"But if that magical trace is a curse..." he argued, drifting off halfway through his sentence. It wasn't that he didn't see her perspective, or that he didn't appreciate it, but he still thought the implications — maybe about whatever culture she was studying but maybe about humanity or history as a whole — were less than stellar. He didn't mean to belittle her field in the slightest, though, and he paused to try and make sure the way that he was wording what he said next wouldn't come across that way. He wasn't trying to make her think he was saying these things were better left undisturbed, or anything. Whatever information they were able to find from a ruin was probably worth a little risk, he imagined, so long as that risk was managed correctly. It was more the fact that those things existed at all, when so many other things hadn't lasted.

"It's just — there's so much good magic. Fixing things, or making new things, or even creating illusions. And any magical society probably had all those same sorts of things, and maybe even other sorts of magic that we don't even teach in England," he said, thinking of the tribal magic he'd learned while abroad. "And wouldn't it be great if that was what was left, after everything else was gone? But it doesn't ever seem to be that way. It's always the curses. And then that's the impression that we're left with," he explained. "Maybe not for you, if you're up close studying it, but — like the fog that happened in Irvingly," he continued. "That came from a cursed object from Egypt. And for a lot of people here maybe that's the only thing they'll ever know about that entire culture."