"I was in the army, too," Micah offered. "Well, technically the mage auxiliary branch, not the army itself. I mostly got stuck pulling apart the spells the other side would try to use, stopping them before they did any real damage. It was kind of insane."

"Yeah?"

"Well, because we were working so fast, we didn't always have time to undo the spells really neatly. We'd find the one part that would unravel the rest of the spell and dismantle that, but that would still leave parts of the spell floating around on their own. And those could have unpredictable side-effects. One time," he laughed, "Gheris' army had this really powerful mage, right? And he threw this nasty spell at us, designed to remove all the air from a two mile radius around us so we'd suffocate in our sleep. The guy on watch woke me up, and I managed to pull it apart in ten minutes, but I'd been moving so fast that I didn't notice the aembic parabola had split into a rhotic curve and sixty-two lutirien waves!"

Blank silence was all that answered.

"It turned the entire army's hair blue for the next sixteen hours," Micah said. "Also, a giant cloud of soap bubbles floated ten feet above my head until the wind blew them away."