Sorry, [ he says, quietly, like it's a personal failing that he's never studied magic properly — in a way, it is, too, since doing magic requires a lot of reading and memorising spells and pronunciations and, well, reading's never been his strong suit. spells require the spirit to be strong, too, and really, between the whole reading part and the fact that edwin'd had his spirit forged during seventy years in hell... there hadn't really been much question of which one of them did the magic and which one the physical fighting.

and that'd been fine, because there wasn't supposed to be a world where they weren't both in — so charles had never needed to know magic, not really, because edwin had always been there to cast the spells.

he's not here now, though, and charles feels like a bit of a failure in not anticipating this happening at some point. ]

Oh, [ he blinks, then, a few times. ] Uh, don't know, yet. Suppose I'll know when I need it, yeah? There's a lot of stuff I've kept like that. Never know what you might need. Like this sword — I kept it around for ages, and then ended up needing it to slay this giant snake that was eating little girls to keep a witch young.