Cooper quickly found himself at the back, helped by the caravan moving in the opposite direction, looking for Reta, who wasn't hard to find as she stood out from the heavily armored man and the bird woman with a bow. Cooper approached the trio and was about to speak but the bird woman spoke first.

"Hey there, shouldn't you be somewhere in the middle?"

"Yes, but I-" Cooper started but Reta interrupted him.

"It's fine, I doubt anything will attack us this close to the town, and if something does, we're here." Reta turned to Cooper. "Cooper, right? I heard about you helping with the situation in the rear. What might you be back here for?"

"Well, you're a mage, I hear, and I had some question about that. Oh, and yes, I am Cooper." Cooper said somewhat sheepishly under the gaze of the higher leveled trio.

"Ah, I see. I can answer most questions yes, but my specializiations are light and fire magic, the other magic styles are, uh, a bit lacking for me." Reta said, lacking the confidence Cooper witnessed earlier during the goblin attack.

"Oh. That'll be fine, I think. The questions are more about fundamentals and basics, I suppose."

"In that case, go right ahead. I'm always happy to talk about magic and anything related." Reta said with an excited smile.

"So, Darren's been showing me some stuff, mostly his light orb thing, but then he also let me Examine his spear, which had a Light Magic Attunement enchantment on it, also I hope he doesn't mind me saying this stuff, I don't know how closely guarded ones weapons secrets are. Anyway, too late for that now, but that brings me to my point, how many and what elements or types of magic are there?" Cooper was a bit embarrassed, not having thought about leaking a potential secret of someone he considered a friend, or close to it.

"We all already knew about Darren's spear, we all had a hand in it. Deciding the enchantments, I mean." Reta eased Cooper's worries. " Right, there are many types of magic, with most if not all having academies or schools dedicated to a type. There are the main ones like air, fire, water and earth. There are many more subtypes, like my light magic, which is related more to air and fire, though it has things in common with water and earth too. You'll probably run into shadow magic, especially with those Dark Shamans from the goblin attack, and stuff like lightning, ice and gravity magic."

"Ok, so, the rest of the elements are subtypes and come from the four main ones? What do you actually mean by related to?" Cooper had many ideas running through his head about what sort of magic he might try to obtain, if he were to try his hand at magic.

"Yes, there are a couple of outliers, but those types of magic are either rare or altogether outlawed in most places. By related, I mean that fire, air and light, for an example, all have things in common, more so than with light and earth for an example. Fire creates light, generally, so you can see where the relation comes from, air is kind of the same, but a bit more complex. If you know fire magic, it is easier for you to grasp related types of magic and mold them into spells."

Stolen story; please report.

"Ah. Okay, I get the gist of that now, but how do you actually mold magic into spells?"

"So there are a couple of different ways, but first we can go over what most people do to learn magic. Learning magic is much easier with a teacher, so that's what most people do, they go to one of the academies, which is a broader type of learning, or they go find a teacher or master outside of an academy, which on the other hand is a more specific way of learning, what you want to specialize in. Mostly people do both, academy first and a teacher second, though some, like me, just find a teacher. Or are just naturals at magic and have no real need for a teacher, though it should still help."

"Okay, but I meant more in an actual, physical manner of molding magic."

"Oh. Sorry. Umm, to summon a magical element you kind of need a feeling for it? Once you summon the element, for an example, fire, it manifests in some way, if I were to hold out my hand like this" Reta held her arm straight ahead of her, palm lightly cupped, a ball of fire appearing in it. "it manifests this small ball of fire. You can just use it like this, throwing it at something will work, or you can just light something on fire, but to mold it into a more complex spell, I need to either follow a pattern of a spell, which would've been taught to you by a teacher or learnt from a book" Reta whirled her hand with the fireball in it in a serpentine motion. "like so. And now I have a flamewhip. Does that do it for you?" She shook the flames away, small embers slowly falling on the road, winking out of existence.

"Cool. Or hot, I guess, considering." Reta lightly blushed but Cooper didn't notice. "Okay, yeah, I think I get it. Going back a bit to the different types of magic, you mentioned there were some rare and banned types?"

"Yeah. I suppose there's no harm in telling you what they are, but I can't point you to where you might learn any of these, may they be outlawed or rare. The rare ones that I know of are gravity, time and void magic. Void magic verges on being illegal, but there's nothing inherently evil with it, it's just very unsettling to witness. The outlawed ones are necromancy and twilight magic. Necromancy isn't exactly an element, but rather an extension of shadow magic, which isn't outlawed. Twilight magic is an unholy combination of magic that is much like void magic in the sense that there isn't anything inherently evil with it, just that in history it has been used to almost break the world and summon all sorts of wickedness."

"Okay, I'm not interested in any of that, I just wanted to know, for the sake of knowing, I suppose. If I'm going to learn any sort of magic, I think I'll be more interested in earth and related magic." Cooper smiled at Reta. "Thank you for explaining."

"Not a problem, I like talking about magic, I just don't know much outside of my favoured elements. And it's good to know I didn't teach the next Twilight Herald about the forbidden magics." Reta smiled back. "It makes sense you'd be interested in earth, seeing as you are a Ranger. Nature is a type of magic closely related to earth, if you're interested in a subtype."

"Good to know. Thanks again, I think it's time I stopped boring your companions with magic talk and went to find Tom-" Cooper was interrupted by his Stalker poking his leg with his snout, causing Cooper to fall over.

"I didn't even see him. What sort of skills does he have, if you don't mind me asking?" Reta stifled a giggle.

"He gets skills?" Cooper asked, lifting his face from the dirt road.