Zachriel perched on a precarious stack of chests nearby, her head tipping this way and that as she peered down at the objects. She reached out a forehand to pick up some to examine them more closely, before turning her head to the Skydancer, spiky brow furrowed.
"I must say, this really isn't my area of expertise. Just having a look at this piece of parchment - which, given its age, is in remarkable condition, I must add - I can only assume this to be the formula for a peculiar sort of spell. However, it's written in an archaic form of Harpy-tongue that I'm only barely familiar with - and it's so odd to see pre-Unification Harpy writing on anything other than their usual historic arts, too? I wonder..." she trailed off into a murmur, chattering to herself on the topic of Harpy writings before and after Beastclan unification.
As she spoke, she lifted the mirror from the chest, turning it upside down and back-to-front, all the while tipping and tilting her head like a spiky, oversized bird. Ever so gently, of the flowers on her head dropped onto the surface of the mirror.
"TRESHAK! SHARAKKER HRASH KIT!" A masked, pink-tinged face appeared suddenly in the surface, shrieking in a gutteral tongue. Zachriel squawked in surprise and jumped a foot, almost dropping it, before hurriedly placing it back in the chest.
"I- yes, well, I see now." The historian's spikes were all standing on end from the shock; she took a second to calm herself down and allow her scales to lie flat again. "It would appear that this is a near-lost form of communication that the pre-Unification harpy clans would use to avoid travelling long distances. Evidently it requires some form of identification, likely to prevent misuse - that phrase it yelled before roughly translates as "Intruder! Identify yourself!" - so I would imagine that it would be bound to the creator. A shame, really: I'm no mage, but this sort of technology could be quite useful. Oh! Wait a second..."
She reached down to root around in the chest again, carefully avoiding the mirror. In one hand, she held the sheet of parchment, and glanced at it every couple of seconds. Lauing a few objects on the ground, she pointed to them in turn.
"A frame is required - most any will do, it seems, such as this one here. From the looks of this painting, it appears to be half-torn from the frame. I believe that a mirror surface isn't required, since, according to the writing here" - she squinted at a slightly torn section of parchment - "the spell will either replace any existing mirror surface, or the existance of a mirror will... cause it to combust?"
She cleared her throat and moved on to the next item: the mummified corpse of a crow. "Given that harpies didn't use runes to power their magic like we do, any spell that required more mana than the caster can provide often drew from the life forces of another being. This bird was likely sacrificed for that purpose. It's leucistic, too - a rarer mutation, and likely used for its auspicious appearence."
The next item was a small bag of pliable pink scales. "Nowadays, these are commonly used for scale armour, but the spell calls for them to be crushed and mixed with crow's blood and a few other ingredients." She pointed to several vials of dried substances, too dessicated to identify, that littered the bottom of the chest. "Combined with the caster's magic, this would create a kind of resinous liquid that would be spread inside the frame to dry - creating a surface just like that of a regular mirror. Only not quite," she added, throwing a glance at the now-silent mirror sitting inside the chest.
"What interests me, though - I mean, aside from all the obvious historical and magical value - is that this spell appears to be partially initiated. There are incomplete Harpy-tongue runes carved on the frame, and as I mentioned before, the painting is half-removed. This bird is already dead, indicating that at least part of the casting had begun. So... why was it left incomplete?"
