The red-haired woman looks at the Icelander with her blue-grey eyes, then stops, beginning smootly and warmly, but hampered a little by the language "Sara Douglas, the mage of Oliver's squad and his sister-in-law. Sort of." extending her hand to shake with a small dignified laugh, calmly steering the conversation back to a normal structure whilst still thinking that Oliver and James shared no parents, but both sets of grandparents, due to the two Harwood brothers each marrying one of the andersen sisters, and she and James weren't getting married until Oliver got back, but even Sara could realise that such information was unecessary for someone you met less than a minute ago to have a proffesional conversation with.
"
Dísa Ánnsdóttir, mage of this expedition. Well, you know that already." Dísa laughs a bit nervously. Sara seems nice though, and a lot more reasonable than her sort-of-brother-in-law.
"We tend to think of ourselves as celtic, we share our gods with the Irish and Welsh, alhough the English have their own gods similar to yours but with different names and importance for each of the gods. We're a little like the finns in that we cannot simply cross the water between the islands, but we have our own methods of navigating the otherworld, by anchoring in the waking world." She reaches into a belt pouch and takes out a disk of granite that fits comfotably in her palm, it's surface carved with a spreading oak tree and a stylised knotted rope around the edge. She holds it out in her upturned right palm, saying "Place your dominant hand on it, grip it lightly, and try to clear your mind then imagine how your dreamscape normally looks."
While listening, Dísa tries to not get overly interested in the Celtic magic-system. At Seiður-academy the teachers mentioned that there were different kinds of mages in Finland and Great Britain in one subclause and left it at that. She still knows a bit more about Finnish mages, since some of the people working at her family´s company used to be soldiers and worked with some of them before. They told stories when she asked. But she has no idea how Celtic mages work.
Being way too curious about all kinds of religions is also what made her sign up for university.
But this is no mythology-lecture, just basic information on contacting a mage, remember that? Don´t shower her with questions!She nods as Sara shows her the stone. It looks beautiful. Icelandic mages don´t use artifacts like this. The Celtic mage has mentioned something about anchoring, maybe that is what it´s for. She puts her left hand on it. "I hope you don´t mind climbing...", she adds after a bit of thinking.
Dísa closes her eyes to imagine a clear picture of her Dreamspace. A small bit of rocky coastline, cracked reddish-brown boulders towering about five meters high next to the water. At the bottom the stones have been smoothed by the tides, further up they have more rough edges, and flowers grow within some of the cracks. The water isn´t deep, but there is no solid ground. Smaller round stones overgrown with slippery green and brown seaweed are covering the bottom of the sea. The Seaweed also grows on some of the rocks that aren´t fully covered in water. It is still wet, as if the tide just went away, but Dísa knows that the water level never changes. This place is just a picture of a moment. It´s enough though to make climbing the rocks unnecessarily difficult, at least according to her cousin Vala. She´s also the reason why Dísa knows it is salt-water, apart from the smell. Vala fell in a couple of times when trying to climb the cliff. Her feet would have kept her over water, the rest of her body on the other hand... But it´s actually not that hard to get up the rocks, at least when you know where to step and where not to. Just to be safe, Dísa imagines all the points to hold onto as vividly as possible. A bit under the highest point of the boulder-tower is something like a plateau, grinded down by wind and water to an almost perfect flat surface. (Though there is never more than a soft breeze in that place either.) On it is something that is best described as some kind of bird-nest, but bigger. It is a construction made from twigs up to full grown branches as well as clearly man-made planks, big enough for a small adult human to lie in with your feet only a bit over its edge. An animal-fur is draped over half of it to soften the wood. from two sides it is protected by rocks rising about a meter higher. This is the place where Dísa usually wakes up, looking upwards to the slightly cloudy sky.
She opens her eyes a bit again, trying not to loose the picture. "And now?", she asks.
You can imagine the landscape in Dísa´s dreamspace to look a little like this, but with higher rocks: (Though this picture was admittedly taken in Sweden and not Iceland. But some of the pictures google gave me of Iceland were similar, so let´s just say it counts.)