It is dropped.

Explorer rubs the top of her rock with a thumb. Promise's starts becoming warmer.

"Neat."

"Can you make another gate here to refresh my memory?" she asks, pointing. "You can close it immediately afterwards, just wanna watch the process."

"I don't like extraneous gates. They're permanent."

"...hm. If I figure out how to destroy the one that's already there?"

"Sure."

She squints at it. She—gives the harmonics a good hard shake, right in the middle of it.

The gate decays into something like what she originally walked through.

Blink.

Blink blink.

"Erm. I. Think I just turned that gate into a tear."

"...well that's not very good."

She grabs an ordinary rock and throws it through the possibly-a-tear.

The tear dissolves into nothing.

"Aaaand it's gone."

"...cool."

"Hypothesis: tears are just gates whose harmonics got too shaken up."

"That's interesting to know!"

"Yeah. Gates are not as permanent as all that, apparently."

"Well, they are known to last at least thousands of years, but sure. It's good you can make them settle instantly or you'd be stuck here till another settled."

"Yeah. I'm hoping this will be enough for me to learn to make my own gates even though I don't actually know sorcery yet. Your magic is... much easier to generalise than mine."

"Generalize?"

"Magic back home's very idiosyncratic. I can get mana and use it, but if I want to understand magic someone else did it's always extremely complex and involved and difficult. But this tear looked just like the tear I went through the first time, and your fairylights look like mine, they're all part of a coherent whole."

"Oh. Yes. Your way sounds annoying."

"It is! I mean, magic's very pretty, and the variety adds to it, but from a practical standpoint, yeah."

"Anyway, gate?"