Tala had, after a few hours of consideration, finally decided to simply go with Alat’s suggestions for the present moment, mainly because it was easy enough to change her words for things once she had a good understanding, and she really needed to start building up her mental ability to actually process the concepts.

Alright, in the dimensions of magic, if it is perfectly aligned with the physical world, it is superficial magic. Beyond that, I will refer to the ‘directionality’ as cranial and caudal.

Regardless, as soon as she’d codified and agreed to the descriptors, it was as if something clicked in her own mind, and she knew her words would need to be changed.

She slid to a stop, struggling not to fall on her face with the sudden shift in her vision.

The world around her seemed to bend and distort as her mind continued to try to twist itself to align with her new mental model.

Tala fell to her knees, retching. As usual, her inscriptions prevented her from actually disgorging anything from her stomach.

-Oh… that is… that is really unpleasant.- Alat was feeling the dissonance as well.

It was worse than simply a twisting distortion of her vision and her mind’s interpretation of it. The means of thinking was rippling backward through her memories, not changing what she saw in those memories—it wouldn’t give her new information—but altering her memory of the visualizations to match her new grasp.

Primary among that remodeling was what she had been thinking of as magical depth and was now being reframed as being cranial or caudal.

To her eyes, all magic began to look… sentient, as if every spellworking, every bit of power, was a creature in its own right, moving across the world, or through her own body.

She nearly gagged, momentarily horrified that this was a reality that she’d just never perceived.

Though… is this just because of my mental model? Is there more that I cannot see simply because of my chosen means of perception? My mental model?

That way lay madness, so she decided to simply let it lie for now.

Tala groaned, holding her head for a moment before replacing her hands on the ground for support.

Rane landed beside her, “Tala! What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

She waved at him and managed to grunt out. “Shift of mental model; it’s uncomfortable, but not truly damaging.”

He seemed to hesitate, but then he nodded. “I’ll stand watch. Focus on what you need to do.”

It was her turn to hesitate, but then she felt a wave of relief.

That would actually really help.

Without saying another word, she let her aspect mirrored perspectives vanish, focusing solely on her remodeling sights.

With her full focus on the issue, she quickly came to realize that ‘cranial’ and ‘caudal’ simply wouldn’t map onto what she could see, and that was causing dissonance of the highest level.

The words are wrong for what I’m seeing, and trying to force it is causing a hallucinogenic effect.

Alat groaned along with her. -It’s like we decided a pebble was a ‘big rock’ and now we have seen a mountain.-

There simply was no head or tail of magic, and so her knowledge of the biological uses for those terms was breaking this mental model even as it tried to form, and thus breaking her as she tried to force it.

I reject those terms.

At the mental pronouncement, the figments and distortions of what she was seeing vanished as quickly as a mirage in the desert.

Unfortunately, she was left with quite a problem.

Her entire ethos for her magesight was in flux, and so she was reconsidering everything.

She had to start somewhere and work her way through what her magesight presented to her.

Alright, the feature that we’ve thought of as flavor or the specific source before: Do we need to reconsider that? What to call it? Flavor doesn’t really feel exactly right. For me, my magical ‘flavor’ matches my gate, which has a tone that I’m just beginning to understand. So, frequency?

That way of thinking resonated with her, especially because she already knew that frequency was usable in all sorts of situations.

Alright, that could work. Now, quality of power, or advancement of the source, I’ve always seen it as a color, so… wavelength?

An odd, painful buzzing filled her mind, and she immediately rejected that. Right, wavelength and frequency are not independently variable.

She growled. She was bending her entire mind toward finding the right model. She had started to change her way of thinking, and her magics would break if she didn’t settle on something. Blessedly, her increased attention and focus was starting to show fruits. Alright, then alignment for ‘flavor.’

She knew that she was still suffering from a bad mental model, and she was trying to build a better one while using her current misunderstandings, but she pressed onward.

Even so, considering the concept of alignment brought some clarity.

While color is helpful—and I don’t want to lose that—what’s often most important in the moment is how the quality relates to my own power… she grimaced.

Alat started laughing. -It does make sense.-

Tala groused for a moment, but then agreed. For power we will use: superior or inferior, in relation to my own quality of power.

Her mental model pulled together more tightly, more coherently.

Finally, up and down in the magical dimension—the whole point of this reframing and what we failed to label cranial or caudal…

Tala growled, her head beginning to hurt.

We first really learned about the extent of this via City Stones, and they are ‘deep’ along this axis, so… stoneward?

-That makes sense to me.-

What about the other direction?

They both considered, but it was Alat who came up with the first reasonable idea. -Starward?-

Fine. Starward and stoneward, with zero on this axis being ‘superficial.’

A resonant tone rang through her mind, and she recognized it as being the current tone of her own soul, her gate. She was close.

She gasped, and the world opened before her.

The ground between her hands was magically saturated at a superficial level, with neutral power, inferior to hers in quality.

Her thoughts ground to a halt.

How could she consider the ‘alignment’ of magic, if the most prevalent form wasn’t aligned at all, yet still worked as if it was aligned with everything at once?

She started to panic, but together, she and Alat reassessed.

Oh… that’s really silly.

-But it would work.-

And so, they conceptualized the alignment of magic as being a shape the power was solidified into, while neutral was a liquid, unset so it could flow through any opening, regardless of the convoluted nature of the opening in question.

-Better yet, it fits the ‘alignment’ mental model.-

Tala knew that she was losing clarity by settling on such a solution, but she needed to find something, or her natural magics would begin to degrade. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be too much of a loss.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Alright, we’ll take what we can get. What I can see with my magesight can be broken down as follows. Alat, your help?

-Starward, superficial, stoneward for up, zero, down through the dimension of magic.-

Superior, equal, inferior for how the quality relates to that of our own power. Non-comparatively, this is also the color for the advancement of a Mage, arcane, or bit of magic.

-We can also detect the amount of power, the amount of magic, but that’s just a subset of seeing it to begin with.-

That’s true. Which means that, finally, we can detect the ‘flavor’ of the source of the magic, most easily, we can detect if something is neutral or aligned with our own gate. Though we should be able to detect the origin or alignment of any magic with practice.

A single chime rang through Tala’s head, and the pain faded.

Within her own vision, she could see so much more.

The magic in the ground was superficial, neutral, inferior power.

That within the inscriptions in her hands—which were resting on the ground before her—was superficial, aligned to her power, and equivalent to her power quality: yellow with a bare hint of green.

Of course it’s equivalent, it is mine.

-Hush, we’re reframing.-

Something new came into her easy sight, somehow not blocking her mundane vision in the least.

Iron.

There were two, thin layers of iron over every one of her inscriptions, one stoneward and one starward to the magics contained within.

As she’d somewhat expected, the iron wasn’t perfectly hugging the superficial layer. Instead, her natural magics were visible, barely stoneward and starward to her superficial inscriptions.

It was incredible to actually see her natural magics, rather than just sensing them, and she could see them packed near-to-bursting with power.

No wonder I am able to get so much greater throughput. With that axis of magic factored in, the cross-section of my inscriptions is… Tala hesitated. She actually had no idea how to calculate the three-dimensional cross-section of something. The very idea seemed like a contradiction in terms.

Another thing to investigate, I suppose.

Focusing back on all that she could now see, she looked more closely at the iron itself. That metal was perfectly aligned with her and inferior, magically speaking.

Good, a lack of magic is on the axis as inferior.

Something tickled at the back of her mind, seeming to indicate that her perception was heavily being influenced by the mental model she had chosen, and that she was missing out on some details, but she squashed that thought before it could destabilize her newborn model.

Perfection was for another day. Right now, she wanted stability.

Then, she made the mistake of turning her magesight stoneward.

That way lay an infinite nothingness, without definition or content, though she did catch something out the corner of her vision, pulling her back from the edge.

Her eyes moved down to focus on Kit, hanging from her right hip.

She could see everything.

Well, not every little detail, but she could see the sanctum as if from a bird’s eye view, even higher than the actual ceiling of the space.

Laid out before her vision was a miniscule world. Magically, it was equivalent and aligned with her power, while being stoneward on that axis.

She had the sense that something about it being aligned with her was allowing her to see all that she could, but it would take further testing to fully understand what that meant.

The physical dimensions were represented to her sight almost all at once, all connected to the same stoneward locked point that the pouch—Kit—connected to.

Deeper down, stoneward, the sanctum shares a location magically speaking? Tala felt her mind expand as she realized how obvious that was. That was why she could so freely move around within Kit.

It was very similar to how Master Grediv had described City Stones.

Kit’s unified state in the dimensions of magic could be why it took Tala’s will, her aligning of others with her will in order to move them within Kit. She could also move stuff, but she’d never had a problem with that.

People being moved could fight it with their own alignment and power.

There was a cascade of connections that she felt like she suddenly comprehended.

Then, she shifted her vision a bit closer to the superficial and saw what had to be the center of Kit’s true form.

It was… cute?

A bundle of magic, perfectly aligned with Tala and equivalent to her in power.

No… that’s… that’s the content, not the casing.

There was something akin to natural magic pathways that were inferior and misaligned with Tala, seeming closer to neutral than Tala’s own power.

I… have no idea what that means, honestly. She obviously knew what being misaligned meant, but the fact of being closer vs further from neutral was currently a distinction without a difference to her mind.

She focused in on the little bundle of power, filled with Tala’s own magic.

That was Kit.

The void-beast-turned-sanctum was easily visible as natural pathways, hanging stoneward of the pouch, through which the sanctum was connected.

It was beautiful, extending both starward—all the way to superficial—and stoneward to fully encapsulate the sanctum and a bit beyond.

Since she had found the core of Kit’s magic, she was better able to parse the natural magics that made up the creature, even while they were filled with Tala’s own power.

Tala considered why she was able to so easily see the twists and curves that made up Kit’s magic. It‘s likely the fact that they are filled with my power…

At that point, Tala noticed something that she really should have considered before.

Kit was under stress.

The inferior nature of Kit’s magics had suborned them to Tala’s power, and the two were eroding each other, the superior obviously winning out in the conflict.

Kit was degrading.

It didn’t seem to be a fast process, but Tala would bet that if something wasn’t done, the natural pathways that she was seeing would be gone within a decade.

-That’s an awfully broad guess, but I suppose we have only observed for a moment.-

Yeah… We also don’t know what full erosion would truly mean. The magics don’t look like they would change shape, but ‘Kit’ might be gone. Whatever that actually means.

Tala found that troubling.

She would have to ask someone at the Constructionist Guild about it. They might not know, but it was better to ask.

Rane’s voice came to her ear. “Tala? Are you doing any better?”

Tala nodded, rolling back off her knees to sit on the snow.

There was still a lot of disorientation as she now saw so, so much more in the world around her.

She was a two-dimensional creature who had just expanded to look upon ‘height.’

-Reasonable analogy. I’ll let it slide.-

Thank you, oh magnanimous one.

Then, Tala caught a glimpse of Rane.

His power was aligned further away from neutral than Tala’s power. His tightly controlled aura filled the superficial with noise, extending somewhat both starward and stoneward.

Even so, she thought that if she focused, she would be able to penetrate the noise.

Huh, just like before. She had been able to penetrate people’s aura to see more clearly before, she just hadn’t made a habit of it.

At his belt, two items stood out.

One was the loop of leather that was both his sheath for Force and his dimensional storage.

Both had power that was superficial and aligned with Rane, their magic being inferior to her own.

Oddly, Force’s magic seemed to be superior to Rane’s power, even while still being inferior to Tala’s.

The leather cord had a much, much simpler form than Kit, while still resembling Kit in basic shape.

As to the expanded space, Tala could barely catch hints of crates, books, and other items through the interfering noise of Rane’s power.

Once again, she thought she might be able to penetrate that obscurement with focus, but she decided not to.

That’s new.

She momentarily thought that she should be able to see how big the expanded or extra space was, but no. The space simply was.

Without details, she couldn’t measure it, or otherwise determine how much space was there, save by way of a guess based upon the potency of the magics involved.

The dimensional magic was inferior to Rane and to Kit, so Tala at least thought she could be sure that his storage was smaller than Kit.

Yeah, that’s not really a helpful measure. Regardless, it was another point of data.

“Tala?”

She had been staring his way—likely with a somewhat vacant expression—for a moment or two. “Oh! Oh, I’m sorry, Rane. I think I am doing better, yes.”

He smiled. “That’s good. What mental model shifted, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“My magesight.”

“Oh, wow. That’s a big one. Master Grediv said that it can really affect how Mages perceive the world. That’s one reason why the teaching of deeper mental models for that sight is so discouraged. It is too easy to subvert a person’s worldview by altering that.”

Tala laughed. “I mean, that’s literally true? It would change how they view the world.”

Rane chuckled along. “I actually hadn’t thought of it that way. Regardless, it’s something that we each have to delve into and construct for ourselves, just like with all our mental models,”—he grinned—“just with a bit more obvious repercussions.”

Tala felt an odd tug at her awareness and realized that all of Rane was somehow vibrating slightly, magically speaking.

Truth? Because it’s resonating with… something? Lie, because it’s coming out of alignment with himself? Both… somehow?

Then, she also caught herself magically fluctuating slightly as well in the corners of her vision. Why was she magically fluctuating?

This makes no sense at all…

She sighed. “True enough. There’s still a lot to get used to.”

He shrugged. “Do you want to take some more time? This is a rather peaceful spot, right?”

Only then did Tala take in their surroundings.

She had stopped in a little clearing, and through a break in the trees to the north, they could see mountains.

It wasn’t anything really special, but it was nice, just as Rane had said.

She checked the time and found that they had some to spare, “You know what?”

He looked her way once more. “Hmm?”

“Let’s eat lunch here before moving on.”

He smiled broadly. “That sounds like a plan.”