And since, despite the world's admitted tendency towards situations best left in the more dramatic varieties of literature, it wasn't literally a stereotypical gothic novel, Kanimir didn't expect anything in particular to happen. If nothing else, there were far more storms that happened to happen at night than there were potentially literature-worthy shenanigans. So it's completely reasonable for him to be curled up in his grand library, enjoying a book on magical theory.
"Well, everyone has a selfspace - at least on my planet - and some people, the magically talented, can do magic with theirs. Conjurors bring things from their selfspace into the real world; shapers change things in the real world the way you can change things in your selfspace; shifters change themselves in the real world the way you can change things in your selfspace. If you can make or change things in the real world so they're magical themselves, like the Door could, then you're a Legendary Talent. There's only one of those every fifty or a hundred years."
"Unfortunately, I don't currently have any spells that can breach dimensions, but I have several centuries of research and development experience. Can you move away from where the door was? I'd like to cast an analysis, in case there's any lingering trace, and a person within the boundary could confound the results."
He gets up and circles the spot where the door was, circumscribing the area more precisely with his hands and murmuring under his breath. When the circle is completed, he pulls out a quartz crystal, tilts his head, and runs a finger around one end. "There's something there," he reports. "It's hard to interpret, but that's not an unsurmountable obstacle."
"The analysis is a spell that examines magic and presents it in a form comprehensible to the human mind. It gives one a spatial awareness of the structure and type of magic, although what those mean is something that must be learned. It is a focused spell with a human or other sapient being as the target which confers on them the sensory perception of magic which the spell provides. I cast it with myself as the target. Separately, I could cast it with you as the target."
He says several of the same words as before, and brushes his thumb across her forehead.
The effect is immediate.
The various magic she had already been able to perceive was slightly more detailed to this way of perceiving it, and other magic--old stuff, inactive stuff--became apparent as well.
"I don't know," he says absently. "It might have been apparent for some reason that I would have been aware of. Can you--do something with it, go into it, while I circumscribe the area? If it were possible to examine more of your world's magic than just this," he gestures to the area where the portal was with the quartz, "that could be immensely helpful."
"Oh, here--" he hands them to her.
The clear chunk contains a pattern identical to the fading residue from the portal, and the smoky chunk contains a completely unfamiliar pattern.
"The circumscription imprints the stone with a replica of the magic inside the circle, so that it can be examined at one's leisure, unlike the original which will fade over time."
"...My selfspace doesn't work right," she says. "It shows me things about the world instead of being full of things I put in it. That's why I have opinions about what your magic looks like even from before you put the spell on me. And I'm wondering if I'd know things about mushrooms if I'd ever paid attention."
"I don't generally consider myself to be exceptionally nice, but it would be both exceedingly heartless and exceedingly wasteful not to help someone who had fallen into one's sphere of influence through no fault of their own with neither material possessions nor the basic cultural knowledge that a local homeless person would possess who presents an interesting magical problem when I have so many resources to do it with."
"It means I don't age--I'm over seven hundred years old, at this point--inclined to be nocturnal in the same way that humans are inclined to be diurnal, burn more easily than even the fairest-skinned human in the sun, have heightened senses, cannot consume solids and must consume human blood. That's why I have ready preparations for guests, and why three other rooms are occupied right now. I find humans who require something--a place to stay for a while, a debt paid off, to evade a given person, or something else--and do not object to, in exchange, staying in my home for a prearranged period of time having blood safely and hygienically removed at prearranged intervals. I hasten to clarify, in case clarification is needed, that I do not expect you to act as such a donor as a result of staying here. Your purpose for being here is entirely different."
"Well - sort of. It's... like your reflection is glowing, except not quite, and there are parts of it that look like they have magic tucked away in them, and now that I know some of what the magic does I can tell where it keeps those parts." She pauses consideringly, then adds, "It does have fangs, now that I look, but they're not out right now."
"Ah. Yes. ...Another magical feature of vampires is that we can be...influenced by the blood we drink. The effect is entirely additive; drinking the blood of a genius may temporarily boost one's cognition, but drinking the blood of a dullard will not impair it. However, animals are sufficiently different that any additive effect has...unpredictable results, which is why the blood of humans--and relevantly humanlike creatures--is necessary."
The shelves themselves--do not want to allow the books on them to be removed, except by their owner and specified other person(s). The books, likewise and separately, do not wish to allow their contents to be accessed by any means except by their owner and specified other person(s).
...That's interesting. Once she realizes what that part of the magic on the shelves is for, she picks a reflection-book off a reflection-shelf just to see what it does, then peers at the cover to figure out that part too. But she did agree not to read any of these, so she puts the reflection back without trying to open it.
Meanwhile, in the real world, she's just sort of standing there.
Tentative smile. Most of seven hundred years of general misanthropy has not done a great deal of good for Kanimir's social skills but he thinks you're probably supposed to smile back when someone smiles at you. Anyway. He pulls out a polished cabochon of some kind of pale blue stone and hands it to her. "If you need me for anything else, tap it four times like this," he raps his hand against the side of a shelf in a two-iamb rap-rap, rap-rap pattern, "and speak into it after approximately ten seconds. If for some reason there's an emergency for which this is too much of a delay, tap it three times in close succession and speak into it immediately."
"It doesn't. It's highly skill-intensive. I'm the most powerful magician in the world because I'm the only one who's spent the equivalent of several human lifetimes studying it. A trinket like this is well within the reach of a normal magician, but even they would have to spend years or even decades of study to do so."
Magic, in this universe, exists in the form of innate powers held by several different categories of being, and in the form of complex rituals which can be condensed down into manageable actions and phrases. Rituals have many distinct components that can show up in different rituals and correspond to fundamental aspects of magic.
After an...amount of time...Kanimir finds her again. (It's probably been at least a few days, maybe a week.) "I think I might have something--an avenue of research, not a potential spell," he clarifies. "But I think it would help to see you doing your kind of magic again, under slightly different circumstances." He holds out a book. It's magicked to tell him when it's been read, and how much and what specifically. "Can you read this only in your selfspace?"
"Your kind of magic works in a fundamentally different way from mine, so far as I can tell, but after extended poking and prodding I've been able to compare its transport function to some magic with similar results from here. I...think that if I could get an appropriate spell drawn up, I could use some of the information entangled with the door's residue to target where you came from."
"It would be hard to say precisely, since the lines between varieties aren't very clearly drawn. The most that I can say for sure are that the nobility are their own kind if any are, and that some have wings and others don't. But there is a startling diversity of physical characteristics within the population."
Yeah, there's a reason he lives by himself in the middle of nowhere. And why he has to be careful where in Fairyland he shows his face.
But there are plenty of places in Fairyland where he can show his face, and it is to a gate to one of these that he brings Riya a bit more than a week later.
Well, the plants: grow in ways more convenient for...someone...(the magic in the plants is very decidedly connected to a person not present) but in a way determined to maintain a "wild grasslands and forest" aesthetic. The land is likewise connected to a (probably the same) person, but in an almost opposite manner; it strengthens and supports them. Those ungulates over there are unnaturally long-lived and have healing magic, mostly but not entirely concentrated in their horns.
These are basically horses! They had magic done to them a long, long time ago, many generations ago in fact, and now they are extremely magic themselves. The healing and the longevity are separate things, although if she tries to copy the former she may be hampered by the lack of a horn to put it in.
Not if she doesn't copy it exactly...
She fiddles with a unicorn's reflection, makes a mess of it, starts over with a different unicorn, isolates something she's willing to take, realizes she could do even better than that, waits for a third unicorn to wander into her range, and finally pulls together what she wants: combining the touch-healing ability with the lingering remnants of the lifespan-lengthening effect to get the property of healing-and-extending-lifespan at a touch. It doesn't come through nearly as powerfully as the original, though. The first unicorn wanders back into range, refreshing its reflection, and she tries again to see if she can do it better.
By this point she has spent quite an inordinate amount of time gazing distantly at unicorns.
He has something that's a lot like the unicorns' lifespan magic, except instead of giving him "some lifespan" it gives him all of the lifespan. This Is Not a person who's going to die of old age. He also has a property that makes food that he meaningfully gives to someone tastier and a property that allows him to alter the colors of things and something that's like the implied other end of the magic on the plants but weaker.
"The magic is... I don't know. Maybe magic just grows like that sometimes. But it looks made to me. And I don't know why anyone would make that bird."
On the other hand, fire resistance sounds useful... She pulls apart the reflection to see how much of that property she can take. It comes away much more nicely than the unicorns. Unicorns are tricky.
Using her selfspace still looks pretty much like using her selfspace. Same old, same old.
But she also has several new additions. Like for example her entire body being sort of a cheap knockoff unicorn's horn. That's new. As is the infinite lifespan she copied from the unicorn tender. And the fire resistance she got from the bird.
Unicorns, unicorns...
"I wonder if I could put the unicorn touching-healing thing together with the immortal thing," she muses. "But I can't copy that person's immortal thing again, I already took it out of their reflection and they haven't gone away and come back."
"Teleporting is very odd," she observes. "But it did work."
She sits down on the ground so she won't have to think about standing while she pokes the unicorn. Combining pieces of different things is much harder than combining different pieces of one thing. But she thinks she can probably do it. Maybe.
After ten minutes of hard work totally indecipherable to external observers, she says, "I messed up the reflection."
"Unicorns are fairly universal. Different fairies have different kinds of magic. There are Greater Phoenixes, of no taxonomical connection to Lesser Phoenixes, that may or may not have the ability to regenerate instead of dying. There are birds that can sing any melody as produced by any instrument. There are many more things than just that, but it would take a very long time to simply recite every item of potential interest without some knowledge of your preferences to guide me."
Almost all of them have new properties! Which ones are interesting is up to her. This species of bird has feathers that change color in response to temperature, and this flower has nectar that will do positive things to your larynx if you consume it, and that tree has sap that will make a syrup that tastes like anything you want if you put a tiny pinch of the anything in the sap while you're boiling it, and that small fluffy thing (it is so fluffy) has fluff that will keep you very warm if you're cold and pleasantly cool if it's too hot.
If she likes fluff, that fluffy thing over there is magic to be extremely soft. Also those flowers over there have supernaturally vivid colors, and those butterflies over there have translucent, jewel-like wings, and those moths asleep over there have wings that glow (not all the time, that would be evolutionary suicide, but as an action just the same as flapping them) and those songbirds can repeat any sound they hear, and those songbirds will repeat melodies they hear as birdsong, and those birds over there can change their size.
"There are a lot of magic things here," she says, examining the fluff and the butterflies and the moths and the birds. "Glowing moths! That looks fun."
She attempts to extract the glowableness of the moth wings and attach it to her hair. It takes four tries, because moths are tiny and it's hard to work at that scale, but eventually she manages it. Glow. Un-glow. Glow. Un-glow.
"Yes."
Maybe she can combine the moths' optional glowing with something else... the moths are so tiny, though. If she had an entire herd of unicorns here and an entire whatever-you-call-it of moths, and several immortal people, she might be able to put together an optional version of her touch-healing and touch-life-extension. But she does not have a herd of unicorns and several immortal people. Well, what else is there around here that might be neat to have an optional version of? Are there any more creatures with optional properties that are bigger and easier to work with than moths?
"There are invisible venomous snakes. Over there. They don't want to bite people unless someone magics them to bite a specific person but they're really easy to magic to bite a specific person. These are wrong snakes," she asserts.
...optional invisibility is kind of cool, though. And much easier to take than the moths' optional glow. She messes up the reflection of the first snake she tries, but manages to copy everything she wants from the second.
Pretty much anything! The optionalness is very agreeable about being combined with things.
For example, that rodent's metabolism--burns fat and glycogen almost as efficiently and accessibly as glucose. Or that perfectly inoffensive snake's ability to appear to be made solidly of one or more translucent colors. Or that bird's weight reduction (wow that's a large bird). Or that flying reptile's ability to breathe fire. Or that fish's ability to breathe air. Or that lizard's ability to breathe water. Or that bush's ability to grow berries that look like gemstones. Or that fern's tendency to curl harmlessly but startlingly around the ankles of passersby.
Well, then...
She does not want to be a grabby plant, but she kind of likes the idea of breathing water. She will take one breathing water and one weight reduction (perhaps it will be useful later if she acquires the ability to fly), and she will optionalize them both, and then she will be out of available Optional Snakes.
"There are a lot of magic things here. It is good."
The grass: is incredibly green! Various flowers also have incredibly vivid shades magically written into them. One species of tree is very, very hard to break. That tree has leaves that chime like glass when rustled by the wind (it is not currently windy). That round foxish raccoonish thing can project an illusion of a much larger version of itself as a self-defense measure, has a tendency to imprint on small children and be loyal pets, and incredibly sleek, soft fur. Sleeker and softer than a unicorns, though not as shiny. That catlike thing over there has biologically-improbably-large retractable claws.
"I have the phoenix thing too now," she says. "If I had a lot of phoenixes and a lot of fairies and a lot of unicorns in front of me... and maybe some of those moths or those snakes... then I could put together a way to make lots of people really immortal just by touching them."
Kanimir nods and takes a small notebook out and notes this down. "Unicorn herds are common, and I imagine those snakes are less so but most likely they wouldn't be difficult to find or contain once you know about them and bring magic to bear on the problem, and I seriously doubt anyone would object to their sudden absence, and there are fairy cities--but trying to get large numbers of phoenixes in one place sounds...difficult."
There are! Some plants with really large sugar-sink roots that are charmed to be exceedingly nutritious and some berries that have a gamut of flavors from sugary-sweet to lemon-sour depending on the temperature, and a water bird that has a really large liver for some reason, and a kind of moss that leeches harmful substances from the air, and a kind of tree that, if it grows large enough (which it will not do without the application of a little extra magic of the type that one fairy and whoever was connected to the grass had) will form an internal hollow accessible only by the person who fed it the magic.
That shrub over there blooms polychromatic flowers after it's rained. That evergreen over there has little hollows in its branches that will close if you put something in them and grow much more aggressive needles around the area, only relaxing the spines and re-opening when the original person who placed the object reaches for it. That catlike thing over there is gravid. That songbird has twelve different songs corresponding to the twelve hours of the a.m., and singing one of them to it in the evening will make it sing the same one at the correct hour of the morning.
That would be terrible. She will not do that.
...She wonders if she could turn it around so that whatever food she touches becomes just the sort of thing she should eat. She'd need a unicorn, possibly. And an optionalizer. And possibly something else too but she isn't even sure what.
"Ah. That makes sense. Would you like me to carry them for you?" He's been pulling his crystals and stuff from places that are unlikely to contain that volume of crystal, so he probably has some kind of extradimensional storage space. Also: his pockets are really definitely extradimensional storage space.
"I talked to multiple persons, including the fairy noblewoman I had been hoping to be introduced to subsequent to someone who was able to introduce me to her. It is fortunate that we did not attempt to visit her uninvited; she now lives in an area completely different from the one she had been when I became aware of her."
Teleport!
...In this new place, there is an enormous dome overhead, so clear that it might be difficult to tell it was there at this distance if it weren't magical. The magic keeps the heat in, basically; it's dreadfully cold outside. Inside is a similarly magically lush environment to the forest, if somewhat more cultivated and less random. No escaped assassin snakes here.
There is a hive of honeybees that make music with their buzzing and honey with any number of convenient linguistic properties, grass that photosynthesizes at an accelerated rate, those same flowers from before with the larynx nectar, some of those lesser phoenixes from earlier, and several unicorns, including one right in front of them mounted by a girl who looks to be in her late teens or early twenties who has the same immortality as the man with the unicorn herd, as well as a much greater version of his plant abilities, something similar with animals, and some more magic that would take a bit longer to puzzle out.
"She has magic which can copy other forms of magic. Since arriving in Fairyland she has acquired immortality from a fairy, a healing touch from a unicorn, regeneration from a Greater Phoenix, and miscellaneous other effects from miscellaneous other organisms. She wishes to duplicate your talents, and potentially your assistance could be useful for a project to distribute immortality to humans."
"It's useful to have that because I might not want to make everyone I ever touch be healed and very immortal," says Riya. "Oh - I wonder if you have things that would be better than unicorns for this? Unicorns do healing when they touch someone with their horns, but if you have something that can do a thing from farther away, that might work better. And if it's from farther away then I might not need to add in the optionalness part separately because it might be already optional."
"You would just have to sit there. But if I was going to do the whole thing with being able to heal people and make them immortal from far away I would need you and a unicorn and a Greater Phoenix all together. And I might need to go away and come back a few times to refresh the reflections."
What interesting magic voice honey that is!
In the meantime, Riya tries to copy the ability to do things with plants. It's almost - no. Maybe if she - no. But at least she didn't mess up the part of the reflection that's important for combining with other things. If she puts that together with the unicorn's healing, can she get a distance-healing power that is usable at will?
She can!
Those trees over there have a faint rainbow sheen to their bark. That one has fruits where if you pluck one, concentrate on a flavor and give it to someone else, the fruit acquires the flavor you were thinking of (it will be tasteless if you eat it yourself). Those grains in that field over there are intensely cold-resistant, just in case.
Her counterfactual planty musk will go so well with her counterfactual personalized hypernutrition.
There is a weasel that will bite you if you try to attack the beehives and a beetle with a counter-camouflage shell that turns the chromatic *opposite* of whatever's behind it, and some reeds that are particularly open to tweaking such that when rustled by the wind they would seem to be whispering some programmed phrase.
True.
There is a moss that releases pleasant-smelling oils to complement your natural skin chemistry if you rub it on yourself, and another with a stunning array of vitamins and minerals, and a sort of grasslike thing that in the presence of soil toxins will draw them up its stalk and encase them in little pearl-like things and a moss under a tree designed to be a shock absorber if you fall out of the tree.
Riya smiles.
She sits down and attempts to put together: this piece from Alcallah which is immortality of the lifespan variety, and this piece from the phoenix which is immortality of a more aggressive kind, and this piece from Alcallah which is the doing of things to things at a distance and on purpose.
"I messed it up, I need to go away and come back and try again," she announces after a few minutes.
Plenty of booping! If Riya had any particular insight as to why people were giving them slightly odd looks, it might provide some insight into the general makeup of the colony that the fact that the Lady's daughter was riding a unicorn at top speed and occasionally shrieking with joy was considered less strange than the fact that she was bringing a mortal with her to do it.