[ He nods. Calm, comfortable. ] Yeah. I know what you're talking about. We called that a hum. You had to train yourself to feel for it, for us. Wasn't always automatic.

[ Nathan's not thinking about it too much, what he's saying. Comes out easy, like she's some new kid at the Menagerie, tasked to sit at a sunlit kitchen table, and Nathan's pulling out old books and pages. ]

You learn to manipulate it. Like clay, or paint. Easiest to spin it into a palette you already know or like. [ Thus the five branches. Some people take better to one over another. ] S'why math ends up being important. Hard sciences, too. Astronomy sometimes. [ He starts drawing another circle over that central point. Fills it in with other webs and shapes; it's complex, if small, a spell circle of sacred geometry, line after line after line, always continuous. ] Some of it comes with intuition, but the more channels you can account for, the more likely your casting will come out stronger. Sharper.

[ He doesn't end up closing that circle. One line away, and it'd make a burst of real starlight burn away in the palm of his hand. Nathan's finger stops, then falls away back down to his side. ]