"I kind of don't want to test it in any context where it might make my foundation spring loose."

"That's fair. Under what circumstances might it do that and not do that?"

"Well, since I haven't the faintest idea how it works..."

"My heaviest-hitting antimagic is Mordenkainen's Disjunction, which destroys nearly all magical effects within a forty-foot radius."

"...If you did that anywhere near me or my castle and it succeeded even partly, I'd expect big trouble. Maybe not the entire mountain getting blown off the map, but trouble."

"Yeah. A normal antimagic field would probably be safer, if I wanted to try it anywhere near here. Ten foot radius and it suppresses magical effects without destroying them."

"Might still fuck things up but I could at least probably handle it."

"Naively I'd expect that if it did anything at all--and you were outside the radius--it would make a bit of castle not actively do magical things, but not affect the underlying structure."

"Yeah. But if for whatever reason it decided some crucial piece of the whole thing was a 'magical effect'..."

"I don't think it would work like that but then I don't know your magic very well. Can you, I don't know, enchant something separate from your base spell and then carry me somewhere out of range of the mountain and get out of range so I can experiment on it? ...And this couldn't be today, I can't cast either of those spells today."

"Just as well, that wouldn't be trivial to accomplish. —what do you mean you can't cast them today?"

"I didn't prepare them this morning. --I have to prepare spells ahead of time, and I have to get a minimum amount of rest between instances of doing that."

"Your magic sounds kind of stupid."

"At least it doesn't do anything worse than give me a headache if I fuck it up."

"That I will grant you. I still prefer my way."

"Seems more convenient if we each like our own best."

"Suppose so. Anyway, I'm sure I can come up with a magelight or two by tomorrow. What do you think of these guest rooms—" he gestures down a cross corridor.

"Nice!"

He smiles.

"Why do you have cool guest rooms?"

"I just really like decorating them. I have never as such had a guest."

"Victims don't count by virtue of victimhood or by virtue of not staying in the castle?"

"Little of both?"

"Fair enough, I suppose. ...Um, awkward question but kind of inevitable once I started comparing the swan thing to my own captivity: you said you had a daughter, was her mom a swan?"

"She was not. Iri was four when I fucked up everything. I did my best with her but, since unlike me she is a good person, she still doesn't like me very much."