“Um, maybe,” I told her. “She might be known by a different name where I come from - if you could be so kind as to tell me more about her, it might jog my memory.”

She didn’t answer this directly, instead, she took out a glass, and then filled it with water.

She did so with a stream of crystal clear water that erupted from the palm of her hand- magic, in other words. I sorely wanted to ask her where she had learned to do that, but that was when she started talking. “Long ago, the land was nothing more than wastelands and deserts. There was a village near the base of a mountain where it would rain, giving the village life, though one year, there was a terrible drought. The crops began to wither in the soil, and soon water was more valuable than gold. One day, a young woman came by the village. The villagers told her to leave, as they were already greatly thirsty and could not share what little water they had with an outsider. The woman, rather than leaving, began to sing.”

“She sung a song of water, describing how water was cold, how it was the elixir of life, and its various properties. She wrote this poem upon the desert sands using nothing more than her finger, and as the winds carried the lettering away, the villagers were astonished as cold, clear water, began to pour out of both of her palms. Soon, many of their pitchers were filled, but the villagers were not satisfied. After all, it was but a small stream of water, and they still had over a thousand mouths that still thirsted.”

“And so, the woman flew to the top of the mountains. She spent many months at the top, meditating upon the nature of water and its properties. The villagers, knowing that something special was happening - even if they didn’t know what exactly, supported her. And so, one day, the fruits of her labor materialized as an epic of the rains and rivers. And thereupon, a mighty river began to emerge. It flowed down the mountain, and then spread its veins throughout the continent, bringing life and greenery to places which hadn’t seen rainfall in over a century. And so, life began to grow - and the woman named this mighty river the Ragini.”

The old lady had seemingly finished her story.

“And the woman who did this was the Goddess Serragnin?” I asked.

She nodded. “I don’t know where you come from, I don’t recognize the name of the place, however, wherever it is, it likely owes its lifeblood to the Ragini and its many branches in some regard. Without it, the continent would not be even half as populated as it is now. And so, you should also pay your respects to her and her vehicle.” She gestured towards the owl statue, and I figured that at this point ‘when in Rome, do as the Romans do,’ approached the statue, and bowed my head before it much like she had done. She nodded in approval as I went back to my seat. I fidgeted with my feet before I finally figured I had nothing to lose by asking: “Could you teach me that spell you used to make water?”

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She chuckled to herself. “If I was younger, it would not be a problem. But these eyes of mine can’t see well, and my hands shake somewhat. I couldn’t write out the grimoire, and even if I could, you can’t read, can you dear? So what use would it be to you?”

“Yeah, I can’t read,” I said for what felt like the thousandth time since I had come to this world, encountering that barrier yet again. “At least, not this place’s language.”

She paused. “So, do you not have a grimoire from your own language that you could use?”

“Grimoire?” I asked her.

“To learn magic from?”

“Uh… no…?” I told her. I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. I had seen people use magic, but I had had other priorities on my mind rather than trying to learn it. And from what I had understood, learning magic required knowing how to read, so I thought it was beyond me for the moment.

She clasped her hands over her face. “Heavens- my father, gods bless his soul, became senile towards the end of his life. He would often forget what day it was or even where he was, but even he was not as lost as you seem, child.”

She sighed, and then walked over to a cabinet where she removed a few things.

She returned with an ink brush, and a well containing some ink. She also brought out a sheet of blank yellowish paper along with a few that had writing upon them. She shuffled through the ones that had writing on them until she happened upon one and laid it out before me. “This- if you could read this, you would be able to [Create Water] as well.”The letters on the pages were written with black ink but had a strange greenish glow to them.

Needless to say I still couldn’t read what was on them, though I made note of the fact that this rune-like script was quite different from the hieroglyphic-like one I had also seen, but what I hadn’t noticed until then was that the lizardmen used the hieroglyphics and the humans used the rune-like writing.

I filed that bit of information away, thinking that it might be useful in the future.

She picked up the brush and began to write on the blank piece of paper. Though the letters seemed to be a bit off while her hands shook, they had an eerie blue glow to them, much like the green glow of the other papers. “This is about as good as I can do,” she said. Her hands started trembling to the point that she couldn’t so much as make a straight line, and I probably couldn’t tell, but the letters must have been way off. Sighing, she handed me the brush. “See if you can write something that might make a grimoire?”