Kei woke with a start and a gasp. As before, there was no more disconnect of memories when she went from being a human man to a fairy woman; yet she still found herself to be a somewhat different person as Kei than she was as Keith. Right now, for instance...Keith had been angry, worried about the "strange dreams" he'd been having, wanting them simply to go away so he could get back to the "real world." Kei, on the other hand, knew perfectly well by now that this was a real world, in which she had a real body and a real mate, as real as anything in Keith's "real world."
And she wasn't angry, she was...she was scared. If Keith somehow got his wish, if he stopped experiencing this...this sleeping transmigration, what would become of her? Would she disappear? Would she just go back to...to being a creature of instinct, as she was before?
It was insane that she should be opposed to her own other self, when everything in her brain told her that his conclusions were perfectly sound. Of course he would want these "dreams" to go away, and...she didn't hate him, she didn't want him to suffer, but...to lose everything she desired and enjoyed here, to never again feel Farin holding her body against his own or to press herself against him...
Even now the Keith part of her brain was reeling at these alien thoughts, but she knew how she felt, and what she wanted. Farin was awake, too, having noticed her sit up. "Are you okay?" he asked.
She nodded. "I just had a bad dream...will you hold me?"
He smiled and took her in his arms, and she sighed happily. She kissed him, he returned it, and it wasn't long before things went on from there.
Jon continued reading well past any reasonable hour. This was just so fascinating; not only did magic exist, some people had apparently made serious attempts to document and analyze it! She wondered whether most of this knowledge was specific to Brittany's tradition and Merlin whom she claimed made this book, or whether this was part of some long-lost shared dialogue of magical study between different groups or even nations?
She wondered, if that were true, why nobody had found any more of it, why she'd never heard of anything like it. The thought crossed her mind that perhaps it was all something brought into existence by her wish, and of course she wouldn't have ever heard of this because she remembered a world where it never happened. But that seemed like a needlessly complicated explanation; after all, the stone had existed before her wish, and magic in general must have existed in some form all along; certainly she couldn't think of how it would be possible to "bootstrap" it into a magic-less universe. But then, any time you tried to figure out the fundamental origins of something like this, you'd wind up with mysteries or absurdities...
Turning her thoughts to the slightly less baffling, she thought about the four elements as described in the text. It was simultaneously reassuring and a little bit annoying that she'd gotten the best "starter magic," with the only hidden condition being the inability to directly cancel a wish. Having to give up something else or risk being thrown into another world or having things run out of control sounded much less pleasant to deal with if you didn't go in knowing exactly what you were doing. On the other hand, it felt a little embarassing to be given the "easy" option of the four. On the other other hand, it sounded like it was probably second in terms of overall capability, insofar as she could rank these things; the water element might be able to surpass it, but her stone didn't have to build up to its full effect.
Well, unless she'd happened to accidentally drain it while unwittingly taking advantage of astrological conditions to affect the entire world, which she had. She sighed; even with the simplest tool, her track record was less than perfect...she'd learn, she already had learned a lot, but it was still discouraging. On the other hand, thinking of the damage she might have done with a careless wish on elemental fire...she shuddered.
One thing she was struck by was the use of symbolically-laden language in the text, the way it spoke of elemental magic as behaving in accordance with its literal equivalent...it was odd. She was used to thinking of, say, fire as a physical process, a chemical process if she stopped and thought about it, but in any case a thing that happened by means of the interactions of lower-level, more general natural laws. But the way the book read, it was like fire was supposed to be a fundamental thing itself, something that transcended the physical phenomena and tied in with some basic nature. Jon had picked up enough from her assorted readings and conversations with Grandpa to recognize this as the idea of the classical elements; did this mean that there actually was some deeper truth to that?
This was all so strange, even with something to finally explain some of it to her. It was weird how she wasn't half so confused and weirded out by the fact that magic existed as she was by all the questions the actual specifics of it raised. She yawned, cracking her neck and feeling her antennae bob with the motion of her head. It was late, later than she really should be up...this was fascinating and she could keep going all through the night, but she really did need to get to sleep.
