Of course you can. Understanding magic doesn't make it something else, you're still reading the world and manipulating it without using hands and eyes.

[She's aware of some 'modern' people, like her final bearer Firesong, who struggled with the idea that magic could be understood with numbers and formulae and felt it was cheapened by the effort. Need had felt like that herself once, a long time ago.]

Hah. One very powerful mage can warp an animal this way and that and maybe the changes will breed true for more than a generation, but 'uplifting' animals to make new species that reason and talk takes a lot of cooperation. Maybe a few names get famous off it but the actual work takes dozens, hundreds of people to help, working for years. Or it took. I don't know if anything like that will ever be possible again.

I'm not saying it wasn't an incredible achievement each and every time. I just... [Need shakes her head, feeling tired. There are a lot of reasons she just, and she's not sure if any of them will make sense to a fanatic who thinks some people are valuable and some are worthless.] It was all very self-congratulatory. Not to mention most of the people who commissioned or helmed these projects and tried to have their names live on like that were forgotten pretty quickly after the Cataclysm.