Alicornutopia

Yay! (/me scurries off to make maps)

P.S. I still love that the term for Chaos et al. is "Materia accessories". I think of it like accessories to a crime.

Presumably Chaos, as one of the Materia accessories, should be connected to the others as well?

Yep, just added that line to my hard copy.

Does burning writing also cause you to forget? I don’t think so, but then I would expect computers to be far more useful than they seem to be for this magic.

Some effects, like weather or translation, don’t seem instant. Even for teleportation the burning seems to take time. If you have a way to re-learn and re-represent something quickly (e.g., Elspeth is present and you can work a chorus into your song), can you burn the same fact multiple times in one act of magic?

Burning writing does cause you to forget, yes. I think I may decide that computer formats don't work.

The effects are not instant but the casting is very close to it. You can't "work a chorus into" your song; if you're singing you get a shortish sentence. You cannot burn the same fact multiple times for one spell.

So the advantage of burning writing is you can burn an encyclopedia’s worth at once if you wanted (or a page’s, for a more practical effect) and you can avoid calling attention to yourself? I get that bigger effects are a huge deal but I thought it was something more than that (and more than the usual benefits of writing, which I expect are by themselves enough to get a Bell to invent it).

Just that, yes.

Okay. That’s still a really big deal, especially since songs can’t be nearly as long as I thought they could.

Unrletadly: I worry about the elfthreads where <author>’s characters are natives of Arda. It seems like the characters can’t possibly succeed or even change too much because lack of free will, but it also seems they couldn’t make the same mistakes as in canon. I’m curious how they’ll turn out.