somewhat fewer clarifying questions than before (she is distracted by obliging her plants to sprout) but has fun with it nevertheless.

Ari has a breakthrough in the cavern spell, something about folding the stone transmutation into the third circle, which results in even less teaching and more very excited sentence fragments! He scribbles with almost alarming speed.

It's kind of cute.

Ari would be delighted of this, were he capable of thinking about anything other than the gnomic macroevocative structure of granite right now! Call again later.

Promise does not voice her opinion of his cuteness. She just asks how he can know that the rock under the Snows is granite in particular.

"It's not, quick scan when we arrived told me it's mostly shale, but- not working with what we have, I'm working with what's best! So if I can just... wait, what if I melt it first- no, symbology, dammit. Where the hell am I supposed to get feldspar? What is feldspar? Igneous..."

"It's most of granite. Comes out of lava. And there's not half enough volcanic- wait, could there- no, I'm not fucking with the tectonic structure for a sturdier workspace. I'm coming at this the wrong way, what about breccia as an intermediate... yeah, yeah, I think that could- yes!" He's lost to the sketchpad again.

"You're going to transmute the rock step by step to get granite?"

"Yeah! I'll take the shale and there's a patch of calcite half a mile off that could go and I've got a bit of mongrelstone with a band of opal in my bag I can chip a bit off of, once that's all mashed together it'll be the same kind of weird mix as granite and I can turn that into granite easy and use that to tell the walls what to be!" Ari gasps in a breath, which he may not have done in a while.

"That's really cool."

"Yes it is!"

"There isn't that much - broad-spectrum technical detail in sorcery. There are individual spells, and there are contexts in which to cast them, and there are the ways those things interact, but that seems very different."

"Mortal magic's a lot about- tricking the world into doing what you want. Making things look more and more plausible until it's hardly even a step to make them that way. Thaumaturgy at least, evocation's just imposing your will on the universe, but if I tried to do this with evocation I'd be hilariously dead."