It spins on the breeze and calls to mind what might be called planar coordinates, though in truth they're a little more like memories of a place that never was. 

Needless to say, graduate students do not get powerful magic done for them very often, especially not when it touches on things that can pose some... if not danger, then at least concern, even to it. 

But it is an interesting new idea, and there are so few of those, this long after it first started having ideas, and this long after it got good at it. 

Gate.

And on the other side --

She has, regrettably, discovered a taste for adventure, for discovery, for breaching the unknown.

To attempt to breach the multiverse, even if it is shaped through Void and not through delving the Twisting Nether, is perhaps too much of the latter to be considered remotely sane.

But she can.  And so she does.

Memories of a place that never was, you say?  Her world fits that quite nicely, what with its having been made last Tuesday*.  And her magic fits just as neatly; the Void shows you what you are expecting to see.

*  (...Okay, that metaphorical Tuesday was many years ago at this point, but still!)

There's a reason that Spell was supposed to be a secret. 

Instead of a stable portal, the Gate forms as a momentary breach where reality is thin, and something is sucked through before it closes with a crash that cuts off any possibility of concern. 

Hope it isn't some kind of eldritch abomination, but it would serve you right. 

It's not particularly possible to make out in the darkened ritual chamber, but it's immediately surrounded with a faint distortion in the air. It gives the thousands of coloured lights that reflect from its endless facets an eerie dreamlike look, as if it didn't look strange enough already. 

Well.  Shitfuck damn, she does not say out loud.

She lands on her feet, whirling around, the crystal at the tip of her staff - she came prepared for this sort of thing and that means battle-magic and environmental spells and stranger things besides - flaring a brilliant purple as magic roils defensively around her.

The newcomer looks mostly like a human - dark hair that could be described as silver in the right light, clothes that look like someone was trying to fit all three of 'wizard', 'noble', and 'protective equipment' into the same specification and mostly succeeded, a pointedly unostentatious silver circlet upon her head set with gems like the ones in her staff - but there is a purple-greenish flare behind her eyes as she snaps a proper magelight into existence.  Metaphorically snaps.  She doesn't literally snap.  She never has figured out how that actually works.  (The light is still purple, it's just round and much more self-sustaining than flaring her staff like she's about to hit someone with it.)

The magelight illuminates a stone ritual chamber with an extremely secure door and arcane sigils engraved in the stonework. 

And makes it glow with a violet-and-blue glare that's uncomfortable to look at, casting brilliant spots of light dancing about the room. 

What kind of wizard wears armour? 

Well, maybe ones from other planes! Her insane project actually worked! Sort of! This was only supposed to see if a connection was possible, not bring anything through, but this works too! 

"Hello! Do you understand me properly? Do you know where you are? Did you mean to come here?"

Oh, no, this isn't armor, her armor's in her other bag of holding*.  This is 'Don't get blown up or poisoned' sorts of gear.

...Which probably doubles as light armor, but still!

"Hello, yes, no, and maybe, in that order."  Translation seems to be working out fine...

(From Naevys' perspective, there's a strange doubling of the sound of the newcomer's voice - she can hear what seem to be syllables of a language that is not whatever she was just speaking, but also a meaning behind them that renders itself into the language she's most comfortable with.)

"So where, pray tell, am I?  And who are you two?  And can you understand me?"

...There's just no way that floaty-rotatey-glowy-crystals is just a random terrain feature.  Jury's out on possible sapience just yet but she thinks she felt her translation earring ping.

* (Which she also brought.)

Her translation Spell (she cast it, just in case somehow she'd get to talk to something from another plane!) makes both parties hear things as if they had said them themselves. She thinks. There are some confusing cases. 

She's getting a strange kind of feedback from the doubling. 

This is so frustrating but she should let the Professor talk first-

It inserts images directly into her mind. It feels disconcertingly like she's imagining what it would say. 

A great tower among the rubble - the last surviving school of magic.

The wheel of all possible worlds - the Conjuration Professor. 

A stream of sounds and images and something analogous but unrecognisable - yes.

"Hello! It's so good to meet you! I'm Naevys, this is an experimental- a novel method for interpreting planar boundaries I designed, I'm so glad it worked! Where are you from? You look kind of human, are you?" She's almost vibrating with excitement, she did it, this is new magic it has got to be worth a real Faculty position, and they have a visitor from another plane!

"...of course it's the blasted last remaining school of magic, did the rest all get destroyed in some sort of cataclysmic event an unknowable amount of time ago, then?  Because I'm getting a real 'the Ancients forgot more about magic than we know', sort of vibe, there..."

The second image prompts a thought so loud it almost echoes like a reply, through the strange layer of Something that the attempt to directly insert information into her mind was deflected into. '...But 'all possible worlds' is a phase space of innumerable unit vectors, not a wheel, is that the local multiverse --?'

And then she realizes Naevys said something as well.  "Oh, excuse me.  Well, define 'human'.  But, yes, close enough, considering.  I could be considered any number of things, from 'sapient self-perpetuating magical manifestation' to 'not exactly not a creator deity if you squint really hard', but I think of myself as human.  ...Ah.  And.  Yes.  Introductions.  Right.  One does need to do those.

"Alicia Thorn, lately of the Royal Academy of the Kingdom of Villarosa, amongst other things.  Pleasure to meet you, Naevys.  I think you bumped into an experiment of mine, going the other way, which is at least weak evidence that yours works!"

"No, mostly they just burn down a lot! Well, all right, yes, I suppose most of them fell with the Old Kingdom but that's what happens to new ones, I think. It was only about five hundred years ago! I'm not a historian, I don't know what magic was like back then but it's a good guess! How did you know? Also much more importantly to what extent are you a creator deity? Because I think I have questions!"

It rotates. It ponders whether to try to punch through and put ideas directly into her brain where they belong. It decides otherwise. It will have to employ language. Something in its liquid-crystal structure shifts.

[There's no need to shout. 'Wheel' is a highly simplified metaphor, or comforting lie, for the nature of reality.]

<Oh, was I thinking that loudly?  Goodness.  My apologies.>  Ah, yes, lies-to-children, is carried beneath her words.  She is not quite such a child, though she imagines that the Conjuration Professor has quite a better view than she.

"The Conjuration Professor took a particular slant on their metaphor, as they informed me of where I had found myself, that struck to my sensibilities of the narratives of these things.  It was a guess, just one that was reasonably well-informed about the way most people tell stories.

"As to the extent of my plausible creator-deity-ness, well.  I only had a particular hand in the magic, and not all the fiddly little details of it.  But I did have a hand in the magic of my present homeworld, when it was being made, and considering that I haven't seemed to vanish in a puff of logic despite your clearly being made of different base materials than I, I still have it here.  Which could be interesting.  ...Incidentally, what's yours like?"

It is even older than most people think. It knows enough that it experiences something analogous to fear. 

It does not reply, but rotates silently on the spot, and reaches out to touch a distant mind. 

"You had a hand in the magic? Do you - do you mean, you helped codify how people learn magic, or-" She might be being rude to a god and is probably being rude to an archmage, here. Or alternatively this is all a very elaborate joke but in that case she's not going to ruin it!

"Sorry, let me start again, we might have a translation issue here! 'Magic' isn't a specific thing, it's a broad general term people use for all sorts of things, normally things they don't understand. 'Wizardry' - is that a different word for you? - is what we call it any time mortals use skills that let them affect the world in ways they normally couldn't! Canonical Wizardry is the subset of wizardry that survived from the days of the ancient archmages, so it's reasonably safe." In truth, she's pretty sure it's not a natural category and the schools of wizardry were one of those political decisions, but that's one of those things you take care about saying out loud.

She takes a deep breath.

"Wizardry arises from your soul, from being alive and aware and conscious. In some languages 'song' and 'Spell'' are the same word, and there's a lot of wisdom in that. Spells are like spirits, or pieces of awareness, or incredibly complex patterns of thought, there are lots of metaphors. You have to shape your soul into a vessel that can hold them, with study and practice and learning to think the right kinds of thoughts in the right way. Then you can hold Spells inside you and use them. Then you are sort of shaped like a Spell, and you can do your own magic. There actually isn't as much of a difference between set Spells and freeform magic as we tell apprentices, it gets complicated, but essentially you use Spells to do the most complicated things. Spellcasting puts a lot of strain on your mind, you have to know your limits. There are also Rituals, those are," completely different and if anybody has a clue how they work they kept very quiet about it any time Naevys was around but she can't say that, "easily misunderstood, and even more dangerous. Is that what you meant, that you helped invent something like Canonical Wizardry? That's really impressive and we are going to have so many questions! If not and you actually are a god then I'm sorry!" It Is Written that the Five Gods will protect you if you offend a heathen Power in good faith but then a lot of things Are Written.

"I think we are having a bit of a translation issue, and before I continue please allow me to clarify that I very much am not actually a deific force - I did not actually effect - or would it be af-fect, I can never quite keep those two straight - I did not personally implement any of this, I am yet still as mortal as anyone else in this room.  Probably.  I'm not willing to test that, at least.  And I'm not offended in the least by you treating me like, well, a regular person.  Honestly it's rather refreshing to at least have that be the fundamental social tension I'm experiencing, rather than...  Well, nevermind all that.  But, ah, no.  I was involved in the design of the whole metaphysical framework that makes something like your concept of wizardry work, after forces very much beyond my control dragged me into the whole process - except that, well.  I was thorough enough about it that the fundament of local physics over there is derived from the magic directly.  ...It's interesting, how similar and yet different the things you're speaking of, seem to be, compared to the system I'm used to working with.  I'm almost tempted to speculate.  It sounds like something I read, once."

"Honestly if anything I'm probably the worst possible person available to ask about Villarosa's equivalent to your Canonical Wizardry, I have a much different perspective so it mostly doesn't work when I try to do it that way.  Well, no, where I need it to it will, I've adapted, but I did have to do that.  ...Regardless.  If you want someone to explain Arcane magic as the Academy teaches it, I'm not the person you want to ask, for all that I do consider myself to have a reasonable competence in the field, generally.  Which is.  I'm sure that the people who know me well would describe that as understatement, as much as I wish they'd stop.  I'm not exactly - well, I guess I did the once, even if that was mostly guile - oh, gods, I need to stop just saying things, I keep accidentally cornering myself into effectively humblebragging out of desire for correctness...  Anyway.  If you describe spells thusly, then...  It would not be inaccurate to say that my world entire is something like spells, or is built atop the interaction between three separate axes of...  Spell-like concepts, shaped like...  Hmm."  She waves a hand, and there is a 3D set of basis vectors that she speaks the names of, as she puts symbols to.

Well.  Speaking is perhaps less the right word than λ-speaking (pron. 'Not-speaking'), because she has several things at once to say about them and she is willing to deal with the way her throat always feels like it has a frog in it after she λ-says things that are λ-words for this one.

"[Order:Chaos::Rules:Change], [Life:Death::Evolution(cycles, growth, adaptation):Stillness(gravity, inevitability, low-available-energy)], and...  Hmm... [Light:Void :: Is:Not :: Hyperstimulus:Irreality :: Unity:Diversity :: Infinity:Infinitesmals], though I'm not quite sure I can encapsulate that last as neatly as I'd like, both of those last two get rather paradoxical.  They're the ones that framed - well.  Creation, in its entirety."

It relaxes - it can't actually relax, it doesn't have very good analogues of muscles and so on, but it shifts its threat-modelling - fractionally, but only fractionally. 

[You had still better do something about this,] it tells the Archbishop. 

(Her dodgy translation Spell searches the Elvish language, which happily is richly stocked with paronyms for the purposes of poetry and gatekeeping, comes up with an approximately analogous noun-verb combination, and does a reasonable translation, not one actual Elvish linguists would like but at least one they'd laugh at instead of smile gently at, and renders it with only a slight delay. You don't get that out of most Spells, let me tell you, and don't come again.)

"Oh that's such a relief! Sorry, summoning and offending gods does sometimes happen around here! I'm not actually sure how often it depends on exactly whom you believe about what but probably at least one story in ten is true! You can talk about social problems if you want to it would actually be fascinating to compare them and maybe we can help! If you have any extraplanar insight into the nature of magic itself then please do speculate!"

All right, it's completely expected to try to get secrets out of other wizards, that's the whole point, but doing it to an extraplanar visitor who didn't sign up for it, on that scale, feels mean on both counts. She'll mentally owe her a favour. 

(She doesn't have any problem ordering, memorising and responding to points at this length, she survived her apprenticeship.)

"You should start just saying things and being correct and not worrying so much about it! Humans talk a lot about the virtue of humility but I don't really get it and anyway this is Silvermoon, even the humans do things like talk about the time the Goddess of Love Herself sat in their lap and offered constructive criticism, and that might not even have all been a lie. 

She has ever heard someone speak a Power Word, and when she was little she listened to Bards, she can handle a little λ-speech even if it does give her a bit of a headache. 

"That's fascinating. There's a certain Canonical Ritual that can lead to a little pocket plane based on - I think a less formal version of that - this is probably wrong but as an [almost certainly wrong first guess]* your world is, kind of like what I'd expect if a god did that!"

*A one-syllable-one-elemental-rumble word in Old High Draconic, long since borrowed by wizards.

...The name 'Silvermoon' draws a surprised sporfle from her.  "Sorry, sorry, weird coincidence, don't mind me."

"...I will add that while, yes, well, humility is a thing that I was thinking of, it's also self-defense against becoming the most interesting thing in the room.  ...Which I'm going to be anyway, aren't I.  Dangit."

Then, the ritual...  And it's tickling her suspicions just a bit!  "...Would this ritual's name, to a first approximation, be Create Demiplane?  And would it be, oh...  What was it...  ...Would, assuming that there is such a thing as a 'spell slot', and that 'spell slots' have varying levels of power, would you say that that ritual requires the expenditure of a spell slot that is, say, greater than or equal to ...seven?  Seven, levels of power out of a total of nine?  And possibly diamond dust or actual diamonds?  Because there's quite possibly weird multiverse things afoot.  It doesn't mean I'll know anything more about the hows of anything you're doing, my magic does not work remotely like the magic I think you might have, it's more like an amount of overall flux you're 'allowed'-qua-able to exert at once than a prepare-in-advance sort of thing unless you're, like, teleporting an entire army somewhere - but I might be able to find a few whats that ought to stick."