A person appears out of nowhere.

She appears to be sleeping, curled up and wrapped in a blanket.

There is - something going on with her, magically speaking. It is an unsettling sort of something. Subtle, dormant, immensely powerful.

Um.

What the heck.

She squints at her.

The ominous presence does absolutely nothing.

The girl blinks awake with a disgruntled mumble, sees Kaede, and squints right back.

"...er. Hi?"

She says something in a totally unfamiliar language.

...Kaede tries two other languages.

Nope. And nope. She frowns slightly.

She starts saying a lot of things in the first language—almost reciting them.

The strange girl watches her in mild puzzlement.

She does a 'wait' gesture with her hand and continues talking to herself.

Okay. She waits.

After about a minute and a half of this—

Hello, are you getting this?

She frowns, puzzled and concerned.

...okay you're getting this, did I mess the spell up, is this nonsense, you should be able to understand me -

She stares intently into Kaede's eyes. Whatever she's looking for there, she doesn't find it.

—how are you doing this? she asks at last.

...magic? Arcanism. It's a spell I designed a while ago—I can stop if it upsets you, we'd just have to learn each other's language -

...that is not... how magic... works.

Blink.

It... kinda is. Although you just appeared here out of nowhere speaking a language that doesn't exist so you possibly have different magic.

"This isn't a dream..." she murmurs to herself, sending the translation at the same time.

"Is it safe, the magic you're doing?"

Oh good idea, she does the same.

"It's safe in the same sense talking is safe? It can't get anything from your head that you don't choose to send, it can't control your actions, it can't directly physically or mentally harm you..."

"...is this place safe?" she asks next.

"It's probably not going to collapse on us anytime soon..."

"I could give you my language and learn yours if I shared a dream with you, but it's not completely safe to do that. I wouldn't do it if something might distract me while we were dreaming."

"It's... very unlikely that anything at all will distract you while you're dreaming here. Would you like to explain a bit more about that?"

"...I have a mara. It's locked now, which is safe unless I die. To use it, I have to unlock it, and if I'm under significant stress while it's unlocked - a fight, anything that shakes my concentration - then it could get loose entirely. That would be bad. But if I am in a strange place with strange magic I know nothing about and where no one knows what a mara is, it is very important that I have a way to communicate with people."

"Yyyeah no one knows what a mara is, and it would be—people would not be normally okay with using telepathy to talk like we're doing—but it might be safer than this mara thing...?"

"...if I learned your language in a dream then I would have a safe way to communicate with anyone who speaks it. This - telepathy - of yours is not a thing that I have."

"Right I meant I could help you with it but yeah I guess. What exactly is a mara?"

"They're the creatures that live in the nightmare realm. And when they stay in the nightmare realm, and humans stay in the physical world, the worst they can do to us is make our dreams very unpleasant. But sometimes they come out into the physical world, and then things get troublesome. —by which I mean that an unchecked mara will trap people inside itself, and draw on its victims to slowly gain power and intelligence while it searches for more prey, until someone stops it. But 'never unlock my mara' isn't a solution to that, because it will get free when I die, and someone else had better be able to deal with it when it does."

"—okay. Yikes that sounds horrible—how do they get out into the physical world, and how did you trap it?"

And okay now Kaede has some more idea what that terrifying thing in her is, can she maybe get some more detail...?

'Subtle, dormant, immensely powerful' is still the theme. It might be easier to see it if it was doing anything, but then again does she really want it to start doing things?

"Sometimes people call up mara to use them. They are very useful. But people who do that nearly always end up possessed. - if you have a mara and you lose control of it, it possesses you, and it can use your knowledge and experience while it goes on to do what mara do, much more easily than if it had just 'eaten' you; but it has a much harder time 'eating' anyone else, because it's anchored to your physical body; and it's possible, although very difficult, for a possessed person to regain control over the mara possessing them. I did not call this mara. I caught it. It came through on its own; they can do that occasionally, though it's much rarer than being invited."

"If I wake up while the dream thing is going on is that a problem?"

"You won't."

"—because I was thinking of setting an alarm spell to wake me up just in case but I could just be more elaborate and illusion us and muffle sound around us."

"...what?"

"I mean, we're basically in the middle of nowhere and I'm pretty sure nothing is going to disturb you, but the steps I would take if my goal were to minimise the possibility would be creating temporary spells around us that would make it much harder for us to be disturbed and for you to wake up if we are."

"—oh. No. The situation is not 'I will be asleep and it would be bad if I was startled awake'. The situation is 'I will be in control of my mara, and it would be bad if something happened that made me lose hold of it'. I'm very good at maintaining focus but it's still prudent to avoid sudden shocks and extreme stress while holding an unlocked mara. If we were likely to be interrupted by bandits or earthquakes or wildfires or anything of that nature, I would be more reluctant to bring out my mara until we were in a safer location."

"Oh. No nothing like that's gonna happen."

She nods.

"Apart from the inherent dangers of using a mara, a constructed dream is not any more dangerous than the normal kind. Transferring languages shouldn't take longer than a few minutes."

"...okay..."

"Hmm?"

"Unknown foreign magic that looks all menacing and stuff, I'm just—a bit unsure about it."

"I am not in an enormous hurry, if you want more time to consider. But I really do not want to rely on someone else for my ability to communicate in this world."

"...I don't suppose you could do some magic that doesn't involve me—just to—you know—"

"Just to what?"

"—be sure? That may be a bit hypocritical of me."

"...be sure of what...?"

"That it's not terribly dangerous and not going to eat me."

"...I can show you what it looks like when I have my mara unlocked, but I am not sure how that would help..."

"...so you probably don't have any metamagic taboos, do you."

"Any what?"

"—I can see and manipulate magic in other people and things. Don't tell anyone."

"...okay," she says. "And you want to see me with my mara out so you can - get a better look?"

"...yeah kinda."

"I see the logic. But what would you be hoping to find out?"

"...whether it's gonna eat me. Or what the actual risk involved is. I mean, no offence, but what I see right now is a huge, ominous, powerful, evil thing in you and—yeah."

"That is exactly what I told you was there," she points out.

"I mean, yes, but it's one thing to be told it and a whole 'nother to see it and—it's terrifying. And fascinating. But mostly the former."

"...all right," she says.

And she closes her eyes, and—something breaks, or opens, or unfolds. There is no longer a solid barrier separating the ominous presence from her mind and the world beyond. The thing between it and the world is her mind - and it's holding perfectly steady, never for a moment allowing the malevolent force to gain any ground.

When she opens her eyes, there is a faint sickly-green spark dancing in the depths of each pupil.

...creepy. Extremely creepy. She's not going to poke it even though she really wants to and will just keep looking at it from various angles and places.

She watches Kaede curiously, holding the mara contained with seemingly effortless ease. It seethes beneath her thoughts like wind-whipped black mist. It is vast and powerful and hungry, eager to conquer and consume, to torture and destroy, a mindless rage that will never rest until everything it can reach is trapped in its eternal nightmare.

The way she has it contained is... like a scale tipped all the way to one side. There is certainly a difference between this and possession, but it's not the kind of difference that comes with a clear bright line. One could imagine them fighting for control, shoving that balance back and forth, neither fully ascendant over the other. At the moment, though, she is firmly in control.

And how is she keeping this control, exactly...?

It's hard to tell; a lot of the details seem to be happening on a mental level not directly perceptible to metamagical senses. Raiel and the mara are sharing space in the arena of Raiel's mind, and fighting a battle for control of it which Raiel is very definitively winning; if she wants specifics she may have to ask.

...okay.

"That is absolutely terrifying but I think I'm okay with it now."

"Okay. May I take you into a dream, then?"

"Yeah."

The mara - ripples, and there is a dizzy feeling that the world is turning sideways, or possibly inside-out; then they're sitting in exactly the same place they just were, except that something about it feels slightly off, a lingering hint of unreality. But what Kaede will probably find more striking is the way that Raiel and her mara are now omnipresent and something like omnipotent, her mind and the mara's magic twining through everything, forming the foundation of the world.

"You can always tell when you're in a constructed dream or the nightmare realm, but it can take some time to pick up the skill," she says. "You might have less trouble with it than most people, though."

"—you're everywhere."

"Well, it's my dream."

"The mara's here, too, also everywhere—"

Can she see anything else?

This place is not physical. It does a good job of pretending to be, but at its heart it is made of thought and magic, not air and stone. Nothing is quite real here. It's - well, a dream.

"Yes; I couldn't create this dream or bring you here without a mara to do the magic for me," she says.

"This is amazing."

Can she... change it? Poke it, pull on it, do anything to it?

"What are you doing—?"

Touching the fabric of the dream means touching something with a mara woven through it. The sensation is not pleasant. Like ice water and static electricity and a distant unsettling chorus of whispers.

She metaphorically winces away. "Touching it."

"It has a mara in it," she points out.

"Yyyes I noticed that."

"It's safe to be in the dream, because I'm in control of it, but I'm not surprised that trying to do magic to it turned out to be unpleasant."

"Well but I'm still curious about it."

"...?"

"I mean, curious from a—metamagic perspective. It's like—magic has this very aesthetic feeling and looking at it the way I am is like looking at a sculpture from below or something and I want to see more of it. Not quite but almost."

"Is there a safer way to do the thing you want?"

"Staring at it for a very long time. Or watching you do things with it."

"I could give you my language, if you like. I imagine that would qualify as doing something."

"Yeah I think it would. Weren't you gonna get mine, too?"

"Yes. I already am. The dream's translation is part of me; I absorb the language for as long as I'm talking to you. To give you mine I have to do something separate."

"Oh. And it's not—doing magic to me or something?"

(Is it?)

(Sort of. It's very - ambient, easy to miss against the backdrop of the dream itself; it transmits meaning between them via the medium of speech, and passively absorbs languages along the way.)

"I don't know what counts as doing magic to you."

"This does. I hadn't noticed it before. Huh."

"Well, here is what giving you a language looks like."

It looks sort of alarming, actually; nothing mundanely visible happens, but magically speaking the dream ripples alarmingly and—doesn't reach for her, exactly, because it's already as close as it needed to be—and touches her, and deposits a language, and withdraws. The mara never makes direct contact; Raiel is - sort of wrapped around it, like a glove, or a skin.

"That was kinda creepy and really cool," she says in the new language.

She smiles.

"What-all can you do with it?"

"With the mara?"

"Yeah."

"Constructed dreams are easiest. They're useful for communication, and as a memory aid, and as a meeting place where violence can be made impossible. But it's also possible to influence the physical world with a mara, although it's an under-studied subject because most people who try doing fancy things with mara get possessed and die."

"And you can do things like translation and language-acquisition in dreams, that's—that'd be terribly expensive with my magic, the second thing."

"Your magic seems to operate on different principles. Translation is a basic feature of dreams, and language acquisition comes along for the ride."

She nods. "What other stuff can you do?"