It's an interesting and fruitful gate- research project, too! One that clearly has a lot of potential, given just where he seems to have thrown himself.

The first thing to see is that magic looks weird. It's like little tiny ley-lines are flowing everywhere, filling the air to greater or lesser density below the level of his Mage-Sight, but blocking nothing to his eyes. They pool and grow into stronger ones midair as much as aboveground; he can't sense any nodes, just the constant density of power everywhere in the air. In some directions they become thicker or thinner as they travel; others sink deeper below him. Some of them seem to have - tiny messages - with them? Spells cast on the ley-line, or microline or whatever it is you want to call it, not on any specific object anywhere, and traveling with it?

The second is that it's not just weird, it's slightly hostile. Like it burns, almost, going into him; not in a physical sense, and not in the sense that he can't get used to it, just a steady discomfort Being Here. Here does not like him. He is not part of Here. The air doesn't smell right, not in the way it might smell wrong if he was fleeing into a sewer to escape assassins, or arriving in a new country he'd never been in before, but in the sense in which it might smell wrong if he had somehow managed to end up in the middle of the Pelagirs. 

The third thing to notice is all the physical details, which would probably be the first thing most people notice, but in this case none of them are any sort of direct threat to him, so they go third. He appears to be in a corridor in an enclosed building; the walls in front of and behind him are wood, but the ground beneath him is stone beneath the fur rugs (furs mostly from creatures he does not recognize because they are either Changecreatures or no Velgarthly animal at all), which have been tanned well enough that they aren't rotting but still kind of crudely, especially by Imperial standards. There's some brass panels on the wall with writing, which would no doubt be helpful to him in understanding what is going on if he could read the language, though the little drawings of nonhuman creatures (a nonhuman creature?) scowling at you would probably help. One of them is directly below a thin slat-paneled cabinet on the wall that appears, through gaps in the slats, to be filled with earplugs.

The whole thing smells poorly ventilated and like there are a lot of people living without imperial sewer systems - that is to say, like almost any major building in an urban center outside the Empire.

He can sense minds off in the distance; there are other people in the building, lots of them, though the thick stone below (and apparently above?) him is making it harder to sense the ones that aren't on this floor or very near him. Most of them are slightly odd ungifted humans, but recognizable as ungifted humans, but there's a couple who are probably humans but it's very hard to tell with something that resembles Mage-gift but it's hard to tell, and some of them who are animals or Changecreatures or something along those lines?

...Interesting. 

Is it the other continent? He's never actually been, himself; the maps and explorers' accounts in his records are more detailed than what anyone else still has, back from before the Mage Wars, when crossing the ocean by ship was, if not routine, at least something that brave-or-foolhardy explorers and trade ventures would attempt, with about two in three odds of a successful return trip. But, of course, one of the things he doesn't know - and had hoped to find out - is how hard-hit the other continent was by the Cataclysm.

It's been three-quarters of a millennium, though. He hadn't expected it to still feel this strange. 

- shields, first. He's already wearing half a dozen protective talismans; he should be invisible to anyone else's Thoughtsensing, unless he deliberately opens a Mindspeech conversation with them, and he shouldn't set off most kinds of passive detection-ward unless he casts anything. He's not shielded against Pelagirs wild magic, because he hadn't expected it to come up and it's still not a technique he knows how to put into an artifact; he can tighten his shields and see if that helps at all with the unpleasantness, which hopefully isn't doing him or his Gifts any lasting damage. ...And an air-filtering shield. He doesn't think the air is toxic, just kind of smelly, but on principle. Neither is a particularly energy-intensive spell, and the Gate was unexpectedly draining but he was trying it from a one-sided semi-permanent Gate-threshold he put together in a records cache for this project; he has enough left in reserves for defensive magic, even if he doesn't trust the bizarre not-ley-lines to be safe to draw on. 

Next, orient. He's still holding perfectly still, and may or may not have been noticed yet, depending on whether any of the strange spells hung directly from the tiny ley-lines are detection wards.

Can he get a scrying-spell up and a closer look at some of the nearby un-Gifted humans? Can he get any surface thoughts off them? 

Tightening his shields suffices to block out all the local mage-energy, but then it has the problem that he isn't picking up local mage-energy. An air-filtering shield works fine; the world still feels somewhat uncomfortable, not-made-for-him, but much less so once he does these things.

He can absolutely do these things! The people are mostly concerned with their own things, thinking about how they want to get through the day. The nearest un-Gifted human is a woman of a foreign ethnicity, wearing not-very-well made wool clothes cut in a shape that suggests some kind of uniform - which is not really unusual for poor people in areas that don't grow linen or cotton - that are rather too hot for indoors in this weather, of a style unfamiliar to him, which you would really expect if he was on another continent. She's wearing silk slippers, for some reason?

She's mostly thinking about how they want to get through the day. The nearest one is a servant who is supposed to be collecting all the laundry and taking it down to the laundry room to be washed, and she really hopes she doesn't run into this warlock - something like a mage but negatively-aspected? - who's a bully, the pay is great but sometimes she wishes she got a job somewhere quieter and further away from powerful people...

The second-nearest is a man of the same ethnicity, dressed similarly (including the silk slippers) with a song running through his head, instrumental on flute and drums and some kind of vaguely luteish stringed instrument, who is dusting the books in the library and idly reading things, including titles like The Forty-Nine And All Their Weaknesses, Onne Thee Mistries Of Anshent Alkhemy, and The Dying Codex, though his eyes are also paying attention to a plaque that says Warning! One bone will be broken for every page torn!

The third-nearest is standing guard outside the royal armory (wearing leather and horn armor and carrying a spear) and is bored out of his mind and hopes someone comes by he can talk to or something, oh gods he is so bored, his armor is SO HOT.

Some sort of foreign court. That part more or less makes sense to him. It's baffling that you would build a royal court in Pelagirs territory, but - if everywhere on the continent is like this, it's not like they would have a choice. It doesn't seem to be harming the un-Gifted locals.

(Possibly it is harming the mages? Which fits with Pelagirs-like damaged land. In the mage-storms aftermath of the Cataclysm, it was more common for Gifted people to be incapacitated or be unable to use magic reliably, but subtler mental changes could and did happen. Matteir isn't delighted by having to shield tightly enough that it mostly blocks his own mage-sight, but picking up subtle damage that causes mental changes would be worse. He keeps shielding.) 

Quiet notes of confusion: the silk slippers, unexpectedly fancy to be given to servants - unless silk is weirdly easy to produce in this region, but if it were cheap you might expect clothing made from it as well, and either way it seems like there must be a reason and he's not seeing it. The earplugs - magical protection? He suspects 'immunity against Bardic Gift' is - trying to map it over to something more familiar than he has any reason to think this place is - but he's noting it, and preparing to raise a sound-barrier if anything happens to hint at a sound-conveyed magical attack. 

There's no sign that they noticed his Gate landing, which means that either they don't have wards to detect it, or only the local mage(s) get those alarms and they haven't alerted anyone else yet. And might or might not mean he could Gate right back out without being noticed, but that's an awfully big gamble. And he's not sure he could easily reverse the experimental Gate-routing without a threshold to cast from. Spending ten minutes gradually exhausting himself by poking at the search-spell, while he still knows so little about his surroundings, is not exactly appealing. Besides, he came here to explore and learn, and he's not done.

...It's not impossible to detect scrying with mage-gift. (He finds himself quietly wishing he had Farsight, which is undetectable as far as scholars know.) It's less detectable to trained mages than a Thoughtsensing probe, though, and Matteir would prefer to get a better look around before he ventures out of the corridor. 

He would prefer to have a local destination to Gate out to in an emergency, though. Before trying to scry any of the local maybe-Changed mages, he's going to toss a scrying-spell out by about a mile in a random direction. What's there? 

Pasture. Looks like some local breed of sheep is the main animal being pastured there? His scrying spell is far enough above eye level that he can see that there's woods if you go far enough away from him and farms clinging to a river that passes through a small, ugly city, in his direction. The city is built around a big stone castle, which he would guess he is currently inside.

(Nobody seems to notice the scrying spell.)

It doesn't look Pelagirs-y. You can't farm in the Pelagirs. You could farm a little on the non-Pelagirs rest of the continent even as it was ravaged by the ongoing mage storms after the Cataclysm, but - not well, not enough to support a royal court. And keeping herds of livestock was generally pretty ill-advised, when they might wander into a Changecircle and turn into something else. 

- well, notice his confusion. Whatever is going on here, it's not exactly what he's tempted to round it off to. You couldn't hang set-spells on ley-lines in the aftermath of the mage storms, either. He's missing some key context that would make sense of any of this. 

Which actually makes him more inclined to stay, even at some risk to himself. That's the entire thing he wanted, right, the whole reason he spent most of the last six months on obscure Gate-research.

(He hadn't really expected it to work.) 

(He's not, himself, risking anything permanent. Just the life of another innocent teenager somewhere in Velgarth.) 

He'll hop his scrying-spell over to the woods, just to grab an exact emergency Gate-location - faster and less draining than a blind Gate off a bearing - and check that it's not full of dangerous Changecreatures or something. And check for magic, he can do that through the scrying-spell even with his personal shields fully up, and the layer of indirection, the spell running through his focus-stone, makes it a little bit safer. 

A quick scan of the woods from above confirms there are totally Changecreatures, or something that looks kinda like them. Weird monsters - a pretty wide variety - with horrifying claws and fangs and natural armor and green veins. There's not a lot of them, most random points in the woods do not have Changecreatures in them, but Changecreatures there are.

Inconvenient. He can't even scout a specific Changecreature-free location, Changecreatures move. Also now he's confused all over again about how it's sustainable to farm livestock here, you would think they would be rapidly picked off. He did notice that the pastures are fenced and the woods cleared for some distance on the other side of the fencing, but it still seems like it would have to be marginal land for farming and herding. 

Maybe they just don't have any better alternatives. That's...an unhappy thought. 

Well, he'll pick a random point that doesn't currently contain a Changecreature and is in a small clearing with slightly better visibility. He's well shielded and can probably hold off one or two Changecreatures without dangerously exhausting himself. 

Time to try scrying one of the weird mage-gifted locals. He aims the scry-point well above the closest mind-presence, at what he estimates should be ceiling height. 

The weird mage-gifted local is currently hurrying up to see King Thrice-Born, carrying a coffer full of the cool stuff he found scouting out old ruins - a couple of flunkies are lugging an even larger chest behind him. He has fancier clothes than everyone else, with lots of color-coordinated soft and well-tanned furs, and a hat decorated with the horns of a particularly nasty thing. He also has faintly green veins, like the Changecreatures. He killed all sorts of big scary creatures and he ordered some of them to stand down and they did, because he's a WARLOCK, and that makes him tough and cool and BADASS, and he can throw fireballs -

Reading his mind closely, Matteir can see that he is - twitchy? Excitable? in a way that not a lot of mages who make it to adulthood are, back in Velgarth.

He, and his servants, are wearing silk slippers like everyone else here.

Oh, and he notices the scrying sensor. Someone's doing something really weird with magic. He pauses to look closer - 

(The flunkies stop abruptly, almost jostling him, and he slaps the nearest one almost hard enough to make him lose his grip on the chest; he staggers, but his partner bears the load for the few seconds required for him to rise and murmur "I'm so sorry, sir." The warlock has more important things to pay attention to, specifically, Matteir's scrying-sensor.)

That's inconvenient. 

Matteir pulls the spell back and unravels it immediately. He got a look, and it's not worth giving the man an opening to try to trace the spell back to him. 

(He doesn't like the green veins. He didn't have a chance to try to sense for subtle magics, but it implies some...concerning...things.) 

A mild note of confusion that his scrying spell was detected at all? It's not a lot of power, and the complex part of the spell is happening where he is, not at its destination. Matteir knows the technique to recognize the visible far end of a scrying-spell as that and not just a random eddy in the background currents of ambient mage-energy, but he has to know to look for it, and also the ambient currents of mage-energy are a lot...busier...here. Maybe there are some kind of scry-detection wards, ones that he failed to sense through the dense tangle of tiny ley-lines? Or maybe it's something weirder than that. He has a suspicion it's something weirder than that. 

In any case, the local mage isn't shielding at all against Thoughtsensing, and his surface thoughts are loud. Even from this distance, Matteir can get a pretty detailed read without any active probing at all. 

He stays where he is. Does the local mage keep investigating once the weird magic is gone? 

He spends a few moments casting spells - defensive ones, by his mind, Words of Power unspoken but humming, but none of his spells stop Thoughtsensing; when he casts the local ley-lines are drawn to him and momentarily depleted of power, before renewing themselves from the surrounding environment - but, having cast and not been attacked by anyone jumping out at him, he just shrugs and keeps going, the two people hauling the bigger chest coming behind him. He'll tell King Thrice-Born about it. Could've been nothing, after all, or something the King was doing himself. The King knows more about magic than him because the King knows more about magic than anyone.

...Intriguing. 

Matteir stays where he is. His Thoughtsensing range extends to several miles if he knows what he's looking for; he should be able to follow the mage with Thoughsensing, and hopefully learn more about the King that way, while staying unseen in his hallway. He doesn't yet feel oriented enough to want to venture out and reveal himself to the locals.

He can track everyone close to him with passive Thoughtsensing, just in case one of the servants nearby decides to come through this hallway. (In which case he's not exactly sure what he would do - his options include talking to them, putting compulsions on them, Gating out to the woods, or just darting ahead and hoping to find a place to hide. But hopefully he can get answers in the next couple of minutes, and make a more principled decision of how to approach this place.) 

The mage is going to head up a couple floors, which strains but doesn't break Matteir's Thoughtsensing link, pass a sign on the walls that he notices that says "Safety tip: Do not interrupt King Thrice-Born while he is working!" paying enough attention that it shows up in his thoughts but not much else, enter a room, read the sign on the inner door that says "King Thrice-Born is IN his workshop, do not enter" with mounting frustration, snarl at King Thrice-Born's secretary and then (with mounting self-preservation) turn to one of the flunkies carrying the bigger box and say "You blundering fool, you made me late!" The blundering fool will mutter abject apologies that the mage will not pay attention to in the slightest, and the mage will turn to the secretary "- Tell the king I have returned with his treasures," and storm off, smacking the blundering fool as he goes hard enough to make him drop his end of the bigger box.

This time the other mage does not catch it and it drops an inch onto the ground with a THUD that is (to the mage) very loud, and the mage will be interrupted in his storming off for just long enough to pause in the frozen, terrified rage of someone who knows that he is going to suffer a horrible fate he does not deserve at all -

The door slams open. It is solid oak, reinforced with iron plates on both sides, and these plates are dented on both sides, one by the Thrice-Born King slamming it open and once by it hitting the solid stone wall (reinforced with an iron plate and then covered with cheap furs for shock absorption) on the other side.

The man who strides through with inhuman speed is not wearing a particularly regal regalia, but what look like a working man's trousers and tunic, undyed wool at least on the outside; he carries no weapons, but is surrounded by a constant haze of spells that curve all the tiny ley-lines within dozens of yards into him, draining everything they bring to cast a thousand wards and a thousand enhancements. 

He is clearly not human. Blatantly not human. Possibly some kind of mutated human, possibly not; his forehead is ridged with bony plates (curved as helmets are curved to deflect arrows), plates come down from his cheekbones to cover his cheeks like a helmet's wings, and what can be seen of his skin is covered with a bone exoskeleton except on the palms of his hands. His feet are armored down to his toes, their soles with a gripping pattern that clings like a frog's for a moment before lifting.

His veins are green.

And he is moving much faster than any normal human as he picks the warlock up by the neck and slams into him into the (wooden) wall behind him hard enough that the wood cracks. (The neck doesn't.)

"I am attempting, Vorn, to carry out work. Important work. Work that may bring about the salvation of every person in this accursed ruin. Works that may save you, you personally, from madness and death."

(Vorn is absolutely terrified and is casting spells to heal himself and strengthen his toughness and not die, with what magic is in him and what magic gets through the spells that attempt to siphon it all to Thrice-Born.)

"Yet for some unknown reason, you seem to believe that, because you are offended at a servant, I should be disturbed, even though any disturbance may mean the loss of vital experiments or the destruction of my laboratories. Every one of you single-lived savages should be desperately praying to every god you know that I finish swiftly. Yet instead you delay me." The grip tightens further.

"Clearly neither altruism nor rationality nor even the desire for survival moves you. Perhaps you have grown too old to be of use, hmm?"

(What Vorn is thinking is that he is about to get his ass kicked, and then that this is horrible and he expects to die and he doesn't want to die, though all these reports about what his boss look like are definitely appearing in his sense information he's not really focusing on them. He's paying attention to what the king says, but only so he can babble the appropriate apologies when he survives.

He is also ABSOLUTELY FURIOUS that anyone DARES to talk to him like this, but he has a lot of experience trying to keep that in check so it doesn't show so he doesn't get murdered for daring to be angry at his boss.)

.....This is concerning on so very many levels. 

Matteir doesn't have a scry up, and certainly isn't about to risk one. In terms of the room and the King's appearance, he catches only the fragments he can glimpse through the eyes of the mage ('Vorn'?) who continues to be totally unshielded, even while under attack - and who has a variant of mage-sight, one that does seem to pick up his surroundings differently from what Matteir would perceive directly if he were willing to risk a scry with mage-sight open. 

He's....very confused. That's the main thing that he's noticing. Why are these people so spectacularly angry in response to the slightest provocation? ...Actually, that particular element is one he remembers, or, well, doesn't remember but knows from his written accounts of the period shortly after the Mage Wars. 

That doesn't explain the bone exoskeleton or the inhuman speed. Changecreatures sometimes have both, but - he would expect a human Changed to that extent would be even less...sane...than this.

They...have problems. That much is clear. Problems that they're trying to address, in their own clumsy way - the warning signs, he remembers seeing those and not understanding, and maybe he understands better now - and the "Thrice-Born King" (another flicker of confusion, curiosity) who is at least claiming to be motivated by fixing - this, or some elements of it - and just...unable to control himself, apparently? 

Matteir doesn't move. (He tightens his specialized shield against the Pelagirs wild-mage-energies, which isn't exactly what's going on here but it did seem to be helping, and it doesn't impede Thoughtsensing.) He checks his immediate surroundings again; if anyone is about to walk in on him, handling that is a higher priority than whatever is going on several floors away.

But if it's safe to, he's going to try to pick up the thoughts of the Thrice-Born King as well. The Thrice-Born King doesn't seemed to have noticed his passive Thoughtsensing read on 'Vorn', and also seems very distracted right now. 

The King's thoughts are around 99% berserk rage and 1% a tiny voice attempting to steer that into a comparatively productive direction, such as 'monologuing' instead of 'murdering everyone in the building!' It's kind of impressive the extent to which, given that he is completely filled with berserk rage, he is not going around murdering people who were totally unrelated to the event just because they're there.

... He does not, really, seem to have a normal human mind? Probably a Mindhealer would get a much better read, but he seems to - not care about anyone at all except himself? With 'save the world' more of a ticking score counter than an emotional desire for anyone else to be all right.

"Any excuse?"

(It is semiconscious that he is deliberately not letting Vorn breathe enough to talk because then he would say something annoying and Karivas - apparently his name is Karivas - would go so totally berserk he would kill everyone in the building.) He will hold Vorn there for several long moments of gasping, and enough time for the berserk rage to dwindle slightly, and then - 

"BEGONE!" 

And he will throw Vorn at the floor hard enough to kill a normal person and storm back to his laboratory, one corner of his attention on the specific question of whether Vorn will leap at his back or not, because if so, Vorn's just going to die immediately.

This world - 

(because he's now, and this is a little surprising even to himself, leaning toward thinking this is a different world from the one he knows - which is absurd, but the Gate he raised didn't feel exactly like a Gate to the other continent - didn't feel like anything he recognized - and magic doesn't work this way in Velgarth)

- this world, which might or might not be the other continent on Velgarth, is really terrible. That's his main conclusion here. 

But there's something Matteir recognizes, in those few brief fragments. Someone trying to do the best they can, under awful circumstances, and - his own awful circumstances were differently awful, and he's not a Mindhealer - and doesn't even know any specific Mindhealers he would trust with this - but he thinks this is a person who - would want to be able to work with him. Maybe. 

And he's looking for new opportunities, isn't he. New levers, or new places to stand on. 

He's not going to move, just yet, because the Thrice-Born King is clearly someone who needs to be approached cautiously. But he might try to intervene in some other way, if it looks like Vorn is inclined to leap at the King's back and die immediately. He hasn't been here for long but he would prefer not that. 

No, Vorn is going to sneak off and abandon his flunkies and go lick his wounds and nurse his resentment somewhere else. He might get drunk. Getting drunk would make him feel better, now that he's thinking about it.

Karel is going to go punch a specially reinforced punching bag until he cools down, and then he's going to go back to looking at his eight ceramic (he doesn't have glassblowers) mugs of near-identical solution for what WAS SUPPOSED TO BE (a brief flare up of the rage) a specific, carefully-measured amount of time but fortunately hasn't quite gone over, and then he is going to go back to his alchemy experiments, trying to immerse himself in them as much as possible.

This place is tragic and horrifying and he wants to help.

(In an earlier life, Matteir might have cared mostly about the resources on offer, and how he could take those and use them for his current projects and plans. But - he's not in that position, right now. He's spent the last twenty years unmoored from any specific plan or goal, and - he doesn't, actually, have to want to help only on the condition that he can make a trade and take their power back to Velgarth. ...He's not sure what the difference there is, exactly, other than how he's not under loyalty compulsions to the Empire anymore. But he does think there's a difference not explained by that.) 

He wants to talk to the King– to Karivas. That definitely isn't going to go well unless he approaches it carefully, and with way more local context than he has right now. 

He drops the Thoughtsensing-links to Vorn and the King, and focuses again on his immediate surroundings. Are either of the servants whose minds he read before still there? Are there others? 

Yep! Nobody's passed through his specific corridor yet, but that will probably happen at some point.

The nearest servant to him is a woman hurrying off to the kitchens worrying about her kid, her sister's babysitting but her sister's not really responsible, Marc will be fine and she knows what to do but she still worries, this's got great wages but it's not really safe -

He's not particularly expecting this to go well, but - he clearly needs to do something, and the risk here shouldn't be too high.

He reaches out with Mindspeech, very gently. Gently enough that she might not notice it wasn't just her own thoughts, if she were unused to Mindspeech and weren't paying attention. (She probably will notice, but if she reacts with panic or hostility to a Mindtouch, then - that's information, too.)

:Come over here: he sends. :To this hallway.: 

Ahhhh! She is definitely afraid!

Also, this is probably something a warlock or the King is saying and warlocks can all kill her she isn't important for anyone enough to care, so she will obey because the alternative is a horrible death.

This place is pretty terrible. But that's not exactly new information, is it. 

When she gets to the hallway, she'll see a man leaning against the wall. He looks like a perfectly normal human man, maybe in his mid-30s. His veins aren't green. He looks calm, and not upset with her at all. 

(He's also reading her mind, trying to pull as much detail as he can.) 

Her name is Guldis and she's almost more terrified, now that she knows he isn't the King. That he isn't going green yet is good, that she doesn't know him is bad - could he be working for one of the other desolation princes? She's heard stories about them - they're horrible - she's thinking about her son, his smile, his dark frown that's more dear to her than anything else, right now - aahhhhhhhhh -

"My lord?" she says, and drops to her knees.

Matteir has a compulsion ready, just in case, but he isn't going to resort to that unless it seems like she won't otherwise cooperate. 

(He hasn't used compulsions much in this lifetime. He drilled it anyway, of course, until he could cast them again with the same ease and speed as before, and he probably will use them again if and when he tries to pull together a large organization. That's waiting on having any idea what his large organization should do.) 

:I am not your lord: he sends, gently. :I - do not expect you to trust me at my word, but I have no plan of harming you.: He lets out his breath. :My name is Matteir. I am - from somewhere very, very far away. Another continent, if not further. I was exploring, and found this place.: A slight, slow shrug. :I would like to help. It seems that you have problems. But I am very confused and I have questions I would need answered before I try approaching your King.: 

How is she reacting?

'Continent' doesn't seem to be a natural category for her, but 'land landmass surrounded by water' still gets through, along with the fact that she doesn't know the rules. She knows the rules her grandmother told her, and the rules her father told her, and now this is a different situation with different rules and a warlock who is telling her that she shouldn't be formal but what if she insults him - 

"Yes, sir?" She can try to answer questions and hope she picks the right answers?

Matteir isn't realistically going to be able to reassure her. He settles for keeping his body language still and calm. 

At least if she tries to tell him what she thinks he wants to hear, instead of factual but unhappy answers, he should be able to catch that in her thoughts. He's not sure that he's well placed to think of the right questions, but it's not like she would know that any better. 

:Your magic is very strange: he sends. :It seems to have - various negative effects, like the creatures in the woods. Do you know if magic here has always been like that? Or was there a catastrophic event in the past that caused it?: 

Demons come from magic? She thought magic came from demons. There's ruins around and you turn up weird magic things sometimes wizards made in the past, but she doesn't know if magic was different when Mir ruled the world, though of course King Thrice-Born says things were better back then and he'd know.

"I'm sorry, sir, I don't know anything about magic. The King would."

Nod. :I understand. Do you know much about your history? How long has the current King ruled - who was the King before that - was the succession peaceful or violent..?: 

"Thrice-Born is king," she says. When he isn't king there isn't a city, or borders. "He is the only king. There has never been another king."

That...is not how kings normally work. But - implies some things, that maybe make more sense of why they call him 'Thrice-Born.' 

(The Emperor wasn't that bad. It usually went on having law and order even when Ma'ar's most recent incarnation was, for the moment, dead, or was a thirteen-year-old trying to make his way back to what he had rebuilt of civilization. But - he could imagine it looking like that, in a more hostile world. If he had tried to found something in the Pelagirs, maybe, assuming for the sake of the hypothetical that there was no Star-Eyed Goddess to murder him if he encroached on Her territory.) 

:I see. Do you know if there are other kingdoms, or other cities far away, that have different kings?: 

She hears if you go far enough there's the red knights and their roads and walls who hate everything but their own armor, but that might just be traveler's tales. Whenever people make it here they're very grateful and surprised things are so good. "I don't know, sir."

...Right. That fits. It's like the early days after the Cataclysm, and this is the closest thing there is to a bastion of civilization. ...Maybe. Or maybe he's jumping to conclusions too soon. He's still missing so much. 

:Is there anything you can tell me about the King? It sounds as though I need to speak with him to learn more of your magic and your - problems - but I would want to be careful, and more prepared for it than I am now.: 

"He's a very good king." He's from the past and he's immortal and Butcher killed him and it didn't last. He pays people money instead of enslaving them. He kills warlocks if they murder and steal and burn too much. "He defends us from our enemies." All the demons who don't come inside because he tells them what to do and all the other desolation princes who are afraid of him (except Butcher, Butcher is afraid of nobody) and the red knights if they exist... "He's going to save the world." You have to say that but she doesn't know what a saved world would even mean.

...Now is not a good time to have emotions about that and so he's not going to. Mostly. ("Demons" are the Changecreature-like things, he's gathering, and not the Abyssal demons he knows. Except that Guldis thinks they cause the twisted local magic, rather than vice versa. ...Maybe. He could have misunderstood that brief fragment of thought, or she could just be uninformed. Really, he shouldn't be forming any confident conclusions about magic hereabouts until he's spoken to one of their mages. "Warlocks", rather, he's not sure what the difference is but it definitely seems like there is one.) 

:I gathered he was aiming for something like that. I also observed that he seems - easily angered. Is that - something that being a magic user here causes? ...In any case, I would like to speak to him without startling him unduly.:  

Is it... not... something that being a magic user causes where he's from? "All warlocks are demon-touched," she says. They drink demon blood and have demon madness and demon minds, especially after the first few years. "And the Great Ones, more. But King Thrice-Born is the greatest king ever to live, will be merciful so long as you respect and honor him." There are instructions on the walls, mostly for the servants because the servants are the people who are dealing with them.

(It's not how being a mage works in Velgarth! It's substantially worse than the thing he had been making an analogy to, where the Mage Storms sometimes - not always! - had troubling mental effects on Gifted people.) 

:Who are the other Great Ones? ...Also, I noticed warning signs, I think - one in the library, one by the King's work room, I think? - but cannot actually read in your language. What sorts of things do they warn about?: 

She doesn't know all of them. There's a bunch. "Butcher. Builder. Singer. Spider. Reaper. Raider. Breaker. Burster. Traitor. There are others, I think. They do what they want where the King isn't." There's all sorts of horrible stories and people who come here have sometimes seen one, but rarely; out in the wilderness you get good at not seeing them.

"They warn not to disturb him when he's working, and not to question his kingship, and not to steal from him in any way or speak to him of Butcher or Traitor, or waste his time with foolish words."

Matteir nods again. :Thank you. Is there a designated room where people can go to wait for an audience with him without disturbing him at his work?: 

"People" important people "talk to one of his secretaries, and they tell him when he comes out of his work room." Secretary is a very very high paying job and you can buy a farm and send all your children to good apprenticeships in only a few years and maybe become a warlock if you live that long.

(She can give directions to where his secretaries may be found, most of the rooms where he spends a lot of time have a soundproof waiting room outside with a secretary or two in them, and then there's a central office and a front desk.)

Matteir thanks her, and then - it's probably time to go and talk to the secretary at the central office. 

He would kind of prefer to plot a route there that avoids any other "warlocks". He can probably take one of them in a fight, but getting into pointless fights would be a terrible first impression, and he would prefer to avoid any power-intensive casting; he's not sure he can safely draw on the ley-lines here without being affected by whatever is wrong with the local magic. He extends Thoughtsensing - is there any path that lets him reach the central office while definitely avoiding any of the warlock-minds? 

Given his ability to sense where all the minds in the castle are, that's not that hard! He'll probably pass a few servants unless he goes out of his way to avoid it, but not anyone with green veins.

He's not going to go very far out of his way to avoid servants; he'll just walk confidently, like he's definitely meant to be there, and try not to appear like he's paying attention to them. It seems like being paid attention by powerful people is mostly bad news, here. 

He reaches ahead, searching for the secretary's mind at the central office. What are they thinking about? 

There's three secretaries in the office right now! One of them is thinking about the crummy quality of the paper he's using to copy down some of the King's notes. They got much better papers when he was younger, and he doesn't know what the King will think about it. (He's probably in his thirties - he's not keeping an exact count - but thinks of himself as a wise old man supervising these foolish children.) One of them is sitting attentively at the front because he can't sense warlock minds and there needs to be someone doing that and is too tense and scared to be very bored, and one is thinking about how unreasonable the man across the street is, everyone else gives him respect because he works for the King himself but that jerk doesn't take him seriously at all - and is dreaming idle revenge fantasies. (He's copying down a new memo that needs to be taken to the brassworker to be made into a plaque, REMEMBER! WALKING LOUDLY OUTSIDE KING THRICE-BORN's OFFICE IS DISTURBING HIM! but he's done it before and isn't too worried about getting it wrong.)

What a place. 

(If the secretaries copy the King's notes, they might know a lot more about him than the servants do, and maybe even have some context on what he's actually working on.) 

None of them are threats. They're probably going to see Matteir as a threat. 

He walks into the office, hands loose at his sides, sleeves rolled up so they can see that his veins aren't green. He stops in front of the desk at the front. :Hello. I am here because I wish to have an audience with the King.: 

... Powerful warlock who hasn't started snapping yet with unknown magic. Right. Fair enough. He'll bow, because, you know, of course.

"I understand, sir. How urgent is this?" Hopefully they don't need to send someone expendable to interrupt him.

(The obvious things for Leareth to pick up on about this group is that they are all fairly young, all the same ethnicity, worn as everyone not a noble is with hard work, and unlike most people not nobles on his continent - actually look like they have gotten a reasonable amount to eat as children? Their clothes and tools are pretty roughly-made, though, with very limited materials and craftsmanship.)

Matteir definitely doesn't want them to have to send someone "expendable" to be murdered by the King for having the temerity to interrupt him. 

:It is not particularly urgent. If it is going to be a while, I would appreciate if one of you is available to answer some questions I have? I am from somewhere - very far from here - and I think it would be valuable to have more context on your region and its people before I meet with the King.: 

(Huh. Matteir isn't sure what to make of that. Some regions - like the stable and well-established inner provinces of the Eastern Empire - have reliable food availability even for peasants, and there exist other regions in Velgarth where the poor quality of their clothing and tools wouldn't stand out, but it's bizarre to see both juxtaposed in the same place. Especially given that his glance at the surrounding area made it look pretty marginal for farming. The tiny farming communities that find a foothold on the outskirts of the Pelagirs don't tend to have good childhood nutrition. Maybe the local style of magic is more useful for boosting crop growth, and less useful for making clothing or tools? Though most of Velgarth doesn't use magic for crafts anyway...) 

Okay, this is obviously creepy, he bets the King can take him if worst comes to worst. "Certainly, sir. We will send a message that the King be informed immediately and he will speak with you when he is ready." This involves the juniormost member putting down his paperwork and his revenge-fantasy and heading off to the currently-in-use royal workshop at the fastest pace achievable, ready to pass the message on to the secretary outside the King's workshop to deliver to him when he leaves.

Nod. :That works fine. ...May I sit down, or should I wait somewhere else?: He's not actually sure what he did in that interaction to come across as creepy, which means he's still missing a lot of context. 

"Sit, sir, sit, please." There are chairs. They are as comfy as the terribly bad tech level can make it. (He had not considered that a warlock would ask instead of sitting.)

(The fact that Matteir isn't acting like a warlock, he's weird and foreign and has weird magic, is what's creepy.)

Well, Matteir can't help the strange magic, he kind of needs to use Mindspeech to communicate, and he's not really in the mood to act aggressive and volatile because that would be more familiar to the locals. 

:I asked one of the servants before, but they did not know very much about the topics I am interested in. I want to understand better how your magic works, and why your warlocks seem to inevitably be - highly volatile people.: 

He is confused about this 'warlocks who are not highly volatile people' thing. "Sir," he says, still obviously wary, "the power of warlocks comes from demons, and the nature of demons is chaos; they set their mortality aside, and with it mortal concerns. Only the King strives to master his nature and overcome this transformation. It is the nature of the world."

... Honestly he doesn't know that much about magic. Yes, he copies down what the King tells him to copy down, but asking questions about what it means would really slow him down. He does work. He wouldn't turn down being a warlock, if someone shows up for the king's head he'd love to be able to get away and survive on his own without starving, but he's not eager for it.

(The senior member of the secretaries is, incidentally, taking cover. The cover doesn't really work against Matteir's powers, but he's doing his best anyway.)

...Matteir is starting to suspect that he's ended up a lot further away than just the other continent. (Is that even possible? Well, there are other planes, and his Gate-technique routes through more of them than just the Void. Different planes have different physical laws, that's to be expected. It's odd that another plane might have mostly the same physical laws and magic, to the point of also having humans, but - assuming any of the explanations he's gotten so far can be trusted at all - it would also be odd for the magic of the other continent to be this different.) 

He's not going to tell the poor secretary that he might be from another world. He can save that for the King. 

:I see. Do your people know how long there have been demons, and where they come from?: 

"They come from the magic of our ancestors and the magic of warlocks and the Great, and have done so for many centuries." There's some kind of horrible magic with cauldrons and usually the corpses of animals and demons and green slime and he does not know how the details work but demons come out of it.

(The King's demons are the best, though people say there are better. He's never seen one, though.)

:Ah. So demons are created - by warlocks? Or by another kind of magic user? And then warlocks obtain their magic from the demons? Does  every warlock need to create their own demon to access its magic, or are there just demons running around now and warlocks use the existing ones?: 

"I do not know if they are created or summoned," he says. "There are those who are warlocks and there are those once warlocks who have transcended humanity, and they are Great." He hopes none of this is wrong in a way where the King will trace it back to him. "The world is thick with demons as fleas on a dog's hide, sir." Maybe that isn't true Very Far Away wherever he's from?

Nod. :And the King is Great? What - are the differences there, exactly, other than having transcended humanity?: 

Mostly it's just an absolutely ridiculous amount of power. "They are mightier by far than any warlock." They can take whatever forms they want and heal from any wound. "They cannot be slain by any save each other."

:Do the other Greats also have kingdoms they rule, in other places?: 

"The other of the Great Ones may rule, but over tribes and wildernesses, not cities and peoples. Only our King is a true King." They kill people, so people run away from them instead of gathering where they are. It's why everyone comes here instead.

He nods again, seriously. :- You said before that only the King seeks to 'master his nature and overcome this transformation.' Could you explain to me what that means?: 

"The King was a sorcerer of Mir, and knows many powers the demonkin by birth know not. His powers sufficed to tear him from the wheel of reincarnation itself and so render him a true immortal; how is this different?"

(He has no idea whatsoever and is repeating random stuff he heard, some of it in royal propaganda. This is basically just guessing.)

That indeed did not make a huge amount of sense, but - Matteir thinks he understood some of it. Maybe the important part. 

:Thank you. ...Is there any advice you could offer me, for speaking with the King?: 

"You should treat him like a King, sir," he says, "with respect." Unfortunately, 'with respect' is a jumbled together bundle in his head all of which makes perfect sense as a coherent unit and which he is not paying much attention to the details of. You don't insult him or make yourself try to sound superior or try to attack him or get in his personal space or call him a liar or...

....Well, it does mostly make sense to Matteir as a coherent bundle, at least? Be deferent, be non-threatening, 'not calling someone a liar' is really just basic politeness (and calling someone a liar very rarely helps even, maybe especially, when it's true.) He's not natively very good at deferent but he does know what it looks like, and he can definitely do non-threatening, or at least avoid the things that would come across as threatening to him if their positions were reversed. (Someone trying to attack him or get in his personal space would definitely qualify.) He should be able to read the King's mind, too, and get real-time feedback on whether he's dangerously close to angering him. 

:Thank you.: He ducks his head, briefly. :I am grateful for your advice. I think that answers most of my questions, but I would certainly welcome more direction, if there is anything obvious to you that someone not from here would be missing.: 

"He is a great king."

(It looks like the King's mind is moving upstairs, though he's not down here yet.)

Compared to the abysmally low local standards, maybe he really is. 

(He has copies made of his research notes. Most of the things people have said about him are...hard to assess...but that's a concrete demonstration of actually putting in effort to succeed at a long term project.) 

Matteir nods, and waits with a pleasantly neutral expression. 

(A few moments before, as the King stretches and emerges from his workshop, glances over to see his secretary kneeling and the little a-message-for-you-sire sign up on his desk -

"Speak." Why is there no one competent in his kingdom? Other than that it is tiny and everyone here is young and stupid?

"Your Majesty. A foreigner with magical powers requests an audience with you."

"- Foreigner." Wait, does that mean -

"Yes, my lord."

"- His skin and eyes and hair -" Does that mean foreign or a different mykon -

(The word is untranslated because it does not match up to anything in any language Leareth knows. 'Continent' is somewhere vaguely nearby in concept-space.) 

"- I do not know that he is human, sire."

His fingers tighten. "He wields a foreign magic unlike ours?" His thoughts are flashing (his brain is alien, warped and shaped in a way unlike any Matteir has seen - his warlocks, but less -)

"Yes, Your Majesty." (The secretary is kind of amazed that Thriceborn knows this.)

"He wields it here?" That should not be possible. 

"He does not speak the language, but with thoughts."

Thriceborn sweeps his hand out to grab one of the less impressive furs on the wall, and it twists and turns in his hand, wrapping itself into a ball as he incinerates it piece-by-piece. (He is not really paying attention to the magic.) "I will speak with him. Summon him to the Red Room." The room is chosen for the easy escape routes and lack of collateral damage to anything important if he needs to fight. If he detects his mind being messed with (since wherever they from they have mind magic) he's going to start committing murder, but an unknown magician - and he can do it here -

The King briefly pauses to collect his equipment (his thoughts are jumping around - this is potentially an unbelievably valuable option, or potentially something that is going to get him killed, so he's going to be armed -) before storming up.

And a secretary will show up to escort Matteir to the red room!

Matteir is also mentally preparing himself to fight, if he has to, but he's carefully not assuming an attitude of expecting a fight; even as practiced as he is at controlling his visible reactions, if the King is good at reading people he might pick up on it. He is approaching this conversation, as much as possible with the angle that he wants to help.

(He's very well shielded. He's not sure how much the local equivalent of mage-sight will be able to pick up on the artifacts' design, but hopefully they'll at least make him look like less of an appealing target, though his actual plan here is to attempt to Gate out immediately to the woods rather than having a fight.) 

He has no intention of interfering with the King's mind. Compulsions are probably detectable by the local magic, and might not even work, the King's mind is bizarre. (Though he's already half-mulling, in the back of his mind, on the question of whether Mindhealing could help with the uncontrollable aggression problem. One advantage of being a wandering scholar outside the Eastern Empire is that he does actually know a handful of Mindhealers, and might even be able to convince them to help.) 

He accompanies the secretary. :Would you ask the King for me if it is all right for me to use Mindspeech to communicate? It will not affect his mind in any other way, but he might not wish to take my word on that. If you are willing to relay instead, that would also be workable.: 

He'll hurry ahead once they it to the door to the Red Room and ask.

"He may." He doesn't want another person in the room here; whether he survives it or doesn't, either way he loses.

This message is passed to Leareth, and he is waved in. The Red Room is on the top floor of the castle, with windows that are slits through solid rock (and, though this may not be immediately apparent, a very thin ceiling), with insulation coming mostly from the brownish-red hides of deer-like animals on the wall.

The King is standing behind a desk; he has no bodyguards, but there's a wide variety of magical items on his person, some of which bear specific extremely complicated triggered spells that are largely incomprehensible to Matteir at his stage of knowledge and others of which (including a sword in a sheath by his side) appear to bend the natural magical forces around them the same way humans (or, uh, the locals, though they're probably just a foreign ethnicity) do. He's currently thinking that if Matteir starts a fight with mind magic, he'll blow up the room and leap out of the room, growing wings on the way. Mostly, though, he's just paying attention to Matteir; hungry for information with an almost physical hunger.

(Leaping out of the room will involve spells, but he's devoting about a metaphorical syllable of attention to each of them and it's a metaphorically foreign language - cut his weight, boost his leaping strength, place a force on him that accelerates him straight upwards?)

Matteir is also doing a quick inventory of his possible exit points, in case for some reason he ends up needing to get out and for some reason can't Gate. He would prefer not to escalate a fight even if the King starts it. 

:Thank you for agreeing to meet with me: he sends, with tight directional shielding that cuts out most of the emotional overtones of Mindspeech. His body language is very calm. :I suspect you have already gotten some basic introduction, but - I believe I come from somewhere very far away, possibly another world entirely. I have a number of questions about your region's magic. I imagine you also have some pressing questions about my magic, and would be happy to answer those first.: 

Thriceborn nods sharply. "My first question," the one he most needs answered under the circumstances, "is what the restrictions on your ability to use magic on a different mykon are." Wait, that wasn't what he was going to say! (He'll start pacing up and down the room.) But he wants to knowwwwwwww...

It's a reasonable question! (Matteir is making a small mental note of concern that the King might be paranoid enough to attribute his - lack of self-control? poor self-prediction? - to being mind-controlled. But there's not exactly anything he should do about it right now.) 

:I am not sure I understand what you mean by 'mykon', but - leaving that aside, I seem to have my usual abilities here. I am speaking to you with Mindspeech, which is a separate Gift from mage-gift - in my region, Gifts are inherited and can either remain latent in potential or awaken around puberty. Mage-gift is much broader and more flexible, and I have not noticed anything failing to work but I have also not tested it extensively. The main limitation may end up being power. In my world, I can draw on external ambient mage-energies, which pool in ley-lines and nodes: he sends a more visual impression of how they appear to mage-sight. :I do perceive ambient mage-energy in your world, but am reluctant to draw on them until I understand your region's magic better and the potential risks.: 

"A region in which the laws of magic are the same," he says, his tone superior. (Petty superstition calls them dead titans.) "Mankind, like all other species, comes in varieties native to the regions in which he lives; each masters the way of his own lands, flourishes inside them, wanes outside." He smiles a superior smile. "You have not learned how to synthesize mage-gifts?"

A superior smile is much better than anger or paranoia. Matteir is unbothered. :No. I would not say it is categorically impossible in my region, but it may be much harder given our local laws of magic. The resources of an Empire of thirty million were thrown at the project – it would have been incredibly valuable, obviously – and the best we could do was to selectively breed for more mages over centuries.: 

"Mmm. Count yourselves fortunate." He's thinking that the magical gifts thing sounds kind of like affinities, except possibly useful.

(Thirty million. Mir had to tame all the land between the seas to accomplish that.) "And the capabilities of your mages?"

:Depend heavily on a given's mages training and experience - complex uses of mage-gift do not come instinctively, and need to be learned. The Gift can also appear in more or less powerful versions - that part is innate, and does not increase with training. Stronger mages can safely draw on energies outside themselves, ley-lines or nodes, which allows them to cast much more before they become exhausted.: Pause to make sure he's giving the King time to keep up. :A weak and minimally trained mage can shield himself against physical force or mage-attacks, or create small fireballs to start campfires, or cast lower-powered offensive magic; a strong but unskilled mage can do the same things, but at much larger scale.:

He decides against bringing up compulsions. It's probably a good idea to mention sooner rather than later, he doesn't want to give the King the impression that he's hiding things - and in the King's position, he would find it reassuring rather than alarming to have more information - but it's definitely something to approach delicately. 

:With training, mages can learn to cast a wide variety of wards or more complex shielding, or create artifacts with set-spells for shields or wards or offensive spells that do not require the mage's ongoing attention.: He taps the little bundle of shield-talismans hanging at the hollow of his throat; presumably the King can sense the magic on them. :A sufficiently powerful mage can learn to Gate, a technique which - opens a doorway directly between two distant locations, routing through a plane we call the Void. Gates are more tiring if they are larger, or cross a greater distance, or are held for longer; Gating to the other side of the planet is approximately intractable even for me. I was researching a way to route Gates more efficiently, and one of those experiments is how I ended up here.: 

This sounds pretty weird to him, honestly. 'Complex uses do not come instinctively' - but others do? 'More and less powerful versions' - well, yes, he supposes, if you care... why do you need power to access power? Isn't that just nonsensical? And there's no mention of the vast majority of what his own magic can do.

Gating is the weirdest, but - "This Void is something that mortal flesh can occupy?" The spirit realm does not have flesh, or anything of the sort. 

(Matteir doesn't think that's any weirder than walking coming instinctively while swordfighting has to be learned. Needing to be Adept-potential to safely touch nodes feels intuitive to him, but he did notice that this world doesn't seem to have nodes, per se, just the weirdly dense tiny ley-lines. 

He definitely hasn't mentioned everything a mage can do, though he also wouldn't be surprised if this world's magic isn't possible - or at least isn't natively straightforward - for Velgarth mages. It would almost be more surprising if the capabilities were the same.) 

He doesn't exactly want to make it salient that he's reading the King's mind, so he keeps those thoughts to himself. 

:No, the Void is not particularly survivable, but space and distance function differently there. A Gate is - this is not quite accurate, but you could imagine it as 'pinching together' two doorways, from locations distant in the material plane but close together in the Void.: 

Well, that sounds like something Sorimer should invent. Maybe he did, and all the Ministers ran off when they reincarnated and retired to somewhere else that wasn't terrible. "Useful. Any healing spells?" He tenses, here, because that matters, if the laws are different or they just crafted a better Word and they can do what Mir could not -

(Matteir is paying very close attention to the King's surface thoughts, now. Why is Healing specifically so important? He wouldn't have thought it was the right kind of thing to solve their, well, aggression problem...) 

:Some. Particularly for delaying aging, but it is a highly specialized field. And less of a priority because we do have a different specific Gift for Healing, which is very flexible and comes with its own Othersense, Healing-Sight, that can perceive and diagnose problems. - I am not myself Healing-Gifted, unfortunately, but if your world has need of that, and I can figure out how to Gate back to bring others here...: 

(Because 'making biology work the way it is supposed to' is really just a subtype of 'making biology do things.')

"There are distinctions between what can be accomplished through sorcery, and what alchemy is needed for. Alchemical healing has - restrictions that make it impractical." Shapestone. Always shapestone. "Sorcerous healing has its uses, but expansions in what it could accomplish," such as "healing" mage-sight into people, "would be of the highest importance."

(Interesting. Unfortunately, that doesn't sound like the kind of thing Healing - or any known Velgarth magic - can do if someone doesn't even have the Gift in potential, though who knows what might be possible by combining the magic of two worlds.) 

He nods. :I am not sure if our world even has the magic you are referring to as 'alchemy', but I would need to hear more about it to be sure. What are the differences between sorcery and alchemy?: 

He would be annoyed because his purposes are thwarted, but in fact he doesn't really notice that his purposes have been thwarted because he likes explaining stuff. "Sorcery - channeling, Dictation - consists of giving commands to the godweb -" something like speech occurs, as he commands and the lay-lines shift "- which it then executes according to its nature. Alchemy, meanwhile, might be called that portion of chemical science which is mykon-dependent -" that's a polite term for it "- such that materials that would be common clay in other lands can, through their interactions with the godweb, act by their own nature to produce supernatural effects alien to other mykoi." Such as, oh, boiling up a pot of soldier-constructs whenever you need them... 

Matteir has so many tantalizing half-formed questions about - the cultural context, significantly, what in the world is the impolite term for 'mykon-dependent' and why - but also what it even means for a material like common clay to act 'by its own nature' to produce magical effects. 

...Godweb. He doesn't like that term. Maybe not for good reasons - who knows what gods are like, here, or if the King even means the same kind of thing - but nonetheless. 

:I noticed the web: he sends. :It resembles our ley-lines, but more - tightly woven - and without the natural pooling of mage-energy in denser nodes.: He pushes across a mental image of what ley-lines look like in Velgarth – much more spread out, tiny local trickles of ambient energy eventually coalescing into more stable 'streams' and 'rivers', flowing 'downstream' to fill 'nodes' that tend to be spread out on the scale of miles. Nodes are - hot, turbulent, each holding enough power to fuel an Adept through an entire battle, but only an Adept can take in that much power without injuring their channels. 

:Anyway. Yours is - in some sense intelligent? Or holds part of the structure and complexity of how magic works here, at least?: 

"It is not intelligent!" he snaps furiously, rising from his seat to pace and gesticulate furiously. "That is a myth, spread by superstitious fools to help them enjoy the corrupt pleasure of debasing themselves before a so-called superior being. But it bears interpretative capacity, no doubt constructed by prior civilizations now lost to mankind, on which more complicated spell structures can be built." HE HAS HAD TO EXPLAIN THIS SO MANY TIMES WHY ARE THERE SO MANY FOOLS IN THE WORLD

That is certainly a demonstration of something.

:Interpretative capacity, then: he agrees, very mildly. :Our ley-lines lack that trait. We have some magical structures that can anchor more complicated spell structures in a perhaps-similar way, called Heartstones, but they are created directly by a god in our region and I have never seen one up close.: 

"There are no gods here," he says, pacing back and forth, "or if there were they abandoned us long ago. The Godweb's functionality was expanded in my first lifetime, with new synthetic words created to simplify common tasks. Further expansions are -" he makes a slashing gesture out past the walls towards his city "- presently impractical. What are these Gifts that you speak of?"